Why Every Nonprofit Should Support a 1% treaty
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Stop Fighting Over Scraps, Grow the Global Pie
Most nonprofits are trapped in a zero-sum game.
They’re like starving dogs fighting over a single bowl of food while an entire banquet sits untouched behind them. The dogs are very focused on the bowl. They’ve developed sophisticated bowl-fighting strategies. Some dogs have hired consultants to optimize their bowl access. None of them have turned around.
Every grant you win is a grant another organization loses. Every dollar you secure for malaria is a dollar not spent on Alzheimer’s. Every donor you convince is a donor distracted from climate change.
Your success requires someone else’s failure. You’re not solving scarcity. You’re reshuffling it while writing very professional reports about the reshuffling.
Meanwhile, the real driver of scarcity, the real reason the bowl is so small, is ignored:
Humanity spends 604 times more on weapons than on clinical trials to discover which medicines actually work.
The bottleneck isn’t basic research or lab equipment. It’s testing. We’ve explored less than 1% of possible drug-disease combinations using existing safe compounds because clinical trials are too slow and expensive. This is the chokepoint that limits every health outcome.
This is not an ideological claim. It’s arithmetic.
Every year:
- Military spending: $2.72T
- Global spending on curing disease: $67.5B
- Military budgets: Rising by hundreds of billions annually
- Medical research budgets: Facing real-term cuts
The pie for solving disease, climate, poverty, and suffering is shrinking.
The pie for building weapons is expanding.
You cannot solve a resource allocation crisis by optimizing inside the smallest slice. That’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are grants and the iceberg is $2.72T pointed at everyone’s face.
You must expand the pie. This turns a zero-sum game into a positive-sum game.
This is the logic behind a 1% treaty.
The Single Highest-ROI Intervention Available
If your mission is:
- curing Alzheimer’s
- preventing cancer
- mitigating climate change
- slowing pandemics
- ending extreme poverty
- protecting democracy
- reducing existential risk
- improving education
- promoting peace
- stabilizing the biosphere
…the single highest-leverage thing you can do is:
Help redirect 1% of global military budgets toward hyper-efficient pragmatic clinical trials.
Why? Math.
- Every dollar spent on war is a dollar not spent on life. This is how money works.
- Every dollar moved from military to health has a 10-200x higher welfare multiplier. Bombs have negative ROI on human flourishing. Medicine has positive ROI. These are different numbers.
- Redirecting the flow of resources changes the future more than any single program. You can bail water forever or you can plug the hole.
- A healthier, wealthier, more stable world reduces every global problem simultaneously. It’s like fixing the foundation instead of patching individual cracks.
War is upstream of poverty. War is upstream of pollution. War is upstream of refugee crises. War is upstream of authoritarianism. War is upstream of disease spread. War is upstream of technological stagnation. War is upstream of climate destruction (militaries are among the largest polluters on Earth, which is ironic given they’re supposed to be protecting it).
Reduce war by 1%, and every downstream mission gets easier.
Increase war by 1%, and every mission becomes almost impossible.
A 1% treaty is not a peace movement. It’s a resource-reallocation movement. Nobody has to hold hands or sing songs. They just have to do math.
Why This Applies to YOUR Organization
If you’re an environmental group: You can’t save the planet while the world’s militaries, the single largest polluters on Earth, continue to wage wars that destroy ecosystems in minutes. A 1% treaty is the most effective climate policy ever proposed because it directly defunds the engine of destruction.
If you’re an anti-poverty group: You can’t end poverty while conflict and disease create more of it than you can possibly solve. The root cause of most modern famines is war. The root cause of most poverty is the crushing economic burden of disease. A 1% treaty tackles both.
If you’re a peace organization: You’ve been making moral appeals for 70 years. It hasn’t worked. Try something else. A 1% treaty makes peace more profitable than war. It’s not a moral argument; it’s a financial one. And in a world run by greed, that’s the only argument that matters.
If you’re a disease advocacy group: You are currently fighting every other disease group for a tiny sliver of the NIH’s budget. You are competing for crumbs. A 1% treaty doesn’t just give you a bigger slice of the pie; it bakes a new, much larger pie. It increases clinical trials capacity by 604 times and makes the testing process 82x more efficient. The bottleneck isn’t ideas or molecules - it’s running enough trials to find out what works. This solves that.
“But Shouldn’t Nonprofits Focus on Their Core Mission?”
Yes. That’s exactly why they should support a 1% treaty.
Every nonprofit today operates inside a system that guarantees scarcity:
- too few grant dollars
- too much competition
- too much fragmentation
- political headwinds
- donor fatigue
- shrinking government budgets for health, climate, and poverty
- ballooning budgets for war
Most nonprofits are fighting each other for scraps of a shrinking pie while the pie-shrinkers get $2.72T annually to shrink it faster.
If your mission matters, this is suicidal strategy.
A small increase in resources within your field leads to small, incremental improvements. More staff. More grants. More programs. More reports about the reports.
A small increase in military budgets leads to arms races, instability, and the destruction of progress you spent decades building.
If your organization does not help shift the resource flow, your future funding and impact will be determined by someone else. Specifically, by people whose job is “convince politicians that killing is profitable.”
Supporting a 1% treaty is not a distraction. It is strategic self-preservation.
The Zero-Sum Trap vs. The Positive-Sum Solution
The Zero-Sum Game (Current Reality):
- You fight for a $100,000 grant
- If you win, the malaria charity loses
- Total global impact is capped by the fixed size of the philanthropy bucket
- You spend 40% of your time writing proposals instead of saving lives
- The bucket is shrinking while you fight over it
The Positive-Sum Game (1% treaty):
- We work together to pass a 1% treaty
- The “philanthropy bucket” grows by $27.2B/year (initially) and scales up
- Everyone gets funded
- Malaria gets cured AND Alzheimer’s gets cured
- You stop writing proposals and start governing the 1% Treaty Fund
- The bucket expands forever
This is like discovering that instead of fighting over one pizza, you can just order infinite pizzas. Except the pizzas are billions of dollars and the ordering is international treaty ratification.
“Why Now?” Because the Window Is Open
For the first time in 80 years:
- the public is angry about rising military budgets
- trust in government spending priorities is collapsing
- medical breakthroughs feel within reach but unrealized
- climate disasters have shifted public opinion
- pandemics exposed the cost of underfunding resilience
- AI and biotech make accelerated progress possible
- leaders are searching for high-leverage, unifying narratives
You cannot pass a resource-reallocation treaty when people feel safe, rich, and complacent.
You can pass it when budgets are being cut, militaries are expanding, and people feel the system is misaligned.
This is the moment.
If nonprofits do not push now, the window closes. And when it closes, every mission becomes harder for decades. The dogs will still be fighting over the shrinking bowl while the banquet rots behind them.
Historical Precedent: This Has Worked Before
During World War II:
- The U.S. converted car factories into bomber factories
- GM built tanks
- Ford built B-24s
- Frigidaire produced machine guns
- Typewriter manufacturers made rifles
Not because they “supported war.” Because the system needed realignment and ignoring it was impossible. Also because the government asked very firmly, with implied consequences for saying no.
Today, the world needs the opposite realignment:
- Less production of weapons
- More production of cures, resilience, stability, and health
The global nonprofit sector is the modern equivalent of those car factories: Massive capacity, talented people, and the wrong pie allocation.
A few years of effort to shift 1% of global budgets could produce more impact than 30 years of incremental programs. This is not optimism. This is arithmetic applied to resource flows.
“Why Not Just Run Decentralized Trials Ourselves?”
You should.
But decentralized trials alone don’t solve the fundamental resource problem.
This is the key insight:
Decentralized trials scale infinitely better when the resource stream feeding them is 10-40x larger.
If you build the most efficient trial system in the world but the budget for clinical progress is shrinking, you still lose. You’ve built a beautiful garden hose attached to a pipe with no water.
You cannot out-optimize a broken budget. You must change the resource flow itself.
Build the infrastructure AND expand the funding. Do both. They’re complements, not substitutes.
A 1% treaty Is a Rising Tide That Lifts Every Mission
What happens if the world shifts just 1% of military budgets?
Health
- 22.8× more clinical trial capacity
- 100x faster therapeutic discovery
- Lower costs per cure
- Diseases get cured instead of managed
Climate
- Lower military emissions (militaries are massive polluters)
- Fewer resource-driven conflicts
- More funds for climate solutions
Poverty
- Trillions in long-term economic productivity
- Fewer war-displaced refugees
- More government revenue for social services
Global Stability
- Less chance of great-power conflict
- More international cooperation on existential risks
- Everyone slightly less dead
Nonprofit Impact
- Everyone stops competing for crumbs
- Every mission receives more oxygen
- Funders far more willing to invest
- You stop writing grant proposals and start actually doing your mission
A 1% move unlocks 100% more possibility.
The Moral Argument Is Simple
War shrinks every future. Health enlarges every future.
Every dollar spent on war destroys life, pollutes the biosphere, undermines stability, and reduces wealth.
Every dollar spent on health increases life, reduces suffering, improves productivity, and stabilizes democracies.
This is the easiest moral tradeoff in history. It’s like choosing between “being on fire” and “not being on fire.” The correct answer is obvious, yet somehow humans have spent 80 years choosing fire.
Why Nonprofits Must Prioritize a 1% treaty (Short Term)
Because nothing else increases their impact, funding, and security more.
Every nonprofit wants to cure something, save something, protect something, or improve something. Every one of those missions is downstream of resource allocation.
A 1% treaty is upstream of everything.
Supporting it is not “getting distracted from your mission.” It’s “solving the fundamental constraint that limits every mission.”
The Ask Is Small, The Upside Is Massive
We are not asking for global disarmament or naive pacifism.
We are asking for 1%.
One penny of each tax dollar currently used to build weapons. One small shift in a $2.72T flow.
Countries still keep 99% of their apocalypse capacity. They can still end all life 19 times instead of 20. If you can’t successfully end the world with 19 attempts, the 20th probably wasn’t going to help.
But that single percentage point:
- creates a $27.2B/year 1% Treaty Fund
- funds global decentralized clinical trials
- makes every nonprofit’s mission 10x more feasible
It is the highest-leverage bargain available to humanity.
The Bottom Line
If you care about your mission, you must care about a 1% treaty.
You cannot solve your mission inside a shrinking, war-distorted budget environment. You cannot optimize your way out of a fundamental resource mismatch. You cannot win a game where the rules guarantee your loss.
The smartest thing the nonprofit sector can do right now:
Stop fighting over scraps.
Stop playing a zero-sum game.
Grow the pie.
Pass a 1% treaty.
Then return to your mission with 10-40x greater resources.
This is not idealism. This is strategy.
A few years of coordinated advocacy for a 1% treaty will unlock more impact across every field than decades of incrementalism.
The dogs need to turn around and notice the banquet.
This is the moment to act.