Fund a Proven AIDS Foe

This week brought reasons to question the highfalutin pledges by U.S. leaders to battle AIDS, which killed 3 million people this year, and HIV, which infected 5 million. On Wednesday, Bush administration officials announced plans to scale back commitments to fight AIDS and poverty by more than 80% between now and 2008. Also Wednesday, the Senate postponed until January approval of a bill that would have allocated $2.4 billion to fight AIDS next year.

With the nation’s budget stretched thin to pay for the war in Iraq and massive tax cuts, there’s not much hope that Washington will be able to fund the entire $2.4 billion.

However, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) -- who has called the spread of AIDS in poor nations “the greatest moral and humanitarian challenge of really the last 100 years” -- should at least press the administration to make better use of whatever funding scraps it thinks it can afford to throw.

The biggest impediment is the administration’s insistence that most new aid flow not to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- the private-public partnership spearheaded by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- but rather to the Millennium Challenge Account, its own program to, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell put it this week, “draw whole nations into an expanding circle of opportunity and enterprise.”

The Bush administration wants the lion’s share of next year’s humanitarian aid increases to go to the Millennium Challenge Account, and it has proposed a $150-million cut in U.S. spending on the Global Fund.

Frist and other congressional leaders should press the administration to distribute more aid through the Global Fund. Unlike the untested Millennium Challenge, the Global Fund, according to neutral auditors, has in the last year proved its ability to effectively finance projects to curb AIDS and other infectious diseases.

In principle, the Bush administration’s notion of using the Millennium Challenge to fight AIDS is laudable. In practice, however, its competition with the already-established Global Fund is sowing needless division in the humanitarian community and delaying the arrival of help that is needed now.