The GSA's self-assessment of the 5th NAP is misleading at best, & a false depiction at worst

[alexande...@gmail.com]

Hello all --

Yesterday, in a mid-term self-assessment released for public comment, the GSA claimed that "the participation and co-creation process for the development of the U.S. Fifth Open
Government National Action Plan (NAP) met the letter of the Open Government Partnership’s relevant OGP Participation & Co-Creation Standards" & that "due to resource and time constraints, it fell short in fully meeting the spirit of co-creation with civil society"

https://www.regulations.gov/document/GSA_FRDOC_0001-2141

This is a false depiction of what happened throughout 2022. (There has still been no self-assessment of the 4th NAP (2019-2022), nor lessons learned.)

Here's the OGP standards, which I'll go through below:

https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ogp-participation-co-creation-standards/

• Standard 1: Establishing a space for ongoing dialogue and collaboration between government, civil society and other non-governmental stakeholders.

The USG claims the Google Group is such a space. It has never been such a civic space, and it did not serve as one in 2022.
https://groups.google.com/g/us-open-government

• Standard 2: Providing open, accessible and timely information about activities and progress within a member’s participation in OGP.

The USG website at open.usa.gov is still missing tons of info at the United States page at OGP, including the contrary to process letters & the history of US participation in OGP: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/members/united-states/ Compare to the NARA archive of the Obama White House page on OGP for resources: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open/partnership There has only been one press release from GSA about this work, when the administrator traveled to Estonia. No press conferences or monthly town halls.

• Standard 3: Providing inclusive and informed opportunities for public participation during co-creation of the action plan.

The co-creation process was entirely virtual and did not include Americans from across the country. Many participants in the workshops in October and November 2022 were not well-informed. The 'hundreds' referred to came from the equity consultation. The U.S. government did not effectively promote these opaque sessions to the press, nor provide readouts with iterative, co-created commitments after.

• Standard 4: Providing a reasoned response and ensuring ongoing dialogue between government and civil society and other non-governmental stakeholders as appropriate during co-creation of the action plan.

The reasoned response did NOT include all inputs, nor acknowledge the pre-baked nature of the report/themes the White House had imposed.

• Standard 5: Providing inclusive and informed opportunities for ongoing dialogue and collaboration during implementation and monitoring of the action plan.

There was very little public, "ongoing" dialogue between participants during the process.

To recap what actually happened/

The USG did NOT adhere to transparency throughout the process.

After posting online forms and a virtual public meeting in May 2022, USG went silent until October – not long after I called on OGP to suspend the USA – OSTP/OMB then posted a draft plan full of the same commitments that are in the final plan. 

The White House conducted 4 listening sessions, refused to post a draft final plan for comment, and, to this day, have never published what it received through the forms, email, or transcript of the meetings.  They did not record those workshops. There was no press conference with civil society when they posted the plan in December 2022. (There has never been a presser about OGP in this administration, only short pretaped remarks from President Biden in December 2021 that fell embarassingly short on the international stage.)

There was very little accountability through the process, as a result of opacity.
 

 OGP standards state a government must "provide clear information about the results of consultation processes and the outcomes of commitment implementation. They should explain, for example, why certain stakeholder priorities were not included as well as the reasons for any changes or delays during commitment implementation."

The US government still has not done so. As I wrote to this U.S. Open Government email listserv at the time, this “reasoned response” was neither prefaced nor followed by an index of the ideas and feedback the White House has received since May 2022, when the USA posted online forms on open.usa.gov. The unsigned document implicitly claims that the response and the previous summary of civil society feedback are accurate and representative summaries of the priorities and proposals we have submitted, while providing no evidence to support the assertion. 

Contrary to the basic requirements of the Open Government Partnership’s co-creation standards, the US government has not “published and disseminated all written contributions (e.g., consultation input as well as responses) to the action plan development on the OGP website/webpage and via other appropriate channels.” In this document, the U.S. government has also not “provided feedback to stakeholders on how their contributions were considered during the creation of the action plan,” because our contributions are not public, as in past cycles, nor specifically acknowledged."

The 5th US NAP was neither innovative nor ambitious.

The US government didn't meet the minimum requirements, much innovate " innovate on ways to develop, co-create and implement ever more ambitious and transformative open government reforms via highly transparent, participatory and collaborative processes." There were no in-person meetings, ideation workshops, public hearings, or uses of participatory platforms or software to collaborative draft or vote on proposed commitments. Officials introduced a pre-baked plan of existing commitments and then stayed in "listening mode." In the self-assessment, GSA Administrator Carnahan cites "the launch of the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, the White House’s new Environmental Justice Scorecard, and the findings of the Subcommittee on Equitable Data’s progress report" as examples of successful commitments. 

As a reminder, that database was the result of an executive order, not a commitment, went out a year later than the due date, and is closed to the public, with no plans to change the latter. That's a far cry from the limited ambition of the Obama-area Police Data Initiative, much less an open database of civilian complaints and official misconduct files across more than 19,000 departments. An environmental scorecard and a report aren't exactly ambitious, nor will either have widespread societal impact.

This "self-assessment" leaves out the fact that the OGP found the US has acted contrary to process in drafting the 4th NAP, implementing the 4th NAP, or drafting the 5th NAP. It also makes no mention of USG ignoring coalition letters, or the lack of civil society participation due to diminished trust.

The fact is that the US government did NOT co-create the 5th National Action Plan, after essentially ignoring OGP domestically for 2021 and most of 2022, and continues to refuse to revise commitments or add new ones.

While the (unsigned) self-assessment noted that the IRM’s December 2023 report recommended that the United States “collaborate with civil
society to identify commitments with the most potential and transform them into SMART commitments," the U.S. government only "intends" to follow this advice during the creation of NAP 6 and is "not revising the NAP 5 commitments themselves to not divert resources from the co-creation process for NAP 6."

To sum up, this self-assessment leaves out key facts and context, makes inaccurate claims, and does not apologize for serial, serious errors in process and public engagement. 

The actions detailed by this small team in GSA here do not address significant civil society concerns about opacity and the lack of accountability for years of non-delivery –much less the structural issue posed by putting this process inside of GSA rather than the Domestic Policy Council at the White House.

These issues will further diminish trust, not restore it.