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Following 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the U.S. government enlisted the public health industry in homeland security and defense, bringing weapons like disease surveillance and life science research to the war against terrorism. As Congress poured out funding for bioterrorism preparedness, agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rearranged themselves around new logics of biosecurity. In the decade after 9/11, CDC brought its surveillance, science, and communication practices to bear on questions of national security, and became a federal organizing agency for emergency response and pharmaceutical stockpile stewardship. The political transformations at the CDC exemplify how bioterrorism changed the role of government in disease management, along with the specific work of the nation’s largest public health agency.

This chapter describes the work of the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention (NTFAP), an organization that grew out of the work of the National Association of Black and White Men Together, and Reggie Williams, its charismatic leader. NTFAP was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1988, and produced some of the earliest knowledge about Black gay men’s sexual practices in the age of AIDS through a nationwide survey that it conducted under the auspices of the CDC grant. At the local level, in San Francisco, the NTFAP also forged a multicultural model of AIDS prevention and safer sex education, situating Black gay men within the broader category of “gay men of color.” However, NTFAP’s federal funding also opened it up to public scrutiny, as when the group was targeted by conservative pundits and politicians for its sexually explicit approach to AIDS prevention.

Politics includes issues of varying complexity. By complex, I mean issues that have multiple and possibly interrelated attributes. While it is arguable that all issues have multiple parts, I use the notion of issue complexity to draw attention to the fact that some issues have so many attributes that educators must make decisions about which parts to emphasize. Consider, for example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the United States passed in 2010. If you haven’t heard of this bill, you may know it by another moniker: “Obamacare.” One measure of this law’s complexity is its length. It is 906 pages long. The law’s table of contents alone is nearly 12 pages. At 906 pages, and given its frequent use of technical language, it is likely that few citizens, including many candidates for office, are knowledgeable about every part of it. It is inevitable that many, and perhaps most, of the people who express public opinions on this issue base their arguments on knowledge of only a few of the law’s many attributes. (This fact, by the way, does not stop people from labeling as “ignorant” others who disagree with them about this law.) In all such cases, experts, advocates, and interested citizens encourage their audiences to weigh certain attributes of the law more (or less) than others when making decisions about it. Insights from previous chapters can help educators make choices about which of a policy’s or candidate’s many multiple attributes to emphasize when attempting to improve others’ knowledge and competence. From chapter 5, for example, we know that just because an issue is complex, it does not mean that an audience’s decision task is complex. Suppose that the task is whether to vote for a specific candidate for office who promises to defeat the healthcare law in its entirety or a candidate who makes the opposite promise. Suppose that we have consulted the relevant range of values and from that consultation we can define a competent choice in the election as the vote that a person would cast if they understood a specific and large set of facts about the law.