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House Cuts President’s FY2011 Development Budget
July 1, 2010
House appropriators marked up the FY2011 foreign affairs spending bill at $52.656 billion yesterday. The subcommittee mark up is roughly $4 billion above last year’s enacted levels, but also $4 billion below the president’s request for FY2011. My takeaway: this budget looks like more of the same and is a long way from a new approach to global development.
The only areas increased above the president’s FY2011 request levels are: HIV/AIDS, refugees, education (including basic education and cultural exchanges) and water. There is no change in funding for Israel, Egypt, Jordan or the Peace Corps. All other programs are cut below the president’s request. On the flip side, the bill contains modest increases above last year’s enacted levels for everything except: Afghanistan, Iraq, counter narcotics, refugees, and voluntary peacekeeping operations.
Some line items of note:
Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC): $1.105 billion; $174 million below the president’s request and the same as FY2010 enacted.
Agriculture and food security: $1 billion; $353 million below the president’s request and $112 million above FY2010 levels. Of the $408 million in multilateral funding requested for global food security, the subcommittee provided only $150 million.
Global health and child survival: $2.725 billion; $288 million below the president’s request and $305 above FY2010 enacted.
HIV/AIDS: $5.875 billion; $25 million above the president’s request and $166 million above FY2010 enacted.
Afghanistan: $0; $3.9 billion below the president’s request. (Read more about the Afghanistan cut from Congresswoman Lowey and CGD colleagues Todd Moss and Casey Dunning.)
Pakistan: $2.514 billion; $540 million below the president’s request and $1.056 above FY2010 enacted.
Clean Tech Fund: $300 million; $100 million below the request and equal to FY2010 enacted.
International Development Association (IDA): $1.235 billion; $50 million below the president’s request and $27.5 million below FY2010 enacted.
Most remarkable is that the president’s requests for his new signature development initiatives on global health and food security are not fully funded. And the MCC, despite sounding a lot like the new approach for U.S. development, also gets cut below the request level. Similarly, administration efforts to channel more funding multilaterally are restrained. Again, I don’t envy the appropriators in this tough budget environment, but it’s hard to see signs of a new approach to U.S. global development here. All the more reason any effort from the administration to reform U.S. global development policy must work with Congress.
Possibly Related Posts
- Lowey Cuts Afghanistan Aid Ahead of FY2011 Appropriations Bill Mark-Up
- President Obama Tees Up New Approach to Development in G-8 Announcement
- If Afghanistan Aid Is Cutoff for Corruption, Why Not Senegal and Haiti Too?
2 Responses to “House Cuts President’s FY2011 Development Budget”
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July 1st, 2010 at 10:37 am
Wow… that’s unfortunate. Perhaps it’s worth clarifying that the budget cuts include both development and (quite a bit of) non-development spending? For Pakistan, for example, at least $300 million of the $540m cut comes off the security assistance side of the ledger (the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund is cut from $1.2b to $900m). Another $700m comes out of the gray area that is counternarcotics—probably mostly in Afghanistan.
More broadly, however, do you have a sense on where this will all be when the carousel stops? Is it safe to assume that at least the majority of Afghanistan funding will reappear somewhere along the line? Doesn’t seem like defunding the entire civilian component of an ongoing war is an idea that will fly too far.
July 7th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Advocacy for TB and for the Global Fund really paid off – - it is impressive that the Subcommittee went ABOVE the President’s proposal on these items given the lower amount of money they had available.
The Subcommittee rejected the Obama proposal to cut the US contribution to the Global Fund below the FY 2010 level. Instead, the Subcommittee approved $825 m, a boost of $75 million for the Fund above FY 2010. About $18 m of that would go to AIDS programs, based on Round 9.
The budget categories tend to make the increase for HIV/AIDS larger than it really is. As I explain in a blog posting at http://sciencespeaks.wordpress.com the Subcommittee provided a boost of $91 million over the FY 2010 level. (President’s Request: $5.150 b; FY 10: $4.959b). This is about half of what President Obama had requested.
Obama had proposed using half of his requested increase for PEPFAR to help finance technical and management assistance for the GHI Plus Countries, and we hear that the report language accompanying allows this. That means that about $50 m of the boost for PEPFAR will go to this purpose and only $41 m will be available to expand access to direct services, such as prevention, care and treatment, and the commodities needed for these programs (such as medicine, condoms, etc).
More on this at my posting here:
http://sciencespeaks.wordpress.....r-fy-2011/