For decades, career civil servants at the White House budget office have held a quiet but essential role in doling out trillions of dollars in the federal budget. Throughout the year, they parceled out money appropriated by Congress to agencies meant to spend it.
Today that job is held by loyalists to President Trump who have turned a routine task of financial management into a potent policymaking tool — and one that has set the White House on a collision course with Congress over its constitutional power of the purse.
In more than 100 cases this year, Office of Management and Budget officials who sign off on funds for federal agencies have attached unusual conditions to the money, including requirements that funds meant to reflect Congress’s priorities be spent only if they align with the president’s views. The moves lay the groundwork for the Trump administration to choke off billions of dollars budgeted by Congress for education, health, housing and research programs.
In some cases, the administration has clearly blocked funding for specific programs. In others, the threat lurks in footnotes tucked in detailed budget logs that congressional appropriators are racing to decipher as their conflict with the budget office grows.
The administration’s efforts to tighten control over spending are apparent in a trove of newly released records, which the White House budget director Russell T. Vought had pulled from public view in March and fought in court to keep secret. The administration only began to publish those documents earlier this month under court order.
A New York Times analysis of thousands of these records posted online through Friday morning shows that the White House has targeted spending at three agencies in particular: the Departments of Health and Human Services; State; and Education. The administration has sought to restrict funding for programs that help families reduce their home energy bills, mothers buy food for young children and laid-off workers find training.
Indeed, the list of accounts over which the White House has exerted new control — each one tied to a single program or operational expense — maps closely onto the parts of government where the White House has proposed cutting funding for the coming fiscal year:
Jack Lew, who served as the O.M.B. director in the Clinton and Obama administrations, suggested that Mr. Trump and his aides had sought “to try to reverse engineer the president’s budget” without congressional approval.
Practically, the directives may mean that money Congress meant for specific programs will never reach the organizations and individuals they were intended to benefit.
“The really big principles at stake are really small things: It’s whether or not a small business gets a loan they were promised, it’s whether or not a particular community health center gets the funding they need,” said Matthew Lawrence, a law professor at Emory University. “To understand those full stakes — it’s mind-boggling.”
The total sum of money at stake, however, remains unclear. The documents, called “apportionments,” still obscure many details about the spending the White House has targeted and the requirements it has imposed. A clearer picture won’t emerge for months of how much money the federal government has actually spent this fiscal year — and on what programs — compared with prior years or with the budget Congress passed.
By that point, the fiscal year will be over, along with it access to broad swaths of unspent money.
The White House budget office responded to questions about how it was using the apportionment process by saying only that Mr. Trump was following through on his promises.
“We can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse — toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country’s invasion — just as the president promised,” Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for O.M.B., said in a statement.
Many of the administration’s moves to reduce or freeze funds, including billions for education and foreign aid, have prompted lawsuits and dozens of investigations by the Government Accountability Office. While many of those inquiries are ongoing, the G.A.O. has already ruled in five cases that the administration illegally impounded, or withheld, funds appropriated by Congress. On Thursday night, the administration unilaterally canceled $4.9 billion in foreign aid using a method the G.A.O. has said is also unlawful.
The budgetary maneuvers have outraged many members of Congress, who are struggling to strike a deal that would fund the government for the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1. In moments of rare bipartisan unity, Democrats and Republicans at times have expressed shared frustration with the White House, faulting top officials for trying to conceal their spending cuts and hamper congressional oversight.
“Even after multiple court rulings, O.M.B. is not complying with the law, and is hiding how its decisions slash lifesaving medical research, steal from students’ classrooms, and hurt hardworking, middle-class and vulnerable people across the country,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
Last month, 26 senators — including 13 Republicans — sent a letter to Mr. Vought urging him to release the $324 million that Congress had appropriated for the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which supports lenders and financial service providers in marginalized communities. The newly released records confirm that O.M.B. has not released most of the program’s funding.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the head of the appropriations committee, declined to comment on the apportionment documents. But on Friday her frustration with O.M.B. appeared to be rising after the president’s foreign aid cancellation. “Article I of the Constitution makes clear that Congress has the responsibility for the power of the purse,” she said in a statement, calling the latest move “a clear violation of the law.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Vought have seized on the apportionment process in a bid to cut spending and map their political agenda onto the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Vought endorsed the idea as part of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint planned for the Trump administration, which proposed replacing career officials with political appointees in key posts who would make “aggressive” use of apportionment “on behalf of the president’s agenda.”
The new documents confirm that nearly all of the apportionments since Mr. Vought took over have been signed by political appointees.
In one example of the process, Congress allocated roughly $4 billion this fiscal year for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps families reduce their energy costs. Those funds are normally released in batches by the budget office to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the program, in part to ensure that the funds last throughout the fiscal year.
The newly released records show that the White House conditioned the funds on approval of a “spending plan” submitted by the health agency. The plan has been kept confidential, but the records say the agency had to demonstrate how the money “aligns with administration priorities.” Notably, the White House’s 2026 budget proposal, which is public, would defund the program entirely.
The White House fashioned requirements like these as footnotes scattered across the budget records. While experts said that past presidents have used similar tactics to address budget problems at federal agencies, many expressed alarm at the scope of the Trump administration’s demands.
“They’re imposing requirements across the government, in places that typically have not had them,” said Joe Carlile, a former O.M.B. official who served in the Biden administration. “And I believe the end result is going to be delayed funds to Americans who need them.”
Or worse, he said, the funding expires.
The footnotes containing these directives are legally binding. Agency officials who don’t follow them can be referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Anti-Deficiency Act.
In effect, the White House has put this threat behind some of Mr. Trump’s executive orders by citing them in apportionment records.
Footnotes for nearly two dozen accounts, primarily within the Education Department, require agencies for example to spend funds complying with the president’s executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the government.
In 2022, Congress passed a law requiring the White House to make these records public precisely because lawmakers feared that the executive branch could use the obscure apportionment process to flout their spending directives. Mr. Trump’s first impeachment stemmed from just such a case: In 2019, he withheld military aid to Ukraine while pressuring it to investigate his political foes, and restrictions on that funding appeared in apportionment footnotes to the Defense Department.
When Mr. Vought returned to the White House this year, he argued that disclosing the budget records would reveal sensitive information, and he pulled down the public database in March. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued, leading to the court order last month requiring the White House to disclose the records, even as it continues to challenge the law in court.
Tony Romm and Jonah Smith contributed reporting.
Alicia Parlapiano is a Times reporter covering government policy and politics, primarily using data and charts.
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Times from Washington. She’s particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected.
Alex Lemonides is a data journalist at The Times, working on a team that analyzes election results and conducts political polls.
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