The American Role in Global Health: Bill Steiger on Moving from Aid to Impact

Raised in a family tradition of public service, Bill Steiger has built a long, varied career defined by an emphasis on global health. On Wednesday, September 16, Steiger detailed his experiences with the Georgetown University community in Professor John Monahan’s Conversations in Health: Global to Local course. At a time when the future of global health feels uncertain, his central message was one of grounded hope: that progress is still being realized.

Steiger began by describing his childhood in Washington, D.C., where his parents’ careers on Capitol Hill instilled an early sense of civic duty. As a student at Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles, Steiger studied Latin American history and gained international exposure representing the United States abroad. He served as chief education-policy advisor to Governor Tommy Thompson before joining Thompson in DC, where Steiger helped establish the Office of Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

At HHS, Steiger helped launch some of the U.S. government’s first international health initiatives. His rationale for U.S. involvement was both humanitarian and economic. As a wealthy nation, the U.S. has a responsibility to share the global disease burden, but American businesses can also benefit when other economies are freed from that burden. Steiger added that soft power also plays a role: by investing in global health, the U.S. shows its concern for foreign countries in visible and tangible ways, building goodwill among its populations.

As a student of health at Georgetown, I am no stranger to the moral case for supporting population health globally. Yet, Steiger’s perspective was a crucial reminder that this appeal alone is often not enough — strategic benefits are needed to justify spending taxpayer dollars on foreign aid. Global health relief, he explained, is one of the clearest ways to demonstrate the impact of those taxpayer dollars because it provides a direct line between American aid and lives saved.

Today, Steiger heads Malaria No More, an international nonprofit working to end malaria through advocacy, policy, communications, and finance. Malaria is uniquely complex because the rapid evolution of both the mosquito and the parasite continuously renders past solutions obsolete. However, Steiger explained that a wave of new pharmaceuticals — sparked by the Trump administration’s emphasis on innovation — may hold potential to address this changing disease landscape. Steiger’s explanation of the Trump administration’s approach to global health is important for students in this course because it shows that what has felt like setbacks in recent months has not ended progress in the field.

Ultimately, Steiger’s lecture broadened my perspective on the strategic importance of global health engagement and offered a silver lining amid disinvestment in traditional global health initiatives. His perspective will serve as a continual reminder that there is more than one way to make an impact in a field, and to stay open to new ways of addressing evolving challenges.

Elizabeth Dolan (H’27) is an undergraduate student studying health care management and policy at Georgetown University.