Ranking Member DeLauro Releases Important Update on OMB Director Russ Vought’s Move to Continue Stealing from American Families and Businesses
Straight Out of Project 2025: Important, Routine Budget Decisions Shifted from Nonpartisan Experts to Political Appointees
WASHINGTON – Yesterday’s Federal Register shows that the White House has taken another step to carry out its Project 2025 agenda to unlawfully steal federal funds promised to Americans. They have done so by shifting the technical budget decisions called “apportionments” – or the tool used by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to distribute the funds as enacted into law by Congress – away from the normal budget process. OMB Director Russ Vought has done this so that he, President Trump, and unchecked billionaire Elon Musk can use these once non-controversial budget decisions as a tool for illegally stealing funds.
The Federal Register notice shows that the Trump Administration has stripped the authority for overseeing these technical budget documents from the nonpartisan budget experts – many with decades of experience working for both Democratic and Republican Presidents – and have vested the authority to issue these legally-binding budget decisions in OMB Director Russ Vought’s hand-picked political appointees, who have been on the job less than one month. This is the same maneuver that Vought employed during his last stint as OMB Director to illegally impound Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funding, which became a central issue in the President’s first impeachment.
“OMB Director Russ Vought, architect of Project 2025, has been telling us for years that his vision for the OMB Director is the consolidation of unchecked power to override agencies in order to steal federal funds promised to American families, communities, and businesses by Congress and federal law,” said Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee Rosa DeLauro. “This move tells us that Vought and his political appointees intend to use apportionments – what he calls an ‘indispensable statutory tool’ for overriding agencies – to ensure that OMB is at the center of stealing from the American people. It is the latest example that proves Vought does not understand that Congress has the power of the purse, not the President.”
This threat to politicize the apportionment process at OMB was an explicit promise made by Vought in Project 2025:
Apportionments are carried out under statutory direction to safeguard the Congress’s power of the purse, not to undermine it. Thousands of apportionments are approved every year and have for nearly the entirety of their existence been overseen by senior nonpartisan career officials with relevant and highly technical budget execution experience. These decisions had been secret for the over 100 years of their existence until the inclusion of historical transparency initiatives in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022.
While the Antideficiency Act makes these decisions legally binding on agency officials, they are only legally binding to the extent that those directions are consistent with the law. You can monitor OMB’s use of this authority and check for any abuses at OpenOMB.org.
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