Trump administration won't observe World AIDS Day

In yet another act of erasure of marginalized people, Donald Trump’s administration has decreed that the federal government will not observe World AIDS Day this year.

World AIDS Day has been commemorated on December 1 every year since 1988. Organizations, businesses, and governments around the globe have recognized it. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have held World AIDS Day events or issued proclamations on it, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump in his first term, although he did not mention LGBTQ+ people. Last year, President Joe Biden hosted the first White House display of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

But this year, the State Department has directed employees and grant recipients not to use any federal government funds to observe the day, according to an email viewed by The New York Times and by Substack columnist Emily Bass, who was the first to report the news. Employees and grantees should “refrain from publicly promoting World AIDS Day through any communication channels, including social media, media engagements, speeches or other public-facing messaging,” the email said, noting that the government’s policy is “to refrain from messaging on any commemorative days, including World AIDS Day.”

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It's still permissible to “tout the work” being done to counter AIDS and other deadly diseases and to attend World AIDS Day events, the email said. But the messaging “lost nuance as it moved through government health agencies,” the Times reports. “An email that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent to its country offices repeated the bans, but left out that employees could still talk about the work and the State Department’s characterization of H.I.V. as a dangerous disease.”

State Department spokesman Tommy Piggott told the Times, “An awareness day is not a strategy. Under the leadership of President Trump, the State Department is working directly with foreign governments to save lives and increase their responsibility and burden sharing.”

Yet Trump has proclaimed many other awareness days this year, including observances for autism and manufacturing. His administration has also cut foreign aid programs that combat HIV and AIDS, scrapped prevention resources, and restricted funding under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a global program started by Republican George W. Bush. It has been reported that the administration may end PEPFAR, replacing it with a program chiefly benefiting the U.S. World AIDS Day is usually when the State Department shares PEPFAR data with Congress, and it’s not clear if the department will still send it that day or another.

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The news that the administration won’t observe the day brought strong criticism. “Even if it is not surprising that the US will remain silent on its own epidemic, it is still shameful,” Bass wrote in her Substack column. “It is hazardous for individual and communal health to grow so accustomed to abuse that it passes without remark. HIV is ongoing in America. The AIDS crisis is not over and is instead evolving and we know, to our bones, that Silence=Death.”

“It just seems petty and hostile, frankly,” activist and PrEP4All cofounder Peter Staley told the Times, adding, “It just felt very reminiscent of the Reagan administration,” which largely ignored the epidemic.

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a gay Democrat from Wisconsin, said the administration’s action was “shameful and dangerous.”

“Silence is not neutrality; it is harm,” Pocan, who chairs the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, told the Times by email. “I’m calling on the administration to immediately reverse this decision and recommit our fight against HIV/AIDS.”