By Bo Erickson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Around 300 students in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, may face changes to after-school tutoring and English-language proficiency instruction unless the district’s $860,000 federal grant is freed up by President Donald Trump’s administration in time for the new school year.
This funding is a part of more than $6 billion in school funds held up on July 1 for school programs nationwide, leaving superintendents including Cleveland Heights’ Elizabeth Kirby in a budget bind. “We have not received any information about whether or not this money is coming,” she said.
The lack of clarity follows a broader pattern in which the Trump administration has provided less detail on how it plans to spend taxpayer dollars, drawing criticism from some Republicans in Congress.
“Delayed budgets, missing details, and omitted spend plans make the federal budget less transparent and less accountable to the people and their elected representatives,” Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee told Russell Vought, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, at a June 25 hearing.
The OMB and the White House did not respond to a request for comment. In previous statements, the OMB said the held-up education funds are a part of an “ongoing programmatic review” due to initial findings of grant programs being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”
Budget experts say this unwillingness to share a broad range of spending details skirts funding law, complicates the budget process going forward, and breaks from precedent aimed at increasing spending transparency.
“At this point in the year, there has never been less reliable information available to either the public or Congress about actual agency spending than at any time since the modern budget process was established in 1974,” said David Taylor, a former leader of President George H.W. Bush’s White House budget office and chief budget aide to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who now runs the research firm Federal Budget IQ.
The U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power of the federal purse to decide how to allocate taxpayer money for the executive branch to disburse throughout its agencies.
But since lawmakers passed a full-year stopgap funding bill in March — signed by Trump — they have been left with questions about where the money is going because a wide swath of federal agencies across the government either failed to share spending plans required by the stopgap bill, or sent incomplete data, according to U.S. lawmakers.
“This administration has — more than any other in my time in office — refused to share basic information with this committee,” said Democratic Senator Patty Murray, a 32-year veteran of the chamber and her party’s top appropriator.
This standoff on federal funding powers will be tested again this week as the Senate considers the administration’s $9 billion request to cancel foreign aid and public media, which could undo the funding passed on a bipartisan basis in March with a simple Republican majority.
The Republican-controlled Congress early this month narrowly passed Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill, overriding some Republicans’ objections about the heavy toll it was expected to take on the nation’s $36.2 trillion in debt.
‘NEED MORE INFORMATION’
The administration’s reluctance to share detailed spending plans has placed Cabinet secretaries in the hot seat on Capitol Hill for the last several weeks, as the funding law required these details by the end of April.
“We need more information than we have gotten,” Republican House of Representatives Appropriations Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in June, more than a month after his department’s spending plan was required.
“I’m doing the best I can,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at his May hearing, pointing the finger at other parts of the administration when hounded about the lack of spending details.
“We have a lot of irons in the fire … as we try to build up staff,” explained Interior Secretary Doug Burgum when pressed by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon about the lack of clarity on conservation projects.
Even the agency plans that were submitted had notable gaps. There were 530 asterisks in the Health and Human Services Department’s plan where specific funding amounts for programs should have been listed, according to Murray and Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top House appropriations Democrat.
“The fact that appropriators are discussing these issues in open hearings means that multiple attempts to get this information behind the scenes has failed,” said Joe Carlile, a former Democratic budget official.
TRANSPARENCY DIVIDE
Trump’s focus on slashing the federal government also has made his administration less concerned about congressional queries, said Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel at Protect Democracy, a group which is suing the administration over removal of online spending details.
“Usually, administration officials would be wary of angering the appropriations committee for the same reason it’s a bad idea to bite the hand that feeds you, but now, Congress is negotiating against an executive branch that seems happy to cut more spending,” Lindgrensavage said.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins cited White House budget office guidance and a 1983 Supreme Court ruling over congressional restraints on emergency powers to defend how his department notified Congress to “reprogram” money away from initiatives the administration deemed wasteful.
Congressional leaders tasked with overseeing VA funding demanded the department request approval to redirect money.
“The way this secretary, and this administration, has interacted with Congress on moving hundreds of millions of dollars from one account to the next is unprecedented,” said Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida.
The panel’s Republican leader, Representative John Carter of Texas, backed Schultz up: “I’ve been on this committee for 20 years … and we are not going to change it now.”
(Reporting by Bo Erickson; additional reporting by Kanishka Singh; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
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