About OpenOMB

OpenOMB is a searchable database that makes apportionments easier to find and track. Apportionments are how the president, acting through the Office of Management and Budget, implements Congress's spending laws. Apportionments set the pace at which agencies may spend appropriated funds over the course of a fiscal year by specifying what money an agency may spend, when, and subject to what conditions.

Congress created the apportionment process in the Antideficiency Act to ensure agencies spend within the limits of the law and do not prematurely exhaust the funds Congress has given them. But administrations of both parties have, at times, abused this authority to defy Congress's spending laws — such as when President Trump's OMB used the apportionment process unlawfully to withhold security assistance funds that Congress had appropriated for Ukraine.

Until July 2022, however, OMB exercised its apportionment authority largely out of public view. Neither Congress nor the public had access to apportionments.

In the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2022 and 2023, Congress took action on a bipartisan basis to fix this problem. It required OMB to post its apportionments on a public website. OMB does so at apportionment-public.max.gov. But OMB's website is hard to navigate and has no search function, making it difficult to find apportionments and oversee OMB's work.

OpenOMB aims to make oversight of OMB's apportionments easier for Congress, the press, and the public. Drawing on the data files from apportionment-public.max.gov, this site makes OMB's apportionments searchable and easier to find. OpenOMB houses all of OMB's public apportionments from fiscal year 2022 to the present. All apportionment files on OpenOMB simply reflect the underlying, primary-source data and documents that OMB has made available on apportionment-public.max.gov. (For accounts with multiple account-specific apportionments in a given fiscal year, OpenOMB has recreated the “Previous Approved” and “Prev Footnote” columns based on the data OMB disclosed in the prior apportionment.)

OpenOMB is updated daily. It is maintained by Protect Democracy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit, and is not affiliated with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Executive Office of the President, the U.S. Congress, or any component of the U.S. government.

For all inquiries, please reach us at contact@openomb.org.