In the first instance, it is important to remember that the Mexico City Policy/Global Gag Rule, which prohibits U.S. family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) assistance from being provided to foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provide abortion services or counsel, refer, or lobby on abortion with non-U.S. funds, is solely an executive branch policy. The Global Gag Rule has been a ping pong ball that has bounced back and forth depending on who was in the White House. President George W. Bush announced the reinstatement of these restrictions, which were in effect during the Reagan and Bush administrations in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, on his second day in office, merely by issuing a "presidential memorandum" to the Administrator of the Agency for International Development. President Clinton had rescinded the policy on one of his first days of his term in 1993 by issuing a similar memorandum. The next President could choose either course of action -- leave in place or rescind. 

Whether or not the United States will provide a contribution to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is dependent upon and an example of the second type of leverage that the President can exert on FP/RH policymaking -- the ability to interpret the law. For the last seven years, President Bush has withheld the U.S. contribution to UNFPA by employing an overly broad interpretation of the so-called Kemp-Kasten amendment (first attached to annual appropriations bills in 1985), which prohibits funding to any organization that "supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization," and by pointing to the presence of a UNFPA country program in China, where human rights abuses have occurred, as grounds for denying funding. Conversely, the lawyers in President Clinton's State Department employed a different and more narrow and proper interpretation of the statute to allow U.S. funds to flow to UNFPA during his tenure. Whether or not the next President wants to fund UNFPA will determine how the Kemp-Kasten amendment is interpreted and whether the United States will rejoin the more than 180 nations that now contribute to UNFPA. 

(The next President might go even further by expanding the application of the Kemp-Kasten amendment, following through on the threat of the Bush administration to defund other organizations working in China with the same Chinese government institutions which they have judged to be the enforcers of the "one-child" policy.) 

The President has wide discretion in the conduct of foreign policy. So unless Congress explicitly prohibits or restricts something, the President enjoys broad latitude in choosing how to implement legislative directives and in establishing policy guidance for the programs the executive branch administers. This separation of powers will enable the next President to choose how to interpret and implement various reproductive health-related provisions contained in the recently-passed reauthorization of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Such provisions include the anti-prostitution pledge requirement and abstinence funding reporting requirement as well as whether the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator will explore ways to better integrate FP/RH activities into HIV prevention programs, such as prevention-of-mother-to-child transmission and voluntary counseling and testing.

As the old aphorism goes, "The President proposes, Congress disposes." On the question of funding for FP/RH programs, the President can also exert considerable influence over the amount appropriated through the request level in his annual federal budget proposal, but ultimately Congress has the power of the purse. Nevertheless, a low request from the President such as the 25 and 29 percent cuts to FP/RH proposed by President Bush in the last two fiscal years, taxes the ability of family planning champions (especially the chairs of the House and Senate State-foreign operations appropriations subcommittees) to find additional funding and to balance many important competing priorities within a limited overall budget ceiling within which they have to work.

Bottom line, whether it is policymaking or funding for U.S. involvement in family planning and reproductive health programs around the world, the President matters -- and matters greatly.

Originally published at RH Reality Check.