If knowledge is power, ignorance is impotence. Citizens, consumers, investors, and patients all need trustworthy information when we vote, making purchasing decisions, buy stocks or other assets, or choose a surgeon, medical device, nursing home, or dialysis center. That’s why … Continue reading
On the morning of March 16, the Data Coalition hosted a public forum on how to use artificial intelligence in public sector regulation. As the Coalition notes, Congress enacted the National AI Initiative Act and the AI in Government Act in 2020, which required the Biden administration to launch of the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force. The following remarks focus upon how open government can prevent digital redlining, as prepared for delivery in six minutes or less.
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Today is National Freedom of Information Day, chosen in honor of President James Madison’s birthday, often cited as a founding father of open government in the United States. https://themarkup.org/denied/2021/08/25/the-secret-bias-hidden-in-mortgage-approval-algorithms
This public forum is happening during Sunshine Week, when we celebrate the public’s right to know and access to information.
That gives us a wonderful opportunity to talk more about how government transparency and disclosure can accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) while protecting privacy, security, and human rights.
As law becomes encoded by technology, code has become law.
Accelerating AI in the public sector must not come at the expense of human rights, civil liberties, or the public’s right to know, which are central to democratic societies.
AI will be part of everyday life, but public sector algorithms have special importance: people don’t have a choice. From making unemployment decisions to getting loans to parole hearings to education and work, code is going to govern how we live, work, play, learn, and govern.
Public sector algorithms must be auditable to ensure that existing inequity and injustice is not codified in a rush to modernize.
Open data and open source code can reveal and check algorithmic bias and racial, gender, or religious discrimination in public services, accommodations, and access to information.
Over the last five years, other nations have enacted laws and regulations that focus on the transparency, participation, and accountability of public sector algorithms, from France to the Netherlands to New Zealand.
In France, the Digital Republic Law mandates transparency of government-used algorithms. Public agencies are required to publicly list any algorithmic tools they use, and to publish their rules.
Imagine Congress ordering federal agencies to do so at Code.gov, and OMB forcing the issue.
Imagine an explicit extension of the Freedom of Information Act to code and meta data.
Imagine investment in the human and technical capacity of the SEC, FEC, & FTC to audit the use of AI across societies.
Imagine every city, state and democratic nation joining a global open algorithms network and committing to engaging everyone governed by code and upholding the rights of the people in these new systems.
Imagine a democratic vision for AI in the public sector that centers on human rights and the needs of the public to know in order to be self-governing, instead of authoritarian coercion, control, secrecy, opacity, and secrecy
The federal data strategy was part of the 4th National Action Plan for Open Government for the Open Government Partnership.
How many of you have ever heard of it? Please ask your colleagues in government when the General Services Administration and White House will begin co-creating a 5th plan that includes commitments on AI and democracy.
This Sunshine Week, please commit to pushing our government of, by, and for the people to collaborate WITH the people in developing legislation and rules that govern its use, codifying our “bill of rights” into the technologies we develop and use every day.
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.What were the key failures of healthcare.gov?
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:
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.
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.
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.
I’d rack that up to:
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.
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.
On December 15th, President Joe Biden delivered pre-recorded remarks to the Open Government Partnership Summit, an international conference that convened dozens of nations in South Korea to discuss the past, present, and future of open government. It’s not clear how … Continue reading
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 itself recommends 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/
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:
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), 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.
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.
The steps the Biden White House has taken on transparency taken are meaningful and welcome, but insufficient. They need to keep showing their work by opening Cabinet meetings & disclosing info, and emphasize being open by default isn’t just an option, but an obligation.
To put it another way, the Biden administration’s vocal commitments to transparency, restoration of press briefings & recognition of the role of journalists are profoundly welcome, necessary steps, but remain wholly insufficient to closing the yawning public trust deficit in the US government that existed before President Obama took office and grew much worse after four years of Trump’s official lies. That’s why transparency advocates have repeatedly asked the Biden administration to to take swift action, from the Freedom of Information Act to declassification and legal secrecy.
It’s not enough to put information online or put press secretaries and senior officials in front of the press, though both of those are profoundly welcome, or to stop attacking the credibility of journalists with lies.
As I told Politico, the Biden administration is doing worse, relative to Obama, given how aggressive, risky, and unprecedented some of the things they were doing online were in January 2009 were, particularly social media, and take questions online. (Press Secretary Psaki is dabbling in it, but it’s limited.)
Though obviously Twitter, Faceook, YouTube & other social media were used to go around the press and evade adversarial questioning by both administrations — and went pretty far into official channels being used to spread misinformation and disinformation under Trump — releasing information directly to the public using these platforms does find us “where we are.”
More transparency can and will be weaponized against them, as visitor logs were against the Obama administration, but rebuilding trust will require intentional investment and leadership on the world stage and around the USA, where the President and Vice President lean into tough questions and adhere to high standards of veracity in their public statements and those of the White House.
Today, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the White House is open to bringing back the “Skype seat” again and to taking questions from it. Psaki noted she took Q’s on Twitter — she then replied to … Continue reading
Dear Secretary Psaki and the Office of the Press Secretary, My name is Alexander B Howard; you may have noticed me tweeting at you this past couple months during the transition and now the administration. I came to DC over … Continue reading
E Pluribus Unum 