Navigating the New Reality in DC: March 2025 updates

In December, EIP published a primer assessing opportunities and challenges for the world related to the 2nd Trump administration and GOP majority in Congress from a holistic point of view. The post included pre-registered best and worst case scenarios in the areas of AI policy, democracy, global health, peace & security, and state capacity, with more topics to come as the year progresses. We committed to update the primer at least quarterly throughout 2025, and the spring edition is now live at the original link.

In response to signals from the first two months of the Trump’s second term, we have significantly downgraded our predictions of how things are on track to go in the areas of global health and democracy. Here are some of the most significant changes we’ve made to reflect the many developments of the past quarter:

• In the global health arena, our focus in December had been the potential of the administration to re-initiate withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which our previous analysis had placed among the world’s most important institutions and which is heavily dependent for its funding upon the United States. But what has unfolded in practice is much worse, with the combination of the stop work order for all foreign assistance and the decimation of USAID (including the cancellation of five-sixths of USAID contracts) leading to significant loss of life both in expectation and reality. The WHO withdrawal order, which did indeed take place on Inauguration Day, has profiled as a minor side story by comparison.

• We are now seeing addressing the fallout from the USAID crisis as the clearest opportunity and priority for donors to make a difference in the world at this time. There is tremendous need, with organizations across the international aid community reeling from the loss of infrastructure and funding that the US government formerly provided, and while individual philanthropists can’t and shouldn’t replicate the entire system as it previously existed, several credible bridge funds have popped up to route private donor funding cost-effectively, with tens of millions of dollars in identified gaps. Meanwhile, there are emerging efforts to coordinate advocacy for a longer-term solution to this crisis that is capable of attracting bipartisan buy-in.

• Our scenarios for democracy in the United States, by contrast, reflected a very wide range of potential outcomes which included everything that we are seeing now. However, there had been some signals during the campaign and transition period that Trump might choose to take a more moderate approach with respect to institutional norms and rule of law in his second term. It’s now clear that those were a mirage and the President has made retribution and revenge against perceived enemies a central theme of the early days of his administration, just as many correctly warned he would do. Currently, the top concerns we are monitoring involve attacks on the independence of the judiciary branch as well as the use of federal government power to coerce ideological conformity among private sector institutions.

• On a meta level, we have made clearer that we view democracy as valuable primarily through the lens of a more general principle of “institutional accountability,” which for us contains three components: a wide moral circle (ideally wide enough to encompass all sentient beings impacted by that institution’s decisions), a willingness to honor agreements, and responsiveness to feedback. This framework recognizes the reality that democracies are not automatically virtuous by nature and that it is also possible to have morally accountable institutions that are not democracies.

This edition of the primer newly integrates several forecasts relevant to the different policy areas we are tracking, thanks to our ongoing partnership with Metaculus. We’ve also added New York Times-style “needle” graphics tracking our predictions in each area.

We invite you to read the updated primer at the original link here, and there is also a PDF version here. If you are a donor or funder with at least $50K in grantmaking capacity and would like to receive more specific donation recommendations, please sign up at this link.