Some really great news: funding for PEPFAR–about $400M for the global fight against HIV and AIDS–has been restored. Millions of lives will be saved.
www.politico.com/live-updates…— Charlotte Clymer (@charlotteclymer.bsky.social) July 15, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Good news, if we can keep it, per Politico, last night:
Senate Republicans will scale back the White House’s $9.4 billion spending clawback request as they look to shore up their vote count.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), who is leading the rescissions effort in concert with the White House, said Republicans will remove a $400 million cut to the global AIDS program known as PEPFAR, bringing the total amount of cuts in the package down to $9 billion.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there was a “lot of interest” among Senate Republicans to address the cut to the program created under President George W. Bush and credited with saving tens of millions of lives…
In addition to preserving the PEPFAR funding, the revisions will include language to “protect” programs related to maternal health, malaria, tuberculosis and nutrition. The substitute negotiated by Schmitt and others will also explicitly state food aid will not be touched as part of the package. Those provisions will not change the new $9 billion topline, a person granted anonymity to disclose the private talks said…
A number of GOP senators, including Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine, had raised concerns about the AIDS funding cuts. It’s not clear whether the $400 million rollback will be enough to secure her vote but it might placate enough Republicans to eke the package through the Senate…
The Senate is scheduled to start voting on the rescissions package Tuesday afternoon. Schmitt said he expected the changes to be reflected in a final “wraparound” amendment offered during a marathon series of votes expected Wednesday.
Any changes to the Senate product will necessitate another House vote ahead of a Friday deadline for action on the request.
Ed Kilgore, at Nymag:
… Shorn of the false accusation, PEPFAR, a legacy initiative of George W. Bush, stands as a testament to the compassionate conservatism the 43rd president always claimed to champion. Aside from Vought’s smear, the main problem with PEPFAR in MAGA eyes is apparently that it represents “foreign aid,” albeit an especially successful and universally admired form of foreign aid that notably helped African nations cope with the deadly AIDS epidemic. And to be clear, other foreign-aid cuts (including those first imposed by DOGE in its assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development) remain in the rescission package, along with the speedy termination of subsidies for public broadcasting. But PEPFAR will survive for now.
Assuming the rescission package does make it out of the Senate, the House will have to approve the amended version. Perhaps some fiscal hard-liners will object to the slightly reduced size of the cuts, and possibly some anti-abortion ultras still believe Vought’s apparent whopper about PEPFAR and Russian abortions. But House Republicans will probably go along and leave the job of driving final nails into the coffin of the United States’s proud foreign-aid tradition for another occasion.
Comes as the NYT caught him cold in a lie about PEPFAR — www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/h…
— City Nolan (@ndhapple.bsky.social) July 15, 2025 at 2:29 PM
When they’re not lying, they have nothing at all…
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.”…
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…
A talking points memo to the Senate committee named a particular organization, JSI Research & Training Institute, that supposedly oversaw the work on abortions in Russia. In an email exchange with The New York Times, Rachel Cauley, the communications director for the O.M.B., said that a subcontractor for JSI, called MSI Reproductive Choices, used the funds for online booking services for abortions and for a hotline that taught Russians to perform their own abortions.
Both MSI and JSI said that was false.
Multiple government databases confirm that the grant was funded by other programs within U.S.A.I.D. — not PEPFAR — and that it was used for work to strengthen health care in Ethiopia, not for abortions in Russia. The grant was terminated in April…
Ms. Cauley, the spokeswoman for the O.M.B., insisted that PEPFAR had administered the grant, and did not respond to repeated requests to provide evidence of her assertions about the program or about the two organizations…
Trollhattan
This is a Big Deal. Heard a lengthy interview last week with the UN head of AIDS programs and the lack of consistent use of retroviral drugs is revving up an explosion of HIV back to transmissible levels. A direct consequence of US pulling funding. (Not that the planet should be relying so heavily on one nation but there’s no practical way to backfill on such short notice.)
zhena gogolia
This is why we have to keep complaining about every single little stupid thing. (I say “we” although I’m lazy.) They do seem to back down on some things.
I hope the widespread revulsion over ICE can have some effect before long.
Josie
These people are so deficient in research and reading comprehension skills that it is laughable. I guess their staffs are equally stupid. Anyone with better skills would not want to work in such an environment.
suzanne
Is this another flavor of TACO? And it happens to be a good flavor?
Trollhattan
Since Every Seat Counts, one of those “moderate Democrat” critters is challenging a California Central Valley Republican congresscritter. Bon chance, as they say.
Baud
That is a nice Easter egg.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Agreed.
Anne Laurie
My personal suspicion is that the Project 2025 people hate PEPFAR because it enables ‘those people’ to have filthy, disgusting S-E-X without the fear of ‘God given’ consequences. They can’t find honest reasons to attack the program, but they dig through every right-wing social media conspiracy site to find something they can pretend gives them a reason to destroy it.
H.E.Wolf
Oh, we’ll do it in tandem, I promise. Together we are mighty! :)
schrodingers_cat
I just had an epiphany while listening to the History of British India, that the foundation of the British Empire was drug trafficking and human trafficking.
And it was maintained using systematized violence. I have never seen them being held to account for the misery, cruelty and the death they unleashed wherever they bought their “civilization”
Josie
@Anne Laurie:
That makes total sense, unfortunately.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s a most interesting (in the “duh, yes, of course!” way) observation. Can you recommend a good source for the history of the EIC?
caphilldcne
Still time to call Senators. HIV/AIDS advocates still oppose the whole package – and let’s be clear – saving $400 million in PEPFAR is ok but getting rid of another $800 million in other aid for malnutrition etc. is not. Here’s an email that has been going around from the HIV side of things:
Yesterday, the Senate voted to move the rescissions bill to the floor for final debate and a vote. They will try to vote on the rescissions bill around 1:30pm ET vote today. We still have time to get calls into the Senate and we’ve seen that there have been changes – your pressure is working!! We must continue to send the strong message that the entire package should be stopped.
Call using our action alert to demand they vote NO on the recessions!
Please be aware that since the bill has changed, if it passes it will then have to be voted on one more time by the House. Please keep an eye out for a final action alert as well for the House. We appreciate your advocacy and activism! Kill this bill! Keep up the fight!
Josie
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve never read anything on India’s history, but I’ve read enough on Irish history to believe you are correct.
bbleh
@Anne Laurie: agree there likely is a substantial dose of Victorian sex-panic in the mix, but I also think there is at least as much stone-cold sociopathy.
They simply don’t care about other people. It’s not so much moral revulsion about other people as … absence of any feeling at all. It’s like people who have no sense of humor — everybody laughs at a joke and they just look puzzled.
Old School
While it’s great that PEPFAR will stick around, it strikes me as likely that the Trump administration still won’t staff/fund it.
NotMax
Reposted from yesterday.
bbleh
@Old School: unfortunately agree. They’ve made it clear that just because Congress passes a law saying money should be spent on something doesn’t mean they have to do OTHER Executive things like, say, hire people to spend it. And the Supremes agree, so there we are.
rikyrah
so much truth
Omnes Omnibus
@Old School: Take the fucking win. Then fight the next fight.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Many don’t know the French tried (and in some cases temporarily came very close) to replace British rule in India.
Looking at the legacy of former French colonies, that would have been even more disastrous.
Josie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thank you.
caphilldcne
@Old School: also very likely.
caphilldcne
They just started vote-a-rama on the rescission. Will likely continue into the morning so I’m telling folks to keep calling Senators and vote against.
Kathleen
@zhena gogolia: My OH#1 Rep Greg Landsman with whom I disagreed when he said Biden should step down nonetheless has been instrumental in getting the hotline that tracked kidnapped Ukrainian children and was discontinued by DOGE back online, He worked with some Republican reps and some people in the Trump administration. He said the most vocal and helpful allies were the evangelicals, many of whom I think help to man the hot line.
ICE seized a Muslim chaplain who worked at Children’s Hospital is scheduled to be deported. Again, Landsman and some other people got an agreement from ICE to let him remain in Cincinnati until his hearing. I’m willing to bet most Dem reps are engaged in this type of activity but we don’t hear about it. I got the idea Landsman wanted to keep the info about working with Trump’s people on the down low for some reason so I’m sure there are valid reasons not to publicize everything they’re doing.
Matt
I long for the days when a high-level official FLAT-OUT LYING TO CONGRESS would have been a five-alarm scandal.
Instead, it’s just another day of Liars For Jeebus hard at work
frosty
Opium, tobacco, slaves
kindness
With all due respect, DOGE and Trump cut the AIDS funds because those patients are not only disposable people, but folk MAGA wants to die. It was a twofer in their world. Man will they be pissed about this.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax:
French came nowhere close to supplanting the British in India. I am not ready to pin a medal on the British as being a good colonial power based on their own telling. Ask the people who were under the British occupation about “good” they were. They weren’t.
schrodingers_cat
@frosty: Tea and indentured servants after abolishing slavery.
It was a criminal enterprise backed by a nation state.
Doctor Science
Indivisible is entering a new phase. So far it’s been organized around pressuring Congress and other electeds, now it’s clear that isn’t enough to stop the authoritarian breakthrough.
Tonight is the first session of One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism. These are training sessions, to get people prepared to organize locally for sustained, strategic nonviolent non-cooperation. These are the kind of movements that *work* to overcome authoritarian regimes — but they’re also the kind that need 3.5% of the population actively involved. In the US, that would be 12 million people.
Right now, we’re aiming to train 1 million, as we build toward a truly society-wide No Kings movement. You can sign up here.
I always liveblog Indivisible’s Thursday afternoon What’s The Plan? meeting, but tomorrow’s will be extra-important, with special guest Erica Chenowth, whose work on the history of resistance to authoritarianism undergirds our strategy. I expect my liveblog will be particulary spotty as I’ll be spending too much time *listening*. Sign up here!.
You should probably front-page something about this, by one of the front-pagers or another regular.
schrodingers_cat
@Doctor Science: Yes Gandhi was able to paralyze the British Empire using non-violent non-cooperation.
Paul in KY
@bbleh: They laugh at cruel jokes.
Chetan Murthy
I have to wonder if there’s some diabolical plot afoot. B/c they never do something for brown/black people out of the goodness of their hearts.
zhena gogolia
@Doctor Science: I thought there was supposed to be a protest today, but I haven’t seen anything since a church announcement.
chrisanthemama
Now do USAID. Oh wait, today’s the day the administration is incinerating $800k worth of food (already paid for) for starving children at a cost of $130k. That’ll show those lazy starving kids, huh. Trump Ignored Warnings and Now Has to Burn 500 Tons of USAID Emergency Food
Old Man Shadow
Okay, we can turn down Hell’s thermometer from 300,000F to 299,999F for them.
schrodingers_cat
@Josie: Ireland was their lab for genocidal starvation.
The Nazis took notes on British experiments in India on the minimum caloric intake needed to survive. Something they used in death camps and work camps.
India was also their lab for studying and practicing policing methods, under the lovely name of crowd control. I just learned that rubber bullets were first used in Occupied India.
FWIW IMHO British had a better PR/information dispensing apparatus than the other colonial powers to sanitize their activities in the colonies for domestic consumption.
Mathguy
If there’s a hell, Vought should pack very light clothes since it will be extremely warm where he’s going. What a POS.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: It was so very successful! Maybe there’s another state that wants its independence that maybe could try that and see what happens? Their current strategery of ‘lets use our popguns against a nation-state that has nukes to force them to give us our independence’ hasn’t worked out quite so well…
schrodingers_cat
@Paul in KY: Are you talking about Kashmir?
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Nope.
Librettist
The lede said a couple of House members flipped to stop Kegsbreth’s re-re-naming of bases.
Trollhattan
@NotMax:
Is that what they settled on for powering AI server farms?
lowtechcyclist
So does this rescission bill need 50 Senate votes, or 60?
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
50
schrodingers_cat
@Paul in KY:Then I have no idea what you are talking about.
Belafon
@Doctor Science: The hard thing will be getting that large of a population to resist while things still feel “normal” to a large part of the country.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: The British defeated French in India in 1760 and after that the French were a footnote in Indian history.
In 1760, EIC’s holdings included Bengal and some fortified towns where they had factories (warehouses). So over 80 percent of India’s territory was held by Indian rulers.
Harrison Wesley
@zhena gogolia: John Lewis protest is tomorrow.
danielx
Pretty much SOP for anyone in the Orange Jesus administration, starting at the top – when in doubt, lie and keep on lying.
Martin
@Trollhattan: CA-22 has the highest percentage of Medicaid recipients in the US. It is a massive issue there.
I’m skeptical that the usual left/right issue spectrum is relevant to winning in a lot of these places. A lot of Trumps success has come from scrambling that up – a lot of the MAHA movement is pretty left crunchy, tariffs used to be a left/labor hobbyhorse. And I think the center is mostly gone – I think we’re past the days where marginal changes to the status quo are seen as solutions and we’re in an era where big, bold ideas are what’s resonating. That district has a lot of active oil fields up around Lost Hills and north of McKittrick. Lot of field workers in that district. So her oil-friendly position probably won’t hurt her. She’s very vocal in support for MediCal for undocumented Californians, which is probably what this race will swing on. There are a lot of voters in that district that have relatives who are undocumented and rely on that care. She’s a bit far south for her Sikh heritage to be a big help, but there’s a general solidarity in the valley among immigrants of all types.
Valadao won by 3 in 2022, and by 7 in 2024 against the same opponent. I think she’s got a decent shot.
Bill Arnold
@Doctor Science:
A good introduction to Chenoweth’s work: Why Civil Resistance Works (Slides (22), Erica Chenoweth, April 8, 2010 )
Longer, PDF:
Why Civil Resistance Works – The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (PDF, 38 pages, Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, 2008)
A key takeaway; her analyses (15 years old now, FWIW) of attacks on armed internal security forces showed that they generally tended to prevent defections of those services to the opposition, i.e. are(were) a bad idea. (Genuine self-defense excepted, maybe, though even they would be spun as attacks on internal security forces.)
Anyway
Are the Mughals considered Indian rulers?
schrodingers_cat
@Anyway: Yes they are. What else would they be? They didn’t tax peasants to the point that they died of starvation by the millions and took that money to Samarkand. Although by 1760 they were a spent force.
zhena gogolia
@Harrison Wesley: Locally I’m hearing nothing about it, whereas the No Kings protest was inescapable.
ETA: Looks as if there’s nothing planned in my town. Weekday.
Geminid
@Martin: David Valadeo was one of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump the second time. Four retired and four lost primaries in 2022. Only Valadeo and Dan Newsome survived, perhaps because California and Washington are “jungle” primary states.
Anyway
i don’t know. That’s why i asked. Sorry if it didn’t meet your exacting standards. I thought they came from Turkey or Iran (or places outside India)
schrodingers_cat
@Anyway: They came from Central Asia from modern Uzbekistan. But they became Indian. Persian was their court language.
Martin
@Geminid: Maybe. California GOP isn’t particularly Trumpy. I mean, it’s there, but we haven’t see a notable uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment in the state unlike most of the rest of the country. Broad tariffs aren’t popular because every industry knows that landscape pretty well. The tomato farmers understand pretty well how that market works, and how it differs from almonds. The idea you can slap national tariffs down and have that work is pretty strongly rejected here. So I’m not surprise there wasn’t a large backlash against his impeachment vote.
But this is a small/medium business landscape more than anything else. A lot of ag and oil work is through subcontractors or as contractors, so there’s a pretty solid pro-business, regulatory cautious environment, even among the workers. We don’t have these big factory farms where the workers are all employees, we navigate the undocumented labor space though a kind of web of plausible deniability. The big factory farm hires a labor subcontractor who pulls in crews from other labor subcontractors, and technically someone down that chain is responsible for checking if workers are legal, but no legal responsibility ever flows uphill. Workers often aren’t even sure who they are working for, and employers often don’t know which subcontractor their crew actually works for – and everyone kind of likes it that way because everyone is shielded. But it means that you have LOADS of small businesses that like to keep government at arms length, so I think there’s an inherent bias for GOP policy. And of course, the biggest policy issue there is water, which doesn’t even get acknowledged at the federal level, or even often by residents in the cities because we always have water, what’s the problem? And those are really difficult issues to get into at a place like this because it’s so utterly foreign to anything in our political space. But put simply, there’s a general view that Democrats fuck over ag water (which, to be clear is insatiable) in favor of cities. North of this CA-22 a water district was stealing water and selling it back to farmers. And a number of water districts in this area aren’t managing their usage in accordance with the law and may be forced to cut off flow to farmers in order to stabilize aquifers. These are big local issues.
Jungle primary works like normal primary up until you get heavily D/R districts where there’s a risk of the top 2 in one party taking those slots. 22 isn’t partisan enough for that to matter, so it works like anywhere else. Even if Valadeo had gotten a MAGA primary, he might have lost to that candidate, but it still would have been a D/R general, so there was no risk to the party for allowing that primary to happen. So I don’t think the jungle primary was a factor here. Not sure about the Washington race – there it might have been.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: What other potential nation-state maybe needs to try non-violence (as they haven’t got squat doing it the ‘violent’ way)?
Hint: It rhymes with Zalestine
schrodingers_cat
@Paul in KY: Got it, thanks.
Geminid
@Martin: Well, you say “Maybe” and I said “perhaps” which is the same thing.
There were several close California House races that I monitored last November. One thing I noticed was that CA22 had many fewer voters than the others, maybe one hundred thousand fewer. I figured this was because of a large number of residents who were not qualified to vote.
Valadeo’s district will be a top target for Democrats next year. So will Ken Calvert’s Palm Springs-centered district and another in the LA area..
WTFGhost
@Trollhattan: Well, Trump was just horrible the way he always is. He doesn’t care about a contract – if he can break it, for his convenience, he will.
Now, I will say one thing: this is NOTHING, repeat *NOTHING* as in, NOT A SINGLE GODDAMNED THING, if Republicans don’t force Trump to spend the money. Remember: this “recissions” bill is trying to retroactively make legal his violation of those contracts.
But there’s nothing that can force Trump to actually release the funds, or use them for their intended purpose, in this nation, at this time, except polls. And the polls aren’t bad enough to end a tanTrump.
Geminid
@Geminid: So I checked out last year’s election results for Valadeo’s CA22 and compared them to those for CA45, where Democrat Derek Tran unseated Republican incumbent Michelle Steel.
Valadeo won with 89,484 votes to Democrat Rudy Salas’s 78,023. Total:167,507.
Derek “Landslide” Tran got 158,226 compared to Steel’s 157,411. Total: 315,875. That total was over 148,000 votes higher than for CA22.
Citizen Alan
@chrisanthemama: I always thought one of the most absurd things in Atlas Shrugged was when one of the heroes was a sea-faring pirate who was praised for hijacking relief ships sent by the US to feed the starving masses of Europe. I remember thinking “How could any human being possibly look upon this character as anything other than a monster?” And now, our government is burning food rather than see it go to starving children. And I bet everyone involved in this abomination, if asked, would proudly claim to be a Christian
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat: Thanks. Uzbekistan?! I had no idea.
Geminid
@Anyway: That whole Central Asian region generated a lot of successful military forces. Among others, the Turkic tribes that conquered Anatolia, and ultimately Constantinople in 1453, came from there.
Turks are very proud of their martial heritage. One of the funnier things I’ve seen on social media was a take on the origin of Azhkenazi Jews. Anti-Israel detractors were arguing that the Ashkenazi did not originally come from the Levant, and that this undercut their claim to the land of Israel. The idea was that they were originally a Central Asian tribe that converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages: the Khazars.
Some Turk chimed in:
I thought that was a very Turkish thing to say.
Kayla Rudbek
@schrodingers_cat: yes, tobacco as the original drug, replaced by opium in China (could maybe make the argument that sugar is another drug, the molasses byproduct from the sugar was made into rum which definitely counts as a drug) and slavery = human trafficking (press-ganging would probably count as human trafficking as well, maybe indentured servitude as well) and kidnapping into being a sailor persisted all the way to San Francisco late 19th-early 20th century (called Shanghaing if I recall correctly)
Kayla Rudbek
@Josie: the English practiced colonialism on Ireland before they took it out to the rest of the world
Kayla Rudbek
@frosty: sugar/molasses/rum and press-ganging and transporting convicts as well
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat: Yes, the Chinese know this too, from the Opium Wars.