It was a startling, almost unbelievable, allegation. It turned out to be untrue.
On June 25, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told a Senate committee that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, had spent $9.3 million “to advise Russian doctors on how to perform abortions and gender analysis.”
His statements had immediate consequences for the committee’s vote and had the potential to create long-term damage to PEPFAR, a program that has long had bipartisan support and has been estimated to have saved 26 million lives since President George W. Bush started it in 2003.
PEPFAR has not operated in Russia since 2012, when President Vladimir Putin kicked the United States Agency for International Development out of the country. U.S. law prohibits the use of any federal funds to pay for abortions. Funding abortions through PEPFAR would imply not just waste, but serious crimes or negligence, or both.