OAKLAND (LN) — California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined a coalition of 21 attorneys general on Tuesday in filing an amicus brief in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Office of Management and Budget, challenging the federal government’s appeal of a lower court order mandating the restoration of a public database tracking federal spending.
The Public Apportionments Database, maintained by the Office of Management and Budget, details legally binding plans for how federal agencies spend funds appropriated by Congress. In July 2025, a district court granted partial summary judgment 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.
“Americans have a right to know where their taxpayer money is going, especially when billions of dollars are at stake,” Bonta said. “The Trump Administration is refusing to fulfill their obligation to publicly disclose how it spends the public’s money, barreling ahead without oversight.”
Bonta added that 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.”
“California demands transparency — we want the receipts,” he said.
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 grounds.
The brief argues that 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 and harm to states and their agencies.
The coalition cited two cases that California co-led in 2025 where the unavailability of timely apportionment data interfered with efforts to restore funding: the Trump Administration delayed over $6 billion in education funds and terminated nearly $400 million in funding for state AmeriCorps programs.
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.