A federal judge gave Donald Trump’s administration some simple instructions when it comes to “violating” the law: Stop doing it.
In a ruling on Monday, District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C. found that the White House Office of Management and Budget illegally took down a public website showing how federal agencies spend taxpayer money.
“There is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money,” Sullivan wrote in a 60-page opinion.
“Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!” added Sullivan — emphasis his.
The administration removed the website in March. OMB director Russell Vought told members of Congress that the office intentionally flouted the law by scraping the database due to the “sensitive” and “deliberative” nature of the information on it.
A lawsuit from nonprofit watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Protect Democracy accused the administration of removing data to which they are statutorily entitled as part of their efforts to monitor government funding.
According to Sullivan, Trump and Vought relied on “an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power” to argue that the government’s appropriation of public funds does not need to be publicly disclosed.
Instead, they complained about the “extra work” required of them under law passed by Congress in 2022 and 2023, Sullivan wrote.
“This is a management issue; not a constitutional one,” he said.
The judge ordered OMB to restore the database and publicly disclose the information on it, including any apportionment information from the time the database was taken offline.
“The law is clear that the federal government must make its appropriations decisions public,” according to Adina Rosenbaum, Public Citizen Litigation Group attorney and counsel on the case. “So this case turned on a straightforward point: The administration must follow the law.”
Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at CREW, said the decision “reaffirms Congress’s constitutional authority to require public disclosure of how taxpayer dollars are spent.”
“Americans have a right to know how taxpayer money is being spent,” he added. “Ensuring public access to this information serves as a critical check on the executive branch’s abuse and misuse of federal funds.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly taken a beating in federal court, with dozens of court orders across the country striking down key elements of his agenda as unconstitutional, or, in one case, confounding a judge who compared his sweeping executive actions to a “gumbo” giving him “heartburn.”
The president, whose critics have accused him of mounting a constitutional crisis in his defiance of the courts, has resisted court orders nearly one-third of the time.
In an analysis of 165 court orders filed against the Trump administration, The Washington Post found the president has been accused of defying decisions in at least 57 cases.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision stemming from legal challenges striking down his executive order that seeks to redefine birthright citizenship could significantly diminish judicial authority.
The high court’s decision could effectively prevent judges — who are facing an avalanche of legal questions challenging the constitutionality of the president’s agenda — from issuing nationwide injunctions, making it extraordinarily difficult to unwind the president’s actions if they are later found to be illegal.
Vought, meanwhile, argues that the appropriations process should be “less bipartisan.”
“There is no voter in the country that went to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process,’” he told a Christian Science Monitor event last week. “That may be the view of something that appropriators want to maintain.”
Vought, a former Heritage Foundation policy director and co-author of Project 2025, had recently ushered through legislation to revoke $9 billion in previously approved federal funding to gut global aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds National Public Radio and PBS.
He told reporters last week that another round of cuts is likely coming soon.
