During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to "launch a new 'America's Voice Corps' to rapidly recruit and train fluent speakers of local languages (Arabic, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa, Farsi, Urdu, and Turkish) with public diplomacy skills, who can ensure our voice is heard in the mass media and in our efforts on the ground."
However, we did a search of Whitehouse.gov, Google and Nexis and found no recent mentions of this effort.
Equally notable, the president's fiscal year 2010 budget request for the State Department makes no mention of this program. While the administration is putting an emphasis on language capabilities, there is no evidence that this particular program is being pursued.
Until any tangible evidence of progress emerges, we're rating this promise Stalled.