U2 frontman Bono lectured podcaster Joe Rogan about the “evils” of his buddy Elon Musk during a new podcast episode.
The conversation began with Bono, who has a long history of involvement with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), citing a study that estimates the number of deaths caused by Musk’s cuts at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at more than 300,000 worldwide. He explained Friday that food is currently “rotting” in boats and warehouses because Musk fired the people responsible for distributing it.
“That’s not America, is it?” Bono asked Rogan.
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Bono told Rogan that he “gets the instinct” to shrink “big government”—but that doing so has consequences.
“To choose which child to pull off the IVs—it just seems to me like, I don’t know if ‘evil’ is too strong a word, but what we know about pure evil is, it rejoices in the deaths, in the squandering of human life, particularly children,” Bono said as Rogan nodded along. “It actually rejoices in it, and whether it’s incompetence, whether it’s unintended consequences, it’s not too late.”
Bono revealed that he’s brought his case on this issue directly to Secretary of State—and acting administration of USAID—Marco Rubio, who is “convinced people aren’t dying” despite all evidence to the contrary.
“I just want to remind Americans of the size of their country, and I’m not talking about the geography,” Bono said, as Rogan chimed in with, “The impact.”
“The size of the idea, it’s just an extraordinary thing,” Bono continued. “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.”
During the conversation, Rogan acknowledged the negative impact of cuts to USAID while still alleging the agency had misspent money.
“So there’s a lot of fraud, a lot of money-laundering,” Rogan said, “But also, 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.”
Instead, Rogan said Musk should have given the agencies time to “prepare” and “build new infrastructure” so that this type of needless suffering could be avoided.
“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,” Rogan then admitted. “They’ve cut nothing.”
A Financial Times report earlier this month found that DOGE has fallen far short of its initial goal to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, saving the federal government even less than the $170 billion in savings DOGE has publicly claimed.
