The Asking

There is a number buried in Guam law that almost nobody can recite, and it may be the most revealing number we have. When a resident asks an agency of the government of Guam for a public document, the agency has 4 working days to produce it. Not a season. Not a news cycle. Four days, extendable to 10 only in unusual circumstances, and only with notice.¹ The Legislature wrote that deadline into the Sunshine Reform Act in 1999, in plainer language than most laws manage: every person has the right to inspect and copy any public document on Guam.²

For much of this year I have been writing about how this government spends, hires, and accounts for itself, and beneath that writing ran an assumption I never thought to question: that our problem was a shortage of law, gaps to fill, safeguards still to be invented. The assumption was wrong. On paper, Guam is among the more transparent governments in the Pacific. We have a freedom of information law with real deadlines. We have an Open Government Law that requires boards and commissions to meet in public, post their agendas, and keep minutes anyone can read.³ We have a procurement code that requires competition, documentation, and a written justification every time competition is set aside.⁴ We have an elected Public Auditor with the independence to follow findings wherever they lead.⁵

The architecture of an honest government already exists. What we lack is not law. It is consequence.

A statute without a consequence is not a rule; it is a suggestion. The Sunshine Act's 4 days become 4 months when nobody counts. The Open Government Law's public meetings become formalities when minutes appear late or not at all. The procurement code's careful exceptions become doorways when no one asks who walked through them, or why. None of this requires villains. It requires only the quiet, compounding knowledge that nothing in particular happens when the law is ignored. Institutions learn what we teach them, and for a long time we have taught ours that these laws are optional.

Every law depends on an enforcement mechanism. Courts enforce some. Auditors illuminate others. But there is one mechanism that needs no statute, no standing, no subpoena, and no office: an election. Once every 2 years, the people who run our government must come to us and ask to be retained or hired. For a few months, the ordinary direction of power reverses. They answer to us, if we think to ask.

This is the season for asking, and 2026 is the largest asking Guam gets. This year we choose a governor and lieutenant governor, an attorney general, a delegate to Congress, and all 15 senators.⁶ Nearly every office with the power to enforce, fund, or ignore our transparency laws will be on the ballot at once. It will not happen again until 2030.

So this election season, I am sending every campaign on the August 1 primary ballot the same questionnaire, now, before the field narrows, at the one stage of an election where a voter has no party label to lean on. The candidates for attorney general, whose race appears only on the November ballot, will be asked when the general-election field is certified. Eight questions. Each one answerable yes or no. And each one anchored, deliberately, not to some imagined ideal government but to laws Guam has already passed. I have no authority to compel an answer, and I want to be honest about that. But authority was never how questionnaires work. The League of Women Voters has put questions to candidates for more than a century without the power to compel anyone, and candidates answer because the asking is public, and because in a democracy, silence in response to a fair public question is itself an answer.⁷

The questions are these.

On money: whether they will support a searchable, public, monthly-updated record of every government of Guam expenditure, so that any resident can see which vendor was paid, by which agency, and how much. Whether they will require every solicitation, bid result, contract, and amendment above $25,000 to be posted online within 15 days. And whether they will support a public quarterly report of every sole-source and emergency procurement, with the justification invoked and the approving office named, because the exceptions in our procurement law were written as narrow doors,⁴ and the public deserves to know how often they swing open.

On information: whether they will direct the agencies under their authority to meet the Sunshine Act's existing deadlines, and publish each agency's actual response times, the way the law already requires agencies to report annually.² And whether they will insist that every board and commission within their reach post agendas, minutes, and recordings as the Open Government Law contemplates,³ with real consequences for the bodies that do not.

On accountability: whether they will fund the Office of Public Accountability at no less than its own requested budget, and oppose any appropriation that cuts the auditor below the prior year, because the office's independence is only as durable as its budget, and its budget is written by the very people it audits.⁵ And whether they will commit that every audit finding receives a public corrective-action plan, with named owners and dates, within 90 days.

On merit: whether they will publish the position description, minimum qualifications, and basis of selection for every appointed position in their administration. This is the question I suspect will be hardest to answer, and it is the one I care about most. An island this size cannot afford to teach its talented young people that the path upward runs through connection rather than competence. They are watching how we hire. Many of them are deciding, this decade, whether to build their lives here or somewhere that will measure them by their work. Every unexplained appointment is a small letter of recommendation for the airport.

Where a question touches executive power, candidates for Adelup will be asked whether they will do these things; candidates for the Legislature will be asked whether they will vote to require and fund them. The full text of both versions will be published at klaru.org before a single questionnaire is sent, so that the questions belong to the public and not to me.

Here is what will happen to the answers. They will be published verbatim, side by side, in a single table: every candidate, every question, every yes, every no, every conditional answer in the candidate's own words, limited to 50 words, and every silence. There will be no scores, no rankings, no grades, and no endorsements. I will not tell anyone how to vote, because the moment a project like this starts ranking candidates it stops informing voters and starts campaigning, and Guam has enough campaigns. The table will simply report. Readers will judge.

The obvious objection is that promises are cheap, and the objection is correct. That is why the answers will not stand alone. For candidates who hold or have held office, their public record on these same subjects, their votes, their budgets, their audit responses, will be linked beside their answers, from primary sources, without commentary. A pledge sitting next to a record needs no editorial. And the answers given this year become a record of their own, the baseline against which the next asking will be measured.

Every candidate in a race will receive the same questions, the same day, with the same 21-day window and one reminder. Any candidate may submit a brief statement, and it will be published in full. Errors, if I make them, will be corrected within 48 hours and logged publicly. The methodology will be posted before the answers are, because a project that asks the government to show its work must be willing to show its own.

Some candidates will decline to answer. That, too, is information. A candidate who will not say, in an election season, whether the public should be able to see how its money is spent has told us something we are entitled to weigh. The empty cell in the table is not a punishment. It is a disclosure.

I keep returning to a simple thought. Public office on Guam is not a possession; it is something held in trust, borrowed from 150,000 people who have every right to ask for an accounting. The candidates who understand this will find the questionnaire easy. Eight yeses, sincerely meant, would take 10 minutes and would commit no one to anything our laws do not already promise. The candidates who find it difficult will have their reasons, and the reasons will be instructive.

We have spent years on this island talking about corruption as if it were weather, something that happens to us. It is not weather. It is the predictable result of laws without consequences, and consequences are the one thing voters alone can supply. No legislature has to authorize us. No court has to grant us standing. We have only to ask, publicly, together, and then remember the answers in November.

The asking begins now, with every name on the primary ballot; the rest follows when the general-election field is certified. The answers, and the silences, will be published at klaru.org, for everyone to see.

Disclosure: The author has received no payment or direction from any candidate, party, or campaign. This project is conducted in his personal capacity as a resident and registered voter of Guam, and is funded entirely by him.