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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.
I have trouble taking the USAID crying seriously. If people really, truly cared about the pullback in aid they would do what they could to fill the gap. The Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis et al have a standard of living most of us can only dream of. Are they sacrificing their luxuries to save these people they are crying about? No. And they'll excuse it by saying a government org can do more blah blah. You know what? When I really care about something, I do what I can about it. I don't throw up my hands and say why bother because I can't do as much as some other way.
It leaves me thinking it's all a bunch of lies. Which is a shame. Because I think some of the programs were good, even if they don't hit my top concerns. So how stupid am I to think the programs were good if people living seriously luxurious lives can't even give up their caviar in order to help fill the gap?
Musk deliberately implemented the cuts in a way which made that almost impossible in the short term. None of the named individual victims identified by Kristof could have been saved by someone taking over funding - they all died because of the chaotic way in which USAID was shut down. If you remember Musk's bragging at the time, the point wasn't just to cut spending - it was to feed the agency into a woodchipper and create psychological distress in the staff. That had consequences, which were intended, and the people who did it are responsible for what they did. (Clearly the number of people who died specifically as a result of Musk's intentional cruelty is much lower than the big numbers being slung around, but Musk continues to insist that it is zero and threaten legal action against people who disagree). I will enjoy the schadenfreude if the screwworms get him. I will not enjoy the schadenfreude if (as is more likely) all they get is a bunch of normie Texas ranchers who voted for the Face-Eating Leopard Party.
The Clinton Foundation is sufficiently notorious that one might suspect bad faith. It wasn't their own personal money, but Bill Clinton spent most of his time since leaving office fundraising and organising charitable work, either through the Clinton Foundation or through his partnership with George HW Bush. The most visible programme the Clinton foundation ran was providing AIDS drugs to kids in Africa - so the Clintons were doing precisely the thing you blithely assume they were not doing.
The Obama's and Pelosi's considerable charitable donations (hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in both cases) are also a matter of public record that I was able to find with 30 seconds googling. Obama focussed on US domestic poverty and providing scholarships for poor kids. (Like most ex-Presidents, Obama moves far more dollars by fundraising than he can donate himself - but that is just being effective in your charitable work). Paul Pelosi focussed on the usual arts and elite universities bougie philanthropy bullshit.
I find this response puzzling.
First, it assumes that USAID spending money was effective on net. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the money was spent in other ways that was more effective (ie Bastiat and Broke Window theory).
Second, it assumes a moral responsibility for USAID funding to continue indefinitely when there is zero moral responsibility (ie there is no moral duty to act contra Singer; otherwise, you and pretty much all of humanity are rotten evil people). Or at minimum if there is a duty to act it seems like the people complaining are throwing stones from glass houses.
Third, it assumes because USAID did some good things it was net good. The mafia helped the community (ie did some good things). Doesn’t make it good on net. Perhaps USAID wouldn’t have been targeted if it wasn’t funneling a ton of money into lefties for political reasons instead of focusing its mission on just doing good.
Everything you list was implied (or said outright) in fribble’s initial complaint. I don’t know why you’re surprised that a response disagrees.
No everyone was saying “if they are actually good why don’t the critics step up.” This criticism is basically suggesting the critics don’t actually believe what they are saying.
But that is a different criticism compared to “sure USAID funding was cut but the funding didn’t disappear and some of the funding supported bad stuff; need to prove on net whether things have gotten worse as opposed to looking at one part of one side of the ledger.” This is saying maybe the critics are in good faith but they haven’t really considered everything.
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