I was shocked when Epoch Times readers first saw my story about the secret royalties of $350 million paid to Francis Collins (ex-Director of National Institutes for Health) and hundreds more scientists and doctors at NIH.
I’ve received lots of compliments since then and positive feedback about the story. Being that there are a lot of dark places in our nation’s capital, it is always great to hear positive feedback from readers.
This exposes what appears to be a huge nascent scandal nation is really about. He may have been a man you’ve seen on cable TV, but he’s no household name in the Real World.
But he should, because Adam Andrzejewski’s transparency and accountability in government have contributed significantly to the preservation of individual freedom, limited government, and the constitutional republic that our great founders left us.
Here’s a list of Open the Books (OTB) wins and achievements. Open the Books is a non-profit government watchdog that was created by Andrzejewski to help place government spending at all levels online.
Andrzejewski’s watchdog group filed over 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests since the creation of OTB in 2011. This includes records about the salaries and pensions for 107 million American public employees at all levels of the American government. OTB had to bring the defendants to trial.
OTB made the Internet “checkbook registers”, for 49 states as well as many municipalities, available. This has given taxpayers access to hundreds of billions of dollars in public spending. Many of these funds are kept secret behind closed doors by politicians representing both parties. California is the last remaining party to be compelled to pay.
OTB relies on FOIA for investigations and works with media outlets like The Epoch Times to expose many scandals. These include the $2.3 Trillion (that’s Trillion with a T) in misappropriated federal taxes, federal funding to the Fortune 100 large corporations, and $27 billion of federal funds that went directly to America’s “sanctuary cities,” where illegal immigrants are welcomed with open arms.
OTB had to deal with many lies from officials who tried to hide or evade responsibility.
This is my favorite OTB project to open the California state government checkbook.
“Unfortunately,” Betty Yee, California State Controller (pictured), declined our sunshine request to the state checkbook. The rejection didn’t argue the law but stated that she couldn’t locate any of the 49 million bills she had paid in the past year.
Andrzejewski and the OTB have created the largest compilable public expenditure database at all levels. This is in contrast to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), whose vision was for a website that would allow anyone connected to the internet to access all federal spending, and “all federal expenses at their disposal”. ”
Andrzejewski, Coburn, and others understood this fact better than most Republican congressmen: “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”
I have been preaching to the Right for many decades that transparency and accountability are the greatest enemies of the Big Government that’s constantly smothering our country.
