Last Updated: September 08, 2026
The 21st Century Government Transparency and Efficiency Act
Your government should be open, efficient, and accountable. Currently it’s none of those things.
What it includes:
- Radical Transparency: Real-time publication of all non-classified government data — spending, contracts, communications, meeting minutes — in a public, searchable database.
- Proof It’s Actually Being Published: Inspectors General check agency records against the database every quarter and publish how complete each agency is. Anything withheld gets listed — what it was, who withheld it, and under what law — so you can see the gap even when you can’t see the document.
- The Duty Follows the Work, Not the Letterhead: These rules apply to whoever is actually doing the public job. Hand a government function to a contractor, a federally funded nonprofit, or an advisory board, and the same publishing duties go with it. Public money doesn’t stop being public because it changed hands.
- Open-Source Mandate: All new government software built as open source, with public code repositories and community review (classified national security systems excepted).
- AI for Efficiency: Automate tedious paperwork like FOIA and permits, with mandatory bias audits and human review for any decision that affects you.
- Participatory Budgeting: Let local communities directly propose, debate, and vote on how federal community-development dollars get spent.
- Independent Watchdog Protection: Inspector Generals can’t be fired without Congressional approval, can investigate anyone in government — including Cabinet members, judges, and the President. Their budgets can’t be quietly starved either: funding is indexed to inflation and to the agency they watch, and cutting it takes a separate recorded vote naming the office and the amount, so it can’t ride along inside a spending bill.
- Fair Hearings on Federal Job Eligibility: If an agency rules you unsuitable for federal employment, your appeal is heard by a body independent of the office that made the call — and the numbers are published every year, so the pattern is visible.
- Ironclad Whistleblower Protection: New independent agency to shield federal employees who expose corruption, with full salary continuation, government-funded legal defense, and financial rewards for major disclosures.
- End the Revolving Door: 5-year ban on industry executives joining the agencies they used to lobby; 10-year ban on regulating a former employer.
- Nobody Grades Their Own Bid: A company competing for a government contract cannot help write the scorecard used to judge it, and its messages to the people scoring are public. The scoring rules get published before bids come in — and if they change partway through, the change is published along with what the score was before. Where a system holds sensitive personal data or public safety depends on it, an outside expert with no stake in the sale has to test the real thing and publish the results before the contract is signed. That test is measured against whatever the current federal security standard is, not a checklist frozen into law years ago — so the bar keeps up as the technology changes, and if anyone lowers the bar they have to say why in public.
- Public Servant Financial Integrity: Stock-trading ban and mandatory blind trusts for members of Congress, Cabinet officials, and federal judges. Extends to immediate family.
- Total Ban on Foreign-Funded Proxies: Any U.S. think tank or PAC that takes foreign government money is permanently barred from lobbying.