Remember all the hoopla over the big cut in anti-terror grant money for NY budgeted by the DHS?  Of course you do, it happened only last week!

But do you remember when, in 1994, the federal governement seriously cut back on AIDS research grants to New York City?  Wasn't a "thinking" Democrat in the White House then?

New York City is losing three of its four community-based clinical trials, a decision that is prompting outrage here and igniting a debate on whether there is a right to participate in clinical trials.

The Federal Government, which pays for the research, has decided to place only one of its 16 programs in New York, the city in the United States with the most people with AIDS. Within three years, the number of New York patients being treated in the trials will decline to 534, from 2,130.

Officials at the National Institutes of Health say their motive was scientific, to pick the best research projects. But New York community groups and politicians, including Senators Daniel P. Moynihan and Alfonse M. D'Amato and Representative Charles B. Rangel, are fighting the shift, protesting that a city with such a high proportion of AIDS patients should have a commensurately high proportion of the research dollars.

It's deja vu all over again.