The White House blog today featured a new post about the "Building Blocks of a 21st Century Digital Government." If these are the building blocks of reinvented government, however, we're on shaky ground.

Most agency CIOs don't know what their agency's major IT holdings are. Really. Decisions determining what data will be released, and how it gets released, are routinely made by individual departments, outside public view, and without review from the federal CIO or CTO, Congress, or the public.

This is a shame, because the $80 Billion+ federal IT budget contains a wealth of vital information, and should be considered a national asset, deserving thoughtful consideration. Instead, the identity of the major information holdings of the US government are still essentially opaque, even to the government officials supposedly in charge of managing them (with only a few exceptions).

Unfortunately, the major information policies of the Obama administration have all punted on this essential point. Transformative open data policy isn't just about APIs and data portals.

This is frustrating because the White House is clearly spending an enormous amount of time and attention on the Federal Strategy, and doing some fantastic, innovative work. The GSA's data stream of agency progress on the new requirements is an exciting new way for the White House to track compliance on explicit requirements (even if some of them are redundant with existing requirements). And the new Innovation Fellows program shows an administration clearly receptive to new ideas and personalities, who will inevitably make some progress facing important challenges.

But there's still a glaring, glaring omission. This strategy still doesn't address existing information that isn't open, and it doesn't empower federal managers or anyone else to get new access to existing information. When the White House says "open up" they mean "build apis," not release information for the first time.

Well formed federal transparency policy has to be built on a circumspect, comprehensive foundation, with knowledge of all major information holdings.

Government information policy can't be about opt-in, voluntary policies that encourage agencies to try some new things. Ultimately, that's what the Federal IT policy preserves: the status quo, where agencies pick comfortable data to release, often without even knowing what they have to choose from.

You can't manage what you can't see.

Tomorrow is the two year anniversary of the Open Government Directive (OGD), the signature transparency policy issued by the Obama administration on December, 2009.

The transparency issues facing the administration, both before and after the 2009 policy, fall well beyond the control of the OGD, which is, after all, an OMB memo. Nevertheless, the OGD is Obama's single broadest attempt to create transparency across the executive branch, and the most high profile attempt to live up to Obama's campaign rhethoric on transparency.

Over the last two years, Sunlight has become familiar with the inherent limitations of directives and declarations such as the OGD, as we've learned that the difference between an aspiration and a mandate can be a huge gap. Announcements about new transparency policies imagine the best possible impact, while implementation often looks to the minimum requirements.

So to mark the two year anniversary of the OGD, we decided to look at implementation of the Open Government Directive.  Since much of the OGD is written in broad, aspirational language, we decided to review how well agencies have lived up to the commitments they created for themselves in their open government plans.  The OGD required agencies to publish these plans, which were all posted and revised during 2010, and often included deadlines and goals for agencies to release data and tools.

Building on the work that OpentheGovernment.org did reviewing all the agencies' plans (we participated in that review), Sunlight has pulled out all the deadlines from the agencies' plans, and checked to see whether the goals were met.

The results are decidedly mixed.

In some cases, agencies' goals were clearly met.  Many of the datasets planned to be released are now available on data.gov, and the projects and tools that agencies described are underway.

Often, however, agencies have failed to live up to the standards that they set for themselves as a result of the Open Government Directive.

The Commerce Secretary never put up a schedule. The Office of Science and Technology Policy only put up 4 years of budget data. And the Department of Justice apparently decided that none of the data they identified for public release was fit for publication on Data.gov.  Perhaps most egregiously, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded part of their plan to post a schedule for new data to be released, and released a new version of the plan scrubbed of that milestone.

Any broad declaration or aspirational policy is going to face complex challenges, as we've noted. But the agencies applied these goals to themselves. Far too often, agencies are failing to live up to the transparency goals that they themselves created. And this review only the concrete goals that agencies set. Many agencies didn't even go through the hassle of setting detailed deadlines for themselves. The Defense Department won't show up on most of our evaluation, because they hardly set any deadlines at all, and mostly committed (doc file) to talking about openness and doing some untrackable internal reviews, despite their size and obvious public importance.

We've expressed disappointment in the Open Government Directive before, pointing out, for example, that the Open Government Directive requires:

A strategic action plan for transparency that... (3) identifies high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication online in open formats with specific target dates.

Cass Sunstein (director of OIRA) once called me Oliver Wendell Holmes for insistently pointing out that agencies who said they'd make some future plans failed to live up to this requirement -- that a plan to make plans was an obfuscation, and that if the White House didn't take this seriously, they'd create the wiggle room that would let agencies evade the White House's best intentions. If he meant that I was being too much of a realist, then I stand by that assessment even more firmly now, as most agencies have clearly failed to comply with that passage.

And that cuts to the heart of the OGD. Openness without information is emptiness.  If some agencies won't even share the plans they've made for publishing new information, how far can their commitment to openness possibly go?

The Open Government Directive has caused a lot of good.  And it has also often failed to live up to its promise, the administration's rhetoric, and agencies' own self-imposed compliance plans. We should remember that Presidential rhetoric and bureaucratic commitments are not the same thing as results, especially as even more administration work happens through broad, plan-making executive actions and plans.

Transparency proclamations are valuable, but the path to transparent government runs through a thousand fights over information. The OGD may have moved the default slightly towards openness, but it doesn't win those fights alone.

We'd like to invite you to review our evaluations of agencies' progress (searching through all the agency sites and plans can be tricky), and to help us think about where the OGD should go from here.

As part of the international Open Government Partnership, the US will soon release a National Action Plan about government transparency, intended to stretch "the country beyond current practice", "with the active engagement of citizens and civil society."

As the White House considers what to include in the plan, Sunlight is suggesting two specific actions for the plan.

1. The White House and the Office of Management and Budget should allow agencies to publish any open government recommendations, draft laws, and plans that they have, without fear of reprisal. Any gag orders or restrictions on sharing transparency proposals should be lifted, and agencies should be encouraged to share their draft ideas.

2. Every agency should publicly index and audit their regulatory data at least as well as the Department of Transportation has, and exceed the requirements of the Presidential Memo on Regulatory Compliance Data.

Open Sharing of Plans

The US National Action Plan should demonstrate what it means for a country to engage in good faith in the complex business of reforming transparency laws.  American transparency laws should be a source of pride, often setting informal international standards for disclosure.  They are also imperfect, and are the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis.

Some of the most informed expert views on any transparency law come from the government officials tasked with implementing those laws.  Unfortunately, those expert views are kept away from the public.  Many agencies that implement open government requirements have drafted legislative changes and guidelines for reform, but they are kept from sharing them publicly by OMB.

As part of the National Action Plan, the White House should demonstrate that transparency laws should be the domain of public discussion, not political control and review by central political staff. OMB should encourage the publication of draft transparency laws.

The complexity and importance of our transparency laws means that their expert review should not be subject to central control and gag orders.  Anyone responsible for implementing an open government law (in any country) should be permitted (and encouraged) to speak publicly about how those laws might be improved.

Indexes and Audits

Open Government Directives and proclamations can do an enormous amount of good. Ultimately, though, their main limitation comes from their vague language and the lack of enforcement mechanisms.  Aspirations can set a direction, but they're rarely enough to keep us on track.

In terms of new data and information, the Open Government Directive from OMB caused an initial burst of new information, but ultimately didn't fundamentally alter the way agencies choose what to release.  That's why we were so excited when President Obama followed up the OGD in January 2011 with a closely related Presidential Memo.  If the first Directive fell short because of a lack of specifics, the Presidential Memo showed that there are meaningful ways to direct agencies to create a public list of their data, and audit how well it's made available.  Specifically, the memo asked agencies to review the data that they collect from those entities they regulate, and make plans for how to improve it.

It's now most of a year later, and the most exciting result we've seen is the draft plan from the Department of Transportation.  It's worth a read, especially the appendices. It's a well designed guide to data collected by the different parts of the agency, organized by whether or not it's public, complete with citations of the laws or regulations that cover the information collection, and including ideas for how data publication could be improved.

While this may seem like basic stuff, it's actually been nearly impossible to get this sort of guide out of agencies, as similar policies have been pursuing for decades. Understanding what is knowable about an agency's work is one of the most powerful ways to approach oversight, and this plan gives any member of the public a great start.  The plan also demonstrates the work that CIOs ignore far too often (as they focus more on technology procurement): active stewardship over public information.

In the National Action Plan, the White House should recommit agencies exceeding the requirements of the Presidential Memo on Regulatory Compliance Data.  Every agency should create a public list of their data (and a plan to improve it) that is at least as comprehensive as what DOT prepared.  Every agency should be a responsible steward of its public information, and the first good faith step in taking that responsibility is to publicly define what datasets the agency is responsible for, and to publicly define the steps that should be taken to improve them.

Ultimately, this indexing and auditing requirement should extend to other fields of information in addition to regulatory compliance, but since some of our public protections have sometimes eroded as a result of atrophying, ineffective disclosure, it's a good, focused place to start.

By including these two changes together, the White House can demonstrate its commitment to openness, showcase the strong foundation for transparency that exists in American government, and also demonstrate that good-faith reform involves including the public closely in a complex, long term process.