Click here to view/read the press release on the continuation of the syringe exchange funding ban

PRESS RELEASE

Contact:  Jennifer Flynn, +1-917-517-5202 or jflynn@healthgap.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                        May 7, 2009

OBAMA BREAKS PROMISE TO FULLY FUND GLOBAL AIDS PROGRAMS

Global AIDS programs are not “wasteful spending”, say activists

Washington, DC:  Today, President Obama released the details of his FY2010 budget, including his numbers on global AIDS.  In launching the budget President Obama outlined the “wasteful spending” in previous budgets. But what he did not acknowledge was that his budget cuts billions from what Congress authorized last year, and what Obama pledged while a candidate, to scale up the most successful and lifesaving public health interventions the world has ever seen. This missing funding will cripple planned scale up in the coming year.

Currently the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is accepting proposals based on the agreement by the US and governments around the world to scale up its funding—but it faces a gap of billions in order to fund planned programs coming before the board this November. The crisis was caused in part by the previous administration’s hostility and chronic underfunding of the Global Fund, which supports effective programs like needle exchange and sexuality education to which the right wing is hostile. President Obama—instead of reversing this crisis and fulfilling his campaign promise to pay the US fair share of the Global Fund—actually proposed just 1/3 of the US fair share.  The Global Fund is flat-funded at $0.9b when the US fair share for 2010 is $2.7b.

“Today our President told us that he was cutting funding to programs that were unnecessary which we fully support. But President Obama needs to explain to why he is abandoning planned programs on AIDS, TB, and malaria that are desperately needed by billions around the world,” said Kaytee Riek, Director of Organizing for Health GAP. “Congress is going to have to step in to save the plans for these programs.”

The FY2010 budget provides on a mere 2% increase for PEPFAR (the bilateral US Global AIDS Plan)—essentially flat funding the program in the second of a planned five-year expansion meant to double the program’s impact. Congress re-authorized Global AIDS, TB, and Malaria programs last year with then-senators Obama, Biden, and Clinton cosponsoring the measure for $48 billion over five years. More importantly the programs set bold targets--3 million people ontreatment, 12 million new infections prevented, and 12 million people receiving care by 2013 along with ambitious plans on tuberculosis and malaria. While experts have been assembling the plan to reach those targets and save millions of lives, most of those plans will have to be shelved at the funding levels announced today.

In addition, Obama also failed to lift the federal ban on funding syringe exchange. Obama committed on the campaign trail to making sure that these programs would receive their fair share. He's broken that promise.

More shocking then budget cuts was the admission from Joseph Crowley, US AIDS Czar, on a briefing call about the budget that the President did not lift the ban on federal funding ban to pay for desperately needed needle exchange programs.  Crowley said, “The President does not want to create policy in the budget.”  And yet, as Vice President Joe Biden frequently told us during the campaign, "Do not tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value."  “We are deeply disappointed that the President did not do the right thing and lift the ban so that we can have an honest and open dialogue about the efficacy of the needle exchange as public health policy, “ said Jennifer Flynn, Managing Director of Health GAP who was on this morning’s call.

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