Diary Prequel Package — page 262

files) and then went to White House for Principals Meeting in Situation Room at 3:45 PM. Present were: Hillary Clinton, Jack Lew (OMB), Denis McDonough (NSS), Chaired by Tom Donoline, Samantha Powers, Tom Frieden, Raj Shah, Eric Goosby, Gayle Smith, Ariel Pablos-Mendez, etc. We agreed upon Option #2, which is greater efficiencies to provide more $ and scale-up of non-Tx prevention as well as increasing the PEPFAR target for prevention to 6 million by 2013 and 8 million by 2015. I stressed to Tom Donoline that the POTUS should strongly call upon more involvement by other donors, particularly China. He agreed. Of note, Susan Rice teleconferenced in from NYC and she voted strongly for Option $3 (Blue Sky), which would require an additional $2.5 Billion. This is a good sound bite, but Jack Lew pointed out that given the budget situation, the POTUS would have to back off on commitments that he has already made to other programs in order to do this. Hillary pointed out that this was not tenable. She also pointed out that we needed to address the ADAP waiting lists. Amazing situation. After returning from the White House, I heard from Courtney Billet and Greg that HHS contacted us and said that although they had no problem with the Op-Ed (see above) and actually cleared us to send it to NY Times, the "White House" told HHS to have recall the Op-Ed since it is "off message". Still not sure what they mean since State, HHS and everyone else approved it. Could be because I called for more resources as well as more "efficiencies" Another amazing situation - At around 7:00 PM, Raj Shah calls me up and asks me to call a meeting with him, Eric and me to see if we could modify the proposal that was agreed upon at Principal's Meeting!!!.. He still insists that the POTUS needs to come out with something "different" and suggests using "pipeline" money from PEPFAR/USAID. He wanted me to broker the meeting. I contacted Eric and bless his heart, he is willing to meet. Meeting scheduled for 8:30 AM in Eric's office tomorrow. Nov. 9, 2001 - Still no information on why the WH ordered me to recall my Op-Ed. Have e-mailed Gayle Smith (NSS). I will explain situation to her tomorrow and see if she has any insight. Meeting did not occur at 8:30 AM because of scheduling issues. Will try to do a call tomorrow Nov.10, 2011 - Got some insight from Gayle, but am afraid she is not telling me everything. She claims that she heard discussion about my Op-Ed at the WH, but not by WHCOMS. Issue was whether it was a good idea to put it out right after HRC's speech since it already got great PR and so why waste a Fauci Op-ED. Perhaps better to wait until the POTUS does World AIDS Day. This could be true, but who knows? Gayle did say that the OMB people might have been concerned by the couple of words that said we need significant increases in resources, including from other donor countries. This implies needing more USG resources, which would obviously bother OMB. However, I could easily have changed this to say we need significant new resources FROM other donor countries. In any event, Gayle assured me that the Op-Ed was not "off message" in the substance of its content. We will hold onto it for now. Having said this, here is another example of the ridiculous need to control the "message" on the part of this White House.