U2 frontman and longtime progressive nut Bono is making a wildly exaggerated claim about U.S. foreign aid. In a recent outburst, Bono claimed that cutting United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funding could lead to 300,000 deaths, a dramatic assertion that was swiftly and brutally dismantled by none other than Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.
During an appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Bono blamed the cuts for 300,000 deaths, saying that they caused tens of thousands of tons of food to rot in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston. He also claimed that the people who ran those warehouses had been fired.
Bono's claim of 300,000 deaths isn’t based on actual fatalities, but rather on a hypothetical scenario created by Brooke Nichols, a health modeler at Boston University. Her projection estimates what might happen if the proposed USAID cuts were implemented, not what has already occurred.
“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable)," she wrote in The Washington Post. “And 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t.”
Nichols told The Times UK that, based on her extensive experience in HIV research, she simply assumed—without verifying—that the cuts would have a significant impact.
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Rogan pushed back, arguing that USAID was a “money-laundering operation” that had lost a “trillion” with “no oversight, no receipts.”
Meanwhile, Musk called Bono a “liar” and an “idiot,” confirming that “zero people have died!”
He’s such a liar/idiot 🤦♂️
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2025
Zero people have died!
