DeLauro Applauds Suit Forcing Vought to Follow the Law
WASHINGTON — Today, House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) issued the following statement after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued Russell Vought and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for unlawfully hiding the administration’s use of trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, by destroying a website that had publicly displayed all of these decisions, known as apportionments.
“The law is clear, and OMB is breaking it. OMB makes hundreds of legally-binding decisions each year on how to spend trillions of American taxpayer dollars, and the public is entitled to see that information. Director Vought has offered no legal basis for destroying the website; without a reasoned justification, we must assume that the agency is motivated to hide their decisions from the public because they cannot, or are too afraid, to justify them,” said Ranking Member DeLauro.
Apportionments are legally binding budget decisions issued by OMB under title 31 of the U.S. Code. These documents are final, decisional, and legally binding on agencies, and officials responsible for violating an apportionment may be subject to administrative discipline, including suspension without pay and termination, and the knowing and willful violation of an apportionment carries with it criminal penalties under the Antideficiency Act.
The 2022 bipartisan appropriations bills instated a requirement for OMB to publicly post in an accessible format all approved apportionments within two business days, along with any footnotes, an explanation for those footnotes. The following year, Congress made those requirements permanent. Those bipartisan requirements have been carried out for the last three years without incident—allowing lawmakers and the public to track OMB’s legal-binding budget decisions.
For more information on OMB’s legally-binding budget decisions, see the March 24 joint statement issued by Ranking Member DeLauro and Vice Chair Murray here, and Ranking Member DeLauro’s hand-edits to Director Vought’s letter on the topic here.
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