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Notes -
The States Unfair
The New Republic reports:
This is, to be blunt, not plausible. It's a pretty obviously not plausible. Pennsylvania is not a small state, nor an economically insecure one, nor a state that leans entirely blue in population or businesses. An individual county was able to find sufficient support for New Jersey's booth; Pennsylvania as a whole has much more resources available. There are, in fact, no small number of Pennsylvania businesses that would drool over the opportunity to represent the state in the most Trump-partisan environment possible, including individual businessmen that have outright donated tens of millions of dollars in Trump-partisan funding.
It appears that Shapiro only began asking businesses shortly before ("the governor’s office approached the chamber less than two weeks out from the start of the fair to help get companies involved", "we were asked by Governor Shapiro’s office in mid June") the start of the event, when it had become both much harder and more expensive to act. Not impossible, since I've personally deployed a small business convention booth literally across the planet with less notice, while driving from the ass-end of Pennsylvania to Washington DC is about seven hours, and no international customs. Still exactly what you'd do if you wanted the request to fail, without admitting that you wanted the program to fail. There are individual high school sports teams who could have gotten this done, including fundraising, had they been given the six months Ohio gave out. It's not even clear that the requests were sincere, rather than perfunctory.
And to spell things out: the Chamber of Commerce businesses did not say they did not want to participate, just that they couldn't manage it. Shapiro's explicit words, that the "None were interested," just weren't true.
There's some fun exploration about where this falls from a Bounded Distrust perspective. Shapiro's office put out a 700k USD price tag that's outright laughable if you've done any serious work like this. But it's also since just been falsified by reality. Pennsylvania's senators put out a call for businesses in the aftermath of the initial reporting, and got response and volunteers and an arranged booth immediately, despite the shorter timelines. So it turns out you don't need die-hard Trump supporters; a variety of mining businesses, crayon merchants, construction companies, and a nutrition supplement seller were quite happy to jump in.
But it got a nice slogan:
This is a trivial matter. The Fair seems to be a bit of a joke, the booth in question is a glorified convention stand, the weather means attendance may be lackluster, and few people will remember it in six months.
It's just that Shapiro, one of the moderates with the greatest reason to want to reach out across the aisle and show de-escalatory competence as an administrator, instead believed it more productive to punt on a glorified convention booth and then give an interview to TNR.
And in that interview, he said things that were false, so as to put the blame anywhere else, and people believed him.
The Shallow End of The Betting Pool
PBS reports:
There he goes, making up conspiracy theories about malicious actors responsible for his own run-of-the-mill incompetence.
... there's (weak) photographic evidence, isn't there.
To be fair, damage to the liner would not, on its own, result in the algae bloom. To be charitable to the point of fault, the liner could both be subject to sabotage and poorly applied or requiring early maintenance. The algae blooms themselves are near-certainly downstream of phosphate levels, and while (contrary to the cited expert) it doesn't take a ridiculous bulk of phosphate fertilizer or a long period to cause an algae bloom even in a pool this size, there are a wide variety of other plausible sources of phosphate. Decaying leaves or grass clippings, run-off from people trying to repair a different vandalism, mechanical failures in a filtration system, or use of water which already had phosphate in it are all possible.
It's just hard to tell what the actual situation is, when the New York Times began with Raise Doubts about Trump's claim at the headline, only to not actually find positive contradictions in the documents, and far down in the story to notice a paraphrased:
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
But that is, ultimately, just a pool liner.
It's not a question with millions of lives on the line.
The Question With Millions of Lives On The Line
The Lancet published:
A better statistician than I has already gone over the modeling problems, and they're significant:
It's a fun read if you like math, and better than I could write on the statistics side, so I'll not try. Instead, I'm going to hammer the model itself.
Some of the faults are simple and direct. A dose-response analysis is fundamentally taking a different perspective than any attempt to cut inefficient or wasteful spending. Some are more esoteric: many of the countries where USAID has the greatest significance are also those with the least state capacity to measure deaths. Instead, the public data sources are models that themselves use aid-dependent variables to estimate mortality rates. This circularity would just be a statistics problem on its own and explains some of the unusually convenient numbers that the LessWrong article notices, but there's a more critical problem: even assuming the aid-dependent modeling was correct, several of those programs were not stopped, only moved under the Department of State.
The Lancet paper does not actually consider a specific mechanism or group of mechanisms, but the underlying drivers of a significant majority are ART provisioning, and that runs into trouble when not all ART was under USAID to start with, and the parts that were had a waiver by February 2025, if not during the initial cuts and freezes.
Some disruption is plausible in early 2025. A complete cessation is not, and was not when the Lancet paper was published. The nightmare scenario that this paper treats as plausible isn't a genuine situation that could happen because of DOGE or the current USAID closure or extant or currently-proposed program cuts.
My problem here is not that this number is, ultimately, made up and dependent on counterfactuals, just as earlier predictions of 600k deaths were made up and counterfactual. It's not the Lancet's reputation: this is the paper that published Wakefield; it knows what it is.
There's a far more serious issue. These aid programs aren't getting less controversial, and they won't get more widely-supported if USAID floats back under the next administration to fund a stack of random scholarship programs and social events. There's no plausible scenario where putting ART programs under the Department of State results in this catastrophic cut from 2025 to 2030.
There is, however, reason to worry about it in the future.
The State Department itself estimates over 20 million people are getting ART through PEPFAR programs. While there's some fuzziness around the edges if you try to track down how they produce that number, since it's at least in part downstream of reporting by organizations that get money based on the number of treated patients, it's probably not off by 50%. Pulling ART from HIV-positive patients produces corpses within a half-dozen years, with very high reliability. And while it might be nice were the relevant governments able to fund their own people's treatment, a large portion of these countries aren't there and won't be there in twenty years.
((I'll caveat that it's not clear how much impact it would have on new infections; the data is pretty strong for it in individual cases, and very lackluster at population levels. While PEPFAR promotes high rates of testing and ART treatment as an HIV eradication tool, in practice even countries that have hit PEPFAR's 95-95-95 metrics officially have only seen modest reductions in new HIV cases that are hard to isolate from other potential causes. Studies have maxed out around 40% reduction. And, of course, ART as an 'HIV eradication' framework has conflict with 15- to 20-million-plus people who would keep having HIV for forty years even if new transmission went to zero.))
And there are a few other programs with other similar body counts and unsolvable problems. It's a little easier for a marginally-capable government to begin handling its own tuberculosis program than handle bulk orders of ART, but many of these countries are not marginally-capable.
The Lancet study is wrong because that ART rugpull isn't happening, yet. What happens if someone does propose it? What, if any, distinction would readers be able to take, when the Lancet gives a panicked paper worried about the next mass murder? Who's going to care?
Most media coverage focuses hard on the trolley problem: whether cutting funding is equivalent to murder. That's an interesting philosophical question, but it depends on a foundation that's falling out of the basement level: whether people would care even if it were.
Because there's a limit. After the third or fourth time you promise your political opponents are going to commit mass murder on scales previously reserved for the biggest genocides ever recorded, and then in the aftermath, have to revise down to unremarkable numbers, that reputation follows you. And it's going to keep following even if the claimed catastrophe's actual meat does show up. Given that several fudge factors that supported the ART program are starting to fray around the edges, with the HIV eradication framework becoming so clearly unachievable that, or the various financial arguments about it being cheaper to avoid infection running head-first into infections that won't go away, that's a concern that needs to be treated seriously, not rhetorically.
But it's more useful to twist the edges of the truth today, to show how one's political enemies are monsters.
With Shapiro: Yes, it's totally intentional and yes, he knows what he's doing. Let's look at his options:
He can enthusiastically participate in, as you say, a gesture reaching across the aisle. There's no political reason for him to do this. His entire political career thus far has been defined by his refusal to get involved in counterproductive culture war arguments that only serve to alienate some segment of the electorate. The result of this is that the only people who actively dislike the guy are rabid MAGA who aren't going to vote for a Democrat if it's the second coming of Christ. Given that the chances that this expo or whatever it is not being about the glorification of Trump were always somewhere around 0%, enthusiastic participation would only serve to alienate member s of his own party. Trump is currently in the process of committing political suicide nationally while enforcing strict loyalty among those left in his tent, so there's nothing to be gained by jumping on a sinking ship. Any reaching across the aisle that Shapiro does is going to be towards Republicans in Harrisburg, and is going to involve things that are actually important, such that he appears to be the reasonable one and any criticism of him is further evidence of MAGA incompetence.
He can inform VisitPA, or the Chamber of Commerce, or whoever else fairly early that the state will not be participating but they are free to put an exhibit together at their own expense. This is the neutral option, the one that Illinois and New York chose, and the one that PA ostensibly chose. If he had done this months ago then this wouldn't be a story at all.
He can refuse to participate entirely on the basis that this is an inappropriate politicization of the 4th. This wins him some resistance points among Democrats but has the downside of making him look like a typical culture warrior.
Let's be clear that the Democratic Party, and Shapiro by extension, benefits from this whole thing flopping as hard as possible. I don't want to get into the whole history of the thing, but it's obvious to everyone that the whole Freedom 250 thing is a poorly-planned politicization meant to glorify the current administration, and there's no greater evidence of that than the fact that even Republicans seem reluctant to actually attend, and that even the states that enthusiastically participated only managed to send underwhelming exhibits. Shapiro's little stunt allows him to contribute to the flop while being able to deny responsibility.
If anyone remembers anything about this a year from now, it's not going to be that Shapiro waited until the last minute so that the Chamber of Commerce wouldn't be able to get any exhibitors together in time, but that the exhibition flopped period. In the meantime, people like Stacy Garrity will reflexively make statements about how the state's lack of participation in an event that's an obvious overpoliticized dud is somehow an affront to core American values, making them look like asses, and Shapiro doesn't even have to respond because he already offered a bullshit explanation and pressing him on it further only makes it look like your taking it too seriously, if it doesn't already look that way. Also, never mind the fact that Garrity and her ilk aren't idle bystanders but active participants in state government and had plenty of time (well, four months at least) to at least inquire about what PA planned on doing, though I'd excuse them if, like the rest of us, the first time they heard about this state fair was when the musical guests announced they were dropping out.
As for the reflecting pool, it certainly is being vandalized, though I highly doubt that its woes are due to vandalism, if you can even call it that. I am by no means an expert on this, but I painted in high school, and we would spend more time prepping the surface than actually painting it. A proper refurbish of the pool would have required it to be cleaned and patched thoroughly, and allowed to properly dry (including tarping the "dry" surface to see if any water in the soil is penetrating the bottom and condensing on the tarp, which would need to be addressed separately). It would also require the entire filtration system to be cleaned and disinfected thoroughly before the new bubbler was installed.
Doing it this way would take several months to complete. Trump instead wanted it done in one to two weeks and got results commensurate with that timeline. I have no doubt that there are so-called vandals who are grabbing loose pieces of the coating and pulling it off. There may also be people cutting it. But the only reason they are able to do this is because the coating didn't bond to the surface properly. Suggesting that people are cutting it with a utility knife and peeling off sheets doesn't make sense to anyone who has ever painted anything before, or dealt with a spray-on truck bed liner, or a garage floor polymer coating. If these things are able to be peeled like that, it's usually from something like rust or water penetrating from the rear. It can also because the surface wasn't prepared properly and the coating was applied over top of dirt or grease that isn't bonded to the underlying surface and will prevent the coating from properly adhering. It looks like that is what happened here, and the media coverage caused curious onlookers to start picking at it, who then became a convenient scapegoat for the administration's incompetence.
The Greenberg family may also have a few opinions.
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