Left: Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, testifies at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing regarding the rescissions package on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib). Center: Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan (U.S. District Court photo). Right: President Donald Trump addresses reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
An appellate court panel has enacted an administrative pause after the Department of Justice’s civil division requested an urgent stop to a federal judge’s decision. This decision identified that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) violated the law by removing an online “Public Apportionment Database,” a tool designed to monitor how congressional funds are spent by the executive branch.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit emphasized that the administrative stay should “not be interpreted as a decision on the merits of that motion,” but in the interim and until further notice, Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan’s orders are temporarily suspended.
“Upon consideration of the emergency motion for an immediate administrative stay and stay pending appeal, and appellees’ notice concerning the request for an administrative stay, it is ORDERED that the district court’s July 21, 2025, orders be administratively stayed pending further order of this court,” said the three-judge panel in brief, also ordering up responses from plaintiffs Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the Protect Democracy Project by 5 p.m. on Friday.
Sullivan, who has previously drawn the ire of Trump supporters, on Monday ordered the government to “stop violating the law!” At the same time, he administratively stayed his own ruling until Thursday at 10 a.m. in anticipation of the appeal we now discuss.
In its emergency motion for an administrative stay and a stay pending an appeal of Sullivan’s ruling, the Trump administration insisted that Sullivan “gave short shrift” to OMB Director Russ Vought’s “determinations” and “failed to appreciate” the way that the law “intrudes upon the Executive Branch’s constitutional prerogatives[.]”
As Law&Crime has explained, the “Public Apportionment Database” came about, at least in part, 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.
The “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.”
Congressional legislation signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2022, however, requires that the executive “publish its apportionment decisions on a publicly available online database within two days of the decision.”
The portion of the 2022 congressional act that required OMB apportionment disclosure.
That apparent violation of the law’s requirements and a “continuing” disclosure “obligation” in a 2023 act were what gave rise to CREW and Protect Democracy’s lawsuits months ago.
While Sullivan granted the plaintiffs partial summary judgment and agreed with their claims that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, he also called the government’s executive-power argument an “extravagant and unsupported” theory.
“[T]he law is clear: Congress has sweeping authority to require public disclosure of how the Executive Branch is apportioning the funds appropriated by Congress,” Sullivan write, adding for good measure that there’s “nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money.”
The Trump administration responded, as expected, by ratcheting up the court fight in the D.C. Circuit.
The DOJ has asserted Sullivan wrongly found the plaintiffs had standing to sue and that the judge didn’t seriously grapple with the administration’s executive authority claims.
“And on the merits, the district court gave short shrift to the determinations made by the Director regarding the ways in which the disclosure requirement impermissibly hampered OMB’s ability to effectively carry out the authority delegated to OMB by the President—and to the explanation in the record provided by a high-ranking and long-serving career official at OMB expanding on those conclusions,” the DOJ emergency motion said. “Dismissing these determinations as mere ‘policy disagreement[s],’ the court failed to appreciate the ways in which the statute intrudes upon the Executive Branch’s constitutional prerogatives, risks the disclosure of sensitive information, and undermines OMB’s ability to effectively administer appropriations laws.”
“Because the district court’s judgments require the Executive Branch to imminently and irreversibly disclose the covered information notwithstanding the intolerable risk that such disclosure will improperly reveal sensitive and deliberative information—and particularly given plaintiffs’ inability to identify any immediate need for the covered information—the judgments should be stayed pending appeal,” the government went on.
After appellees CREW and Protect Democracy file responses on Friday, the appellant administration will have an opportunity to reply by 10 a.m. on Monday.
