DeLauro Celebrates Court Requiring the Office of Management and Budget to Restore Transparency Website

WASHINGTON — Today, House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) issued the following statement on the court ruling Russell Vought and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) must restore the public website detailing the administration’s use of trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, known as apportionments.

“This is a decisive victory for transparency, the Constitution, and the rule of law. The court has ruled as we have long known: the Office of Management and Budget is required to restore the website detailing how it is spending taxpayer dollars,” said Ranking Member DeLauro. “Taking down this website was not just illegal; it was a brazen move to hide how President Trump and Russ Vought are stealing from the American people. When I drafted this requirement—and it was signed into law—it was not about which party held power. It was about showing the American people how their hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being spent in their communities. Now, it is time for the Trump administration to show what it has done with working Americans’ money since they broke this basic, bipartisan transparency law.”

Apportionments are legally binding budget decisions issued by the Office of Management and Budget 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 required 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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