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Senator Murray on Partial Restoration of Spending Transparency Website After Court Orders Trump, Vought to Stop Breaking the Law to Hide Their Tracks

Murray demands all apportionment data be published online as court order requires

Murray: “It’s clear now why Vought and Trump have fought so hard to prevent this information from being public: they have used this process to secretly and illegally exert even more control over funding approved by Congress, freezing key investments from going out the door for agencies to conduct critical work and help the American people.”

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, issued the following statement after the Trump administration was forced to put a key spending transparency website back online after breaking the law to take it down so that it could hide how it’s executing spending laws from the American people.

In March, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), headed by Director Russ Vought, illegally took down the apportionments website that it is required by law to maintain. Earlier this month, a federal circuit court unanimously ruled that the administration must restore the website and publicly post all apportionment data that has been hidden from public view over the last few months. Late Friday, OMB finally relented in its months-long fight to continue breaking the law to hide this information—restoring the website and beginning to post some of the apportionments it’s hidden from public view for months.

“Every time any member of this administration tries to claim they are being transparent, remember that they spent months illegally hiding how they were spending your taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately for Russ Vought and President Trump, the law is very clear—and now that a federal appeals court has unanimously ruled they must restore the spending transparency website, the site is back online.

“It should never have required months in court for this administration to begin complying with a truly basic and straightforward transparency requirement. OMB must now ensure every last bit of this important budget data that has been hidden is promptly made public, as the court has ordered, and that the data is posted within days, as the law requires, going forward.

“It’s clear now why Vought and Trump have fought so hard to prevent this information from being public: they have used this process to secretly and illegally exert even more control over funding approved by Congress, freezing key investments from going out the door for agencies to conduct critical work and help the American people.”

Background on Apportionments

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 found responsible for violating an apportionment from OMB may be subject to administrative discipline, including suspension without pay and termination. What’s more, the knowing and willful violation of an apportionment carries with it criminal penalties under the Antideficiency Act.

The bipartisan fiscal year 2022 appropriations spending law established a requirement for OMB to publicly post in an accessible format all approved apportionments within two business days, along with any footnotes and an explanation for those footnotes. In the following fiscal year spending law, Congress made those requirements permanent. Those bipartisan requirements were carried out over the last three years without incident—which allowed lawmakers and the public to track OMB’s legal-binding budget decisions.

Background on Russ Vought’s Weaponization of the Apportionment Process

In late March, however, Vought illegally pulled the website down without any explanation—and adamantly refused to restore it, despite bipartisan calls for Vought and OMB to simply follow the law and adhere to this common sense requirement.

Vought’s decision to yank the website offline immediately raised questions about what exactly he and the president were seeking to hide in preventing the American people—and lawmakers responsible for conducting oversight—from accessing this information about how OMB is spending taxpayer dollars. Notably, Vought—a key architect of Project 2025—has long contended that political appointees like himself should have more say in how OMB operates and should exercise significantly more control over federal funding. Over the last many months, Vought has taken sweeping steps to exercise more control—and notably, in President Trump’s first term, OMB illegally used the apportionment process to cut off security assistance for Ukraine, which, of course, was the basis for Trump’s first impeachment.

Earlier this month, public reporting began to shed light on why Trump and Vought have obscured this data from public view. Reports showed OMB had used the apportionment process to block the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from accessing roughly $15 billion in funding provided for lifesaving research into treatments and cures—and then quickly reversed course after the blockage was made public. Just days later, reports also showed that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from spending large chunks of funding for mission critical work that it is required to conduct. Senator Murray slammed both actions—and called for the Trump administration to stop improperly choking off funding approved by Congress and to finally restore the website so the American people have visibility into OMB’s actions.

The apportionments that have so far been made public now that the website has been put back online make clear that Vought and OMB have been using the apportionment process to exert even more control over federal spending and to choke off key funds provided by Congress on a bipartisan basis for all kinds of essential programs that working people and communities nationwide count on every day.

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