EA - EA Probably Shouldn't Try to Exercise Direct Political Power by iamasockpuppet

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Probably Shouldn't Try to Exercise Direct Political Power, published by iamasockpuppet on July 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Last May, EA-aligned donors helped to make Carrick Flynn's campaign in OR-06 one of the best funded primary campaigns in US electoral history. Flynn, a researcher at FHI and CSET, lost the primary, receiving about half as many votes as the winner despite support from the EA community. This prompted several further analyses on the EA forum: Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid Early spending research and Carrick Flynn Yglesias on EA and politics Virtually all of the initial analysis has focused on ways that EA can better win future political races. I believe that it would be harmful to try; that EA as a movement attempting to hold direct political power as elected officials would be somewhere between neutral and harmful; and that seeking to influence existing non-EA elected officials would be more effective. The arguments on the EA Forum in favor of Flynn’s election were wrong > even with a small chance of success ( The Biden administration released a fantastic $65 billion plan that aims to prevent future pandemics. Congress has funded practically none of it. Part of the problem is that nobody in congress has made pandemic preparedness a ‘core issue.’ Congressional members don’t oppose the president’s plan, and there are some standout champions, but none of them are trying to get it passed with the desperation that I think the issue warrants. > My sense is if Carrick had won, he could have done a lot of good – in particular, advancing pandemic prevention (e.g., via participating in bill markups), with an outside chance of getting Biden’s pandemic prevention plan enacted. These comments are incorrect; Carrick Flynn's election would likely not have had much influence on advancing the pandemic prevention plan. 538 currently forecasts an 87% chance that Republicans control the House after the 2022 elections; this would likely leave Flynn more-or-less irrelevant for the next two years. The Democrats currently hold the House, yet have not passed their own President's pandemic plan. Nobody, in any of the comments above or elsewhere, seems to have any idea why; as a result, the arguments above are remarkably vague. The absence of domain knowledge from this conversation is really bad! (I don't claim to be an expert on politics, to be clear; it is entirely possible that the explanations I offer below are wrong. But EA extensively discussed the Flynn campaign and moved significant amounts of money, seemingly without a very basic public analysis of the facts on the ground.) Each fiscal year's federal budget is (supposedly) written and passed by April 15 of that year. There is extensive advanced planning for the budget. For FY 2022, the White House released its budget request April 9th, 2021, too soon for the White House pandemic plan, released September 2021, to be included. The recently released FY 2023 budget request does include funding for the pandemic plan. Carrick Flynn would be unlikely to have much influence over the FY 2023 budget, since he wouldn't even be in the House until most of the way through the negotiations, even assuming that he won the primary, won the general, and the GOP didn't hold the House. (New representatives take office January 3rd; the House passed its FY 2022 budget March 9th of last year.) The most likely way for the budget to exclude the pandemic plan if the Democrats hold ...