Nonprofit Watchdog Claims Victory in Battle to Make California’s Spending Public

A Chicago-based non-profit transparency watchdog declared victory on Aug. 25 in a years-long battle to expose more than $300 billion in California government spending, making it the 50th and last state to have its “checkbook” made public.

Unlike most of the other 49 states, however, California officials fought OpenTheBooks.com at every turn and would have succeeded in keeping state government expenditures concealed from the state’s taxpayers but for the determination of the nonprofit.

At one point in the struggle, California’s Controller Betty Yee claimed in a state court after the nonprofit sued for the spending data that officials could not provide it to OpenTheBooks.com or anybody else because the state has no central payments database.

Yee also claimed that compiling the data would be an excessive burden on officials because the state receives volumes of paper payment documents from thousands of suppliers and vendors every year.

It was at that point that OpenTheBooks.com’s auditors took on the herculean task of submitting separate public records requests to every one of California’s 469 individual state agencies, boards, and commissions, and to then compiling the data in an accessible public database.

OpenTheBooks.com president Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement upon releasing the California checkbook that his group’s auditors “accomplished what the governor, controller, attorney general, lawmakers, a Superior Court judge, and state bureaucrats refused to do. We opened the books on California’s line-by-line state expenditures.

“It was an historic knockdown, drag-out, dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”

Among the first revelations, the checkbook revealed that California state officials paid out nearly $76 billion to more than 64,000 vendors in 2021. For the first time in the Golden State’s history, every individual taxpayer with a computer and internet access can see what officials are buying with tax dollars and then make voting decisions on a much more thoroughly informed basis.

Much work remains to be done, however, because according to Andrzejewski, 25 junior colleges, the University of California at Irvine, and the state university system’s Board of Regents refused to provide requested data.

Andrzejewski told The Epoch Times that his group will go after spending data being hidden by the uncooperative education organizations with equal determination.

“We will not rest until every dime is online in as real-time as possible. So, all options are on the table, including more litigation to force these California junior colleges, the Board of Regents, and the University of California-Irvine, to open their line-by-line checkbooks,” Andrzejewski said.

“We are inviting them to join the transparency revolution. They can do it the lawful, easy way, or the hard way. In any event, we will force open their spending,” he added.

OpenTheBooks.com auditors have uncovered spending that is likely to prompt new controversies, including big checks made payable to two of the wealthiest private foundations in the country.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation got $436,336 in state payments, as well as almost $20,000 for the Gates Millennium Scholars program. The Gates organization has an endowment of nearly $50 billion.

The San Francisco-based Tides Center has $126 million in net assets and is known as one of the originators of the “dark money” technique of providing an anonymous tool for rich donors who want to fund radical left-wing activists to do so without being publicly identified.

The California checkbooks show that the Tides operation received nearly $4 million from state taxpayers, including $50,000 paid to the related Tides Advocacy, a non-profit activist group that works to defund the police.

California’s attorney general has a staff that includes 3,700 employees, with 1,100 of them being lawyers. Even so, according to the checkbook, four of the Golden State’s most prominent law firms—Munger, Tolles & Olson ($3.4 million), Loeb & Loeb ($2.8 million), Musick Peeler ($1.7 million), and Reed Smith ($1.6 million)—were on the receiving end of big tax-funded payouts.

OpenTheBooks.com battled with California officials for a decade, but this struggle was not the nonprofit’s first with recalcitrant state leaders.

It took seven years of litigation to finally dislodge the Illinois state government’s checkbook.

In Wyoming’s case, it took six years.

In addition to the 50 state government checkbooks and those of thousands of municipalities around the country, the nonprofit’s website also provides access to most federal spending, including the compensation paid to millions of career civil servants.

The work of the nonprofit was originally made possible in 2006 after then-senators Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, and Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, won congressional approval and President George W. Bush’s signature on the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA).

The FFATA directed the government to establish USASpending.gov, a website that provides access to about three-fourths of all federal expenditures.

Coburn, who passed away in 2020 after a long battle with cancer, was honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com.

Nonprofit Watchdog Claims Victory in Battle to Make California’s Spending Public (theepochtimes.com)