That was the headline of a recent op-ed in The Bulwark by government reform expert Daniel Schuman.

OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign donations, has laid off a third of its staff. The Sunlight Foundation, OMBWatch and OpenTheGovernment are all gone. The Center for Public Integrity is on its last legs.

Fix the Court is primarily an open-government nonprofit, one of the few working on courts.

We believe the judiciary is more closed off than it should be, its top officials are rarely held to account when they violate ethics rules and that these things should change.

We have done peerless work exposing these issues — and working toward solutions — on a shoestring budget. But it won’t be tenable forever. We need to raise money to hire researchers to keep it going.

Why is what we do so important?

1. Fix the Court holds power to account.
Like President Biden last year, President-elect Trump is expected to name around 100 judicial nominees this year. We want to make sure that questions on ethics are a part of every nomination hearing (all the more important if there’s a Supreme Court vacancy). And we plan to review nominees’ disclosures for conflicts of interest (we’ve often found the goods, including an $89,000 personal loan disbursed by Trump nominee a few years back).

2. Fix the Court leads the work on realistic, bipartisan solutions to the judiciary’s crisis of public trust.
In the halls of Congress, we keep the ships running on proposals like stronger workplace conduct rules for the third branch, free access to court documents and more oversight of the judiciary’s accountability-free bureaucracy. Each of these has a shot of becoming law this year, thanks in large part to FTC.

3. No one else is doing the work that Fix the Court is doing.
We’ve uncovered gifts and trips that Supreme Court justices haven’t publicly reported, have gotten dozens of lower court judges to file required disclosures when they attend free seminars and successfully pushed state supreme court justices to file more comprehensive disclosures. And that was just last year.

This is the type of good-government work that appears to be in danger. But we believe in it, and we trust that you do, too.

Please consider a donation at FixTheCourt.com/Donate.