Few national publications bothered to write a story when President Trump signed into law the OPEN Government Data Act this month, but advocates say the transparency law is poised to permanently improve government accountability.
The law requires agencies to release data by default in machine-readable format and to hire “chief data officers” to manage implementation. Agencies must also post inventories of their holdings, and any data withheld can be sought under the Freedom of Information Act.
In signing the bill, Trump gave the force of law to “open government” policies unveiled in 2009 by then-President Barack Obama but increasingly forgotten during his second term, when Obama’s claim to lead “the most transparent administration in history” aged into a punchline.
“By the time the administration changed, the political spotlight, to be honest, had already moved on,” said Matt Bailey, who worked in the Office of the U.S. Chief Information Officer for two years, spanning the Obama and Trump administrations.
“It’s a very big deal,” Bailey said of the law. “It’s really going to bring a lot of rigor to work that began under Obama. … It’s a statement that it’s a priority — or still a priority — and that it’s the law of the land.”
The Obama-era transparency push gave rise to publicly accessible data repositories, such as USASpending.gov, a site tracking contracts, and Data.gov, which hosts a variety of agency-produced data sets deemed to hold public-interest value.
Cheered by good-government proponents, the bill also received business backing pushed by the Data Coalition, a trade group including members such as contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton.
Christian Hoehner, Data Coalition’s senior policy director, anticipates expanded release of contract, human resources, and program data, boosting oversight while helping streamline government functions.
“There are thousands of people working on acquisitions in the federal government, and there’s no real way to query or inventory the sum history of acquisition procurement actions so that they can speed up that time to award and get contractors brought in,” he said. “This could result in the delivery of services in a way that’s better for the public.”
“This gives a government-wide requirement that the public has full access to its data, and it also forces agencies to go through and truly understand what data they have,” Hoehner said.
There was a “mixed bag” of compliance with earlier open-data principles, he explained, with gradually diminishing release of data inventories. He credits Trump’s Office of Management and Budget with continuing many efforts. “The principles of the Obama administration morphed into a management plan under the current administration,” he said.
The impact of the new bill won’t be felt immediately, as agencies review holdings and add data officers, Hoehner said.
“It’s always hard for the public to realize when something transformative takes place in government,” he said. “There’s going to be about a year’s worth of implementation work, so a lot of this is going to go on under the hood.”
Bailey, who worked on transparency within the Obama and Trump administrations, cautioned that “this mandate seems simple but is actually enormously complex.” In the best-case scenario, the law will bring sustained accountability to government functions, Bailey said, but warned that lack of dedicated funding could hamstring efforts.
Although ultimately bipartisan, the bill was introduced by Democrats Rep. Derek Kilmer of Washington and Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. When incorporated into a larger package by House Republicans, it included the FOIA tie-in, linking it to the legacy transparency law and its procedures.
John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, said the reform encountered no organized opposition because transparency is uncontroversial, “unless you are pro-ignorance and inefficiency.” More proactive data releases will speed the processing of traditional FOIA requests for documents, he said, though he believes there may be court battles over details, including what counts as machine-readable formatting.
Wonderlich said the significance of the reform may have escaped broader notice due to the political cage match that characterizes the Trump era. The bill was signed weeks into a government shutdown.
“We are having such fundamental fights about government’s role that questions about data are a totally oblique point,” Wonderlich said.
