03.24.25

What are they hiding? Murray, DeLauro Demand OMB Promptly Restore Access to Website Detailing Federal Spending Allocations, As Federal Law Requires

 

Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair, and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, issued the following joint statement after the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) moved to unlawfully hide how the agency directs agencies to spend taxpayer dollars. OMB hid this information by destroying a website that publicly displayed all of these decisions, known as apportionments.

 

“Federal law is unequivocal: OMB must publish the agency’s legally-binding budget decisions. 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. 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. We call on OMB to immediately restore access to the website and resume compliance with this most basic, bipartisan transparency requirement.”

 

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 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 instated 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. 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.

 

As of March 24, however, OMB’s apportionments database was taken down with no notice or explanation, and reporting indicates the website was destroyed in defiance of the bipartisan requirements enshrined in federal law that OMB maintain the site.

 

Importantly, there have never been national security concerns associated with this statutory requirement, and the law requires OMB to make any classified documentation referenced in any apportionment available at the request of the Chair or Ranking Member of any appropriate congressional committee. Classified programs are frequently addressed in public statutory language, including in the recently passed Republican full-year continuing resolution, with classified annexes available on a need-to-know basis.

 

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