United States End-of-Term IRM Report 2015-2017

The third US action plan involved regular consultations with civil society and the public, but fell short of active collaboration. While several commitments led to major changes in open government, most led to modest improvements. Going forward, there is a need for more ambitious commitments to further increase government openness.

Commitment	Overview	Well-Designed? *	Major or Outstanding Results? **
✪Modernize implementation of FOIA	Improve online services for access to information requests and proactively disclose information such as nonprofit tax filings.	Yes	Yes
✪Open Science	Publish the results of federally funded scientific research and develop low-cost scientific instrumentation.	Yes	Yes
✪Police Open Data	Improve transparency of policing by expanding the Police Data Initiative.	Yes	Yes
✪Open climate data	Promote open climate data, with a focus on the Arctic.	Yes	Yes

* Commitment is evaluated by the IRM as being specific, relevant, and potentially transformative
** Commitment is evaluated by the IRM as having major or outstanding results in terms of the ‘Did it Open Government?’ variable
✪ Commitment is evaluated by the IRM as being specific, relevant, potentially transformative, and substantially or fully implemented

During implementation, the government consulted civil society through a Google Group and quarterly meetings of the Interagency Open Government Working Group. The meetings generally featured government updates on specific commitments, and were open for feedback, but focused mainly on the government’s agenda.

The United States did not act contrary to OGP process A country is considered to have acted contrary to process if one or more of the following occurs: The National Action Plan was developed with neither online or offline engagements with citizens and civil society The government fails to engage with the IRM researchers in charge of the country’s Year 1 and Year 2 reports The IRM report establishes that there was no progress made on implementing any of the commitments in the country’s action plan

Mostly “governance” civil society Significant involvement of line ministries and agencies

The third US action plan was more ambitious than prior plans and led to major advances in fiscal transparency, open science, and access to police data. However, there were regressions in extractives transparency and e-petitions.

(This indicator is calculated using data from the most recent round of published IRM reports.)