This post contains an audio recording (above) of a public Zoom call held on July 20, 2023 to update Americans on select commitments in the 5th U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government, more than six months after the White House published the plan online at the end of December 2022.
Officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) presented on their work on commitments to make the voices of the public heard.
Should the Federal government adopt a common framework for participation and engagement? What might such a framework include?
How would you design an ideal process to develop such a framework?
What points in the process (e.g., outline, first draft, final draft) are most important for public engagement?
What engagement formats or activities would be most effective for developing a Federal framework?
What might the Federal government do to make it easier for people to participate?
Our view? OMB should go back to the future. Review the Public Participation Playbook the Obama White House developed with the public in 2015, as part of the US government’s efforts to open government. Then, working in collaboration with the Office of Public Engagement, host a series of open government roundtables with the nation’s leading authorities on civic engagement and public participation in 2023 and 2024 that inform guidance for the federal government.
Officials might review what approaches were effective in engaging Americans with public health information in the pandemic, voting information, and extreme weather — and which were not.
That work should be part of a new open government plans at OMB and OSTP that are hosted at whitehouse.gov/open, showing President Biden’s commitment to government transparency like whitehouse.gov/equity shows his administration’s commitment to equity.
Screenshots of the presentation follow. (Our apologies: we missed slide 3 and 9.)
Should this White House publish slides or notes from this public session on its work implementing open government commitments, we will update this post.
(Officials said that the session was not recorded, so we are providing the above resources for the Americans who were unable to attend or who did not hear about this opportunity to engage with OMB and OIRA about broadening public engagement because this administration did not engage the public. As you’ll hear in the recording, the public participants in this listening session offered praise for the guidance and suggestions for improvement tempered with critiques of the opaque process, poor communications about the forum, and dissatisfaction at the lack of a cohesive way to track and understand this administration’s work on government transparency and accountability.)
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The White House has launched COVIDTests.gov, which the Biden administration says will enable every home in the U.S. to order 4 free at-home COVID-19 tests through the mail, starting on January 19th — with no shipping costs or credit card required. Ideally, the administration will also allow Americans to request the high-quality masks President Biden said the US government would distribute through COVIDTests.gov as well.
As with Vaccines.gov, there’s a tremendous amount riding on the Biden administration delivering on this news service. Hundreds of millions of Americans REALLY need this administration to deliver on sending free tests and masks to the people through the mail who ask for them right now. This will be a simple but profound interaction.
If the White House can pull it off, it could rebuild public trust during a profoundly uneasy time, delivering the tests and masks that — with vaccines — would enable us all to navigate out of the pandemic together.
If COVIDTests.gov were to be overwhelmed by demand, flooding attacks, automated fraud, or test distribution is botched by the U.S. Postal Service, public trust could erode further.
Last week, Politico reporter Ben Leonard reached out and asked a series of questions about whether the Biden administration would be able to deliver on a website to request rapid tests, raising concerns about whether this be a repeat of the Healthcare.gov debacle of almost a decade ago. The answers below lay out the case for why this White House is likely to succeed.
The public and major media focused a lot on the technology angle because healthcare.gov is a website, and it’s true that technical and design decisions caused major problems at the relaunch, when the Department of Health and Human Services moved it from being a glossy brochure to being a marketplace for health insurance. Lack of beta testing. Hosting at that couldn’t scale to meet demand. Incomplete integration between federal agency systems. Artificial bottlenecks in the marketplace flow.
That all led to a crisis when Americans began trying to use the site, in no small part because Healthcare.gov wasn’t iteratively built or tested “in the open” using modern software development practices, with the people it was meant to serve.
Much like the endemic IT failures that have bedeviled big state and federal projects for years, however, the fundamental problems stemmed from:
Outsourcing huge contracts to systems integrators and contractors
Challenges recruiting and retaining technologists who must be sitting at the table from the beginning of a complex project
The team that rescued the site in the winter of 2013 was able to address many of these failures and then founded the U.S. Digital Service based upon these insights and the inspiration of Gov.uk in the United Kingdom.
How can the Biden administration avoid them this time around?
The White House can give the U.S. Digital Service and 18F (the software development organization inside of the General Services Administration which could be involved) – resources and cover to do their best work. (Ideally, they will “show their work” as they go, too.) That means strong product management, iterative development,regular check-ins, designers and technologists in government, and working with best-in-class technology partners who understand how to build and scale modern responsive websites.
It’s also worth noting that building a website to request a COVID-19 test is not the same technical challenge as one that had to tie into the IRS to check eligibility for subsidies and complete a secure transaction. Failure would still be consequential, but the bar is much lower, as are the risks surrounding errors.
What were the key issues with Trump’s promised national COVID-19 screening website? What lessons can be taken from it?
Former President Trump was unfit to lead a coordinated national response to a pandemic and uninterested in building out the national testing infrastructure that showed his lies about the prevalence of a deadly airborne virus to be false.
This promised website was vaporware, not a serious project that can or should be compared to past or present .gov efforts. The Trump White House never built or delivered anything after the President engaged in misleading hyperbole in the Rose Garden.
Instead of convening technologists, designers, and project managers from relevant agencies and private sector in a Manhattan Project for testing or grand national challenge, however, Trump misled the public by claiming that Google was already working on it. There’s no “there there” to compare.
Vaccines.gov seemed to roll out more smoothly. Why do you think that happened and what lessons can be drawn?
I’d rack that up to:
Competent leadership at the U.S. Digital Service involved from the outset in coordinating and managing the project, top-down cover from the Oval Office
Subject matter expertise from the medical professionals who built VaccineFinder.org
Deep technical expertise and capacity to deliver at scale from private sector companies involved
We all would know a lot more about what worked and why if the Biden administration had narrated its work in the open, held a press conference about Vaccines.gov, and taken questions instead of giving the news to Bloomberg on background.
How big of a technical task do you think putting together this website will be?
If the functionality of COVIDTests.gov is limited to someone requesting a test be delivered to a given address, I don’t think that’s a big task for US government in 2022, even under heavy demand. If the COVIDTests.gov needs to authenticate someone and create accounts to prevent fraud or abuse, that will be a bit harder.
My hope is that we’ll see a lightweight website that uses Login.gov and a shortcode — say, text your zipcode to GETTST – that will enable people to quickly and easily request tests from a smartphone – along with a package of better, medical grade masks for themselves and their children that President Biden announced today would be made available for free to all Americans.
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There’s much to be learned from the experience of the city Gainesville, Florida, where a commissioners voted in 2014 to publish the public’s email correspondence with them and the mayor online.
More than five years on, the city government and its residents have are ground zero for an tumultuous experiment in hyper-transparent government in the 21st century, as Brad Harper reports for the Montgomery Advertiser.
It’s hard not to read this story and immediately see a core flaw in the design of this digital governance system: the city government is violating the public’s expectation of privacy by publishing email online.
“Smart cities” will look foolish if they adopt hyper-transparent government without first ensuring the public they serve understands whether their interactions with city government will be records and published online.
Unexpected sunshine will also dissolve public trust if there’s a big gap between the public’s expectations of privacy and the radical transparency that comes from publishing the emails residents send to agencies online.
Residents should be offered multiple digital options for interacting with governments. In addition to exercising their rights to freedom of expression, assembly and petition on the phone, in written communications with a given government, or in person at hearing or town halls, city (and state) governments should break down three broad categories of inquiries into different channels:
Emergency Requests: Emergency calls go to 911 from all other channels. Calls to 911 are recorded but private by default. Calls should not be disclosed online without human review.
Service Requests: Non-emergency requests should go 311, through a city call center or through 311 system. Open data with 311 requests is public by default and are disclosed online in real-time.
Information Requests: People looking for information should be able to find a city website through a Web search or social media. A city.gov should use a /open page that includes open data, news, contact information for agencies and public information officers, and a virtual agent or “chat bot” to guide their search.
If proactive disclosures aren’t sufficient, then there should be way to make Freedom of Information Act requests under the law if the information people seek is not online. But public correspondence with agencies should be private by default.
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