What LexDOGE is — and what it is not

LexDOGE is non-partisan. LexDOGE is not a political organization.

LexDOGE exists as a community service: an open-source, freely accessible window into how public officials and public institutions in Lexington-Fayette allocate public capital — and whether those allocations are responsible, consistent with the public record, efficient, and in conformance with the laws of the community.

The federal DOGE dashboard is the cautionary template — it claimed $214B in savings while only $1.4B was independently verifiable. LexDOGE's design principle is the inverse: flag, never accuse; data integrity over spectacle. Every published claim cites a source document, page, and section. Every AI-generated paragraph carries a confidence score and passes through tiered human review before anything characterizing a named individual reaches the public surface.

LexDOGE is not an activist organization and not a reactionary one.

It does not endorse candidates, parties, factions, or policy positions. It does not draw conclusions about motive, intent, or character. It does not align with, endorse, or coordinate the projects of any other organization — civic, journalistic, academic, governmental, or otherwise — and it does not enter into collaborative campaigns that would compromise editorial independence.

It interfaces directly and unmediated with the community it serves. What it publishes is a function of what the public record contains and what well-accepted quantitative methods surface from it — not a function of which institutions are willing to amplify it.

What you read here is what the data says. Decisions about what it means — politically, legally, or morally — belong to citizens, journalists, council members, auditors, and the courts. Not to LexDOGE, and not to the model.

Anyone in the community can contribute. Data submissions, tips, document leads, source-document corrections, FOIA suggestions, and code contributions are welcome — anonymously, pseudonymously, or under your real name, your choice. There is no application process, no membership, no political litmus test.

Pseudonymous contribution is a first-class pattern, not a tolerated edge case. Civic transparency work that relies on insider knowledge of how public institutions actually operate often depends on contributors whose identity must remain protected. LexDOGE's contribution surface is designed for that reality.

LexDOGE is, deliberately and openly, an AI-maximalist experiment. The code in this repository was written by AI agents. The agents maintain it. They author the ingestion pipelines, parse the documents, draft the findings, write the FOIA requests, monitor production, and write commits. The infrastructure is configured, deployed, and observed by them as well.

The experiment is the demonstration. A small civic project run by autonomous agents, with bounded human oversight where the law and good editorial practice require it, can monitor public finance at a scale, speed, and cost previously impossible without an institutional newsroom or audit firm.

• Cost is near-zero per document.
• Methodology is reproducible — every prompt, tool, threshold, and gate lives in the public repository.
• Bias surface is auditable for the same reason.
• Forkable — other communities can point the same machinery at their own jurisdictions.

This is what positive-sum AI for public goods can look like. LexDOGE exists in part to make that argument concretely: by working, in public, under public scrutiny, with full source available.