Promise Made. Promise Kept.

A Story About Compassion.

Today is the birthday of one of my best and oldest friends - a human being with few peers. Let me tell you about him.

Six years ago in National Harbor, Md., at a resort and conference center on the banks of the Potomac, some 4,000 health-care professionals gathered for the Ryan White National Conference on HIV Care & Treatment. The three-day symposium was named in memory of the Indiana teenager who had died of autoimmune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) almost 30 years earlier.

Near the close of Day 3, leaders of the Health Resources and Service Agency (HRSA), one of eight divisions in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, paused the proceedings to present an HSS Lifetime Achievement award to a government worker who had spent three decades as a warrior on the front lines of a terrifying and little-understood epidemic. He had no idea the award was coming, and if he had, he probably would’ve tried to talk them out of it, or at least to low-key it. That’s usually how it is with everyday heroes. They don’t do what they do for glory, or a keepsake, and certainly not for the paycheck. They do it because they have a passion for their work, for making the world a little safer, better, kinder, more empathetic. That’s what the honored man, Steven Young, had spent his professional life doing, working in a variety of positions, the last of which was as director of HRSA’s Division of Metropolitan HIV Programs. He supervised a department of 30 people. Long before anybody had ever heard of the menace of DEI, Steven was the only white, heterosexual, married male in the entire division. He hired people who were smart and committed and hard-working. One of them was Seraphine Morgan, who worked with him for about a dozen years, before Steven’s retirement in 2019.

“Steven didn’t just have liberal compassion,” Morgan says. “He had something way beyond that - genuine care for poor people, addicted people, people who were in the street or people who were sick. His (daily mission) was to get the most help to the most people possible.”

You hear an awful lot of bleating these days about fraud and waste in the sprawling corridors of the federal government. No doubt that exists in some sectors, but Elon Musk and his marauding minions can’t seem to be bothered with taking the time to carefully analyze and assess where the inefficiencies exist. They are all about scorched earth.

Bloated bureaucracy? Employees mailing it in with impunity? Sure, let’s bulldoze entire agencies, and humiliate people on the way out the door.

But that’s neither a humane approach, nor a productive one. Put down your wood chipper for a minute, Elon, and pull up a chair. Let me tell you a bit about Steven Young’s days for his 30 years in the federal government.

Depart home: 5:45 a.m. Fifty-mile carpool ride. Get to desk at 7 a.m. Back home at 5 p.m. See his wife, coach his kids, help with homework. Dive into more work at night and on weekends. That was the routine from 1990 to 2019. Sixty-hour work weeks were the norm. Such was the culture of his entire division, according to Morgan. Steven wouldn’t change any of it, because look at the results.

“It was grueling but rewarding,” he says.

*

Ryan White was 13 years old when he contracted the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a blood transfusion, a procedure he required because he was a hemophiliac. He was diagnosed in December 1984 and was supposed to die within six months. Quite suddenly, a middle-school kid from Kokomo, Ind. became the poster child for a deadly disease with no known cure, one that until then was widely perceived to be limited to the gay community and drug addicts who shared needles.

Working for the New Jersey Dept. of Health at the time, Steven got a call one day from Dr. Jack Rutledge, the No. 2 man in the department statewide. Dr. Rutledge enlisted his help to launch a statewide HIV program with a focus on Newark and Jersey City, two of the communities that had been most ravaged by the virus. Steven didn’t know it, but Dr. Rutledge was dying of AIDS even as he worked to safeguard others. His last visit with Dr. Rutledge was at his apartment in New York City.

“Steve, please keep working on this because you’re making a difference,” Dr. Rutledge told him.

“I promised him I would,” Steven says.

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In August 1990, scarcely four months after Ryan White passed (a month before his high-school graduation), Congress, with bipartisan support, approved the Ryan White Care Act, which became the largest federally funded initiative to combat HIV and the terminal disease –AIDS – it inexorably led to. The effort could not begin soon enough. From 1981 through 1990, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported that almost 101,000 Americans had died from AIDS – almost one third of them in 1990 alone. By 1994, U.S. HIV-related deaths increased to almost 45,000. Being diagnosed with HIV was virtually a death sentence; it was the third leading cause of death among men between the ages of 25 to 44, and even more devastating in Black communities.

As bleak as things looked, the funding from the Ryan White Care Act quickly made a striking impact. Grants through HRSA powered programs that addressed a variety of pressing needs, providing medical services and follow-up care for uninsured and often impoverished people; immunization programs; organ transplants; and training regimens for doctors and nurses. Presiding over a division that had 52 metropolitan areas in its jurisdiction, Steven made it a point to visit nearly every location, forging partnerships and gaining important insights into how to best support local health officials.

“We got better over time reaching people in marginalized communities,” he says. “You have to meet people where they are.”

Combined with the introduction of several highly effective medications, the network of HIV prevention programs – on the local, state and federal levels – resulted in plummeting death rates and extended lives. Magic Johnson, who announced that he had HIV in 1991, has lived more years with the disease than without it. The collective forces, and the billions of dollars, that the Ryan White Care Act unleashed have stirred verifiable hope that you can have HIV and still have a life. Maybe even a long one. Indeed, just last December, HRSA announced that a record-breaking 90.6 percent of people receiving treatment through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program are virally suppressed, meaning that people with HIV who are taking their medication can no longer transmit HIV sexually, and can live longer and healthier lives.

That’s what makes this such a deeply troubling time for people like Steven Young and Seraphine Morgan. Just this week they watched in horror as 20,000 HHS employees were fired, grants were paused or eliminated altogether and the current administration’s assault on science and scientific research continued unabated. It was like watching something you’ve built and nurtured and poured your heart into get mutilated before your eyes.

“It’s despicable,” Steven Young says.

But Steven didn’t give in to despair or hopelessness in 30 years of fighting against HIV, and won’t now. He and his wife of 44 years, Margie, have joined the resistance against the deceitful, dark-hearted agenda that masquerades as our government now, lifted up by their sense of justice and humanity, and by the gratitude they have for all the good things in their lives, among them two wonderful adult children and three beautiful grandsons (No.4 is on the way). Margie and their son, Josh, were surprise attendees at the Ryan White Conference six years ago (Alicia Romig, their daughter, had a work conflict) when Steven was presented the U.S. Dept. of HHS Lifetime Achievement Award. Later, Josh Young wrote this on social media:

Very few humans can say they have devoted their life’s work to something. Even fewer can say they have for something impactful, important, and in which they truly believe. My father can, and because of him, the conversation is now about ENDING the HIV/AIDS epidemic once and for all. I was honored to stand beside 4,000 coworkers and countless more who are no longer with us to recognize my father. There is no one who deserves it more.”