Thanks, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
As you said, I'm Gary Bass, and I run an organization called OMB Watch. For roughly 30 years we've been focused on trying to promote open government and transparency, so you can imagine that it was with great delight that we heard President Obama, on his first day in office, talk about a theme, a set of principles, that would guide government, which included three points: transparency, participation, and collaboration.
I must say, from the perspective of a non-governmental organization that has been tracking this issue, it is remarkable how much change has occurred in the two years since the President announced those principles. By the same token, I wouldn't be representing an advocacy organization if I didn't say that we have a long way to go still.
What I'm hoping I don't do today is really assess that open government initiative; instead, what I'm hoping to do is to pull from it some lessons that may be helpful to you as you pursue open government initiatives, and they should be reflected as a perspective from a non-governmental organization rather than from an insider of government.
For me, there are three striking things about how the Obama administration has pursued open government. I'll put them into three categories: policy changes, technology changes, and cultural changes. You have my written brief, which goes into much greater detail, so I'll just summarize some of the key points. Then I'll try to conclude with some points I would take out of problems that still have to be addressed with open government, as well as some suggestions about strategies that might be helpful to strengthen open government.
For the Obama administration, one area of approach was to address the policy changes. We have just, in this country, come through a previous administration that held the viewpoint that where you could withhold information, you should. Of course, this occurred in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and there was a growing increase in secrecy. President Obama came in, and one of the first things he did was set in place a guidance strategy for changing the policy on our Freedom of Information Act laws. In essence, he reversed the “wherever you can, withhold” model to one that said “where you can disclose, you should” and actually had a policy plan that said that to the extent that you can affirmatively disclose—that is, voluntarily disclose—information, the agency should do so. That was a huge policy change.
He put in place many other policy changes. One example would be the change in policy about disclosure of who visits the White House. You can now go online and pull up visitors to the White House to identify who they visited, and by doing that at least get a sense of the general purpose. It doesn't list the purpose of the meeting, but from the identification of the individual you get a sense.
In addition, it isn't just about all the domestic disclosures. The President also changed policy in the area of national security policies. For example, he put in place a new kind of policy on declassification of information, arguing that no information should ever be permanently classified, that ultimately all information should be declassified at some point.
So the policy changes were quite significant, quite important, and quite needed.
The second area they moved on was the technology front. There are lots of jokes that could be made about a government that lives in the 20th century even as we're in the 21st century in terms of technology. The Obama administration came in and couldn't really use very many social media tools; technology was behind the times. It was a struggle, especially for a President who lived with two BlackBerrys on his belt. So they quickly moved on the technology front, and I think the legacy that we live with in the United States—a permanent change in the heavy use of technology—is that public access now always will equal online access. That's a permanent change that we'll never go back on.
This administration jumped in very quickly on the technology front with such things as Data.gov, which was to be a repository of significant data holdings from the agencies. It jumped in with an information technology dashboard, which has yielded savings in the information technology management area whereby the public could look at benchmarks to see whether or not IT performance was really occurring. Today we see agencies moving forward with mobile applications, whereas, as I mentioned, two years ago we were still wrestling in some respects with improving fax technologies.
So there is very rapid change on the technology front, and from the agency's point of view, it is a very exciting time.
The third area includes really the cultural changes, and in fact these are probably the hardest. We all know that even if you have the best of policy changes and they are complemented with the best of technology tools, unless you change the culture or the viewpoint within the government around open government, you're going to be presented with many challenges.
The Obama administration took on the cultural issues in several ways. They immediately moved to create an interagency working group that put the focus on the agencies and their method of implementing some of the open government policy changes. This came through something called the Open Government Directive, which came out December 8, 2009. It was a directive that told agencies to pursue a set of steps to move forward on with creating web pages, creating open government plans, and placing high-priority information on the Internet.
In addition to this kind of interagency working group, the President complemented it with the creation of a leadership team within the White House. It's the first time ever in this government that we have had a White House team focusing on transparency issues. It really has served as inspiration for the agencies, because they see at the highest of levels that the President is serious about these endeavours.
I will say that another very helpful piece is that the leadership team, along with the interagency working group, worked very collaboratively with such groups as OMB Watch and other public interest organizations. That helped to create a very different kind of environment. Complementing all of that on the cultural front, the Office of Management and Budget has issued guidance to the agencies to better maximize awards for transparency—giving rewards, if you will, for that kind of behaviour. At least in this government, for civil servants there is basically only a penalty for disclosure. There's a sort of “gotcha” kind of environment, such that if you put out the wrong information, there is a penalty to pay. Rarely are there accolades or positives for the disclosure. So this idea of presenting awards or incentives was very important.
I will say that one thing missing on this front is the notion of incorporating performance reviews of civil servants and incorporating the notion of disclosure within those evaluations. From our perspective, if it's an important enough issue to be a national mission, then it should be woven into the evaluation of the workers within government.
In any case, these three areas of policy changes, technology changes, and cultural changes are vitally important and work hand in hand in the strategies that the Obama administration brought.
When we move into a more interactive component here, I can go into details on any of those pieces, to describe more in detail what they have done. What I'd like to do, though, is take a few seconds to talk about difficulties within this open government initiative.
I want to mention four examples of challenges. The first is the huge gap between putting in place useful or positive policy and the implementation of those policies.
An example is our Freedom of Information Act. The President, as I mentioned, has shifted gears to say “where possible, disclose information”: have an affirmative disclosure or a voluntary disclosure model whereby agencies should proactively disclose to the public. There's been a huge gap between that policy framework and its actual implementation. We will find out in another month or so the latest data on either problems or the movement toward solutions in dealing with backlogs of requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
But by and large, I think many of us outside of government still see a huge gap between that and the effective implementation of the concepts behind the policy, and that's something that needs to be addressed. That's one type of challenge that will always exist but is vitally important to figure out how to tackle.
A second kind of problem that may exist is that under the open government directive I mentioned, and the emphasis for disclosing information, many of the agencies.... The strength of that model was that it was controlled, by and large, by the agencies, as opposed to the White House. The disadvantage of that is exactly the same, which is that each agency determined what information to be disclosing. The net result of it has been a very heavy emphasis, a much heavier emphasis, on what I'll call mission-driven disclosure. There are specific kinds of disclosures that meet the mission of the agency's fundamental purpose.
What they're not as good at and have not been as prominent on is disclosure about the agencies' activities: things like data and information around accountability and influence of special interests. Those kinds of procedural components have been left largely unattended to, while the focus has been mission driven.
From our perspective, both types of information--the type that's needed for accountability as well as the type that empowers the citizenry--are needed in an open and transparent system. That's the second kind of hurdle.
The third that I want to mention deals with data quality. Obviously, if you have information that is of poor quality, it is going to make the transparency much less valuable. We're fortunate that over the last number of years there has been a much greater emphasis on, say, federal spending transparency, to better track who's getting how much money and for what purposes.
Under our recovery act, which dealt with stimulus spending, we have a Recovery.gov website that has been remarkable in adding disclosure around spending of the recovery act dollars. Similarly, we have a USAspending.gov website that tracks general government spending. The problem is that if the information available through those websites is not accurate and there's no way to verify its accuracy, it diminishes the value of that.
Now, the open government directive knew about this problem and addressed it by having a component that said we have to find ways to improve data quality. This is an ongoing struggle, and one that I would draw to your attention as Canada thinks more about open government initiatives.
There's a last point I would make in terms of a challenge, and that is having the right building blocks for making disclosure really work well. For example, where I was just talking about spending disclosure, what we would ideally want to do in today's Internet age is to be able to mash up disparate data sets so we can bring data from one kind of database, such as regulatory compliance, say, in with spending data.
One ideal would be to know whether government contractors are complying with laws and regulations of the land. Well, to do that, you need to have a key identifier that links data sets. In this country, we do not have, and we haven't employed government-wide, the right kinds of identifiers to make that kind of linkage.
That's what I call a building block. Until you address those fundamental issues—and they're not glamorous issues, by any means, they're very thorny—we will always face difficulties in the transparency arena.
My last comment is to make four points of suggestion as you think about moving forward in Canada on open government issues. I think many of the points I've made should certainly be utilized. I think the Obama administration is an excellent model for moving forward, notwithstanding any criticisms I may have. I think it's a wonderful model. As I said, it was a remarkable achievement within two years.
My first point would be that I think one of the elements that worked extremely well is the collaboration between the government agencies and the non-governmental and private companies as we've moved forward on this openness initiative. That collaboration has bred greater trust. It has created new and innovative approaches, and it has taught us more about the concerns and difficulties that agencies may face in going forward.
The second thing I would say is important to think about going forward is tools for the public to hold the government accountable. Having key benchmarks or measures or metrics are essential to know whether progress is made. It's essential to break down the broad agenda of transparency into discrete sizes so that the public can judge whether or not you have made progress.
The third point I would make in terms of suggestions is to allow for evolution of what you mean by open government and transparency. It's always going to be an evolving tool. As we have better technology, as we have better policies, as we have newer ideas, the notion of what can be done will always change. I think your policies and the structures underlying those policies need to be permissive of an evolving process.
The final point I would make is that I think one of the more successful elements of the Obama administration's effort has been having a leadership that has a dedicated and demonstrated concern for openness. It comes from the President himself. It comes from the White House staff that I was mentioning, the team. It comes from the interagency working group. Demonstrating this leadership is not simply symbolic; it is very real in moving the agenda forward.
With that, I'll stop. I know I've thrown out a number of things. I apologize for throwing so many things out so quickly.
Thank you.