Paul Farmer and the US Government?

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-05-15 11:54:00 UTC
Topics:

(photo credit: Lesley University)

I've talked about Paul Farmer before. If you work in global health, he's one of your inspirations. Period. He founded Partners in Health. He was one of the first people to work on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. He's been an advocate for the poor and the marginalized since day one, and he's shown both moral and physical courage throughout his career.

And he might go to work for the US government. According to the Boston Globe, Farmer is "mulling a possible appointment by the Obama administration to coordinate the United States' growing overseas health initiatives."

If the position involved coordinating all US health initiatives, this would most likely be at the State Department, possibly in the office of the Director of US Foreign Assistance. (for those who are familiar with US foreign aid - yes, that is the notorious F office). He would need to harmonize all the different health programs and agencies currently funded by the US government.

These agencies include an alphabet of acronyms such as the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), USAID, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are probably others I have forgotten. Eliminating redundancy and getting them to play nicely together will not be an easy job. (and I have mentioned before, my own personal view is that we should put all health programs under USAID and dump all these separately funded efforts.)

The upside of all these programs is we've got a lot of international health capacity in the US government. I'd say it's probably the strongest technical area of US foreign assistance. If we could get all the energy working for the same goes, we've got the people and the skills to run our programs very, very well.

Paul Famer might be able to take that capacity and reshape American program into something extraordinary. Or he might get bogged down in paperwork and bureaucracy, and we'd lose the skills and contributions of a major global health figure in exchange for someone minor improvements in PEPFAR policy.  I know we're all hoping for that first one, but only time will tell.

Alanna Shaikh
PREVIOUS STORY:
Daily Darfur: Wanted: International Political Will
NEXT STORY:
Campaign about Apple Factories in China Gains Wide and Diverse Support

COMMENTS (10)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.