On June 10, we filed a response to the United States government’s request for comments on its mid-term self-assessment of the United States fifth National Open Government National Action Plan. It was posted on June 17 and can be downloaded as a PDF from Regulations.gov. We have reproduced the comment in full, below, with added links.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the state of the US government’s involvement in the Open Government Partnership in June 2024.
I have been an active participant in open government in the United States for nearly 2 decades, going back to when I became a full-time journalist in 2006. I covered the Obama administration’s open government efforts as a journalist, participated in co-creating the second, third, fourth, and fifth U.S. National Action Plans on Open Government for the Open Government Partnership, and oversaw implementation of the Open Government DIrective, DATA Act, FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, OPEN Government Data Act, during my time as an advocate at the Sunlight Foundation, the Digital Democracy Project, and as an independent writer, analyst, and advocate.
I appreciate the space this administration has made to comment by filing this assessment. I must note, however, that this administration did not go back and file a final self assessment for the third US National Action Plan for Open Government in 2021, nor a midterm self assessment of the Fourth National Action Plan in 2021, nor a final self assessment for that cycle. A key part of this self-assessment could – and perhaps should – have included a frank, honest recounting of not just the United States government’s performance in OGP, but the broader context of government transparency, accountability, ethics, and corruption in our union during that time.
Had the administration done so, it would have inevitably had to acknowledge several key truths about the U.S. government’s past and present participation in OGP, including the fact that much of the effort has been focused on other countries from the outset.
In 2017, at the end of his term, President Barack Obama has acknowledged as much to journalists – and the near-complete disengagement from OGP by President Trump and President Biden confirmed it, in combination with the absence of WhiteHouse.gov/open from the Internet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1PfDnmxWxg
While there is no question that this administration’s record on open government includes many important accomplishments, from historic disclosures to the restoration of press briefings and visitor logs to improved scientific integrity and open access policies, the story of recent years has been one of missed opportunities, opacity, and a lack of accountability for broken promises around collaboration, co-creation, and public engagement.
The self-assessment states that OGP is an “important vehicle for promoting democratic resilience globally,” and that is a fair assessment, despite many nations openwashing, regression, and shutting out civil society.
The reality, however, is that the Open Government Parnership has not had a net-positive impact within the United States at the scale and scope necessary to fight domestic and democratic movements, autocratization, corruption, and pervasive low trust in institutions before, during, and after a historic pandemic.
These flaws result both from the design of OGP in the United States, which did not explicitly include Congress or the Supreme Court from the outset, serial failures of leadership at the highest level, and the absence of the deep integrations in mainstream media institutions or partnerships with tech companies that would have ensured that this work had the public awareness, transparency, and accountability necessary to drive adoption, impact, and influence public trust through participation and delivery.
Contrary to the remarks of US officials at fora this past year, the United States has never had a multi-stakeholder network to coordinate consultations and commitments across cities, states, and federal agencies. For the first five years of the partnership, OpenTheGovernment played a key role as a coalition builder and partner in assessing progress on these commitments. After the dissolution of that organization, however, following years of decreasing capacity across civil society, there is still no multi-stakeholder network.
The General Service Administration’s new Federal Advisory Committee on Open Government may help address some of these issue – but it is woefully inadequate to the capacity required to engage this nation in the next consultation. The United States could have worked with partners across different sectors of American society to create a multi-stakeholder network that taps into state and local governance structures, feeds into public and civic media initiatives, and is connected to academic research centers. It has not done so. It still could.
This midterm self assessment also did not acknowledge several key findings from the Open Government Partnership’s Independent Review Mechanism, letters from the OGP Secretariat, or letters from U,S. civil society that assess the U.S. government’s lack of public engagement, accountability, and delivery in a negative light. These omissions are thus deceiving to anyone who is not deeply familiar with the history of open government in the United States, or US government performance in the cycle or past ones. The reality is that the United States has acted contrary to process in the co-creation of both the fourth and fifth national action plans – and their implementation.
When a few remaining members of US civil society engaged with the administration in good faith in 2021, the letters and requests for in-person workshops and ambitious commitments around open government were met with silence or officials stuck in “listening mode.”
When the White House returned to the table in the spring of 2022 and announced that co-creation would begin in May, there was some hope that the indifference to the collapse of domestic trust and the dissolution of open government programs, policies, & personnel would reverse.
Instead, after posting forms, the United States government did not reengage with civil Society until the fall of 2022. These failures were documented outside of government and by the Open Government Partnership’s Independent Review Mechanism. It is worth noting that the secretariat’s archive of public meetings does not include the decade that proceeded its creation, nor links to the forms or inputs they received.
Even more problematically, the record does not include public meetings in
November 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5k4Hs1U9vc
April 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyveE12Sd80
May 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NNGV-IYUsM
…at which White House officials made promises regarding the restoration of process and policy, that were then broken.
The record of public meetings also does include White House workshops in the fall or winter 2022 that are now being represented in this self assessment as the basis for the commitments in the plan! This omission is dishonest and further undermines accountability for the administration’s failing in this area. The virtual listening sessions of 2023 and in-person workshops of 2024 did not address the fundamental flaws in the plans and consultations.
We would cite numerous constructive critiques to show these issues but, unfortunately, the commenting policy unilaterally imposed by the administration for this assessment states that linking to outside sites is not allowed — though this runs contrary to over a decade of practice around the Open Government Partnership’s reports, research standards, and the way that the US government itself approaches, documenting its successes and failures.
This self assessment states that the participation and co-creation process for the development of the fifth national action plan “met the letter of the relevant participation” in co-creation standards – but that is false.
To the contrary, the inputs sent in to White House email addresses and online forms still have not been disclosed, nor have records from the virtual sessions conducted under Chatham House rules in the fall of 2022 been disclosed, both contrary to OGP standards. The pre-baked draft “plan” and virtual forms were also not publicly promoted in ways that violated the publicy conditions of OGP in principle and practice.
After starving the GSA of the resources required to convene an effective consultation with the American people – as the U.S. government committed to doing in the 4th NAP, this administration pulled together a “report” full of pre-existing initiatives in the fall of 2022, instead of delaying co-creation efforts until more resources could be assigned to the mission. It is now claiming that this “plan” is the result of co-creation processes.
In this self assessment, the administration cited “resource and time constraints,” but does not acknowledge that those constraints were of its own making, and that more time for a proper co-creation process could have been added, as we encouraged the White House Working Group to do in December 2022.
The resulting plan — which is weak, poorly defined, & contains multiple commitments unrelated to open government — was then introduced online over the holidays. The White House published it without the participation of US civil society, as indicated by the lack of quotes from stakeholders in the press release, with no in-person launch event and press conference like peer nations. The officials who signed off on subsequently left the administration, and have not been engaged since. There has been no accountability for how badly broken this process was, nor remorse from the participants who misled the remaining members of US civil society,who chose to legitimize the consultation through their participation.
This approach guaranteed that instead of rebooting U.S. participation, the administration poisoned the well with the good governance advocates and organizations who might have championed its good works to the press and a distrustful, cynical public. Instead of celebrating all of the extraordinary civil servants and officials who have kept government transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration happens across the enormous federal enterprise, the administration’s opacity, secrecy, and neglect robbed domestic OGP efforts of the legitimacy derived from true co-creation and iterative implementation.
Unfortunately, this self-assessment amounts to more of openwashing, where poorly designed and promoted processes, an opaque consultation, and a resulting lack of accountability are now being obfuscated behind unsubstantiated claims and a report that recounts the score on the government’s own scoreboard. As we have been saying for many years, the only way back to trust was through action and delivery, not empty rhetoric.
For whatever reasons, this administration remains unwilling to publicly acknowledge the lies and corruption of the previous White House, including secrecy, waste, fraud, lies, and outright maladministration during the pandemic. Tragically, the administration is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the various ways that its own performance has fallen short. The ongoing effort to evaluate the performance of the United States government purely through its performance on a self-defined series of pre-existing commitments exemplifies this approach. To be effective, a government-wide initiative on open government must include all programs, policies, personnel, and platforms across the vast enterprise, not just act as a compliance exercise to ensure that a multilateral organization’s boxes are checked.
As mentioned earlier, the final commitment of the fourth U.S. National Action Plan was to vastly improve upon what the previous administration and OGP IRM acknowledged was a weak consultation and p;an. That administration had broken trust with everyone who had participated in 2017, simply walking away from the draft commitments and ideation forms. Instead of a blank slate, workshop participants received a copy of the president’s Management Agenda, which was laid out in printed on the tables in the GSA in 2018.
Instead of learning from this experience, this administration pursued an even weaker consultation. The administration refused to meet in person with advocates until 2023, evading accountability for broken promises in 2022. It declined to set up an open forum where draft commitments could be created in collaboration with all participants and shared with the American people – with the legitimacy that would have resulted.
Instead of reviving OGP globally with the power of our example domestically, this administration has undermined the legitimacy of the partnership at home and abroad. The predictable result of poor domestic performance is placing the global leadership of the United States on good governance within OGP into serious doubt, despite the real accomplishments of this administration on anti-corruption and public integrity initiatives.
The implementation phase of the fifth plan has shown some improvements, as a result of the secretariat at the GSA, but the disengagement of the White House has made it clear that OGP and its processes are an unwelcome compliance burden that will not be elevated nor legitimized through the participation of the president and members of his cabinet. Until that changes – or Congress and the Supreme Court decide to co-create and submit their own plans – OGP is likely to be doomed to irrelevance domestically or simply ignored in an administration that is not committed to government transparency, accountability, and multi-stakeholderism.
For over a year, this administration has declined to revise weak, irrelevant, or poorly formed commitments as the OGP IRM and civil society stakeholders have requested. This White House has refused to elevate open government Into a priority for the administration by using OGP as a platform to deliver much-needed transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration.
This stands in marked contrast to the Summit for Democracy, which created a parallel framework to OGP that was weaker at every return and yet received global attention because o the participation of the President and other world leaders. Unlike OGP, there was no support unit, no secretariat, no steering committee, no transparent dashboard of commitments, and no independent review mechanism to assess the strength of plans, their progress, nor the impact of their implementation.
In fact, the creation of the Summit and direction of the limited institutional capacity of the US government to support it starved OGP of the attention, resources, and capacity required to make it effective. In effect, implementing President Biden’s wish for a “democracy summit” undermined the efficacy of President Obama’s signature good governance initiative at home and abroad.
In contrast to the Summit, the administration did not – and does not – brief the White House press about OGP commitments, events, or implementation and the ongoing work of the secretariat. The White House does not consistently celebrate the dedicated civil servants and officials across the US government who have continued to do valuable work on transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration, from the national archives to NASA to components of the GSA itself, like the teams that work on Challenge.gov & Data.gov.
Even within the General Services Administration, which should have been supporting the Secratariat’s work, there have only been two press releases about this work, regarding the administrator’s travel to Estonia and the creation of a federal advisory committee.
This lack of promotion and high-level support undermines the claims made in the self-assessment and the broader sense that the administration is proud of its work and willing to invest in the necessary capacity to rebuild deeply eroded relationships. The goal should be to create a foundation for trust that will lead to the impact and outcomes stakeholders hope to see through collaboration, not to shut out civil society from co-creation and sideline subject-matter experts who cry foul.
To take one example, the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database cited in the self-assessment is the result of an executive order that was promulgated prior to the launch of this plan, not a commitment from the consultation. The database finally went live almost a year after the deadline the President set for the Justice Department. During the implementation phase of this plan, US officials were the opposite of transparent regarding its development, and the resulting closed resource is not a sterling example of an open database.
Instead, the product is limited in scope, scale, ambition, and accessibility to people outside of government, therefore limiting its ability to restore trust in the public regarding the pernicious persistence of unconstitutional policing, maintaining unacceptable opacity with respect to members of law enforcement who have engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct.
Open government coalitions of good governance organizations have repeatedly asked for a much more ambitious open justice initiative that would’ve centered a national misconduct database that aggregated open data from across nearly 19,000 police departments across the USA. That should be a flagship commitment in a NAP 5.5.
To take another example, the administration has refused to engage in good faith with stakeholders around the implementation of the OPEN Government Data Act, which became law in January 2019. The previous administration distributed draft guidance in 2020, but this one has not promulgated final guidance regarding how the law should be implemented, specifically with respect to how agencies will make public information more open and accessible to the public they serve.
To state the obvious, implementing an open government law should be central to the United States participation in the Open Government Partnership, and yet officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget continue to ignore entreaties regarding the absent guidance and provide the necessary leadership, oversight, and resources to move the default on public information to open in concert with the Chief Data Officers Council.
To take a third example, this administration has overseen the sunsetting of FOIAOnline. That website was a flagship commitment from earlier plans to create a single online platform for the American people to not only make requests under the Freedom of Information Act but to access records disclosed as a result of other requests. Over a decade, dozens of agencies joined the platform and contributed records. Notably, however, the Department of Justice left FOIAOnline, leaving the Environmental Protection Agency to operate it and continue to support these other agencies with limited budget. Facing increasing bespoke development and limited resources, the EPA CIO and US CIO decided in secret in 2021 to sunset FOIAOnline after making an assessment that commercial-off-the-shelf software had advanced sufficiently to replace its function – despite the ongoing satisfaction that many agencies and the requestor community had with the platform, including the EPA itself. FOIAOnline – and all of the records on it – is now offline.
While improving the Freedom of Information Act and its implementation was a central focus of the first three national action plans, it was not part of the fourth. The record shows that FOIA was only added to the fifth NAP at the request of civil society stakeholders — those being me and Daniel Schuman. The three “commitments” that the Justice Department’s Office o Information Policy made all existed prior to the consultation. While OIP’s subsequent delivery of an improved self-assessment toolkit, FOIA business standards, and a “wizard” at FOIA.gov are all valuable contributions to the administration of the FOIA, none of them were co-created with civil society nor represented civil society priorities.
By taking this approach, the administration thus made a mockery of the co-creation process, with no accountability for the lack of good faith on the side of the Justice Department. In 2024, there are now dozens of FOIA platforms across the US government, with varying levels of compliance with the interoperability mandate given by Congress, poor user experience, endemic backlogs, mothballed reading rooms, and continued disclosures of records in closed formats. Improving FOIA should have been at the center of a new national action plan in 2022, but this administration chose to prioritize equity plans and commitments over restoring transparency and accountability, in accord with the mandates of Congress and the petitions of civil society advocates. The ongoing lack of oversight of FOIA in Congress is paired with an appalling lack of oversight of open government and US participation in OGP.
For whatever reasons, this self-assessment was far short of the honesty and accountability that should have followed such poor performance over a decade. The assessment states that the US government is assessing the challenges that have hindered engagement and ambition in previous cycles, without acknowledging that these challenges persisted in its own work, nor naming them. The challenges and failures are well-documented: the administration is simply refusing to acknowledge how, why, and when it failed.
After engaging in a hybrid meeting with civil society that we participated in designing and convening this spring, the administration has declined to act on the insights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brOGRRXcOMY
Specifically, instead of revising and commitments – as the IRM recommended – and adding ambitious “challenge” commitments – as good governance organizations have been requesting since the founding of the partnership and the Obama administration did in 2016 – there is a continued push towards the 6th NAP.
The key way to rebuild trust and show that the administration understands that it must address the engagement and ambition failures of its own officials would be to refine the commitments in the fifth national action plan, instead of kicking the can towards the sixth. The recent forum during Open Government Week demonstrates this will does not yet exist, given the complete absence of civil society partners from an event that should have conveyed government and outside stakeholders as equals and void in announced Challenge commitments, unlike in peer nations.
This is of special concern to civil society advocates, given the fact that this national action plan ends at the end of 2024. As 2025 begins, there will be no commitments in place that represent the shared priorities of the civil society and US officials.
We assess that the future of the Open Government Partnership in the United States is endangered at best, and at an existential risk at worst. Indifference, negligence, and the continued silence of the White House on its official channels has made it clear that this work is not a priority for the US government, despite the claims of its officials in the sessions over the past year.
Unless this situation is addressed with a redesign of the charter for the FAC to include Cabinet officials and representatives from the Defense Department, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Department – we assess that the creation of a secretariat and FACA in the GSA will not be sufficient to change the course of history in the ways the inbound challenges our nation faces requires.
Without the support and explicit connections with the power centers in the United States government where policy is made, from the Domestic Policy council to the Justice Department to the defense community to the intelligence community to the Supreme Court and Congress, OGP will not be directly relevant to how power is used to ensure good governance.
That is a marked contrast to other nations, where OGP has had a positive impact, where parliaments, courts, and media are all highly engaged partners in multi-stakeholder approaches.
As we have said consistently for many years, unless the United States invests more in the personnel, policies, and programs, OGP will be dust in the wind before a global tide of authoritarianism, corruption, and societal disruptions wrought by climate change.
Given the hopes and efforts of countless people around the nation and around the world since the United States co-founded OGP, that would be a terrible outcome. Open government as a principle, practice, and programs has existed outside of OGP for centuries. and should be coordinated at a government wide level that is not limited to the narrow lens of commitments in a plan defined by the GSA.
We encourage the United States government to be much more open, honest, and accountable for the serial failures in implementation and creation that have marked US involvement in OGP since 2017 and to immediately take corrective action to address the substitute critiques of society that have been levied in recent years. To not do so invites more of the same, with the expected outcomes.
Governing Digital 