Taking the Pulse of PEPFAR

PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, started in 2003 and is the largest country-to-country bilateral investment in addressing any single disease. PEPFAR is not only funding, but expertise, and has saved millions of lives since the Bush administration. Dr. Jennifer Sherwood, Director of Research in the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) public policy office, talks to us about attacks to PEPFAR, the populations that are impacted, and some recent protections to PEPFAR’s crucial work. 

Early in 2025, a pause on new funding going out into the field was announced, in combination with a stop-work order. Soon after, a PEPFAR waiver was announced, yet it included extremely specific restrictions. amfAR completed a survey across 46 different countries asking about grant status, service provision, and more. It found that nearly 80% of organizations surveyed had grant cuts or eliminations. Because of the cuts, amfAR documented 1,700 site closures, including drop-in clinics that are essential to key populations. Local organizations were also disproportionately impacted by closures and grant impacts. 

The term “key populations” refers to populations that are at high risk of acquiring HIV and experiencing additional, structural barriers to care. Often, this is sex workers, men who have sex with men, other gay and bisexual men, transgender individuals, and those that use or inject drugs. Programs particular to key populations were absolutely decimated, as strongly documented in amfAR’s survey. These impacts are also being exacerbated by the recent expansion of the Global Gag Rule.

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE

amfAR on Facebook
amfAR on Instagram
Taking the Pulse of PEPFAR
PEPFAR: Achieving an AIDS-Free Generation
Ranking Member Robert Garcia Demands Answers on PEPFAR as Trump Administration Guts Lifesaving HIV/AIDS Programs
Grace Howard on Her New Book: The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood 
The Dangerous Concept of Fetal Personhood
Pregnancy Criminalization, Surveillance, and the Child Welfare System 
Fetal Personhood: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Jennie: Hi rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, I'm recording this just like a smidge early. I'm recording this on the Thursday before you are hearing it because I have some things going on next week, and so I don't think I'm gonna have time to record the intro right before it goes out. So, doing it a little early, but I'm very much looking forward to this weekend. I am so excited. I treated myself to a special, I needed a new bookcase. My bookshelves are overflowing and starting to look really chaotic. And I saw this really gorgeous rotating one. I am so excited to put all my books in it, but also that means I need to like put it together, which I'm sure is gonna be a bit of an ordeal, but I am very much looking forward to having this gorgeous new bookcase and putting all of my books on it and having some uh semblance of order restored to my bookshelves. That is my big weekend plan, other than getting my hair cut, which I am seeing [my hair] on video right now, and it's real, it's real bad. It really, it's long. I need to get it cut. And I know people who have like longer hair don't understand like how chaotic like it's maybe my hair is maybe like an inch longer than it was, but with a pixie cut, that's like it's like one of those like things that has like has to be super maintained, otherwise it like gets chaotic very fast, and it has reached the chaotic length of just it's starting to look a little shaggy. So, I'm very excited that I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow and color, so it'll brighten it up and be much shorter and it will be wonderful. So, I'm very much looking forward to that as well this weekend. Let's see. I think those are like the big things I'm thinking about at the moment. I'm really, like, staring at the box that that bookshelf is in as I am recording and just so excited to have to put it together but not necessarily looking forward to the process of putting it together. Maybe I'll share a picture on socials once it is together and it is all my books are in it. So hopefully it will be a fun, not torturous process. Let's see. Oh, the other thing I wanted to talk about was if you all have not seen the episode from when you're hearing this, not this previous Sunday, but the Sunday before’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver does a deep dive on "fetal personhood." It was such a great episode, definitely worth checking out. I'm so grateful to his team that they are covering continually covering issues related to abortion. It really helps get these issues to a much bigger audience. I think there are so many people who would be who would care and are would be upset about what's happening but just aren't aren't seeing it and don't know what is happening around fetal personhood and pregnancy criminalization. So, it was so wonderful to see those issues get drawn to a much larger audience. We have some episodes of the podcast that I think are great to listen to in conjunction. So, we'll link the John Oliver episode of last week tonight in the show notes so you can easily find it. But we'll also include a link to some of our episodes where we do a deeper dive into either fetal personhood or pregnancy criminalization. I'm thinking of three specific ones off the top of my head. So, we'll have them in the show notes that they are definitely worth checking out if you want to get a much deeper dive into that episode, which you should also check out. I think I will pause there and go to this week's episode. I am really excited for this week's episode where you're talking about something we don't necessarily talk about a ton on the podcast. And that that's a shame. I should make sure that we bring it in more frequently, and that is the PEPFAR program or the global HIV program from the US. So, I'm very excited to talk about what is happening with PEPFAR right now, and in particular, what has happened since the administration basically did this like stopped all foreign assistance and has restarted some. And like what have been the impacts that we are seeing on the PEPFAR program? So, I'm very excited to have on the podcast today Jennifer Sherwood with amfAR. They put out a really amazing report in July looking at what have the impacts been of the Trump administration's actions around foreign assistance, particularly on PEPFAR. Y'all, it is dark and bleak and really upsetting how widespread these impacts are. But it is such a great conversation. And so, with that, let's go to my interview with Jennifer.

Jennie: Hi, Jennifer. Thank you so much for being here today.

Jennifer: Great to be here.

Jennie: I'm so excited to talk about all things PEPFAR. It has been way too long since we've talked about it on the podcast. But before we get into that, maybe would you like to take a second and introduce yourself?

Jennifer: Great, yeah, for sure. I'm Jennifer Sherwood. I am the director of research in amfAR's Public Policy Office, which is the Foundation for AIDS research, based right here in Washington, DC.

Jennie: Yeah, you are very close. We live in a similar neighborhood.

Jennifer: Very close, yeah, right in the action.

Jennie: Yeah.

Jennie: Okay, so as I mentioned at the top, we have not talked about PEPFAR a ton on the podcast. So, it feels like before we get into what's currently happening and what your newest research showed, we should probably start there. Like, what is PEPFAR?

Jennifer: Yeah, great, yeah. And I should say that I'm a big PEPFAR fan. I have been at amfAR for over a decade, and one of our key functions is to, in our policy office, is to defend the US investment in HIV, try to make it as impactful as possible, as evidence-based as possible. And I think, you know, over the years I've been really proud of the work that it has done. But, you know, just to just some brief background, PEPFAR began in, it stands for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. It actually was a Republican program. It was a Bush program. It started in 2003. And it is the largest bilateral investment in any single disease. So that means country to country. So, the US government's big country investment in any single disease is HIV. It's over $5 billion. You know, I think what makes PEPFAR special is that it's not just a granting, it's not just a pot of money. It also comes with expertise and over the years has really been responsive to changing new evidence, expanding its funding portfolio, and really has saved millions of lives over the years.

Jennie: Yeah, it has been a monumental success of a program. I think maybe there's like a couple things we should pull out that I think we're gonna be talking about later, but maybe we should take a minute to define up top. And please also if there are others that I'm missing, let me know. But I think one of the ones that we'll probably talk about quite a bit is "key populations," or sometimes we'll still hear "key pops." So, what do we mean when we talk about key populations?

Jennifer: Yeah, great. And public health is just teeming with all of these um these like very specific lingo. So, absolutely. "Key populations" refers to populations who are at high risk of HIV, of acquiring HIV, but additionally are experiencing social or structural barriers to care. And so, these are people living under criminalized settings. So, we often refer to key populations as the core group are sex workers, people who sell sex, men who have sex with men, or other gay and bisexual men, transgender people and women, and people who use or inject drugs. Yeah, are sort of the big four, but there's you know, there's some conversations about who else should be in that group also.

Jennie: I'm trying to think if there's anything, like I feel like that was a big one that was probably gonna come up as we got talking. I'm trying to think if there's anything else we should think of, like up top.

Jennifer: I think we can define as we go, maybe, but it's hard to think of the of the ones since they're so steeping. I know, right? My brain, like, froze. Yeah. But I'll certainly try to be mindful.

Jennie: As it comes up, I'll be like, hey, can we like-

Jennie: Yeah. [chuckles]

Jennie: Perfect. So, we know that PEPFAR is a huge program, very successful, and then came the second Trump administration and huge sweeping changes that happened at the beginning. So, what happened at the beginning of this new administration?

Jennifer: Yeah, 2025 was an extremely difficult year. I actually remember where I was in the beginning of 2025. I was at a funders’ summit with some other private philanthropists, and the news started hitting as we were sitting in the room, first with the stop work order and the freeze, and you could really you could really feel the sentiment in the room drop as you saw these activists and philanthropists who have been working in this space for so long see just feel the backslides that are happening. And so, yeah, 2025, just in brief, early in 2025, it was announced that no, that there would be a pause on new money that would be going out into the into the field for HIV, for actually, you know, foreign aid in general, until the administration could do a review of all of that money. They wanted to, you know, the party line and what was said was that they wanted to make sure that it aligned with the Trump administration's stated goals. This was also coupled with the announcement of a stop work order. So, it wasn't only that new money couldn't flow onto the field, it was that actual current grants that were in the field and people had the money in their bank accounts, they were not allowed to spend it on services. They, and that is extremely deadly. We did a little back of the envelope calculation at the time to say what each day meant in terms of lives lost, in terms of services halted. Those are people who might be going to clinics and no longer could find medications, contraception, etc., because that money was and that services were frozen. Soon after the stop work order was announced, they also announced a waiver for PEPFAR saying that for specific life-saving services and programs for which PEPFAR was included, money could continue to flow. But with that waiver came really specific restrictions. And you know, we did some research right after the waiver was announced to say, like, have you know, among implementing partners asking, have you applied for a waiver? or did this help? And largely people were still very confused, money was not still flowing, the disruptions were clearly still in the field, despite what I think you might read in the news, that things were okay and that the waiver had protected PEPFAR as a whole. And as I was talking, I actually did note that I said implementing partners, which might be a pretty niche term, also, which you know, just to say these are organizations that receive funding to implement the PEPFAR program. They can receive it directly from the US government, and then they often sub it out to other partners.

Jennie: So yeah, it's one of those things that, like, thinking about when that happened, it was so sudden. And you know, I think all of us were planning for all of the things that could happen during the administration, and I don't think anybody thought anywhere that they would go so big so fast. Yeah, I think that we were prepared for lots of really bad things, but not the complete elimination of USAID, right? Like that was not something that people were thinking about and planning for. And so, people didn't like implementing partners, people on the ground, like, all of a sudden they didn't have money tomorrow today. Like, that is huge and has devastating impacts.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I think you're touching on exactly a problem with the advocacy community in general is that we are really used to needing to defend upcoming allocations and spending for next year, which historically that's been the fight is yeah, you know, we need to start preparing now for FY27 and thinking about what's gonna happen. But they just pulled the rug out from underneath us. The money that we had already fought for last year, you know, and had and had won last year was now frozen. And we were like, can they do that? We felt very behind in terms of the advocacy playbook. We weren't prepared.

Jennie: Okay, so you all just released an amazing new report looking at what were the impacts of this funding freeze and the and the stop work orders and all the things. So, what are what did you see when you did the survey?

Jennifer: This was a really big global effort. What we did was we attempted to survey every single PEPFAR implementing partner. And we do have the list of all of those partners, the prime partners, the ones that get money directly from the US government. And so, we worked to find emails for all these organizations, tried to get the survey out to everyone. It was certainly a monumental task because you know it feels max comparatively, compared to when we did this type of research in previous years on the global gag rule, which was difficult and we had to get people to trust us to talk to us. This time we had the additional challenge of a lot of these organizations having been closed or having staff been terminated, so a lot of bounce backs from these emails, you know. So, trying to figure out what is happening to a system that is currently restricting or collapsing was a really big research challenge. So, you know, against sort of that backdrop, I am proud of the work that we were able to do, which was to reach about 23% of implementing partners. This was across 46 different countries, and so we got 166 responses, and you know, that might seem small, but actually each response is a whole organization. So, we're really measuring what that whole organization was doing at the country level. So, I think you know, it's still really impactful work. And yeah, we sent out an electronic survey to these folks, and we asked a lot of things. We asked about what of their grants had been terminated, what was still active, what they're hearing about the new US policies, what they have done in response to those policies, what services they've stopped or altered. We really went deep. So, I'm happy to give some top lines of what we found or go into any of those findings if that's-

Jennie: Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Jennie: Let's go ahead and do some top lines.

Jennifer: Yeah, and just to say we have this full report, and I'm really you know happy to share too as on our website. So, yeah, for me there was, I mean, there was a lot of a lot of big and important findings. One was that nearly 80% of the organizations that we surveyed had a grant that was terminated or delayed. So, these cuts were reaching like everyone, you know, and I think that that's important to say it wasn't just a few folks who were who were impacted. Because of those cuts, we documented over 1,700 site closures. And this could be sites within public health facilities, private facilities, mobile clinics, or drop-in centers. And for me, this was really important to document. And just to say this is among only 23% of the implementing partners, so to see really that. It's so many, it really is so many, and what that can mean for delivery of services is, you know, can be catastrophic. And I do think about the drop-in centers specifically, which are sort of one-stop shop models to reach key populations and often bring friendlier services in contexts where these folks are criminalized and really can't access services well at a public health facility. So, a closure of that clinic uh or that drop-in center can mean the loss of care. It doesn't necessarily mean that that person could just transfer and find quality care in another location. So, putting some of those numbers out there, I think were important.

Jennie: Yeah, I'm really glad you raised that because I think that's something that people in the US, like, don't necessarily appreciate of these centers. It doesn't mean that you just are going the next town over or even the next couple towns. Like, this may mean the absolute loss of a safe facility for you to go to get trusted information, and that has the potential to have really devastating consequences.

Jennifer: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a really important point when we're talking about global health, is that you might have one clinic that serves a whole community. You don't always have deep networks of service delivery. You have one place you can go, and that's for all of your health care. So, you know, closures matter a lot in this context. And I will say too, one I think an important note on this is that we found that the closures, site closures, and grant terminations were disproportionately impacting locally based organizations comparatively to big global international organizations. So, groups or you know, organizations that were based in the country where they're delivering the services, were more likely to have a terminated grant or to have to close a site. And that's really important because the government, the US government itself, has said we want to shift away from funding international organizations. We want to make sure that we're funding local groups, that's more sustainable, we want the country to lead. And that's not what happened. And it’s important to have these kinds of numbers because, in fact, we found exactly the opposite: that these policies are funneling money into more international NGOs and away from some of the local, locally based NGOs. And so, that’s not a way to build a more sustainable global health infrastructure.

Jennie: Yeah, it makes me think of when during the first Trump administration, they expanded the global gag rule to include like all of health, and after all of the Obama administration working to like make sure that the health funding streams were like integrated, and so you could have this one-shop health center where you could go and get all of your health care needs instead of having to go here to get this service and there to get that service. And then the new global gag rule came in, and it was like, oh, you also do this, uh the whole stream of funding is gone.

Jennifer: That's right, yeah. And you know, not to get too sidetracked on those types of policies, but I think it's super important because those types of policies are not just a restriction on what you can do with them with US money. It's well, if you take US money as an organization, your whole organization is impacted, and you have to, you know, attest that you won't be delivering certain types of services even with non-US money. And so, and that's very similar and actually is what happened this time around with the gag rule and also other policies which are ideological in nature and restricting the types of things you can say and do as a whole.

Jennie: Okay, let's get through a little more top line and then we'll get to the new iterations of gag, because they have like some particularly pernicious things around HIV work that I think will have impacts.

Jennifer: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so you know, I think some other big top lines are that is that all we found that really all parts of the program were impacted, but some were impacted more than others. So, I think that one of the myths that's sort of floating around around PEPFAR is that, oh, well, like the treatment program is still running, you know, some of the parts of the program that we tried to protect are still running. And we found that even care and treatment programs were impacted. We saw reductions in organizations' ability to deliver treatment. PMTCT with the prevention of mother-to-child transmission or vertical transmission was also impacted. We saw that I think 63% of the implementing partners who we spoke to said that we have disruptions to our PMTCT programs, and 22% said we've stopped this completely and entirely. So, you know, these were programs that were meant to be actually protected, that were meant to continue. Those were impacted, you know, in serious ways too. And it really speaks to this point of: you can't just cancel certain things and certain grants of the global health infrastructure and expect that everything can keep going. If you terminate staff, those weren't just staff who did one thing. They also provided pregnant women care, you know, and so you really, you know, you can't do what you think you can do. But the real sad story and the big top lines for what programs were most impacted was the key population and prevention programming. We saw just decimation of these. You know, while no program area was safe, these programs were really, really impacted. Like 90% of our sample, over 90%, said that we have disruptions to our key population programs. And we really saw that almost universally. And so, it was, you know, I think, you know, it was difficult to see how this was being played out because not only were organizations responding to funding cuts and terminations and grants that mentioned the word gender or said key populations were more at risk of being terminated. That was happening in addition to new policies which were explicitly trying to restrict funding from trans people. And so, this is sort of happening against the backdrop of funding restrictions, and so and so folks are doing sort of anything they think the US government would want so they could keep money in some way, and that often meant termination of services for LGBT people, for trans people, for key populations, and that was very strongly documented in the in the survey.

Jennie: I remember when you came and presented this at a coalition meeting, I was at, like all of the numbers were terrible and bad, but like my jaw hit the floor with some of the prevention stuff and key population stuff. Like, I remember there was like condoms and lube, like was like 90%. Like that is like such a key part of HIV prevention. It blew my mind to see that number.

Jennifer: Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, in addition to the survey, we looked at the money, like actually, where are the expenditures by program area slashed the most? And not surprisingly, it lined up very closely with our survey. We're seeing that cuts equal impact. And the number you're citing was a shocking one for me too, which was that there was a 93% reduction in condom and lube expenditures by the US government between 2024 and 2025, which is a I mean, it's a key and necessary in the backbone service of HIV prevention, family planning, you know, contraception, STI reduction, et cetera. So, it was shocking to see.

Jennie: Okay, so we have all of that, and then we have these new terrible expansions to the global guy rule, and we're not gonna have time to do a deep dive into that. So, y'all, if you want to know more, we did an episode with Caitlin Horrigan and Beirne Roose-Snyder. We will have links to that in the show notes if you want a deeper dive into it. But we'll do just a really quick, like, we had the huge, the big expansion, which expanded from just covering family planning funding to all of global health. And then this year also expanded uh around like LGBTQ and DEI specific, which again perfect storm for like terrible HIV program impacts. So, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I think your survey wouldn't have captured all of that quite yet, but also there were executive orders that started that ball rolling a little bit. So maybe some.

Jennifer: Yeah, because all of this was happening at once--the funding cuts, the policies.

Jennie: You can't separate it.

Jennifer: Yeah, it certainly, it felt- if it was confusing for us, if you can only imagine how confusing it is for someone on the ground getting all of these wild emails from different funders, not knowing what it means, the language not being clear, you know. So, we did capture some impacts, I think which would be specifically from the policy changes. But yes, it was sort of early in their announcements, a lot of chaos was happening, so we don't exactly know what's causing what. But we did document, you know, we asked folks, like, you know, what are you hearing about around the policies which were related to reproductive health restrictions and DEI or diversity, equity, inclusion programming, which it's very difficult to even talk about what these really would mean in a global context. And I think, you know, so I'm not being Intentionally so, right? Intentionally obtuse here. I, you know, it's very confusing, and I and I think intentionally so. So, folks told us, organizations told us that they had heard about these new executive orders and that in response they were stopping LGBT programming or LGBT outreach. They had decided that, you know, they didn't want to work with LGBT organizations anymore just to try to be safe. They had stopped gender-based violence programming because it had the word gender in it. There were examples that they reported to us that they were told that they had to stop harm reduction services, especially for sex workers or for people who use drugs. So, in these documents it's hard to know what was said versus what was interpreted. But as a researcher, it doesn't really matter, you know, the impacts of how people are restricting their services, whether or not it's how they understood the policies to be okay. So, it's sort of like, well, was that what actually was said? Maybe not, I don't know, but the important part of documenting the human impact of that is what is actually being interpreted on the ground. And it was, you know, there were certain examples of things that are very very far from what we would even, you know, what we would expect to see, just based on like the letter of the law, you know, but people are scared and they're over implementing and it's confusing. So, we certainly found lots of examples like that.

Jennie: It's just so devastating because thinking of those key populations, like PEPFAR was a trusted partner, like those implementers were trusted partners, and so to hear that they have decided to implement and not serve those communities anymore is a break of trust with those communities. So, even if a light switch were to be flipped with a new administration or something and all the funding were to start flowing again, and everything supposedly was maybe gonna go back to normal, like those people may not come back because they no longer trust those providers to provide them with the services and leave them out in the cold trying to find providers, but also thinking through like maybe that provider closed, that they don't just like suddenly reopen and just the like layers of like harm and devastation that are happening is kind of mind-boggling.

Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, certainly the US is not currently seen as a reliable partner, and that is clearer and clearer to me as I continue to work and live in these spaces. The impacts are beyond the funding terminations and the loss of services in life. They also include the sort of anti-American sentiment, feeling like what happened was cruel. Yeah. And feeling like if there's any other option besides working with the US going forward, they would like to take it.

Jennie: Okay. So, that's enough on like all of the harm, right? It is bad.

Jennifer: I know, I know. I wish I had some good news out there too. Maybe let's do that first.

Jennie: What good news are you seeing? And maybe we'll just merge it together with like how what can we do to like I guess fixes like early, right? Like, unless we can magically make them the administration change their mind. Maybe we can think a little bit, maybe in terms of harm reduction. What are some things that need to happen right now?

Jennifer: Yes, and there are good things. You know, I don't mean to be a fully bad story because there are good things that are happening, there are shifts in the landscape, the global health landscape, I think that are promising and that we should hold on to and grow. So, I think some good news is that there is an attempt to do some gap filling by national governments themselves and by philanthropic donors. We asked organizations: were you able to secure more any other additional funding after you lost? Some did; not a non-zero number did secure other funding. Most of that was from US philanthropic organizations. Very few, like less than 2%, said that it was enough to make up the US money. But there are some indications that, you know, that that money is that philanthropic orgs are responding, that national governments are responding. I think, you know, the question remains: are national governments able to fill the types of holes that we're seeing for key populations specifically for adolescent girls and young women, you know, I think they might be more likely to be able to keep their facility-based treatment programs alive and running versus the really deep community outreach and work, which you really need to be working with key populations to deliver. So, you know, I think that remains to be seen. But as we are thinking about how to protect the HIV response going forward, you know, we can lean into government, national government partners to take over treatment programs or to do what they can do. We can lean into philanthropic organizations or others to really do the key populations work and then slowly try to, you know, build that bridge between national government and community, which is not always easy or safe. But you know, I think there's examples of where that's happening. Not every country is hostile and not every country's friendly. It's all a nuance, you know. So, I think there's some individual good stories there. And the other good news I think is that Congress, you know, the US Congress continues to appropriate money for HIV. I mean, we there's money there. It's just that it's being locked in some of these government-to-government negotiations. The administration is holding on to funds, you know, that were appropriated by Congress but are not moving. So, you know, in terms of who should be mad, it should be the US taxpayer too, who gave this money and is now being held up and is not going for the intended purpose. So, I think I can see tides shifting. I can see more congressional leaders stepping up and talking about the need to move the funds, the need to protect this global health program for lots of reasons. And so, I think there’s some political wins and movement that's happening. And that’s not just the US, you know. I think a lot of other countries have, you know, are starting to see how they can play a role moving forward.

Jennie: Okay. I always like to end by focusing on: what can the audience do? So how can the audience get involved at this moment?

Jennifer: I think that HIV has been with us for so long now in comparison to some of the other global health and viral emergencies that we've had in the past decade. COVID, Ebola, Marburg, the things that are sort of emerging and grabbing attention. I think that not forgetting and really understanding that HIV is still the number one killer of women of reproductive age on the continent of Africa, it's still a public health threat, an emergency. And we have done so much to combat it. The scientific advances in the HIV world have been incredible from you know new prevention drugs, new antiretrovirals, and that has really been that has really been an American investment, a lot, you know, many others, but like we've put a lot of time and money into this, and it shows. And if we let this moment slip past us, we will see viral re-rounds in places where we're close to winning. So, I think that staying informed about what's happening around HIV, around global HIV, is super important. And then, we all have, well, I live in DC, but most of us have Congressional representation and senators and who care about your voice. And we, you know, I think that if you're engaged with your politicians, bringing up HIV and wanting them to support global and domestic funding for HIV as part of our continued work around the world is important. So, I think those are some of the direct conversations that you can have, you know, because a lot of the people who are in Congress now weren't here for the beginning of PEPFAR. They weren't here in the '80s and '90s when things were different with the HIV prospects and life expectancy and things. And so, I think reminding them too that this is a real threat and an opportunity for a huge global public health win as we get to, as we get to move and implement all the scientific advances that we've made in the past couple decades into practice.

Jennie: Jennifer, thank you so much. It was so good to end with a little bit of hope after kind of a bleak conversation about the impacts of the cut. So, thank you for being here.

Jennifer: Thank you so much. I really had a great time talking to you, and congrats on this work. And really, I was listening to some of the other episodes before I came on, and I was just thinking what an important, important platform this is. So, I was so happy to be a part of it.

Jennie: Oh, thank you.

Jennie: Okay, y'all. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jennifer. Again, it feels weird to say enjoyed since it is such a bleak conversation, but she did mention that she was seeing some signs of hope. So, let's hold on to that. And I will see everybody next week. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com, or you can find us on social media. We're at rePROs Fight Back on Facebook and Twitter, or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and want to make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you want to make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com.