This is absolutely outrageous.

ProPublica (@propublica) posted at 6:20 AM on Fri, Aug 22, 2025:
On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout.

On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar.

This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵 https://t.co/AXrrlzwFPy
(https://x.com/propublica/status/1958851685801250918?t=7gidhZyp2zXnZSgceXgEaQ&s=03)
2/ It starts with a viral Elon Musk post.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the graphic read, falsely claiming that USIP was funding the terrorist group through Halimi, whose work with the independent nonprofit involved providing expert advice to help U.S. diplomats understand Afghanistan.
3/ Halimi initially wonders if Musk’s accusation is an April Fool’s joke. After all, the decades of work he had done consulting for U.S. diplomats wasn’t in service of the Taliban; it was the opposite.

Little did he know his nightmare was just beginning.
4/ First came the flurry of threatening messages.

A week later, the realization of his worst fears: Taliban agents blindfolded his relatives and held them for several days in a remote prison, where they were repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi’s work.
5/ Halimi tried his best not to show his panic. He turned to his bosses in Washington to ask for help in clearing his name, but everyone he knew was gone.

DOGE had axed them all. Now USIP was firmly in the hands of someone he’d never heard of: Cavanaugh, who had been installed as interim President.
6/ Halimi and his family were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all blow over if they stayed quiet and laid low.

That’s when Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE members made an appearance on Fox News.
7/ One by one, each of the DOGE members one-upped each other with outrageous — yet often inaccurate — examples of government waste.

With each story, host Jesse Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the team would burst into laughter.
8/ Then came Cavanaugh’s turn. The United States Institute of Peace, he told the assembled men, was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.

As he spoke, the chyron at the bottom of the screen read: “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”
9/ Cavanaugh called the US Institute of Peace “the least peaceful agency we worked with.”

He told Watters he’d uncovered documents showing USIP was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban and that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments.
10/ But documents obtained by ProPublica show that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had received detailed records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work.

Records included invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days.
11/ Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News. But Cavanaugh defended cuts at the agency as needed and aligning with President Trump’s agenda.
12/ “DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior advisor for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”
13/ Neither the White House nor Musk responded to reporters’ requests for comment.
14/ For Halimi and his family, those actions would have far-reaching consequences.

Read the full story from @AASchapiro @Bing_Chris

https://t.co/8jpJKN0ekT
(https://x.com/propublica/status/1958853144042983746?t=C6ib5WrAeO37BSnqSvkC2w&s=03)

From the Article:
Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi, who fled the Taliban in 2021, had worked to help U.S. diplomats understand his homeland. Then DOGE put his family’s lives at risk by exposing his sensitive work for a U.S.-funded nonprofit.
by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing
Aug. 22, 2025, 6:30 a.m. EDT

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

……………………………..

ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.

Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.

…………………….

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.
About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.

The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.

Much more at the link above.