Research

When then-Sen. Obama was running for president, he told the American people, “We have a significant stake in ensuring that those who live in fear and want today can live with dignity and opportunity tomorrow,” adding that “the security and well-being of each and every American is tied to the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders.” 

As part of this commitment to what Obama called our “common security,” he pledged to increase funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global health initiative started in 2003 by George W. Bush to prevent the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic:

Barack Obama and Joe Biden will commit $50 billion over five years to strengthen the existing program and expand it to new regions of the world, including Southeast Asia, India, and parts of Europe, where the HIV/AIDS burden is growing.

And yet, Obama’s budget is prompting worries “that some of the gains made against the AIDS epidemic since 2003 could be reversed.”  Hidden within the president’s budget this year is a near freeze on increasing funding for the very program he co-sponsored appropriations for in 2008.  President Obama’s $165 million PEPFAR budget increase is on track to be well short, approximately $15 billion short, of what he promised on the campaign trail, breaking an important funding promise Obama told Americans was critical to our security and that should have placed PEPFAR’s budget over $8 billion by this year, as it reached $6 billion in 2008.

But this brings to mind a much more recent promise Obama made. When the president promoted his discretionary spending freeze during his State of the Union address two weeks ago, he promised that “spending related to our national security … will not be affected.” Yet, according to Obama’s logic, this freeze in resources for PEPFAR is a freeze that affects our national security because, as he said in 2006, the HIV/AIDS situation has national “security implications as countries whose populations and economies have been ravaged by AIDS become fertile breeding grounds for civil strife and even terror.”

Unsurprisingly, only Obama can break two promises with one action.