GOP-appointed judge smacks down Trump admin for hiding government spending: report

Law & Crime reports a federal judge called out President Donald Trump's administration for violating a court order demanding access to hidden spending plans.

In win for transparency groups, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, first appointed by President Ronald Reagan and later by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, had to school the Trump administration over what it could and could not hide from the public.

Last year, Sullivan ordered the administration to "stop violating the law" and restore public access to the "Public Apportionment Database," which Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought ordered removed last March.

At the judge’s order, the database was back online by last August, but plaintiffs noticed documents in the database contained references to an "undisclosed spend plan," according to an eight-page motion to enforce filed last September. Access to the information in the footnotes, they argued, is just as legally binding as the original document the judge ordered released.

Law & Crime reports Sullivan had to give the Trump administration a crash course in “remedial legal education” by citing from Black's Law Dictionary to explain why the protesting administration had to cough up the info. The source of a “legally binding footnote,” the judge concluded, must be disclosed.

But it turns out that the Trump administration — much like President Donald Trump himself — can’t seem to keep the name of former president Joe Biden out of its mouth. While Trump is more than happy to keep blaming Biden for the Trump economy, Middle East instability and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has also leaned on Biden for excuses. In the case of the OMB redactions, his administration essentially argued that Biden was guilty of doing the same thing.

“The government, for its part, claimed that the Biden administration similarly did not provide access to such spending plans,” Law & Crime reports, but Sullivan agreed with plaintiffs that the Biden administration's database documents "rarely" even contained such references.

“The court rejected the argument about the Biden precedent out of hand. In turn, the court also rejected a related defense claim that the plaintiffs waived their argument because the Biden administration established the practice of referencing undisclosed spend plans,” Law & Crime reported.

“[B]ecause Defendants illegally removed the database, Plaintiffs could not have known that OMB is now with significantly greater frequency incorporating spend plans by reference into apportionment documents," Sullivan said. "Plaintiffs have not waived this argument because until the illegally removed database was restored, Plaintiffs could not have known that documents 'required to be disclosed by the 2022 and 2023 Acts' were missing."

The decision counts as a win for the open records advocate Protect Democracy Project, who sued the OMB over the hidden spending plan.

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