Joe Rogan sets Bono straight after U2 frontman suggests 300,000 people have died due to USAID cuts

Joe Rogan called out the waste, fraud, and abuse of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) when celebrity singer and songwriter, "Bono," whose real name is Paul David Hewson, appeared on his podcast suggesting that 300,000 people have "already died" because of the cuts to the agency by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Bono said, "It's not proven, but the surveillance enough suggests 300,000 people have already died from just this cut off, this hard cut of USAID. This food rotting in boats, in warehouses."

"I think it's 50,000 tons of food that are stored in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai, and wait for it, Houston, Texas. That is rotting rather than going to Gaza, rather than going to Sudan, because the people who know the codes or for the warehouse are fired," Bono added, asking Rogan to comment on the claim.

Rogan responded, "They're throwing the baby out with the bath water, right, right? This is the problem, the problem is for sure, there have been a lot of organizations that do tremendous good all throughout the world. Also, for sure, it was a money laundering operation. For sure, there was no oversight. For sure, billions of dollars are missing. In fact, trillions that are unaccounted for."

"The way Elon Musk described that, he said, if any of this was done by a public company, the company would be delisted and the executives would be in prison. But in the United States, this is standard. When Biden left office, when it was clear that Trump won in the 73 days, they spent $93 billion from the Department of Energy on just radical loans, just throwing money into places, and there's no oversight, no receipts. Like the whole thing ... there's a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering," he added.

Elon Musk responded to the clip from Rogan's podcast in reference to Bono, saying, "He’s such a liar/idiot. Zero people have died!"

The 300,000 figure cited by Bono comes from one professor at Boston University, who said that 300,000 people may have already died due to a lack of assistance from USAID. However, the data from the professor is an estimate and not based on any reported deaths.

One example in the methodology to arrive at the 300,000 number that some may take issue with is that the professor assumed the number of children that USAID is helping to treat for severe malnutrition is based on the number of dollars that were allocated to the agency’s "nutrition program."

Using 2024’s amount of USAID funds as a base assumption, the methodology appears to simply have divided $168 million by an assumed cost of $150 annually to treat a child with severe malnutrition, arriving at 1.12 million children that the USAID is treating for severe malnutrition.

This and other assumptions are baked into the estimation of the 300,000 deaths.