It’s not just trade

Trump is addressing scientific research, public health, and other crucial issues with the same lack of care

I did not sell any shares of stock when Donald Trump won the presidential election. I also didn’t dive into the market, full of enthusiasm for his promised new golden age of American prosperity. But I didn’t panic sell.

I was aware of Trump’s extremely dubious ideas about trade policy and thought it was definitely possible that he would implement them. But I was also aware that Trump is a huge liar, and the argument from his business community allies that this was just populist chum that he had no intention of following through on seemed plausible.

Then came Liberation Day, on which his business allies learned that he is crazier than they thought.

After several days of begging and pleading and stock market losses, he was persuaded to partially reverse course. But what will happen next with Trump and trade? I have no idea. I am in the same position that I was in on the evening of the election: I’m aware that Trump has crazy views about trade, I’m aware that Trump’s public statements are wildly dishonest and inconsistent, and I’m aware that Trump likes it when the line goes up. I really don’t know what’s going to happen.

But I also know something else about Trump, something that I wish his business allies would more seriously consider, which is that the slipshod manner in which he makes trade policy is not unique to trade policy.

Laura Loomer, for example, is a nut job every bit as much as Peter Navarro. Susie Wiles seems to have been concerned about Loomer’s influence during the campaign and found a way to get rid of her for a while. But during all the tariff drama, she scored an Oval Office meeting with Trump and purged six officials from the National Security Council, as well as the head of the National Security Agency. Firing Timothy Haugh as the head of the NSA was the biggest deal, but the NSC purge was in some ways crazier, because those guys were Republicans and political appointees. What actually went down? Nobody seems to know.

There was no official explanation given by the White House for any of it, a true banana republic vibe. The issue here isn’t any question of the president’s statutory authority to hire and fire for these jobs — it’s a question of the quality of his judgment and the caliber of the people he’s listening to.

It seems to me that if you look at how Bill Ackman or the right-of-center members of venture capital Twitter view Trump, their assumption is that he’s doing lots of great stuff but just got it wrong on the reciprocal tariffs. Elon Musk even publicly referred to Navarro as “Peter Retardo” to signal that it’s okay to say that the czar has this one wicked advisor.

But does he?

Or are we looking at Navarro-level personnel and Liberation Day-quality decision-making across a broad swathe of issues, except without the kind of direct financial market feedback that eventually made it clear, even to Trump, that he was on the wrong track? I think the bulk of the evidence points in the latter direction — that Trump is making lots of really poor decisions that just don’t happen to have short-term influence on financial markets.

Killing poor kids in Africa

A recent analysis in The Lancet says that without stable PEPFAR programs, nearly 500,000 children in Africa are likely to die of causes related to HIV/AIDS over the next five years.

That’s pretty bad. As I have covered both pre-Trump and since DOGE started destroying USAID, it is genuinely true that a lot of official American development assistance was wasteful. I say that not just in a throat-clearing, message-testing effort to assure people that I understand their concerns about government waste. We were really, truly spending a lot of money on the wrong things.

The reason that I’m so confident we were spending wastefully, though, is that the best aid opportunities are incredibly cost-effective. In our personal giving, we are big supporters of GiveWell, which directs money to highly effective charities doing public health work in desperately poor countries. A minority of USAID spending, including the programs related to PEPFAR, is broadly similar to those GiveWell programs — it’s focused on scalable solutions to health problems in very poor countries, where highly effective interventions are extremely cheap.

What was wasteful about USAID is that in addition to funding some highly effective global public health interventions, they were also funding a bunch of other stuff. Most of the money, in fact, was dedicated to “other stuff.” And any time a majority of the good is being done by a minority of the money, there’s room for improvement.

I’m a big bleeding heart, so if I were in charge, I would have redirected all the foreign aid spending to cost-effective programs and then said, “Hooray, this is so cost-effective that we should spend 25 percent more on it!” But I could also respect a fiscal tightwad who came in and said, “We could cut the total budget by 25 percent, redirect all of the remainder to highly effective programs, and save the taxpayer money while actually accomplishing more good in the world.”

But, crucially, this is not at all what Donald Trump and Elon Musk did. They just wrecked everything.

I don’t really know why. Maybe they’re assholes. Maybe it got mixed up with abortion. Maybe they’re careless people who break things. I saw a focus group with Trump voters who voted Democratic down ballot, and they specifically called out slashing foreign aid as a Trump policy they agreed with. Maybe politically, Musk and Trump realized that cutting bad foreign aid programs wouldn’t get much coverage, but precisely because PEPFAR is so good, they could be sure of securing coverage for slashing it. Maybe by complaining about this, I’m playing into their hands.

The main thing that I want to say, though, is that the stock market doesn’t really care if poor kids in Africa die. If you agree with the president on tax cuts and he fucks up tariffs in a way that causes the market to fall by five percent, you will hear about it. If you agree with the president on tax cuts and he fucks up PEPFAR in a way that causes thousands of poor children to die, you may end up just ignoring it. But you shouldn’t!

Kneecapping education research

Wrecking global trade is the craziest thing Trump has done in terms of touching a hot stove. Wrecking foreign aid is the most morally hideous thing he’s done.

Somewhere in between is his administration’s frankly bizarre attack on program evaluation for American education.

As Ben Miller previously explained for Slow Boring, the federal Department of Education performs a grab-bag of tasks, and neither running K-12 schools nor telling them what to teach is on the list. But the Department does contain a small office called the Institute of Education Sciences that produces statistical information about American schools and also funds research. The amount of money at stake here is tiny — the whole IES is an $800 million agency — but this mostly goes to show that funding social science is not that expensive.

By contrast, the American K-12 education system is, in the aggregate, extremely expensive. The federal share of this spending is pretty small, so it’s not a huge line item for the federal government. But total public sector spending on K-12 is over $850 billion, of which 13.6 percent is federal. At any rate, to quote Ben, someone decided that it would be smart to save pennies on the dollar by gutting research aimed at evaluating what in that gigantic budget is actually effective:

Beyond statistics, IES also funds a lot of research into education, including rigorous reviews to determine if different educational interventions are effective.

For example, it’s currently supporting research into how borrowers on certain student loan repayment plans fare and how states are doing in helping the K-12 schools identified for the greatest assistance. In the past, it supported research into how parent messaging affects absenteeism, advising in college access programs, and quality improvement in after school programs, to name a few. It administers a “what works clearinghouse” to help increase the adoption of evidence-based policy. And until earlier this year, it managed 10 regional education laboratories that help states and districts consider evidence and evaluation in their own work.

The Trump administration’s cuts apparently eliminated 90 percent of IES staff, leaving approximately 20 total employees, including just three to do all the work of NCES. The Administration also previously cancelled significant numbers of existing IES grants.

This is so crazy that Stuart Buck’s first reaction was that it must be some kind of mistake. But it’s not.

In my experience, it’s often hard to convince people that a politician they like is doing something that’s truly terrible. Trump’s supporters know that he faces a lot of over-the-top criticism, so me pounding the table and being mad isn’t persuasive. Which is why I’m bringing it up again in the wake of Liberation Day, where we can all see with our own eyes that on a very high-profile issue, Trump just completely shat the bed. But then because the shit on the bed was stinking up the stock market, he made an effort to wash the sheets. But while the effectiveness of American K-12 schools is reasonably important for the long-term trajectory of the American economy, it’s not the kind of thing that makes for dramatic short-term market moves.

And the same is true for the administration’s broader attack on scientific research.

A parade of problems

Late last Wednesday, the Trump administration unexpectedly retreated from DOGE’s cutbacks to the Social Security Administration that had undermined basic customer service functions.

It was a reminder, like the partial walk back of the tariffs, that Trump is on some level willing to retreat when things become too politically hot.

Social Security is the proverbial third rail of American politics. It’s also the federal government’s largest expenditure, so trying to take it on makes some kind of sense. But taking it on in a way that antagonizes everyone while saving almost no money is absurd, and I can’t believe they did it. But then again, I also can’t believe they put a 17 percent tariff on imports from Israel and fiddled for days through a self-induced stock market crash.

The point is that I do not think anyone’s takeaway from this should be that Trump is a prudent guy who corrects his errors.

The lesson is that Trump is a reckless person who has empowered sloppy people to make sloppy decisions. Sometimes those decisions backfire in a way that is high-profile and obvious, in which case he may back down after days of controversy.

Equally sloppy, equally bad decisions can fly under the radar, though. For example, cutting the IRS’ tax enforcement staff in half is not going to generate short-term outrage. In the short term, more people will just get away with cheating on their taxes.

But as conservatives know when it comes to anything other than tax crime, the consequences of going soft on crime can spiral. At first, a few more people start getting away with cheating on their taxes. Then because more people are getting away with it, even more people start cheating. Then we have fewer tax cops chasing a larger number of tax crimes, and the odds of detection go down further. The next thing you know, America’s high level of voluntary compliance with the tax laws has collapsed and we’re in a Greece-like situation. Simply starving the government of tax revenue doesn’t do anything to alleviate the fiscal burden of an aging population or of growing tensions with China. You’re just piling on debt and hurting the economy.

But these harms accrue over the long term, like the harms of gutting education research or basic science. Who knows what Loomer is doing to the national security apparatus beyond the fact that she’s already gotten a bunch of people canned and is now gunning for the general counsel at the Pentagon.

My point is that far from seeing Trump’s reversal as a positive sign, it ought to be an eye-opening moment for sane people on the center-right about the fact that these guys really will do things that are incredibly crazy and stupid.

They are, in fact, doing many such things.

At times, those things will have short-term non-financial political blowback, as with Social Security. Other times, it’s stuff that they can get away with. The foreign aid cuts are arguably even good politics, they’re just morally repulsive. But we could be blundering into a war or fatally compromising counterterrorism efforts with amateur hour antics. This feels like eleven controversies ago, but the National Security Advisor did accidentally add a prominent journalist to a private group chat on which he and other principals were discussing detailed military plans.

Beyond the comic elements of that, the anti-Houthi military campaign appears not to be working, which is the kind of thing that happens when sloppy people are making decisions. Here Linda McMahon seems to be confusing AI (artificial intelligence) with A1 (steak sauce). No harm to that gaffe, I suppose, but it’s yet another indication that the people making decisions in the Trump cabinet are perhaps not very well-informed. And that’s a problem that has broader and deeper implications than Trump’s business allies seem willing to admit.