A federal judge on Monday ruled that the White House budget office broke the law by taking down a website that gave Congress and the public detailed data on how the administration is spending taxpayers’ money.

Trump officials had argued that having to post the information violated the president’s powers. But Judge Emmet G. Sullivan was not convinced, saying Congress wrote a law requiring the Office of Management and Budget to post the data, and the president must follow the law.

“There is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money,” the Clinton-appointed judge wrote. “Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”

He said the database was ordered by Congress after President Trump’s first impeachment, which saw the Democrat-led House accuse him of wrongly “impounding” or withholding money that Congress had earmarked for Ukraine.

Lawmakers said presidents regularly hide decisions about how they apportion federal funding — how they specifically carry out the spending laws written by Congress. The database was intended to provide that visibility.

The website, apportionment-public.max.gov, had operated for several years until the new Trump administration took it down in March.

In a letter to Congress at the time, OMB Director Russell Vought said they had concluded it trampled on their executive privileges by sharing internal deliberations on constantly changing decisions.

“Such disclosures have a chilling effect on the deliberations within the Executive Branch,” he wrote. “Indeed, these disclosure provisions have already adversely impacted the candor contained in OMB’s  communications with agencies and have undermined OMB’s effectiveness in supervising agency spending.”

In later arguments, the government was more explicit, arguing the disclosure laws were unconstitutional and Congress had no right to demand the information be made public.

Several watchdogs challenged the move, and Judge Sullivan largely sided with them.

He rejected OMB’s contention that the information was secret deliberations. Instead, he said, since the government actually disbursed taxpayers’ money based on the information, it constituted final agency actions which aren’t protected by deliberative exemptions.

“At bottom, defendants are complaining about the extra work the 2022 and 2023 acts require. This is a management issue, not a constitutional one,” he said.

Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, hailed the decision as “a major win for transparency.”

“The courts have affirmed that the American people have a right to know how President Trump is using their money and what he may be trying to hide,” he said.

Nikhel Sus, a lawyer at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, one of the groups that challenged OMB, said the ruling “reaffirms Congress’s constitutional authority to require public disclosure of how taxpayer dollars are spent.”

“Americans have a right to know how taxpayer money is being spent,” he said.

Congress has the power of the purse, deciding where to spend taxpayers’ money. Once a spending bill becomes law, the president then carries it out.

Those decisions are known as apportionments.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.