As the Trump administration and members of Congress continue to battle over the power of the purse, the White House has restored a public database that tracks federal spending, delivering a court-ordered victory for Democrats and two nonprofit government watchdog organizations who had sued after the government website was taken down in March. But the restored data highlights the ways in which President Trump and his budget office, led by Russell Vought, are trying to exert control over federal spending.
“It’s clear now why Vought and Trump have fought so hard to prevent this information from being public: They have used this process to secretly and illegally exert even more control over funding approved by Congress, freezing key investments from going out the door for agencies to conduct critical work and help the American people,” Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Monday.
How we got here: A pair of laws enacted in 2022 require the White House Office of Management and Budget to publicly disclose all decisions about how to allocate congressionally approved funds, known as “apportionments,” and to do so within two business days.
The website had been up since July 2022, but the Office of Management and Budget took it down this past March, raising alarms among lawmakers and government watchdogs. Vought told lawmakers that the budget office would no longer maintain the system because it “requires the disclosure of sensitive, predecisional, and deliberative information.” He argued that some of the information could threaten national security and foreign policy and that the required disclosures “have a chilling effect on the deliberations within the Executive Branch” and undermine the budget office’s effectiveness in overseeing spending.
Two non-partisan, non-profit groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Protect Democracy Project — sued. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the site restored, and earlier this month a federal appeals court panel ruled unanimously against an administration request to put a hold on that ruling, saying the administration had to put up the site and all the data that hadn’t been made available. OMB restored the site on Friday night.
“It should never have required months in court for this administration to begin complying with a truly basic and straightforward transparency requirement,” Murray said in her statement. “OMB must now ensure every last bit of this important budget data that has been hidden is promptly made public, as the court has ordered, and that the data is posted within days, as the law requires, going forward.”
Why it matters: The fight over making apportionment information public is one element of a larger battle in which Vought and the Trump administration are looking to assert more control over federal spending and challenging Congress’s power on funding decisions. The administration has cut off funding approved by Congress for a range of programs.
“Apportionments show how OMB is implementing federal spending laws — or potentially impounding funds in violation of the law,” Protect Democracy said in a statement Monday. “Apportionment information is essential for Congress, journalists, and members of the public seeking to better understand how federal tax dollars are being spent. Public information about apportionments is critical now as the Trump administration continues to illegally withhold funding from federal agencies – including funds agencies must spend by September 30th.”
What the push for transparency reveals: Protect Democracy said it and others are working to analyze the new data to ensure all the required information is available. At the same time, The Washington Post reports that the newly available documents “show Trump’s budget office is imposing litmus tests on releasing money — demanding plans from agencies to show they are following guidance Trump has laid out in executive actions, such as avoiding spending on diversity programs.”
The documents reportedly show that OMB has blocked some funding until agencies deliver a spending plan approved by the White House or prevented spending that doesn’t align with Trump’s orders.
“The restrictions effectively give Vought, the director of the White House budget office and an architect of the controversial conservative governing plan Project 2025, the power to approve or deny virtually all spending decisions,” the Post’s Riley Beggin and Jacob Bogage write.
Vought and the administration have argued that a 1974 law that restricts the president’s power to withhold congressionally approved funding is unconstitutional.