Is Obama Failing on AIDS?

President Obama is coming in for a very public flogging over a perceived lack of action on the global AIDS pandemic. Is it deserved?

In Washington, D.C., bus stop posters earlier this summer compared Obama to former president Bush and asked, “Who’s better on AIDS?” (Hint: You’re supposed to conclude it’s Bush, who launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -PEPFAR.) Now a new campaign is up, illustrating the disparity between the money being spent to fight the war in Afghanistan and the dollars flowing to AIDS prevention and treatment worldwide. It’s a stark comparison.

The criticism reached a climax at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, where one observer described the mood toward the Obama administration as “rage.”

Rage, led by organizations like the Global AIDS Alliance, over what they see as broken promises from a candidate who was supposed to be a champion for the cause. Before he was elected, Obama co-sponsored PEPFAR’s reauthorization. And on the campaign trail he committed to spend more than $50 billion by 2013 on the fight against AIDS.

Instead, his administration has basically flat-funded U.S. financing of international AIDS programming. Exact numbers are still being debated, but U.S. funding for AIDS relief was, at best, only slightly up in 2009 compared to 2008. And, as The Washington Post reports, the administration’s funding request for the next fiscal year is only about two percent higher than this year.

Still, the administration will tell you that it is on track to give $63 billion by 2014 as part of its Global Health Initiative, though it’s a year later than Obama initially promised. Additionally, in a smart piece of analysis, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Laurie Garrett points out that the United States was one of only three countries to increase support for HIV in 2009. And that U.S. donations, coupled with contributions for private American donors, represent “more than 85 percent of all support for HIV/AIDS efforts, though its share of world GDP is just 24.6 percent.”

At Vienna, a member of the administration argued that Obama’s commitment is evident and that the president is personally hurt by claims he hasn’t done enough.

So why are people so angry with Obama?

The answer is that the president led voters to believe we could — and he would — do so much more on AIDS than his predecessors. As Obama said in a 2006 speech, “AIDS must be an all-hands-on-deck effort” that demanded more money and more attention.

A year and a half into his term, though, and AIDS is still not an administrative centerpiece. I’ve written here before that, given the current state of the international economy, AIDS programs should get used to some belt-tightening. I still believe that, but when I see the comparison between money spent on Afghanistan in 2010 ($102 billion) and on HIV/AIDS ($6.5 billion), it’s easy to understand the rage.

Under Obama, fighting AIDS was supposed to be as important as the war on terror, domestic healthcare reform and stemming the financial crisis. Not marginalized by them. That is why people are angry and they're holding the president accountable.

Photo Credit: geoftheref