Joe Rogan has claimed on his podcast that hip-hop's declining chart performance is linked to cuts in US foreign aid funding, alleging that USAID had been secretly bankrolling "radical anti-government rappers overseas" as part of regime-change efforts, and suggesting its 2025 defunding explains rap's fall from the charts. The claim, made alongside comedians Shane Gillis, Mark Normand and Ari Shaffir, has no credible basis and misrepresents both USAID's actual work and the real reasons behind hip-hop's chart decline, making it another example of Rogan amplifying unsubstantiated conspiracy theories to his large audience.

There is only a thin factual thread behind the claim: USAID once supported a Cuban anti-Castro rapper known as Aldo via a contractor in 2009, and separately funded a Tanzanian youth health-awareness music programme, but no evidence exists that it ever funded rappers within the United States. USAID, a roughly $23 billion agency mostly providing food and medical aid abroad, saw its budget slashed by more than 80% under Elon Musk's DOGE initiative in 2025, a cut some estimates link to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths overseas. The genuine explanation for hip-hop's charts slump lies elsewhere: Billboard altered its methodology last year to deprioritise YouTube streams, a change that has disproportionately affected the genre.