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.)
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.