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Sunlight Foundation scales down, may merge

One of Washington's leading voices for transparency and public access to government data, the Sunlight Foundation, is planning to shut down much of its operation and may merge into another organization.

In an unusual blog post Tuesday, Sunlight Foundation chairman and co-founder Mike Klein said an unsuccessful search for a new executive director for the decade-old organization led its board to reconsider the group's viability.

"The board has not found a candidate for executive director who persuaded us of both a compelling new strategic vision and of their capacity to lead Sunlight to its achievement,” Klein said. “Accordingly, we have determined to explore alliances with other organizations similarly motivated, perhaps merging with one of them, in an arrangement that advances and preserves Sunlight’s mission and identity with increased efficiency and effectiveness.”

Sunlight was an early innovator at easing online public access to campaign finance and legislative information, but earlier this year it shut down its OpenCongress database, saying others were providing similar tools. Klein said Tuesday that Sunlight plans to no longer maintain its government databases and will be seeking to transfer some projects to others.

"We will discontinue our tool building and database maintenance activities, and encourage others to continue our most promising projects," Klein wrote. He said the group was "making necessary adjustments to staff in accordance" with the planned changes.

The original executive director of Sunlight, co-founder Ellen Miller, retired in 2014.

Klein said some of the organization's aspirations for tracking the influence of money in the political system had been dashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. While the majority in that case insisted it was not tampering with disclosure laws, other legal rulings have produced a flood of cash into so-called dark money groups whose donors are not disclosed publicly.

"The board had to recognize that Sunlight’s initiating objective — to build support for better legislation against and regulation of the power of money in politics — has been significantly limited by the US Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision," Klein added.

The group's 2014 tax filing showed annual expenses of about $6.6 million and revenue of $4.2 million, down from $8.9 million in 2013.

Josh Gerstein is a senior reporter for POLITICO.