Feb 11, 2005  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

The proposed 2006 budget that President Bush submitted to Congress this week calls for cutting funds for federal AIDS prevention and surveillance programs by $4 million, a development that drew sharp criticism from AIDS activists.

Activists said they were especially concerned that the proposed cuts came at the same time the president is calling for a $38 million increase in programs aimed at curtailing AIDS and teen pregnancy by promoting sexual abstinence until marriage.

“Programs which focus on abstinence as the sole means of preventing HIV/AIDS put our young people at tremendous risk,” said David Smith, an official with the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay political group that lobbies Congress on AIDS.

Smith and other gay and AIDS activists said abstinence-only programs, which ban discussion of safer-sex procedures such as condom use, are harmful to gay youth who can’t marry and often don’t have access to information about AIDS.

The Bush budget calls for a $10 million increase in funding for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, or ADAP, which provides life-sustaining AIDS drugs to low income people who don’t have private health insurance. But the president’s budget calls for no additional funds for all other parts of the Ryan White CARE, the sweeping federal statute that created ADAP and other programs to provide care and treatment to low-income people with HIV and AIDS.

Flat funding is a cut
Activists said the proposed “flat funding” of Ryan White programs is equivalent to a cut in funds because of rising costs in medical care and the growing number of people with HIV and AIDS in the United States.

The president’s call for cutting the Medicaid program by an average of $4.5 billion a year over the next decade will create even more hardship for low-income people with HIV, activists said. Medicaid serves as the single largest provider of medical care to people with AIDS in the U.S.

Although the president mentioned how AIDS has hit minority communities the hardest in his Sate of the Union speech, he proposed no additional funding for the government’s Minority AIDS Initiative, a program that targets African Americans and other communities of color for AIDS prevention and treatment efforts.

The budget submitted to Congress by Bush also proposes a $14 million cut in the Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS, or HOPWA, program. The program provides housing subsidies for low-income people with HIV or AIDS.

In his budget message to Congress, Bush said he was initiating a 1 percent cut in spending on discretionary domestic programs in an effort to reduce the federal budget deficit by one-half by 2009.

“It meets our nation’s essential needs,” he said.

A statement released by the White House notes that the president’s budget calls for spending more than $17 billion for domestic AIDS “treatment, prevention, and research, including almost $21 million for Ryan White programs and its comprehensive approach to address the health needs of persons living with HIV/AIDS.”

The White House statement stressed that the 2006 budget would continue to fund Bush’s $15 billion global AIDS relief program, which calls for spending that amount over a five-year period.

“The president’s 2006 budget proposal supports the status quo, but what is really necessary at this juncture is an infusion of cash similar to what we saw with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief: real money and swift action,” the national AIDS advocacy group AIDS Action said in a statement.

Christopher Labonte, HRC’s legislative director, said HRC would join gay and AIDS groups to call on Congress to add more funds to the AIDS programs that Bush wants to cut. Labonte said HRC was hopeful that Congress would at least restore the cuts Bush is proposing for AIDS prevention programs run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

“We have to be clear that the president’s message of compassion about AIDS in his State of the Union address was not reflected in his budget,” Labonte said.

Gay Republican activist Carl Schmid, who lobbies Congress on behalf of the AIDS Institute, a national group based in Florida, said the group was disappointed in the president’s funding proposals on AIDS.

“They say they want to decrease the number of infections, but they are decreasing the funding on prevention,” Schmid said. “We obviously need more money in prevention.”