PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program, hasn’t operated in Russia since 2012.
It was a startling, almost unbelievable, allegation. It turned out to be untrue.
On June 25, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told a Senate committee that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, had spent $9.3 million “to advise Russian doctors on how to perform abortions and gender analysis.”
His statements had immediate consequences for the committee’s vote and had the potential to create long-term damage to PEPFAR, a program that has long had bipartisan support and has been estimated to have saved 26 million lives since President George W. Bush started it in 2003.
Mr. Vought was at the Senate Appropriations Committee to defend a package of cuts proposed by the Trump administration to this year’s spending on global health programs and public broadcasting. The full Senate is expected to vote on the “rescissions bill” by Thursday. On Tuesday afternoon, White House officials agreed to drop cuts to PEPFARfrom the bill.
At the June hearing, Mr. Vought listed funding of abortions in Russia as evidence of PEPFAR’s waste of government funds. The example prompted Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a longtime supporter of PEPFAR, to say he would vote in favor of rescinding funds from the program.
“You know why I’m going to vote for it? Just as a statement that PEPFAR is important, but it’s not beyond scrutiny,” Mr. Graham said. “There is a consequence to this crap.”
PEPFAR has not operated in Russia since 2012, when President Vladimir Putin kicked the United States Agency for International Development out of the country. U.S. law prohibits the use of any federal funds to pay for abortions. Funding abortions through PEPFAR would imply not just waste, but serious crimes or negligence, or both.
