How Well is the Open Government Partnership Working?

A draft of the United States of America Midterm Self-Assessment Report - Third Open Government National Action Plan 2015-2017, September 2016, is now available. The self-assessment report "describes the development process for the third NAP and the progress made implementing the initiatives halfway through the two-year implementation period. " The initiatives are based on four open government principles: transparency, civic participation, public accountability, and technology and innovation for openness and accountability. All 45 open government commitments of the NAP are described in a quick-view chart along with each one's level of completion.  The commitments cover a wide range of areas from helping students make informed decisions about higher education to improving health with data-driven precision medicine to developing a common whistleblower training curriculum for the intelligence community.

Open Government Initiatives Going Dark

According to Federal News Radio, an internet-only all-news station focusing on the Federal Government and those who do business with it, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will shut down several public and internal government websites started under President Obama's Open Government Initiative because of a lack of e-government funding. Unless something changes, funding will begin to run out April 20 for the public sites:

• Data.gov,  
• IT Dashboard, and 
• paymentaccuracy.gov

Funding is projected to run out soon after July 30 for

• USASpending.gov and
• Apps.gov/now

Internal government sites reported to face the budgetary ax include some sites related to the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort and:

• Performance.gov (login required even to view the homepage), and
• FedSpace
.

For the complete story see OMB prepares for open gov sites to go dark in May (March 31, 2011 - 2:46pm).

Other organizations are providing information about these proposed cuts too. William Matthews of GovernmentExecutive.com discusses the scaling back or elimination of these open-government/transparency sites in his April 12, 2011 news story entitled Transparency websites hit by budget ax. (To read the article, click on Continue to Government Executive at the top of the advertising page the link initially accesses.) On April 12 Bill Shuman of the Sunlight Foundation also posted a blog entry entitled Major Cuts for Online Tech Transparency Progs. In the entry Shuman provides a link to bill H.R. 1473 containing the appropriations, a brief Save the Data video, and an opportunity to sign a letter to Congress asking members to protect funding for these sites.

2010 Secrecy Report Card

On September 7, 2010, OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of groups committed to open government, released the 2010 Secrecy Report Card. In the corresponding press release, Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, states, "In general, after hitting high water marks during the Bush Administration, statistics indicate the creation of new national security secrets is slowing ebbing." However, the report also highlights "looming secrecy problems the Obama Administration should address."

Audit of U.S. Government Agencies' Open Government Plans

To explore the success of President Obama's December 8, 2009 Open Government Directive, OpenTheGovernment.org recently completed audits of U.S. Government agencies' open government plans. Receiving high marks were NASA for "inviting the public to collaborate in the development of technologies that are core to its mission" and Health and Human Services for planning to identify and publish high value data sets this year. The report also praises the Labor Department for making "significant amounts of information publicly accessible" and opening new platforms for potential internal and external collaboration, and the Department of Energy for improving on its Open Energy Information platform. However, the Department of Energy was also included in the group receiving the five lowest scores. Ranked from the best of the worst to the worst of the worst are the Department of Treasury, the Department of Defense, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Justice.

Agencies have until the end of May to revise their plans. In early June OpenTheGovernment.org will review the plans again to ascertain agencies' responses to the audits.

A full list showing how agencies' plans rank is available from http://bit.ly/OGovRank. The full audit results and links to agency evaluations are available from http://bit.ly/OGovEvals.