While the eleventh-hour measure cooked up by President Obama and Congress keeps the U.S. from going over the fiscal cliff, AIDS advocates are worried it’s only temporarily stalled massive cuts to domestic HIV/AIDS programs.
Back in September, the White House released the Office of Management and Budget’s Sequestration Report, which detailed automatic cuts to programs across the board, including more than $500 million in spending cuts that would affect people living with AIDS.
Housing Works breaks it down:
According to the report, the CDC HIV Prevention program will lose $64 million in funding; the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program will lose an astounding $196 million; the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP and whose list has recently dropped to 88 people across the country) will lose a disheartening $77 million, and the National Institutes of Health AIDS Research will lose $251 million in funding.
Did you get all that? In total, domestic AIDS research, treatment, services, and assistance will lose an astounding $538 million in funding cuts should the sequestration go through. The AIDS Institute stepped in and called on House of Representative speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, among others, to reach an agreement that won’t further devastate the country’s HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment efforts.
The New Year’s deal didn’t address the Sequestration cuts—it merely delayed them for two months. And insiders say, barring a miracle, the cuts will go forward as planned.
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It would be interesting to compare the massive $538 million cuts in domestic spending for AIDS to the annual $ 3.5 Billion foreign aid package to Israel, from which no one seems to be able to identify one dollar of specific cuts. And you wonder who’s buying Congress?