FY18 House Foreign Aid Spending Bill Protects Poverty-Focused Accounts

At the end of July, we began to see the “RESULTS” of your First Hundred Days efforts and the many calls, letters, and face-to-face meetings urging members of Congress to increase funding for global health and education programs in fiscal year 2018. The months of appropriations advocacy and Congressional sign-on letters have led to a promising State and Foreign Operations (SFOPS) Appropriations bill that has already moved through the House subcommittee and full committee mark-up process.

In a year of increased uncertainty and vulnerability for global health and development funding, it is remarkable that the House bill rejected the cuts in the President’s budget, restoring funding for most of these programs to fiscal year 2017 levels, and even increasing funding for a couple. This was not without your hard fought efforts to ensure these programs got the attention they needed on Capitol Hill.

Some of the wins for the accounts we support:

• Even with a 10 percent cut to the topline funding allocation for the foreign affairs account in the House (meaning the committee was given $5.6 billion less in resources for the SFOPS bill this year) all of our priority health and development programs were either protected at current spending levels or increased.
• Funding for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) in the House bill is $87.5 million, which is $12.5 million above fiscal year 2017 levels. This puts us in a great position to negotiate for higher funding in the Senate bill, but also to leverage other donors to give more to GPE at the upcoming replenishment conference in 2018.
• The House bill also fully funds Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, at $290 million, matching our request and the President’s. This increase for Gavi by $15 million from fiscal year 2017 also puts us on track to meet our $1 billion over 4 year pledge that the U.S. made to help immunize over 300 million more children by 2020.

It’s expected that the Senate will move its own SFOPS Appropriations bill through the process in early September. Those two bills will from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees will either go to conference to resolve any differences between them, or may still be wrapped up in a group of bills known as an “omnibus bill.”

RESULTS will continue to monitor developments in the Senate’s appropriations process, and will alert grassroots volunteers to advocacy opportunities as the SFOPS bill moves forward. Thanks for your advocacy and commitment to fully funding these important antipoverty accounts!