Citizens United for Transparency is a nonpartisan watchdog focused on disclosure: who funds the advocacy, the research, and the campaigns that shape decisions about infrastructure, energy, and emerging technology in American communities.
We ask organizations to be transparent about their money. We are transparent about our money. We are not transparent about the identities of the people who do the work, and this page explains that decision rather than hiding it.
For the safety and security of our staff, biographical information about individual employees is not publicly disclosed. We do not publish names, photographs, prior employers, or personal details for members of our research, policy, or communications teams.
This is not a decision we take lightly, and we recognize the tension in it. An organization that asks for openness should expect scrutiny of its own choices. So here is our reasoning, in plain terms.
Our work involves tracing funding relationships, filing public records requests, and publishing findings that are unwelcome to well-resourced parties on more than one side of a heated national argument. Researchers who work on funding disclosure and on surveillance technology have, with some regularity, been subjected to targeted harassment, personal doxxing, and pressure applied through their families and former employers. Several of our staff came to this work from roles where they experienced exactly that.
We concluded that we could either publish a staff directory or do this particular kind of research well. We chose the research. We would rather lose the credibility that comes from a polished team page than lose an analyst.
We want to be precise about what this policy is not. It is not anonymity for the organization. Citizens United for Transparency is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that files a public Form 990, is governed by a board of directors, is audited by an outside firm, and is answerable in its own name for everything published under it. Our funding disclosures, our corrections, and our errors carry the organization’s name because the organization is accountable for them.
If a reader believes something we have published is wrong, the remedy is the same as it would be at any newsroom: show us the record. We will correct it. Knowing the author’s biography would not make a sourced claim more or less true.
We are a small organization — deliberately so. The chart below describes roles and reporting lines rather than individuals.
Legal review and the annual audit are performed by outside firms that do not report to the Executive Director.
We cannot tell you who our people are. We can tell you what they have done, in categories, so that you can judge whether this organization has the competence its work requires.
Several members of our policy and research teams previously served on Capitol Hill. Collectively their experience includes:
Our communications function is led by people who came from the corporate side, not from advocacy. Their backgrounds include:
We consider this an asset rather than an irony. People who have built persuasion campaigns professionally are unusually good at recognizing one.
Our research team includes former working journalists and records specialists, with experience in:
Funding analysis is technical work. The people who do it here bring:
Because most of these decisions are made locally, we staff for local:
Supporting the above:
Journalists seeking an identified spokesperson, officials seeking underlying documents, and members of the public with information to share can all reach us through our contact page. We welcome confidential submissions, and we protect sources.