On December 17th, we delivered our petition with more than 86,000 signatures to President-elect Barack Obama’s foreign policy transition team.
The petition asked Obama to make a clear statement, through his upcoming inaugural address and budget priorities, that he intends to fulfill his campaign commitments to fighting poverty and preventable disease worldwide. View the petition here.
Senior members of the Obama-Biden Transition’s foreign policy team gladly accepted this petition, and were impressed by the 86,113 members –- at the time of delivery –- whom we mobilized on behalf of the world’s poorest people.
Although the initial delivery is complete, you can still sign the petition here. As the number of signers grows — hopefully hitting our new goal of 100,000 before the inauguration on January 20th — your signature will keep on working in our fight to alleviate global poverty and prevent diseases, including HIV/AIDS and malaria. We will continue using this petition in our advocacy efforts, taking every opportunity to encourage the President-elect to get us on track to meeting his pledges.
After the inaugural address on January 20th, we’ll be looking at Obama’s first Presidential budget request, for Fiscal Year 2010, and working hard to make sure it provides sufficient support for the proven, effective and affordable programs that give hope and opportunities to millions of people now living in desperate need.
ONE recently prepared a set of transition documents for President-elect Obama’s transition team. These documents essentially represented ONE’s best effort to put in writing a set of recommendations for how the Obama team could put its vision for development into action after taking office. The booklet included issue specific recommendations that could be implemented both in the short and longer term.
All of these recommendations are meant to fit into Obama’s broader vision for fighting poverty and making the Millennium Development Goals America’s own goals for development. In order to do so, President-elect Obama also committed to double U.S. spending on development assistance by $25 billion. In an effort to tie the two together, ONE’s transition document includes a section outlining the annual expenditures necessary to reach this goal over five years. It lists each of Obama’s existing commitments to development and added those priorities that ONE recommended to fulfill the overall vision. All of these things can be accomplished with an increase of $23.96 billion by fiscal year 2013.
While this increase sounds large, it still only represents less than 1% of the U.S. federal budget and can provide significant assistance to countries struggling to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Some of the priorities and commitments we include are:
Fully funding PEPFAR, tuberculosis and malaria as authorized in the Lantos-Hyde act passed this year
Create an initiative to build long-term agricultural capacity
Work toward universal primary education by signing and funding the Education for All Bill
Create and small and medium enterprise fund to support economic growth in Africa
These are just a few of the ideas mentioned in the briefing.
The scale up acknowledges that the United States is currently facing a difficult economic crisis and that therefore the new Administration will have to strategically choose which priorities to invest in immediately and which will have to be initiated a year or two down the line. Ultimately however, despite the difficult budget environment facing the U.S. in this upcoming year, ONE hopes that the Obama administration will begin the scale up with a total increase of $4 billion over the spending level in fiscal year 2008 so that those most critical initiatives can begin their scale up. Delaying the effort will only make annual increases required in future years more difficult to achieve. You can view the chart showing scale-up here.
Last week, ONE released its transition briefing to President-elect Obama’s transition team. Our transition briefing builds on the already robust agenda laid out by the President-elect with a series of short- and long-term policy pitches to the transition team along with a detailed sketch of how the Obama Administration can meet its commitment to double foreign assistance.
A transition briefing like this is meant to provide our thoughts on new priorities that could be taken up early on in the Administration and that also fit well with President-elect Obama’s vision. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all the things that ONE will support during the next four years whether they be existing priorities or new ideas that may emerge.
President-elect Obama’s campaign commitment to double foreign assistance provides us a framework for our requests and while it may sound ambitious, it is a critical necessity to the overarching goals. We are not naïve to the financial realities our country is facing, but for far too long development has played a supportive role in our overall foreign policy. It is our hope that President Obama will act on the vision he described as a candidate and raise the profile of development. We believe this briefing provides a roadmap to do that.
We hope that you find this briefing helpful and look forward to working with President Obama, his Administration, Congress, and all of our members to make this vision a reality.
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