WASHINGTON – The chief science officer for the US flagship HIV/AIDS programme left his role this week and criticised the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign assistance and what he said was its use of aid as leverage for US commercial interests.
President Donald Trump in 2025 dismantled the US Agency for International Development, which previously oversaw most foreign aid programmes, but officials said life-saving work mainly in developing African nations under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a bipartisan initiative created under George W. Bush’s presidency, would continue.
Associate Professor Mike Reid, a practising infectious disease physician who served as chief science officer for PEPFAR in the State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, said in a post on Substack on April 20 he had stayed in the job for the past 18 months in hopes of preserving at-risk programmes.
But he said funding for health programmes overseas was being used as leverage over developing countries, citing a New York Times report in March that said the State Department was considering withholding assistance to help people with HIV in Zambia to push the country to sign a favourable critical-minerals deal with the US.
“When access to treatment or prevention becomes entangled with access to critical minerals or geopolitical positioning, the work is no longer what it claims to be,” he wrote.
The work of global health was “inherently anti-fascist” and incompatible with the administration’s “authoritarian” domestic trajectory, he added.
The State Department, after seeing the post on April 20, told Prof Reid his employment was being ended immediately, he told Reuters in a phone interview on April 21.
Asked about Prof Reid’s post, the State Department did not respond to his specific criticisms. A department spokesperson said Prof Reid departed by mutual agreement after he “admitted he could no longer provide non-partisan scientific advice”.
“As in every administration, the president and his team set policy, and it is the duty of every person affiliated with the department to faithfully execute that policy,” the spokesperson said.
The State Department last week published data showing that the number of people being tested for HIV dropped sharply in 2025 amid interruptions to PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing HIV infections in 7.8 million babies born to HIV-infected mothers since its start in 2003.
The State Department spokesperson said Mr Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “building to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic as they champion the transformational work happening under the America First Global Health Strategy”, and noted that Prof Reid praised some parts of the Trump administration’s policy in his Substack post.
That referred to Prof Reid’s acknowledgment that the Trump administration’s strategy seeks to have poorer nations take ownership of the fight against HIV/AIDS and other diseases in their countries through bilateral agreements.
Prof Reid also wrote, however, that the US was doing so while reducing overall funding to those countries as US military spending has increased and as Mr Trump has launched a war with Iran.
Prof Reid told Reuters that moving funding to government health bodies instead of non-governmental organisations was the right approach, but that it was coming after many of the US officials who previously monitored for corruption and other misuse of funds had lost their jobs.
“I am concerned at the speed and the lack of oversight,” he said. REUTERS