AIDS Office Left in Limbo Under Bush

Two months into the Bush administration, the only thing left of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy is a Web site directing callers to an empty office and a telephone no one answers.

The 35-member Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS isn’t sure if it still exists--four letters seeking clarification from Chairman Ronald Dellums to President Bush and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson have brought no response. And the interdepartmental task force on AIDS has held no meetings.

Questioned last month about his attention to the global epidemic, Bush said, “We’re concerned about AIDS inside our White House, make no mistake about it.” But AIDS activists, members of Congress, foreign governments and international institutions--as well as officials working on the issue throughout the federal bureaucracy--are growing uneasy as evidence of high-level engagement has yet to materialize.

“It’s hard to say” what the White House’s intentions are on AIDS policy, said one congressional staff member who follows the issue. “Right now, there’s nobody home. My concern is that the epidemic is not going to wait. . . . There needs to be somebody in the system who is the focal point” on a variety of fast-moving AIDS-related issues.

Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Congress’ most vocal advocate of an activist policy on international AIDS issues, has praised Secretary of State Colin L. Powell for “making AIDS a high priority.” But Frist said that leadership on what he describes as one of the greatest “moral, humanitarian and foreign policy challenges” of the century “has to go ultimately beyond” Powell.

While he remains confident the administration will come up with a strategic plan, Frist said he tells the president at every opportunity that “this is a big issue and . . . that the world looks to the United States to address the big issues.”

The pace of developments on the international AIDS front has picked up markedly in the last several weeks, as pharmaceutical companies bending under harsh international criticism have announced a flurry of price cuts for sophisticated AIDS drugs in sub-Saharan Africa. With price becoming less of an issue, there have been ever-louder calls for developed countries to figure out a way to pay for treatment for the world’s poorest people with AIDS.

Preparations for a special U.N. General Assembly session on AIDS in June are well underway. Members of several delegations who attended a meeting in New York last month complained that the head of the U.S. team--a mid-level official who did not attend most of the sessions--was ill-prepared and seemed to have no instructions.

Italy, which will host the next Group of Eight meeting in July, has said the session will focus on Africa, including the developed world’s response to the AIDS epidemic there.

White House officials insist that Bush is aware of the need to establish a government-wide structure to deal with AIDS, particularly in Africa, where 25 million of the world’s 36 million HIV-infected people live. But while a spokeswoman said the White House is “working on developing the structure of our initiative,” one senior official said decisions about what the policy will be, who will lead it and how it will be coordinated could be months away.

Government officials outside the White House who work on AIDS issues are concerned that “we are not in a dialogue” over the issue, one said. “The White House is holding a very tight rein on all policy decisions, and on all meetings, including international meetings, we attend. They don’t know what they want to do yet. They tell us, ‘Just hang in there. You can go [to meetings], but don’t say anything.’ ”

The White House got a taste of the danger of appearing insufficiently engaged on AIDS last month, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. told USA Today that the administration planned to close the AIDS policy office. When AIDS activists expressed outrage, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announced within hours that Card was “mistaken. . . . There is nothing that is closing. That office is open.”

But the office on Jackson Place--vacated in January by Sandy Thurman, President Clinton’s AIDS policy coordinator--has remained unoccupied.