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Existing Machinery

A maintained list of tools, organizations, and rules that already answer one or more of the four questions: proof that none of this needs to be invented, only normalized.

Every entry gets the same treatment the essay demands of everyone else: what it is, which question it serves, who pays for it, and the honest caveat. If an entry can't survive its own caveat line, it comes off the list.

Inclusion criteria. An entry must (1) make an institution's structure (incentives, corrections, verifiability, or exit) legible to outsiders, (2) be checkable itself (public methodology, public funding, or public data), and (3) currently exist. Proposals are listed only in the "In Progress" section and labeled as such.

Last updated: 2026-08-07. Corrections and additions: see changelog at bottom.

Question One: Who pays them?

Open Payments (CMS): openpaymentsdata.cms.gov Federal database of drug and device company payments to physicians and hospitals, searchable by your own doctor's name. Created by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. The purest existing "who pays them" page: one screen, standardized, mandated by law. Who pays for it: Taxpayers, via CMS. Caveat: Reporting thresholds and categories are set by regulation and lag industry practice; it covers healthcare only.

OpenSecrets: opensecrets.org Campaign contributions, lobbying, dark money, and foreign-agent spending, federal and state (absorbed FollowTheMoney.org), with published methodology. Who pays for it: A 501(c)(3) funded by foundations and individual donations; funders disclosed. Caveat: Can only track what disclosure law forces into the open; genuinely dark money stays dark.

ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer: projects.propublica.org/nonprofits Every nonprofit's IRS filings, searchable: revenue, executive pay, and who funds whom. Who pays for it: ProPublica's donors, disclosed. Caveat: Form 990 data runs one to two years behind.

Candid (GuideStar) / Charity Navigator: candid.org · charitynavigator.org Nonprofit transparency profiles and ratings, including financial disclosure and accountability metrics. Who pays for it: Foundations and, in Candid's case, the nonprofits themselves for premium profiles. Note the issuer-pays echo. Caveat: That echo is real; a paid profile is partly a marketing product.

Question Two: What happened last time they were wrong?

NTSB / aviation investigation model: ntsb.gov The reference implementation. Independent investigation, published findings, rule changes, blame explicitly deprioritized so errors surface instead of hiding. Who pays for it: Taxpayers, independent of the FAA and the airlines. Caveat: Recommendations are not binding; the FAA can and does decline them.

Retraction Watch: retractionwatch.com A public, running log of scientific retractions, plus a database now used by journals and reference managers. A corrections log built for the institution that theoretically already had one. Who pays for it: Foundation grants and, since 2023, Crossref's purchase of the database to make it freely available. Caveat: It can only log retractions journals actually issue; the deeper problem is retractions that never happen.

Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade: hospitalsafetygrade.org A–F grades on preventable errors, injuries, and infections for ~3,000 US hospitals, twice a year, public peer-reviewed methodology, free. Who pays for it: Founded and funded by large employers and healthcare purchasers, the people who actually pay for care. The incentive alignment is the design, not a bonus. Caveat: Partly reliant on hospitals' voluntary survey responses; measures what's measurable.

Postmortem / status-page culture (software industry) Public incident reports and live status pages as an industry norm, the closest thing to a corrections-log culture that emerged voluntarily, because uptime is checkable and customers can leave. Who pays for it: The companies themselves, as a competitive signal. Caveat: Severity grading and root-cause candor vary; a status page can be a PR surface too.

Question Three: Who can check from outside?

Clinical trial preregistration: clinicaltrials.gov · alltrials.net Trials state their endpoints in public before collecting data, so the goalposts can't quietly move afterward. The existing implementation of an advance-commitment registry, running at global scale. Who pays for it: NIH runs the registry; AllTrials is a campaign funded by research-integrity foundations. Caveat: Registration is enforced unevenly, and outcome-switching still happens; the registry makes it detectable, not impossible.

IIHS crash testing: iihs.org Independent vehicle crash tests with published protocols, funded by auto insurers, who lose money when cars fail, so the verifier's incentive points at truth. Who pays for it: Insurance companies. Caveat: Insurers' interests and consumers' interests overlap heavily here but are not identical.

SOC 2 and independent security audits Third-party attestation of a company's security controls, now table stakes for anyone selling software to enterprises. An example of verification becoming a market norm without legislation. Who pays for it: The audited company pays the auditor: issuer-pays again. Caveat: Exactly that. The 2008 ratings agencies were also "the outside audit."

The Markup ("Show Your Work"): themarkup.org A newsroom that publishes the datasets, code, and full methodology behind its investigations, so anyone can rerun the analysis. Who pays for it: Nonprofit, foundation-funded, funders disclosed. Caveat: Small; the model has not spread as far as it deserves.

The Trust Project / Journalism Trust Initiative: thetrustproject.org · journalismtrustinitiative.org Standardized newsroom disclosures (ownership, funding, corrections policy, methods) adopted by hundreds of outlets (Trust Project) and an ISO-style certification version (JTI, from Reporters Without Borders). Who pays for it: Philanthropy, including Craig Newmark and Google (Trust Project); RSF and institutional funders (JTI). Caveat: Disclosure standards verify that policies exist, not that they're followed.

Ground News: ground.news Displays outlet ownership, funding, and cross-spectrum coverage side by side for lay readers. Who pays for it: Subscriptions (readers, not advertisers). Caveat: Its bias classifications are themselves a judgment call, made by a private company.

Question Four: Can I leave?

Phone number portability (2003, FCC) The proof of concept. A lock-in asset (your number) converted to a portable one by mandate. Now so normal nobody remembers carriers fought it. Who paid for it: Carriers, under FCC order. Caveat: None worth listing. This one just worked, which is why it leads the section.

Open banking / CFPB Personal Financial Data Rights rule (Section 1033) Requires banks and most financial firms to hand consumers their data and help transfer it to a competitor, free. Who pays for it: The institutions, by mandate. Caveat: A live one: the rule was finalized in 2024, then the CFPB moved to vacate it in 2025, then announced a rewrite. Exit rights that depend on who runs the agency are exit rights on a leash. Status watched here.

Australia's Consumer Data Right: cdr.gov.au The most ambitious portability regime: an economy-wide data-sharing framework, live in banking and energy, expanding toward telecom, pensions, and insurance. Who pays for it: Regulated industries, by mandate. Caveat: Rollout has been slower and costlier than promised; uptake is the open question.

Data Transfer Initiative: dtinit.org Nonprofit founded by Google, Apple, and Meta building service-to-service data portability tooling (successor to the Data Transfer Project). Who pays for it: The platforms themselves. Caveat: Portability funded by the incumbents it would discipline. Real code has shipped; judge it by what actually transfers.

GDPR Article 20 (EU) The legal right to receive your data and transmit it to another provider, economy-wide. Who pays for it: Compliance costs fall on data controllers. Caveat: A right on paper that lacks the standardized plumbing open banking has; uptake outside finance is thin.

In Progress: proposals, not yet machinery

National Patient Safety Board: npsb.org An organized coalition advocating an NTSB-for-medicine: independent, data-driven investigation of medical error. Listed here because it shows the aviation model's export has momentum, not just plausibility.

Run the card on this list

Who pays for it? Nobody. Maintained by the essay's author. Weigh accordingly. What happens when it's wrong? Changelog below; entries get corrected or removed, and removals are logged, not silently deleted. Who can check from outside? Every entry links to its subject; every caveat is verifiable against public sources. Can you leave? It's a web page.

Changelog