Tom Vargas

• Tom Vargas 1 Apr 2025 12:02 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: US For­eign Aid Fund­ing Pause: A Frame­work for Giv­ing in Uncer­tain Times

  Thanks Nick, helpful!

• Tom Vargas 31 Mar 2025 14:01 UTC

  7 points

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  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: US For­eign Aid Fund­ing Pause: A Frame­work for Giv­ing in Uncer­tain Times

  Hi Nick, Thanks for engaging! I’ll engage with one bit of your comment in return :) As you can imagine, cost-effectiveness is very important to us, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in our approach. One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities. In these situations, we believe it might be important to consider some of the things we’ve pointed out. For example, how many future opportunities will we lose to run cost-effective programs if some organizations cease to exist? (Maybe a lot!) There might also be a weaker, but plausible, case for supporting organizations implementing work below a certain cost-effectiveness threshold, when we consider some of those implications we outline.

  Thanks again for reading!

• Tom Vargas 14 Feb 2025 15:36 UTC

  1 point

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  on: US For­eign Aid Bridge Fund

  Thanks Tyler, super helpful. I agree with your logic. I’ve been thinking a lot about projects that deliver aid specifically and that have been cut-off, and how to think about the cost-effectiveness for funders if their additional dollars go directly to delivery. Seems like it would be high.

• Tom Vargas 14 Feb 2025 15:33 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: US For­eign Aid Bridge Fund

  Thanks for your thoughts Nick, helpful. I think being skeptical of rushing to fund everything that USAID was funding is the right instinct, and it sound like you have a strong prior regarding the resilience of some projects—at least in SSA. Would you generalize broadly, across cause area and geography? It seems to me that significant reductions in the stability of American foreign aid, and the infrastructure that it provides, will hobble some efforts. The key, therefore, is to do some quick work—hopefully public facing—that identifies those causes and areas that are most likely to suffer from uncertainty in the short term.