What’s There to Hide? Attorney General Bonta Urges Transparency in Federal Spending of Taxpayer Dollars

OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today joined a coalition of 21 attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Office of Management and Budget challenging the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) deactivation of the Public Apportionments Database. The Public Apportionments Database is an online resource maintained by OMB that details legally binding plans for how federal agencies spend funds appropriated by Congress. In July 2025, a district court granted partial summary judgement and ordered OMB to restore the website. The federal government appealed and moved for a stay pending appeal, which the D.C. Circuit denied. In the brief, the coalition opposes the federal government's appeal and argues that the Trump Administration’s refusal to make apportionment decisions public impairs states’ ability to quickly identify unlawful funding decisions the Administration makes. 

“Americans have a right to know where their taxpayer money is going, especially when billions of dollars are at stake,” said Attorney General Bonta. “The Trump Administration is refusing to fulfill their obligation to publicly disclose how it spends the public’s money, barreling ahead without oversight. President Trump has already illegally withheld or redirected billions in funding countless times in broad daylight, raising serious concerns about what else the Trump Administration wants to keep hidden. If there is nothing to hide, why keep it a secret from the very people who pay? California demands transparency — we want the receipts.”

Since 2022, Congress has required OMB to make its apportionment decisions public on its website within two days of the decision so that entities and organizations can identify — and, where necessary, put a stop to — the federal government’s failures to comply with appropriations laws. In early 2025, OMB announced that it would no longer comply with this statute on separation-of-powers and deliberative-process-privilege and, since then, the Trump Administration has repeatedly and unlawfully withheld billions of dollars in appropriated funds, often in secret. In some cases, the Administration has failed to announce that it is withholding appropriated funds; in others, it delayed the announcement until the withholding caused a crisis; and often, the Trump Administration refused to reveal, even when its efforts to withhold funds are discovered, whether it was OMB or the administering agency that is responsible for the violation.  

In today's brief, Attorney General Bonta and the coalition argue that states have a strong interest in ensuring this information remains public and accessible. The absence of timely apportionment data creates an ongoing problem in which states cannot monitor in real time OMB's failure to release appropriated funds, leading to crisis situations, chaos, and harm to states and their agencies. The unavailability of timely apportionment data has already caused real-world problems, meaningfully impairing states’ ability to protect their interests and hindering the litigation. For example, in two cases that California co-led in 2025 — the Trump Administration delayed over $6 billion in education funds and terminated nearly $400 million in funding for state AmeriCorps programs — the unavailability of timely apportionment data interfered with California’s efforts to restore the funding, efforts that ultimately proved successful. Having timely access to apportionment decisions has enabled the states, including California, to protect our interests, such as analyzing apportionment data to determine both when funds had stopped flowing and where they had stopped.

In submitting the brief, Attorney General Bonta joins the attorneys general of the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin.