Left: Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan (U.S. District Court photo). Right: President Donald Trump speaks to the media, Friday, June 27, 2025, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File).
A veteran federal judge remembered for not simply taking the DOJ”s word for it during President Donald Trump’s first term — when the administration suddenly moved to dismiss a long-running criminal case against former National Security Advisor and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — is now ordering the government to “stop violating the law!” on public disclosure of executive branch spending distribution decisions.
Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Monday, in a 60-page decision, ripped the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for flouting congressional legislation signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2022 that required the executive to “publish its apportionment decisions on a publicly available online database within two days of the decision.”
The so-called “Public Apportionment Database,” Sullivan noted, was in use until March, “when, without notice,” the Trump administration “took the database offline” under the notion that the underlying law was “an unconstitutional encroachment on the Executive Branch’s decision-making authority.”
Yet, the database came about as a consequence of Trump’s Ukraine impeachment, which at its core had alleged the first Trump administration had illegally impounded congressionally appropriated military aid on the condition that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announce investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. Trump was ultimately acquitted in the U.S. Senate, just as he was following his Jan. 6 impeachment.
The portion of the 2022 congressional act that required OMB apportionment disclosure.
In April, government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), represented by the public interest law firm Public Citizen Litigation Group, filed suit in Sullivan’s court claiming that OMB, led by Director Russell Vought, ignored the 2022 law and a “continuing” disclosure “obligation” in a 2023 act when removing the “Public Apportionments Database” suddenly and “without reasoned decisionmaking.”
“Defendants’ removal of the Public Apportionments Database and the information it contained, failure to operate and maintain the Public Apportionments Database, and failure to make publicly accessible the information required by the 2022 Act are arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the requirements of the 2023 Act,” the suit said.
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On Monday, Sullivan agreed with CREW and its fellow plaintiff Protect Democracy Project that the removal of the database violated the Administrative Procedure Act. As a result, the judge granted the plaintiffs partial summary judgment.
“Defendants argue that this public disclosure law is an unconstitutional encroachment on the Executive Branch’s decision-making authority. Relying on an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power, Defendants claim that their apportionment decisions — which are legally binding and result in the actual spending of public funds — cannot be publicly disclosed because they are not final decisions about how to administer the spending of public funds,” the judge wrote. “However, the law is clear: Congress has sweeping authority to require public disclosure of how the Executive Branch is apportioning the funds appropriated by Congress.”
Sullivan then stated that there’s “nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money.”
“Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!” the judge said, adding in an exclamation point for emphasis.
The Trump administration seems likely to appeal the opinion and order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as it has following most to all adverse rulings of the kind.
Sullivan’s ruling contemplated this result.
“The Court DENIES WITHOUT PREJUDICE Defendants’ request for a stay pending appeal and enters an administrative stay through 10:00 am on July 24, 2025,” the judge wrote, keeping his own ruling from going into effect for three days and, by extension, giving the government time to appeal.
In the meantime, attorneys for Public Citizen and CREW are praising Sullivan’s ruling.
“The law is clear that the federal government must make its appropriations decisions public,” Public Citizen attorney Adina Rosenbaum said in a statement. “So this case turned on a straightforward point: The administration must follow the law.”
CREW deputy chief counsel Nikhel Sus called the ruling “thorough and well-reasoned” in its support for “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,” Sus said. “Ensuring public access to this information serves as a critical check on the executive branch’s abuse and misuse of federal funds.”
