The Trump administration is blocking more than $400 billion in congressionally approved funding, according to an update from top Democratic appropriators.
Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrats on the Senate and House Appropriations Committees, on Monday updated a tracking site, first released in the spring, that details the funding that the Trump administration and White House budget director Russell Vought are freezing, cancelling or fighting in court to block.
“We are now nine months into the year—and weeks away from the end of the fiscal year—and President Trump and Russ Vought continue to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars from families, farmers, children, small businesses, and communities in every part of the country,” Murray and De Lauro said in a joint statement. “They are cheating families all while giving big corporations and billionaires trillions of dollars in new tax breaks. … Republicans have total control in Washington—and total control of whether Americans will receive the funding they are promised. Trump and Vought need to stop blocking these investments, and Republicans need to join us in insisting that every last dollar flows—particularly the billions of dollars in funding that will otherwise expire at month’s end.”
In April, the Democratic tracker said the administration was blocking at least $430 billion in funding. A June update put the number at more than $425 billion. With the end of the fiscal year approaching, the tracker now shows at least $410 billion being withheld and at risk of expiring.
“Since the last update in June, some funding has been released in the face of public outcry—and a number of investments that were being blocked have since been rescinded through Republicans’ reconciliation bill and President Trump’s rescissions package. This funding is no longer listed in the tracker,” the Democratic news release says.
The Democrats note that their tally is not exhaustive and say that efforts to fully track blocked funding are complicated by the administration’s systematic efforts to obscure its funding moves and an “unprecedented lack of transparency.”
With a shutdown deadline looming at the end of the month, Murray and De Lauro added that they are prepared to work with Republicans to pass bipartisan funding bills, and they called for Congress to reassert its power of the purse: “Any funding agreement must reflect Democratic priorities, and we must pass full-year spending bills that ensure lawmakers—not Donald Trump and Russ Vought—decide how taxpayer dollars get spent.”
Vought and the Trump administration have been challenging congressional power over spending, with the White House successfully clawing back $9 billion in appropriated money and now looking to rescind another $4.9 billion. But administration officials reportedly pushed back on the latest Democratic tally, with one unnamed senior administration official telling The Hill: “If anyone knew what Murray and DeLauro were smoking, they’d be rich.”