FAUCI DIARY ARCHIVE — Wednesday, May 29, 2002
https://faucisdiary.com/diary/2002-05-29

Text below is verbatim from the released PDFs, with the original line breaks.
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DIARY ENTRY — Wednesday, May 29, 2002
Source: Diary Prequel, p. 46 of 2026.07.27_Diary-Prequel-.pdf
Words: 300
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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.