A Message from Our New CEO, John Hart

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The following is a transcript of John’s video message to you, our dedicated transparency team:

My name is John Hart. I’m a longtime friend and supporter of Open the Books.

As you may know, we recently lost our CEO Adam Andrzejewski who unexpectedly passed away in August.

If you’ve followed our work you’ll know that Adam’s enthusiasm was contagious. His passion for transparency and putting every dime online, in real time, made Open the Books a tremendous success.

Adam was a great leader and a great friend. He loved his family, his community and his country. He believed every dollar saved in Washington was a dream realized somewhere in America.

I met Adam when I was working for the late U.S. Senator and Dr. Tom Coburn. We had worked with a Senator named Barack Obama on a landmark transparency bill called the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. That bill put all federal spending online in a searchable database for the first time.

When Adam made Dr. Coburn the Honorary Chairman of Open the Books he said the Coburn-Obama bill made his work possible. But I can tell you Dr. Coburn believed that it was Adam, and his talented and dedicated team and board, that made our vision of citizen activism a reality.

I believe that vision is more vital today than ever. So I’m honored to announce that I’m succeeding Adam Andrzejewski as the CEO of Open the Books.

I can promise you that we will honor Adam’s legacy. We’ll be revving up the transparency revolution.

You see, at Open the Books, we believe transparency is a first principle. It’s a building block of representative government written into our Constitution 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’ll never take our freedoms for granted, and we’ll never stop fighting for this first principle of transparency.

Now, I’m aware I’m making this announcement a few days before an election. I wanted to do this now to make it clear that our mission and values won’t change based on who wins. Our job isn’t to cater to power but to speak truth to power. Tom Coburn spoke truth to power. Adam Andrzejewski spoke truth to power. I’ll speak truth to power.

I say this with resolve but also humility. I don’t believe there is such a thing as my truth. Truth is something that exists apart from my perspective. I believe Americans are hungering for a reality-based politics and they want institutions like ours to provide information they can trust. That’s what we’ve done and that’s what we’re going to keep doing.

Now, I have a perspective. I believe Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

I want to tilt the scales toward liberty by giving you the information you need to hold government accountable.

An important part of our work will be investing in technology and expanding our database of government spending that is already the largest database of its kind in history. We’ve called our quest to map all government spending The Spending Genome project. Now, we’re going to call it Project Adam to honor Adam’s legacy.

That project will be something we’re always building, always creating, always expanding and always perfecting.

Individual data points in a database may not seem particularly inspiring but I can promise you that big data can create big change. Every piece of data Craig Mijares and his team painstakingly track down and enter is a brush stroke, a pixel, a point of light that creates a constellation a picture that tells us something important about the nature of government and our relationship to it.

This is important because we hear a lot these days about what government should do to constrain technology. But I want to flip that script. Instead of asking what government should do to constrain technology we should be asking what technology should do to constrain government. The answer to misinformation isn’t more mandates, or censorship, but more information you can trust. MLK put it well: Darkness never drives out darkness; only light can do that.

Let me close by saying that even though I had a special relationship with Tom Coburn I believe this legacy belongs to Barack Obama as much as it does Coburn or to former President George W. Bush who signed the bill into law.

So whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, libertarian or socialist you’re invited to join the transparency revolution. We can bring our best arguments and see who wins. I’m willing to be proven wrong. I hope you are too.

Let’s Open the Books together and find out!