Helping in Haiti, facilitating adoptions

This week, the U.S. Senate passed legislation I co-authored to facilitate charitable giving by Americans to the emergency aid and rebuilding efforts in Haiti.  The bill will let U.S. taxpayers make charitable contributions to Haiti relief programs before March 1, 2010, and claim those contributions on 2009 income tax returns.  The President is expected to sign immediately into law our Haiti Assistance Income Tax Incentive (HAITI) Act.

Americans give generously to disaster relief, and I hope this extension will help them give even more.  I also hope everyone will make sure the charities they support are above board. After the 2005 tsunami, some con artists were quick to try to turn a profit on the tragedy.  So everyone should be careful to give only to groups they recognize and trust.

The tax legislation we passed this year is similar to the 2005 legislation I sponsored to encourage Indian Ocean tsunami relief donations.

This week, I also joined a bipartisan group of senators and House members to urge greater collaboration among the federal agencies in an effort to evacuate the 600 to 700 orphans in Haiti who have adoptive families waiting for them in the United States.  Our letter to administration leaders said that a lot of the chaos that surrounds efforts to get these orphans safely to their adoptive families in the United States is a direct result of a lack of logistical inter-agency coordination, a lack of communication to the public and ad-hoc processing of travel documents by the U.S. Embassy.  And we asked for a commitment that these orphans be safely and efficiently evacuated within the next ten days.