Bono and Joe Rogan clashed over the humanitarian impact of DOGE’s cuts — specifically the planned gutting of USAID — during the U2 singer’s visit to the podcast Friday.
During the episode, Bono confronted Rogan — a friend of the now-outgoing DOGE head Elon Musk — about a study that warned that 300,000 people worldwide might die from the cuts at USAID, which distributes food, clean water, and medical supplies to over 120 countries.
“There’s food rotting in boats and warehouses,” Bono said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “There is 50,000 tons of food. The people who knew the codes — who were responsible for distributing that aid — were fired. That’s not America, is it?”
“To destroy, to vandalize, it felt like with glee, that these life support systems were being pulled out of the walls,” Bono continued, “[One aide worker said], ‘We don’t have the funds, we have to choose which child to pull off the IVs.’ It just seems to me, I don’t know if ‘evil’ is too strong a word, but what we know about pure evil is that it rejoices in the deaths, in the squandering of human life — particularly children. It actually rejoices in it. And whether it’s incompetence, whether it’s unintended consequences, it’s not too late for people.”
Rogan responded by calling the imperfect, somewhat mismanaged USAID and with its “trillion” dollar losses a “money-laundering operation” with “no oversight, no receipts.” The singer pushed back, reiterating both the necessity of USAID and America’s role and responsibility in providing aid amid the Trump administration’s isolationist lean.
“I just want to remind Americans of the size of their country, and I’m not talking about the geography,” Bono said. “The size of the idea, it’s just an extraordinary thing. It’s an idea big enough to fit the whole world, and when it becomes an island rather than a continent … when it shrinks, America seems to stop being America.”
Rogan acquiesced in part, “We help the world and when you’re talking about making wells for people in the Congo to get fresh water, when you’re talking about food and medicine to places that don’t have access, no way that should have been cut out. And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts. There’s got to be a way to keep aide and not have fraud.”
The podcast host added, “The ironic thing is, even though Elon Musk has proposed all these things and the DOGE committee has proposed all these things, they’ve made no cuts in terms of the budget… They’ve cut nothing.”
Musk, predictably, responded to Bono’s claims on X, writing “He’s such a liar/idiot. Zero people have died!”; Bono was citing a study that warned 300,000 deaths could occur if the USAID cuts go through.