The Reasons Why The Truth Matters — Now More Than Ever

🔴 What USAID Actually Was — Before the Lies Started

Understanding what was destroyed requires understanding what existed. USAID was the development pillar of America's “three D” approach to foreign policy: Diplomacy, Development, and Defense. Its mission was to promote and demonstrate democratic values abroad while advancing a free, peaceful, and prosperous world — and to do so at a cost that represented less than 1% of the federal budget.

• USAID responded to an average of 75 humanitarian crises per year and operated in more than 100 countries.
• Between 2001 and 2021, USAID-supported programs were estimated to have saved 92 million lives — including 30.4 million children under five — through reductions in HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition, and other preventable causes. This figure comes from a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet.
• USAID was a key implementation partner for PEPFAR — the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, created by Republican President George W. Bush in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives. In 2023, 60% of PEPFAR's bilateral HIV assistance was implemented through USAID.
• USAID's budget in FY2024 was approximately $42.8 billion — accounting for roughly 0.4% of total federal spending. The United States was by far the world's largest provider of humanitarian assistance, funding about 47% of the global humanitarian appeal in 2024.
• As former Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated: “Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.” Gen. John Allen, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said USAID's work could do as much to prevent conflict as the deterrent effect of a carrier strike group.

Sources: Council on Foreign Relations — What Is USAID and Why Is It at Risk? • UCLA — USAID Cuts May Lead to 14 Million Deaths, The Lancet • NBC News — What Is USAID?

🔴 The Conspiracy Builder: Who Mike Benz Is and What He Actually Claims

The dismantling of USAID did not begin with a government audit, a congressional investigation, or a credible whistleblower. It began with a man named Mike Benz.

Benz is presented in right-wing media as a cybersecurity and national security expert and a former State Department official. The reality is considerably thinner. He spent approximately two months at the State Department during Trump's first term in a mid-level communications role — so briefly that, according to NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny, his photo never made it onto the department's website and he likely never figured out where the bathrooms were. Before his brief government stint, he ran a YouTube channel under the alias “Frame Game” where he posted videos promoting white identitarianism and blaming Jewish organizations for what he called white genocide. He is not a trained intelligence analyst, not a development expert, and has no verified expertise in the areas he claims to expose.

Starting in 2022, Benz began building an elaborate conspiracy theory about USAID across hundreds of hours of videos and social media posts. His specific claims include:

• USAID is “a covert operations division of the CIA”
• USAID funded COVID-19 bioweapon research in Chinese laboratories
• USAID paid for the 2019 Trump impeachment
• USAID funds terrorist groups in Pakistan and the Sahel in Africa
• USAID runs a global internet censorship program targeting conservatives
• USAID enriched a small elite class of administrators at taxpayer expense
• Obama, the Bush family, and others across both parties are “all in on it”

Benz appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast in late December 2024. That appearance is identified by the Washington Post as the trigger for Elon Musk's first mention of USAID on social media. Within weeks, Musk had interacted with Benz's posts more than 40 times, amplifying them to his 216 million followers. Benz then appeared on Charlie Kirk's podcast, Steve Bannon's War Room, Glenn Greenwald's Rumble show, NewsNation, and dozens of other right-wing platforms. Before Musk began attacking USAID, his own companies were benefiting from it: Tesla held a stake in a USAID-funded renewable energy company in sub-Saharan Africa, and SpaceX had partnered with USAID to bring Starlink to Ukraine after Russia's invasion.

Sources: NBC News — How Elon Musk Boosted False USAID Conspiracy Theories • Washington Post — How an Ex-State Department Official Fueled Musk's Attack on USAID • Foreign Policy in Focus — A Look at USAID from the Inside

🔴 The Specific Lies: What Musk and Trump Said vs. What Was True

Sources: FactCheck.org — Sorting Out the Facts on “Waste and Abuse” at USAID • FactCheck.org — No Basis for Corruption Accusations About USAID Administrator • PBS NewsHour — Fact-Checking Trump and Musk's Fraud Claims • NBC News — How Musk Boosted False USAID Conspiracy Theories

🔴 Marco Rubio: Praised It for a Decade, Destroyed It in a Week

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was appointed acting administrator of USAID before overseeing its dismantlement, spent more than a decade as one of its most vocal champions. PolitiFact reviewed his public record and found that on at least two dozen occasions over more than ten years — in speeches, social media posts, and legislation — Rubio praised USAID's work and defended foreign aid as essential to American interests.

• In February 2017, Rubio tweeted: “Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”
• In a 2022 letter to the Biden administration, Rubio urged prioritizing USAID's funding as a key tool to “counter the Chinese Communist Party's expanding global influence.” In February 2025, he dismissed those exact same concerns on Fox News.
• Over the years, Rubio praised USAID's work on tuberculosis, hurricane relief, maternal and child health, human trafficking, Philippines security, and education programs worldwide. He called USAID's achievements “amazing.”
• He sponsored legislation to strengthen USAID oversight and accountability — demonstrating he understood and supported its mission — in 2013, 2015, and 2016.
• On the Senate floor in 2017, he said PEPFAR had saved more than 11 million people and prevented 2 million babies from being born with HIV. He called it evidence that “millions of human beings are alive today because of the United States.”

PolitiFact rated Rubio's reversal a “Full Flop” — one of its most severe ratings. His change from praising USAID's value from 2012 to 2023 to calling it a threat to U.S. foreign policy in 2025 — and then abolishing 97% of its staff — was described as one of the most dramatic reversals in recent political memory.

Sources: PolitiFact — Marco Rubio Supported USAID as a Senator: Full Flop • CNN — Rubio's Years of Strong Support for USAID • Center for Global Development — Dear Secretary Rubio: You Are Right, Foreign Assistance Works

🔴 Lindsey Graham: The “Soft Power” Champion Who Cheered the Kill

Senator Lindsey Graham was, for decades, one of Congress's most prominent advocates for the concept of “soft power” — the idea that foreign assistance and diplomatic engagement protect American security more cost-effectively than military force. USAID was the embodiment of that concept.

• In February 2011, Graham told Foreign Policy magazine: “The world we live in takes a multifaceted approach. To the American taxpayer: We need to be investing in improving people's lives before the terrorists try to take over.”
• Graham has stated repeatedly that the U.S. needs a “strong USAID” with sufficient resources to accomplish its mission, calling it essential to national security and a pillar of America's global strategy alongside diplomacy and defense.
• Graham served as a director of the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit funded substantially by USAID, making him a direct beneficiary of the agency's work.

When USAID was dismantled, Graham stood flanked by lawmakers at a GOP press conference and declared the agency “should cease to exist as it did before.” He said what he had seen at the agency “makes me sick to my stomach.” He offered no evidence for this reversal. The Washington Post then reported that Graham had quietly joined Democrats in privately pressing Rubio about the foreign aid freeze — publicly cheering the cuts while privately expressing alarm about their consequences.

Sources: ABC News 4 — Graham Backs Trump's Push to Dismantle USAID Despite Past Support • The Borgen Project — 10 Foreign Aid Quotes from Congress • Washington Post — GOP Senators Privately Press Rubio on Aid Freeze

🔴 The Death Toll: What Has Happened Since

When Sen. Jeff Merkley asked Rubio at a congressional hearing in May 2025 about estimates of deaths caused by the USAID cuts, Rubio was firm: he said no one had died. When Elon Musk left DOGE at the end of May, he wrote on X that “zero people have died” from the cuts. The documented evidence says otherwise — and the scale is staggering.

• A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet on July 1, 2025 — the same day USAID formally ceased operations — projected that if the cuts continued, more than 14 million additional deaths could occur by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. The study analyzed data from 133 countries and was conducted by researchers from the U.S., Spain, Brazil, and Mozambique.
• By November 2025, Harvard surgeon and former USAID global health chief Dr. Atul Gawande wrote in The New Yorker that Boston University epidemiologist Dr. Brooke Nichols' models showed the dismantling had “already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”
• The Center for Global Development's own analysis found cuts may have led to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 lives lost in 2025 compared to previous years, with projected annual losses of 670,000 to 1.6 million going forward.
• Senator Brian Schatz told the Senate floor that over 360,000 people had already died from not having food and medication following the funding cuts.
• A ten-year-old boy named Peter in South Sudan contracted HIV from his mother at birth. PEPFAR kept him alive with medication. In February 2025, when funding stopped, Peter fell severely sick and died. His health worker said simply: “If USAID would be here, Peter would not have died.”
• In Sudan, a mother described watching her toddler die from a treatable chest infection after antibiotic supplies to local clinics were cut. Soup kitchens were closed. Cholera outbreaks became harder to contain. HIV clinics in South Africa shut down. Medical programs in Afghanistan were terminated.
• A new Lancet study published in February 2026 — one year after the dismantlement began — projected that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030 as other donor nations also began cutting their foreign aid in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal. The U.S. had funded 47% of the global humanitarian appeal; no other donor nation can fill that gap.

The State Department's response to the Lancet study was to call it “a failed journal.”

Sources: UCLA — USAID Cuts May Lead to 14 Million Deaths, The Lancet • Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — USAID Shutdown Has Led to Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths • Center for Global Development — Update on Lives Lost from USAID Cuts • Sen. Brian Schatz — Senate Floor Statement on USAID Destruction • CNN — One Year On: Lancet Study Projects 9.4 Million Deaths by 2030 • Democracy Now! — Dr. Atul Gawande: Hundreds of Thousands Have Already Died

🔴 What Was Also Lost: America's Goodwill on the World Stage

The deaths are the most urgent consequence. But there is a second casualty that will take years, perhaps decades, to fully measure: America's standing as a nation that other people around the world could count on.

For generations, when disasters struck, when famines threatened, when diseases spread, when floods overwhelmed — the first responders often arrived carrying bags, trucks, and planes marked with the American flag and the words “From the American People.” That was not just generosity. It was strategy. It was the reason that nations the U.S. had no diplomatic relationship with still allowed USAID workers in. It was the reason that communities that had every reason to distrust the U.S. government saw the American flag as a symbol of help coming — not a threat.

As Senator Schatz said from the Senate floor: “We used to be the indispensable nation that people around the world counted on for help. People would see the American flag, whether on the side of a truck or a sticker on a food parcel, and think, the good guys are here. Help is coming. But not anymore. We are causing death now. We are spreading disease now. We are deepening starvation now.”

Into the vacuum China is moving. Russia is moving. Other powers who have watched the United States retreat from its role as the world's leading humanitarian force are now positioning to fill that space — not with the same values, not with the same commitments to democracy and human rights, but with the same leverage that comes from being the people who show up when everyone else is suffering. The United States spent 63 years building that leverage. It was dismantled in weeks, based on conspiracy theories from a man who spent two months at the State Department and wasn't there long enough to get his picture on the website.