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The White House is trying to reassure House Republicans that Donald Trump’s plans to slash funding to Aids projects around the world will spare a number of key prevention programs.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow GOP leaders in the lower chamber of Congress are racing to shore up support ahead of a vote on a $9.4bn package of spending cuts Thursday.
Congressional Republicans have expressed particular concern over planned cuts to former commander-in-chief George W Bush’s signature President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), which has been credited with saving millions of lives across the globe since 2003.
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As part of an effort to allay those worries and rally the troops, the House GOP leadership has vowed to retain treatments offered under PEPFAR as well as a number of other prevention schemes, according to Capitol Hill sources cited by Politico.
Speaker Johnson’s whip team reportedly spent Monday evening frantically texting Republicans and calculating probable votes for the “rescissions” package, which, in addition to cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign Aids funding, also targets public broadcasters like NPR and PBS, both of whom are currently suing Trump’s administration over the withdrawal of federal funding.
Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, told appropriators last week that the administration is seeking to take “an analytical look” at Aids prevention and instead prioritize funding for “life-saving treatment” for sufferers as part of its scaling back of PEPFAR.
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“It is something that our budget will be very trim on,” he said of prevention funding.
“We believe that many of these nonprofits are not geared towards the viewpoints of the administration. And we’re $37 trillion in debt. So at some point, the continent of Africa needs to absorb more of the burden of providing this healthcare.”
Trump’s cuts to Aids prevention funding, enacted under an executive order he signed within hours of returning to the Oval Office in January, have been forecast to have disastrous results.
A crisis that had been on course to be brought under control by 2030 will now be extended at the cost of an estimated 4m more lives, according to forecasts from the United Nations Aids agency.
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The disruption to global HIV programmes by the U.S. is also projected to lead to more than 3m more Aids orphans than was previously anticipated by the end of the decade.
But the president himself has insisted that it is Europe that needs to step up and invest more to help the nations worst-hit by the disease.
“Nobody does anything but the United States… Other countries should be helping us with that,” he told reporters onboard Air Force One last month.
“We’re the only country. Where are the others? Where is France? Where is Germany? We’ve spent billions and billions of dollars.”
A documentary investigation by The Independent, which includes reporting from remote areas in Uganda and Zimbabwe, has recently demonstrated that Trump’s brutal severing of aid – and abrupt halt in medication – is already tearing lives apart.
Earlier this year The Independent revealed Trump’s slashing of foreign aid has derailed the projected end of the Aids pandemic and could lead to four million extra deaths by 2030. Figures show the number of Aids-related deaths could jump from six million to 10 million in the next five years unless funding is reinstated, according to forecasts from the UN Aids agency (UNAIDS).
The unprecedented disruption to global HIV programs by the U.S. is also projected to lead to more than three million more Aids orphans than previously expected by the end of the decade.
