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The Sunlight Foundation was established in January 2006 and formally began operations four months later with the goal of “using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.” The Foundation derives its name from Justice Louis Brandeis’s assertion that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
While it officially “does not support or oppose candidates for public office,” the Sunlight Foundation identified three specific priorities for the incoming Congress in 2007:
(a) Contemporaneous online filing: “The public reports about campaign receipts and expenditures, personal financial disclosure, trips, gifts and travel currently required of lawmakers should be filed electronically [on a monthly basis] and shared online within 24 hours of their filing.” Moreover, the Foundation believes that candidates' Personal Financial Disclosure reports should be amended to require disclosure of the affiliations of lawmakers (and their family members) with political organizations or charities.
(b) Ending secret legislation: “All earmarks, bills, and amendments should include an identification of the proposing Member's name. All non-emergency legislation should be posted online, in its final form, at least 72 hours before a vote.”
(c) Meaningful lobbyist disclosure: “All who are paid to engage in direct issue advocacy with lawmakers and their staff should be required to register, and all registered lobbyists should disclose all legislative contacts, all legislation and regulations discussed, all contributions they make and coordinate to Members and organizations affiliated with members, all prior government employment, and any relationship to a current Member of Congress, staff member, or executive branch employee.”
The Sunlight Foundation’s co-founder and Executive Director is Ellen S. Miller, who previously served as Deputy Director of the Campaign for America's Future, where she directed its Project for an Accountable Congress. She also established the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics (which is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts) and Public Campaign (funded by the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Columbia Foundation, the Compton Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Ford Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy). Miller is the former publisher of TomPaine.com, a former fellow at The American Prospect, and an occasional contributor to The Nation.
The co-founder and Chairman of the Sunlight Foundation is Michael Klein, who in January 2006 retired from the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering after 35 years as a practicing attorney. He now serves as a trustee of the American Himalayan Foundation and the Pen Faulkner Foundation.
A Senior Fellow at the Sunlight Foundation is veteran journalist and editor Bill Allison, who for nine years worked for the George Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity, where he co-authored The Cheating of America, whose central thesis holds that “the rich and powerful shirk their responsibilities” as taxpayers. Allison was also senior editor of The Buying of the President 2000 and co-editor of The Buying of the President 2004.
Another Senior Fellow at the Foundation is Larry Makinson, who was a journalist in Alaska in the mid-1980s and then worked for fifteen years at the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), including two years as its Executive Director. After leaving CRP he spent a year as Senior Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.
The National Director of the Sunlight Foundation is Zephyr Teachout, who formerly worked as a lecturer at the University of Vermont and was Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. A licensed attorney, Teachout has represented indigent death-row inmates in North Carolina for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation; she was also the co-founding Executive Director of the Fair Trial Initiative, a fellowship program that trains young lawyers in death penalty trial work.
The Sunlight Foundation currently oversees six major projects:
1) Sunlight Labs: This in-house development team of programmers, designers and analysts seeks “to move Sunlight Foundation and its grantees into a leadership role demonstrating how the Web can enable meaningful citizen participation and create avenues for renewed trust between citizens and their elected officials.”
2) Opening Up Access to Congressional Information: Sunlight Foundation grants have helped create two new online databases: (a) Congresspedia, which was launched in April 2006, “uses the wiki model to harness citizen reporting on members of Congress, scandals and pieces of legislation.” It has two paid professional editors who fact-check and edit user submissions as they deem necessary. (b) OpenCongress provides official congressional data on bills, votes, floor statements and conference reports; press coverage of those items; and blog analyses generated by its users. This website is designed to “allow anyone to easily track a bill, an issue, a vote, a member, a campaign contribution, or a phrase used in the Congressional Record, and to follow developments in any of those areas …”
3) Expanding Data Resources: As of January 2007, the Sunlight Foundation was in the process of putting together a new website, Washington Watchdog, intended to serve as a “full searchable record not just of every action of Congress, but also the Federal Register, presidential statements, and all regulatory agency actions and rules.”
4) Supporting Citizen Journalism: In 2006 the Foundation launched “a series of distributed reporting and research projects that looked initially at Congressional financial disclosure forms, investigated earmarks in appropriations bills, and identified those members of the House of Representatives who have hired their spouses to work for their reelection campaign committees.”
5) Expanding Public Education and Training: In the fall of 2006 the Sunlight Foundation launched the website Watchdogging 101, which contains “more than 20 illustrated tutorials explaining how to answer basic money-and-influence questions.”
6) Changing the Culture of Congress: In August 2006 the Foundation created a sister organization called the Sunlight Network, which seeks to make public officials openly disclose their daily activities to the public. One early campaign offered citizens a cash award if they could persuade their lawmakers to post their daily schedules on the Internet.
The Sunlight Foundation’s major disbursements (ranging from $25,000 to $325,000) in 2006 included grants to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which also has received financial backing from George Soros's Open Society Institute, Democracy Alliance, the Tides Foundation, the Streisand Foundation, and the Arca Foundation), the Young Elected Officials Network, (a project of People for the American Way), MAPLight.org, the Center for Responsive Politics, OMB Watch, the Center for Media and Democracy, the Center for Citizen Media, NewAssignment.Net, Room Eight, the Project on Government Oversight, and ReadtheBill.org. Smaller grants (ranging from $1,650 to $16,000) were made to Metavid, More Perfect, Arizona Congresswatch, the Connecticut Local Politics Blogspot, WashingtonWatchdog.org, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the Project on Government Oversight, and the BluegrassReport.
The Sunlight Foundation website features four blogs on the subject of ethics and money in Washington; they are run by four of its principals: Citizen's Notebook (Zephyr Teachout); Sunspots (Ellen Miller); Under the Influence (Bill Allison); and Dollarocracy (Larry Makinson).
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