Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1992. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Saturday, August 29, 1992
Lack of money has also forced the 15-member panel to cancel hearings set for September, and defer until at least October a report on the link between HIV infection and tuberculosis. Last month, two staff members scheduled to attend the AIDS meeting in Amsterdam could not go because of a lack of money even though one had actually helped plan the international conference.
The crisis arose after the commission was told it could not use in the current fiscal year $750,000 left unspent from the previous year's appropriation. For months, the commission had been told the money would be available, and planned accordingly.
"Cutting our staff drastically, having to lay off people with a depth of experience -- that is a big loss. Once you have that kind of disruption, you don't get back to square one easily," said June E. Osborn, dean of the school of public health at the University of Michigan and chairman of the commission.
The job of the bipartisan, volunteer commission, whose members include basketball player Magic Johnson, is to look at the AIDS epidemic from a national perspective and provide advice to both Congress and the president.
The panel's initial report, "America Living With AIDS," was released in September. It called for more money for treatment of HIV-infected persons, more money for research, drug treatment on demand, greater coordination between federal departments, and a generally more urgent response on the part of the federal government. Relations with the Bush administration have been chilly since then.
After a meeting in July with Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, one of three nonvoting commission members, the panel issued a statement calling the administration's current efforts "tragically insufficient."
"The commission reluctantly concluded that President Bush and HHS have failed to meet fully their responsibilities in leading the national response to the monumental human suffering . . . from the HIV-AIDS epidemic," it said.
Although the panel's budget problems emerged soon after, numerous commission and staff members attributed that to coincidence and found no evidence of political interference.
"I don't think the problems can be traced to any kind of political interference," said Osborn. "I don't know of any way to implicate evil doings in this. We were reassured and reassured and reassured that those monies were ours, but in the end we were told that the carry-over funds couldn't be used."
It was executive branch agencies, specifically the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget, that originally told the commission it could carry over the money from fiscal year 1991. The commission sought those funds after its original fiscal year 1992 budget was cut from $2.5 million to $1.75 million in a House-Senate budget conference last November. Last spring the funds were transferred back to the commission's account, said Osborn.
In June, however, the House Appropriations Committee headed by Jamie L. Whitten, D-Miss., asked the General Accounting Office to review the matter. The GAO said the money could not be carried over because the appropriation bill did not explicitly allow it.
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