AIDS, Race Offices Will Remain Active

White House officials said Wednesday that President Bush would leave largely intact the AIDS and race-relations offices he inherited from the Clinton administration--a seeming reversal after Bush’s chief of staff earlier said they would be closed.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and other senior officials, moving to quell a public relations squall, portrayed Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. as having made a mistake when he said the two task forces would be abolished.

“One of the hardest jobs in the White House is to keep up with everything,” Fleischer said. “He made a mistake. It happens.”

“We are committed to keeping the office and the staffing,” another senior White House official said of the AIDS task force.

The official added that the race office, which Fleischer called a “working group on uniting America,” would be “an important program” within the White House’s domestic policy operation. The aide added that another Clinton program, the Office of National Service--which focuses on volunteer work--also would continue to operate.

Card told USA Today on Tuesday that the AIDS and race relations operations would be shut down. On Wednesday morning, he told senior staff members that he had made a mistake.

Bush shed little light on the confusion.

Asked how his chief of staff could be unaware of the president’s plans for the Office of National AIDS Policy and the Initiative for One America--as the race program is known--Bush told reporters that the White House is concerned about AIDS, “make no mistake about it. And ours is an administration that will fight for fair, just law in the country.”

Claudia French, executive director of AIDS Action, a lobbying and education group, responded: “While we were encouraged by earlier reports that President Bush decided to keep the office, we are now baffled by doublespeak from the White House.”

She complained that the White House had not shown a commitment to making the fight against HIV and AIDS a priority.

One AIDS Action official said: “It sounds like they are effectively closing it, but not saying it.”

The makings of the flap apparently began several weeks ago, when a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services told AIDS groups that the incoming Bush administration was looking in particular at the fate of the AIDS office. This set off rumors--fed by occasional comments by senior Bush aides about the missions of both offices--that the AIDS task force was being eliminated.

Its work space in a townhouse half a block from the White House has in fact been dark for several weeks.

Cornelius Baker, executive director of the Whitman Walker Clinic in Washington, said that in a meeting with the clinic’s staff Jan. 19--one day before Bush was inaugurated--the HHS official told them that “the [new] administration was looking at whether to continue the office.”

The result was an effort by some members of Congress--including Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.)--to persuade the White House to keep the office running. And they suggested a candidate to run it--former Rep. Steve Gunderson, a Wisconsin Republican who is gay.

Despite White House assurances Wednesday, some in the AIDS community remained suspicious that the government’s AIDS effort would be scaled down.

But Fleischer said the structure of the government’s top offices dealing with AIDS policy would remain largely unchanged from the Clinton years.

A task force, which Fleischer suggested would be the equivalent of the current policy office, would remain in place, he said; HHS will lend employees to the White House; and the Domestic Policy Council staff would include a White House employee given the task of working on AIDS and other health care issues.

He said he was unable to say how many people would be assigned the work or to compare it with the size of the Clinton staff.

The race relations office, Fleischer said, largely had completed the work Clinton had assigned it--studying the state of race relations in the United States.

“What President Bush intends to do is to broaden that effort,” Fleischer said. “And that is why we will, as part of our effort to improve race relations in America, create a working group on uniting America that picks up the themes and develops the policies that the president talked about in his inaugural address--the concerns he mentioned about people who don’t see the justice, that we have justice for all.”

He said that work would also be assigned to the Domestic Policy Council and the White House Office of Public Liaison.

But Fleischer suggested, as did other senior White House officials, that the final structure of such efforts would not look exactly as they had in the Clinton White House.