Half truth:  The Obama Administration has increased its FY2011 appropriations request for PEPFAR by a very small percentage, but

• in terms of real dollar purchasing power FY2011 appropriation are less than FY2010 appropriations.

Truer:  The reauthorization of PEPFAR would have justified a much higher appropriation for both FY2010 and FY2011, basically a $1 billion per year increase for each of five years through FY2014.   That level of increased funding would deplete the five-year Lantos-Hyde Act authorization of $39 billion and would allow significant scale up of HIV/AIDS programming to bring us closer to the goal of Universal Access.  Instead, we are bombarded with claims that the US is spending more on global AIDS, year-after-year, even though actual funding has been essentially flat-lined for three consecutive years once you take inflation into effect.  Moreover, a leaked 2009 presentation from the administration showed that the administration’s intention is to spend only $37 billion over six years, a scale-up of only $1 billion over the entire six-year period.  This flat funding is also occurring at the global level as well since overall International AIDS Assistance actually decreased from $7.7 billion in 2008 to $7.6 billion in 2009.