Sunlight Foundation

April 14, 2017 — “By announcing a return to secrecy for White House visitor logs, the Trump administration has continued to evade public accountability and transparency for the highest office.”

Sunlight Foundation announces Kat Duffy as director of Sunlight Labs

November 5, 2015 — The Sunlight Foundation today announced the hire of Kat Duffy as the director of Sunlight Labs.

August 31, 2015 — The Sunlight Foundation is thrilled to announce that technologist and open gov champion Waldo Jaquith is joining the organization as senior technology adviser.

July 16, 2015 — A new report published today by the Money, Politics and Transparency project found that the role of money in politics challenges states worldwide, both rich and poor. Its abuse often raises problems of graft, corruption and cronyism, undermining legitimacy and governance. Major scandals linked to money in politics are currently rocking ruling parties in countries such as Chile, Malaysia and Brazil, with calls for leading politicians to resign. And there are problems in established democracies as well.

April 30, 2015 — A joint analysis released today by the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics found that in the 2014 elections, 31,976 people — the one percent of the one percent of the American population — accounted for $1.18 billion in disclosed federal political contributions.

April 20, 2015 — WASHINGTON — Today, the Sunlight Foundation announced its participation in the just launched ‘What Works Cities,’ a three-year, large-scale initiative to accelerate the ability of American cities to use data and evidence to engage the public, make government more effective and improve people’s lives.

March 2, 2015 — The federal government has just begun to release comprehensive lists of every dataset it knows it possesses, revealing data holdings pertaining to how government agencies operate and conduct oversight that have likely never been publicly identified before. These lists lay out the datasets that agencies create and rely on every day. The release comes in response to a Freedom of Information request first made in December 2013 by the Sunlight Foundation.

February 9, 2015 — Last Friday, the Office of Management and Budget sent a letter to the Sunlight Foundation confirming its plan to comply with Sunlight’s Freedom of Information request and subsequent administrative appeal for indexes of agency data holdings, which have never been released to the public before.

December 23, 2014 — WASHINGTON — Today, the Sunlight Foundation announced that Sue Gardner, Allison Fine, Mark Horvit and Daniel X. O’Neil would join its board of directors.

December 15, 2014 — If there was ever a time for some sunshine, it should be now. We should all being working to share the news about how Congress just used closed-door deals to not only hand out perks to special interests, but to also kill a popular, bipartisan and timely reform to modernize the Freedom of Information Act.

November 17, 2014 — The Sunlight Foundation is releasing “Fixed Fortunes,” a groundbreaking analysis and dataset of the money the biggest corporate political donors put into campaigns and lobbying and what they get in return.

Sunlight’s research found that, between 2007 and 2012, 200 of the most politically active for-profit companies in the United States disclosed spending a total of $5.8 billion influencing Washington through campaign contributions and lobbying, and have benefitted from $4.4 trillion in contracts, grants, loans and subsidies. The number exceeds the $4.3 trillion that 50 million Americans received over the same time period from Social Security.