August 23, 2023
The Honorable Joseph R. Biden
President of the United States
The White House
RE: Advancing Ambitious New Commitments on Open Government to Defend Democracy
Dear President Biden,
In December 2021, you urged governments at the Open Government Summit to “stand with those in civil society and courageous citizens around the world who are demanding transparency of their governments.” We write today to urge you, Vice President Kamala Harris, and every member of your Cabinet to stand with our coalition of open government advocates and commit to bold, ambitious actions on open government at the 2023 Open Government Partnership Summit.
Your administration’s demonstrated commitments to transparency — including new FOIA guidelines, restoring regular press briefings, declassifying the JFK files, and disclosing COVID data, tax returns, and intelligence about Russian actions — have all been welcome actions.
They remain insufficient to this historic moment, when the widespread erosion of trust in government has burdened hearts and poisoned minds across our body politic. The American people remain deeply divided, disillusioned, and distrustful after years of a historic pandemic and decades of official deception about war.
Since the beginning of your administration, members of our coalition have sent letters to this White House. Given the urgency of strengthening transparency and accountability in the United States to combat the rise in authoritarianism at home and abroad, we are troubled the recommendations we have made have not been acted upon.
As you know, after the Open Government Partnership was launched in 2011 during the Obama-Biden administration, U.S. civil society organizations have repeatedly made recommendations and expressed our concerns when they were not included in action plans nor executive actions. We met quarterly with the U.S. Open Government Working Group, when it existed. We participated in years of workshops and consultations related to the Open Government Directive and U.S. commitments to the Open Government Partnership. We attended public meetings in 2021 and 2022 at which White House officials promised us that our priorities would be represented in your administration’s actions.
Unfortunately, we have not seen follow-through during your administration, from delays on classification reform to a missing police misconduct database to an ongoing lack of public engagement. As documented by the OGP IRM, your administration did not co-create new commitments with us, choosing instead to issue a new plan constituted of existing priorities, programs, and policies. This has led us to have real concerns about the limits of your commitment to government transparency and accountability. We believe the lack of investment in open government has been a historic mistake.
A newly published results report for the United States from the Open Government Partnership’s Independent Review Mechanism is an indictment of the Trump’s administration’s failures to co-create ambitious commitments with the American people and then deliver on them in the open.
The researchers found that “civil society had no control over which commitments were eventually included in the NAP4 and no say in the decision to exclude others. The predictable result of this process was a NAP that mostly reflected government priorities and contained commitments that were part of ongoing or planned initiatives that were going to happen regardless.”
We assess that some of the same flaws persisted in your administration’s co-creation process in 2022 and persist in 2023 – despite the recent creation of an Open Government Secretariat in the General Services Administration to institutionalize open government across federal agencies.
There are also bright spots in the report that reflect a positive change. The IRM hailed your administration’s actions to “Broaden Public Access to Federally Funded Research Findings and Data” after you took office, which have resulted in more public knowledge being available to the American people.
The independent assessment notes how an open government approach to improving public health led to better outcomes for collaboration in the fight against Lyme disease: “holding open events and sharing recordings and full transcripts—and consultations followed by the provision of feedback helped overcome lack of trust in government and science.”
If the Summit for Democracy and Open Government Partnership are worthy of national and international attention, then the U.S. government needs to demonstrate progress achieved through these initiatives, co-create ambitious new commitments on good governance, and then invest more resources in the human capacity required to deliver on them.
Building upon our coalition’s open government 2021 agenda that endures in the Blueprint for Accountability, we propose the following initiatives:
- A new Open Government Directive that explicitly requires all federal employees to embrace the spirit and principles of open government. Issue an executive order that makes it clear that transparency and accountability are the key bulwarks against authoritarianism in democracies, at home and abroad. Stand up a public dashboard for progress on NAP commitments at a new White House.gov/open. Encourage the American people to read the Federal Register, use Data.gov, Challenge.gov, USASpending.gov, Regulations.gov, CitizenScience.gov, Vote.gov, FOIA.gov, Performance.gov, and Invest.gov to learn about what our government is doing, how we can participate, where federal funds are being spent, and with what impact. Enshrine public access to public information and public participation in governance as defining priorities of this administration.
- An Open Justice Initiative, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, modeled on her groundbreaking work on open justice in California. This commitment would build on the work of the Police Data Initiative, creating an open federal database of civilian complaints regarding police officers and disciplinary records. This is referenced in Executive Order 14074, on “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety,” which should have been launched on January 20, 2023. This commitment to open justice should be expanded to include specific commitments and deliverables, from passing legislation with mandatory reporting requirements that address the serious data discrepancies at the FBI to setting up a national data warehouse that enables more than 19,000 departments to upload records and validate it.
- Effective implementation of a Beneficial Ownership database led by the Secretary of the Treasury to be used in anti-corruption work around the world, from Russia to China. It’s crucial that the White House fully deliver on the intent of Congress to ban anonymous shell companies in the USA as part of a global anti-corruption strategy by continuing to improve draft regulations.
- More sunshine on secret laws. Address the creation of and reliance upon secret law embodied in final legal opinions issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Specifically, the administration should commit to proactively disclosing all final legal opinions to the maximum extent possible, and in those unusual circumstances where the opinions cannot be proactively disclosed, the Department of Justice should publish a list of the opinions as part of its enterprise data inventory. Full-throated administration support for the DOJ OLC Transparency Act is critical to achieving this priority, reflected in a new commitment.
- Effective Implementation of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and the Open Government Data Act. Build on U.S. Attorney General’s memorandum mandating the presumption of openness and ensure fair and effective FOIA administration. Convene the U.S. Digital Service, 18F, and the nation’s civic tech community to work on improving FOIA.gov, using the same human-centric design principles you’ve applied to service delivery elsewhere. Make sure FOIA.gov users can search for records across reading rooms, Data.gov, USASpending.gov, and other federal data repositories. Restore a Cross-Agency Priority goal for FOIA. Advise agencies to adopt the US FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations. Start tracking spending on FOIA and increase funding to meet the demand. Direct the Department of Justice to roll out the “release-to-one, release-to-all” policy for FOIA piloted at the direction of President Obama, which the State Department has since adopted. Collect and publish data on which records are being purchased under the FOIA by commercial enterprises for non-oversight purposes, and determine whether that data can or should be proactively disclosed. Fund and build dedicated, secure online services for people to gain access to immigration records and veterans records, instead of forcing them to use the FOIA. Commit to extending the FOIA to algorithms and revive Code.gov as a repository for public sector code.
- Work with Congress to enact higher transparency anti-corruption standards for all three branches of U.S. government. Open PACER so that court records are free to the American people. Enact an enforceable judicial ethics code. Ban stock trading and conflicts of interest in the legislative branch. Protect our democracy through strengthening voting rights. Co-create campaign finance rules that will carry our union far into the 21st century. Offer official support for relevant legislation, including the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act of 2023, the Restoring Faith in Government Act, the Halting Ownership of Non-Ethical Securities and Trusts (HONEST) Act, and the Protect Our Democracy Act.
- Launch a database of ethics disclosures across all three branches of U.S government at Ethics.gov. Assign its stewardship to the Director of the Office of Government Ethics. A relaunched Ethics.gov will aggregate the disclosures of US government officials across the executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch. The work the Center for Responsive Politics, Project on Government Oversight, and the Anti-Corruption Data Collective did to open tens of thousands of ethics disclosures suggests a way forward.
- Make it the official policy of the United States to oppose Internet shutdowns in every nation. The investments that USAID is making in digital democracy and legal defense to support journalists is the right direction: keep going. If access to information is a human right, and Internet access is essential to get that information, then shutting down the Internet is a human rights violation. The USA should commit to providing safe, secure, and open access to an open Internet not only to Americans, but to every human denied access to information by authoritarian governments in shutdowns. Provide them online access through satellites, mesh networking, and open civic technologies developed by the Open Technology Fund. Open Internet access should be a core part of the work the United States government does to support human rights and democracy everywhere. Make press freedom and Internet freedom the planks of a bridge to the next century of access to information.
- Work with Congress to reform classification and transform declassification in statute. Invest in human capacity and technology in a world class declassification center at the National Archives. Open up the ongoing declassification review process in intentional ways that inform and engage the American people in participatory governance.
- Create a Federal Advisory Committee for open government, modeled on the President’s Council of Science and Technology (PCAST), accountable for tracking and implementing U.S. commitments to the Open Government Partnership and Summit for Democracy and relevant sunshine laws. A “President’s Council for Responsive Government” would be made up of civil society and government members. Such a body would move activity from the opacity of background briefings and workshops, adding the sunshine in government necessary for this process to be institutionalized. Crucially, the committee would host and engage with a multi-stakeholder forum, like those in Canada and the United Kingdom, extending civic engagement beyond DC to the entirety of the American people, across all states and territories.
Please combine these new commitments with those you made for the Summit for Democracy, and announce them at the Open Government Partnership Summit in September. Doing so would reflect the leadership position the United States is seeking to reclaim, instead of undermining the partnership through openwashing.
As we face the headwinds of authoritarianism in the 21st century and adapt, improvise, and overcome the many challenges ahead, we want to express our gratitude for your service and leadership to date.
Consistent, honest leadership over time that combines truth with accountability is critical for building back broken public trust in any government of the people after years of corruption and lies. Your administration’s actions in the spring of 2022 showed how disclosure and exposure could defuse lies of a nation intent on making war, building domestic and international support for a coalition to respond.
Transparency and accountability are the key pillar in any strategy to defeat autocracy and combat corruption. We urge you, the Vice President, and all members of your administration should double down on leading the free world by the power of example.
Please show the American people how our government can execute through action, not words. Deliver on fundamental reforms that will defend our democracy from foreign and domestic threats to the Constitution, from protecting voting rights to ensuring every person has access to the information necessary for self-governance.
We hope the White House will invest far more capacity now, building on the foundations laid by generations of Americans in the past to erect an enduring architecture of open governance to strengthen and sustain our democracy.
Please contact Alex Howard, Director of the Digital Democracy Project at alex@governing.digital, if you have any questions or concerns.
Respectfully,
The Digital Democracy Project
Public Citizen
OpenTheGovernment
Project On Government Oversight (POGO)
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Demand Progress Education Fund
National Security Archive
Transparency International U.S.
Public Resource
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Cc:
The Honorable Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States
Jeff Zients, Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff
Bruce Reed, Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff
Neera Tanden, Assistant to the President and Domestic Policy Advisor, Domestic Policy Council
Arati Prabhakar, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Shalanda Young, Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget
Governing Digital 