How much could the DOGE cuts reasonably have been prevented? And would the prevention there even have been politics-shaped (vs. e.g. being friends with Musk)?
I have some sense that getting a bunch of congresspeople to feel more positively about foreign aid would have done ~0 to block these cuts (unless the congressperson was really willing to die on the foreign aid hill), but I’m not sure.
I made a prediction that foreign aid would be cut significantly in ~September of last year (see below) so seems like there’s some degree to which at least some cuts were predictable. I think the intervention I advocated for at the time, stopping Trump from being elected, would have been the most straightforward action to take (and I think EV of doing that from even a pure global health perspective looked alright).
I didn’t predict specific DOGE cuts. That said, if one had, then trying to get the message to Musk that this matters could have been a reasonable action to take (and would have been usefully informed by better political analysis). Plausibly there’s some messaging stuff one could do?
Otherwise, the best thing to do might have been to have some contingency planning for large aid cuts? I’m not sure how much counterfactual value having those plans would end up being but it seems possible that with some preparation beforehand one could keep larger parts of PEPFAR alive maybe? Certainly it seemed like the sector was really overwhelmed upon learning of USAID cuts and that seems like some indication that more preparation would have been useful.
Overall, I don’t feel too strongly that knowing DOGE cuts were coming would have been super high leverage but I think it exemplifies politics as being something which can have extremely far reaching impacts on cause areas that EAs care about—even far beyond anything happening internal to the field. Same thing seems true of AI as well as animal welfare and pandemic prevention. In the extreme, the end of democracy in the US would seem pretty likely to have a bigger negative impact (by far) on all EA cause areas than basically anything one could do internal to the cause area.
Exact prediction about aid cuts (which I made after maybe 1-2 hours of looking into this): “If [Harris] spends at the same level as Biden (and Trump reverts to his prior spending), getting her into office would lead to ~$16 billion going to international aid [over the full term] that otherwise wouldn’t have. ”
My sense is that even if the full weight of EA were thrown towards preventing Trump from getting elected, it would still have not been enough, and also it would have antagonized Trump.
I helped work on this piece along with some other research attempting to assess tractability. I think it wasn’t super obvious that it was the best way to spend money but it was probably cost-competitive with many top donation opportunities in expectation. There also may have been ways we could have influenced things early on if we’d been putting in the effort in, say, 2023 (e.g. trying to get Biden out faster).
Politics work is basically always going to very low probability, high reward. In this election I’d argue the expected impacts counterbalanced the low probability of success.
I agree. I don’t think any amount of political donations or support would’ve made “We should give lots of taxpayer money to Africa” politically palatable in 2024. Enough voters were in an isolationist mood.
This would absolutely be a bad message to use, voters don’t care about aid at all. You’d just use the best message-tested stuff available which generically moves the needle in the direction you want it to go
How much could the DOGE cuts reasonably have been prevented? And would the prevention there even have been politics-shaped (vs. e.g. being friends with Musk)?
I have some sense that getting a bunch of congresspeople to feel more positively about foreign aid would have done ~0 to block these cuts (unless the congressperson was really willing to die on the foreign aid hill), but I’m not sure.
I made a prediction that foreign aid would be cut significantly in ~September of last year (see below) so seems like there’s some degree to which at least some cuts were predictable. I think the intervention I advocated for at the time, stopping Trump from being elected, would have been the most straightforward action to take (and I think EV of doing that from even a pure global health perspective looked alright).
I didn’t predict specific DOGE cuts. That said, if one had, then trying to get the message to Musk that this matters could have been a reasonable action to take (and would have been usefully informed by better political analysis). Plausibly there’s some messaging stuff one could do?
Otherwise, the best thing to do might have been to have some contingency planning for large aid cuts? I’m not sure how much counterfactual value having those plans would end up being but it seems possible that with some preparation beforehand one could keep larger parts of PEPFAR alive maybe? Certainly it seemed like the sector was really overwhelmed upon learning of USAID cuts and that seems like some indication that more preparation would have been useful.
Overall, I don’t feel too strongly that knowing DOGE cuts were coming would have been super high leverage but I think it exemplifies politics as being something which can have extremely far reaching impacts on cause areas that EAs care about—even far beyond anything happening internal to the field. Same thing seems true of AI as well as animal welfare and pandemic prevention. In the extreme, the end of democracy in the US would seem pretty likely to have a bigger negative impact (by far) on all EA cause areas than basically anything one could do internal to the cause area.
Exact prediction about aid cuts (which I made after maybe 1-2 hours of looking into this):
“If [Harris] spends at the same level as Biden (and Trump reverts to his prior spending), getting her into office would lead to ~$16 billion going to international aid [over the full term] that otherwise wouldn’t have. ”
Is there any reason to believe that the election would have been a tractable cause area? As @Jason noted, “the pre-eminent EA funder was one of the top ten donors in the 2024 US elections cycle”
My sense is that even if the full weight of EA were thrown towards preventing Trump from getting elected, it would still have not been enough, and also it would have antagonized Trump.
I helped work on this piece along with some other research attempting to assess tractability. I think it wasn’t super obvious that it was the best way to spend money but it was probably cost-competitive with many top donation opportunities in expectation. There also may have been ways we could have influenced things early on if we’d been putting in the effort in, say, 2023 (e.g. trying to get Biden out faster).
Politics work is basically always going to very low probability, high reward. In this election I’d argue the expected impacts counterbalanced the low probability of success.
I agree. I don’t think any amount of political donations or support would’ve made “We should give lots of taxpayer money to Africa” politically palatable in 2024. Enough voters were in an isolationist mood.
This would absolutely be a bad message to use, voters don’t care about aid at all. You’d just use the best message-tested stuff available which generically moves the needle in the direction you want it to go