Statement of Senator Peter Welch
On Republicans’ Rescissions Package and Funding to Combat HIV/AIDS
As Prepared for the Congressional Record
July 14, 2025
Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, a June 25th article in the New York Times captured, in a single headline, the disaster that the misguided policies of this White House are inflicting on the world’s most vulnerable people. It also illustrates the immense damage this White House is causing to years of hard-won goodwill for the United States around the world.
The title of the article, “Promise of Victory Over H.I.V. Fades as U.S. Withdraws Support,” says it all. The headline goes on to describe how, “a new drug that gives almost complete protection against the virus was to be administered across Africa this year. Now, much of the funding for that effort is gone.”
I remember vividly, as do many of my colleagues, when President George W. Bush announced the PEPFAR program, a program that for the past 22 years has received enthusiastic bipartisan support. A program that has saved countless lives. A program that people and governments around the world have thanked the American people for.
Each year in our appropriations bills we have always, without disagreement, provided the funds to sustain PEPFAR and to fulfill our pledges to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. The Global Fund works in close collaboration with PEPFAR, as well as in countries where PEPFAR does not, because HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases do not pick and choose who they infect. No country is immune, and no person is safe. Millions of Americans travel, work, and serve overseas, and then they return home. Everyone is at risk if the virus is not contained everywhere.
Now, the Trump Administration is proposing drastic cuts to PEPFAR and our contribution to the Global Fund – two programs that by any measure have been wildly successful. This week the Senate will consider President Trump’s request to cut $400 million from PEPFAR and another $500 million in other global health programs. If Congress goes along with that, we will share responsibility for sabotaging one of the great public health achievements of this century.
Mr. President, President Trump is pushing these cuts at the cusp of a potential breakthrough in our fight against the HIV epidemic.
There is a new preventative therapy for HIV—it’s called lenacapavir, and it’s a twice-yearly injection that protects against infection. This drug was supposed to be getting rolled out in eastern and southern Africa.
Not many years ago, preventing HIV infection altogether would have seemed impossible. Now it’s real—and it’s being derailed by these reckless cuts.
Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund, put it this way:
“If you want countries to take on the responsibility for their H.I.V. responses, in terms of both leadership and funding, it’s a very different thing to take on a problem that is still growing than a problem where you have made a significant dent in the numbers of new infections. . . And lenacapavir gives that opportunity to dramatically reduce new infections.”
We don’t even know what the full impact of these cuts will be, because funding for collecting the data needed to track infection rates is on the chopping block.
So, I can’t help but wonder why? Why is the White House walking away from these life-saving programs that everyone agrees have been a huge success story? It would be one thing if HIV/AIDS had been eradicated. But we are a very long way from that. There are an estimated 1.3 million new HIV infections every year.
We cannot let down our guard. We cannot be so shortsighted to think that we would save money by cutting funding for PEPFAR and the Global Fund. Prevention is far less expensive than treatment. If Congress does not reject these funding cuts there will almost immediately be more infections, not fewer. More Americans will get sick. Mother to child transmission will exponentially increase. Many more people will die needlessly.
A drug developed by an American biopharmaceutical company that can prevent HIV/AIDS finally exists. Let’s do again what President Bush did nearly a quarter century ago and show the world that the United States can be the world’s leader in saving lives from a deadly disease.
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