"In 1987 Reagan appointed a presidential commission on the epidemic, composed of cronies and cranks ‘whose lack of experience was matched by their reckless beliefs’, France writes: it included a New York cardinal, a supporter of quarantine laws for PWAs, and a proponent of the toilet seat theory. When, against the odds, and thanks to the unforeseen (even by him) leadership of James Watkins, a retired admiral, the commission produced a wide-ranging report of 576 recommendations, one of which was to triple the federal budget to $20 billion (‘seven tenths of 1 per cent of the defence budget’), Reagan ignored it."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague