Death of the Open the Books founder leaves a massive hole in government watchdog community

Many people think San Francisco has turned a bit crappy. Adam Andrzejewski decided to measure just how much.

Mr. Andrzejewski and his organization, Open the Books, mapped all public reports of feces the local government collected from the streets of San Francisco. The “Poop map,” as it became known, drew nationwide attention last year when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held up the map during a televised debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In a world dominated by dry numbers, Mr. Andrzejewski found a way to make spending and government bungles interesting. From Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era wealth increase to $1.3 billion spent last year on payments to dead people, Open The Books has shone a light on government spending.

Mr. Andrzejewski, 55, died Sunday, leaving those in the spending watchdog community to mourn an “irreplaceable” figure.

“Adam’s belief in the power of transparency to transform government and hold it accountable at every level is the driving force behind our work. His relentless pursuit of open records and forensic auditing has set new standards in the fight for government transparency,” Open the Books’ board of directors said in announcing the death.

The organization said its work will continue.

Mr. Andrzejewski’s death was sudden. On Monday, a day after he died, an op-ed he wrote with Sen. Joni Ernst on federal spending on “risky, secretive research” in China appeared in the New York Post.

“Adam 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,” said Ms. Ernst, Iowa Republican. “Adam’s facts were impeccable, and he was fearless in his mission, never shying away from holding even the most powerful accountable.”

Mr. Andrzejewski was inspired to found Open the Books by then-Sen. Tom Coburn, Congress’ all-time champion waste-watcher. Open the Books’ mission was to report every dollar and cent of Uncle Sam’s spending on the web. It captures state and local level spending, too.

Gathering the data means sending out 55,000 open-records requests a year to every unit of government, each with its own quirks about requesting spending data. That’s overseen by Open the Books’ chief operating officer, Craig Mijares, who has also been with the outfit from its start.

The result of all that data allows users to peer into the checkbook of every state in the union.

Big hits over the years included work on the amount of money the federal government spends on ammunition. A report zeroing on specifically on IRS agents’ ammunition spending spurred calls for reform on Capitol Hill.

His work was not without detractors.

After Mr. DeSantis highlighted the poop map last year, The Washington Post rushed in with a fact-check, complaining that the map was misleading because it covered too many years and used such big markers to identify each pile of poo, making the city look like it suffered from a brownout.

The Post plotted the poo on its own — using a magenta color instead — but ended up concluding that map was still pretty worrying. In the end, The Post said Mr. DeSantis’ “big brown map” oversold things but “none of this is to say that San Francisco doesn’t have a problem with human waste. It does.”

When Open the Books reported earlier this year that the University of Virginia spends $20 million a year for employees working on diversity, equity and inclusion, the school howled.

It challenged Open the Book’s methodology that found 235 people employed in DEI efforts, saying its own count put the figure at just 55.

Mr. Andrzejewski countered that Open the Books had published an entire chart with every employee it identified.

Mr. Andrzejewski made a small fortune co-founding a company that published small-town telephone phone directories. After nearly a decade he started in public policy, including a run for political office in Illinois as a Republican.

But he was zealous about keeping Open The Books nonpartisan. His reports on pork-barrel “earmark” spending in Congress found conservative Republicans to be just as quick to belly up to the trough as anyone else.

He also believed sacred cows were meant to be slaughtered.

During the pandemic that meant a frequent focus on Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Open The Books reported saw his net worth rise amid the coronavirus chaos. Mr. Andrzejewski’s work was frequently cited during congressional hearings with Dr. Fauci.

But not everyone was happy with it.

Forbes, where Mr. Andrzejewski had wrote a regular column, fired him. He said the outlet told him he was doing “too many columns on Fauci.”