Republicans in the House aim to reduce funding for AIDS programs

House Republicans’ plans to reduce spending include a $542 million cut to the effort to end AIDS in America, Politico reported.

Four years after then-President Donald Trump put hundreds of millions of dollars behind the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. initiative, House GOP members plan to propose a 95% cut to the program.

“It’s one of those things where it’s like, what do you have to have and what would be nice to have?” Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., chair of the subcommittee overseeing the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) budget, told Politico. “We had to get down to the bare bones of what we really had to have.”

The House’s proposed cut is a nonstarter in the Democrat-controlled Senate. However, advocates worry that the loss of Republican backing for the program will make it much harder to sustain the gains made in the last few years.

“HIV has historically, and recently, been such a bipartisan issue and such an area of true collaboration that we really didn’t see such an extreme response coming at us,” Jeremiah Johnson, the executive director of the advocacy group PrEP4ALL, told Politico.

In his 2019 State of the Union speech, Trump asked lawmakers to aim to “eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years.”

In March 2019, Trump’s proposed a 2020 fiscal year budget that included $291 million for the AIDS initiative. Congress’ appropriators agreed to launch the program with $266 million.

Since then, annual funding for the program has grown to $404 million in 2021, $473 million in 2022, and $573 million in 2023.

President Joe Biden’s budget proposal called for $850 million in 2023. The Senate has proposed a $3 million increase for 2023.

Preliminary statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that among the nearly 37,000 new HIV diagnoses in 2022, nearly 40% affected Blacks and more than 30% affected Latinos.

Use of drugs that are effective at preventing infection is known as PrEP. Although 94% of whites who could benefit have a PrEP prescription, less than 13% of Blacks and less than 25% of Latinos who could benefit have a prescription.

House Republicans cited those gaps in justifying the proposed cuts.

The House Appropriations report said the program “has demonstrated a lack of performance data based on outcomes, insufficient budget justifications, and vague spending plans. The initiative has not met its original objective,” Politico reported.

The program has paid for millions of HIV tests and enabled tens of thousands of HIV-positive people to access care, according to HHS.

CDC data shows that 36% of people who could benefit from PrEP have a prescription in 2023, up from 22.7% in 2019.