Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.

At Open the Books, we believe transparency is a first principle. It's a building block of representative government that makes all our other freedoms possible. For most of history, and for much of the world today, transparency was and is a distant dream. At Open the Books we never stop fighting for this first principle.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

We’re tilting the scales toward liberty by giving you the information you need to hold government accountable.

We operate the largest private database of public spending in human history. 10 billion points of data that includes all federal salaries, line-by-line spending by the feds, all 50 state “checkbooks” – their own line-by-line spending each year – plus millions of state-level salaries and pension funds, and spending across more than 17,000 municipalities.

And we’re aren’t done yet. We won’t stop until we’ve captured every dime and put in online, in a close to real-time as possible.

The database is open to journalists, researchers, activists, public officials – and most importantly – every American taxpayer.

Because we believe transparency can transform the way we govern ourselves.

Individual points in a database may not seem particularly inspiring but big data can create big change. Every spending figure we painstakingly locate and preserve is a brush stroke, a pixel, a point of light that reveals a bigger picture. It tells us something important about the nature of government and our relationship to it.

Americans are hungering for a reality-based conversation with information they can actually trust. At Open the Books, it’s at your fingertips.

But we know Americans lead busy lives, so we also have a brilliant team of independent journalists working to synthesize and analyze our data and deliver you critical, exhaustive reporting on waste, fraud, abuse, and self-dealing across every unit of government.

Take a spin around the site to crunch your own numbers, read our dozens of comprehensive oversight reports on federal agencies, or head to Substack where we’re making headlines weekly with breaking news! 

 

What They’re Saying

 

The Fine Print

To view our rating on Charity Navigator, click here.

For recent 990 tax returns, click here.

For recent Annual Reports, click here.

Open the Books is a project of American Transparency – a 501(c)3 nonprofit, nonpartisan charitable organization. All donations are tax deductible for federal or state income tax purposes to the fullest extent of the law.

As a government watchdog organization, we accept no government funding.

We run the largest private database of public spending in human history.  Because transparency can transform the way we govern ourselves.