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| Dr. Joseph O’Neill told friends that he is leaving the
State Department to return to the White House. Insiders expect O’Neill to
play a key role in the Ryan White Act.
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HOME > NEWS > NATIONAL NEWS
By: LOU CHIBBARO JR. COMMENTS
 
continued...
on April 19. “I think it is
a good thing to have someone like Joe on the inside.”
Gene Copello, executive director of the AIDS Institute, who also met with O’Neill
on April 19, said O’Neill informed him he would be working on a variety
of domestic AIDS issues in addition to the Ryan White reauthorization process.
“I’m confident Joe has a good sense of how this disease should
be treated,” said Copello, who added that O’Neill would likely give
a fair hearing to the concerns of AIDS advocacy groups.
Prior to coming to the White House in 2002, O’Neill served as acting
director of the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy at the Department of Health &
Human Services.
During the Clinton administration, O’Neill served as associate administrator
for HIV/AIDS at the Health Resources & Services Administration, which is
an arm of HHS.
In that post, among other duties, he was charged with running the entire Ryan
White Program, including overseeing its annual budget of $1.7 billion and a
staff that served more than 500,000 people with HIV and AIDS.
Bush administration officials that have been friendly to gay Republicans and
AIDS advocacy groups are concerned that Rove and Allen might persuade the president
to agree to structural changes in the Ryan White Act’s administrative
and planning process that would discourage participation by gay and AIDS activists,
one of the sources familiar with the White House said.
According to the source, religious right groups with ties to faith-based organizations
involved in AIDS work believe the “homosexual lobby” and gay activists
have dominated the planning councils that were created by the Ryan White Act
to help local and state officials allocate federal AIDS funds. These groups
want to “de-gay” that process, the source said.
The act authorizes mayors and governors to appoint the members of the planning
councils. In D.C., for example, D.C. mayors have named gays with experience
in AIDS work to fill as many as half of the seats on the Ryan White planning
council representing the D.C. metropolitan area. The planning councils are considered
important because they help determine which community-based organizations receive
Ryan White funds from the federal government.
The administration may have begun this “de-gaying” process on the
Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, known as PACHA, according to some
AIDS activists. Bush retained several gay PACHA members appointed during the
Clinton administration and appointed three or four gay members himself during
his first term.
But since his initial appointment of gay members during his first two years
in office, the president has not appointed other gays to fill the seats of the
gay members whose tw
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