Attorney General Bonta Calls for Transparency in Federal Spending, Calls out Trump Administration for Shrouding Spending Decisions in Secrecy

OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta last week co-led a coalition of 19 attorneys general in submitting an amicus brief in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Office of Management and Budget, a case that challenges the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) deactivation of the Public Apportionments Database. The Public Apportionments Database is an online resource maintained by OMB that details legally binding plans for how federal agencies spend funds appropriated by Congress. In the brief, submitted in U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the coalition argues that the Trump Administration’s refusal to make apportionment decisions public impairs States’ ability to quickly identify any unlawful funding decisions the Administration makes.  

“The Trump Administration is attempting to dodge their obligation to publicly disclose how it directs agencies to spend taxpayer money, limiting state’s view into how the Administration is handling critical funding,” said Attorney General Bonta. “This information is important for citizens and states to ensure transparent governance — and especially essential given the billions of dollars the Trump Administration has already illegally cancelled or withheld. I urge the court to stay the course and insist the Trump Administration transparently report how its spending appropriated funds.”

In 2022, Congress directed OMB to make its apportionment decisions public in a timely manner so that entities and organizations could identify — and, where necessary, put a stop to — the federal government’s failures to comply with appropriations laws.  Earlier this year, OMB announced that it would no longer comply with this statute and since January, the Trump Administration has repeatedly and unlawfully withheld billions of dollars in appropriated funds, often in secret. In some cases, the Administration has failed to announce that it is withholding appropriated funds at all; in others, it has delayed the announcement until the withholding caused a crisis; often, the Trump Administration refused to reveal, even when its efforts to withhold funds are discovered, whether it is OMB or the administering agency that is responsible for the violation.  

Among other examples, the Trump Administration has delayed over $6 billion in education funds; terminated nearly $400 million in funding for state AmeriCorps programs; and disrupted millions of dollars in critical funding supporting state-run libraries. 

In the brief, Attorney General Bonta and the coalition argue that states have a strong interest in in ensuring this information remains public and accessible. The absence of timely apportionment data creates an ongoing problem in which states cannot monitor in real time OMB's failure to release appropriated funds, leading to crisis situations, chaos, and harm to states and their agencies. The unavailability of timely apportionment data has already caused real-world problems, meaningfully impairing states’ ability to protect their interests and hindering the ongoing litigation described above.

In submitting the brief, Attorney General Bonta co-leads the attorneys general of the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. 

A copy of the brief is available here.