A provision that could have kept White House budget numbers secret months after they were given to Congress will be removed, if possible, according to the man responsible for it.

The item, stuck into a massive spending bill, would have restricted the release of the Bush administration's requested budget for the Transportation Department until June, open government advocates complained last week.

The White House delivers those numbers to Congress in February, but critics said language in the bill barred the administration from sharing that information with anyone beyond the House and Senate Appropriations committees. In interviews with ABC News, Senate and House aides disagreed on whether the law would have blocked public access to the information.

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Following a small outcry from open-government advocates and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., the House chairman responsible for the bill has said he will remove the provision. The dispute was first reported by Cox Newspapers.

"Olver agrees with Coburn that it should be removed," said Massachusetts Rep. John Olver's spokeswoman, Sara Burch. She said the language came from a Republican-authored 2006 version of the annual spending bill. When Olver's staff drafted this year’s version, they used much of the same language as the GOP's version, she said.

"There are so many issues, so many provisions" in the massive bill, Burch said, "it was just carried."

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