One lesson of DOGE is that a lot of federal govt spending is sent to old ppl (social security, Medicare) and affluent individuals/orgs (defense, health spending) but the spending with the highest “lives saved per dollar spent” tends to go to v poor people or to scientists working on ignored diseases
So if you’re trying to slash govt spending without upsetting old/affluent interests you’re (a) going to fail to find meaningful cuts and (b) inevitably gutting some of the most life-giving programs.
(And that’s bad.)
Something I’ve seen a lot in the last few months on here is what I’d characterize as a “bias against claims of virtue.”
Believing that an organization is good just because it claims to be good is bad, and I shouldn’t do it. If I do it, I hope people call me out for it. But PEPFAR is actually good. Bed nets and antiretroviral programs are good—even tho, sure, you *could* argue that at some margin they take the place of local govt programs and thus incur the risk of moral hazard.
But what we have a lot of now is a reflexive judgment among conservatives who basically think any program that claims to be virtuous is probably full of shit on account of its virtue claim. And I don’t think that’s the most useful framework for seeing the world.
This is the classic red herring sleight of hand people use to vilify any attempts to cut government spending — assuming all “life-giving” programs are unassailable by virtue of the fact they *purport* to benefit people who are not wealthy.
It is this very (oftentimes unconscious) assumption that many unscrupulous actors use to defraud the taxpayer, using sympathetic causes as a shield to make questioning their impropriety politically problematic.
Until we can get over this notion that every organization that says they do “good” things is unquestionably good, this will remain a major pipeline for fraud and abuse.
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