The White House’s “reasoned response” omitted key civil society priorities

[alexande...@gmail.com]

Hello all.

This public comment was transmitted to the White House Working Group on Open Government on December 20th, 2022. As the U.S. government has still not published the public comments it received since May 2022, during the delayed co-creation process for the 5th National Action Plan for Open Government for the Open Government Partnership, we are publishing our response in full: https://governing.digital/2023/01/18/the-white-houses-reasoned-response-dismissed-civil-society-priorities-and-undermined-the-open-government-partnership/

As people on this list-serv know, despite our plea to extend the consultation into the new year, the White House published the Fifth U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government over the holidays on December 28th, accompanied with a press release.

We will be publishing a separate report regarding the weak commitments in the plan itself, which reads as a report of existing initiatives instead of new ones, and the design flaws in the opaque process that arrived at them. For now, we can only say that the United States did not “seize the moment.”

As detailed in the comment linked above, we encouraged the White House to publish a draft plan and seek much broader public feedback on proposed commitments in 2023 – as the U.S. government had committed to do in the 4th National Action Plan for Open Government.

Our thinking was straightforward: By investing more capacity in the co-creation process to ensure this plan would have the legitimacy derived from deep engagement with stakeholders, the US government would be modeling the kind of iterative, open process of engaging with a large, distributed modern democracy that our diplomats and development officials at the State Department and USAID encourage other nations to pursue for OGP.

That’s what the USA should have been modeling for the Summit for Democracy, which is a weaker version of the multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI) model that the USA adopted and adapted in designing OGP in 2010-2011. (Unlike OGP, the Summit has no secretariat, Independent Review Mechanism, or co-creation standards.) Based upon the lack of domestic progress and international progress by participating governments and civil society actors, we assess ongoing efforts around the Summit are likely to end after the March gathering, after two years of drawing away media attention and scarce government capacity away from OGP.

As we told the White House in December, publishing a final plan that included both irrelevant commitments and others that were never publicly proposed without giving Americans the opportunity to comment would be acting contrary to process. Pushing out an open government plan out over the holidays – instead of introducing it in a presidential press conference – would undermine OGP in the USA and abroad, contrary to the stated goals of the Biden-Harris administration and the hopes of the individuals and organizations who participated in OGP over the years.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this White House did. Unlike peer nations like Canada, there has been no ongoing followup on the plan since its publication. (Canada published consultation data for the co-creation of its 2022-2024 plan, as part of a report on what it heard from Canadians, and continues to engage its public on social media and the Web.)