Open government advocacy group Sunlight Foundation cuts staff, suspends reporting tools

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy group that supports open government and tracks money in politics, announced that it was cutting staff and suspending its data-driven projects and reporting tools. The organization, which launched in 2006 with the express purpose of tracking money in politics, said that it would end its tool building and database maintenance, which are often used by reporters writing about campaign finance and politics.

Michael Klein, the Sunlight Foundation’s board chairman, wrote a post explaining the decision to scale back dramatically. “While we are enormously proud of what Sunlight has accomplished over the past decade, and has come to stand for, we are also aware of the changes time has wrought,” Klein wrote in the post. “We are aware that the robust maturation of technology over the past decade has — happily but substantially — reduced the urgency of Sunlight’s early role as a leading transparency innovator. In addition, the board had to recognize that Sunlight’s initiating objective— to build support for better legislation against and regulation of the power of money in politics— has been significantly limited by the US Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision.”