It was a startling, almost unbelievable, allegation. It turned out to be untrue.
On June 25, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told a Senate committee that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, had spent $9.3 million “to advise Russian doctors on how to perform abortions and gender analysis.”
His statements had immediate consequences for the committee’s vote and had the potential to create long-term damage to PEPFAR, a program that has long had bipartisan support and has been estimated to have saved 26 million lives since President George W. Bush started it in 2003.
Mr. Vought was at the Senate Appropriations Committee to defend a package of cuts proposed by the Trump administration to this year’s spending on global health programs and public broadcasting. If the Senate votes to approve the package, global health programs will lose $900 million, including $400 million from PEPFAR for the current fiscal year. PEPFAR and other programs also face huge cuts, even terminations, for the coming fiscal year. The full Senate is expected to vote on the “rescissions bill” by Thursday.
At the hearing, Mr. Vought listed funding of abortions in Russia as evidence of PEPFAR’s waste of government funds. The example prompted Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a longtime supporter of PEPFAR, to say he would vote in favor of rescinding funds from the program.
“You know why I’m going to vote for it? Just as a statement that PEPFAR is important, but it’s not beyond scrutiny,” Mr. Graham said. “There is a consequence to this crap.”
PEPFAR has not operated in Russia since 2012, when President Vladimir Putin kicked the United States Agency for International Development out of the country. U.S. law prohibits the use of any federal funds to pay for abortions. Funding abortions through PEPFAR would imply not just waste, but serious crimes or negligence, or both.
“If they have reason to believe that’s true, they should put the information forward,” said Dr. Mark Dybul, who led PEPFAR under Mr. Bush, adding that he was “shocked” by the allegation.
Other former PEPFAR leaders and staff members were incensed.
“It’s so irresponsible and so demeaning for them to think that they could get away with a strategy that includes open, overt, aggressive, accelerated lying,” said Dr. Eric Goosby, who led PEPFAR under President Barack Obama.
“I’m so distraught over having things thrown at the wall to see if they stick,” he added.
Jirair Ratevosian, PEPFAR’s chief of staff under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said he was puzzled by the statement because it was so easy to disprove.
“Their cavalier departure from the truth is just as egregious as the unfounded claims they make about PEPFAR,” he said.
A talking points memo to the Senate committee named a particular organization, JSI Research & Training Institute, that supposedly oversaw the work on abortions in Russia. In an email exchange with The New York Times, Rachel Cauley, the communications director for the O.M.B., said that a subcontractor for JSI, called MSI Reproductive Choices, used the funds for online booking services for abortions and for a hotline that taught Russians to perform their own abortions.
Both MSI and JSI said that was false.
Multiple government databases confirm that the grant was funded by other programs within U.S.A.I.D. — not PEPFAR — and that it was used for work to strengthen health care in Ethiopia, not for abortions in Russia. The grant was terminated in April.
JSI “has never used or subgranted United States government funds for the performance or promotion of abortion,” a JSI spokeswoman said.
MSI has not received any PEPFAR funding since 2017, and “doesn’t have any programs connected to Russia,” said Kylie Harrison, a spokeswoman for MSI.
Vera Zlidar, a global health fellow at U.S.A.I.D. from 2014 to 2019, said that if anything, the agency’s programs strove to prevent abortions by teaching women to use family planning methods.
It also would have been near impossible to have funds for abortion slip through the cracks at the agency, said Ms. Zlidar, who worked on reproductive health programs.
“There were checklists. There were repeated reviews. There were clearances,” she said.
“The process related to any project, but more so the family planning and reproductive health stuff, was ridiculous, onerous, time-consuming, but that was all done to make sure that people did what they were supposed to do with the money,” she added.
Ms. Cauley, the spokeswoman for the O.M.B., insisted that PEPFAR had administered the grant, and did not respond to repeated requests to provide evidence of her assertions about the program or about the two organizations.
Some other examples Mr. Vought presented also differed from official records, including what he described as a $35 million grant “to address ‘vasectomy messaging frameworks’ and ‘gender dynamics’ in Ethiopia.”
The grant that most closely matches that description is not a PEPFAR project. “Regardless, PEPFAR has not funded vasectomies,” said Jennifer Kates, the director of global health and H.I.V. policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“Any administration can ask for rescissions and provide reasons for doing so,” she said. “However, the reasons here are not backed up by facts.”
Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health for The Times, with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.
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