Trump Has Made Billions in Taxpayer Dollars Virtually Untraceable

Even Republican members of Congress can't find where Trump put appropriated funds

By Anna Kramer and Mark Alfred

It was mid-September when Sen. Lisa Murkowski discovered that the Trump administration had pulled education funding for institutions serving Alaskan and Hawaiian Natives.

It was close to $350 million, “that we just found out about,” she told NOTUS last week, as Congress sat in a stalemate over how to prevent a government shutdown.

The Department of Education announced the change on Sept. 10, stating that the funding intended for those programs would be repurposed for other unspecified education programs.

Murkowski said she has no idea where the money is going.

Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.

The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions. Some of these taxpayer funds expire on Sept. 30. If they’re not spent by then, like all funds Congress appropriated specifically for 2025, they disappear.

NOTUS attempted to trace the money appropriated for more than 100 government programs to understand where taxpayer dollars are going, only to hit dead ends repeatedly. Data is outdated or conflicting, agencies have been vague in their explanations, and in many cases, there’s no publicly available evidence that appropriated money is being spent at all.

The connection between Congress’ decisions and current spending should be obvious — but in many cases today, it’s obscured.

Lawmakers and their staff told NOTUS they’ve faced the same barriers.

“I don’t think that there has been anything close to the transparency that we would hope,” Murkowski said. “We’re kind of finding out about it at the very last minute.”

When asked if she felt confident that she can get the information she needs, she responded:

“No! No. I get it by reading something in the newspaper.”

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In February, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed a second round of DOGE-led grant cuts by sharing the information with the New York Post. The agency went on to pass along the precise details of the EPA’s early cuts to Madeleine Rowley, a reporter at The Free Press.

The day after the agency emailed with Rowley, House and Senate appropriations staff from both parties jointly requested the EPA turn over the specifics of the 20 grants terminated in February.

“Can we please get a list of which grants were cancelled, recipient, amount per grant, program, and how these grants were funded (base, IIJA, IRA)?” senior Republican appropriations staffer Daniel Mencher asked via email. “I would hope that since this is on the EPA website, we’ll get a quick response.”

“Some of them are on Page 6,” he noted, linking to the New York Post story.

EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Daniel Coogan asked his colleagues to refrain from sending the list of cancelled grants to the Hill for the time being. Agency staffers spent over a day debating whether to fully loop in Congress. “I don’t object to these being sent but recognize there are lots of moving parts re the Hill right now,” Paige Hanson, who at the time was a senior adviser at the EPA, wrote to colleagues.

These previously unreported emails, reviewed by NOTUS, are among a tranche of documents filed in a court case against the Trump administration for terminating grants. They reveal congressional Republicans’ efforts to ascertain how the Trump administration is spending funds — and the lack of clarity they have received in response.

The EPA told NOTUS it answered Congress’ request “and, as always, worked diligently to fill every request from our partners in Congress to keep staff apprised of EPA actions.” The emails show, however, that congressional appropriations staff were still seeking basic information about the EPA’s cuts weeks later.

In mid-March, EPA congressional liaison Sarah Talmage passed along a spreadsheet listing a dozen grants to Mencher. “Below is a list of grant terminations,” she wrote, adding, “Will make sure to update you on a rolling basis.”

“Can you help me better understand what these reflect?” Mencher asked Talmage. “The latest was 400 grants totaling $1.7B per the press release. The amounts on this list only total $6.5M. Just trying to close the gap between what’s in the press releases and what is below.”

“It will take some time to process the full 400,” Talmage replied. “As such, we will send you updates on a rolling basis.”

“But to confirm these are from the fourth grant cancellation announcement?” Mencher asked. “What about the grants from the previous three cancellations?”

“We’ve been asking about those for 6+ weeks,” he added.

Staff for the chair of the Senate appropriations committee declined to comment.

In May, facing questions on grant cuts from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers at a hearing on the agency’s 2026 budget proposal, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin repeatedly testified his agency would “continue to be distributing funding appropriated by Congress as we go through the rest of the fiscal year.”

“It is our intent to continue to be spending money that was appropriated by Congress,” he said later in the hearing, even going so far as to suggest that the spending could even include some of the grants that had been canceled.

But now, one week before the end of the fiscal year, it appears that the administration has not spent those funds.

“EPA conducted a robust assessment of grant funding and looked to re-obligate it in a manner accountable to taxpayers and in line with administration priorities. In that time, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law on July 4, 2025, which rescinds the appropriated funds for Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants. EPA is working diligently to implement the law in accordance with congressional intent,” the agency said in response to NOTUS questions about what had happened with the money.

EPA made the same argument in defense of the grant cancellations in a July legal filing. That case is now pending a decision from the judge.

It remains unclear what other canceled funding the Trump administration has no intention of spending.

The Trump administration’s budgeting has looked different from the beginning. After DOGE swept through agencies, the Office of Management and Budget’s 2026 requests to Congress were unusually late and vague, missing statistics about the size of the workforce, among other details, said Demian Brady, the vice president of research at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

Many of the budget requests raised basic questions: Where was all the money that DOGE claimed to have been saving going? For example, the National Park Service’s budget suggested that the Trump administration’s spending in this fiscal year was nearly identical to what it was in 2024. Yet spending should have been different — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has cut full-time park staffing levels significantly and restricted new hiring.

The explanation came in the footnotes. The administration claimed “authority” to “revise spending within the amounts provided by Congress.” Those revisions were not reported to Congress.

The Trump administration’s OMB only published what’s known as the apportionments database — a document that shows how the White House is distributing federal funds to agencies over the course of the year — in late August, after a court ruling required it. The database indicated that funding for certain programs has been restricted until OMB approves a “spending plan” aligned with Trump’s priorities.

The proposed spending plans have never been made public.

“If you want to get spending approved, you’ve got to deal with the OMB people, because they are the ones who hold the keys to the treasury,” said Daniel Schuman, a longtime government transparency advocate who now leads the think tank the American Governance Institute.

“They’re pretending to play an administrative role, but they are really playing a political role.”

OMB did not respond to a request for comment.

These spending restrictions are everywhere. For example, funding for endangered species listings and for conservation efforts to help restore habitats, usually directed to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has been made subject to a “spending plan.”

Without one, the agency cannot spend any of the apportioned money on anything other than salary, payroll costs, and legally required payments, according to a footnote on the apportionment.

A very similar footnote applies to the funding for land acquisition at the Fish and Wildlife Service as well. At the Department of Agriculture, funding is restricted for a food bank program for seniors called the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. At the Department of Education, the list of restricted programs includes “Safe Schools and Citizenship Education.” At the Department of Health and Human Services, more than $1 billion apportioned for “Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion” has been restricted.

The Departments of Agriculture, the Interior and HHS did not respond to requests for comment. The Department of Education referred NOTUS to OMB.

NOTUS found well over 100 footnotes with a “spend plan” or “spending plan” approved during the Trump administration and attached to 2025 fiscal year apportionments. About half of the apportionments for the Department of State and the Department of the Interior in the last six months have reference to a spend plan, according to a motion filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in the court case against OMB.

“This is a fundamental challenge to the idea that legislatures are the ones that are the lawmakers,” Schuman said. “Negotiations over what appropriations will be in the future are also a waste of time, because every agreement that you strike we can unilaterally change. That’s where we are.”

NOTUS reviewed USAspending, the Federal Program Inventory, the 2026 fiscal year budget request breakdowns from agencies, an appropriations tracker put together by Democrats, the OMB’s apportionments database and government records revealed during the discovery process of lawsuits against the Trump administration.

In mid-September, CREW filed a motion asking the court to force OMB to publish spending plans. “Members of the public are unable to determine how much funding is available for obligation for different programs or purposes, and they are unable to monitor these documents for potential misuse of appropriated funds,” they wrote. “In counsels’ communications about the issue, OMB has made clear that it does not intend to post the incorporated-by-reference spend plans in the Public Apportionments Database.”

The federal government has not yet spent anywhere close to 2025 fiscal year budgetary resources. But how far off are they from where Congress intended? That’s when it becomes near-impossible to know.

One example: the EPA has obligated about $22.97 billion for the 2025 fiscal year — per data on USAspending that has not been updated since July 30. For comparison, in the 2024 fiscal year, EPA obligated about $53.49 billion.

Democratic appropriations staffers built a publicly available database to identify where funding has been cut off for some programs. Many entries have few details. The database was created based on a hodgepodge collection of information — combining publicly available documentation, information from federal agencies when possible and reports from people and groups who were supposed to receive money but didn’t, according to a Democratic appropriations aide.

And the list is likely incomplete.

“This information should be free, and it should be available, and it should be available in a format that we can use and understand,” said Nan Swift, a budget transparency expert at the conservative R Street Institute. But now, “unless you have whistleblowers in place, the only way to know something has been cut is if the anticipated recipients step up and say, ‘We didn’t get XYZ.’”

The Trump administration “has demonstrated an unprecedented lack of transparency and responsiveness to routine oversight requests,” said the Democratic aide, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about their experiences with the administration. Even though the administration is occasionally braggadocious about when it’s canceling funds, there are other times when they “pretend that there is nothing to see, even in cases where funding that should be going out the door so clearly is not,” said that staffer.

Another Hill staffer told NOTUS they are less concerned that the money will expire before it’s spent, and instead are more worried that it’s being spent in ways that Congress did not intend. This staffer said that they are primarily learning about shifts in spending through those affected by the changes reaching out to staff and Congressional offices to ask for explanations or help.

The Government Accountability Office has opened more than 40 investigations into whether the administration is illegally withholding funds in violation of Congressional instructions. GAO has already found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the Department of Health and Human Services are among the many agencies violating the law.

Murkowski isn’t the only Republican voicing her frustrations.

The Trump administration is “really pushing the limits of what the executive can do without the consent of the legislative branch,” Appropriations Chair Susan Collins told The Wall Street Journal in July.

She escalated her language at the end of August, when the White House made clear that OMB Director Russell Vought intended to pursue a controversial method of withholding funds called a “pocket rescission.”

“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” Collins said in a statement. “Instead of this attempt to undermine the law, the appropriate way is to identify ways to reduce excessive spending through the bipartisan, annual appropriations process.”