Our mission · c/o Values for America
Build civic infrastructure more durable than the power it holds accountable.
Values for America is a 501(c)(3) foundation building open-source infrastructure for the American Republic.
We exist because the Constitution is a set of values that only holds when citizens can actually see and act on how those values are being honored — or violated. The institutions that produce government data do not present it in forms a citizen can use. The institutions that process citizen grievances are designed to exhaust the citizen before the grievance is heard. The institutions that set federal policy have drifted from the people they represent, sometimes by 40 or 50 percentage points. There is no structural mechanism — open, auditable, durable — that closes these gaps.
So we're building one.
Foundation
“Our values”
The "values" in Values for America are not political values. They are constitutional values — the invariants that the Constitution itself makes binding on the Republic regardless of who is in power.
Enumerated powers
The federal government does what the Constitution grants it permission to do. Nothing more.
The Bill of Rights
Not a suggestion. Not subject to majority vote. Not waivable for convenience.
Individual sovereignty
The burden is on the government to justify restriction, not on the citizen to justify freedom.
Decentralization
Power held closest to the individual. The Tenth Amendment is not decorative.
Due process
No one gets to lose rights, liberty, or property without fair notice and a fair hearing.
These are not our values in the sense that we invented them. They are the values the Constitution enshrined. Our contribution is to make them operational.
Operating record
“What we do ↔ What we don't”
- Seeing. Every public record on every named government actor, graded against the Constitution.
- Acting. Grievances become action packets. Proposals become legislative pressure.
- Comparing. Citizen votes run in parallel with legislator votes, measuring the gap.
- Building. Structural ideas get first-principles treatment and citizen endorsement.
- Endorse candidates, parties, or political movements.
- Accept funding that compromises our first principles.
- Generate editorial content or calls for resignation.
- Target private citizens. Public power only.
- Publish without a primary source.
- Gatekeep. F-graded content publishes with a warning — never removed.
Why open-source
“Infrastructure outlasts the operator”
Closed platforms can be deplatformed, sued into silence, pressured by regulators, or starved of funding. A proprietary accountability tool is one subpoena away from disappearing. A federated, open-source platform with mirror data in the Internet Archive cannot be taken down. Anyone can fork it. Anyone can host it. Anyone can audit it.
The code, the data, and the operating practices are all public. This is not a marketing posture. It is a survival strategy. If Values for America disappears tomorrow, OpenOS lives on.
Get involved
“Ways to support”
- → Create an account and use the platform
- → Contribute code to the OpenOS repository (public soon)
- → Join the team
- → Donate (501(c)(3) tax-deductible giving coming soon)
Our north star
Constitutionally consistent. Citizen sovereign. Structurally permanent.