Susan A. Cohen is Director of Government Affairs at the Guttmacher Institute, where she is responsible for facilitating and coordinating issue analysis and strategy development within the Washington, DC office.
The theme of the Toronto International AIDS Conference in August was "time to deliver." Indeed, while the U.S. deserves credit for ramping up the amount that it has been spending on the global AIDS effort, it is time-past time-to look more closely at how the U.S. is spending its money in addition to talking about how much it is spending overall. Luckily, a rare opportunity to ask just these questions of the person in charge of U.S. AIDS efforts will come on Wednesday, September 6, at 1 p.m. Under the chairmanship of Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), a Government Reform Committee subcommittee will hold a hearing examining the impact of the requirement that at least 1/3 of all U.S. global HIV/AIDS funding must be reserved for "abstinence until marriage" programs.
This hearing will be significant because it will be the first opportunity since Toronto for U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul to testify specifically on what kind of prevention programs the U.S. is delivering.
