Court to OMB: Stop the cover-up

The White House needs to come clean with Congress and the public about how it’s spending taxpayer dollars

OMB Director Russ Vought. Will Oliver/Shutterstock

In April, we sued the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for taking down a statutorily required government website that disclosed key federal spending decisions called “apportionments.”

We and others relied on that website to provide transparency on how administrations were spending (or not spending) taxpayer money.

Read more about the website’s role: The White House is covering up its spending decisions.

Yesterday, a court ordered OMB to restore the site. The administration now has until the morning of July 24 to decide how to respond. While this may not be the end of our fight — the government can appeal the ruling — it is an important step forward in the ongoing battle over the public’s access to information about how the government is spending your tax dollars.

Read the ruling here.

Why did Congress require OMB to make this information public?

Apportionments are an essential first step in implementing federal spending bills. Once the law is passed, it is the OMB’s job to dole out (or apportion) the money to federal agencies — sort of like an allowance. Apportionments are legally binding documents that tell agencies how much money they can spend over a certain period of time — for instance, agencies might get their money monthly, quarterly, or even yearly depending on the agency and the program.

Congress created the apportionment process to help agencies stick to their budgets. Because even after Congress made it illegal in 1870 to spend money unless it was appropriated by law, federal agencies struggled with budget discipline — some agencies like ICE are still having problems today.

The thing is, agencies cannot spend funding until OMB apportions it, even if the law requires them to do so. So, for instance, if the president decided he did not want to spend all the funding Congress appropriated by law for libraries and museums, he might (unlawfully) refuse to apportion the funds for the agency so it could not spend them. (Thanks to libraries bringing a lawsuit — we actually know this has happened.)

This is not some new or idle threat. The entire conflict behind Trump’s first impeachment was about apportionments. The White House attempted to use the process to illegally withhold congressionally mandated funding for Ukraine unless Zelenskyy agreed to investigate the Bidens ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The abuse of apportionment authority in the Ukraine case was a major reason Congress enacted apportionment transparency.

Read more: Is the president following the law when it comes to spending?

Why does this all matter?

Right now, a fight is playing out between OMB Director Russ Vought and Congress over whether the administration will follow the law to implement the current 2025 spending bills as they were passed this March, or if OMB will defy the law and continue to withhold funding that should be spent by federal agencies.

At stake is Congress’s power over the purse. Who gets to control the purse strings of government — whether it’s Congress, as the founders intended, or the president, as Trump would prefer — is quite literally a foundational fight for the future of our democracy.

Read more: The purse and the sword.

And the clock is ticking. The bulk of funding passed for this year will expire on September 30 — which means agencies only have a few more months to get this funding out the door in the form of grants, contracts, or whatever a particular program calls for.

It’s awfully suspicious that OMB is seeking to keep apportionment information secret at the same time that it seeks to withhold funds and propose cuts or “rescissions.” There have been reports that agencies across the government are illegally withholding funds. Sometimes, like with after-school program funding, the administration backs down in the face of public pressure. But it is extremely hard to understand all the places, programs, and ways that the government is unlawfully withholding funds. Even Congress believes it only has a partial list.

We are in the last quarter of this fiscal year. By this time most agencies should be actively wrapping up spending their apportioned funds for the year. Instead, some programs may be at square one.

Disclosing apportionments of federal funding is one way for the public to track which funds are held up where, but the White House has fought to cover up that information. At the same time, OMB Director Vought has threatened to make things even more confusing by sending Congress more proposals to cut funds from the current fiscal year — even though Congress is already struggling to find the time to complete work on the spending bills to prevent a shutdown at the end of September.

Under the Impoundment Control Act, the president must send any proposals to cut funding to Congress as soon as he identifies potential funds to cut. But it is clear that OMB has not been following the law. The first rescissions package was announced almost 50 days before it was finally sent to Congress.

And even when the White House finally sent a rescissions proposal to Congress, it still refused to share with Congress, the press, or the public crucial information about how long those funds had been withheld and whether any additional funds were being frozen — information we could have if OMB put the apportionments website back online as the law requires and a court has ordered.

Vought has said more rescissions may be coming and claims the president can send rescissions proposals as late into the fiscal year as he wants. (To be clear, proposing rescissions this late in the year is highly unusual.) With the possibility of more rescissions on the horizon, it will be more important than ever to ensure the public has access to information about apportionments.

Can Congress claw back its authority?

As Vought continues to try to hide the ball from Congress by keeping the apportionment website offline and delaying rescissions packages until the last minute, that raises the question: Is the White House trying to hide its attempts to violate the law by withholding and cutting federal funds without congressional action?

And just as importantly, if this ends where we suspect, and the White House is revealed to be covering up illegal efforts to withhold funds, what will Congress then do about it?

After all, their status as a co-equal branch of government is quite literally on the line here. Unless legislators make it clear that the law is the law and that Congress still holds the power of the purse, they may find themselves permanently demoted to a mere advisory body to the president on matters of spending.