Public Health - Obama Presidency Oral History

Under the banner of preventative public health, the administration developed an interagency focus on obesity, which worsens overall morbidity and mortality rates, and increases risk for other chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and fatty liver disease. Obama established a Task Force on Childhood Obesity, while in the East Wing of the Obama White House, First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Let’s Move! initiative to end childhood obesity within a generation. Working with the Department of Agriculture and congressional Democrats, the administration helped pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in late 2010, which reauthorized child nutrition programs; increased eligibility for, and access to, school meals programs; and empowered USDA to set updated nutritional standards for school meals. The administration also expanded nutritional access for low-income and unemployed Americans by reauthorizing and expanding funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly the Food Stamp Program) in the Recovery Act and 2014 Farm Bill. These efforts and initiatives are discussed in greater detail on the topic pages for the East Wing and Agriculture.

Throughout the Obama presidency, a wide variety of agencies and offices pursued policies that advanced population and community health, both domestically and abroad. Among many others, agencies involved in environmental protection and industrial regulation set and enforced environmental quality standards to limit exposure to toxins and pollutants; international development agencies administered programs to treat HIV/AIDS and expand electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa; and the Department of Veterans Affairs worked to treat traumatic brain injuries and trauma-related mental health conditions, and prevent suicide. The administration also funded basic medical research, and launched competitions to encourage breakthroughs in personalized medicine, cancer treatment, and neurotechnology. That research is discussed further on the Science topic page, while across the project archive, narrators provide details about the enormous variety of health-related programs with which they were closely involved.

While the administration worked to reorient American public health toward prevention, a series of outbreaks and public health crises demanded urgent, all-of-government responses. The first of these was the H1N1 influenza pandemic, which began to spread in the United States in the spring of 2009, just months after Obama took office. The administration worked to track the course of the outbreak, coordinate with global public health institutions and foreign governments, and develop and administer new vaccines. An even larger effort was mustered in response to the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa in 2014, as the administration developed border control policies and constructed emergency facilities in West Africa, and hundreds of American physicians and volunteers traveled to affected regions to provide treatment and care. In the final years of the Obama presidency, the administration increased attention on the epidemic of opioid abuse and overdose death in the United States. The White House launched an initiative to promote opioid safety and reduce over prescription of addictive drugs, and secured $1 billion in funding in late 2016 to support state treatment and prevention programs.  In their interviews, narrators involved with these crisis response efforts share their experiences, evaluate the administration's responses, and discuss the role of the United States in global public health emergencies.