Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative
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I.
PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever. A Trump decision briefly put it “on pause”, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful.
In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home?
This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means it’s a purely philosophical question unrelated to the real issue.
If you cancelled PEPFAR - the single best foreign aid program, which saves millions of foreign lives - the money wouldn’t automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives.
Instead, it would . . . well, technically it would sit unspent, because Congress earmarked it for PEPFAR, and the executive branch cannot re-earmark it. But probably something would happen, deals would be made, Congress would think about the extra money when deciding how much deficit spending to do, and eventually it would in some vague sense go back into the general pot of all other federal spending. This would take the pot from its current $1,500 billion dollars all the way to . . . $1,506 billion dollars. From there would go to the same kinds of programs1 that the rest of the pot goes to - like the Broadband Equity And Deployment Program, a $42 billion effort to give rural Americans Internet which, after endless delays, has failed to connect a single rural American.
Is it unfair to focus on BEAD and other especially bad programs? Shouldn’t we expect the average newfound dollar to be redirected to an average program? I think we should expect somewhere between average and worst. We should expect it to equal the worst program if government spending rationally picked the lowest-hanging fruit first (ie invested their first X dollars in the best program, the next Y dollars in the second-best program, and so on, always investing the marginal dollar in the best available program). We should expect it to equal the average program if the government has no idea what it’s doing and just funds random things based on what cable news show a Senator watched last night. In truth, it’s somewhere in between, so we should expect a newfound dollar to go to something in between an average program and the worst program.
When studying charities, Toby Ord found that of two randomly chosen charities, one will be (on average) 100x more effective than the other. Government programs aren’t charities, but common-sensically we might expect similar dynamics to apply2, and for an unusually good program (like PEPFAR) to be 100x more efficient than one which is somewhere between average and worst.
(if this sounds common-sensically impossible, remember that PEPFAR probably saves ~250,000 lives/year3, so a 100x efficacy difference would require a somewhat-worse-than-average 6 billion/year government program to save 2,500 American lives or do something equivalently good. Given the few really good programs and very large amount of total waste, this sounds doesn’t sound like a crazy underestimate to me.)
Couldn’t people instead choose to redirect the saved money to the single best domestic program? I doubt it. If there was some adult in the room who could do this, why hasn’t money already been redirected to the single best domestic program? Why are we wasting money on non-best programs at all, when the best one is right there? I think an honest answer to this would involve admitting that the government is a mess not really under anyone’s control, such that you can’t guarantee PEPFAR money would be spent any more efficiently than any other money. So I think the original methodology - assuming it would go to other programs of approximately average effectiveness - is correct, and we can keep our 100x worse number4.
So in a discussion of the ethics of canceling PEPFAR, I don’t think it’s enough to say that you care about Americans more than foreigners. You would have to care about Americans more than 100x more than foreigners. I doubt most people have a specific finite foreigner-to-American ratio which is more than 100x5, so I think a belief in this category would effectively be saying that the lives of foreigners have zero value, at least from a government perspective.
In the end, I don’t think ratios are the right way to think about this. There’s a common problem across lots of moral philosophy where if we accept some category as having moral value at all and then try to do moral calculus with it, it quickly overwhelms everything else and makes our normal values meaningless. I don’t think there’s a good way to solve this, but I solve it by replacing value ratios with budgetary ratios for categories, ie we discharge whatever claim foreigners have to our charity by trying to spend 1% of the budget on foreign aid, as effectively as possible. I think this is a better solution than either ignoring foreigners in need completely, or declaring them to have literally zero value. I think if we spent 1% of the budget on effectively helping foreigners6, PEPFAR would easily pass the bar for what we included.
II.
The debate du jour is over JD Vance’s invocation of ordo amoris, the classical Christian theory that you should value the life of your brother more than that of a complete stranger (while continuing to value both). I am not qualified to debate the doctrinal issues here, although I have seen smart Christians come out both for and against Vance’s interpretation.
But again, this is a distraction from any real issue! Oh, you should value the life of your brother more than a stranger? You don’t say? I’m hearing this for the first time! Now let’s kill five million foreign children to fund one sixth of a broadband boondoggle.
I am happy to “concede” that if you face a choice between saving a stranger and saving your brother, save your brother! Or your cousin, or your great-uncle, or your seven-times-great-grand-nephew-twice-removed. I’ll “concede” all of this, immediately, because it’s all fake; none of your relatives were ever in any danger. The only point of this whole style of philosophical discussion is so that you can sound wise as you say “Ah, but is not saving your brother more important than saving a complete stranger?” then sentence five million strangers to death for basically no benefit while your brother continues to be a successful real estate agent in Des Moines.
In case this isn’t clear enough, my positions are:
I have no principled method for deciding how much of the US budget should go to foreign aid, but the current amount of ~1% doesn’t seem excessive. Even if it was, PEPFAR is among the best foreign aid programs and should be one of the last to get cut, so I think you would have to believe that less than 0.1% of the budget should go to foreign aid before you started cutting it.
I have no principled method for determining the relative value of your own life vs. that of your brother vs. that of your countryman vs. that of a foreigner, but I don’t think your brother/countryman/foreigner are literally zero. I think even valuing each step 100x less than the preceding (eg a foreigner 100x less than a US national) would be compatible with continuing to support PEPFAR. I’m not a theologian, but I would be surprised if Christianity could be invoked to justify multipliers greater than 100x.
I think people should donate 1-10% of their income to effective charities, then not feel obligated to worry about altruism beyond this level. If someone’s brother is actually in danger in some way such that they can only be saved by not donating the 1-10% to charity, I think it is only human, and not morally blameworthy, to screw the 1-10% donation and give it to their brother. If your brother is not in danger, or you don’t have a brother, why are you worrying about this?
If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, you probably don’t want PEPFAR. But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about.
It could also go to tax cuts and deficit reduction, but don’t get too excited - the biggest ever drop in the size of the federal budget was something like 10% and very temporary, so we should still expect the vast majority to go to other programs.
Since PEPFAR is not an average government program, but one that we’re talking about because it’s especially effective, we should expect the differential to be higher than this. I originally guessed 1000x, but when I ran this through sanity checks, it didn’t seem to be true, so I’m sticking with 100x.
I say “millions” above, but here I’m using 250,000 as a per-year estimate to remain equivalent to the $6 billion/year spending.
Realistically I think it’s even worse than this, because in practice the government levies as many taxes as it feels like levying, spends as much money as it feels like spending, and turns the difference into deficit, so it’s not obvious that canceling PEPFAR gives any more money to American programs. I’m writing this assuming that we want to keep the deficit fixed, which is a laughably fake assumption for the real government.
A long time ago, I asked blog readers to give their animal lives to human lives value ratio - you can see the medians here. Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
We currently spend 0.7% of the total budget and ~3% of the discretionary budget on foreign aid.