OMB Director Russ Vought testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Jan. 15, 2025. (Screenshot from committee webcast)
WASHINGTON — A nonprofit organization filed suit against the Trump administration on Monday, alleging its decision to stop posting budget documents in late March violates federal law.
Protect Democracy Project’s case is the second lawsuit challenging the Office of Management and Budget’s choice to pull down a webpage with apportionment information that detailed when and how the administration was spending money appropriated by Congress.
The case, as well as the one brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington last week, asks a federal judge to require OMB to restore the website that publicly shared the data for years.
OMB Director Russ Vought told Congress late last month that the budget office would no longer publicly post apportionment information, writing in a letter that to do so would disclose “sensitive, predecisional, and deliberative information.”
“Such disclosures have a chilling effect on the deliberations within the Executive Branch,” Vought wrote. “Indeed, these disclosure provisions have already adversely impacted the candor contained in OMB’s communications with agencies and have undermined OMB’s effectiveness in supervising agency spending.
“Moreover, apportionments may contain sensitive information, the automatic public disclosure of which may pose a danger to national security and foreign policy.”
A ‘brazen move’
Democrats in Congress sharply criticized the decision, with a few calling on the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, to investigate.
House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., issued a joint statement in late March urging Vought to reverse course.
“Congress enacted these requirements over a Democratic President’s objections on a bipartisan basis because our constituents, and all American taxpayers, deserve transparency and accountability for how their money is being spent,” DeLauro and Murray wrote. “Taking down this website is not just illegal it is a brazen move to hide this administration’s spending from the American people and from Congress.”
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrats on the Budget committees, urged the Government Accountability Office to look into the matter.
GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez did and wrote in a letter released earlier this month that OMB’s decision to withhold publicly sharing the apportionment information was “very concerning.”
“We understand that OMB took down the website taking the position that it requires the disclosure of predecisional, and deliberative information,” he wrote. “We disagree.”
Perez rejected OMB’s argument that all of the information had to be removed since “apportionments may contain sensitive information which, if disclosed publicly automatically, may pose a danger to national security and foreign policy.”
“While there may be some information that is sensitive if disclosed publicly, it is certainly not the case that all apportionment data meets that standard,” he wrote. “Where there is such sensitive data that should be protected from public disclosure, those would be the exception and should not serve to take down the entire database.”
Lawsuits want public info restored
The two lawsuits — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Office of Management and Budget and Protect Democracy Project v. U.S. Office of Management and Budget — ask federal judges to require OMB to post the information online once again.
CREW wrote in its filing that OMB posted a public version of the database in July 2022, after Congress required it to do so in a government funding bill.
The Trump administration removed that webpage on March 24, though OMB “provided no notice or explanation prior to its removal,” according to the lawsuit.
The CREW lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and assigned to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton.
Protect Democracy Project wrote in its lawsuit that the “laws requiring transparency for apportionments make it more difficult for the executive branch to impound funds unlawfully outside the view of Congress and the public.”
The Trump administration faces numerous lawsuits stemming from its efforts to block several departments and agencies from spending money appropriated by Congress, also known as impoundment.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 bars the executive branch from holding onto money instead of spending it as directed by Congress. But Vought has said several times he believes the law is unconstitutional.
Protect Democracy Project’s lawsuit was also filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, though it hadn’t been assigned to a judge as of Monday afternoon.
This post was originally authored and published by Jennifer Shutt from AZ Mirror via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
