The future is uncertain for the Office of National AIDS Policy — as well as millions of lives.
January 30 2017
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Donald Trump’s first week as president has been the
nightmare we've mostly been expecting, and LGBT people weren't left
behind in his path of destruction.
Following the inauguration, all references to LGBT people
disappeared from the White House website, including an apology from
Secretary of State John Kerry about the government’s history of purging
LGBT workers from federal jobs in the 1950s and '60s. Most troublingly,
the webpage for the Office of National AIDS Policy has been removed,
triggering reports that the program had been eliminated.
Jeffrey Crowley, the former director of ONAP under President Barack Obama, told The Advocate that there’s no indication the office has been shuttered as of yet.
Crowley, who served in the office from 2009 to 2011, said
that he didn’t start until a month after Obama’s inauguration, as most
White House staff are political appointees and change between
presidents. The previous ONAP staff ended their service on January 4,
which means it could be weeks before the LGBT community learns about the
department’s future in Trump’s White House.
“This administration is widely recognized to be behind in
the transition,” he explained. “If it took me a month to get in, I
presume it will take longer than that for them to even make a decision
about whether they’ll have an ONAP.”
The truth is that Trump, who said almost nothing regarding
HIV/AIDS prior to his election, likely doesn’t have a strategy in place
for tackling the ongoing epidemic — or even maintaining the programs
already in place. The 45th president mentioned HIV just once on the
campaign trail; that was in regards to the U.S. President’s Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief, a program set up by President George W. Bush to
tackle the spread of the disease in Africa. Trump's comments left much
to be desired.
During an appearance at the No Labels Conference in October
2015, an audience member asked if Trump would “commit to doubling the
number of people on treatment to 30 million people by 2020” through the
program.
“Those are good things — Alzheimer’s, AIDS,” the candidate
said at the annual summit, which is intended to promote bipartisan
cooperation on critical issues. “We are close on some of them. On some
of them, honestly, with all of the work done, which has not been enough,
we’re not very close. The answer is yes. I believe strongly in that,
and we are going to lead the way.”
But as Ed Yong first pointed out in The Atlantic,
there’s a problem with Trump’s response: “It’s unclear if Trump actually
understood the question, given that PEPFAR doesn’t cover Alzheimer’s.”
His transition team would later question the need for foreign aid to
curb HIV/AIDS, referring to it as a “massive, international entitlement
program.” As of the time of writing, the White House’s PERFAR web page
remains active.
Jason Cianciotto, the vice president of policy, advocacy, and communications for Harlem United, told The Advocate that since October 2015, Trump has “not said anything about HIV/AIDS, domestic or international.”
“Our analysis of President Trump’s record on HIV/AIDS in the U.S. found that he doesn’t have one,” he said.
Harlem United, an advocacy organization focusing on
HIV/AIDS, co-authored a report with the Boston-based care center Fenway
Health on where the major party candidates stood on the need to end the
ongoing HIV crisis globally. The two groups examined the nominees’
campaign statements and public platforms, as well as interviews and news
articles written about them. Trump was the only candidate to remain
virtually silent on the virus, with his campaign website totally
ignoring the issue.
If HIV/AIDS isn’t on Trump’s radar at all, that could be a
major problem under the new administration. Last Monday, the president
signed an executive order instituting a hiring freeze on all federal
government jobs. The move was intended to reduce the “dramatic expansion
of the federal workforce in recent years,” press secretary Sean Spicer
said.
The failure to restaff ONAP could jeopardize the office’s
future under future administrations, Crowley said, which would have a
devastating effect on the progress we’ve made in tackling the spread of
HIV in the U.S. In 2010, Obama unveiled the National HIV/AIDS Strategy,
an ambitious plan that designed to “reduce the number of new diagnoses
by at least 25 percent,” among other things.
That strategy has fallen short of its high goals, but under
Obama, the rate of HIV infections has flatlined at around 40,000 new
cases each year, according to David Ernesto Munar, the CEO of Chicago’s
Howard Brown Health Center.
Without a policy to match the previous administration’s,
it’s highly likely that those numbers would increase, especially given
his vice president’s previous failures on HIV.
As the governor of Indiana, Mike Pence dramatically reduced
state spending on public health, leading to the closure of the sole
Planned Parenthood in Scott County, a rural district located in the
southeast corner of the state. It was just one of five that operated in
Indiana prior to the cuts. That center provided crucial HIV testing and
preventative care to the county’s 28,000 residents.
Without those
resources, there was a major outbreak of the virus, leading to 190 new
cases of HIV in 2015.
In addition, Pence advocated the diverting of federal
funding for the Ryan White Care Act, a program that provides life-saving
resources for low-income people living with HIV, to conversion therapy
on his website during his 2000 campaign for Congress. The Republican has
yet to respond to criticism of his record on HIV/AIDS.
Following the election, critics were asked to give Trump a
chance — or wait and see what becomes of his policies. HIV-positive
individuals don’t have that option.
