Panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt are on display on the South Lawn of the White House for World AIDS Day on Dec. 1. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
The Republican-controlled Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has released its Fiscal Year 2026 funding bill that calls for cutting funds for domestic HIV prevention, treatment, and care programs by at least $1.7 billion, which is an amount significantly greater than the AIDS budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump.
Among other things, the bill, if passed by the full Congress, would eliminate federal funding for all HIV prevention programs in the U.S. as well as eliminate the Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative program that Trump persuaded Congress to pass during his first term as president.
“This is not a bill for making America healthy again, but a disastrous bill that will reignite HIV in the United States,” said Carl Schmidt, executive director of the D.C. based HIV + Hepatitis Policy Institute, in a Sept. 1 statement.
“We urge Congress to reject these reckless cuts,” Schmidt says in the statement. “Eliminating all HIV prevention means the end of state and local testing and surveillance programs, educational programs, and linkage to lifesaving care and treatment, along with PrEP,” the statement continues. “It will translate into an increased number of new HIV infections, which will be costlier to treat in the long run.”
It adds, “At a time when we have the tools to prevent HIV, including new long-acting forms of PrEP, we must not abandon the bipartisan progress our nation has made in combating HIV.”
The proposed bill by the House Appropriations Committee, which has not yet taken a full committee vote on the bill, would also cut the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Care and Treatment Program by $525 million or 20 percent.
The bill would eliminate the entire $1 billion in prevention funding at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including $220 million allocated to President Trump’s Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) initiative.
Schmidt points out that nearly 90 percent of this funding “flows to state and local health departments, including those in the South that do not have dedicated state funding and carry over half of HIV cases in the country.”
The House committee proposal supports the president’s budget proposal to eliminate $43 million in dedicated funding for hepatitis prevention at the CDC and instead proposes a $353 million block grant to states that would also include STD and tuberculosis prevention. This is $53 million more than the president proposed but still represents a combined cut of $24 million, Schmidt says in his statement.
“Instead of decreasing and diluting funding for hepatitis, if the country is serious about addressing chronic health conditions,” added Schmid, “we should be increasing funding so that people with hepatitis can be identified through testing and linked to treatment, and in the case of hepatitis C, a cure.”
The proposal by the House Appropriations Committees follows the U.S. Senate’s release earlier this year of a bipartisan FY 2026 budget bill that would maintain current funding for domestic HIV programs. If the House committee passes its proposed budget bill the budget provisions would have to be reconciled with the Senate version, and a reconciled version must then be passed by the full Congress.
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