Government Transparency
You Can't Fix What You Can't See
The Problem
The Freedom of Information Act was signed in 1966, when government records lived in filing cabinets. Today the average FOIA request takes months — sometimes years — and agencies routinely deny, delay, and over-redact with little consequence. The default has become secrecy, with transparency as the grudging exception.
Meanwhile, trillions in federal spending gets reported late, in inconsistent formats, or buried in databases no ordinary citizen can navigate. When the public can't see what its government is doing, waste goes unnoticed, corruption gets easier, and conspiracy theories fill the vacuum that facts should occupy.
What We Propose
Flip the default: government information is public unless there's a specific, articulable reason it can't be — not the other way around. Agencies should publish proactively, so citizens don't have to file a request to see records they already own.
Modernize FOIA for the digital age: enforceable response deadlines, real penalties for agencies that stonewall, machine-readable records, and a public tracker for every request so delays are visible to everyone.
Real-time federal spending data in open, standardized formats. Every contract, every grant, every subsidy — searchable by any citizen, not just lobbyists with expensive subscriptions.
Protect what genuinely needs protecting. National security, active investigations, and personal privacy are legitimate secrets. 'Embarrassing to the agency' is not a classification level.
The Trade-offs
Transparency has real costs. Compliance takes staff time, and publishing everything risks burying the important in the trivial. Proactive, structured disclosure is cheaper than fighting requests one at a time — but it's an investment up front.
Radical openness can chill honest internal debate. Officials who fear every draft becoming public may stop writing things down. Deliberation needs some breathing room; final decisions and the money behind them do not.
The line between legitimate secrets and convenient ones will always be contested — which is exactly why an independent body, not the agency being scrutinized, should be the one drawing it.