Congress took an important step toward fiscal transparency in requiring the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make public a database of critical funding decisions for agencies and activities, known as apportionments. In a new insight, Director of Fiscal Policy Gordon Gray explains the proposed legislation that would, among other reforms, make the database public permanently.

Key points:

• Once Congress makes high-level budget decisions, it falls to the executive branch to distribute that funding to agencies and activities, but many of the executive branches’ budget functions are less than transparent to the public and policymakers.
• Congress is currently considering making permanent the public availability of the OMB database, as well as additional reforms to strengthen Congress’s primacy in budget policy.
• While this is an important reform in the interest of fiscal transparency, it also represents a step toward Congress reclaiming its Article I power of the purse.

Read the analysis