About Transparency47

Transparency47 is run by Citizens for Government Transparency. The site exists because public power leaves a public record, and that record should be easy for ordinary Americans to preserve, inspect, cite, and question.

Government transparency should not require an insider, a lobbyist, or a legal budget. It should be possible for a citizen to ask what a bill does, what an official said, what a disclosure shows, and how the public record changed over time.

Public records only

Transparency47 catalogs, converts, and preserves public material: public government posts, public posts by government officials, public legislation, public votes, public disclosures, and public filings.

We do not publish private records. We do not need private records to do this work. The public record is already enormous; the problem is that it is scattered, fragile, and too often presented in formats that make scrutiny harder than it should be.

We do not delete preserved public records

When public officials release public material, the public should not lose access just because a post is deleted, a page changes, or a document is replaced. Transparency47 treats preserved public government material as part of the record.

Corrections are handled by adding context, source notes, or updated records. The record itself remains.