DOGE Focused Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban...

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, received a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s identify had simply appeared in a viral put up on X, shared by none apart from the location’s proprietor and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day in any case. Musk had been assigned a giant job within the Trump administration, working the newly shaped Division of Authorities Effectivity that was established to comb via the federal government to root out waste and fraud.

Halimi had a a lot smaller job, engaged on a contract for america Institute of Peace, an unbiased nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes battle decision efforts around the globe, together with in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no method, he thought to himself, that somebody like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.

However Halimi’s son was not joking. He advised Halimi to go surfing and see for himself. The put up, which Musk shared together with his 222 million followers, was actual. It had already been picked up by the native press again house. And it was probably lethal.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post learn. On the backside, the put up named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the funds to him as U.S. help for the militants. Beneath that, 1000’s of feedback tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for locating that “the federal authorities is paying the Taliban they usually coated it up.”

Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. international support efforts may argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But when there was one factor Washington ought to have recognized about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.

It was true that he’d as soon as labored for the Taliban authorities that dominated Afghanistan within the Nineties, however he had switched sides after america invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cupboard minister within the U.S.-backed Afghan authorities, the place he typically shared his information of the Taliban’s inner workings with intelligence officers and navy leaders.

In truth, throughout President Donald Trump’s first time period in workplace, Halimi was a part of a crew of advisers that helped the U.S. put together for troublesome diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which ultimately included ensures to permit American troops protected passage out.

And his political beliefs had been simple to determine: Halimi had made quite a few media appearances as one of many Taliban’s extra ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true rules.

This all made him an apparent goal. The Taliban had tried to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at the very least 3 times through the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. authorities knew he had confronted actual hazard previously. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the assistance of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer within the nation. Since then, he had tried to reside a largely quiet life, partly to maintain the family he’d left behind protected from retribution.

The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the other.

ProPublica has obtained information making clear that Musk and his crew on the newly shaped DOGE ought to have recognized this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in exact element within the company’s information, all the way down to the duties he carried out on particular days. His function on the institute was removed from high secret, but it surely had been handled as extremely delicate and confidential. Amongst different duties, it concerned a program gathering data on the bottom about residing situations for Afghan girls, who’re largely barred from training previous major faculty or from having a job in public life.

Partly due to Halimi’s contentious historical past with the Taliban, the militants may equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anybody concerned with it. By exposing him, Musk and his crew endangered these working with Halimi, as effectively his family who had been nonetheless in Afghanistan. The White Home and Musk didn’t reply to requests for remark.

A number of senior authorities officers on the State Division had been warned concerning the hazard that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s household, in response to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They had been attempting to cease the harm from spreading. However Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for management of USIP. The deceptive narrative about Halimi grew to become central to DOGE’s argument; American international support was corrupt and even, at instances, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE needed to take over.

These battles had been taking part in out throughout the federal government on the time. DOGE typically gained, however in the end Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE on the finish of Might, shortly earlier than a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of presidency companies introduced chaos and confusion and left many certified bureaucrats jobless. However Halimi risked dropping much more.

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages started showing on his cellphone. Essentially the most ominous got here from members of the Taliban. Simply as Halimi had nervous, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which may very well be like a loss of life sentence for anybody linked to him again house. “My household was in nice hazard,” Halimi thought to himself.

A couple of week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears had been realized. Taliban intelligence brokers in Kabul descended on the houses of his family and detained three of his relations. They had been blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup vehicles and pushed to a small distant jail. They had been held incommunicado over a number of days and repeatedly crushed and questioned about Halimi and his not too long ago publicized but ambiguous work for america.

The account of the beatings relies on interviews with a number of individuals accustomed to the occasions. ProPublica didn’t interview any sources in Afghanistan, a rustic the place persons are generally imprisoned for talking out towards the federal government.

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief authorities spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, mentioned Halimi “just isn’t vital to us and we don’t wish to discuss him that a lot.” He added that there was no energetic prison investigation concentrating on him. The spokesperson didn’t reply questions concerning the remedy of Halimi’s household, saying, “I don’t contemplate it essential to reply.”

Whereas Halimi felt powerless to do something, his family in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to placed on a courageous face, although he knew from his personal near-death experiences with the Taliban that the state of affairs was more and more bleak.

“To maintain the morale of the household excessive, I didn’t present them my panic,” he advised ProPublica in one in every of a number of interviews performed via a translator.

He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts towards him and to hunt assist clearing his identify. However everybody Halimi labored with had been fired.

A 28-year-old faculty dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been put in as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its chief, State Division veteran George E. Moose.

Halimi and his family members had been on their very own. Possibly, they hoped, this could all cross in the event that they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their marketing campaign towards USIP and Halimi to a different stage.

In Might, somewhat greater than a month later, DOGE invited Fox Information host Jesse Watters to sit down in and movie one in every of its crew conferences. It was the primary main media appearance by the bigger DOGE crew. For almost half-hour on prime-time TV, Musk and greater than a dozen triumphant younger males in fits sat round a desk congratulating each other. They swapped warfare tales concerning the authorities fraud they’d uncovered and the wasteful bureaucrats they’d delivered to heel.

At that time, DOGE was using excessive: It had largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the principle international support company. The watchdog Client Monetary Safety Bureau had been decreased to a skeleton crew. And on the Division of Schooling, DOGE had reduce a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to an internal research arm that tracks the efficiency of public colleges.

For weeks, DOGE had been posting on-line a whole bunch of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the financial savings — although in a number of instances, the totals had been later found to be wildly off, or the contracts largely misrepresented. The White Home has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson not too long ago saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with company procurement officers.”

With Watters, the DOGE crew zeroed in on authorities spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping instance of waste from the Schooling Division. He mentioned that the division had misused taxpayer cash by funding events at Caesars Palace, a on line casino and lodge in Las Vegas, earlier than DOGE carried out new necessities to submit receipts. The declare appeared to have little resemblance to the reality: One faculty district in Utah had used DOE funds to ship lecturers to an training convention hosted at a Caesars lodge. Davis didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Musk went across the desk, prodding the opposite members of the crew as they one-upped each other with outrageous examples of their very own. With every story, Watters egged them on, elevating his eyebrows in disbelief. On occasion, the DOGE crew would burst into laughter.

At one level, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an ungainly joke about how the work he’d discovered being accomplished at america Institute of Peace was truly “the other of the title.”

Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceable company we labored with.” To show his level, he turned towards Watters and mentioned he’d uncovered paperwork displaying that the company was making funds to a contractor related to the Taliban.

Watters checked out Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of right here.”

“That is actual,” Cavanaugh mentioned. Watters raised a hand, urgent on: “What was the cash going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”

“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.

He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron on the backside of the display learn, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”

In an announcement, a spokesperson with Fox Information mentioned, “It’s clear ProPublica is attempting to insert FOX Information into this story regardless of acknowledging the community having no half in any unmasking or identification of the unbiased contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no level was the contractor recognized, and the main target of the interview was on excessive spending practices and potential billing fraud inside authorities companies.”

In an e mail, Cavanaugh mentioned he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that features the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An amazing majority of Individuals would agree that the Federal Authorities shouldn’t be funding former members of the Taliban when our nation is $36T in debt.” He didn’t reply to questions on why DOGE selected to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether or not it knew the danger in doing so.

Whereas DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the excellence was generally misplaced as Halimi’s contract grew to become a viral social media and information story. For instance, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding a number of terrorist organizations” was considered by greater than 180,000 individuals. And on Fox Information, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work merely as funds to the Taliban.

Cavanaugh advised Watters that DOGE was unable to seek out any justification for these funds. However ProPublica’s reporting confirmed that 4 weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been despatched dozens of pages of inner information from USIP outlining Halimi’s work intimately, in response to paperwork obtained underneath the Freedom of Info Act. There have been invoices, undertaking descriptions, and dates and instances displaying what Halimi was imagined to be doing on particular days. Cavanaugh didn’t reply to questions on his entry to those information or how they appeared to battle together with his statements on Fox Information.

USIP’s personal information, obtained by ProPublica, present that not one of the institute’s work concerned funds to the Taliban. A lot of what Halimi did was truly routine international coverage consulting: He offered professional recommendation to the State Division to assist U.S. diplomats perceive spiritual dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, the place he made contact with different distinguished political and spiritual figures throughout the Center East on behalf of the USIP.

He was additionally an adviser to USIP on girls’s points in Islam, one thing he was uniquely certified to do each personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of home violence, and Halimi spoke about her brazenly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan girls’s rights advocate who opened the nation’s first girls’s shelter after the Taliban fell.

As an official within the authorities of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the vital supportive and open-minded spiritual students I’ve ever recognized,” Akrami mentioned in an interview.

Halimi went on to serve in quite a lot of high-profile posts within the U.S.-backed authorities, together with as an investigator on the Supreme Court docket, a spokesperson for the nationwide spiritual council, an adviser to the nationwide safety council, and at last the minister for spiritual affairs and hajj underneath the final democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.

After the Fox Information interview, Halimi was struggling to maneuver ahead. By early spring, the Taliban had launched his crushed and terrified relations. However they made it clear that they anticipated Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There have been no good choices. Such an admission would imply that his household would by no means be protected once more, since they’d without end be related to a traitor. But when he refused, they might even be underneath fixed stress.

Halimi had barely escaped the nation 4 years earlier, when the U.S.-backed authorities he labored for collapsed within the face of a fast Taliban navy advance into the capital. A distinguished Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — putting a bullseye on his head. And Halimi mentioned {that a} broad amnesty provide from the Taliban, prolonged to most of their enemies, wouldn’t apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson advised ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)

The state of affairs was dire, and the U.S. authorities knew it too. In these remaining days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and together with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded a number of Taliban checkpoints en path to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to remark. The Pentagon declined to remark and referred questions on Halimi’s previous work with the U.S. to the State Division.

“I by no means cried more durable in my life than I did that night time once I left my nation,” he advised ProPublica. “However I had no selection.”

It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.

When he was 7 years outdated, his mom took him and his six siblings throughout the border to Pakistan to flee the civil warfare that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are simply of warfare, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi mentioned. “My mom used to inform me Afghanistan was a peaceable place previously. I’ve no reminiscence of it.”

Halimi’s father, the city imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was younger. He and his siblings grew up in a tent throughout the border inside a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi discovered a method out via a scholarship to check Islamic regulation in Egypt.

Halimi’s time in Cairo, the place he socialized with worldwide college students from throughout the globe, modified him. He started wanting on the world otherwise, he mentioned, with a curiosity about different cultures and a lifelong curiosity in international languages.

However by the point he returned house, a gaggle of conservative spiritual college students turned insurgent fighters had been dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil warfare and had consolidated energy over the capital. They had been referred to as the Taliban.

Halimi took a job in a authorities workplace liable for coping with international diplomats, not as a result of he believed in Taliban ideology, however as a result of, for a person with a university diploma and political aspirations, “it was the one good job I may discover,” he mentioned.

Then got here the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban authorities and ushered in a bloody, protracted warfare. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban authorities at a large jail at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was amongst them. The remedy was brutal. He was consistently shackled by his arms and toes, besides for brief rest room breaks. However alongside the best way, he mentioned, he realized English and constructed an understanding of his captors.

Whereas some distinguished Taliban fighters and leaders had been despatched to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a comparatively unknown bureaucrat, was a part of a gaggle that was steadily set free. Some individuals had been enlisted to affix the U.S.-backed authorities; their expertise made them helpful to Washington and its native allies’ efforts to know, and even talk with, the Taliban.

In these early days of the battle, the U.S. navy and intelligence communities had been underneath large stress to cease additional assaults on the homeland. But they knew just about nothing about their assumed enemy. What adopted was twenty years of American navy intervention throughout the area that led to a whole bunch of 1000’s of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very teams the U.S. as soon as sought to unseat.

When U.S. forces lastly withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His nation had been savaged by warring powers for many years. In some way, he had managed to remain alive via all of it, however now there was no place for him.

Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to counsel he could be chosen to wind down a world conflict-resolution company. His quarter-hour of fame on Fox Information represented an unlikely flip for a younger man who’d spent his brief profession founding area of interest tech startups.

Cavanaugh comes from a rich household — his father constructed a $100 million sports activities complement firm — and he advised individuals he was impressed by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He began two small corporations, which centered on specialised software program instruments to assist corporations handle their funds and mental property. However buyers in each advised ProPublica that neither firm efficiently took off.

When DOGE was introduced, Cavanaugh was keen to affix up, a former co-worker advised ProPublica. It’s not clear how he in the end received linked to the group, however DOGE recruited closely from younger right-wing tech circles in California.

Buddies and former colleagues mentioned they’d by no means heard him focus on American international coverage or present an curiosity in geopolitics. But in January, as a frontrunner in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to guage and oversee funds cuts throughout a wide range of federally funded worldwide applications. Among the many companies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio had been the Inter-American Basis and African Growth Basis. He was a part of the DOGE crew that sought cuts on the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to construct a park stuffed with statues of “American Heroes,” in response to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.

However it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased constructing overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, the place Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established underneath President Ronald Reagan, the company had as soon as loved bipartisan help. Whereas it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP just isn’t a authorities company; its contracts haven’t sometimes been posted publicly, and its staff function with a level of removing from U.S. officialdom. That provides the institute some capacity to function behind the scenes and set up relationships with figures on the heart of advanced conflicts — figures reminiscent of Mohammad Halimi.

It’s typically pushing casual diplomacy: In 2023, for instance, USIP workers helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the federal government of the Philippines within the nation’s restive south.

However in 2024, the Heritage Basis — which led Project 2025 — revealed a report arguing that USIP had turn into a partisan, Democrat-controlled establishment.

When Cavanaugh and a number of other different DOGE officers first confirmed as much as take management of the USIP in March, he was bodily blocked from getting into the constructing by its safety chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer earlier than becoming a member of the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter once more somewhat later, this time with two FBI brokers in tow. O’Brien blocked him once more, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no enterprise dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an unbiased entity.

Over the subsequent few days, DOGE put extra stress on O’Brien. FBI brokers indicated O’Brien was the topic of a brand new Justice Division investigation. They usually visited the house of one in every of his subordinates for questioning. In the end, the interim U.S. lawyer in Washington on the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officers give DOGE entry to the constructing.

The following time Cavanaugh appeared on the company’s door, he and a phalanx of native cops compelled their method in. “I’m a agency believer that what makes this nation particular is that we observe legal guidelines and course of,” O’Brien mentioned. “What occurred that day was the antithesis of all the things I consider in.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to touch upon the function of FBI personnel within the takeover. Martin didn’t reply to a request for remark. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Division of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which mentioned that cops spoke with the brand new performing USIP president and assisted him in eradicating “unauthorized people” from the constructing.

As soon as in possession of its workplaces and knowledge techniques, Cavanaugh and his crew fired just about all USIP personnel, together with over 100 abroad workers. With little warning or consciousness of the potential hazard to abroad staff, former staffers mentioned, they shuttered USIP workplaces in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s worldwide safety crew, its workers in Libya feared for his or her security and had been compelled to flee on their very own throughout the border. Cavanaugh and his workers canceled greater than 700 contracts over 12 days.

They rifled via different USIP recordsdata, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE additionally bragged about uncovering funds for “non-public jets,” when, actually, information present that USIP chartered a single aircraft for an evacuation mission out of a warfare zone for its workers. Cavanaugh didn’t reply a query concerning the assertion.

Over the next weeks, the DOGE crew celebrated its newfound energy contained in the USIP constructing. Members had been seen smoking cigars within the workplace and consuming beer as they labored late into the night time. The company’s insignia was torn from the entryway.

“DOGE was fully detached to the impact their actions had on human beings,” mentioned Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan professional who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Division. All it cared about, he mentioned, was making “its enemies look unhealthy.”

Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi continues to be choosing up the items and attempting to get solutions.

Throughout his lengthy profession as an official within the Afghan authorities, Halimi typically rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, however now nobody within the Trump administration is asking him again. He proudly confirmed ProPublica a letter he obtained from Stephen Hadley, the previous U.S. nationwide safety adviser underneath George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “selling democracy” in Afghanistan.

Former senior State Division, White Home and nationwide safety officers who labored on Afghanistan during the last twenty years described the Trump administration’s assault on Halimi as not solely absurd, but additionally harmful.

Johnny Walsh, a former State Division official who labored with Halimi, recalled that “he wished the identical factor because the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceable finish to the warfare.

Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the Nationwide Safety Council who centered on Afghanistan within the first Trump administration, mentioned, “DOGE didn’t do their homework. They’re placing in danger people who’re serving to america.”

As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented simply lengthy sufficient for a number of relations to make it in a foreign country. ProPublica just isn’t disclosing how that occurred or the place they’re for his or her security, however they continue to be stranded with out immigration standing.

Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, introduced he was leaving authorities service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the chance to assist scale back wasteful spending” and mentioned that “I’m hopeful america continues to prioritize wise spending — I consider it’s important to take care of our supremacy 🇺🇸.”

USIP’s operations have been basically frozen. Its headquarters is underneath federal management — standing empty other than a couple of safety guards monitoring the entrances. A brand new performing president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.

Beattie is a former Duke College professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it got here out that he spoke at a convention repeatedly attended by white nationalists. Beattie didn’t tackle a ProPublica query concerning the occasion however previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”

At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the group to match the Trump administration’s international coverage priorities.

In an emailed assertion to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s remedy of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to finish the weaponization of presidency, reduce off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding applications that find yourself undermining our nationwide safety.”

George Foote, the previous head lawyer of USIP who nonetheless represents its outdated management in ongoing litigation towards the Trump administration, referred to as DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”

Halimi stays with out work. He wonders how he’ll help his spouse and kids and whether or not there’s any likelihood he can clear his identify. On the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has brought on his household a lot hurt.

In one in every of ProPublica’s remaining interviews, Halimi made a final request: May we assist him get an viewers with Musk?

“Why would one of many richest males on this planet commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi requested. “Generally I feel that if Elon Musk himself had been totally knowledgeable about this matter, he would seemingly be deeply ashamed.”