RFK Jr. Voices Support for PEPFAR Amid Trump Foreign Aid Funding Freeze

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he supported a large U.S.-funded global AIDS program during his confirmation hearing this morning as the Trump administration moved to exempt the program from the administration’s broad freeze on spending on foreign aid.

“I absolutely support PEPFAR and I will happily work to strengthen the program,” Kennedy said in response to a question from Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, during his confirmation hearing to become HHS secretary, the top healthcare position in the federal government.

PEPFAR stands for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The program, which started in 2003 during the George W. Bush administration, takes credit for saving 25 million lives since its inception, most of them in Africa, and being responsible for 90% of new starts of preexposure prophylaxis, the primary way that governments and healthcare organizations are currently using to prevent new infections. The program’s annual budget for fiscal year ending in Sept.30, 2024, was $6.5 billion.

One of the executive orders that President Donald Trump signed executive order on Jan. 20, the day of his inauguration, put a 90-day pause on foreign aid spending. The stop-work orders implementing that pause were interpreted as applying to PEPFAR. News outlets reported earlier this week that programs in South Africa and elsewhere abruptly shut down because PEPFAR funding was abruptly cut off.

But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver to the foreign aid freeze for PEPFAR under a provision that allows exceptions for humanitarian assistance. The extent of the waiver and whether it applies to preventive efforts is unclear. “UNAIDS welcomes this waiver from the US government., which ensures that millions of people living with HIV can continue to receive life-saving HIV medication during the assessment of US foreign development assistance,” said UNAIDS Executive Director, Winnie Byanyima, M.S. in a news release issued today.

PEPFAR has bipartisan support, and Cornyn cited a stream of statistics about the number of lives it saved and infections it prevented during his friendly questioning of Kennedy. But supporters of the program were concerned last when Congress shifted from authorizing funds for it for five-year periods to a yearly authorizations.

“This has introduced some uncertainty about PEPFAR’s future, even though the program will continue as long as Congress provides funding for it,” KFF said in a policy paper published in August 2024.

Kennedy hasn’t much said recently about HIV and AIDS, but in this 2021 book titled “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy ad Public Health” has a chapter on HIV in which Kennedy attacks Fauci for suppressing debate and research into whether HIV-AIDS causation and whether the virus needs an cofactor to cause AIDS. Kennedy quotes Peter Duesberg, a University of California, Berkely, professor, extensively in the chapterr. Duesberg has argued that HIV is merely bystander to AIDS, not a causative agent.

Kennedy says in the book that he “takes no position on relationship between HIV and AIDS.”

During today’s hearing, Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, asked Kennedy whether he wrote in “his book” — Kennedy has written many and Bennet didn’t name the book — that “it’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS.” Kennedy answered Bennet “I am not sure” and seemed about to elaborate but Bennet cut him off. That is sentence does appears in the HIV chapter of the “The Real Anthony Fauci

In the same paragraph, Kennedy wrote that “no one has ever explained how a disease largely confined to male homosexuals in the West is a female heterosexual disease in Africa.”