The Office of Management and Budget OMB

Before 1921 each federal agency sent its own spending requests directly to Congress, and no one assembled them into a budget. The Budget and Accounting Act of that year required the President to submit a single annual budget and created a Bureau of the Budget in the Treasury to prepare it. Franklin Roosevelt moved the bureau into the new Executive Office of the President in 1939, making it his own staff. Richard Nixon's Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1970 renamed it the Office of Management and Budget and added a management mission, and since 1974 its Director has required Senate confirmation.

OMB prepares the President's budget each year, negotiating every agency's request down to the line item. After Congress appropriates money, OMB apportions it, deciding how much each agency may spend and when, a power that gives it day-to-day control over the flow of federal funds. It clears all agency testimony and legislative proposals so the administration speaks with one voice, issues statements of administration policy on bills, and sets governmentwide rules on financial management, procurement, and information technology. Its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, created in 1980, reviews every significant agency regulation before it can be issued, weighing costs and benefits.

With about 500 staff, mostly career civil servants who stay from one administration to the next, OMB is small for its reach. Its program examiners know agency budgets in more detail than many agency heads. The Director, a cabinet-level official, is typically among the President's most influential advisers, and several, from David Stockman to Mick Mulvaney, became national figures. OMB's calculations and spending decisions are often the battleground on which disputes between the President and Congress over money are fought.

Under its 2025 Director, OMB became the center of an argument over the President's power to refuse to spend money Congress has appropriated. It froze and withheld funds across many programs, used apportionment to slow spending, proposed rescissions, and in August 2025 sent a so-called pocket rescission timed so that the funds would lapse before Congress could act. The Government Accountability Office found several of the withholdings illegal under the Impoundment Control Act, which the Director argued is itself unconstitutional. Supporters called it a long-overdue assertion of executive control over spending. Critics in both parties called it a direct challenge to Congress's power of the purse.