Federal courts ordered the White House to republish a website with apportionment data. Westend61 / Getty Images
Federal courts have ordered the Office of Management and Budget to publish information about how agency funding is disbursed, but Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington contends that officials are using footnotes to obfuscate disclosure.
A progressive good government nonprofit has accused the Trump administration of not fully complying with a court order to publish information about how federal funding is distributed.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asserted in a Sept. 19 filing that the Office of Management and Budget is circumventing a court order that required it to resume publishing data on apportionments, which details when appropriated agency funding becomes available, by adding footnotes that the spending is subject to “spend plans.” But those plans aren’t public.
Trump administration officials in March pulled down an OMB website used to post congressionally required apportionments data. The move resulted in a lawsuit filed by CREW, and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in July ruled that the website must be republished.
OMB officials in August resumed posting the apportionments data after a panel of federal judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the administration’s appeal to pause the lower court ruling.
But CREW reported that at least 131 of the 2,245 apportionment documents approved between March 24 and Sept. 5 include undisclosed “spend plans.”
“For many apportionments, OMB is stating in legally binding footnotes that the funds ‘are available for obligation consistent with the latest agreed-upon spend plan’ between the agency and OMB, or using similar language that makes the funds available according to the terms of spend plans,” according to the filing. “Yet OMB is not including the spend plans in the Public Apportionments Database.”
The nonprofit requested that the court order OMB to post such plans, arguing that not doing so leaves the public in the dark.
“Through these footnotes, OMB has given legal effect to amounts, terms and conditions in agency spend plans, made the availability of funds contingent on OMB’s agreement with the plan and simultaneously attempted to keep all such information out of the public eye,” wrote Christie Wentworth, a senior CREW policy counsel, in a Sept. 19 blog. “Now, for any individual or organization without access to the amounts and terms in these undisclosed yet legally binding plans, the ‘apportioned’ amounts in the publicly posted documents are effectively meaningless.”
For example, Wentworth pointed out that the State Department inspector general received a $27 million apportionment on June 10 that was subject to a spend plan. But because the plan itself was not posted, the published information does not address possible conditions on the funding, limits on specific activities or potential revisions.
OMB did not respond to a request for comment. CREW said in its filing that representatives for OMB have “made clear” that the agency does not intend to publish the spend plans.
How congressionally approved funding is distributed has gotten more scrutiny during Trump’s second term. The Government Accountability Office has determined in six separate cases that the administration violated the Impoundment Control Act by withholding or delaying the obligation of appropriations.