White House issues demanding open government directive

The directive was developed based on recommendations from federal CTO Aneesh Chopra. Mark Lennihan/AP

The White House issued on Tuesday a highly anticipated directive outlining how agencies should make operations more open and solicit public opinions, setting an aggressive timeline for them to implement the new practices.

The guidance, which President Obama announced on his first day in office, is intended to promote an open government, in which the public is more involved in its daily business. The 11-page document adheres to principles Obama has detailed throughout his first year in office: transparency, in which disclosing government information is the default; participation, which incorporates citizen input in policymaking; and collaboration, which creates partnerships inside the government and with industry.

Agencies must deliver on many initiatives in the directive. Depending on the requirement, deadlines are 45, 60, 90 or 120 days. For example, agencies have 45 days to publish online at least three new downloadable data sets. The contents of the statistics must help citizens hold the government accountable, learn about the agency's work, find a financial opportunity or meet some other need the public has conveyed to the agency. In addition, within 45 days each agency must appoint a high-level senior official to oversee the quality of the federal spending data that is posted on the Web.

In a nod to complaints about the accuracy of stimulus job-creation data, the directive calls for separate guidance within 120 days that demands agencies report quarterly on their progress in enhancing the quality of spending information. Lawmakers and citizens have berated the administration for what they say is erroneous data posted on Recovery.gov, the official stimulus-tracking Web site, and USASpending.gov, a database that is supposed to track all federal contracts and loans.

"One of the challenges we have across the federal government is poor data quality," Vivek Kundra, federal chief information officer, said during a live webcast on Tuesday. Kundra; Aneesh Chopra, federal chief technology officer; and White House New Media Director Macon Phillips explained the directive to the public.

Within 60 days, agencies must post an open government Web page to showcase activities related to the directive, and the administration must launch a site that tracks agencies' compliance. The Office of Management and Budget plans to issue more guidance in 90 days that instructs agencies on how to organize contests that tap the public and federal workforce for cost-effective ideas on improving open government.

Perhaps one of the directive's most challenging tasks will be a 120-day review of White House policies that present obstacles to open government. The directive highlights as an example often-criticized rules surrounding the 1995 Paperwork Reduction Act, which require agencies to wait for public comment and federal approval before posting online quizzes and polls.

The directive has been one of the key, and long-awaited, components in Obama's government management agenda for the past 11 months. In a memo he issued on Jan. 21, Obama asked the federal CTO to develop recommendations for a directive within 120 days. The process got off to a slow start, partly because Chopra was not confirmed until the week the recommendations were due in May. Government transparency advocates also at first were dissatisfied that the public was not given a chance to submit ideas on a policy intended, ironically, to foster public collaboration.

The administration reached out to the public on blogs, offered online voting to rank ideas, and provided a wiki page that any user could edit or write ideas on. White House officials also personally met with open-government activists to collect ideas.

OMB posted the directive on Whitehouse.gov on Tuesday morning during the live webcast. In the spirit of open government, citizens were invited to ask questions and give suggestions during the event.

Washington watchdog organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation, OMB Watch and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cheered on the administration for reflecting their ideas in the guidance.

Specialists in the information technology community said they expect the deadlines will produce faster results, but are skeptical that agencies will have the money, staff and time to make productive changes in time.

"The tight deadlines are laudable in their intent to mobilize management and force the changes . . . that compliance with this directive will require," said Ed Meagher, former deputy CIO at the Interior Department and former CTO at the Veterans Affairs Department. "However, these kinds of aggressive goals and timelines can also force errors and care must be taken to ensure that doing it right has precedence over doing it quickly."

Agencies must follow privacy and security restrictions while embracing this new culture of disclosure, according to the directive. "It will be a real challenge for many departments and agencies to ramp up their [Freedom of Information Act] and privacy offices with qualified professionals and subject matter experts this rapidly," Meagher added.

"I am sure that this set of deadlines will get more [agencies that] will do what's required than if there were looser deadlines or, worse, no deadlines at all," said Jerry Mechling, who researches government IT management as the faculty chair of the Leadership for a Networked World Program at Harvard University.

During the question-and-answer session, Mechling raised privacy concerns. Kundra assured that national security and privacy safeguards were part of the directive. In addition, new technologies that were never available before will provide protection, he said.

Some federal contractors said the directive will be difficult to execute because many agencies have large sets of data that are either meaningless to most citizens or cannot be read by commercial technologies that compare statistics to find relationships and causes. They added that the language leaves enough wiggle room for agencies to meet the deadlines without performing quality work.

An OMB Watch official said the short-term deadlines mean agencies likely had been working on the directive's requirements before the document was public. "I'm hoping that those deadlines indicate that progress has already been made," said Sean Moulton, director of federal information policy at OMB Watch. "They may already all have weeks or months invested in this. . . . It may be that pieces of this have been well known and locked in for quite a while. If agencies knew that, it would have been smart to work on them sooner rather than later."