The Senate “invoked cloture” on PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) late in the afternoon on Friday.

This basically means that the bill has passed another hurdle and is continuing to move forward.

We are expecting debate on the Senate floor starting today around 3pm EST. We’ll keep you posted and give you web link to the live debate as it happens.

A few senators have indicated that they intend to introduce amendments to reduce the amount of funding in the bill (currently $50 million for AIDS, TB and malaria over the next 5 years) but as of now, we don’t expect those amendments to pass.

-Virginia Simmons

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under PEPFAR2008, HIV/AIDS, PEPFAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.