The Trump administration is facing pressure to restore a public website that showed how funding is apportioned to federal agencies and that lawmakers on both sides say is required by law.
Advocates and Democrats have spent weeks ratcheting up criticism over a move by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to take down the online database. But the Trump administration is also hearing from Republicans about the tracker’s removal.
“It’s the law. It’s a requirement of the law, so it’s not discretionary on OMB’s part,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) told The Hill on Thursday.
The top appropriators from both parties in the House and Senate sent a letter to OMB Director Russell Vought, first reported by The New York Times last week, calling for public access to the site be restored.
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) also signed onto the letter, along with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrats on the appropriations committees in both chambers.
“We look forward to working with you to restore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute,” it read.
Collins said top appropriators had “not heard back from the OMB.
The website’s takedown adds to a list of actions by the administration that have been challenged in court this year, with a federal judge hearing arguments on the matter on Friday.
Representatives for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Protect Democracy Project argued that the Trump administration broke the law when it nixed the database, pointing to legislation enacted during the Biden administration they say required OMB to operate the apportionments tracker.
Under the apportionment process, agencies are given limited authority to spend funding allocated by Congress in installments.
Congress had initially required the OMB to implement an “automated system to post each document apportioning an appropriation” as part of a funding deal struck in 2022. The office was eventually ordered in another funding deal to “operate and maintain” the required automated system for “fiscal year 2023 and each fiscal year thereafter.”
But the Trump administration has said it cannot continue to operate the system, arguing it contains sensitive information that could pose a threat to national security.
In a letter explaining the move in March, Vought told appropriators that the agency determined it could “no longer operate and maintain this system because it requires the disclosure of sensitive, predecisional, and deliberative information.”
“By their nature, apportionments and footnotes contain predecisional and deliberative information because they are interim decisions based on current circumstances and needs, and may be (and are) frequently changed as those circumstances change,” the letter, which was publicly shared by DeLauro, said.
Democrats have rejected the administration’s claims, however, with DeLauro arguing in her own response to Vought that apportionments “are final agency actions” subject to the Freedom of Information Act and that the “website publishes no sensitive data and law accounts for classified information.”
Others have also argued taking down the apportionments website could make it harder to track moves by Trump’s Department of Government and Efficiency (DOGE).
“You can find out from other sources, grants that have been made, you can figure out total outlays by budget account and that sort of stuff,” Bobby Kogan, a former Senate budget aide, said Friday, but he argued that apportionment data provides “under the hood details” and “help us take notice of any places where they might be illegally impounding.”
In the weeks leading up to the website’s shuttering, Roll Call and Propublica reported on DOGE receiving millions of dollars in funding as the Trump administration ramped up a sweeping operation to cut federal funding and shrink the size of government.
“The only reason we know how much money DOGE was getting and where it was housed within the federal government [is] because the White House was following the law at that point,” said Kogan, now the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.
Elon Musk, who Trump tapped to head up DOGE, previously estimated the office saved $160 billion as he prepared to step back from the effort. Other estimates of the funding that’s been targeted as part of the effort, or the potential costs incurred through DOGE’s operations, have varied.
Testifying before senators in April, Gene Dodaro, head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), said the watchdog had dozens of investigations underway as it probed the administration’s efforts to freeze federal funds.
Trump agency heads are already getting grilled about the administration’s moves on spending this funding season as appropriations hearings begin to pick up in Washington for fiscal year 2026.
During a House appropriations hearing this past week, Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) pressed FBI Director Kash Patel about the missing apportionments system and whether he would commit to “making the FBI’s account-specific apportionments publicly available.”
Patel responded that he would “absolutely” commit to doing so, so long as he has “the appropriate request.” But when asked about a potential timeline as to when it would be possible for the FBI to provide the information, Patel responded that he hadn’t had one but would do so for the congresswoman.
The Hill reached out to the FBI for comment regarding Patel’s remarks.
The agency said in a statement on Sunday that it is “committed to working with the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Justice, and other government partners on FBI budget matters,” while referring to OMB “for questions about apportionment.”
