Open the Books has built the largest private database of U.S. federal and state government data in the world. Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.
When Open The Books founder Adam Andrzejewski passed away suddenly last year, shockwaves rippled through conservative policy circles nationwide. Over more than a decade, Adam and his colleagues broke the code not only on how to quickly find valuable gems of data deep in the bureaucratic swamps of Washington, but how to turn them into headlines that afflicted the most comfortable and powerful of our public servants. Government transparency is a bedrock principle and the foundation for trust in our institutions. Transparency is for government; privacy is for the people.
OTB broke stories that even the Left should have paid closer attention to: Kamala Harris’s inability to retain staff, the paltry portion of federal workers who actually go into the office, how Anthony Fauci became the highest-paid federal worker, and the like. Filing almost 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests annually, OTB is building something the federal government would build if it cared about transparency—an up-to-date and easily-searchable database of all federal spending. In fact, OTB has built the largest private database of U.S. federal and state government data in the world.
For DOGE and other budget hawks in Congress and the private sector, OTB has shown what can be done with the right talent and laser focus on transparency. In 2023, they captured 20.2 million public employee salaries, 5.2 million retirement pension annuities, and 163 million individual vendor payments. They’ve revolutionized the capture and loading of open records requests. Displaying the captured government spending data on its website and proprietary mapping platform, OTB is using big data and cloud technology to finally bring sunlight into the massive federal bureaucracy. The goal? Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.
An astounding resource for vigilant citizens of any background, anyone can now search all government spending at every level—federal, state, and local—for free. And with this newly-available resource, OTB’s own researchers are breaking stories that wouldn’t have been breakable even ten years ago.
- $1.3 billion in payments given to Russia and China while they undermine and in some cases attack U.S. interests
- Hundreds of millions of dollars in Republican earmarks
- The $1 billion subsidy for the Palestinians that lifted up Hamas
- Elite colleges receiving over $45 billion from taxpayers
- The militarization of the EPA and IRS in the form of millions of dollars of tactical weaponry and armor
Of the many findings made by OTB or made possible by their research, one of the most concerning is the extent to which federal public health agencies officials personally benefit from the grantees funded by the agencies they oversee. In 2023, the National Institutes of Health paid more than $30 billion in grants to some 56,000 recipients, while $325 million flowed back in the other direction to NIH, its scientists, and leadership.
Typical was the case of Anthony Fauci (then-director of NIAID, which is under the NIH umbrella), who testified before Congress in 2022 that he couldn’t recall if he received royalties from any NIH grant recipients. NIH, for its part, refused to disclose to Congress the names of the companies paying royalties and to whom they were given, but because Open The Books was on the case, transparency finally prevailed, finding that Fauci, NIH director Francis Collins, and others were rewarded handsomely by the companies receiving NIH grants.
Those who share the Impact Fund’s concern with the politicization of science don’t fault scientists for benefitting from innovations they produce. It’s the massive amount of federal funding changing hands through an agency whose leadership has fought tooth and nail to avoid oversight that is concerning. Were it not for transparency and accountability hawks like Open The Books, there’s no telling how much of the federal public health infrastructure is actually advancing public health and how much is, like so much else under the federal banner, cause for very serious concern.
Now under the leadership of John Hart, long-time transparency advocate and friend of OTB, staff are ratcheting up their efforts to make government data accessible online to everyone, including public citizens, investigative reporters, academics, think tanks, politicians, etc. This is the “transparency revolution” that Adam Andrzejewski set out to lead. With a new administration that promises a revolution in accountability at the federal level, OTB’s unprecedented success in publishing data behind the bureaucracy and longstanding relationships with likeminded policymakers couldn’t come at a better time. Backing OTB’s innovative transparency-in-data model demonstrates Impact Fund donors’ commitment to bringing accountability where it is most needed—accountability that a truly civil society requires.
