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Make public accountability data usable: searchable, machine-readable, complete enough to audit, and bounded by privacy, security, and law-enforcement limits.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
Cited Sources
9
What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
Transparency is not the same thing as dumping PDFs onto a website. It works when the public, journalists, watchdogs, Congress, researchers, and honest agencies can inspect what government is doing without needing a lawsuit, a vendor contract, or a data-cleaning team to decode it.
The current facts make this plank more concrete than the 2024 title. DOJ's FY2025 FOIA summary reported a record 1,707,197 FOIA requests and 1,635,055 processed requests. The federal government has FOIA.gov datasets, USAspending.gov, Data.gov, public AI use-case inventories, lobbying disclosure reports, and program inventories. The problem is not absence of portals. It is incompleteness, data quality, missing spending categories, weak linkage between programs and awards, late or inconsistent disclosures, and transparency systems that do not always support real audit.
Fund FOIA capacity around backlog reduction, proactive disclosure, case-management modernization, and public quarterly metrics. Agencies with high request volume should publish the records people repeatedly request before another requester has to ask.
Make federal transparency data machine-readable by default: stable APIs, bulk downloads, data dictionaries, source lineage, change logs, version history, and plain-language context for non-specialists.
Close federal spending gaps by requiring other transaction agreements, subawards, emergency spending, and program identifiers to be reported in ways that connect USAspending.gov, SAM.gov, the Federal Program Inventory, and agency performance data.
Keep public AI-use inventories and high-impact AI reporting mandatory, with summaries understandable enough for affected people to know when an agency is using AI in a consequential process.
Restore beneficial-ownership transparency where public money, foreign influence, or federal contracting is at stake, while respecting the reality that current FinCEN rules exempt domestic companies and U.S. persons from broad BOI reporting.
Strengthen lobbying and campaign-finance disclosure through validation, enforcement referrals, APIs, and searchable links between lobbyists, covered prior federal jobs, clients, contributions, contracts, and policy actions.
The party's position is not "publish everything." Classified, personal, law-enforcement, trade-secret, and security-sensitive information still need limits. The standard is useful transparency: publish what the public can safely use, in forms that make accountability possible.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.