Disclaimer: I lead grantmaking for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness at Open Philanthropy, but this endorsement is written in a purely personal capacity.
Carrick Flynn is running for congress in Oregon’s 6th district as a Democrat. He is also the first person to ever run for US congress on a platform of preventing future pandemics. This campaign provides a rare opportunity for smaller donors to make a large impact, since political contributions are capped at $5,800 per person ($2,900 for the primary and $2,900 for the general, but you can donate both up front).
His campaign website is here, launch video here, and donation link is here. Only US citizens and permanent residents can donate. The campaign also needs volunteers and staff (more details at the bottom of this post).
About Carrick
Carrick is a close personal friend and somebody I have enormous admiration for. I’ve worked with him since 2015, when he came to Oxford and subsequently set up the Centre for the Governance of AI. His wife Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn is also amazing, being the founder and CEO of Magnify Mentoring (formerly WANBAM).
Carrick embodies a number of virtues that I want to briefly highlight, and his story is remarkable. He grew up in poverty in rural Oregon, in an abusive household. A flood left him homeless as a child, and he shared a mattress on the floor with his brother until he was 17.
These experiences drove him to help others in poverty. After graduating from the top law school (Yale), he disregarded lucrative career opportunities to work in international development. In India, he saved potentially thousands of lives by clearing a roadblock to a nationwide vaccination program. He also secured a court decision that reallocated over $1 billion to high impact health programs by manually going through over 1,000 pages of accounting documentation.
This is just one instance of Carrick’s determination and work ethic. At Oxford he worked harder than almost anybody else I knew—in fact, out of everybody I’ve worked with in the past decade, my time in Oxford with Carrick would put him in the top 5 people I’ve seen in terms of raw work ethic.
He’s also brilliant. I’ll skip shallow measures of this[1] and just say that I saw Carrick’s intellect firsthand when he pivoted to thinking about pandemic preparedness during COVID. There he would rapidly digest information and connect it to what needed to be done. He’s likely the only person running for congress who has nuanced opinions on pathogen sequencing, platform vaccine tech, and what should go into the strategic national stockpile.
Finally, many people who are as brilliant and driven as Carrick are assholes, and Carrick is emphatically not. He is one of the most warm, caring, and supportive people I know. He cares for animals too, and he and his wife are vegan (and not in an asshole-like way).
I also know that Carrick is fiercely loyal. If he wins, his constituents in Oregon will have a representative that takes this duty seriously and puts their interests above his own.
The importance of a champion in Congress
After 9/11, the U.S. government spent over $1 trillion on counterterrorism to ensure something similar wouldn’t happen again. After losing almost 900,000 lives and $7.6 trillion in economic damage to COVID, what do you think Congress is doing to prevent the next pandemic?
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.
Carrick will make this a priority, and has committed to devoting a full time staff member to focus on pandemic preparedness issues. Realistically he won’t be able to change much overnight as a junior member, and the majority of his impact would only come years in the future. Still, even if this results in only a 1-in-500 counterfactual chance of eventually getting something as impactful as the $65 billion through, that’s still over $100 million of pandemic preparedness spending in expectation[2] (which I believe is substantially more well-spent than typical government spending).
What a donation of $2,900 means
I was recently told that congressional candidates typically spend more than half of their campaign time on the phone calling people and asking for money. This strikes me as insane and sad, and I would much rather Carrick spend his time listening to voters and developing smart policy.
The campaign has an informal target of raising $1 million for the primary, which is the level of funding required for them to stop thinking about money (they’ve already raised over $200,000 before launching). The maximum primary donation is $2,900, so the campaign needs to reach only 300 more people to donate the maximum amount. If you are a US citizen or permanent resident and privileged enough to be able to donate this much, you could be one of these 300!
(I know smaller donations are also sincerely appreciated!)
What does the donation do? As a conservative lower bound, I think instantly hitting the fundraising target would free up over 250 hours of work from Carrick, and I think those 250 hours would increase the chances of him winning the election by more than 2% (I’m assuming a counterfactual in which they still raise the money but it takes more time and effort). Taking these numbers ($1 million for an additional 2% chance of winning) means that roughly speaking you should donate if you think Carrick winning the election would produce more good things in the world than $50 million worth of donations. Given what I know about Carrick and the fact that Congress spent almost $5 trillion last year, I feel like this should be an easy bar to clear (a factor of 100,000 over the $50 million mark).
I’m posting this in a community of people that take charitable giving seriously. Recently, large funders like Open Phil have made it harder for smaller donors to find outstanding opportunities to contribute. My personal giving pledge has sometimes felt like an afterthought since joining Open Phil, so I was proud to be able to finally donate in a situation where my donation wasn’t replaceable. It may have been the most impactful $5,800 I will ever spend on preventing pandemics!
Or… volunteer for the campaign!
The campaign also needs volunteers and staff. If you’re interested in helping out, email reachout@carrickflynnfororegon.com and let them know. I think they are most interested in volunteers who can call voters and spend time in Oregon, anybody with campaign experience, and people who can organize fundraisers (although my hope is that the fundraisers will be out of a job quickly, thanks to you!).
But if you happen to care about stuff like this, Carrick got a 99.6th percentile LSAT score. ↩︎
Due to diminishing returns, this isn’t the same as being worth $100 million of biosecurity spending. But it doesn’t feel like more than a factor of 10 reduction, e.g. I would prefer a 1-in-500 chance of getting $65 billion rather than a sure chance of getting an additional $10 million. ↩︎
I don't know Carrick very well, but I will be pretty straightforward that this post, in particular in the combination with the top comment by Ryan Carey gives me a really quite bad vibe. It seems obvious to me that anyone saying anything bad right now about Carrick would be pretty severely socially punished by various community leaders, and I expected the community leadership to avoid saying so many effusively positive things in a context where it's really hard for people to provide counterevidence, especially when it comes with an ask for substantial career shifts and funding.
I've seen many people receive genuine references in the EA community, many of them quite positive, but they usually are expressed substantially more measured and careful than this post. This post reads to me like a marketing piece that I do not trust, and that I expect to exaggerate at many points (like, did Carrick really potentially save "thousands of lives"? An assertion thrown around widely in the world, but one that is very rarely true, and one that I also doubt is true in this case, by the usual EA standards of evidence).
I don't know Carrick, and the little that I've seen seemed positive and reasonable, and I think he is very likely going to be a vastly better congress person than people currently elected from the perspective of my values and principles, but I still feel like that isn't sufficient reason to break many norms we have about exaggerating and being honest in our assessments of others, and being grounded and measured in the references and endorsements we give to others (in particular in combination with threats of negative consequences to anyone who provides counterevidence).
I understand that posts like this, and their surrounding social dynamics, are a norm in political races, and that I expect people participating in these races to feel like they are necessary. I haven't thought through the tradeoffs here in much detail, but I am pretty confident posts like this have a cost on the quality of the discourse in EA and the forum. That cost might be worth it, though I do think it is a substantial cost and a major reason for why I am quite hesitant for many people in the EA community to get too involved with politics (though my real expectation is that we probably could just be honest and straightforward, and this wouldn't actually hurt candidates, and we could just get the best of both worlds, but I do know that many people disagree with me on this).
Edit: Trying to operationalize what I would like to see instead of posts like this, I feel like I would like to have discourse about political candidates that allows readers of the forum to straightforwardly distinguish between four different cases for a potential candidate:
I feel like this post kind of doesn't really provide me with evidence to distinguish between these four cases. Like, I am not sure whether I would actually see evidence that looks very different from this for a candidate that isn't actually a very good fit for political office at all. Or I would see evidence that's different if a candidate looks good from an EA perspective, but not good from a broader lights perspective.
To be clear, I do think there is value in clear and unambiguous endorsements, and there is real evidence communicated here from ASB. But I feel like the way the evidence is communicated actually makes each individual piece less trustworthy, and I can't shake this deep underlying current of the piece trying to persuade me instead of trying to inform me. A core part of this is definitely that I expect negative evidence about Carrick to be quite systematically filtered out, but another component is that a number of considerations that seem relatively irrelevant from an EA perspective (like Carrick's childhood background) are given at the same time as pretty relevant statements (like the positive working experience that ASB had), in a way that makes me think I should treat both of them as the same.
Like, as an example, I feel like Carrick's childhood background in this primarily serves the purpose of making Carrick emotionally sympathetic, without actually being any real bayesian evidence on whether he is a good or a bad fit for political office. I do think in an important sense, his background matters, but not because it should be compelling directly to me, but because I should expect others to find it compelling, and so assign higher chances to his political success, but signposting that kind of distinction feels very important to me when discussing political candidates.
That's...a lot of karma.