Trump CDC Plans to Cut $600 Million in HIV, STI Funding … Only to Blue States

In the olden days, a corrupt Presidential administration would at least have had the good decency to make an effort in pretending that its reprisals against foes weren’t actually reprisals, but merely necessary actions that affected friend and foe alike. A past Republican or Democratic President would never have been able to get away with simply proclaiming that because they disliked their political opposition and the way states controlled by that opposition were run, that they would vindictively strip those red states or blue states of lifesaving medical program funding. The public outcry would have been intense; the calls of hypocrisy at least somewhat united. But that’s not the world we’re now living in. Now we’re living in a timeline where the Trump-era CDC simply announces it’s stripping $600 million from HIV and STI program funding, and that it’s taking the money exclusively from four blue states, and the American public and lawmakers are expected to be so hopelessly tethered to their partisan identities that half the country is supposed to simply cheer the move on. MAGA members of red states, cheering the disease prevention health services stripped from the MAGA members of blue states. Oh, you’re a Republican voter who lives in Illinois, Colorado, Minnesota or California, and think you should have access to local programs for sexually transmitted disease? Too bad; the President doesn’t care if you die from AIDS, because you have the poor fortune of living in the wrong state.

It’s a level of petty vindictiveness that quickly strips the spirit, but nothing new for this administration, given that they also like to play these types of games with issues as critical as disaster response at FEMA, likewise granting emergency declarations to red states and denying them to bigger and more expensive disasters in blue states. In this case, the states affected are some of the usual suspects in Trump’s crosshairs: California, Colorado, Illinois and poor Minnesota, which truly cannot catch a break. Yesterday, DHS announces that they’ll be ending their immigrant purge in Minneapolis in the hopes that Congressional Democrats won’t shut down DHS, and the next day they’re rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars in lost CDC funding to fight HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Great trade, yeah? Thankfully, a federal judge stepped in to temporarily block enforcement of the cuts, although there’s no guarantee that will prevent the loss of the funds.

The cuts are in the form of suspended grants to local public health agencies, hospitals, non-profit groups and universities in the states. In the past, the entities had used those funds to both study the spread of HIV and STIs, track outbreaks and provide pre-exposure prophylaxis to members of the community.

A federal judge in Illinois quickly issued a restraining order after the Trump administration slashed more than $600 million in CDC grants to four blue states. n.pr/4rgxxX4

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— NPR (@npr.org) Feb 13, 2026 at 1:26 PM

What is the administration’s rationale for trying to rescind medical funding only from blue states? Awww, bless you for thinking for even a moment that any coherent rationale would exist. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told ABC News only that the grants were terminated “because they do not reflect agency priorities,” while a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget claimed that the cuts were affecting states with “a history of fraud and mismanagement,” pulling out the magic “fraud” word this administration loves to use to steal social services from every American. So to recap: “Fraud and mismanagement” is only possible in blue states, and because it may exist, any Republican in those states at risk of HIV or a sexually transmitted disease does not deserve those services. Saving the lives of those MAGA voters would not “reflect agency priorities,” because there’s not enough of them in that state to deliver an electoral vote to Donald Trump. Minnesota Republicans, how does it feel to be told to get sick and die by your President’s CDC?

In terms of HIV specifically, this is of course not the first time that the Trump administration has already cut funding designated to fighting the disease. In March 2025, the National Institutes of Health canceled the funding for dozens of studies and HIV-related research grants. The administration has reportedly mulled simply eliminating the CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention entirely. Doing so would be a classic Republican case of “we’re doing well at reducing something, so clearly it doesn’t need funding anymore” reasoning.

The rate of annual HIV infection in the U.S. has indeed fallen by nearly 70% since the height of the HIV epidemic in the mid-1980s, a testament to the effectiveness of persistent messaging, preparation and early detection. Leave it to Trump and co. to see that kind of data and think that the response should be stopping our efforts, rather than continuing them. Given that they don’t care about the spread of sexually transmitted disease, I suppose they would probably approve of the poor planning at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics as well, which has apparently led to the Games completely running out of condoms.

“Getting people to engage in prevention work is some of the hardest work we do, but it is so meaningful, and we are on the precipice of truly transforming the way that prevention has happened,” said Matthew Rose, senior public policy advocate at Human Rights Campaign, to ABC News. “So we’ve done it in all the ways we’ve asked for. We created new technologies, we’ve done programmatic working efforts, we’ve drilled down into those most effective programming, and then they’re like, ‘No, let’s pull up all the roots.'”

The nakedly vindictive funding cuts will of course be challenged in court by state attorneys general in Illinois, California, Colorado and Minnesota, arguing that the cuts are obvious retaliation for the blue states daring to resist elements of the federal government’s attempted domination, especially when it comes to immigration enforcement.

“President Trump is resorting to a familiar playbook,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement. “He is using federal funding to compel states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda. Those efforts have all previously failed, and we expect that to happen once again.”

The Trump administration’s efforts may fail or succeed, but the bottom line will be more sick Americans, and more dead Americans, on both sides of the partisan aisle. If only our elected officials cared about that sort of thing.