At Open the Books, we believe transparency is a first principle, secured by the Founders in the Constitution and a precondition for freedom itself.
We operate the largest private database of public spending in history — billions of records tracing every dollar spent by federal, state, and local governments. Each figure represents more than an entry in a ledger; it is a choice made with public money, and therefore a truth that must belong to the public. We estimate that our database covers nearly 40% of the entire U.S. economy.
Our team files tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests each year, prying loose what bureaucracies would rather bury. The result is a living, growing record of how the American state spends, rewards, and wastes.
We seek facts and publish evidence. We are not blind partisans; we are archivists of the truth. And when that truth becomes undeniable, policy changes, budgets shift, and power is, at least briefly, reminded that it belongs to the people who pay for it.
The work is at times tedious, often thankless, and occasionally explosive. But it is, in the oldest sense, what a republic requires: it restores to citizens what is rightfully theirs — knowledge.