Members of Congress aren’t the only federal employees on vacation in August. At least 116 Washington bureaucrats are junketing to the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City this week, representing the National Institutes for Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health Resources and Services Administration, Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Department of Defense, Census Bureau, and the Peace Corps.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., reports that U.S. taxpayers will get a bill for at least $473,025 for a government information booth at the conference, as well as to pay airfare, hotel and conference registration fees for the 116 attending bureaucrats.
Once all additional expenses are paid for things like food and taxis for the 116 U.S. attendees, the total cost will be even higher.
Among the presentations on the conference program are “Sex Workers Mini Film Festival,” with a workshop led by a group from Thailand that boasts about the dollars generated by sex. It’s mere coincidence, we suppose, that Thailand’s HIV infection rate puts it in the top one-third of the world’s 166 nations.
The Catholics among the U.S. attendees will want to be sure and attend this workshop: “Good Catholics Use Condoms: How to Answer the Tough Questions Surrounding HIV/AIDS Prevention and Religion.” Coburn notes that this workshop is the work of a group based here in D.C. that advocates multiple positions officially opposed by the Catholic Church.
That $473,025 might sound like a paltry sum in an annual federal budget of nearly $3 trillion, but Coburn provides a startling perspective: Instead of sending federal employees to Mexico City to talk about AIDS, those hard-earned tax dollars could have been used to pay for treatments for every person now on the waiting list for the life-extending AIDS drugs, or to cover the costs of preventing transmission of HIV to 50,000 newborn babies.
“This is a simple question of priorities when it comes to addressing HIV/AIDS — talk or treatment? Conference or care? While the waiting list for federal employees to attend the AIDS conference may now exceed the waiting list for patients seeking AIDS drugs, most taxpayers would probably agree that providing life saving treatment to 35 of their fellow Americans is a better expenditure of funds than paying to send 116 government employees on a trip to Mexico.
No one will die from not being able to attend a conference, but the same is not true for those who are living with HIV/AIDS and cannot access treatment,” Coburn said.
By the way, the Oklahoma senator is a practicing physician who delivers babies when he’s not on the Senate floor fighting for taxpayers.
