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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
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This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
Nice one for taking action!
What was the illegal part? Isn't it just unprecedented?
(Checking partly for my own knowledge and also because it seemed quite central to your call to action to the legislators)
The retaliation against Anthropic by labeling them a supply chain risk is indeed illegal. Congress authorized DoD to label companies as supply chain risks under very specific circumstances - the goal is to prevent foreign adversaries from infiltrating their components into our weapons systems. Hegseth flagrantly abused this power in a contract dispute with an American company. Anthropic has sued, and they will win in court.
In the meantime, the question is whether American companies who do business with both DoD and Anthropic will comply with the illegal decree. Will those companies cut off their business with Anthropic?
Having Congress stand up for the law will strengthen the spines of those companies. That is why I believe contacting your representatives is helpful on the margin.
Cool, makes sense. To be clear, I think contacting representatives is helpful! I wasn't trying to question that.
I don't know anything about the Congress authorisation so will defer on that. I'll just say that if the legality is in dispute rather than unambiguous/settled, then using the word illegal might be counterproductive/polarising, whereas "unprecedented" seems unambiguously true.Â