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AGENCY FOR INT’L DEVELOPMENT v. ALLIANCE FOR 
OPEN SOCIETY INT’L, INC. 

Syllabus
 

ernment program.  Pp. 6–15.

(a) The  Policy  Requirement  mandates  that  recipients  of  federal
funds explicitly agree with the Government’s policy to oppose prosti-
tution.  The  First  Amendment,  however,  “prohibits  the  government
from telling people what they must say.”  Rumsfeld v. Forum for Ac-
ademic  and  Institutional  Rights,  Inc.,  547  U. S.  47,  61.    As  a  direct 
regulation,  the  Policy  Requirement  would  plainly  violate  the  First 
Amendment.  The question is whether the Government may nonethe-
less  impose  that  requirement  as  a  condition  of  federal  funding. 
Pp. 6–7.

(b) The  Spending  Clause  grants  Congress  broad  discretion  to  fund
private  programs  or  activities  for  the  “general  Welfare,”  Art. I,  §8,
cl. 1, including authority to impose limits on the use of such funds to
ensure they are used in the manner Congress intends.  Rust v. Sulli-
van, 500 U. S. 173, 195, n. 4.  As a general matter, if a party objects
to  those  limits,  its  recourse  is  to  decline  the  funds.    In  some  cases, 
however,  a  funding  condition  can  result  in  an  unconstitutional  bur-
den  on  First  Amendment  rights.  The  distinction  that  has  emerged
from this Court’s cases is between conditions that define the limits of 
the Government spending program—those that specify the activities
Congress  wants  to  subsidize—and  conditions  that  seek  to  leverage
funding  to  regulate  speech  outside  the  contours  of  the  federal  pro-
gram itself. 

Rust illustrates the distinction.  In that case, the Court considered 
Title X of the  Public Health Service Act, which authorized grants to 
health-care  organizations  offering  family  planning  services,  but  pro-
hibited federal funds from being “used in programs where abortion is
a method of family planning.”  500 U. S., at 178.  To enforce the pro-
vision, HHS regulations barred Title X projects from advocating abor-
tion  and  required  grantees  to  keep  their  Title  X  projects  separate
from  their  other  projects.  The  regulations  were  valid,  the  Court  ex-
plained, because they governed only the scope of the grantee’s Title X
projects,  leaving  the  grantee  free  to  engage  in  abortion  advocacy 
through  programs  that  were  independent  from  its  Title  X  projects. 
Because the regulations did not prohibit speech “outside the scope of
the  federally  funded  program,”  they  did  not  run  afoul  of  the  First 
Amendment.  Id., at 197.  Pp. 7–11.

(c) The  distinction  between  conditions  that  define  a  federal  pro-
gram  and  those  that  reach  outside  it  is  not  always  self-evident,  but 
the  Court  is  confident  that  the  Policy  Requirement  falls  on  the  un-
constitutional  side  of  the  line.    To  begin,  the  Leadership  Act’s  other
funding  condition,  which  prohibits  Leadership  Act  funds  from  being 
used “to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitu-
tion or sex trafficking,” §7631(e), ensures that federal funds will not