On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government that called for “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” The President identified two purposes of greater openness: to “strengthen our democracy,” and to “promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” Over the past two years, the Administration has indeed taken unparalleled steps to make our democracy both stronger and more effective. These efforts have emphasized three principles of openness—transparency, participation, and collaboration. As part of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative, every major agency has formulated its own Open Government Plan, and made available to the public unprecedented amounts of information. On June 13, 2011, the President furthered these efforts through his Executive Order on Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government. In particular, through this Order, he established the Government Accountability & Transparency Board to provide strategic direction for enhancing the transparency of Federal spending and advance efforts to detect and remediate fraud, waste, and abuse in Federal programs. Through all of these efforts, the Administration has also institutionalized a culture of open government, and created an openness infrastructure to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their government. This ongoing work will continue to promote a more robust democracy and effective government.

Featured Story: Transparency in Federal Spending

The Administration recently expanded USAspending.gov to show not only how money is spent directly by the government, but also how the government’s recipients spend those funds through sub-contracts and sub-grants. USAspending.gov now displays a total of over $25.4 trillion in prime awards, based on over 47,000 individual prime awards, and over $3.9 trillion total in sub-awards.

Promote Transparency

Government information is a national asset that should be published online in forms that the public can readily find and use. Such transparency promotes efficient and effective government by providing citizens with information about the workings of their government. Making information held by government available online also promotes corporate accountability; enables the creation of tools like healthcare.gov that give consumers better choices; and empowers innovators to use government information to build business. To that end, the Administration is working on:

  • Making Government More Accessible: In response to the President's call for open government, the National Archives launched Federal Register 2.0,  which is a graphical, searchable, easy-to-read version of the most widely read government document. The new website represents a historic milestone in making government more accessible and increases access to pending rules, grants, and opportunities.
  • Greater Openness Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): FOIA is a critical tool for the public to access government information. Answering President Obama’s call for greater openness through the FOIA, agencies together with the Administration are actively working to reduce FOIA backlogs and improve their administration of the FOIA.
  • Tracking Spending and Performance: By visualizing the investments and impact of stimulus dollars, general expenditures, and information technology budgets in easy-to-understand “dashboards,” the Administration has empowered agencies and the public to spot – and halt – wasteful projects.
  • Making More Data Publicly Available: In May 2009, the Administration launched Data.gov, a website that makes economic, health care, environmental, and other information available in multiple electronic formats, allowing the public access to more government information online than ever before. The website now houses over 379,000 datasets for the public to download and analyze. Pursuant to the Open Government Directive, federal agencies are working to inventory their data and make it available online via Data.gov.
  • Publishing More Information on Government Workings: The Administration has taken several efforts to disclose to the public more information about its internal workings, including providing records of White House visitors and data on what regulations are pending and where the regulations are in the rulemaking process.
  • Accounting for Federal Spending: On USAspending.gov, the public has one-stop access to Federal spending through grants, contracts, and other forms of Federal financial assistance.  An unprecedented view into the how Federal programs are executed, the public can search this database and download information by multiple criteria, to include type of recipient, Federal agency, year of the award, or keyword.

Foster Participation

Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies are dedicated to offering Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide the Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information by:

  • Enabling the Use of Social Media Across the Federal Government: The Administration has updated its policies and created a new platform – Apps.gov – to foster the use of innovative new tools to facilitate public engagement across the Executive branch. Apps.gov gives agencies access to several dozen (and growing) free social media tools, such as blogs, wikis and social networks with appropriate terms of service as well as privacy and accessibility protections. In addition many agencies have an employee innovation website and program in place to gather good ideas for addressing challenges across the Federal workforce.
  • Increasing Prizes and Challenges: Recognizing that the best ideas don’t come from Washington alone, the Open Government Initiative has spawned Challenge.gov, a one-stop place for agencies to post and the public to find opportunities to participate in solving problems, including prize-backed challenges.
  • Expanding Expert Networking: In order to inform policymaking with the best research and evidence, the Administration is building a system for “expert networking” – using the Internet to help identify and invite those with expertise, interest and enthusiasm for a particular issue to participate better in evaluation of policymaking and grants. The project plans for this effort will be posted online shortly.

Increase Collaboration

While participation brings information to government so that officials can make more informed policy decisions, collaboration focuses on finding innovative strategies to address problems. Collaboration actively engages all of us in the work of our government. Executive departments and agencies are beginning to adopt innovative tools, methods, and systems to encourage cooperation, such as:

  • Increasing Collaboration among Government Employees: In 2009, the President announced the SAVE Award, which requested ideas from employees on how to make government more efficient and effective. In just three weeks, OMB received more than 38,000 ideas. OMB staff assessed the ideas, passing back the most promising ones to agencies to include as part of their budget plans. Some of these proposals have already become a reality. Additionally, OMB narrowed the submitted ideas down to four, and the American people voted on these final four. The Administration also held the second SAVE Award and expanded the process so Federal employees could both submit ideas and vote on ideas submitted by others in a collaborative process. Agencies are also decentralizing work that used to be under tight control. This kind of employee brainstorming has become so popular in the last year that a Community of Practice has arisen to enable agencies to share best practices about how to collaborate with employees. For example, the Wikified Army Field Manual invites military professionals to participate in writing Army tactics, techniques, and procedures on all aspects of military life collaboratively. By inviting participation in writing Army doctrine, the men and women who serve our nation participate in and have access to the best possible information when they need it.
  • Increasing collaboration across government institutions: To provide better service in alerting the American people to unsafe, hazardous, or defective products, six federal agencies with vastly different jurisdictions have joined together to create a "one stop shop" for Federal government recalls, providing consumers with up-to-date product safety information. Website visitors can also download mobile phone apps to find the information by typing a product’s name into a phone and learning immediately whether that product has been recalled because of a safety concern. Consumers can also see photos of recalled products and learn what to do with recalled products in their homes.
  • Increasing collaboration with the private sector: By inviting the collaboration of people across the United States to develop novel software applications that transform raw HHS data into powerful knowledge, the Community Health Data Initiative is fostering game-changing solutions to problems in public health. For example, a team of innovators is working with the National Association of Counties to develope a “Network of Care for Healthy Communities” dashboard that allows citizens and civic leaders to see local health performance compared to other counties, and automatically ties in “best practice” information from around the nation showing how other communities have tackled similar issues and generated positive change. Building these kinds of tools helps to focus attention on what works and enables people to reach out to one another to develop and share best practices.