Michael Huber 
Until recently, Elon Musk seldom posted about the U.S. Agency for International Development on X, where he is wont to share his thoughts on nearly every subject.
Then on Sunday came a flurry of posts wherein the world’s richest person, the Trump-appointed head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, described USAID, the foreign humanitarian assistance agency, as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.”
“Time for it to die,” Musk posted.
Musk’s sudden — and consequential — interest in USAID did not emerge from a vacuum: The agency has long been a target of criticism that its aid programs masked nation-meddling and overspent American tax dollars abroad. Some conspiracy theories alleged that the global humanitarian programs were a cover for biowarfare research or that USAID’s funding enriched an elite few who control the world.
But until very recently, those claims were largely outside the mainstream, and USAID, which delivers billions of dollars of food and medicine to more than 100 countries, generally enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington.
That is no longer the case: President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that while he appreciated “the concept” of USAID, the people in the agency “turned out to be radical left lunatics.” Trump signed an executive order freezing foreign aid, and the agency is expected to be reduced to about 290 workers of the more than 5,000 foreign service officers, civil servants and personal service contractors it currently employs, according to two sources familiar with the plans.
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Most of Musk’s more than 160 posts about USAID have been responses to a handful of small but influential verified accounts, many of them using pseudonyms. The most popular — including posts from Wall Street Apes, Kanekoa the Great, Chief Nerd and Autism Capital — have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, amplified by Musk and his 216 million followers, according to X metrics. As the theories spread, they are repackaged, and in many cases added upon, to further the claims.
A review of the accounts’ profiles reveals how a lengthy crusade to paint USAID as a malevolent force built up in recent years in relatively fringe internet circles, only to be suddenly elevated and acted upon by Musk. The pattern is similar to one that played out with the so-called Twitter Files in 2022, when selectively framed narratives and out-of-context internal documents were weaponized to fuel allegations of a grand government censorship conspiracy. And it is one likely to continue under Trump and Musk, who have histories of trafficking in falsehoods.
Musk has not offered evidence for his descriptions of USAID — in an X Space, he called it “a ball of worms.” Trump said a report on its “tremendous fraud” is forthcoming and released a list of projects funded by the agency, including efforts to support diversity and inclusion, and examples of projects that had unintended and problematic consequences, including agriculture work that wound up supporting poppy farming in Afghanistan.
The Trump administration, Musk and the State Department, which now oversees USAID, did not respond to requests for comment.
In recent days, Musk has promoted the anonymous account DataRepublican and a corresponding searchable website of government grants and charities. X users have taken to plugging in the names of politicians and media figures who have spoken against the shuttering of USAID and charting organizations they are connected to, misrepresenting their opposition.
“The money laundering is done through several intermediaries,” Musk posted Thursday.
Influencers often collaborate with their audiences in that way to build conspiracy theories, according to Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, who was one of the earliest researchers to study online rumors.
“But now many of those influencers have immense power, both financial and political,” Starbird said. “Not only are they shaping the content and flow of those conspiracy theories, but [they are also] making hugely impactful decisions and shaping the structure of political institutions based upon them.”
The overarching message seems to be resonating beyond X, to networks like Gab and Telegram, according to Pyrra, a platform that monitors social media.
“Two narratives permeate the MAGA argument against USAID,” said Eric Curwin, Pyrra’s chief technology officer: “that it’s a tool of the left” and that “it’s a lawless organization, without oversight and rife with fraud.”
A key voice behind both the Twitter Files and the USAID conspiracy theories is Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official-turned-conservative researcher whom Musk has promoted and interacted with on X more than 40 times in the past week.
Benz, a self-described cybersecurity expert who briefly worked as an assistant deputy for international communications for the State Department under Trump, started tweeting about USAID in 2022. He framed its funding of a handbook on disinformation from a nonprofit democracy consortium as evidence of an agency-run global internet censorship program.
Over the next two years, he posted waves of tweets and dozens of hours of video presentations marked with highlighted texts and red notes, scribbles, circles and arrows, flicking at a sprawling narrative of USAID as a covert operations division of the CIA in which staff members sought to enrich themselves, spread leftist ideology at home and abroad and harm Trump. The theory alleged that USAID was behind the mass censorship of Americans, as well as global efforts to manipulate social media, rig elections and quash dissent.
“Benz runs the same playbook every time,” said Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and author of a book about how fringe creators, including Benz, increasingly influence public opinion. “He picks a villain, pretends it has ties to the CIA or some ‘deep state’ and acts as if he has inside knowledge when he’s really just decontextualizing public content. The remarkable thing is that the masters of the universe seem to repeatedly fall for it.”
Benz did not respond to a request for comment.
USAID provided humanitarian assistance to foreign countries as an independent agency. It has always faced criticism from groups arguing that it lacks accountability, that its results are difficult to quantify and that its projects do not always align with a clear national agenda, said Andrew Natsios, USAID’s administrator during the George W. Bush administration. But never has the entire agency, which Natsios said safeguards against the international spread of disease, famine-induced immigration and a host of other dangers to the United States, been so demonized.
Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm, agreed.
“It’s a big organization in a huge government, and clearly there are lots of inefficiencies, plenty of programs that I’m sure any sensible American would find that we’re spending too much money on or that shouldn’t be continued,” Bremmer said.
“If you ask me does an organization like USAID scream for reform, along with pretty much every part of the U.S. government, the answer is, of course, yes,” he continued. “But the idea that the organization is somehow criminal or evil or that all the money is wasted is, on its face, ludicrous.”
But according to Benz’s posts, USAID’s crimes are plenty, and they go straight to the top, accusations he lobs in rapid speeches filled with acronyms and hyperbole.
Benz paints a federal grant to a journalism outfit as proof USAID funded the 2019 impeachment of Trump; in reality, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global investigative news consortium in part funded by USAID, has produced significant reporting, including the Panama Papers, a massive leak of financial details about secret offshore accounts in 2016, and it revealed Rudy Giuliani’s political activities in Ukraine.
For Benz, funding to a scientific research nonprofit is evidence that USAID played a role in starting the pandemic. He draws that conclusion based on contributions of funding by USAID — along with the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department and other government agencies — to the EcoHealth Alliance, in part to identify emerging infectious diseases. One organization EcoHealth worked with was the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, a potential origin point of the Covid pandemic, though scientists and authorities are divided over the lab-leak theory.
“So our U.S. tax dollars were used effectively to, in the end, kill Americans, which is insane,” Musk said of USAID in an X Space on Monday.
Benz also cites unspecified “source docs” as substantiation that USAID was censoring social media. From former President Barack Obama to the Bush family, “they’re all in on it,” he told a Newsmax host Tuesday.
Benz was a relative unknown until 2022, when he positioned himself as the primary researcher behind a conservative fight against perceived government censorship. His Twitter Files research — which he rolled out in hourslong videos and posted on X, then known as Twitter — consisted of poring over government websites, academic documents, news reports and internal Twitter communications to draw what he claimed were connections among them that showed intent to silence conservatives.
Few seemed to question Benz’s qualifications, and fewer still seemed to be aware of his identity as a former alt-right vlogger, a self-described white identitarian who posted videos under the alias Frame Game alleging a mass censorship conspiracy against white people, with links to Jewish organizations, the U.S. government and social media companies. (After NBC News published an article connecting Benz, who is Jewish, to Frame Game in 2023, he said the account was a covert effort intended to somehow combat the antisemitism it espoused.)
Since then, his profile has only grown in conservative circles, where he runs a “free speech watchdog” organization and has been promoted by Musk, Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. In 2023, he made $253,889 in consulting fees from the Institute for Citizen Focused Service, a nonprofit public policy think tank led by former Trump officials, tax filings show.
Benz’s USAID theories have again made him a darling of right-wing media. This week, he has appeared on NewsNation, Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble show and Steve Bannon’s “War Room.” On Wednesday, Benz hosted a full hour of Charlie Kirk’s podcast.
Before Musk led the charge to terminate USAID, his companies worked with and took funding from it. Tesla holds a stake in a company called Zola, which is funded in part by USAID to bring renewable energy to agricultural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. And Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor, SpaceX, partnered with USAID to bring its Starlink satellite internet service to Ukraine in 2022 after Russia’s invasion destroyed telecommunications infrastructure.
While Musk and his businesses were lauded initially for bringing Wi-Fi service to Ukraine, controversy erupted after SpaceX withheld Starlink access from Ukraine’s military, effectively thwarting its drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in 2022, which Musk said he did to avoid being complicit in a “major act of war.” Russian troops also reportedly obtained and began using Starlink against Ukraine within its borders. Musk denied Starlink terminals were sold to Russia. Last year, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee initiated a probe, and USAID’s inspector general was investigating Starlink’s use in Ukraine as part of its own accountability checks.
On Wednesday, Musk shared a faked video claiming USAID had sponsored celebrity visits to Ukraine. Darren Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, told NBC News the video was manufactured Russian propaganda.
The impact of false conspiracy theories on USAID — whether they have directly shaped Musk’s actions at the agency or provided a convenient justification — is already being felt. Critical medical supplies, essential medicines and food aid are being withheld from their intended international recipients, and aid workers are scrambling to comply with the ordered shutdown of the agency on Friday.
“All of these things have been in the mix for a long time,” said Joseph Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “Now it’s coming from the president, and it’s got real teeth attached to it.”
On Tuesday, Benz took to X to suggest more was coming.
“I know this is going to sound weird but I feel like I haven’t even begun to unload on USAID and how dark it all goes,” Benz posted.
“Wow,” Musk replied.
