Is the president following the law when it comes to spending?

OpenOMB makes it easier to track apportionments

When then-President Trump sought to pressure Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate the Bidens ahead of the 2020 presidential election, he turned to federal funds for his leverage. 

In late 2018, Congress had appropriated $250 million in security assistance for Ukraine. So the same day Trump spoke with Zelensky by phone, he had his budget office put a hold on the security funds, freezing them in place. This hold violated federal law and led to the former president’s first impeachment.

To halt the funding, Trump relied on a little-known budget mechanism called an apportionment. Apportionments are how the president, acting through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), carries out Congress’s spending laws. But presidents of both parties have abused this authority in defiance of the law. And until recently, they exercised this authority largely out of public view. Neither Congress nor the public had access to apportionments. 

In July 2022, because of a law Congress passed and President Biden signed, OMB finally began disclosing apportionments. But OMB did so by putting them on a website that’s hard to navigate and has no search function, making it difficult for Congress and the public to see how the president has been using this obscure but important authority. 

Today, Protect Democracy is launching OpenOMB.org, a new website that makes it easier to find and track apportionments — and assess whether the president is following federal spending laws or potentially flouting them. 

What is an apportionment?

An apportionment is kind of like the government equivalent of an allowance; it's a way for the president to make sure that agencies don’t spend more than they are supposed to by giving them only a little of their yearly budget at a time. An apportionment is, in other words, a legally binding plan that sets the pace at which federal agencies may spend appropriated funds over the course of the fiscal year. It specifies what funds an agency may spend, when, and subject to what conditions. 

Apportionment is the second step in the life cycle of federal funds. 

First, Congress passes appropriations or other spending laws to fund federal programs, such as those providing medical care to veterans and financial support to lower the cost of home energy bills. But enacting those laws does not immediately send money to federal agencies to spend. Agencies must receive an apportionment from OMB making the funds available to them. Only then can agencies spend the funds, following the plan the apportionment lays out. 

You can think of OMB’s role in this process as like turning the nozzle on a hose. 

Congress turns on the faucet to fill the hose with the water an agency needs to do its work. But the agency doesn’t get that water until OMB turns the nozzle, letting the water out. OMB’s turning the nozzle on or off, or adjusting the nozzle’s opening to let more or less water out at a given time, is meant to ensure the agency has enough water to do what it needs but not so much water that it uses up its supply before the end of the fiscal year. 

How have presidents abused apportionments?

Congress created the apportionment process in the Antideficiency Act to help ensure agencies spend within the limits of the law.

But presidents of both parties have abused this process to advance their agendas in defiance of the law. Former President Trump did so by withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine through a series of apportionments that put a pause on that funding. The Government Accountability Office found that this hold violated the Impoundment Control Act. But Trump and his advisers have called for more of the same if he’s reelected. The former president has vowed to impound funds on a massive scale to “crush the Deep State.” And Trump’s former OMB Director Russell Vought has advocated for the “aggressive” use of apportionment authority “on behalf of the President’s agenda.”

In the 1970s, President Nixon relied on apportionments, among other tools, to withhold billions of dollars in funds from domestic programs he disagreed with. This led to a thicket of lawsuits against the administration, which it overwhelmingly lost. And President Roosevelt pushed the bounds of this authority during World War II, using it to halt funding for numerous programs that Congress had enacted into law but that the president deemed non-essential to the war effort. Roosevelt’s withholdings prompted blowback from members of Congress, who took to the House floor and used their time in hearings to challenge the legal basis for the withholdings, and lobbied the executive branch to change course.

Despite the importance of apportionments, until July 2022, OMB exercised this authority largely out of public view. Neither Congress nor the public had access to apportionments.

Congress mandates transparency — and so we built OpenOMB

In the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2022 and 2023, Congress took action on a bipartisan basis to fix this transparency problem. It required OMB to post its apportionments on a public website. Under President Biden, OMB complied, creating apportionment-public.max.gov. 

But that site is hard to navigate and has no search function, making it difficult to find apportionments and oversee OMB’s work. 

That’s why we built OpenOMB — to make oversight of apportionments easier for Congress and the public. 

OpenOMB uses a simple process to provide easier access to apportionment files. Each day, OpenOMB pulls the primary source data from OMB’s site and stores the files in a database in a manner that allows them to be searched, filtered, and indexed. OpenOMB’s search function then provides a means to query that database, searching for information in and across apportionments. The site is, in short, a user-friendly interface that provides access to a store of primary source data that is updated daily and contains searchable and well-organized files. (All apportionment files displayed on OpenOMB reflect the underlying primary source data and documents that OMB discloses on its site.) 

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Congress created the apportionment process in the Antideficiency Act to reinforce its constitutional power of the purse. By using the authority to apportion funds at times to flout rather than carry out federal spending laws, presidents of both parties have undercut Congress and claimed greater power over federal funds than the law gives them. 

OpenOMB aims to make it easier for Congress and the public to find and track apportionments — and identify potential executive abuses of this authority if they are happening.