Wednesday, 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.