Washington

When President George W. Bush announced in May that the United States would inject $200 million into a global fund for fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, he boasted that the contribution would be “in addition to the billions we spend on research”.

But a month later, with rather less fanfare, addition became subtraction. Bush wrote to Congress last month suggesting that part of his original commitment should be paid for by cutting $95 million from next year's funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

According to a memo to Bush from Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, the transfer would involve a $25-million tap on the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which supports much of the NIH's AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis research portfolio. The other $70 million would be removed from the administration's plan to spend $306 million on building and improving the NIH's research facilities.

AIDS activists reacted indignantly to the proposed transfer. “The whole point of this fund is to create a new source of money for battling those three diseases, not to rob Peter to pay Paul,” says Alexis Schuler of the advocacy group AIDS Action.

A spokesman for the NIH says it was “too early to tell” how the White House proposal would affect individual construction projects or the details of the NIAID's budget.

But sources in both the House of Representatives and the Senate say that Congress is unlikely to accept the idea of money for the new fund being transferred from the NIH. One reason for the likely rejection is that the administration has already sought to use the bulging NIH budget to bankroll other health-related programmes worth $460 million.