A government watchdog group is taking the Trump administration to court over its decision to hide a database that shows how it is spending taxpayer funds.
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By law, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is required to operate a publicly accessible database that shows how it is directing federal agencies to spend the funds that Congress has appropriated.
This allows Americans to understand how their taxpayer money is being spent, and government watchdog groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) can use this database to figure out whether OMB is attaching any strings to the apportionment of these funds.
However, the Trump administration, which claims to be especially transparent, has recently taken this apportionments database offline — a decision that is now subject of a lawsuit seeking to restore the access of the public to this information.
On Tuesday, CREW, which is represented by the Public Citizen Litigation Group, sued OMB and its director, Russell Vought.
“The information contained in the Public Apportionments Database is critical to understanding how OMB has apportioned funds appropriated by Congress, including any requirements or conditions imposed by OMB on an agency’s spending of Congressionally appropriated funds,” the lawsuit stated.
Vought, an architect of Project 2025, the government destruction playbook the Trump administration is following, clearly feels otherwise. Last month, he notified Democratic lawmakers that his agency would “no longer operate and maintain this system because it requires the disclosure of sensitive, predecisional, and deliberative information.”
This, however, violates the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2022 and 2023, the watchdog group asserts in its lawsuit.
“The Trump administration’s illegal removal of the Office of Management and Budget’s apportionment website is yet another attempt to dodge transparency and accountability,” said Nikhel Sus, CREW’s deputy chief counsel. “In the first Trump administration, OMB notoriously abused its apportionment authority to withhold federal funds and undermine Congress’s power of the purse. Without access to the apportionment website, CREW and other organizations cannot monitor for those kinds of abuses and inform the public when they occur.”
In light of the havoc that Elon Musk and his DOGE team have wreaked in Washington, that is probably why.
“Taking down this information hides how the Trump administration is spending taxpayer dollars and harms the public’s ability to hold the administration accountable to the American people for its spending decisions,” stated Wendy Liu, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group who is the lead counsel in the case.
While the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, the Trump administration, under the guise of claiming to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, has been withholding appropriated funds for programs that it opposes on ideological grounds.
And, because many of these moves are highly unpopular (and likely illegal), it makes sense that the White House would try to cover its tracks.
Now, however, the Trump administration will have to defend its actions in front of yet another court and explain why it feels that it is not bound by the law.
