Lame Excuse: Rubio Cuts Off Funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Lame Excuse: Rubio Cuts Off Funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Secretary Rubio’s decision on May 1st to invoke the Kemp-Kasten amendment and deny funding for UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, relies on a lazy and inaccurate justification. This decision will deny millions of women and girls access to voluntary family planning services, maternity care, post-rape services, and other life-saving care in more than 150 countries and territories that UNFPA assists, many of which are in crisis. Flagged later in this memo, the Trump administration added fuel to the funding crisis when it submitted a proposal to Congress early last week rescinding $9.4 billion in previously appropriated funds, including funds for family planning, reproductive health, and UN agencies. The impact of Republicans caving into Trump, approving these rescissions, and taking back already appropriated funds would be disastrous.

The Kemp-Kasten amendment  has been included in the annual State Department and foreign operations appropriations bills since 1985 and prohibits foreign aid funding to any organization that “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” Rubio’s justification that UNFPA is ineligible to receive future U.S. funding relies on the tired pretext employed by previous Republican administrations that by working with national governments—as all UN agencies do in countries where they are present—is tantamount to agreeing with all of the policies within that country, in this case the Chinese government’s restrictive measures on family size. This is the equivalent of saying that any engagement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is agreement with all HHS policies. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, where the government has imposed strict limits on births on its citizens, there is no question that China’s one-child and other population policies led to coercive measures and have resulted in human rights abuses.

Although Secretary Rubio’s decision to invoke the Kemp-Kasten amendment to withhold all future U.S. funds from UNFPA for its vital work in advancing reproductive health care globally was made over a month ago, the determination had not been publicly acknowledged by the Trump administration until last Tuesday’s session of the annual meeting of the UNFPA Executive Board at UN headquarters in New York. (Even though the text of the determination directs that the document be published in the Federal Register, it has yet to appear. If Marco Rubio had any shame left, one might conclude that the State Department was a bit ashamed of the justification he used in making the decision.)

Prior to Tuesday, the only reason that it was known that the determination had even been made is the release of a statement by UNFPA on May 9 in which the agency “notes with deep regret” the U.S. government’s “intention to deny future funding . . . based on unfounded claims about UNFPA’s work in China that have long been disproved—including by the U.S. Government itself.” Nevertheless, citing the United States as one of its founders and a long-time member of its executive board, the agency’s statement notes that it “remains keen to maintain an open dialogue.”

The decision to invoke the Kemp-Kasten amendment and to withhold U.S. funding from UNFPA was all but inevitable. Every Republican administration has made the same determination since Reagan in 1985. The ultimate outcome was foreshadowed in the January 24 presidential memorandum, which reinstated the Global Gag Rule on foreign nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. global health assistance. The presidential memorandum also directed “the Secretary of State to take all necessary actions, to the extent permitted by law, to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” the statutory language of the Kemp-Kasten amendment

Dust Up in the UNFPA Executive Board

During UNFPA’s Executive Board meeting last Tuesday, the first public acknowledgment from the U.S. government that it was withholding all funding to UNFPA after invoking the Kemp-Kasten amendment was revealed in remarks by Jonathan Shrier, the acting representative of the United States to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Initially striking a conciliatory tone, the U.S. representative wished Dr. Natalia Kanem, who was participating in her last executive board meeting before leaving her post as UNFPA Executive Director, the “best in [her] next endeavors.”  He noted that the United States “recognizes the importance of advancing the health and well-being of women and girls, improving maternal health, preventing obstetric fistula, and reducing maternal mortality so that women can experience safe pregnancy and childbirth and the joys of being a mother.” He also outlined the U.S. government’s concern about violence against women and girls, including in humanitarian settings, and listed in particular its intense opposition to the practices of female genital mutilation and child, early, and forced marriage. (A recording of the executive board meeting can be viewed on UN TV at the following link.)

But the absence of any mention of one of the most effective health interventions to advance the “health and well-being of women and girls”—expansion of access and use of modern contraceptive methods to prevent unintended pregnancies—was, of course, noteworthy and consistent with the view of the Trump administration that family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) services are not “lifesaving,” all evidence and experience to the contrary.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. representative proclaimed that the United States would pursue “these shared objectives for improved health for women and girls” under the framework of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-sexual and reproductive health and rights document created out of whole cloth by first-term Trump political appointees that seeks to upend authentic international agreements like UN human rights conventions and the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action.

The U.S. representative’s remarks then sharply turned, and he delivered a pointed rebuke of UNFPA’s work in China and called on UNFPA “to end its partnership with the Chinese government agency responsible to implementing coercive policies.” He decried UNFPA’s alleged silence in calling out the human rights abuses of the Chinese government in the implementation of its population policy. He accused—without evidence—UNFPA of being “complicit in China’s population control” and stated that the United States had “determined the Kemp-Kasten Amendment precludes the [U.S.] from providing funding to UNFPA.”

In her closing remarks, UNFPA Executive Director Kanem addressed the charges by the U.S. representative and the denial of future U.S. funding to UNFPA as a result of Secretary of State Rubio’s invocation of the Kemp-Kasten amendment. Her comments echo the contents of the agency’s May 9th statement that the “decision is based on unfounded claims about UNFPA’s work that have long been disproved—including by the U.S. government itself” and defend UNFPA’s well-documented record in exposing and calling out coercive birth control practices.

Just before the conclusion of the session, the Chinese government exercised its right of reply with its representative stating, “China strongly rejects the baseless allegations of the U.S. delegation against China’s population and development policy.” Considering the Trump administration’s dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and over 60 years of U.S. government investments in global development, health, and humanitarian assistance in its first 100 days, the remainder of the Chinese representative’s pointed remarks are worth recounting in full:

“The U.S. pursues unilateralism, tramples on multilateralism, and stops and withdraws funding for UN agencies. It is in no position to criticize or accuse others. At present, the UN and multilateral agencies face financial difficulties single-handedly due to the actions from the U.S. The U.S. policies have led to millions of civilians—including women and children—leaving them unable to receive aid from the aid agencies, risking their lives and their survival. The international community is clear-eyed on this . . . China urges the U.S. to learn to respect each other [through] dialogue and cooperation.”

Nature—and politics—abhor a vacuum, and many American policymakers worry that China is already stepping in to fill the void in multilateral institutions and countries that the United States has now abandoned to the detriment of U.S. national interests.

Guilt by Association

As mentioned earlier, this year’s Kemp-Kasten determination is “unclassified”, and Secretary Rubio has instructed that it should be posted in the Federal Register. Theoretically, it should appear in black and white at some point soon. However, the public may not be able ever to read the accompanying justification memorandum that contains the allegations being made against the work that UNFPA is supporting in China, which have triggered the negative determination because it is reportedly stamped “sensitive but unclassified,” one of the lowest levels of classification for U.S. government documents.

The text of this year’s justification memorandum is characterized as a minimally edited, cut-and-paste job from past iterations during the first Trump administration, with some updating. It reportedly closely resembles the justification memorandum accompanying the 2017 determination—the only year during Trump’s first term in which such a memo was unclassified and available for the public to read.

The rationale for cutting off UNFPA remains, basically, guilt by association. This conclusion is confirmed by the wording of the U.S. representative’s remarks on Tuesday at the UNFPA Executive Board, calling for UNFPA to “end its partnership with the Chinese government agency responsible to implementing coercive policies.” UNFPA’s alleged crime, as it has been in past Trump administration determinations, is that it continues to partner with the National Health Commission (NHC)—China’s Ministry of Health. Formerly named the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), NHFPC was renamed the NHC in March 2018—removing the phrase “family planning” from the ministerial structure—at the same time the Chinese government continued to move to relax enforcement of its infamous “one-child” policy, now a “three-child” policy.

According to the approved five-year country program document for China (2021-2025), the Ministry of Commerce is the “coordinating entity” between the Chinese government and UNFPA—not the NHC. UNFPA’s work is principally focused on supporting policy development in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and rights (including gender-based violence), adolescents and youth, gender equality and women’s empowerment, and population dynamics. The country program document does not refer to any financial or technical assistance for family planning activities being provided by UNFPA to the NHC or any other Chinese government institution.

Several other U.N. agencies “partner” with NHC on other health programs and continue to emerge unscathed, as in past determinations. Up until the Trump-Pence administration launched its public relations campaign in 2020 to pin responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic on the Chinese government, even U.S. government departments and agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health had long-standing partnerships with Chinese government health authorities, all of which have now been presumably terminated.

It would not be surprising if the memorandum of justification for Secretary Rubio’s determination reaches the same final conclusion as that eight years ago in 2017 that “while there is no evidence that UNFPA directly engages in coercive abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China, the agency continues to partner with the [NHC] on family planning and thus can be found to support or participate in the management of China’s coercive policies for the purposes of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment.”

As was the case during the first Trump term, no U.S. government official has visited UNFPA’s country office in China to see its programs firsthand and investigate the facts on the ground. Instead, the sad fact is that the State Department continues to rely on a nearly expired country program document that merely lists the NHC as a “partner” to justify invoking the Kemp-Kasten amendment and denying congressionally earmarked funds to UNFPA. Lame and lazy.

Magnitude of Funding Implicated

One significant difference between the Trump administration’s last term in office and the current administration is the amount of humanitarian assistance funding that UNFPA has received from the Biden administration to support its work in humanitarian and crisis settings. Member States—including the United States — have recognized the outsized impact that women and girls in crisis face in humanitarian settings, so they have invested in UNFPA and called on the agency to build its capacity to deliver reproductive health supplies and training to better serve women and girls in humanitarian settings. Accordingly, humanitarian assistance, largely drawn from the Migration and Refugee Assistance account, dwarfs the voluntary contribution of $32.5 million to UNFPA from the International Organizations and Programs (IO&P) account, which UNFPA supporters in Washington have typically concentrated most of their advocacy efforts.

UNFPA’s humanitarian assistance funding was caught up in the same chaos that effected bilateral foreign assistance brought on by Trump’s executive order on inauguration day freezing funding for 90 days followed by a “stop work order” four days later, both actions allegedly taken to allow for a review of USAID and State Department grants and contracts, purportedly to ensure alignment with the new administration’s foreign policy and to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Sixteen UNFPA awards received Secretary Rubio’s emergency humanitarian waiver to the foreign aid pause, instituted in response to widespread public outcry about the abruptness, severity, and impact on the ground of the dramatic slashing of U.S. foreign aid.

Entering 2025, the U.S. government had awarded 48 grants to UNFPA totaling approximately $377 million—or 10 times the size of the annual voluntary U.S. contribution—for UNFPA’s work providing maternal health care and addressing gender-based violence in over 25 countries and territories experiencing humanitarian emergencies, including Afghanistan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gaza, Haiti, Mali, Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine.

However, by mid-May, the UNFPA reported that it had received termination notices for more than 40 of those existing humanitarian assistance projects, including many that had previously been able to continue under a humanitarian waiver, representing a loss of approximately $335 million in U.S. funding. (In between, as outlined in a footnote updating data in UNFPA’s late February press release in mid-April, a number of projects had been terminated, had their terminations rescinded, and then were re-terminated.) A few U.S.-funded UNFPA projects continue to operate and should not be impacted by the Kemp-Kasten determination, which applies only to future U.S. funding to UNFPA, not existing awards.

What’s Next

The fiscal year (FY) 2026 appropriations process has commenced in the House with markup of the State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill—or as Republican appropriators are attempting to rebrand as the National Security and Related Programs bill—scheduled for the last week in June. The highest priority for advocates will be to persuade congressional appropriations champions to continue the longstanding practice of including statutory funding floors for both bilateral and multilateral FP/RH programs in the final legislation. In addition, advocates will seek to prevent the attachment of any anti-SRHR policy “riders,” such as a legislative codification of the Global Gag Rule or language prohibiting a UNFPA contribution from any account.

On May 30, late on Friday night, the Trump administration released an “appendix” with additional detail on its FY 2026 federal budget request. The magnitude of the more than 60 percent cut to global health and disparaging references to family planning in the previously released “skinny” budget suggest that the Trump administration will request zero funding for FP/RH in FY 2026.

The Trump administration also sent an official notification to Capitol Hill last Tuesday, a long-awaited package of proposed rescissions of $9.4 billion in previously appropriated funds for foreign assistance and public broadcasting. Within the package is a proposal to claw back $500 million in FY 2025 funds for global health to “eliminate programs that are antithetical to American interests,” absurdly suggesting that “family planning” and reproductive health” serve to “worsen the lives of women and children.” Another section of the package proposes rescinding $437 million, the entire amount in the IO&P account for voluntary contributions to UN agencies, calling out UNFPA and even the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as UN agencies the United States can no longer afford to support.

At some point, Congress must reassert its constitutional prerogatives and compel a rogue Trump administration, through whatever means available, to spend the funds that it has appropriated for the purposes for which it intended, both in the current and prior fiscal years and in the future. Should Republicans in Congress choose to support this rescissions package, the damage that would be done to the regular bipartisan appropriations process is potentially catastrophic and incalculable.

Stay tuned for future updates on the disposition of the rescissions package and the FY 2026 appropriations process. Coming soon.