Stop the OMB from Taking the Power of the Purse

A boring little office in the executive branch, the Office of Management and Budget, continues to try to steal the power of the purse from Congress and give it to political appointees under the president. Like a dog chewing a bone, when one attempt is stopped, they go after another piece of funding! We must push Congress to block these attempts and eventually permanently block OMB from making these rules.

We are asking everyone to meet with their senators and representatives (or their staff) to push them to keep the power of the purse with Congress. Defend Public Health is here to support you in meeting with your member of Congress! Meetings with congressmembers require two things for maximum impact: 1) stories of how politicizing funding from the federal government to our states and communities will impact you, your family or community and 2) data to show what’s been lost, what is at risk and what the future could look like if the executive branch took complete control of spending. We have developed a toolkit to help you with setting up and holding the meeting plus a 1-pager for every state and district (including DC) with critical facts and statistics that will help you -- see links below.

In addition, we’ve provided trainings and have also written an explainer document for the 1-pagers, to help you explain the information to your representative.

A little more background: The White House has already cut $177 billion in federal funding to the states, but the OMB wants even more control. In May they proposed a rule giving them power over all discretionary funding by putting political appointees in charge of both approving and terminating grants. Defend Public Health and other organizations helped organize nearly 500,000 comments on this rule and successfully pushed Congress to add language to the continuing resolution funding the U.S. government through December 11, 2026 prohibiting the OMB from implementing the rule while the continuing resolution is in effect.

Then, the president floated an executive order tasking OMB Director Russell Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya with forming a political committee to decide on grants for ALL 21 institutes and centers at the NIH. Happily, congressional pressure forced the president to scrap this plan. With the midterms nearing, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are pushing back against this overreach, but they need to hear from voters that this matters. Now is the time to ACT! Reach out to your congressmember’s office today. See below for the information that will help you get started:

Tools that will help you:

This toolkit will help you get started. Then click the name of your state to go to a folder with your state’s OMB report, which contains useful facts and statistics, and similar reports for each of your state’s congressional districts.