On the recordOctober 30, 2023
as you and I both know, we are in the process of talking about the spending bills, long overdue. We are in our fiscal year as of October 1. Well, here comes the end of October, and we are still laboring over how we are going to spend money for the next fiscal year from October 1 to September 30 of the year 2024. And there is debate back and forth between the House and Senate, debate on the Senate floor, and some issues are becoming priorities. I would like to address one of them that doesn't get a lot of attention, and it should. I don't agree with former President George W. Bush on many things, but I have given him credit repeatedly for making the United States a leader in stemming the HIV/AIDS epidemic in some of the poorest parts of the world. Twenty years ago, the program was called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, what Bono once said was ``the most eloquent expression of American values anyone can think of in recent times.'' You see, PEPFAR, and its companion effort, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, dramatically curtailed the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging the world. It has saved more than 25 million lives so far. Both of these programs provided retroviral drugs for those with AIDS, allowing them to live productive lives and prevent the spread of disease through childbirth. They have been so effective that some might have forgotten just how devastating AIDS was in certain parts of the world.…
