White House restores spending database it sought to keep secret

WASHINGTON — The White House has restored a website that shows how spending authority is parceled out to federal agencies throughout the year, but Democrats say some of the information that is required to be disclosed may still be missing.

The Office of Management and Budget restored the website on Friday night to comply with a court-imposed deadline. The Trump administration had shut down the site in March, shielding from public view its decisions on so-called apportionments — directives that control the flow of appropriated funds.

The restoration of the public spending database marked a victory for Democrats and two organizations that had sued the administration over its attempt to keep the database secret: Protect Democracy and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“It should never have required months in court for this administration to begin complying with a truly basic and straightforward transparency requirement,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Monday. “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.”

Democratic lawmakers and Protect Democracy said they are scrutinizing the website to see if any apportionments or related information are missing.

Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, D-Pa., said OMB Director Russ Vought and President Donald Trump “must immediately restore the full budget data and show the public what they have been doing with our tax dollars.”

“I will not stop fighting to defend critical investments and protect American families from the Trump administration’s corruption,” Boyle, thr ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said in a statement over the weekend.

Protect Democracy said in a statement Monday that it is “actively working to analyze the new apportionments to ensure all the information that OMB is required to provide is once again posted publicly online.”

Protect Democracy, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian group, said 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” Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

The administration has argued that any funding it has withheld or paused has been within the law.

Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel for Protect Democracy, said being able to see the apportionments “means we can finally see where OMB may have abused this tool to unlawfully delay spending —potentially in preparation to unlawfully cut funds through a pocket rescission.”

Vought has not ruled out the use of what is called a pocket rescission, where the president would send a request to Congress to claw back previously appropriated spending so close to the end of the fiscal year that the funding would expire before Congress could act on the request.

Under the 1974 budget act, the president is allowed to send a rescission request to Congress, but if Congress does not approve the request within 45 days, the funding becomes available to be spent.

Congress passed two laws in 2022 requiring apportionments to be published on an automated website within two days of their approval by the OMB. The Biden administration complied with the law, as did the second Trump administration until March.

But the OMB then shut down the website, saying that publishing the apportionments required disclosure of “sensitive, pre-decisional and deliberative information” and that such disclosure had a “chilling effect on the deliberations within the Executive Branch.”

The lawsuit asked for the website to be restored. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the restoration earlier this year. And on Aug. 9, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously denied OMB’s request to put the lower-court ruling on hold while it considers an appeal.

The Justice Department is still appealing the district court ruling that taking down the apportionment website violated federal law. It remained unclear whether the DOJ intends to ask either the full bench of the Appeals Court or the Supreme Court to intervene and allow the administration to take down the website again while the case plays out. The OMB did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

Under the apportionment process, the OMB provides a schedule to federal agencies to spend enacted funding throughout the fiscal year to avoid running out of money before the end of the year and to spend the funds effectively.

The OMB also can and does attach “footnotes” to some apportionments that may restrict the use of funds or temporarily pause spending that is undergoing a White House review.

Last year, Protect Democracy launched its own website, OpenOMB.org, designed to make the apportionments on the OMB website easier to track.

Congress passed an initial apportionment disclosure law partly in response to the OMB’s actions during Trump’s first term.

Vought — who was budget director then as well — presided over a temporary hold on military aid for Ukraine through an apportionment “footnote.” Withholding that funding led to the first impeachment of Trump, for which he was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.

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—Michael Macagnone contributed to this report