There are reasons to be hopeful about open government as the United States as the new year begins, but also cause for grave concern. In December 2023, researchers at the Independent Review Mechanism (IRM) of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) confirmed what good governance advocates have said since 2017: the federal government is still not meeting the standards for open government domestically that the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) encourages other nations to adopt internationally.
Instead of standing with people demanding transparency from U.S. government, as President Biden encouraged other nations to do in December 2021, the White House refused to hold meetings in person in 2022 and 2023 and to incorporate the priorities of the (dwindling number of) good governance organizations and individuals willing to participate in voluntary multi-stakeholder processes after years of eroding trust and inaction.
Instead of seizing the moment and reviving the process with renewed leadership, the Biden administration starved OGP of attention, capacity, and relevance while creating a far weaker multi-stakeholder initiative, the Summit for Democracy.
The White House did not co-create a new “National Action Plan” for Open Government in 2022 with the American people and then announce it in a press conference, embrace accountability for the failures of the previous administration, and then use participation and collaboration to build back public trust.
Instead, the IRM found that the White House pre-drafted and then published a report full of vague, mostly pre-existing commitments – including many that were not relevant to government transparency and accountability – ignored expert feedback regarding opaque processes and flawed product, and then published yet another weak open government plan online over the holidays in December 2022.
This is unfortunately not novel. The OGP IRM has found the United States to have repeatedly acted contrary to process for years now. Nonetheless OGP restored the country to good standing after the Trump White House delivered a new plan in 2019 – despite ample cause for keeping a corrupt, secretive administration under review prior to a historic pandemic and attempted auto-coup.
After documenting the White House’s failures to engage the American public at scale, collaborate in choosing and drafting commitments on transparency and accountability, disclose comments, or provide a reasoned response for ignoring the consensus recommendations of good governance organizations, researchers at the Open Government Partnership Independent Review Mechanism recommended that the U.S. government collaborate with civil society to identify verifiable commitments with the most potential and refine them in 2024.
In their report, the IRM identified six “promising commitments” in a policy area that important to stakeholders or the national context which are verifiable, have an open government lens, and modest or substantial potential for results:
Commitment 1: Production, dissemination, and use of equitable data
Commitment 4: Public access to federally funded research
Commitment 8: Data for environmental justice Commitment 18: Government-wide anti-corruption strategy
Commitment 27: Access to government information through FOIA
Commitment 35: Effective and accountable policing and criminal justice
The good governance community also called on the US government to add new commitments to the 5th NAP in August, which the White House has so far declined to do — despite a mechanism that would allow it, as in the 3rd NAP.
Unfortunately, the White House has yet to acknowledge the (incredibly) constructive criticism from the researchers by revising selected commitments – much less added new ones, as the Obama White House did in 2016.
Instead, the administration invested a million dollars to fund an Open Government Secretariat within the General Services Administration to track progress on the commitments the White House chose and host a series of virtual seminars in 2023, complying with the bare minimum of the Open Government Partnership’s requirements for documenting implementation.
The Biden administration also has yet to respond formally to the “contrary to process” letter the Partnership sent in August or the letter a coalition of good governance groups sent to the President, bring senior officials to in-person roundtables in DC and around the nation, fix an opaque process, and heal badly broken relationships.
There continue to be good faith efforts across the agencies in the executive branch, from the National Archives to the General Services Administration, but strategic silence from the White House on open government has signaled to civil society and officials alike that this is not a priority.
If the President and his advisors see the value of investing political capitol, oversight capacity, and top-level leadership in open government across the federal government, change is possible. It’s crucial to provide dedicated civil servants with the air cover and capacity to do the work necessary to bring dormant or dissolved policies, programs, and partnerships back online to build resilience against headwinds for American democracy at home and abroad.
If the United States does not lead by the power of our example in 2024, our government will lose an opportunity to build trust in democratic governance through accountability and increase resilience against authoritarianism though transparency.
In August, the U.S. Chief Freedom of Information Act Officers Council issued a memorandum on the deadline for interoperability with FOIA.gov & sunset of FOIAOnline on September 30.
The U.S. FOIA Advisory Committee discussed the memo at our public meeting on September 7, 2023.
Imagine if senators were refusing to vote on a deputy attorney’s nomination, blocking the administration of the Freedom of Information Act at the Justice Department. Imagine if President Biden then proposed defunding the Office of Information Policy. Now, imagine if OIP didn’t just offer guidance and generated reports on FOIA but combined the functions of the National Archives, Justice Department, Congress & judicial ethics offices into one transparency institution that oversees all three branches of a federal constitutional republic under a strong freedom of information law.
Bienvenidos a Mexico. This is exactly what’s happening in Mexico right now as the AP reported on April 30.
This threat to freedom of information and public knowledge is not happening in isolation, either.
That’s a mistake: both Congress and news media should be focusing on what the changes to good governance in election systems, open government agencies, & chilling of NGOs would mean to Mexico, especially when combined with ongoing threats to journalists and activists from cartels, organized crime, & corrupted police.
The destabilization of Mexican democracy would represent a huge diplomatic, economic, and security challenge for the USA which must neither be ignored nor neglected.
What happens there will affect more than our politics, especially if conditions at the border deteriorate after a major natural disaster, from supply chains to labor supplies.
The looming challenges of migration from destabilized states should be driving comprehensive immigration reform, with investments in human capacity, courts, and services that would all increase resilience against the escalating stress that millions of people seeking asylum and economic opportunity in the USA will place on our own systems, as we are seeing today across the southern border of our union.
The renewed efforts to eliminate this transparency institution are a dagger of Damocles dangling over the heart of a still-young democracy whose stability and development are critical to American national security, public health, and public safety.
An assault on any one of institutions that provides checks and balances in a nation destabilizes the whole, from an independent judiciary to a free press to nonpartisan electoral administration.
An assault on all of them at once is a flashing WARNING sign that should be provoking an “all hands on deck response from the United States.
The long arc of our nation’s history with Mexico suggests to me that honesty, humility, and humanity from our nation’s leaders will be more effective here than bullying, bluster, or blunt demands or threats that would further fuel toxic headwinds.
In a different timeline, the President, Congress, and Supreme Court might be issuing a joint statement encouraging the Government of Mexico to invest in the laws, institutions, and people that are at the heart of a thriving democracy, reminding them that to allow any one party or politician to corrupt one organ risks killing the entire body politic.
In the world we have, such a public alignment between the leases of our own government seems inconceivable. It should be possible for the US government to speak as one to our neighbor in a new clear, stunning statement offering a hand in friendship to our neighbor partner to build more healthy democratic states together that center human rights, human dignity, and human potential.
Until that happens, it’s crucial for everyone else to call on Mexico’s leaders to uphold the public right to know and election integrity.
Relevant vectors include: 📰 news 📻 radio 📺 TV 💬 texts 🤳social media 📧 email 🎙️town halls 📚libraries 🚉transit 🏫schools
Instead of banning TikTok, imagine if the White House tried to engage ~150 million Americans there, & then crossposted each video PSA across Instagram Snap Inc. & YouTube to ensure that info was available to all.
Start with vote.gov & serve.gov or. Build new .gov & services with us.
I know it looks dark online, but we should still be thinking bigger about how to do more than just get We the People Internet access, as foundational as that is: we need to make it matter, rebuilding trust through the delivery of trustworthy information over time on participatory platforms.
Better digital services won’t be enough: we need integrated offline and online strategies that find publics with information wherever we are.
We need a government communications revolution proportionate to the paired public health and civic crises we have collectively endured over the pandemic.
I still believe in the capacity of my fellow Americans to deliver on it, in no small part by learning about what the rest of the world is doing online and adapting, adopting, and improving civic technologies that meet our own needs.
As I told CNBC yesterday, Twitter’s ban on promotion of selected social media services and restriction of links was not a good policy. Suspensions of journalists reporting on moderation decisions was similarly horrific, chilling journalism on the platform and serving notice that new management was willing to change policy and ban journalists.
Successful companies should compete in the markets for attention, advertising, & information online by making & deploying robust, compelling products and services, not suddenly imposing draconian limits to freedom of expression and linking to other services online, which key anti-competitive behavior & anti-consumer behavior.
After a massive backlash, Twitter owner Elon Musk apologized for sudden policy changes, Twitter deleted @TwitterSafety’s tweets and a webpage that outlined the regressive policy banned alternative social platforms, and Musk created a poll asking if he should step down.
Got all that?
It’s been helluva 48 hours online, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time on social media over the past two decades.
This rollercoaster ride to and from Hades is far from over.
If explicitly anti-press, anti-government, & transphobic rhetoric, suspensions of the press, & extraordinary restrictions on both freedom of expression & freedom to link continue, more institutions will be forced off the sidelines this week to suspend participation, shift to listening mode, or leave outright Twitter.
As with every platform where we spent time, attention, or money, online or off, individuals, corporations, news media, & democratic governments all must reassess what corporate behavior, norms, & policies they are willing to endorse through continued participation, much less support through paid promotion or subscriptions.
Since 2006, Twitter has acted as an information utility, along with a news browser, organizing tool, office watercooler, social network, & global platform for protests, campaigns, & lies that fueled an insurrection.
It’s always been driven and shaped by the action of humans on it, not just the product and policy and feature decisions of its operators. The emergent behavior we see in reaction to the past week of changes will shape what Twitter will be in 2023, & to whom.
The impact of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the subsequent exodus of staff from layoffs and resignations continues to ripple outwards today. While the platform remains online today, every person or institution that uses it should be preparing for downtime and continuing changes to the policies on Twitter, along with the diminished capacity of its remaining staff to fix technical issues or mitigate the range of governance crises associated with running one of the world’s most prominent social media companies.
Government agencies have special considerations, however, and can’t afford to fiddle around while Twitter’s servers burn. Putting aside the prospect of regulatory action by the Federal Trade Commission or European data protection agencies, there’s some basic block and tackling that leaders need to moeg on, now. Lindsey Crudele reached out with questions about what that might look like this past week and published a useful article on what government agencies should do. I’ve published the answers I sent her in full, with an addendum to the last.
Why does Twitter matter to government agencies in 2022? Examples of usage you’d consider notable)?
Social media has been where publics have been online in increasing majorities across nations since the dominant platforms of today launched in the 2000s: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – along with hundreds of social media startups that died, or faded, like Tumblr or Flickr or Delicious, though many still have millions of active users. MySpace still exists!
More seriously, while Twitter is much smaller than other global social platforms, in terms of daily active users and time spent, it has developed disproportionate influence and impact because of who those users are: world leaders, journalists, politicians, and thousands of institutions, from governments to universities to corporations.
Former President Trump’s use and abuse of Twitter made it even more of a central clearinghouse for US politics and US government policy. While banning him significantly reduced the amount of misinformation and lies on the platform, the Biden administration and other governments haven’t retreated from using Twitter to make announcements, break news, push back on misleading narratives, or engage publics.
If Twitter went away tomorrow, that broadcasting activity would likely be distributed across other services, from Facebook to Mastodon. What would be missing is the (mostly) open platform to listen in natural disasters or crises that Twitter provided and the default backchannel for many public conversations across industries and culture.
Given staffing cuts and leadership changes, what does platform and policy instability mean for government agencies on Twitter?
It means they should be making a plan for Twitter to go down, due to infrastructure issues, or for the integrity of the platform to decrease as content moderation capacity, support, and security are degraded, the level of misinformation and disinformation surges, and people leave the platform. (This is the same disaster recovery and business continuity plan that agencies should have had in case Twitter was taken offline by a hostile nation state around election day.)
It’s critical for governments to go where people and press are online to listen and engage, but never to become dependent on any company. No one — government, politicians, media, academia, nonprofits, private corporations, activists, foundations, or scientists — should allow a third party company, much less one owned by a capricious billionaire who espouses anti-government and anti-democratic views, to own their relationships with communities, clients, or constituents. It’s crucial for the stewards of public institutions and the services and information they provide to avoid any single point of failure so as to avoid a singular crisis.
What is your advice for agencies who use Twitter at this time in light of the changes?
As I said elsewhere, the first step is not to panic. Keep calm and tweet on. Let the constituents, residents, citizens, and communities who depend on you know that you will keep listening and link to your website and other channels to request help or get information
Second, turn on multi-factor authentication now. (Use an app, not SMS.) Disconnect third party apps.
The next step is to make sure agencies are ready for Twitter to go down, cease to be useful, or put their accounts behind a paywall, which may limit its utility as a public engagement channel – parallel to op-eds placed behind newspaper paywalls or interviews on subscription-based streaming services. If there’s a large enough engaged group of constituents and residents on a given platform, it makes sense for government agencies to at least be listening there.
The fourth step is to download agency social media archives, to ensure all public records are properly memorialized, and proactively disclose them on agency websites.
The fifth step is to secure all institutional social media accounts (not just Twitter) and connected email accounts – all of which should be connected to a .gov email! – with two-factor authentication.
The sixth step is to think bigger. Agency leadership should think about how all public communications and civic engagement efforts are working together in a holistic way, including email, texting, websites, social media, PR, direct mail, print/radio/digital ads, and press relations.
Finally, explore an institutional presence on Mastodon, in coordination with local, state, and federal leadership: it may make sense for one agency to create an instance to host accounts on, like the German government and MIT has stood up.
In the USA, President Biden should direct U.S. Digital Service and 18F to pilot a U.S. government instance on Mastodon, in collaboration with the Library of Congress and U.S. National Archives, and request Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young to issue guidance to all federal agencies on Twitter to download an archive of our public records from all official accounts. Imagine something like mastodon.usa.gov with agency accounts on it, for example, or mastodon.congress.gov with all official Congressional accounts.
P.S. Over on Twitter, consultant and CTO Shannon Clarke suggested that “potentially specific agencies might want their own instance of Mastodon (or similar ActivityPub platform) so like email all users/accounts there would be clear which agency so perhaps name at agency.social dot is .gov or similar.”
That may make sense across local, state, and federal agencies – particularly for those with tens of thousands of staff. It might not be the right fit for tiny state or local agencies, though running a open, federal social system as a part of a polity’s websites may become table stakes for webmasters & IT staff. It’s certainly possible to imagine schools and libraries creating instances for students as alternatives to commercial social media, but that would be predicated on internal capacity, the ability to pay vendors, or the presence of state or local digital services that can delivery or maintain those systems.
I expect we’re going to see a riotous combination of approaches if there isn’t clear leadership. Clarke further posited that “there will be a reasonably good business (or service of an agency) in managing hosted instances of ActivityPub servers perhaps with government specific additional features (like formal, permanent archives; integration to identity management systems etc).”
I suspect he’s right and that will bear out over time in parallel ways to how Drupal and WordPress have been adopted and maintained by agencies – but
P.P.S. Also on Twitter, technologist Bob Wyman made an important point about how a “federal fediverse” should be configured: “If government uses Mastodon, or some other software, its public addresses or names should not include the software’s name. Government names should be generic. They should refer either to protocol (i.e. http://activitypub.gov), or to function (e.g. http://announce.gov).”
This makes sense to me, in terms of how domain names interact with the underlying technologies and protocols. Imagine social.usa.gov as a entry point for all executive branch .gov social media accounts or social.congress.gov.
In many ways, one future is already here: the metaverse Meta imagines is just not evenly distributed yet. But, as with the Internet that the nascent virtual worlds Facebook founder is building has in many senses been built upon, what the metaverse (or metaverses!) will be has yet to be written – much less the ways humanity will use it.
In 2022, the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center surveyed hundreds of technology experts about what the metaverse will look like in 2040.
Two key themes emerged from that non-scientific canvasing:
A “notable share of these experts argued that the embrace of extended reality in people’s daily lives by 2040 will be centered around augmented-reality and mixed-reality tools, not in the more-fully-immersive virtual reality worldsmany people define today as being ‘the metaverse.’”
Experts “warned that these new worlds could dramatically magnify every human trait and tendency – both the bad and the good. They especially focused their concerns on the ability of those in control of these systems to redirect, restrain or thwart human agency and stifle people’s ability to self-actualize through exercise of free will, and they worried over the future freedom of humans to expand their native capacities.”
This following is our full answer to Pew’s questions, with two summaries distilled from the survey results. (You can read the rest in this PDF or Pew’s website.)
What we imagine about the future has always shaped by great authors and filmmakers whose vision inspires humans to invent the future. It can take decades or centuries or even millennia for many technology to catch up with someone’s imagination, though the future we experience may differ from the one we expected because of an accelerant like a global pandemic or a war. It may take years for the relevance or full impact of a new technology upon society to become apparent, like the Internet, smartphone, social media, bulk surveillance, drones, artificial intelligence, or mRNA vaccines.
The metaverse will be no different.
We may think of of it as conceived by Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash,” the iconic cyberpunk novel from the 1990s that described a virtual world that could be accessed using personal terminals with goggles, public terminals and booths, or portable rigs operated by “gargoyles” who were always online. In many ways, such a space has existed and endures Second Life for the past two decades, but – unlike text and video-based social media platforms – never reached planetary scale. Around two hundred thousand people log onto Second Life daily in 2022, but the other 7 billion of us do not.
By 2040, we should expect the personal and public terminals that Stephenson once envisaged to exist in many forms around the globe, from public kiosks to university pods to private homes to library booths to commercial gear operated corporations to police and military interfaces. If the world is anything like today, each will have its own affordances, stigma, power, and privileges that will be reflected in capacity and appearance.
We should also expect that the smartglasses, VR goggles, and AR browsers in our smartphones today will be akin to the personal computers of the 1980s and cellphones of the 1990s in two decades time. The emerging panoply of computing devices that augment what we see and enable us to explore virtual worlds using avatars project images onto lenses or our eyeballs are still in their relative infancy today, as are the smartwatches, health bands, and fitness trackers of today.
In 2040, we should expect spoken and gestural interfaces like the ones we saw in “Minority Report” that enable us to interact in augmented reality layers in a given physical location, viewing the annotations and glyphs others have left, with background systems pulling up information about the people, places, and objects we observe. This will have some implications for how we live, work, play, govern, conduct business, pursue romance, as these new civic, corporate, and private spaces become commercialized or co-opted by the same societal forces and institutions that shaped the development and extension of Internet technologies in the 20th century.
When combined, all of these devices, our activity on them, the sensors in them, and the urban environments around us and above us will make up an “embodied Internet” on which we leave digital exhaust with each action or movement.
As with smartphones and the data collection practices of 2022, people won’t need to be wearing goggles, smartglasses or other wearable computers to be affected by adding more Internet-connected cameras, sensors, and autonomous devices to public and private spaces. This will put a premium on nations and states enacting data protection laws that protect children, consumers, citizens, and seniors as they move through these sensorized spaces.
While dystopian outcomes aren’t assured, there is gathering risk that failures in collective action will allow today’s ransomware and speak phishing to persist and become even more pernicious as more and more human activity is tracked as we navigate a planet overlaid with a metaverse. As with rapidly emerging systems that currently are being used in concentration camps by authoritarians in modern surveillance states, such a metaverse could empower authoritarians to track, control, and coerce billions of humans in silicon prisons ringed by invisible barbed wire, governed by opaque algorithmic regulation and vast artificial intelligences.
By 2040, we should expect to see positive applications of augmented reality in education, the sciences, entertainment, manufacturing, governance, and more, combined with virtual experiences that mix up holographic avatars with humans in ways that recall Star Trek’s holodeck.
In the most optimistic timeline, we will see the best of the generative aspects of today’s crude virtual worlds on Roblox or Minecraft evolve into global marketplaces in which people can buy synthetic goods and services with digital assets. If nation states can shape democratic norms into globally respected laws, billions of humans will be able to work, learn, play, and share in new civic spaces in which privacy and security by default protect human rights and civil liberties across platforms and media. Human nature itself will not change, but the nature of being human will be informed by this shift, as will our capacity to push for collective action to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
If nations do not enact data protection laws that center human rights online, however, and insist upon open standards and democratic norms for the emergent civic spaces of today, then the metaverses of 2040 will be pervasive closed platforms of coercion & control driven by surveillance capitalism, not open platforms for expression, connection, & generativity.
The following is a brief prepared for civil society leaders in the United States considering how or whether to participate in the Open Government Partnership, a multi-stakeholder initiative launched a decade ago.
Executive Summary
There is a bonafide opportunity for advocates to push the Biden administration to connect good government, anti-corruption, freedom of information, press freedom, civic literacy, and participatory democracy together in a cohesive national strategy, but only if good government groups work in coalition to refuse to participate without concrete actions by the White House prior to the Summit.
As with other voluntary multilateral stakeholder initiatives, the future success of the Open Government Partnership will depend upon the direct involvement by President Biden, partnerships with media (and perhaps tech) companies, and “going big” on transformative commitments that will excite the imagination of the American public and review faith in the relevance of participation in these kinds of governance processes. Small, technocratic initiatives will not inspire or engage a polarized, angry population rife with disinformation in a low trust environment.
While this doesn’t mean that meaningful regulatory, administrative, policy, or personnel commitments won’t be on the table, involving Congress in reforming itself and enacting reforms remains paramount for both domestic relevance of the Open Government Partnership and enduring changes.
To rebuild badly damaged global credibility on good governance and democracy, this White House will need to acknowledge past mistakes and commit to working to pass reforms and invest in personnel and policy changes, from open justice initiatives to ethics reforms. Delegating a civil servant in the USA to ask for feedback on broken commitments was not a good start.
Background
For those unfamiliar, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Partnership is a global multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI) that acts as a collective governance mechanism for national governments and their publics to create commitments towards transparency and accountability reforms and tracks implementation. As in other MSIs, participants voluntarily make collective commitments towards achieving a given goal. The Paris Accord on climate change may be the MSI best known to the public,
Past and current OGP commitments have included reforms aimed at increasing public access to information, improving good governance, reducing corruption and improving service delivery using new technologies, and engaging the public in public business and processes. This FAQ lays out the history of the initiative and organization up to 2018.
After the OGP went dormant in the United States after the USA published a weak plan in 2019, it ceased to be relevant to domestic politics or US government, for reasons explored further below.. While other democratic nations and their leaders continued to participate and engage their publics, the Trump White House stopped making public statements about OGP and the plan in 2019 after a consultation that failed to meet OGP’s “co-creation” standards for public participation.
The conclusion from a decade of experience with OGP is that it doesn’t work in the USA — and likely other nations — if a given nation’s leader is corrupt, untrustworthy, & fundamentally anti-democratic. If a president doesn’t believe in democracy and attacks it, adherence in a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative amounts to gauze in a gale.
Without Presidential leadership and high expectations for elected officials to hold themselves accountable to various norms of transparency and accountability, from disclosing tax returns to acknowledging and supporting the role of a free press to standards for veracity in public statements regarding policy, public health, or science, OGP doesn’t work in the USA – or presumably elsewhere.
What good governance watchdog or other civil society entity who participated in the co-creation process view OGP as a key point of leverage with the Trump White House or US government?
Who saw OGP as a point of leverage to stop the Trump administration from rolling back past OGP commitments or voluntary transparency, from visitor logs to the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative?
The USA stayed in OGP thanks to the efforts of former White House official Matt Lira and many US civil servants, which enabled it to continue to operate in countries where the necessary condition for good faith participation existed: a world leader who believed in democracy as both a principle and practice.
In 2021, OGP is being led by career civil servants at GSA and State, not a senior official, much less the President. It and its processes are irrelevant to Congress, where fundamental transparency and accountability reforms originate in the USA. Few Americans have ever heard of OGP, much less participated in any of the “co-creation workshops.” When OGP made the news because of President Obama’s involvement, US outlets tended to be skeptical, or simply ignore it.
Major, mainstream US news media outlets still do not regard OGP as relevant to power or policy. For the most part, most of the press remains unaware of OGP after a decade, as has most of Congress. Negative IRM reports or letters don’t generate headlines or political pressure in the USA: blockbuster investigations, lies, corruption, and attempted self coups do.
The Opportunity Ahead
In the spring of 2021, the Open Government Partnership hosted a virtual event discussing what it would take to revive the US process with the new administration. The paper is online. A recording of that forum is here:
It’s possible that OGP process could move forward in a healthy, productive way in a domestic context if the United States government and foundations make a series of policy and personnel commitments, but that hasn’t happened in the months since.
A key overarching conclusion from the U.S. experience with OGP comes through from this paper, though. Voluntary multi-stakeholder initiatives don’t work if a given nation’s leader is corrupt, untrustworthy, and fundamentally anti-democratic.
If a president doesn’t believe in democracy and attacks it, adherence in a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative amounts to gauze protecting a porch in a gale. If there’s no good faith partner on the other side of the table that civil society organizations can depend on to respond to letters, implement reforms and commit to meaningful significant commitments – or those they do not want to implement – then participating in OGP co-creation could actively harm other efforts because it creates the imprimatur of good governance under the administration without its reality.
That’s openwashing, not open government.
Under those circumstances, OGP’s steering committee should take action to suspend a nation’s participation instead of signing off on extended deadlines or allowing an administration’s claims of good faith participation to remain unchecked when co-creation guidelines and policy regression are so clearly violated.
That didn’t happen in the USA in recent years. OGP’s leadership and members of the steering had little to say about the presidency’s descent into authoritarianism and illiberalism until after President Trump left office, and the Internal Review Mechanism pulled its punches regarding the administration going silent and increasingly regressing over time.
Key Steps to Building Relevance
If the Biden administration now intends to build US participation in OGP “back better,” there are a series of steps it could take to rebuild trust with the American public, civil society organization, and leaders who would be partners in a restored dialogue, starting with restoring past commitments and showing open government is a presidential priority.
First, President Biden needs to reify the relevance of the Open Government Partnership to reform efforts and ask Americans to participate.
There is no replacement for a world leader’s involvement, much less the Presidential leadership, and there are endless opportunities offered by this historic moment. For instance, Vice President Kamala Harris could lead be leading an open justice initiative modeled on her work at California, developing a national clearinghouse of criminal justice data, like the use of force by police or misconduct files, and extended the FOIA to private prisons and government contractors. Restoring wh.gov/open is a good symbolic shift here.
Second, involve major media outlets and social media platforms.
The US has a vibrant independent press and powerful watchdogs that use FOIA and investigative journalism to reveal official corruption paired with an independent judiciary that mandated disclosures after lawsuits. No open government advocate was able to use OGP as a platform to make the Trump White House ethical or the President transparent and accountable.
No one in the DC media ecosystem, national broadcast or print media seemed to care about OGP going dormant in the USA, including what the Internal Review Mechanism said about the Trump administration — unlike other nations. Sycophantic far-right media outlets aligned with the administration echoed its propaganda about transparency, while the most corrupt administration in American history made a mockery of US participation in global good governance.
OGP’s legitimacy and relevance rely not just upon the consent of the governed but also on the public’s participation. In addition to online ideation platforms like Ideascale or Github or a rebooted White House petition platform, the White House will need to do more than just use US government media assets to promote its initiatives. The administration needs to “meet Americans where we are,” online and off.
Global media and tech partners will put critical pressure on the US government to perform better to have any shot at regaining global leadership position on open government. Media involvement will give civil society organizations more leverage to extract commitments that the Biden administration doesn’t want to make or implement. OGP can’t act as a platform for non-governmental entities without the leverage presidential involvement and public awareness provide.
Involving tech companies that profit from surveillance capitalism will carry profound complexities, especially while they’re under scrutiny by regulators for privacy and anti-trust violations, but injecting prompts to participate into social feeds would dramatically increase participation and awareness. Their self-interest in being seen as partners in good governance could make such partnerships viable.
Third, involve Congress and the judiciary branch.
The OGP itselfrecommends parliamentary involvement: “Some of the key aspirations of the open government movement – placing citizens back at the heart of government, defending democracy, protecting & promoting civic space – simply cannot be met by the executive alone: they require legislative support.”
If President Biden and Vice President Harris invest in this partnership, it could be a meaningful platform for civil society to achieve limited reforms within the executive branch’s discretion, from executive orders to policies. If the administration expanded it to other branches of US government, however, it would be far more transformative. USAG Garland backing legislation on access to reporters’ records is what such a commitment could look like in practice. (Garland’s meeting with leaders from media organizations is in of itself both evidence of good faith and the irrelevance of OGP to the current mechanisms through which power is being wielded, checked, or negotiated.)
If there are reforms the Biden administration or the Supreme Court don’t want to adopt or adapt in OGP, however, civil society groups and the public might understandably limit participation and continue to focus limited capacity towards reform through direct advocacy in Congress, regulatory agencies, and the White House.
Four, create a multi-stakeholder network.
OGP works better in countries where there is a vibrant civil society coalition, like the United Kingdom and Canada. The USA never did, relying instead on the coalition capacity of OpenTheGovernment. If the White House is serious about co-creation commitments and being accountable for delivering, part of re-engaging needs to include working with philanthropies and nonprofits to establish such a network and then lead, with Cabinet officials meeting with advocates regularly and internal working groups coordinating cross-agency priority goals on FOIA, rulemaking, and challenges.
Finaly, go big on good governance.
For instance, Congress established a beneficial ownership registry at the US Treasury in the NDAA and then overrode Trump’s veto to enact it at the end of 2020 — but the legislation did not make it a public registry.Committing to open beneficial ownership data like the United Kingdom did in 2013, after studying and mitigating the issues other nations have had, would be significant. hat would be genuinely transformative for anti-corruption efforts not only in the USA, but around the world.
If the USA and UK’s financial industry & regulators collaborated on a commitment to combine, clean, and maintain a global registry, many other nations might see concrete gains and measurable impact on corruption from open data disclosure, re-use, and applications. Anti-corruption and open justice are obvious transformative commitments.
So too would making federal court records free by modernizing the PACER system through legislation, reforming the classification system and investing in declassification and redaction technology and personnel. Or both Houses of Congress committing to robust, distributed remote participation, from bill drafting and markups to oversight and nomination hearings to voting. The Accountability 2021 Agenda has many more options: https://www.accountability2021.org/
Conclusion
Civil society and government leaders at OGP’s recent “community briefing” in October 2021 did not fully grapple with these issues when challenged. The absence of White House officials at the briefing calls into question whether the Biden Harris Administration understands how much trust in the relevance or utility of OGP to enacting reforms proportionate to the glaring flaws in American democracy has been eroded within the good governance community in the USA.
For the Open Government Partnership to have any realistic shot at being relevant to domestic politics or reform in the United States, this White House has to be willing to make commitments it does not want to make, and then show progress towards implementing them, every month. It must literally build OGP back better.
As the Biden administration cannot diplomatically extricate itself from participation in this global multilateral initiative, however, there is an opportunity for the good governance watchdogs, press freedom groups, and open government advocates to use its inability to walk away as leverage to extract good faith evidence of commitments to come back to round tables to craft a new plan.
If OGP is going to be relevant, the next “co-creation” of an open government plan can’t just be an opaque, inside-the-Beltway affair conducted under Chatham House rules.
It must not not exclude good governance groups, leaders, advocates, and activists from workshops and meetings, instead engaging Americans from every state and territory.
President Biden and Vice President Harris need to be directly involved in committing to major, transformative reforms to transparency and accountability and engaging Americans about it.
Ambassador Rice will be in a key role ensuring follow-through domestically, as will Attorney General Garland, Secretary Yellen, Secretary Blinken, and USAID Director Power. Running OGP out of the State Department as a diplomatic initiative like other multi-stakeholder initiatives, at present, can’t become the norm.
Unless a presidency invests OGP with importance and legitimacy through participation and acknowledgement, it has no formal binding power.It’s all soft pressure through the need to perform in the eyes of other nations and the public if there is a high-profile global event.
The upcoming OGP Summit and Democracy Summit will be one of the few points of leverage at which civil society can exert real pressure to get concessions by acting in unison to condition participation on commitments or evidence of meeting a commitment, as expressed in a policy or personnel or disclosure change.
Civil society groups should use maximal leverage to refuse to come to the table until the Biden-Harris administration takes action on the subject of various coalition letters. There is a useful precedent in Mexico, where groups left in protest after government surveillance.
These could include some or all of the following executive actions advocates view as meaningful evidence of good faith:
Issue executive orders on Freedom of Information and open government
Appoint a senior official accountable for ethics and governance
Reboot the White House petitions platform
Issue overdue guidance for implementation of the Open Government Data Act
Acknowledge and respond to coalition letters regarding good governance reforms and set up ongoing roundtables. (“The process is the product” here.)
Disclose virtual visitor logs from the White House
Have the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice issue a “release to one, release to all” policy for FOIA
If the administration won’t commit to enacting meaningful reforms — like on ethics, as OGP’s Joseph Foti recommended so many times — or those they do not want to implement (making visitor logs permanent, surveillance reform, or beneficial ownership transparency), thenparticipating in OGP co-creation could actively harm other efforts because it creates the imprimatur of good governance under the administration without its reality.
To avoid being embarrassed on the international stage, President Biden and Vice President Harris shouldn’t just acknowledge the letters on open government and FOIA they’ve received, but take concrete actions, now, that show that their administration can be trusted to honor OGP’s co-creation standards in 2022 and implement commitments in the years to come.
In an email posted to a newsgroup addressed to the “open government community,” the General Services Adminstration asked for comment on which of the past commitments the United States has made to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) should be submitted for a “people’s choice award” at an international summit in December.
At a basic level, the problem with this outreach is many of the dozen listed commitments are of questionable value, or have been rescinded.
For instance, the United States withdrew from a flagship commitment when the Trump White House withdrew from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in 2017. The Institutional Review Mechanism should not have listed it.
“Amendments to the Freedom of Information Act” were not achieved through OGP: the Department of Justice lobbied against reforms, and the Obama White House did not push for reform, resulting in a weaker bill.
The Trump administration censored open climate data and pushed out climate scientists who collected and published it, instead of “promoting” it. The former president directed hatred towards a whistleblower who came forward about the president’s corruption, instead of strengthening whistleblower protections. And so on.
The fact that the IRM put these commitments forward at all places considerable doubt on whether the IRM researchers are accurate arbiters of US government performance or record. It also casts doubt on whether the Biden administration is willing or able to be an honest broker regarding what’s happened to open government initiatives or policies over the past decade. The tepid criticism in the most recent IRM report on the U.S. government’s record on open government, from 2019, did not acknowledge the Trump administration’s attacks on transparency, much less the impact on public trust that would later be so devastating in the pandemic.
At a higher level, however, the fundamental problem in September 2021 is that the Biden White House has not publicly or privately re-engaged with many of the good governance watchdogs and open government advocates that have repeatedly called on the administration to act on the reforms.
To echo an indictment of the last administration’s “opacity by obscurity,” not introducing this call for comment on open government commitments at a press conference and taking questions on it falls far short of the bare minimum we should expect of the United States government. If it’s not issued in the the Federal Register or blogged about at WhiteHouse.gov, why should Americans take it seriously?
That’s a compounding mistake. Instead of rebuilding the broken trust between US government, the people it serves, and the reformers who seek to strengthen it, the White House is not using its convening power or capacity to be publicly responsive to the legitimate concerns of watchdogs exhausted by years of devolving good governance.
There is no reason that GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan, an honorable human with a long record of public service, should not have done so, save that it would be more appropriate if it was coming from the White House. President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have had little to say or do regarding the multi-stakeholder initiative that the current administrator for U.S. Agency for International Development once called President Obama’s “signature good governance initiative.”
After the most corrupt administration in U.S. history showed the dire weaknesses in a system built upon adherence voluntary democratic norms, that has been a profound disappointment for anyone that hoped to see more than a return to the mixed record of the Obama administration. President Biden and Vice President Harris should be holding U.S. government accountable with executive action.
They should be marshaling support for legislative and regulatory reforms externally, & making it clear to faithful civil servants and allies internally that this White House is committed to cultural changes as well, after years fear and chaos, by putting officials on the record and appointing senior ethics officials.
They also should be honest about how past reforms came to pass, what came of them, and what has happened to them since. Neither Data.gov nor USASpending.gov were achieved as the “result” of OGP. White House petitions were ignored under the Trump administration and have not been brought back by this one. So why are all three listed on the GSA’s open government page?
It’s worth noting that this void in public engagement itself violates the final commitment in the most recent National Action Plan for Open Government, which was to Expand Public Participation in Developing Future U.S. National Action Plans:
“Citizen engagement and public participation area among the most important elements of the NAP co-creation process. During the development of this NAP4,everyday Americans provided some of the most thoughtful and engaging ideas. As we begin to contemplate a fifth national action plan, we will prioritize including a more geographically diverse and diffuse representation of citizen stakeholders in the development of the document.We will aim to conduct a series of consultation sessions, in-person meetings,and livestreamed discussions around the country to generate ideas, encourage public input, and engage in conversations with the most important stakeholder–the American public.”
None of that happened after the plan was released in early 2019.
An administration genuinely “committed to transparency” and good governance can and must build back better, from the Office of Management and Budget issuing guidance on the Open Government Data Act (and enforcing it) to shifting its posture on declassification and the Freedom of Information Act.
It’s time for this White House to provide much more than diplomatic cover at the State Department for the civil servants who kept both the spirit and practice of open government alive over the past four years.
There’s no shortage of good ideas, only the political will and personnel capacity dedicated to implementing them.
Congress has designated June 19 as a national holiday, Juneteenth. President Biden will sign the bill into law today, and as a result, tomorrow will be a federal holiday for many federal workers. It is another step on a long journey towards our nation recognizing and grappling with a dark history of slavery, realism, prejudice, and enduring inequity. Someday, we will arrive together at truth, reconciliation, and restorative justice.
In 2021, we will recognize a historic moment in America’s story.
On Juneteenth, we will celebrate the emancipation of African-Americans after the Civil War.
On Independence Day, we will celebrate declaring independence from Great Britain.
On each day, our union can stand united by a common creed: all humans are created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.
We cannot say yet that we have upheld those rights for all in 2021, but that is the right standard to strive for together as states formed into a union, like equal justice before the law and freedom from hunger, fear, hatred, or want.
American young democracy remains flawed, but celebrating the end of slavery will help remind us all of who we have been and what this nation could yet become: a thriving, multiracial, pluralistic liberal democracy based upon a Constitution.
The USA remains a fragile, messy experiment in self governance, not yet even three centuries old, under threat by enemies both foreign and domestic. And yet, the arc of American’s history is still being bent towards justice by our votes and active citizenship.
May we all find common cause in preserving and defending our union for generations yet to come on Juneteenth and Independence Day, united as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
E Pluribus Unum 