PEPFAR likely to be exempt from spending cuts

The President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, a program that fights HIV and AIDS globally, will likely be exempt from a package of spending cuts Congress is considering.

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Senate Republicans have agreed to exempt $400 million for PEPFAR from what’s called the recsissions package, which will formalize spending cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency, Politico and other sources report. The Trump administration has agreed to this.

“There is a substitute amendment that does not include the PEPFAR rescission, and we’re fine with that,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Tuesday, according to The Hill. The amendment means the House of Representatives will have to vote on the bill again.

PEPFAR, which receives $7.5 billion annually, is the main source of HIV-fighting drugs to 54 developing countries, mostly in Africa. President George W. Bush started the program in 2003. It has been credited with saving an estimated 26 million lives.

Earlier, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, had spoken out against any potential PEPFAR cuts. “I can’t imagine why we would want to terminate that program,” she said recently, according to CBS News.

Earlier this year, the administration had exempted PEPFAR from a global aid funding freeze, but activists have said the program was not functioning properly even after the freeze was lifted. Also, the State Department had decreed that HIV prevention drugs “should be offered only to pregnant and breastfeeding women,” therefore withholding them from LGBTQ+ people who had received them previously.

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Even without the PEPFAR cuts, the rescissions package slashes $9 billion in in federal spending, including funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development and to public broadcasting — roughly $8 billion for USAID and other foreign assistance programs and $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private nonprofit that oversees funding for the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. Many right-wingers have been critical of public broadcasters, with the White House asserting they “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”

U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, had expressed concern about cuts to public broadcasting stations that serve Native American communities, so Republican Senate leadership and Vought agreed to direct some unallocated funds to them, The Hill reports.