The Obama Administration built its foreign assistance programming around the priorities and practices it identified in the 2010 Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) on Global Development. The PPD was the first of its kind and sought to elevate global development as a pillar of American foreign policy, alongside defense and diplomacy. It identified broad-based economic growth and democratic governance as overarching U.S. development priorities and focused on three key initiatives as a means to support those priorities: the Global Health Initiative (GHI), the Global Climate Change Initiative, and the Global Food Security Initiative (Feed the Future). While built on the foundation of existing programs, each initiative was intended to bring new focus, improve coordination, and boost funding to the aid sectors it supports. The Obama Administration followed a particularly active era in U.S. support for global development. Under the George W. Bush Administration, foreign assistance levels more than doubled, a new foreign aid agency was created (the Millennium Challenge Corporation, MCC), and the Bush Administration established, with strong congressional support and involvement, one of the largest foreign aid programs in history—the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The Obama Administration built upon these efforts, although within the context of an increasingly constrained budget and political environment. Within months of the PPD's release in 2010, the Republican Party won majority control in the House of Representatives, with priorities often at odds with the Democratic Administration. Concerns about the budget deficit and enactment of the Budget Control Act the next year reduced spending levels across the federal government, thereby reducing prospects for new investments in development assistance programs. Perhaps as a result of this political dynamic, the Obama Administration did not establish new aid programs, with the arguable exception of Power Africa, but rather sought to reconfigure and refocus existing programs. Some analysts suggest that the Administration was effectively limited after 2010 to efforts that were budget neutral and required little or no support from Congress. Specific funding for the global health, climate change, and food security initiatives was first requested in the FY2011 International Affairs budget, but support through ongoing program funds was provided in FY2010 appropriations. Congress has generally not used the initiatives as funding frameworks but has supported the activities they encompass to varying degrees. The portion of U.S. bilateral development assistance obligated for global health, agricultural development, and environment programs—more than one-third of total economic aid from FY2012 to FY2015—has increased under the Obama Administration, continuing a trend begun under the Bush Administration ( Figure 1 ). While each of the Obama Administration initiatives is distinct, several common threads run through them, reflecting the Obama Administration's general global development strategy and priorities, as outlined in the PPD: Focus on Host Country Capacity . The policy sought to improve aid effectiveness by focusing efforts on partner countries and regions where the conditions seem most amenable to sustained progress. This took the form of "fast track" countries in the Global Health Initiative and "focus countries" in Feed the Future. One aspect of this focus on building partner capacity was an attempt to shift away from a pattern of emergency response aid toward a preventive posture (e.g., agricultural development aid instead of emergency food aid, or increasing capacity of governments to predict floods and other climate change impacts rather than providing post-disaster response). This selective approach is challenged by diplomatic pressure to spread aid broadly, potential conflict between U.S. priorities in a country or region, and concern that aid may be most needed in places with the least government and institutional capacity. Investment in Innovation and Research. The Obama Administration sought to foster development-focused research as a means to incentivize and identify "game-changing" innovations such as new vaccines, weather-resistant crop varieties, and clean energy technology. The U.S. Global Development Lab within USAID is perhaps the most significant manifestation of this PDD priority, but there are initiative specific components as well. For example, a Food Security Innovation Center (FSIC) was established at USAID as part of Feed the Future, which oversees numerous collaborative research programs, many of which predate the initiative. Whole of G overnment . Each initiative, as described in its roll-out and strategy documents, involves several U.S. government agencies beyond the primary international development actors (the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department, and the MCC). The Obama Administration emphasized that this "whole of government" approach was intended to bring the full range of U.S. expertise and resources to the challenges addressed by the initiatives, as well as to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of existing, but often uncoordinated, international activities. The whole of government approach may also be a way to identify a broader range of ongoing U.S. government funding that can be attributed to these objectives and related international commitments. In practice, this approach has faced coordination challenges, caused in part by varying congressional committee jurisdictions and lack of legislative or executive authority to compel cross-agency coordination and cooperation. The fractured oversight and lack of coordinating authority has also presented challenges for tracking initiative spending. Results - Oriented . The PPD emphasized the use of metrics by which to measure development progress and the accountability of recipients for achieving results. The initiatives were established with specific goals and, except for the Global Climate Change Initiative (perhaps due to the longer time frames required to return accurate environmental assessments), specific performance indicators. This was not a new concept, but reaffirmed an ongoing whole-of-government effort stemming from the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, updated in 2010, which established unprecedented statutory requirements for all U.S. government agencies regarding the establishment of goals, performance measurement indicators, and submission of related plans and reports to Congress. The Obama Administration emphasized tracking results and impacts of foreign aid generally, updating the evaluation policies of USAID, State and MCC between 2010 and 2012 to require more frequent and methodologically rigorous evaluation of aid programs. Congress supported this effort as well, passing legislation in 2016, the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act, that codified many of the new evaluation and reporting requirements. Nevertheless, measuring outcomes that can be attributed to U.S. aid interventions remains a significant challenge. Much of the results information reported for the initiatives is selective and is not the product of evaluations using control groups to identify impact. Global Partnership . All of the initiatives sprang from multilateral efforts such as the G8 food security summit or the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change, and all have multilateral components, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Fund, and the Green Climate Fund, among others. Furthermore, each initiative emphasizes working with private sector partners to bring greater resources and expertise to development challenges, a foreign assistance trend that predated the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration made efforts to expand the multilateral aspects of the initiatives, arguing that U.S. resources can be leveraged for greater impact through partnership with other donors and entities, including private sector actors. Congress has generally been less supportive of the multilateral aspects of the initiatives, citing oversight and governance concerns, among other things. Cross- S ectoral . One theme of the Obama development approach detailed in the PPD was the need to work across sectors and avoid the "stovepipe" approach for which foreign assistance, and particularly health aid, has sometimes been criticized. The global health initiative, for example, recognized that nutrition, clean water, and women's empowerment may be as important to healthy communities as vaccines and antiretroviral drugs. Agricultural development activities to promote food security also affect community resilience to climate change. The three initiatives all overlap to some degree in their objectives, creating opportunities for synergies but also confusion over the attribution of funding to one initiative or the other. This report provides a brief overview of these initiatives as they were introduced, how they have evolved over the years, funding trends, reported results, and other areas of particular congressional interest and activity. U.S. investments in global health increased significantly under the George W. Bush Administration, primarily as a result of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Rather than create a new global health program aimed at a particular disease, President Obama emphasized the integration and coordination of ongoing global health efforts through an initiative he called the Global Health Initiative (GHI). The Administration launched the GHI in May 2009, calling on Congress to provide $63 billion over five years to "improve health outcomes through strengthened health systems, increased and integrated investments in maternal and child health, family planning, nutrition and infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases, and through a particular focus on improving the health of women, newborns and children." The approach was sometimes described as treating patients, not diseases, in contrast to the HIV-specific focus of PEPFAR. While GHI became the framework for all U.S. global health programs, the Administration identified eight "fast-track" countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, and Rwanda) in which to focus additional technical and management support to enable quick implementation and learning from the new approach. The Administration established a small GHI coordinating office within the State Department, put together GHI country teams in 42 countries, and established GHI country strategies, all with the purpose of streamlining efforts across agencies and program silos. The 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) outlined a plan by which leadership of GHI would shift to USAID when certain conditions were met. This transition never happened, however, and over the course of the Obama Administration the GHI as a distinct structure or strategy faded away. The "fast-track" country designation was no longer used. The GHI office closed in 2012, and its activities were integrated into the State Department's Office of Global Health Diplomacy.