DOGE focused him on social media. Then the Taliban took his household.

Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi, who fled the Taliban in 2021, had labored to assist U.S. diplomats perceive his homeland. Then DOGE put his household’s lives in danger by exposing his delicate work for a U.S.-funded nonprofit.

These highlights had been written by the reporters and editors who labored on this story.

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, bought a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s title had simply appeared in a viral publish on X, shared by none aside 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 an enormous job within the Trump administration, working the newly fashioned Division of Authorities Effectivity that was established to comb by means of the federal government to root out waste and fraud.

Mohammad Halimi was pressured to flee Afghanistan in 2021. “I had no choice,” he mentioned.

Halimi had a a lot smaller job, engaged on a contract for the US Institute of Peace, an impartial nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes battle decision efforts all over the world, together with in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no approach, 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 publish, which Musk shared together with his 222 million followers, was actual. It had already been picked up by the native press again dwelling. And it was doubtlessly lethal.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the publish learn. On the backside, the publish named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the funds to him as U.S. help for the militants. Under that, hundreds 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 government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”

Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. international help 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 Nineteen Nineties, however he had switched sides after the US 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 inside workings with intelligence officers and navy leaders.

The truth is, 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 tough diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which finally included ensures to permit American troops protected passage out.

And his political opinions 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 ideas.

This all made him an apparent goal. The Taliban had tried to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at the least 3 times in the course of the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. authorities knew he had confronted actual hazard up to now. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan within the closing days earlier than the U.S.-backed authorities 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 principally quiet life, partly to maintain the family members 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 alternative.

ProPublica has obtained data making clear that Musk and his crew on the newly fashioned DOGE ought to have recognized this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in exact element within the company’s data, all the way down to the duties he carried out on particular days. His position on the institute was removed from high secret, however it 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 nicely his family members who had been nonetheless in Afghanistan. The White Home and Musk didn’t reply to requests for remark.

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A number of senior authorities officers on the State Division had been warned in regards to the hazard that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s household, in line with two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They had been making an attempt 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 turned central to DOGE’s argument; American international help was corrupt and even, at instances, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE needed to take over.

These battles had been enjoying out throughout the federal government on the time. DOGE typically received, however in the end Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE on the finish of Could, 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 shedding much more.

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages started showing on his telephone. Probably the most ominous got here from members of the Taliban. Simply as Halimi had anxious, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which might be like a dying sentence for anybody linked to him again dwelling. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.

A few week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears had been realized. Taliban intelligence brokers in Kabul descended on the properties of his family members and detained three of his members of the family. 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 the US.

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 “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no lively felony investigation concentrating on him. The spokesperson didn’t reply questions in regards to the therapy of Halimi’s household, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”

Whereas Halimi felt powerless to do something, his family members 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 keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he advised ProPublica in certainly one of a number of interviews carried out by means of 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 title. 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.

Former USIP appearing President George Moose, left, and appearing counsel George Foote on Could 21 exterior the company’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Halimi and his family members had been on their very own. Perhaps, they hoped, this could all move 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 degree.

At that time, DOGE was using excessive: It had principally shut down the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement, the primary international help company. The watchdog Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau had been lowered to a skeleton crew. And on the Division of Schooling, DOGE had minimize lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to an inside analysis arm that tracks the efficiency of public faculties.

For weeks, DOGE had been posting on-line lots of of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the financial savings — although in a number of instances, the totals had been later discovered to be wildly off, or the contracts principally 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 agency procurement officials.”

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 resort 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 academics to an training convention hosted at a Caesars resort. 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. Every now and then, the DOGE crew would burst into laughter.

“The Taliban Gets DOGED”

The phase by which Nate Cavanaugh, Elon Musk and others mislead viewers in regards to the content material in Halimi’s contract.

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

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

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

“This is real,” Cavanaugh mentioned. Watters raised a hand, urgent on: “What was the money 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 screen learn, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”

Timeline of Occasions

Mar. 17DOGE staffers, standing alongside native regulation enforcement officers, work their approach into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.

Mar. 317:17pm ESTIn a publish on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, value $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.

Apr. 17:46 a.m. ESTDOGE’s publish about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by native press in Afghanistan, the place the Taliban discover the event.

Round Apr. 9Members of Halimi’s household are picked up by Taliban safety forces round Kabul, taken to jail and crushed.

USIP’s personal data, 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 overtly 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 most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami mentioned in an interview.

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

***

Halimi had barely escaped the nation 4 years earlier, when the U.S.-backed authorities he labored for collapsed within the face of a speedy Taliban navy advance into the capital. A distinguished Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — inserting 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 closing 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 never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he advised ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”

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 conflict that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi mentioned. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory 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 approach out by means of a scholarship to review 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 trying on the world in another way, he mentioned, with a curiosity about different cultures and a lifelong curiosity in international languages.

Halimi, entrance, second from the left, with Afghan college students in Egypt.

However by the point he returned dwelling, a gaggle of conservative spiritual college students turned insurgent fighters had been dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil conflict and had consolidated energy over the capital. They had been often called the Taliban.

Halimi took a job in a authorities workplace answerable 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 only good job I could find,” he mentioned.

Then got here the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban authorities and ushered in a bloody, protracted conflict. 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 therapy was brutal. He was continually shackled by his fingers and toes, besides for brief rest room breaks. However alongside the way in which, he mentioned, he discovered 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 let loose. 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 beneath large strain to cease additional assaults on the homeland. But they knew nearly nothing about their assumed enemy. What adopted was 20 years of American navy intervention throughout the area that led to lots of of hundreds 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. By some means, he had managed to remain alive by means of all of it, however now there was no place for him.

***

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 targeted on specialised software program instruments to assist corporations handle their funds and mental property. However traders 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 bought linked to the group, however DOGE recruited closely from younger right-wing tech circles in California.

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Associates and former colleagues mentioned they’d by no means heard him talk about American international coverage or present an curiosity in geopolitics. But in January, as a pacesetter in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to guage and oversee finances cuts throughout a wide range of federally funded worldwide packages. Among the many companies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio had been the Inter-American Basis and African Improvement 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 line with a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.

But it surely 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 beneath President Ronald Reagan, the company had as soon as loved bipartisan help. Whereas it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP shouldn’t be a authorities company; its contracts haven’t usually been posted publicly, and its staff function with a level of elimination from U.S. officialdom. That provides the institute some capability to function behind the scenes and set up relationships with figures on the middle of complicated conflicts — figures similar to 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 Venture 2025 — revealed a report arguing that USIP had change 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 coming 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 just a little 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 impartial entity.

Over the following few days, DOGE put extra strain on O’Brien. FBI brokers indicated O’Brien was the topic of a brand new Justice Division investigation. And so they visited the house of certainly one 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 subsequent time Cavanaugh appeared on the company’s door, he and a phalanx of native cops pressured their approach in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien mentioned. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to touch upon the position 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 broadcast assertion, which mentioned that cops spoke with the brand new appearing USIP president and assisted him in eradicating “unauthorized individuals” from the constructing.

As soon as in possession of its places of work and knowledge techniques, Cavanaugh and his crew fired nearly 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 places of work 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 pressured to flee on their very own throughout the border. Cavanaugh and his workers canceled greater than 700 contracts over 12 days.

They rifled by means of different USIP recordsdata, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE additionally bragged about uncovering funds for “private jets,” when, the truth is, data present that USIP chartered a single airplane for an evacuation mission out of a conflict zone for its workers. Cavanaugh didn’t reply a query in regards to the assertion.

An plane constitution settlement exhibits that USIP chartered a airplane in the course of the interval of the 2021 Kabul airlift in Afghanistan.

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 ingesting beer as they labored late into the evening. The company’s insignia was torn from the entryway.

“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect 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 bad.”

***

Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi continues to be choosing up the items and making an attempt 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 looking him again. He proudly confirmed ProPublica a letter he acquired from Stephen Hadley, the previous U.S. nationwide safety adviser beneath George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.

A letter on White Home letterhead despatched to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for nationwide safety affairs, thanking him for his work.

Former senior State Division, White Home and nationwide safety officers who labored on Afghanistan during the last 20 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 wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceable finish to the conflict.

Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the Nationwide Safety Council who targeted on Afghanistan within the first Trump administration, mentioned, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented simply lengthy sufficient for a number of members of the family to make it overseas. ProPublica shouldn’t be 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 opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and mentioned that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”

USIP’s operations have been basically frozen. Its headquarters is beneath federal management — standing empty other than a couple of safety guards monitoring the entrances. A brand new appearing 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 frequently attended by white nationalists. Beattie didn’t handle a ProPublica query in regards to the occasion however beforehand 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.

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

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

In certainly one of ProPublica’s closing interviews, Halimi made a final request: Might we assist him get an viewers with Musk?

“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi requested. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”