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WASHINGTON – In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to non-profit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting.
More than $1 million in AIDS money went to a housing group whose ailing boarders sometimes struggled without electricity, gas or food. A supervisor said she was ordered to create records for ghost employees.
About $400,000 was paid to a non-profit organization launched by a man who once ran one of the dstrict’s largest cocaine rings, for a promised job-training center that has never opened.
More than $500,000 was earmarked for a housing program whose executive director had a string of convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. After the D.C. Inspector General’s Office could find no evidence that he was operating an AIDS non-profit group, the city terminated the grant but never sought repayment.
All told, the Health Department’s HIV/AIDS Administration awarded more than $25 million from 2004 to 2008 to non-profit agencies marked by questionable spending, a lack of clients, or lapses in record-keeping and care, a 10-month Washington Post investigation found. Many of the groups have since closed or are no longer providing AIDS services.
Across the city, the sick are suffering. More than 15,000 people have HIV or AIDS in the District, 3 percent of the population older than 12. For black men, the rate is more than double, at 6.5 percent – one of every 15 people.
The disease has spread so fast, to every corner of the capital, that health officials call it a “modern epidemic.” The District’s AIDS rate is higher than that of some countries in West Africa.
Twenty-five years ago, the District was on the forefront of the fight against the disease. City leaders created a government-funded AIDS office and began to pour tens of millions of dollars into a network of local groups that promised critical frontline support.
Early on, the District focused on white gay men in more affluent areas. In recent years, however, city officials have pushed to support community-based groups in poorer neighborhoods that had traditionally been underserved by AIDS agencies.
But the program morphed into something of a free-for-all among many non-profit groups, enabled by a city agency that routinely gave out money but failed to ensure the funds were used to help people with the disease.
The waste has spanned every arm of the HIV/AIDS Administration. As the steward of the city’s AIDS dollars, the agency receives about $100 million a year, largely from the federal government, for prevention, medical care, housing, case management and support services.
Much of the money goes to large medical clinics. From 2004 to 2008, about $16 million a year was divided among 90 small non-profit groups.
In all, one dollar of every three went to groups with identified deficiencies.
