THE Trump administration is mulling significant reductions in the budgets of the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development—perhaps by as much as 37%. Polling evidence suggests that makes a lot of sense politically: aid and foreign affairs frequently top lists of least-popular spending. Nonetheless, achieving that cut may be more difficult than it first appears, particularly when it comes to support for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. The potential difficulty is that Mr Trump’s desired cut could cause millions of deaths.
Fighting HIV accounts for about $7bn of America's $34bn foreign economic assistance budget. America is responsible for about two-thirds of the global funding of international assistance for HIV, which flows mostly to sub-Saharan Africa. And 80% of funding for HIV programmes there comes from donors. In countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Namibia and Tanzania all publicly financed antiretroviral treatments are funded by donors. It is not plausible that a dramatic cut in American funding would be made up by other donors or by recipient countries—and that suggests that the number of...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2nmnFPu
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