# The Deduct Box

> Huey kept a locked strongbox at the Roosevelt Hotel, filled with a cut of other people's paychecks. We keep one too. Ours is filled with something the people in power owe you: information.

**By:** Bentley Hensel  
**Published:** 2026-07-17  
**Updated:** 2026-07-17  
**Canonical:** https://kingfish.la/the-deduct-box  
**License:** CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)  
**Cite as:** Bentley Hensel (2026). The Deduct Box. Kingfish. https://kingfish.la/the-deduct-box

---

The Kingfish Project takes a data-centered approach to the news. I've spent a long career as a senior data and DevOps engineer — I know ball when it comes to data — and I built this newsroom the way I build production systems: collect everything, structure everything, connect everything, and let the stories fall out of the records.

The Deduct Box is our answer to a government that would prefer the great people of Louisiana not look too closely. It's an intelligence platform for the public interest: a permanent, searchable, cross-referenced archive of what central Louisiana's public bodies do, say, spend, and sign — built almost entirely on open-source tools, running on hardware we own, stitched together with a tremendous amount of custom code that we'll be opening up ourselves.

## Why "Deduct Box"

Huey P. Long ran his machine out of a strongbox at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Into it went the "deducts" — a slice of the paycheck of nearly every state employee who owed a job to the machine. It was crooked as a cypress root, and Huey would have told you to your face that it got done what Louisiana needed done.

Ours runs the inversion. We don't take a dime from anybody. We deduct _information_ from public officials — the disclosures, votes, minutes, contracts, budgets, and filings they owe the people as a condition of the power they asked for — to force the future Louisiana deserves.

## The price of public trust

When you run for office, accept an appointment, or take a government job, you enter a position of public trust. Nobody drafts you into it. It's a choice, made freely, based on the job or responsibility you went looking for — and transparency is the price printed on the tag.

I know, because I've paid it. When I ran for Congress in 2024, I knew I would lose. I ran to make a point about transparency and openness, and that meant filing a [personal financial disclosure](https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-pdfs/2024/10060073.pdf?ref=kingfish.la). It's all sitting on a federal server for anyone to read: what I earned, what I held, my entire financial life at the start of 2024.

Was that fun? No. Was it necessary — good for the government and for the political system that any voter could see exactly what financial influences sat behind a would-be congressman? Absolutely.

The Deduct Box runs on the same principle. Every record in it exists because somebody chose a public role. This isn't about party, and it isn't personal — the box reads one official's ethics filing exactly the way it reads the next one's. If an official wants that level of privacy back, private life is hiring.

## What's in the box

A few of the rooms:

**The Library.** The document corpus, built on OpenAleph and Elasticsearch: every agenda, minute book, contract, and filing we scrape, request, or receive — OCR'd, entity-extracted, and searchable in one place, with the connections between people, companies, and payments stored as data instead of trapped in PDFs.

**The Roosevelt.** Object storage (SeaweedFS), where the original files live untouched — named for the hotel where the real box sat.

**Round Robin.** A graph database mapping who's connected to whom: officials, boards, LLCs, contracts, donors. It's named for the document that fifteen state senators signed in 1929 pledging to acquit Huey before the impeachment evidence was even heard. Loyalty maps decided Louisiana's fate then. They still do.

**Win or Lose.** The collection engine, named for Huey's oil company: a scheduler and a growing stable of adapters that pull records from public bodies on their own clock, so nothing depends on a human remembering to check a website.

**The Advance.** A structured record of public meetings across the region — what's on the agenda, when and where, and what actually happened — feeding the meeting coverage on this site so you can show up too.

**Pot Likker.** The meeting-video pipeline: transcription and speaker attribution, so what an official says on the record in a public meeting becomes searchable text with a name attached. Permanently.

**Alice.** Our in-house AI — self-hosted, built and maintained on our own hardware. She reads what's in the box so we can ask better questions. Alice is built and maintained by [Bentley](https://kingfish.la/author/bentley/); she also runs his household and keeps his personal life somewhat in check.

Underneath it all sits the unglamorous plumbing — databases, queues, identity and access infrastructure — that keeps the box locked until something in it is ready to be public.

## Where it's headed

The box is built to grow. Coming next: cross-referencing officials' financial disclosures against their votes, contracts, and public statements. When a disclosed holding shows up next to an agenda item, that's a question we'll ask out loud. And when the market turns, and a man's votes start drifting toward the money — when he suddenly can't lift his truck quite as high as he'd like — the records will tell us where to start asking.

Also on the road: screening vendors, contractors, and counterparties against sanctions and politically-exposed-persons watchlists; graph analysis that can walk the path from a campaign donation to a contract award and show its work; and the Sound Truck — a public intake app for tips, photos, and documents, joining the channels we already run (email, Signal, SecureDrop, and the web form). Huey drove his sound truck to the people. We're parking ours where you can reach it.

## Watch us back

We spend our days demanding transparency from public bodies, so here's ours: every service in the Deduct Box reports its status publicly, live, at [status.deduct.kingfish.la](https://status.deduct.kingfish.la/?ref=kingfish.la). If the box goes dark, you'll see it the same moment we do.

## The box stays open

Until Louisiana's public officials truly represent the people — and are truly open to them — the Kingfish Project will keep expanding and sharpening what the Deduct Box collects, connects, and can see. They chose the office. We choose to watch.

Every record a king.

---

## Citation formats

### BibTeX

```bibtex
@misc{kingfish-the-deduct-box,
  author = {Bentley Hensel},
  title = {The Deduct Box},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {The Kingfish Project},
  howpublished = {\url{https://kingfish.la/the-deduct-box}},
  note = {Accessed: July 17, 2026. License: CC BY 4.0}
}
```

### CSL-JSON

```json
[
  {
    "id": "kingfish-the-deduct-box",
    "type": "article",
    "title": "The Deduct Box",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Bentley Hensel"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2026
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "The Kingfish Project",
    "URL": "https://kingfish.la/the-deduct-box",
    "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
  }
]
```