CREW v. OMB

The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is responsible for making “apportionment” decisions—that is, legally binding budget decisions that specify the federal funds that an agency may spend and any conditions on the agency’s expenditure of the funds. In the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2022 and 2023, Congress required OMB to post on a publicly accessible website a database containing documents with apportionments decisions, including footnotes and written explanations for those footnotes. Since July 2022, and until recently, OMB operated and maintained a Public Apportionments Database, regularly posting apportionments information, as required by law.

On or about March 24, 2025, OMB took down the Public Apportionments Database. Several days later, OMB told Congress that it will no longer operate and maintain the Public Apportionments Database.

Representing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit challenging OMB’s removal of the Public Apportionments Database from its public website. The complaint alleges that the action is contrary to the 2023 Appropriations Act, arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to the Paperwork Reduction Act. On April 18, 2025, we moved for a preliminary injunction and partial summary judgment, asking the Court to declare that the Defendants’ removal of the information is unlawful and to require them to restore public access to the information.

In a decision issued in July 2025, the court granted our motion for summary judgment. The court ordered OMB to restore the Public Apportionments Database and to make publicly available the apportionment information required to be disclosed by the 2022 and 2023 Acts, including the apportionment information from the time the database was taken offline.

OMB appealed and sought a stay of the order pending appeal. On August 9, 2025, the D.C. Circuit denied the motion for a stay pending appeal. The appeal remains pending.

Meanwhile, OMB reposted the Public Apportionments Database. In legally binding portions of many documents in the reposted database, however, OMB provided that funds would be available to agencies as set forth in documents known as “spend plans.” OMB did not make those spend plans publicly available. We therefore filed a motion to enforce the judgment, explaining that the spend plans were documents apportioning an appropriation that had to be publicly disclosed under the law and the court’s order. On January 28, 2026, the district court granted our motion and ordered OMB to post in the Public Apportionments Database any spend plans whose terms are incorporated by reference in legally binding apportionment documents.