House Appropriations Committee Democratic Leaders Write to Trump Administration Opposing Political Power Grab
Ranking Members in New Letter to Vought: “Proposed regulation…would impose an increased regulatory burden on our constituents.”
WASHINGTON – House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) together with the other eleven Democratic subcommittee Ranking Members urged the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to withdraw its proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance in a letter submitted as part of the proposed rule’s comment process.
This letter was highlighted in the New York Times as part of the growing, nation-wide, nonpartisan opposition to the Trump administration’s attempt to undermine Congress’s constitutional power of the purse and subject American citizens to the unpredictable whims of unelected, partisan, political appointees.
“We write to you today as leaders of the Committee on Appropriations of the U.S. House of Representatives to urge you to withdraw the proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (Docket OMB-2026-0034), initially published in the Federal Register on May 29, 2026 (91 Fed. Reg. 32198),” the Ranking Members write to OMB Director Russell Vought. “As proposed, this regulation would result in a seismic and ill-informed change to an enormous portion of the United States economy and would upend the established understanding of how Federal appropriations are carried out, undermining the integrity of government programs.”
“In our judgment, the proposed regulation would threaten direct services and Federally-funded research in at least two key aspects: it would inject politicized unpredictability into the funding of awards and would impose an increased regulatory burden on our constituents,” the letter continues. “This regulation, however, does not successfully account for the interests of our constituents or the nation as a whole. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on formalizing the ability of political appointees to manipulate Federal financial assistance based on their understanding of a Presidential agenda that is not articulated with any clarity in the body of the proposal. The regulation would, in other words, subject grantmaking decisions to political whim.”
House Appropriations Committee Democrats are ready to do the work of the American people, and engage in earnest, bipartisan collaboration to deliver the services that the nation needs. That mission can start by blocking the Administration’s capricious and anti-constitutional attempt to undermine the power of the purse through this misguided rulemaking.
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