For a party with such distrust in the mainstream media, Republicans certainly put a lot of stock in the headlines about PEPFAR. While thousands of people would most certainly not die from the targeted cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Senate Republicans are determined to keep throwing taxpayer dollars at the Democrats’ woke programs in the name of “foreign aid.”

In a blow to Donald Trump’s goal to end government bloat and abuse, moderate senators — led by Susan Collins (R-Maine) — threw a tantrum over the White House’s plan to shave a fraction ($400 million) of PEPFAR’s annual $7.1 billion bucket without ever reading what the cuts actually were. The casualties weren’t life-saving care, treatment, education, and training, as administration officials repeatedly tried to point out. They were course corrections from Joe Biden’s outrageous African expansion into radical LGBT and abortion advocacy.

And yet, Collins and company, desperate for the approval they’ll never get from the press, went to the mat, demanding that any cuts to PEPFAR — even quite reasonable ones that eliminated gross corruption and waste — be excluded. Thanks to the GOP, the world’s infected countries can resume their pastry cooking classes for male prostitutes, their dance focus groups, and fighting for lesbian justice — over the objections of the very countries they’re serving!

“Susan Collins was very vocal against [the cuts]” at Tuesday’s closed-door lunch with White House Budget Director Russ Vought, an anonymous attendee told Politico. “I don’t think you can win her over.” By the end, the fight had gone out of Trump’s OMB chief. “We’re fine with the adjustments,” he conceded to the press.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) saw the entire package hitting the rocks right before Friday’s deadline and decided to force the issue. “There was a lot of interest among our members in doing something on the PEPFAR issue,” he explained, “and so, that’s reflected in the substitute [amendment]. … We hope that if we can get this across the finish line in the Senate and that the House would accept that one small modification.”

Senior administration officials had done their best to shoot down the global misinformation campaign from celebrities, the Left, liberal media, and even the church, reminding everyone that “[l]imited program cuts targeted LGBTQ education and capacity building — not core life-saving care.” And while some conservatives urged Republicans to stop listening to Bono and start listening to Africans, they clung stubbornly — and inexplicably — to the Left’s pet projects.

“We’ve got some weak knees up here,” Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) shook his head. “The big picture to me is that we’re $37 trillion in debt, and we have an opportunity to start walking away [from] some of that,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch” when news broke about the change. “President Trump gave us $9.4 billion [in cuts]. I’m horribly disappointed to see that we’re only going to cut $9 billion of this,” the physician lamented. “… But to your point, there was mission creep [with] what they were doing with that money. Suddenly, [it] was funding abortions. … They were funding LGBTQ-type programs as well. I wanted that all cut.”

Unfortunately, he and his fellow conservatives lost. Look, Marshall insisted, “I have all the compassion in the world for people with AIDS. I want to do everything we can to help those folks. But again, we’re already giving them $7 billion a year, and we wanted to cut out some of this waste, fraud, abuse, as we just described.”

The reality is, Perkins explained, PEPFAR has been around for almost 25 years, and it’s ballooned to 330% of its original cost. “Five percent is all President Trump was asking to be cut from this. And it’s not in the direct aid of the drugs and the essential resources needed to treat AIDS. [These are], as you pointed out, frivolous, wasteful programs.” And even if, Marshall interjected, you were determined to spend that $400 million in these countries, there are a lot better ways to do it. “The poor kids are dying because they don’t have clean water. [That] would be a better use of this money. So I just think that sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Even more shocking — to Perkins and others — is that it’s Senate Republicans, not Democrats, clinging to this expensive, taxpayer-funded garbage. “[People] need to look at the track record of PEPFAR,” he urged. “And we actually have documents on that. … It got really, really off track during the Obama years and then the Biden years,” he explained, before adding, “A lot of Christians are claiming, ‘Oh, this is the compassionate thing to do.’ No, it’s not [compassionate] to fund abortion,” the FRC president insisted. “To keep a program that’s $7 billion a year that promotes most values that are antithetical to biblical teaching? That’s not Christian. That’s not compassionate.”

If they think this will magically put them in the press’s good graces, they’re mistaken. “My sense on this,” Perkins reflected, “is that it’s really not the substance” of PEPFAR they’re trying to save. It’s themselves. “It’s the fear that Democrats are going to take this and run with it against some Republicans, saying they cut AIDS funding. And it doesn’t matter that it’s being used for something totally opposite. That’s not the point. The point is they’re afraid that it will be used against them politically,” he observed.

Marshall nodded, pointing to the futility of that strategy. “The Left is going to lie about us no matter what. … [And] the Left is going to twist it. They’ve lost their mind up here … [but] your listeners know the truth.” He paused. “America is much smarter than what the national media gives them credit for.”

In other words, when Susan Collins holds Trump’s spending cuts hostage to keep Biden’s woke programs — and then votes against the package anyway — people notice. They don’t see a woman who cares about AIDS; they see a politician exploiting taxpayers.

What she and others lack, Marshall vents, “It’s called courage. It’s called doing the right thing.” For now, conservatives can only hope that Trump will keep charging ahead to make DOGE’s reforms permanent. “I’m frustrated about it,” Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) admitted about the changes to the bill. “It’s already a drop in the bucket. We’re making it even smaller,” he said regretfully. “And my request to the White House is to quickly send us the next one.” 

But after this, who trusts Republicans to have the stomach to pass it?