'Must be made publicly available': Judge dings Trump admin for violating court order over access to hidden spending plans in win for transparency groups

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to stop hiding information about agency spending in a matter-of-fact rebuke of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

In the underlying litigation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the Protect Democracy Project sued over access to the "Public Apportionment Database," which was taken offline at OMB Director Russ Vought's behest in March 2025.

In July 2025, Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, ordered the Trump administration to "stop violating the law" and restore access. In ruling for the plaintiffs, the court found the removal of the database violated the two prior year appropriations acts and certain provisions of the Paperwork Reduction Act.

By August 2025, the database itself was back online. But, the plaintiffs quickly complained, several dozen documents in the database contain references to an "undisclosed spend plan," according to an eight-page motion to enforce filed last September.

The crux of the plaintiffs' motion is that mentioning those plans "in legally binding footnotes" means they are documents which "apportion" an appropriation under the relevant law. In other words, the non-public information is specifically about the funding in question and should be accessible within the same database.

"Stated differently, by incorporating by reference the terms in spend plans in legally binding footnotes apportioning appropriations, OMB has made the terms of the spend plans part of the apportionments," the motion to enforce reads. "Thus, to comply with the statutory transparency requirements, OMB must disclose the spend plans in the Public Apportionments Database."

In a 14-page memorandum opinion and order, Sullivan cites from Black's Law Dictionary to provide the U.S. Department of Justice with something not entirely unlike remedial legal education.

From the order, at length:

When a "secondary document" is incorporated by reference, it becomes "part of [the] primary document." Moreover, "[w]here a writing refers to another document, that other document . . . becomes constructively a part of the writing, and in that respect the two form a single instrument." Put otherwise, "[t]he incorporated matter is to be interpreted as part of the writing."

The court goes on to note that the Trump administration defendants "fail to respond to Plaintiffs' incorporation-by-reference argument."

And that argument, Sullivan says, is enough here.

"The Court agrees with Plaintiffs that when OMB conditions the ability of an agency to obligate funds upon OMB's agreement with the contents of a spend plan in a legally-binding footnote, OMB has incorporated-by-reference the terms of the spend plan into the apportionment and therefore the spend plan is a 'document apportioning an appropriation' that must be disclosed under the 2022 and 2023 Acts," the order reads.

The government, for its part, argued that Joe Biden's administration similarly did not provide access to such spend plans. But, the court noted, the plaintiffs countered that the Biden administration's database documents "rarely" even contained such references.

The court rejected the argument about the Biden precedent out of hand. In turn, the court also rejected a related defense claim that the plaintiffs waived their argument because the Biden administration established the practice of referencing undisclosed spend plans.

"[B]ecause Defendants illegally removed the database, Plaintiffs could not have known that OMB is now with significantly greater frequency incorporating spend plans by reference into apportionment documents," Sullivan explains. "Plaintiffs have not waived this argument because until the illegally removed database was restored, Plaintiffs could not have known that documents 'required to be disclosed by the 2022 and 2023 Acts' were missing."

The court then tidily summarized the issue and order:

OMB has incorporated-by-reference the terms of certain spend plans in legally binding footnotes. Since the terms of such spend plans contain legally binding limits on the agencies' ability to obligate funds, the spend plans are "documents apportioning an appropriation," and must be made publicly available under the 2022 and 2023 Acts and this Court's July 21, 2025, Order. Because the spend plans have not been made publicly available, Plaintiffs have not "received all relief required by the Court's earlier order."