Bill Clinton: “Well, in general, let me say I think the budget should reflect better attention both to prevention at home and to the…”

“Well, in general, let me say I think the budget should reflect better attention both to prevention at home and to the communities of color. And I've been trying to get more money for the USAID mission, and we'll put some more money in there. I think I'd like to make two points. One is that this budget year will be more difficult than the last one because we got such big increases in everything last time. And because of the global economy kind of slowing down, we don't expect the same amount of revenues to come in this time, and we have to fund all the big increases we got last time again. But we'll do the best we can. The second thing I would like to say is I think that it would be very helpful to have all of you using your--whatever influence you have with Members of Congress in both parties to support more global efforts, because eventually all this is going to be a menace to the United States. So it's not only a moral imperative, it's also very practical over the long run. One of the things that has kind of bothered me is that, in the aftermath of the cold war, we were able for several years to reduce our defense budget, and that was a good thing, and everyone--and even the Pentagon wanted to do it. There was just like about 300,000--the number of civilian employees--and they plan for further reductions there. But during that time, we actually needed to make a larger commitment on the diplomatic front or in the nondefense security areas, if you will. And with the exception of the special efforts we made in the former Soviet Union to dismantle and destroy nuclear weapons, basically there's been a wholesale effort to cut back on our diplomatic budget even though, contrary to popular wisdom, the United States spends a smaller percentage of our income on international affairs than any other major country. And one of the things that I have seen--almost no one knows this, but it's true--one of the things I have--now, to be fair, we also spend more on defense, and a lot of our defense goes to protect other countries, as you see in the last couple of days. But still, for--the numbers are so much more modest, not only for 8 years; let's look at the USAID program, the health programs, the empowerment of women and children, especially young girls, initiatives, the small scale microeconomic development, all that stuff that doesn't cost much money and it has a huge impact, and especially a lot of the things we can do in public health--and, interestingly enough, a lot of the preventive activities that we would engage in with regard to AIDS, for example, would go quite well with other things we need to be doing out there with these large populations anyway in a lot of countries that have severe public health problems. So we've been sitting here meeting in our--I've been having, each of the last 3 or 4 days, rather long, detailed budget sessions, trying to figure out how to get more blood out of that turnip. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is to figure out how to make the case to the Congress, in an effective way, that the United States has enormous interests, as well as obligations, in making these kinds of investments beyond our borders. And I think anything you can do to help that, I would appreciate it. I mean, there is this sort of general awareness in Congress that the world is becoming more interdependent. There's a much more sophisticated understanding of the economics, for example. But it's not just economics. It's the environment; it's the public health; it's all these other things where we are becoming more and more caught up with each other. Our major military mission in the last 6 months, before the operation in Iraq, has been to send several thousand of our uniformed personnel to Central America to help them rebuild after Hurricane Mitch. It's not only the right thing to do from a humanitarian point of view, it is in our national interest. Because if those countries don't rebuild, they will become highly vulnerable to all the drug traffickers. And if they don't rebuild, then all their people will have to come here and, if they can't get here legally, they will try to become illegal immigrants. So there's all these things that we need to begin to see our relationships beyond our borders as more of an extension of our relationships with one another rather than as something totally different and apart from our relations with one another. And anyway, I don't mean to give you a speech on that; I know you believe that. But the point I want to make is most people who run for Congress never have to think about these things unless they have a large immigrant population within their district from a particular place. So it doesn't--this kind of discussion we're having, because you understand the HIV/AIDS issue--I'm preaching to the choir here. But anything you can do to sort of just sit down and walk through this with congressional delegations or their chiefs of staff or whoever the appropriate people are from around the country, I would really appreciate, because I think there is a lot of support. For example, you can always get good support in Congress, bipartisan, for a big increase in the Ryan White Act. And now we've finally got pretty good support in Congress, this whopping increase we had to help people purchase the drugs, the medicines. But it drops off markedly when you try to talk about the connection between what we're doing here at home and beyond our borders. And I really think you could help, because this is one example of a more general challenge the country will have to face more every year for the next 20 years, maybe forever, but certainly for the next 20 years. Dr. Hitt. Mr. President, we really have made--probably hundreds of recommendations in the past few years, I mean--[laughter]. We've tried our best to narrow down----”