Making government & politics more accountable & transparent
Spotlight
Unprecedented secrecy in the Senate on health care bill is bad for democracy - The road to rebuilding public trust in Congress is paved with transparency and accountability to constituents, not secrecy. Every U.S. Senator should insist upon regular order, not sacrifice openness on the altar of naked legislative power.
Latest from the blog
- Today in OpenGov: Senate healthcare secrecy is the wrong prescription for ailing democracy Jun 21, 2017 08:14 AM
- Unprecedented secrecy in the Senate on health care bill is bad for democracy Jun 20, 2017 01:52 PM
- Today in OpenGov: A bad six months for transparency and American democracy Jun 20, 2017 08:01 AM
- Today in OpenGov: What can we learn from President Trump’s financial disclosures? Jun 19, 2017 07:14 AM
- Today in OpenGov: Co-creating better FOIA software Jun 16, 2017 08:15 AM
Our Projects
Through the generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Sunlight’s Open Cities team provides direct technical assistance to dozens of mid-sized American cities participating in the What Works Cities Initiative, helping improve public information disclosure and reuse.
Tracking Trump’s Conflicts of Interest
On November 28, Sunlight began maintaining an ongoing list of confirmed reports of conflicts of interest, where Trump business has clearly mixed with public business. [Read more]
Tracking U.S. Government Data Takedowns
Sunlight and our open government allies are tracking confirmed news reports of the Trump administration removing open government data from the Internet and links to where data has been archived. [Read more]
Tracking Trump’s Attacks on Transparency
In March, Sunlight joined C-SPAN to make sense of the Trump administration’s record on open government during Sunshine Week. We continue to add to a long list of examples that offer insight. [Read more]
Our MissionThe Sunlight Foundation is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses the tools of civic tech, open data, policy analysis and journalism to make our government and politics more accountable and transparent to all. Our vision is to use technology to enable more complete, equitable and effective democratic participation. Our overarching goal is to achieve changes in the law to require real-time, online transparency for government information. And, our work focuses on the local, state, federal and international levels.
These efforts have produced real results. To date, we have served more than 4.2 billion API calls (and counting), indicating how much the data we liberate is needed. Our reporting is frequently cited by the world’s preeminent journalists. Our research has led to congressional hearings, and our tools have stripped problematic measures from bills. And we recently won a major victory when, at our urging, the federal government agreed to begin the process of releasing all data sets held by federal agencies.
As government grows ever-more complex, and as the flow of political money becomes more perverse, we will all need better and more creative tools to ensure that democracy thrives.
More about us
