Sunlight Foundation

While the Sunlight Foundation claimed to be nonpartisan, its original national director, Zephyr Teachout, became a left-wing Democratic politician; ³ its funders included the left-of-center Bloomberg Philanthropies; ⁴and its policy positions aligned with left-of-center priorities. ⁵

In 2016, due to personnel failures and a lack of mission-related urgency, the organization laid off a large portion of its staff and discontinued many of its programs. ⁶ By 2018, the Sunlight Foundation’s limited programming mainly focused on tracking the negative aspects of the Trump administration. ⁷ In September 2020, board chair Michael R. Klein announced that the Foundation would be closed after all staff and major activities had been transferred to other organizations while the name Sunlight and its IP would be transferred to both the Internet Archive and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In his message Klein stated, “We have now reached the point at which Sunlight’s board has determined that its role is no longer essential to its original central mission.”  ⁸

In 2018, the Foundation was sharply criticized for previously employing (and later failing to reprimand) Clay Johnson as its Sunlight Labs director despite specific warnings to the foundation’s executive director that Johnson allegedly tried to sexually assault two women. Johnson also allegedly treated female subordinates in a harassing and inappropriate manner. Moreover, the Foundation’s failure to address Johnson’s behavior reportedly emboldened “other men whose conduct crossed the line” and created a permissive culture of sexually inappropriate harassment towards women within the organization. ⁹

Background

Two left-of-center activists, Michael Klein and Ellen Miller, started the Sunlight Foundation in April 2006 on a $3.5 million startup grant from Klein. ¹⁰

When it opened, the organization sought to redefine public information to mean information available online. It established new tools and websites to enable individuals and communities to better access and sort that information and put it to use.  ¹¹

The organization started with a focus on the U.S. Congress. It later broadened its reach to include local, state, federal, and international transparency.  ¹² The foundation said its efforts led to congressional hearings and that its tools exposed information that led to provisions being removed from certain bills.  ¹³

Projects

The Sunlight Foundation helped create more than four dozen public records databases, as well as other tools to shed light on political, policymaking and lobbying activity. The organization scaled down in 2016, transferring most of the projects to other organizations, and closed in September 2020 after transferring more of its projects and personnel to other groups. ¹⁴

Among the first projects, Sunlight Foundation partnered with the left-wing Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) to run “Congresspedia,” a repository of information on members of Congress which existed as an edited “portal” on CMD’s SourceWatch opposition-research website. In 2009, the project became part of OpenCongress. ^{15 16}

Sunlight Labs was the foundation’s division dedicated to building useful data tools from government files. In 2016, it closed the projects, and ProPublica took over several initiatives. This included “Politwoops,” an archive of tweets deleted by U.S. politicians; Capitol Words, a tool that visualizes words and phrases used most frequently by legislators on the House and Senate floor, providing insights into which issues they address on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis; a House Staff Directory, with names and contact numbers for congressional staffers; a House Expenditure Report that tracks how House members spend taxpayer money on office overhead; and Congress API, which lets programmers build their own apps using information on members of Congress. ¹⁷

Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics assumed ownership of Sunlight Foundation’s Foreign Influence Explorer and Political Party Time programs.  ¹⁸

The Marshall Project took over Sunlight Foundation’s Hall of Justice program, and the U.S. Department of Commerce, a federal government agency, took over “Sunlight’s Python wrapper for the Census API.”^{7 18}

The Open Cities project was aimed at making municipal government across the country more transparent and accountable. ¹⁹ Greg Jordan-Detamore was a former Open Cities product lead for the Sunlight Foundation. In May 2020, just months before the closure of the Sunlight Foundation, Jordan-Detamore went to work for Results for America to lead the Open Cities Team there. He stayed at Results for America until 2022 rising to a senior manager role, before going to several other jobs before starting work in 2024 at Nava, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that consults with government offices on technology. ^{20  21}

Owen O’Malley, who was the Open Cities Project Manager for the Sunlight Foundation also went for Results for America, where he was listed as the associated director of digital product management as of 2026. ^{22  21}

In 2015, Bloomberg Philanthropies donated $42 million to a partnership with Results for America, the Sunlight Foundation, and research centers at Johns Hopkins and Harvard to improve about 100 midsize American cities by giving them insight into policy data. ²³

Discontinued Activities

Aside from these programs, the rest of Sunlight Foundation’s programs and projects appeared as of 2026 to have been discontinued. The information its programs previously published continued at that time to be housed for public viewing through various partner organizations such as the Internet Archive. ²⁴

Sunlight Foundation’s discontinued programs include Influence Explorer, ²⁵ Political Ad Sleuth (monitoring political ad spending), and Follow the Unlimited Money. ²⁶

The Fixed Fortunes project, provided data arguing that corporations that spent billions of dollars for political influence received $4.4 trillion in federal support. ²⁷

Other projects included the Inner Workings of Congress project, Earmark Watch, ²⁶ and the Poligraft project, which sought to uncover political influence in federal and state-level politics news coverage. ²⁸

Beginning in January 2018, Sunlight Foundation limited its programing and began running projects largely focused on tracking the happenings within the administration of President Donald Trump. ⁷ These projects included “Tracking Trump’s Conflicts of Interest,” “Tracking the Trump Administration’s Record on Transparency,” and the “Web Integrity Project,” which was created to keep track of changes in website content and access to government internet-based resources during the Trump administration. ²⁹

Policy and Lobbying Agenda

The Sunlight Foundation had said its “overarching goal [was] to achieve changes in the law to require real-time, online transparency for all government information, with a special focus on the political money flow and who tries to influence government and how government responds.” ³⁰

The Foundation generally advocated that all information and data relating to government decisions should be publicized promptly online in a searchable and permanently preserved manner. The Foundation also called for the creation of a new centralized high-level executive office to oversee the online dissemination of government data. ⁵

In what the group called a “major victory,” the federal government in 2015 agreed to release all datasets held by federal agencies.  ¹³

The Sunlight Foundation was part of a coalition of watchdog groups that pushed for new reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. The same coalition also advocated for modernizing the DATA Act.  ¹³

The Sunlight Foundation advocated for the passage of the OPEN Government Data Act, the Honest Ads Act, and other reforms to “hold the Trump administration accountable to the public it serves.”  ¹³

In 2014, the Foundation called for the Federal Communications Commission to create of a political advertising spending database ³¹ and argued that the Securities and Exchange Commission should impose regulations mandating advocacy spending disclosures for all publicly traded companies. ^{31 32}

The Sunlight Foundation has been a persistent critic of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision, which protected the First Amendment right of certain advocacy groups to comment on election-related matters. ^{33 34}

Conversely, the Foundation from 2011 through at least 2018 called for the enactment of the so-called DISCLOSE Act, which would mandate expanded disclosure of political financial contributors. ^{5 35}

People

Co-founders Michael Klein and Ellen Miller began working on the idea of the Sunlight Foundation in November 2005. The goal was that “emerging tools of computer technology could have a positive impact on citizen understanding and oversight of government and the political spheres.” ^{2  12}

Klein was Sunlight Foundation’s chairman of the board through its entirety and provided the organization with its initial $3.5 million startup grant. Klein is a D.C. securities lawyer and formerly a partner with Wilmer Cutler & Pickering. ³⁶ Klein has identified himself as “primarily a Democrat” ³⁷ and founded the Gun Violence Archive as well as the Global Warming Mitigation Project. He has also sat on the board of directors of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. ³⁸

Ellen Miller was the first executive director at the Sunlight Foundation. Prior to Sunlight Foundation, Miller was a publisher of the left-wing blog TomPaine.com and was deputy director of Campaign for America’s Future, a labor union-backed group opposed to President George W. Bush’s Social Security and Medicare drug plans.^{5 37} Miller had previously founded two other government watchdog groups, Public Campaign (which changed its name to Every Voice Center) and Center for Responsive Politics (best known for its website, OpenSecrets.org).  ³⁶ She retired in February 2014. ³⁹

Zephyr Teachout was the first national director of the Sunlight Foundation. ³ Teachout subsequently was the “liberal rival” candidate to then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in New York’s 2014 Democratic gubernatorial primary. ⁴⁰ Teachout was also a Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress in upstate New York in 2016. ⁴¹

The outgoing executive director of the organization was John Wonderlich.  ⁴² He delivered speeches internationally on technology and transparency, and testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. He is a graduate of Penn State University. ⁴³

Over the years, the Sunlight Foundation’s board of directors had included Andrew McLaughlin, a former CEO of Digg and Instapaper; Sue Gardner, former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation; Mark Horvit, former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors; Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and Craigconnects; and Daniel X. O’Neil, a one-time executive director of Smart Chicago and co-founder of EveryBlock.  ³⁶

Listed as members of the board of directors on the still-active Sunlight Foundation website, presumably up to the closure, were Klein; Newmark; Katherine Maher, who would go onto become the CEO of National Public Radio and faced criticism for highly partisan comments such as calling Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath”; Wonderlich, and Zoe Reiter, the acting representative of the United States at Transparency International. ^{44  45 46}

The Sunlight Foundation’s advisory board included Yochai Benkler, a Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School; Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Lawrence Lessig, while he was the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; Charles Lewis, the founder for the Center for Public Integrity, and Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.  ³⁶

Sexual Misconduct Controversy

In 2018, the left-of-center online news service HuffPost released reporting alleging widespread sexual misconduct by a former Sunlight Foundation digital staffer and mishandling of the fallout by Sunlight Foundation senior staff. According to the report, in 2008, the Sunlight Foundation “quietly hired” liberal digital operative Clay Johnson to head its Sunshine Labs division where he “played a significant role in helping the nonprofit raise money and attract grants.” ⁹

Shortly thereafter Sarah Schacht, who had worked with Johnson on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, informed the Foundation’s executive director Ellen Miller that Johnson had allegedly tried to sexually assault her and another woman. ⁹

Schacht at the time had started and was running a small nonprofit that previously received that previously received a Sunlight Foundation grant and was treated favorably by Miller. However, Schacht claimed there “was an abrupt change” in her relationship with Miller after she reported that Johnson’s previous attack against her. Schacht claims that after her report the Sunlight Foundation denied her organization’s request for a larger grant, and “announced plans to launch a legislative tracker that Schacht felt was in direct competition with hers.”  Miller denied the allegations and said that she did not remember having a conversation with Schacht about Johnson’s alleged abuses. ⁹

According to multiple former Sunlight Foundation staffers, during his time at the Foundation Johnson “routinely made obscene comments toward his co-workers” that were reported to the Foundation’s leadership. ⁹

Nisha Thompson, a former Sunlight employee, alleged that Johnson had made obscene sexual comments to her including saying, “I’m going to [f***] you in the [a**].” In another instance, Johnson reportedly “said something so inappropriate” to a young digital designer “that the team, in dramatic fashion, dragged her desk away from his and surrounded her with their own desks.” After the designer and at least one other team member complained to Sunlight’s de facto human resources representative about Johnson’s behavior, he was given a warning but was not fired. Johnson reportedly quit the next day. ⁹

Multiple former Sunlight Foundation employees said that the organization’s failure to address Johnson’s behavior emboldened “other men whose conduct crossed the line” and created a permissive culture enabling harassment and sexually inappropriate comments towards women. In a 2015 exit memo, a former Sunlight Foundation employee reportedly wrote that she was very disappointed with how the foundation “handle[d] hostile work environment or sexual harassment issues.” The former employee continued, “It became clear to me that, as colleagues came to me with examples of these issues they actively faced at Sunlight, they did not feel there was anyone in the organization they could turn to for addressing the issue.”  ⁹

Clash With Twitter

The Sunlight Foundation ran a site called “Politwoops” from 2012 to 2015 that monitored deleted political posts on Twitter.  ³⁶

The site noted deletions for reasons such as typos, actual changes in position, “or even secret daughters,” Politico reported. In one notable example, when soldier Beau Bergdahl was brought back to the United States, several Republican and Democrats praised him, but took those tweets down after news emerged that he might have deserted his post in Afghanistan before he was captured.  ³⁶

Twitter revoked the Polititwoops access to the Twitter API, preventing the website from preserving deleted tweets. A Twitter spokesperson explained at the time: “We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents, but preserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement. Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress.”  ³⁶

In response, the Sunlight Foundation president Christopher Gates published a “eulogy” for Politwoops, asserting, “Clearly, something changed — and we’re not likely to ever know what it was. Unfortunately, Twitter’s decision to pull the plug on Politwoops is a reminder of how the Internet isn’t truly a public square.”  ³⁶

Grants Distributed

The Sunlight Foundation gave over $2 million  to 46 organizations between 2010 and 2014 ⁴⁷ to expand their information capacities and create new sources of data. ³⁷

Among those grants, Sunlight Foundation gave millions of dollars to left-leaning organizations. The Foundation gave $737,300 to the Participatory Politics Foundation, $525,000 to the National Institute on Money In State Politics, $100,000 to OMB Watch, $95,000 to the Center For Public Integrity, $25,000 to the National Priorities Project, $25,000 to the Wesleyan Media Project, $12,000 to Code For America, $10,000 to Democracy Works, $10,000 to the Foundation For National Progress (publisher of Mother Jones, a social-democratic magazine), $10,000 to the Fund for the City of New York, $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation, and $10,000 to the New Venture Fund. ⁴⁷

Funding

From 2005, the Sunlight Foundation claimed to have received over $60 million in contributions, tens of millions of which came from left-of-center organizations. The group had received over $19 million from the Omidyar Network, $9.7 million from its left-leaning founder Michael Klein, $7.75 million from the Rockefeller Family Fund, $5 million from the John and James Knight Foundation, $2.9 million from Pew Charitable Trusts, $2.1 million from the Google Foundation, $1.26 million from the Ford Foundation, $1 million from the Hewlett Foundation, and over $1 million from George Soros associated foundations (Open Society Foundations and Foundation to Promote Open Society). ⁴⁸

The group had also received tens of thousands of dollars from the MacArthur Foundation, Jennifer and Jonathan Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Cuban, ProPublica, O’Reilly Media, Microsoft Corporation, the makers of “Cards Against Humanity,” and the Craigslist Charitable Fund. ⁴⁸

Among the final donors in 2019 were the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund of Fidelity Charitable, which contributed $150,000 to the Sunlight Foundation; Andrew Bergman through the Schwab Charitable Trust, which contributed $62,500; Craigslist Charitable contributed $3,000; Cards Against Humanity contributed $15,612.61; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation contributed $100,000; the Open Contracting Partnership gave $50,000; and Results for America contributed $60,000 in support of What Works Cities Economic Mobility project targeted at rising income inequality in cities.  ⁴⁹

Wind-Down and Closure

Reduction of Operations

In 2016, Sunlight Foundation chairman and co-founder Mike Klein stated that the organization would reduce its operations, would close its Sunshine Labs contingent, would dismiss one-fourth of its staff, and would seek to merge many of its operations with other organizations. ^{6 50}

The Atlantic writer Robinson Meyer noted that “taken together, the posts presented ominous but confusing news” about the organization’s future operational functionality. ⁵⁰ Robinson noted that the foundation had not received “a new multimillion-dollar grant for operating costs since 2012” and was instead sustained by contributions from its founder and chairman Mike Klein.  ⁵⁰

In December 2016, Sunlight Foundation announced that it would continue operations under a new executive director, John Wonderlich. The organization declared that during 2017 it would retain and expand its functional capacities to attack “regressive legislation and regulation” at the federal, state, and local level, turning the left-tilting watchdog organization into a liberal advocacy group. ⁵¹

Despite these assertions and the hiring of a new executive director, the Sunlight Foundation’s revenues sharply decreased from previous levels. In 2013, the Foundation raised $8.9 million; ⁶ by 2016, annual revenues had decreased to just $327,000 and net assets dwindled to $1.7 million, down from $5 million the year before. ⁵²

Closure

In September 2020, the organization closed. Sunlight Foundation board chairman Michael Klein announced at the time that the organization’s “role is no longer essential to its original central mission.” Klein added, “Virtually all of the activities and staff of Sunlight have been transferred to other engaged institutions, or closed.” ¹⁴

Klein announced the name Sunlight and its IP would be transferred to the Internet Archive and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. ⁸