During an appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” U2 lead singer and longtime world hunger activist Bono made the unsubstantiated  claim that President Donald Trump’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has already caused more than 300,000 deaths worldwide.

The singer’s claim was quickly shot down by Rogan in an exchange that went viral on social media.

“Just a recent report, it’s not proven, but there’s surveillance enough, suggests 300,000 people have already died from just this cut off, this hard cut of USAID,” Bono claimed. “So there’s food rotting in boats, in warehouses.”

The Irish rockstar then claimed “50,000 tons” of food are currently rotting in warehouses from Djibouti, to South Africa, to Houston, Texas. “And that is rotting rather than going to Gaza, rather than going to Sudan, because the people who know the codes for the warehouse are fired, they’re gone,” Bono continued before asking Rogan for his thoughts on the matter.

Rogan — who has long commanded a reputation for nuanced views — noted that there are indeed hundreds of charitable organizations that do tremendous work throughout the globe.

“Also for sure, it was a money laundering operation,” the top-rated podcast host said of USAID. “For sure there was no oversight. For sure, billions of dollars are missing. In fact, trillions that are unaccounted for, that were sent off into various – they don’t even know where because there’s no receipts.”

He then pointed to previous statements from Elon Musk, who noted that if a public company were run in the manner of USAID and other bloated government agencies, they 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,” Rogan continued. “The whole thing is, there’s a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering.”

Elon Musk, who recently ended his term with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), reacted to the clip by calling Bono a “liar” and an “idiot.”

“Zero people have died!” the X owner added.

Bono appeared to be getting the 300,000 figure from a speculative model built by Brooke Nichols, a mathematical health modeler at Boston University. Nichols stressed that the number is purely speculative and cannot be verified due to lack of tracking data in affected regions.

“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.”