Seeking help with a curl command in a bash script - SOLVED

I've got this command in a bash script:

TEST=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -k -w "%{http_code}" -u "${USERNAME}:${PASSWORD}" "${URL}/dashboard/")
echo "${TEST}" #debug

When the script runs, the output is "000".

When I run the same curl command from the shell, the output is "200" (which is correct, since the URL is valid).

I verified that the USERNAME, PASSWORD, and URL vars are being passed to the subshell.

I'd appreciate it if you could point out what I'm doing wrong here. :)

UPDATE: This has been solved.