The Trump administration, bereft of any serious ideas of its own, excels at scaring up some concept or faction on the left — wokeism, DEI, socialism, communism — and then frantically warning it will trigger America’s descent into a hellscape. Now, in an unexpected twist, President Donald Trump’s government is turning its attention to “effective altruism,” a niche philosophical and social movement focused on the idea of maximizing efficient giving often by arguing against traditional charities and focusing on “doing the most good possible for the most people.” If a 2023 poll still holds true, the overwhelming majority of Americans know nothing about it.
As Axios reported, this week the Defense Department has posted messages on X calling for “Americanism, not effective altruism.” Defense Department Undersecretary Emil Michael slammed the ideology on Fox News, calling it “dystopian,” and then the Defense Department boosted the clip on X. The focus on hammering effective altruism appears to be part of Trump’s strategy for opposing regulation of artificial intelligence. Many figures in the effective altruism movement favor regulating AI toward the end of doing good for humanity, whereas Trump’s position is that no regulation other than the instincts of a “SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” will ensure AI is used appropriately.
The administration’s focus on effective altruism is a head-scratcher. Effective altruism is not widely known. Moreover, the administration’s quest to try to fearmonger about it is likely to be a heavy lift and bound to make it look more callous and out of touch with Americans on one of the hottest policy issues of the day: how to rein in AI.
When explained in basic terms, effective altruism is hard to demonize.
The offensive against effective altruism speaks to how overly online the Trump administration is. Effective altruism is not going to be on most Americans’ radars. It’s mostly gotten traction in certain sectors of academia, the nonprofit world and Silicon Valley. A lot of it involves arcane intellectual debate about utilitarian ethics and discussing how to make projections about human suffering in the future. Although one aspect of its futurism has shifted into focus recently: A point of emphasis for many in the movement has been guarding against the dangers of runaway AI, while advocating to use the technology to reduce suffering in unprecedented ways. (I have many critiques of effective altruism, particularly in its more extreme manifestations, but they have little to do with the right’s objections.)
To be fair, “critical race theory” was also an obscure idea for most Americans before the right successfully waged war against it, but I think effective altruism is likely to be a harder sell. Trump’s attempt to turn the public against effective altruism will likely be complicated by it not sounding nefarious to the layperson. One may be left wondering what the White House’s objection is to “effectiveness” or “altruism.” When explained in basic terms, effective altruism is hard to demonize — it is common for people to demand that their donations go to trustworthy, efficient charities and not, say, be spent mostly on overhead.
The Trump administration appears to believe that brazenly embracing selfishness and denigrating helping others is an obvious political winner. But the public’s response to the administration’s dismantling of U.S. Agency for International Development — the agency that oversees a huge chunk of U.S. foreign aid and whose collapse is expected to cause the death of millions — should have shown the administration otherwise. Shutting down USAID never commanded majority support, and a year later, polling indicates a majority of Americans, including many Republicans, support its mission — especially when they’re aware of how much USAID achieved with just a fraction of the federal budget. In an implicit admission of how ghoulish that whole operation was, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who was involved in overseeing that project as the chief of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has denied the effects of shuttering USAID and has had meltdowns when pressed on the moral implications of that closure.
On AI, effective altruists in Silicon Valley today are not only right to call for regulating the technology — they’re also in line with the direction of public opinion. With AI developing at an unnervingly quick pace and security incidents involving out-of-control AI growing more salient, Americans have expressed increasing unease around the technology in surveys. A recent Politico poll shows that most Americans think AI could someday destroy humanity — exactly the kind of initiative that some effective altruists are keen on preventing.
Given how vacuous so much of Trump’s midterm elections strategy — if it can even be called that — is going, it isn’t the biggest surprise in the world that his administration is scrounging around for a new bogeyman to whip up hysteria over. This one is particularly weak.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
