The National Academy of Public Administration’s Agile Government Center Coordinator, G. Edward DeSeve, joined Cherry Bekaert’s Advisory Leader, Srikant Sastry, in a conversation with Nick Hart, the current president and CEO of the Data Foundation. In this episode, Ed and Srikant discuss the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Trust in Government Framework. According to the OECD, governments with high levels of trust among their citizenry “provide open and accessible information so the public better understands what government is doing.”
Hart gives his view on the state of openness in the U.S. government and what the Data Foundation is doing to promote transparency. He also shares his work in advancing important laws that have led to greater government transparency – the DATA Act, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, the GREAT Act, the Financial Data Transparency Act – and what kind of reception he gets when arguing for these openness frameworks.
The second in our mini-series covering the five pillars of trust, this episode covers:
- The key drivers in restoring trust in the government
- Whether transparency builds trust or erodes it
- How to measure the extent to which citizens find their government sufficiently open and transparent
- Data quality:
- How good is the data government collects, uses and reports
- If the data reported is unreliable and what that means when it comes to trust
- The ways that technology has transformed the landscape of government transparency
- Advice for policymakers at every level who are hesitant to embrace openness and transparency
- Anticipated future trends in the realm of government data and transparency
If you have any questions specific to your business needs, Cherry Bekaert’s Government & Public Sector team is available to discuss your situation with you.
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CHRISTIAN FUELLGRAF: Welcome, and thanks for listening to Cherry Bekaert's Government and Public Sector podcast series.
CHRISTIAN FUELLGRAF: In each episode, we hear from the best in the business on the latest challenges, trends, and opportunities affecting the government and public sector.
CHRISTIAN FUELLGRAF: I'm Christian Fuellgraf, leader of Cherry Bekaert's Government and Public Sector Industry Team. I hope you enjoy, and thank you for joining.
SRIKANT SASTRY: Welcome to another edition of the Cherry Bekaert podcast on the topic of trust in government. I'm Srikant Sastry, and I lead advisory services for Cherry Bekaert.
SRIKANT SASTRY: I'm delighted to be joined once again by G. Edward DeSeve, Executive Fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government and Coordinator of the Agile Government Center at the National Academy of Public Administration.
SRIKANT SASTRY: Welcome back, Ed.
G. EDWARD DESEVE: Thanks, Rick. I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to be co-chairing this with you for one more ride on the journey toward restoring trust in government. We have a great discussion ahead of us today.
SRIKANT SASTRY: On our first podcast on the topic of trust in government, we dove deeply into improving the citizen experience, because according to the OECD, it's one of the major drivers of trust in government.
SRIKANT SASTRY: This time, we're talking about another OECD driver, openness or government transparency. According to the OECD, governments with high levels of trust provide open and accessible information so the public better understands what government is doing.
SRIKANT SASTRY: That's why it's so great that we're joined by one of the U.S. federal government's most ardent advocates of open government, Data Foundation President and CEO Nick Hart. Welcome, Nick.
NICK HART: Thanks for the invitation to join. Glad to be here.
SRIKANT SASTRY: I have to ask: your LinkedIn header says "using data and evidence to make the world better." Could you explain what you mean by that?
NICK HART: We've been talking about how to use data in our country and in society for generations. It's actually written into the Constitution that we collect data intended to be open for allocating representation. Our first statistical agency is the Census Bureau, and it's one of our great sources of open data, though it also has many confidential records.
NICK HART: I love that you used the term openness, which is an important way of thinking about data use. The work we do at the Data Foundation, and the work I've done for most of my career, is trying to think about how we apply openness — all forms of data and evidence — to make better decisions.
NICK HART: That implicates Congress, the executive branch, program administrators, and regular people trying to use information as effectively as they can. We've learned a lot about improving data literacy and now AI literacy. All of that is foundational to having access to information.
NICK HART: So how do we get that access, and how do we encourage it in our society? That's what we're working on.
SRIKANT SASTRY: What's the state of openness, in your view, in the U.S. federal government?
NICK HART: It's a complicated story. There are pockets of incredible success in openness and open data. Some agencies have been doing this for years. I mentioned the Census Bureau as a great repository of knowledge. The federal statistical system produces economic indicators like gross domestic product and unemployment rates that drive markets.
NICK HART: We also have agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency that produce information collected from regulated entities and make it available to the public, so you can see local pollution sources. All of that knowledge is useful for everyday decision making.
NICK HART: The intent was always to provide much more information to support the public and decision makers. A couple of years ago, we passed the Open Government Data Act, which says open should be the default in government. We're still waiting to see full implementation, so there's a long way to go, but we've made significant progress.
SRIKANT SASTRY: Ed, could you talk about your experience leading the Recovery Board, one of the great success stories in openness in the federal government?
G. EDWARD DESEVE: I had a very small band of brothers and sisters, and we had to involve the public as transparently as possible to build trust that the $800 billion we were spending was being spent wisely.
G. EDWARD DESEVE: We, along with 12 inspectors general, developed a management system that visualized what was going on: where the money was being spent, who was spending it, and what was being produced. That information could be accessed at any time by anyone in the world.
G. EDWARD DESEVE: We received great kudos for that, but it was hard. There were 77,000 funding recipients, and beyond that, many individual projects, so it was a lot of data in many places. Unfortunately, the system has been taken down after it was transferred to the Treasury.
SRIKANT SASTRY: Nick, when we think about allowing people to use geospatial mapping to access data easily — so it doesn't have to be someone with a satellite connection — is geospatial mapping and other techniques helpful to making data available to people?
NICK HART: Absolutely. There's an incredible amount of knowledge people want about how their communities are operating. I used the EPA example and pollution because so much happens at the local level.
NICK HART: When the oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the big questions was the economic implications in addition to the environmental ones. We needed to generate knowledge rapidly at the county and city levels and below.
NICK HART: FEMA is a good example: during an emergency, we need rapid insights about what's happening at a micro level to be responsive to the public's needs in a disaster. Spatial information is therefore very important at the community level.
SRIKANT SASTRY: Let me follow up with a question I'm struggling with now. It's interesting ex ante to figure out what's going on and how things are happening.
