Trump Administration Abused Spending Safeguards to Advance Its Agenda — and Illegally Hid Its Actions

The recent release of 1,800 internal budget documents shows just how far the Trump Administration is willing to go to illegally withhold or restrict funding. The documents detail how the Trump Administration has abused its authority by adding new layers of political interference and control over agency spending to impose its policy priorities and preferences, even when doing so conflicts with the law.

Until a court intervened, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had been illegally hiding agency “apportionments” — a crucial aspect of financial management whereby OMB grants agencies access to the funds appropriated in statute — actively and intentionally frustrating Congress’s ability to provide oversight over the Administration’s compliance with spending laws.^[2] Yet an apportionment is meant to be a routine plan for agencies’ use of funding intended to ensure that the federal government does not violate the restrictions on spending established in law.^[3]

Though delaying the spending of lawfully provided funds for policy reasons is illegal, the Trump Administration has seemingly sought to do so through three tactics. First, it is delaying apportionment approvals well past when they are required by law, or withholding them altogether.^[4] Second, it is establishing further conditions for an agency’s actual receipt of funds that are hidden from public view. Third, it is designating significant funding amounts as “unallocated” — apparently making it unavailable for agency use for the purposes Congress outlined in law, pending some later agreement between OMB and the agency. In each instance, it is creating an opportunity for abuse that the public disclosure of apportionments was meant to prevent.

Congress gave OMB the power to apportion funds for good reasons: to ensure that spending laws are faithfully followed and that agencies do not overspend the resources available to them and prematurely run out of funding. Congress voted on a bipartisan basis to require these apportionments be made public after President Trump used the apportionment process to illegally withhold military assistance intended for Ukraine during his first term.^[5]

With the documents’ recent release, we do not yet know the depth to which the Trump Administration abused the apportionment process, or the full scope of the effects on programs — and people. But what we have seen is more troubling evidence of its efforts to illegally “impound” — not spend — the funds Congress provided.

To take just one example, the Administration leveraged its apportionment power in its effort to illegally withhold billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) support for medical breakthroughs and treatments in cancer, diabetes, and other critical health research fields (see “Apportionment as a Tool of Impoundment: NIH as a Case Study” below).

Similarly, it abused its apportionment power to illegally freeze Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) support for public health programs until late into the fiscal year, when the funds would be at risk of going unused. With these types of abuses, the Trump Administration has ignored Congress and the law to undermine critical programs that people count on.

Delaying Apportionment Approvals

The Trump Administration is waiting longer than in past administrations to apportion funds for certain programs to delay obligations. Although apportionment plans must be approved within 30 days of enactment of appropriations, OMB consistently provided approvals much later in 2025.^[6] For instance, in 2024 OMB approved over 100 apportionments for Department of Health and Human Service accounts in the 30 days following the enactment of full-year appropriations, compared with fewer than ten over the same period in 2025.

The Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund, designed to generate economic growth and opportunity in some of the nation's most distressed communities, has faced an enormous delay in gaining access to the funds provided by Congress in March. The Trump Administration only apportioned funds for the administration of the CDFI program on July 30 — more than four months after full-year appropriations had been enacted — and still has not apportioned the funds for making awards.^[7] By comparison, in 2024, those funds were apportioned roughly two weeks after the funds were appropriated.^[8]

Notably, the July 2025 apportionment of CDFI’s administrative funds came the day after 26 senators sent a bipartisan letter to OMB expressing concern over delays in making awards.^[9] That the Trump Administration has proposed severe cuts to the CDFI Fund for 2026 raises the clear possibility that its actions to illegally restrict congressionally provided support in 2025 through the apportionment process are an effort to unilaterally advance its desired policies despite the funding enacted into law.

Requiring Agency Spending Plans

OMB also conditioned many apportionments on its approval of a separate “agreed-upon spending plan” with the agency, above and beyond approval of the apportionment itself. These requirements can be found in over 100 apportionments approved by the Trump Administration between March and August of 2025, which affect at least six cabinet departments, as well as the Social Security Administration and other smaller agencies.^[10] Similar requirements — conditioning the availability of funds on OMB approval of an agency spending plan — have been used only rarely in prior administrations.

Further, in over half of those more than one hundred instances, OMB explicitly required the agency to provide a “detailed description” of how the spending plan “aligns with Administration priorities,” illegally delaying funds from being used for the purposes established in law in order to effectuate the Administration’s own spending priorities. In some cases, OMB laid out in the apportionment the minimal purposes for which it would allow an agency to spend funds in the absence of an approved spending plan — making clear that approval of the spending plan had not yet been given at the time an apportionment was approved.

With no transparency about what was required for a spending plan to meet OMB approval, the process is ripe for abuse and misuse. The Administration’s approach provides no way for the public to know if the information being required of agencies is merely an excuse to delay making funding available, or if agencies are required to give other unrelated policy assurances to OMB to gain access to their statutorily provided funds. It is at least possible that approval of some spending plans was conditioned on agencies providing assurances that they would not fully spend some portion of the lawfully provided funding. Arguably, given that the apportioned funds cannot be made available until these “agreed-upon” spending plans were approved, the plans themselves constitute “documents apportioning an appropriation,” which OMB is required to make publicly available under the law.^[11]

In the case of funding for the CDC’s public health programs targeting health promotion and chronic disease and injury prevention, no apportionment was received until July 29. But even worse, the apportionment stated that CDC could only “continue to make obligations for salaries and related administrative expenses” until OMB approved its spending plan, suggesting that had not yet occurred. This was confirmed in reporting on August 1 that CDC awards continued to be frozen, with an OMB spokesperson saying that “the CDC money is undergoing a programmatic review because the office is still waiting on CDC’s spending plan.” Thus, CDC still could not make awards with two months remaining in the fiscal year, leaving it unclear whether CDC can responsibly award all its lawfully provided funding before the September 30 deadline at the end of the fiscal year.^[12]

Using “Unallocated” Accounts

Finally, in at least a handful of instances, the Trump Administration apportioned significant funds as “unallocated” — apparently making them unavailable for use to execute the purposes Congress outlined in law, pending some later agreement — in accounts where that is uncommon, if not unprecedented. For example, at the Department of Education, over $600 million in Innovation and Improvement funds and roughly $500 million in Institute of Education Sciences funds were, and remain, apportioned as “unallocated.”^[13] The Trump Administration has proposed significant budget cuts for both in 2026.^[14] Further, apportionment footnotes reveal OMB plans to “automatically” re-apportion these unallocated funds once OMB agrees to their planned use — meaning that whether these impounded funds are ever released, or the purpose to which they are to be put if released, may remain hidden until after the fiscal year ends.

The apportionment data the Administration tried to illegally hide, and was ultimately forced to divulge, reinforces that the Trump Administration acted with the intention of illegally delaying and restricting funds lawfully provided by Congress. But it will take some time for auditors, Congress, public interest groups, and reporters to comb through all the recently released documents to fully understand the extent to which the Trump Administration has been abusing the apportionment process to advance its policy goals and aid in its illegal impoundments.