Joshua Green: The Heroic Story of How Congress First Confronted AIDS

Joshua Green is a senior editor of The Atlantic and a weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe

Members of Congress have not distinguished themselves lo these past few days, and an unfortunate result has been to draw attention away from the 30th anniversary of the first published report of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (6/5/81). I'd like to take a moment and try to rectify both of those things by reminding readers that Congress can, in fact, do admirable and even heroic things, and that a good example is the story of how some members in the early 1980s forced the government to confront and respond to the AIDS epidemic. By way of disclosure, most of what I know about this subject comes from collaborating with Rep. Henry Waxman on his book about Congress, which I'd recommend to anyone interested in the subject.

Oddly enough, it was the specter of Republican budget cuts that led to the first awareness of the AIDS epidemic in Congress. Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, had targeted public health agencies for massive cuts. A Waxman staffer, concerned about their potential effects, had gone to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to do reconnaissance. CDC scientists were alarmed and predicted that the cuts would lead to an epidemic, although they imagined it would involve a preventable childhood illness, since Reagan had proposed cutting the immunization budget in half. Waxman was worried enough by what he learned to join with a Republican colleague, Pete Domenici, to protect the immunization budget....

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