On January 24, the State Department paused disbursements of foreign aid for a 90-day review period. So far, there are exemptions for emergency food aid but not for PEPFAR. This market resolves YES if PEPFAR funding is unfrozen as of February 15, 2025, and NO if funding is (still) frozen on that date.
https://apnews.com/article/state-department-trump-foreign-aid-bf047e17ef64cb42a1a1b7fdf05caffa
Update 2025-02-07 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Clarification of Resolution Criteria
50% Funding Threshold: The market will resolve YES if at least 50% of total PEPFAR funding is unfrozen by February 15, 2025, as estimated from reliable sources.
Outcome: If less than 50% of the funding is unfrozen by that date, the market will resolve as NO.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ2,885 | |
| 2 | Ṁ2,492 | |
| 3 | Ṁ763 | |
| 4 | Ṁ674 | |
| 5 | Ṁ443 |
The Supreme Court is now demanding that aid be unfrozen. It would be weird if they were demanding aid be unfrozen if it wasn't frozen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/foreign-aid-supreme-court-trump.html
Boooo. You equated waivers with unfreezing, and even confirmed that was sufficient for YES, before you changed your mind and moved the goalposts.
Now you've put the changed market description into chatgpt, and even then it told you "waiver coverage ... accounts for roughly half (or slightly more) of PEPFAR’s budget."
Kelsey and pepfarreport people are great, and we're all sad that the waivers aren't being well-executed and people are gonna die. To be absolutely clear, I'm am not interested in a YES resolution at this point. But when the world got more complex and ugly than the original political-policy frame, you ignored the divergence and are still ignoring it. I am very disappointed (in the manifold game context - keeping in mind that mana means nothing, it's the spirit of the game here at stake) in your behavior as market creator.
@TiredCliche you appear to be arguing against the "political policy" frame by simply using the "aid delivered" frame without acknowledging the existence of the first frame.
Both frames are valid! But. It is the switch from the first to the second that rendered this market incoherent.
@JamesBaker3 But the policy seems to be that the funding is not just frozen, but cancelled, considering that Rubio's lawyers said they're cut.
@JamesBaker3 You can read day by day briefings of the State defending the blanket ban here. https://avac.org/avac-vs-dept-of-state/
I guess if your view of policy is "something Rubio said", but what the state is saying in court is much more official, and lawyers are not supposed to lie to courts, while politicians may lie about their policies as they please.
Anyway, if the funds weren't still frozen, we probably wouldn't have a judge demanding that the funds be unfrozen.
@JamesBaker3 It's very clear that the waivers are not being "not well executed." They're not being executed at all. Rubio lying and releasing a bullshit statement about waivers does not change the fact that funding remains frozen. That doesn't make Rubio's lies policy. The policy is clearly to freeze payments.
Rubio saying something does not policy make. My boss says that my organization does not discriminate in service, but in reality, yes, we discriminate. I have literally been trained to discriminate. Discrimination is, therefore, our policy, regardless of what my boss says publically.
@TiredCliche Three messages in three days, I apologize for asking for a citation because it sent you off arguing again, just inside inside that frame.
To quote myself, "Both frames are valid! But. It is the switch from the first to the second that rendered this market incoherent."
@JamesBaker3 There is no need for apologizing, I am not upset at you. Maybe I am misunderstanding your argument. I thought the first frame was the policy one, and that's the one you were arguing from. If your frame isn't the policy or the real outcomes, what is it?
@TiredCliche The switch I'm referring to is that the market creator agreed that the release of the waiver would resolve this YES, and then later changed their mind and switched to the "50% of funds flowing" definition.
Making a market in either frame and sticking with it is great, and markets that start with ambiguity and get more precise with folks agreeing is also fine, but when people are revealed to have been betting on different things, that's when N/A becomes the only fair resolution.
@TiredCliche I only bet after the criteria changed, so it's fine with me, but it seems like @JamesBaker3 has made a number of good points over the last 20 days that have gone unaddressed. So I have to contest 'obviously'- if there were obvious answers to his criticism, I would expect someone to have made the trivial effort of providing them.
@Frogswap I never saw the notifications. Here is the trivial effort: PEPFAR charities are not receiving their money and Rubio's lawyers said he cut basically all of them.
Finally getting back to this; apologies for the delay in resolution.
I originally thought this market would resolve YES given the Rubio's announcement of exemptions. However, the resolution criterion is based on whether the funding was in fact available. Hypothetically, it could still have resolved YES despite staff being fired causing the funding not to be useful, but funds would still have needed to be disbursable if requested.
Given the confusing situation, I considered resolving N/A, but at this point it seems clear enough from reporting that the bulk of the funding was not unfrozen in practice. ChatGPT Deep Research explains:
Scope of Unfrozen Funding: The central question is whether at least 50% of PEPFAR funding was unfrozen by Feb. 15, 2025. Based on official reports and media analyses, the answer is no – the threshold was not met. The waiver coverage was limited to PEPFAR’s treatment-focused funding, which historically accounts for roughly half (or slightly more) of PEPFAR’s budget. (Under past authorizations, about 50% of PEPFAR’s funds were earmarked for treatment and related services positivelyaware.com.) In theory, this means the waiver could have unlocked close to half of PEPFAR’s activities. However, in practice the administration released only a small fraction of PEPFAR’s money during the freeze. A Reuters investigation on Feb. 21, 2025 revealed that the largest non-security exemption granted during the aid freeze was about $500 million for PEPFAR (reuters.com). For context, PEPFAR’s annual budget for 2024 was about $6.5 billion. The $500 million lifeline is less than 8% of PEPFAR’s yearly funding, far below the 50% mark. Even acknowledging that only a portion of the fiscal year had passed by mid-February, the data show that the majority of PEPFAR funds remained frozen. Mainstream news outlets consistently described the exemption for PEPFAR as “limited”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/24/musk-doge-usaid-cuts-dc/ is another source that indicates that many payments were blocked by DOGE despite nominal exemptions.
I also checked with authors of https://pepfarreport.org/ and they agreed that funds were not unfrozen in practice. Resolving NO.
One last bit on the food aid comparison: this market defined emergency food aid as something that, by already being "exempted", was NOT frozen, in contrast to PEPFAR.
However, food aid has been subject to the same kind of post-waiver confusion:
https://www.devex.com/news/the-mess-inside-rubio-s-lifesaving-waivers-109398
"The mess inside Rubio's 'lifesaving' waivers
On Jan. 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an exemption to the foreign aid freeze: a waiver for lifesaving humanitarian programs. But over the last three weeks, nothing about the waivers has gone according to plan."
This hopefully helps illustrate how "state dept policy" and "what happens after state issues waivers" are two separate things.
@DanielZiegler I asked this to DeepSeek R1 via Perplexity, and it stated that the waiver led to 53% theoretical capacity, but with 18% "implementation loss" only 35% of funding was operational. However, I don't know how reliable this is. Facts on the ground change quickly and I'm afraid DeepSeek can't properly deal with it. That said, it did draw on quite some practical information and I was nevertheless impressed.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-at-least-50-of-pepfar-fundi-vnHNYS0oQWyalVKnXySSYA#3
Good luck resolving this 😅
@DanielZiegler You agreed with a "resolves Yes" comment 14 says ago.
The market was written originally about exemptions granted by the State Department.
You've converted this from a political question (will the State Dept walk back their pause of this aid) to a very different "how well are the gears of bureaucracy turning" question.
I don't know why you're pushing forward with reversing the meaning of this market, and I protest. I feel annoyed because I think your response to my protests has been to avoid responding.
I will claim once again that the right thing to do is to N/A this market.
@DanielZiegler 12 days ago you agreed that YES was satisfied and just needed to stay that way through Feb 15. 7 days ago you redefined the market and have been silent since then. Can you please clean this up? People are still betting on contradictory assumptions.