Even the financial backers of an organization founded on the belief that sunlight makes for better government have begun to wonder if their mission has become futile.
“We’ve been funding transparency for the last decade and democracy has gotten worse, trust in institutions has gotten worse,” Hilary Braseth, executive director of OpenSecrets, recalled big contributors to her organization telling her.
Founded by former senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Hugh Scott (R-Pennsylvania), OpenSecretshas been at the forefront of the transparency movement for more than four decades. It tracks political donations to candidates and national party committee lobbying data, helping tie together what those donation dollars often yield in terms of government contracts or legislation.
But the last decade has been tough for those advocating for cleaner, less corrupt government:
- A U.S. senator was convicted for accepting illegal gifts, including gold bars, from a foreign government.
- Convicted felons have openly hired lobbyiststo win pardons.
- A dozen billionaires, who donated hundreds of millions to last year’s presidential campaign, won appointments to the new administration.
Yet, there’s been little movement toward further restrictions on financial conflicts. Congress has not even banned stock trades by lawmakers despite years of concerted effort and polls showing near-universal support. The Supreme Court seems poised to loosen restrictions on national party committees spending funds in coordinationwith political candidates.
Veteran lawmakers who have tried to reduce the influence of money in politics feel defeated. They predict that only a scandal of massive proportions can bend the arc back toward the reformers’ direction.
“I think the electorate is numb to big money. I think it’s reached a point where we’re statistically numb,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who is retiring next year after 44 years in Congress.
Braseth, 36, is now almost two years into running OpenSecrets and has set about on a mission to both revamp the organization and, perhaps more important, defeat the cynicism that surrounds the transparency movement.
Hoping to make a “critical backbone” for voters seeking information, OpenSecrets’ staff of about 20 has maintained a website that can easily track the flow and trends of money going into politics.
Click the “elections” link at the top of the homepage and a visitor is taken to a page showing the explosive growth of outside spendingin presidential and congressional campaigns not affiliated with the candidates or their political party committees.
As recently as 2008, those “independent expenditures” tallied less than $144 million; last year, $4.21 billion.
There’s a “politicians” link that shows fundraising data for members of Congress. The data shows, for example, how House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) was one of the worst fundraisers in Congress his first three terms, bringing in barely $1 million for each campaign, a third of what the average House member raised. Then last year, he took in $19 million once he became speaker in late 2023.
A merger in 2021 with the National Institute on Money in Politics, with its website followthemoney.org, has provided OpenSecrets with a treasure trove of information on state races for governors, legislatures and judgeships. Like many mergers, some kinks appeared and once the three-year grant to fund the merger expired, the group’s financial picture grew dour.
According to its annual 2024 report, revenue was $3 million, about two-thirds coming from large foundations, and expenses approached $4.5 million, leading to a staff reduction of about a third over the last couple years.
Now, Braseth has launched a new OpenSecrets Pro plan that is designed to increase revenue by charging professionals such as the media and campaign consultants for additional features and access beyond what’s public.
The group ran 41 sessions to train more than 1,400 journalists last year on how to use its data.
Braseth, who has a tech background, is leading a revamp of the website to make it the “go-to resource for any voter” so that they can click on their phone and discover anything they want.
“So people can understand and toggle between different datasets, click on a state and see all the races happening in that state. The candidates running for office, who are their main funders, where are they personally invested,” she said.
Despite financial struggles, OpenSecrets remains a well-read site, with more than 11 million unique visitors last year and about 70,000 searches for data each day.
Sometimes its users are seeking quick information on the potential partisan leanings of suspects of political violence.
The group saw a surge in searches of any political donations for Thomas Matthew Crooks after his assassination attempt of Trump last year, along with Luigi Mangione and United Healthcare after Mangione’s alleged murder of the health giant’s executive last December.
More often, it’s used by average citizens trying to cut through the incredible noise of 24/7 politics to get right to the source of money and politics.
“People are wanting access to primary source information to piece together the story themselves, rather than be told that story always through an intermediary like a news outlet,” Braseth said.
Her path to running a good-government group in Washington is nothing like Ellen Miller’s, who co-founded the Center for Responsive Politics (the original name for OpenSecrets) in 1984, after serving on staff for several congressional committees focused on investigations.
Braseth grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and went into the Peace Corps after college. She was stationed in the West African nation of Guinea in its infancy as a democracy.
She dabbled in side jobs, creating a technology program to help people launch businesses.
“The absence of any transparency is truly a breeding ground for corruption,” she said, explaining how communities can get torn apart. “People were afraid to start businesses in my small village because they were worried their neighbor would sabotage it overnight out of jealousy.”
Lawmakers like Durbin used to believe that forcing political donors to reveal how much they contribute and spend on campaigns would prompt the citizenry to demand a new way to finance politics.
Durbin spent years pushing legislation to have public financing of elections, but gave up when he could only find one Republican co-sponsor: Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), who would eventually switch parties and become a Democrat.
“The garlic’s in the soup, as far as most people are concerned. You can’t take it out. We got big money in this process and a process that eats every dollar we can raise,” he said.
He recalled the day when Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada), then Senate majority leader, explained how a new super PAC would spend about $20 million in 2010 or 2012 to help retain their majority.
It’s now topped $1 billion in spending, according to OpenSecrets.
“Now both sides look at it and kind of chuckle and say, ‘how naive to think that you can do public financing.’ It’ll take a scandal of proportions I can’t describe to you to get people back into a conversation about putting limits on spending,” Durbin said.
That’s the biggest fight for OpenSecrets, continuing to reveal the special interests and their work in financing campaigns and then lobbying those that win — without feeding the cynicism cycle.
Braseth knows what she’s up against.
“More transparency equals less trust, i.e.: Citizen A thinks that the system’s corrupt, they see OpenSecrets data, it confirms the bias that everything’s just corrupt and they want to dissociate,” she said, mimicking those conversations with skeptical donors.
But Americans remain engaged on this issue, according to a Pew Research Center poll from February that Braseth regularly cites.
In a survey about economic concerns, 72 percent of Americans cited the “role of money in politics” as a “very big problem,” the top concern.
She spoke to a group of Columbia University students, one of whom asked whether transparency was actually a good thing. Braseth went back and forth with the students and came away encouraged.
“I actually think healthy skepticism is a really necessary thing in a democracy,” she said. “Greater trust doesn’t mean no doubt. About the system. Greater trust needs to live in coexistence with doubt because doubt fuels accountability that reinforces trust.”
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