You write: “While many EAs tend to focus on private philanthropy, this crisis highlights why government action is indispensable.”
I think this is totally right. Over the last few days, I think that EAs have over-focussed on “how can we donate directly to the programmes that are being cut”, rather than “how can we influence governments, now and in the future, to maximise the amount of aid that goes to effective programmes”. It’s good that you are thinking politically about this. The leverage from influencing government policy is so high. The lessons of the last few days/weeks should be “more EAs need to think and act politically about global health and development, as that is where the real leverage is”, rather than “how can we directly make up the shortfall on the ground”. (Though of course I understand the very admirable instinct to do the latter...)
I think EA has been taken in too far by “mistake theory”, with the idea that surely everyone values saving lives, they just disagree with each other on how to do it, and if we just explain that PEPFAR saves lives to the right people, they’ll change their minds.
But like… look at the ridiculously hostile replies to this tweet by Scott Alexander. There is an influential section of the Right that is ideologically against any tax money going to help save non-american lives, and this section appears to be currently in charge of the US government. These people cannot be reasoned out of their positions: instead the only path is to rip them away from power and influence. These anti-human policies must be hung over the head of the Republican party, and they must bleed politically for them: so that future politicians are warned away from such cruelty.
this section appears to be currently in charge of the US government
What section do you put Marco Rubio in?
These people cannot be reasoned out of their positions
Not sure hostile tweets are compelling evidence here. Social media participation seems very self-selected. Generally I think hostile tweets represent tails of a bell curve. (Also, most of the replies I’m reading don’t seem overly hostile.)
Search for “Life Effects” in Scott’s survey results. Many readers say they donate more to charity as a result of his blog. His reasonable approach appears to work.
Even if we grant that some people are unpersuadable—If your goal is for Republican poll numbers to go down as a result of the USAID situation, the best advocacy strategy isn’t obvious. For all we know, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric will polarize more people against foreign aid.
Vegans have taken a super-aggressive approach to advocacy for years. My sense is that it works on about 5% of the population, and turns off the remaining 95%.
Progressive activists only make up 8% of the population in the US (they’re just very vocal): https://hiddentribes.us/
“You’re anti-human because you bought yourself a birthday cake instead of donating to malaria nets!” Even EAs don’t use this kind of language with each other. If it doesn’t work for us, why would we expect it to work on the general population?
The side that defied a court order to eliminate 90% of USAID programs this week including all the lifesaving programs described above, with the name Marco Rubio referenced as being the decision-making authority in the termination letters.
I’m not sure the number of statements he’s made in favour of some of these programs being lifesaving before termination letters were sent out in his name is a mitigating factor. And if he’s not actually making the decisions it’s a moot point: appealing to Rubio’s better nature doesn’t seem to be a way forward.
I’m inclined to agree that EAs should think more politically in general.
But the value of specific actions depends on both scale/leverage and the probability of success.
Influencing governments in the short-term has a low probability of success, unless you’re already in a position of power or it’s an issue that is relatively uncontroversial (e.g. with limited trade-offs).
Because of the scale of government spending, it could still be worth trying—but the main value might be in learning lessons on how to get better at influencing in the future, rather than having any immediate impact.
From the perspective of the long term, helping humans to improve how they govern themselves, might be the necessary condition for any other causes. Without it, even miracle scientific breakthrough will not produce positive outcomes.
I’ve got really mixed feelings here and I don’t know which way to swing. I’m still extremely uncertain about how much we can influence aid policy especially amidst the current messy global political situation.
Sure leverage can be high, but the question is how on earth do we get that leverage? What do you suggest?
I would love to see some great posts on the forum about how we counterfactually could have spent our money or time to prevent this current mess? That might convince me that future work could be valuable too.
To state the obvious Politics is super hard to influence for many reasons including
1) huge money and effort already poured into influencing politics from many angles, so achieving acting in that environment is really difficult.
2) so much unpredictability and change over time.
CE literally started an org which was trying to do something like this, which soon shut down because they didn’t feel it was working
I think it’s easy to say that leverage is “high” for political action but there still needs to be a meaningful pathway to make that happen. Right now in the wake of trump, AID policy might be a harder needle to shift than ever before. A recently elected left wing government in the UK even just slashed aid by 40 percent—wild stuff.
There could even be a counter argument that in a world where governments are backing away from international aid and are harder to leverage, increasing EA donations and covering gaps could be more important than a few years ago.
I know EA aligned people put a lot of successful effort into helping USAID funding be more evidence based, which bore great fruits for a while but now it’s unfortunately in the dust at least for now
I’m all for political leverage and putting funding into it, but we need concrete fundable ideas different from those we have tried which didn’t work already.
Also Making up the shortfall on the ground is a great thing to do, and like your said in no way mutually exclusive from political work.
Appreciate this thoughtful comment Nick! I’m also unsure where I fall on how EAs should respond/ where the balance between funding policy advocacy and cost-effective interventions on the ground should be. I think within the advocacy piece—my argument would be that EAs should diversify influence strategies and the types of organizations they fund in order to build power from multiple angles. And even to build the evidence base needed for these kind of calculations, because I think everyone is kind of shooting blind. Influencing aid policy is difficult but it’s possible with the right strategy…which I think could be more diversified than it is now.
Funding more grassroots advocacy strategies. Grassroots organizing is an essential but often overlooked piece of policy influence. While direct lobbying by experts and insiders plays a role, real political change happens when elected officials feel pressure from their own constituents. This is one of the most powerful tools we have in democracy, but it doesn’t fit neatly into impact assessments and is underfunded as a result. Without sustained grassroots pressure, even the best policy ideas often go nowhere. But even with robust and already established grassroots networks, it can take multiple congressional sessions to get bills passed or funding increased. But it’s hard to prove impact if it looks like your campaign didn’t achieve anything. Even if you are at a significantly stronger starting point than you were at the start of the last session 2 years prior, you basically need to start over with re-introducing bills, educating new members of congress, recruiting volunteers in districts that are newly important due to committee assignments, etc. Influence with Congress depends heavily on relationships and trust built through prior collaboration, but funders (understandably) want to see results on shorter grant cycles.
Prioritizing established experts/organizations in particular markets…A big challenge in the CEAP blog was underestimating the complexity of political advocacy. Policymakers don’t simply weigh competing voices; they listen to those who understand the policy landscape, the political constraints, and the key decision-making processes, which can take years to grasp. it’s important to understand who is influential to the people you want to influence, and how/if you can get them to be messengers of your ideas, which takes time in these spaces and to understand the interpersonal dynamics of decision makers, sometimes apart from their official role. I think, in part because of this complexity and difference between donors, that it’s best for organizations to specialize in one sovereign donor (especially where they’re based) and/or a multilateral system rather than casting a broader net or taking a more meta approach.
For example, much of the governing/oversight for US foreign aid is done through the annual appropriations bill, which very few members of Congress fully understand, and which few organizations are funded to engage in depth on—given restrictions around funding lobbying.
…while supporting cross-market networks/coalitions. I think there’s great value in making linkages/coordinated pushes across donor markets, and EAs could do more to support networks/coalitions of aid effectiveness advocates across multiple countries. My organization is a founding partner of a group of civil society organizations across 14 countries advocating for increased global health ODA in our markets and globally. This kind of infrastructure means we can mobilize quickly when opportunities—or threats—emerge in ways that newer orgs often can’t. The example in the CEAP blog of Sweden aid cuts is a great case in point—having deep, existing networks allows for rapid response in time sensitive situations. We also benefit from individualized expertise and credibility of our local ties, local grassroots networks, and individual relationships with policymakers—it’s just not that an American INGO has a DC office, Brussels, office and Nairobi office—which would be weaker position IMO.
Leveraging existing organizations and strategies for change, rather than standing up new EA-specific groups. I think EA efforts in this space have struggled because they often start from scratch—and bring in advisors and those with expertise—instead of partnering with experienced advocates and established networks that already have access and influence. Without that foundation—and knowing the ins and outs of key levers of power for foreign aid oversight (like appropriations and the annual SFOPS reports in the US) - it’s difficult to meaningfully advise career civil servants who have spent decades navigating these systems. With the extreme hollowing-out of USAID staff in the past 3 weeks, and loss of thousands of years of experience across them, I’m not sure what this dynamic will look like moving forward but expect it will be dramatically different, at least in the short term.
I have never worked at an explicitly EA policy advocacy organization, so this is a big assumption on my part, but taking lessons from successful campaigns less focused on evidenced-based programs could be useful. Policy advocacy is incredibly relational and based on emotion. People’s hearts and minds are usually not changed by the data/evidence, rather they have some kind of emotional breakthrough that makes them more willing to hear the other evidence. Not to say it should be that way…but it’s what I’ve experienced. it’s not enough (in the US market) to have a clearly defined “edge” or produce detailed or factual reports. Also to emotion/ego on the other end, policymakers tend to listen to those who tailor solutions to them and solutions they feel they can claim as a personal win and “own” moving forward and this kind of advocacy communication is a unique skill that can be honed over time.
EAs have so much experience evaluating programs and identifying what to move forward, so I think a big challenge for this community will be figuring out how to move forward. I think increased investment in grassroots advocacy strategies could be most useful in the short term, especially in a culture currently leaning anti-intellectual and anti-science.
I’m a huge fan of grassroots organising although its so hard to quantify the benefits of I’m not sure it falls in the realm of what effective altruism can easily get behind. Also grassroots organisation shouldn’t need very much money—I’ve been involved in the past and we didn’t need much!
I’m only a fan of leveraging existing orgs if they can really show they are achieving wat they say they are. How do we know current advocates are effective? I can’t see a reason reason for me why EA orgs shouldn’t be able to start up and work on this over time—I would take a few EA orgs failing at advocacy as some signal that it might not be a super cost effective approach.
I’m skeptical of the idea that there are magical orgs out there doing things that new orgs couldn’t replicate at all. Could you suggest some existing orgs that you think are very good that EA could support?
EA does support some too. One example that EA does support with stacks of cash in this space is the Center for Global Development. I’ve had one terrible interaction with them that lowered my confidence in whether they really are a good faith org and also their general competency, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing impactful stuff.
Great points Nick. Can I message you/are you open to moving this offline? I want to keep the conversation going and have a lot of thoughts but some I’m not comfortable sharing publicly yet (not 100% convinced of my position) and I need to be sensitive given my job and relationships with other orgs in the space.
You write: “While many EAs tend to focus on private philanthropy, this crisis highlights why government action is indispensable.”
I think this is totally right. Over the last few days, I think that EAs have over-focussed on “how can we donate directly to the programmes that are being cut”, rather than “how can we influence governments, now and in the future, to maximise the amount of aid that goes to effective programmes”. It’s good that you are thinking politically about this. The leverage from influencing government policy is so high. The lessons of the last few days/weeks should be “more EAs need to think and act politically about global health and development, as that is where the real leverage is”, rather than “how can we directly make up the shortfall on the ground”. (Though of course I understand the very admirable instinct to do the latter...)
I think EA has been taken in too far by “mistake theory”, with the idea that surely everyone values saving lives, they just disagree with each other on how to do it, and if we just explain that PEPFAR saves lives to the right people, they’ll change their minds.
But like… look at the ridiculously hostile replies to this tweet by Scott Alexander. There is an influential section of the Right that is ideologically against any tax money going to help save non-american lives, and this section appears to be currently in charge of the US government. These people cannot be reasoned out of their positions: instead the only path is to rip them away from power and influence. These anti-human policies must be hung over the head of the Republican party, and they must bleed politically for them: so that future politicians are warned away from such cruelty.
What section do you put Marco Rubio in?
Not sure hostile tweets are compelling evidence here. Social media participation seems very self-selected. Generally I think hostile tweets represent tails of a bell curve. (Also, most of the replies I’m reading don’t seem overly hostile.)
Search for “Life Effects” in Scott’s survey results. Many readers say they donate more to charity as a result of his blog. His reasonable approach appears to work.
Even if we grant that some people are unpersuadable—If your goal is for Republican poll numbers to go down as a result of the USAID situation, the best advocacy strategy isn’t obvious. For all we know, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric will polarize more people against foreign aid.
Vegans have taken a super-aggressive approach to advocacy for years. My sense is that it works on about 5% of the population, and turns off the remaining 95%.
Progressive activists only make up 8% of the population in the US (they’re just very vocal): https://hiddentribes.us/
“You’re anti-human because you bought yourself a birthday cake instead of donating to malaria nets!” Even EAs don’t use this kind of language with each other. If it doesn’t work for us, why would we expect it to work on the general population?
The side that defied a court order to eliminate 90% of USAID programs this week including all the lifesaving programs described above, with the name Marco Rubio referenced as being the decision-making authority in the termination letters.
I’m not sure the number of statements he’s made in favour of some of these programs being lifesaving before termination letters were sent out in his name is a mitigating factor. And if he’s not actually making the decisions it’s a moot point: appealing to Rubio’s better nature doesn’t seem to be a way forward.
I’m inclined to agree that EAs should think more politically in general.
But the value of specific actions depends on both scale/leverage and the probability of success.
Influencing governments in the short-term has a low probability of success, unless you’re already in a position of power or it’s an issue that is relatively uncontroversial (e.g. with limited trade-offs).
Because of the scale of government spending, it could still be worth trying—but the main value might be in learning lessons on how to get better at influencing in the future, rather than having any immediate impact.
From the perspective of the long term, helping humans to improve how they govern themselves, might be the necessary condition for any other causes. Without it, even miracle scientific breakthrough will not produce positive outcomes.
I’ve got really mixed feelings here and I don’t know which way to swing. I’m still extremely uncertain about how much we can influence aid policy especially amidst the current messy global political situation.
Sure leverage can be high, but the question is how on earth do we get that leverage? What do you suggest?
I would love to see some great posts on the forum about how we counterfactually could have spent our money or time to prevent this current mess? That might convince me that future work could be valuable too.
To state the obvious Politics is super hard to influence for many reasons including
1) huge money and effort already poured into influencing politics from many angles, so achieving acting in that environment is really difficult.
2) so much unpredictability and change over time.
CE literally started an org which was trying to do something like this, which soon shut down because they didn’t feel it was working
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/emBSDADvCnSwtL2kS/center-for-effective-aid-policy-has-shut-down
I think it’s easy to say that leverage is “high” for political action but there still needs to be a meaningful pathway to make that happen. Right now in the wake of trump, AID policy might be a harder needle to shift than ever before. A recently elected left wing government in the UK even just slashed aid by 40 percent—wild stuff.
There could even be a counter argument that in a world where governments are backing away from international aid and are harder to leverage, increasing EA donations and covering gaps could be more important than a few years ago.
I know EA aligned people put a lot of successful effort into helping USAID funding be more evidence based, which bore great fruits for a while but now it’s unfortunately in the dust at least for now
I’m all for political leverage and putting funding into it, but we need concrete fundable ideas different from those we have tried which didn’t work already.
Also Making up the shortfall on the ground is a great thing to do, and like your said in no way mutually exclusive from political work.
Appreciate this thoughtful comment Nick! I’m also unsure where I fall on how EAs should respond/ where the balance between funding policy advocacy and cost-effective interventions on the ground should be. I think within the advocacy piece—my argument would be that EAs should diversify influence strategies and the types of organizations they fund in order to build power from multiple angles. And even to build the evidence base needed for these kind of calculations, because I think everyone is kind of shooting blind. Influencing aid policy is difficult but it’s possible with the right strategy…which I think could be more diversified than it is now.
Funding more grassroots advocacy strategies. Grassroots organizing is an essential but often overlooked piece of policy influence. While direct lobbying by experts and insiders plays a role, real political change happens when elected officials feel pressure from their own constituents. This is one of the most powerful tools we have in democracy, but it doesn’t fit neatly into impact assessments and is underfunded as a result. Without sustained grassroots pressure, even the best policy ideas often go nowhere. But even with robust and already established grassroots networks, it can take multiple congressional sessions to get bills passed or funding increased. But it’s hard to prove impact if it looks like your campaign didn’t achieve anything. Even if you are at a significantly stronger starting point than you were at the start of the last session 2 years prior, you basically need to start over with re-introducing bills, educating new members of congress, recruiting volunteers in districts that are newly important due to committee assignments, etc. Influence with Congress depends heavily on relationships and trust built through prior collaboration, but funders (understandably) want to see results on shorter grant cycles.
Prioritizing established experts/organizations in particular markets…A big challenge in the CEAP blog was underestimating the complexity of political advocacy. Policymakers don’t simply weigh competing voices; they listen to those who understand the policy landscape, the political constraints, and the key decision-making processes, which can take years to grasp. it’s important to understand who is influential to the people you want to influence, and how/if you can get them to be messengers of your ideas, which takes time in these spaces and to understand the interpersonal dynamics of decision makers, sometimes apart from their official role. I think, in part because of this complexity and difference between donors, that it’s best for organizations to specialize in one sovereign donor (especially where they’re based) and/or a multilateral system rather than casting a broader net or taking a more meta approach.
For example, much of the governing/oversight for US foreign aid is done through the annual appropriations bill, which very few members of Congress fully understand, and which few organizations are funded to engage in depth on—given restrictions around funding lobbying.
…while supporting cross-market networks/coalitions. I think there’s great value in making linkages/coordinated pushes across donor markets, and EAs could do more to support networks/coalitions of aid effectiveness advocates across multiple countries. My organization is a founding partner of a group of civil society organizations across 14 countries advocating for increased global health ODA in our markets and globally. This kind of infrastructure means we can mobilize quickly when opportunities—or threats—emerge in ways that newer orgs often can’t. The example in the CEAP blog of Sweden aid cuts is a great case in point—having deep, existing networks allows for rapid response in time sensitive situations. We also benefit from individualized expertise and credibility of our local ties, local grassroots networks, and individual relationships with policymakers—it’s just not that an American INGO has a DC office, Brussels, office and Nairobi office—which would be weaker position IMO.
Leveraging existing organizations and strategies for change, rather than standing up new EA-specific groups. I think EA efforts in this space have struggled because they often start from scratch—and bring in advisors and those with expertise—instead of partnering with experienced advocates and established networks that already have access and influence. Without that foundation—and knowing the ins and outs of key levers of power for foreign aid oversight (like appropriations and the annual SFOPS reports in the US) - it’s difficult to meaningfully advise career civil servants who have spent decades navigating these systems. With the extreme hollowing-out of USAID staff in the past 3 weeks, and loss of thousands of years of experience across them, I’m not sure what this dynamic will look like moving forward but expect it will be dramatically different, at least in the short term.
I have never worked at an explicitly EA policy advocacy organization, so this is a big assumption on my part, but taking lessons from successful campaigns less focused on evidenced-based programs could be useful. Policy advocacy is incredibly relational and based on emotion. People’s hearts and minds are usually not changed by the data/evidence, rather they have some kind of emotional breakthrough that makes them more willing to hear the other evidence. Not to say it should be that way…but it’s what I’ve experienced. it’s not enough (in the US market) to have a clearly defined “edge” or produce detailed or factual reports. Also to emotion/ego on the other end, policymakers tend to listen to those who tailor solutions to them and solutions they feel they can claim as a personal win and “own” moving forward and this kind of advocacy communication is a unique skill that can be honed over time.
EAs have so much experience evaluating programs and identifying what to move forward, so I think a big challenge for this community will be figuring out how to move forward. I think increased investment in grassroots advocacy strategies could be most useful in the short term, especially in a culture currently leaning anti-intellectual and anti-science.
Thanks Dorothy those are good points.
I’m a huge fan of grassroots organising although its so hard to quantify the benefits of I’m not sure it falls in the realm of what effective altruism can easily get behind. Also grassroots organisation shouldn’t need very much money—I’ve been involved in the past and we didn’t need much!
I’m only a fan of leveraging existing orgs if they can really show they are achieving wat they say they are. How do we know current advocates are effective? I can’t see a reason reason for me why EA orgs shouldn’t be able to start up and work on this over time—I would take a few EA orgs failing at advocacy as some signal that it might not be a super cost effective approach.
I’m skeptical of the idea that there are magical orgs out there doing things that new orgs couldn’t replicate at all. Could you suggest some existing orgs that you think are very good that EA could support?
EA does support some too. One example that EA does support with stacks of cash in this space is the Center for Global Development. I’ve had one terrible interaction with them that lowered my confidence in whether they really are a good faith org and also their general competency, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing impactful stuff.
Great points Nick. Can I message you/are you open to moving this offline? I want to keep the conversation going and have a lot of thoughts but some I’m not comfortable sharing publicly yet (not 100% convinced of my position) and I need to be sensitive given my job and relationships with other orgs in the space.