Passing of Open the Books Founder a Huge Loss for Government Accountability Movement, Say Officials, Colleagues

Deceased activist’s foundation makes public “every dime, online, in real time” so every American can know where his tax dollars are going.

Adam Andrzejewski. Courtesy of the Conservative Partnership Institute

When Open the Books founder and Chief Executive Officer Adam Andrzejewski quietly drew his last breath early in the morning of Aug. 18, his passing was as unexpected as it was uncharacteristic of the way he lived.

Andrzejewski, 55, had successfully competed in the Chicago Marathon eight times and was training for his ninth race in the weeks just prior to his passing. Professionally, he was often in the middle of swirling national controversies about the wasteful federal spending programs he had exposed.

The cause of death has not been revealed.

A long-time resident of Hinsdale, Illinois, Andrzejewski is survived by his wife, Kerry, daughters Ellie, Molly, and Emma, six younger siblings, and his mother.

After graduating from Northern Illinois University with a degree in business management, Andrzejewski launched HomePagesDirectories Inc. in 1999. By 2007, it had grown into a $22 million publishing force.

It was then that Andrzejewski met Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who, with an assist from then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), had led a successful congressional campaign to secure passage in 2006 of the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA). That mandated federal officials to create USASpending.gov.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in an elevator on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 31, 2012. Susan Walsh/AP Photo

USASpending.gov was intended to provide every American “with access to the Internet and a computer to see how every tax dollar is spent,” according to Coburn. Launched in 2011, the website today gives citizens internet access to how trillions of federal tax dollars are spent annually.

Andrzejewski, who had already begun posting some local government spending data in Illinois, reached out to the Oklahoma Republican and, according to John Hart, who was then Coburn’s communications director, the two men quickly bonded.

“We had wagered that putting federal spending online would create downward pressure on spending and tilt the scales toward freedom for decades,” Hart told The Epoch Times. “Adam Andrzejewski proved us right. When Adam contacted us and kept contacting our office, we knew our legislative work would bear fruit.”

And it did. Andrzejewski launched Open the Books (OTB), a nonprofit foundation with a website dedicated to ensuring that all Americans could access “every dime, online, in real time.” Coburn, who died of cancer in 2020, was OTB’s honorary chairman at that time.

OTB began filing thousands of freedom of information and public information requests to officials across the country for the purpose of posting the checkbooks of all 50 states online. The group filed more than 50,000 such requests in 2023, seeking to keep so vast a spending database current and easily accessible.

Then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), co-sponsor of the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA),  speaks during the "Growing American Jobs" summit at Palm Beach Community College Lake Worth Campus in Lake Worth, Fla, on Oct. 21, 2008. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

It took more than a decade and overcoming multiple court challenges, especially in California, but by 2022, OTB posted spending data for all 50 states, as well as 16,000 of the nation’s cities. The OTB database also includes 25 million public employee salary and pension records from 50,000 public bodies across America. 

Along the way, Andrzejewski developed working relationships with public officials and journalists across the political spectrum who supported the movement to bring greater transparency and accountability to government at all levels by making spending data easily available to the public.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who often turned to OTB for data and information in her campaigns against waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, lamented Andrzejewski’s passing, telling The Epoch Times that he is “irreplaceable” and that his death “is a huge loss for taxpayers.”

The Iowa Republican said she “regularly collaborated with Adam to reduce waste, protect taxpayers, and make Washington more transparent and accountable,” singling out their joint efforts in “exposing binge-buying bureaucrats’ spending sprees to tracking taxpayer dollars sent to China.“

Andrzejewski was effective, Ernst said, because “he had far more knowledge and concern about government finances than most of those in Washington who are supposed to be responsible for our nation’s budget.”

“Adam made an immeasurable impact by exposing the outlandish and indefensible ways the government spends our money that compelled policymakers to take action. Adam’s facts were impeccable, and he was fearless in his mission, never shying away from holding even the most powerful accountable,” she said.

As a result of his work, Andrzejewski made regular appearances in recent years on major broadcast and cable network newscasts, and he was quoted in hundreds of news stories based on OTB digging published by The Epoch Times, The Washington Post, the New York Post, and The Associated Press.

The work of OTB has also been cited by congressional committees, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Research Service. Andrzejewski was invited to speak on data journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard Law School, and the law schools at Georgetown University and George Washington University.

However, exposing wasteful spending also made Andrzejewski some powerful enemies.

He was canceled by Forbes after an eight-year run, during which his work generated nearly 20 million page-views for the Forbes magazine website regarding 206 columns based on OTB investigations.

Four of those columns had to do with Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and the highest-paid federal employee in the country.

Information published by The Epoch Times in 2022, based on research by OTB, reported in July 2022 that Fauci was slated to receive a more generous tax-supported annual federal pension than the president of the United States.

After Andrzejewski protested being barred by Forbes to write any further columns on Fauci, his column was canceled.

Roland Foster, a legislative aide to Coburn during and after the FFATA campaign, had remained friends with the OTB founder and spoke with him regularly. He told The Epoch Times he was shocked to hear of Andrzejewski’s death.

“We email/text/call almost on a daily basis. An op-ed we worked on together just ran in the New York Post! We were chatting on Friday about some future collaborations. He really carried on the Coburn legacy of transparent government in a way no one else could,” he said.

Foster recalled that “when Senator Coburn first proposed putting government spending online, it wasn’t a sexy idea to most.”

Then, Illinois Senator Obama jumped on it right away, and so did one of the future president’s constituents: Adam,” he said.

“He traveled to Washington to meet with Coburn and was ecstatic about how he could take that data and transform it into meaningful information for taxpayers. And he did!”

Officials at OTB told The Epoch Times their organization will continue doing the investigative, data acquisition, and analysis projects that Andrzejewski pioneered.