Diary Prequel Package — page 46

announcement of a major initiative at the G-8 Conference this summer in Ottawa. Terrell asked me to put it together for her and I enlisted Mark Dybul who did a great job with me. I and Terrell had several pre-meetings at the White House Conference Center on Jackson Place during early May and then today Mark, Terrell and I met with Gary Edson and Jay Lefkowitz of the WH. To present our plan to save 146,000 babies from being infected per year for a cost of about $100,000,000 per year. Gary and Jay loved the plan and will present it to the President within a couple of days. It was a great meeting and they were very impressed at how we organized the data and the presentation. May 29, 2002 - I briefed President Bush in the Hamilton Room of the West Wing on the MCTC plan. Present were Josh Bolton (Deputy Chief of Staff), Andrew Card (Chief of Staff), Karl Rove, Mr Calio, Gary Edson, Secretary Thompson, Andrew Natsios (USAID), Terrell Halaska, Christen Silverberg, Jay Lefkowitz and others. The President liked very much our plan, which I presented to him succinctly, but completely. The background of the initiative is that Sens. Frist/Kerry are trying to get through a supplemental Bill on adding more money to the Global AIDS Fund. The President is against this since he feels that the Fund has no plan and the money will be wasted. This is the reason that he wants to seize the opportunity of the Congress throwing more money at us to put forth his own initiative on a concrete proposal as opposed to the vagaries of the Fund. He accepted my proposal. Interesting dynamics at the meeting in that Andrew Natsios was upset that this was an HHS proposal and started (quite inappropriately in front of the President) getting into a turf war where he pointed out that he has an MOU with the CDC that with regard to AIDS in Africa, USAID has the lead. The President picked up on this discord and said that the only thing that he knows is that he likes "Tony's plan" and that HHS and USAID should work out (with Gary Edson as referree) how it is going to be implemented. He stated, however, that he wants "a person" to be held accountable for the success or failure of the project. To say the least, Sec. Thompson was angry with Natsios. From my standpoint, the meeting was a great success since our plan was accepted by the President and he was extremely friendly to me. June 6, 2002 - I found out at National Airport that President Bush was establishing a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that would encompass 160,000 employees with a budget of >$30 billion by consolidating all activities related to terrorism, including bioterrorism in one Department. This would mean that $1.748 billion of NIAID money for FY 2003 would go to DHS. June 6 - 12, 2002 - Spending a lot of time working with the DHHS and th White House in trying to hash out the details of legislation that would create the DHS. Everyone seems to agree that the research would still be done at NIAID under my direction; however, the money likely will first go to DHS and thenn be passed through or contracted to me to perform the research. Also, the President is planning to announce the MTCT program that I helped to put together in a few days.