loading . . . GSA ends U.S. participation in ‘open government’ initiative The Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the Open Government Partnership, ending for now U.S. engagement with a near 15-year-old initiative aimed at promoting transparency and combatting corruption.
The U.S. withdrawal doesn’t come as a surprise to representatives of civil society groups, who argue it’s part of a pattern of the Trump administration disregarding transparency and accountability.
In a Jan. 15 letter, the General Services Administration notified the Open Government Partnership of the United States withdrawing its membership. Since 2023, GSA had led domestic implementation of U.S. participation in the international group through an Open Government Secretariat.
In the letter, GSA Administrator Edward Forst wrote that “government is accountable to the people is a core American value enshrined in our founding documents.” But he added that continued U.S. participating in the OGP “has become at best ineffective and at worst detrimental to advancing these principles.”
Forst identified four primary reasons why the Trump administration had decided to withdraw from the group, including that “the United States strictly opposes participation in any body that seeks to erode U.S. national sovereignty – or suggest it is accountable to anyone other than its citizens.”
Forst also listed “OGP’s embrace of divisive ideological agendas,” pointing to “racial identity politics, anti-police bias, LGBTQ+ advocacy, feminism, and climate alarmism.”
The GSA administrator also argued OGP had become “demonstrably ineffective in its stated mission.” Forst pointed to $5.6 million invested by the United States in OGP initiatives since it was founded in 2011. “This outlay has produced no significant benefits for the American people,” Forst added.
But members of civil society who were involved in OGP say the critiques in Forst’s letter miss the mark on what was a voluntary and member-driven process.
“The rhetoric from the GSA administrator does not line up in any way with the reality of the Open Government Partnership, which is basically creating an accountability mechanism. Did you do those things that you said that you were going to do? We are going to evaluate, but we can’t force you to do it,” Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, said in an interview.
The U.S. withdrawal from the OGP comes the same month Trump directed the United States to withdraw from 66 international organizations. However, the OGP was not listed in Trump’s memo.
“This action allows the United States to better align taxpayer dollars and engage with the world in a way that more effectively advances our national priorities,” a GSA spokeswoman told Federal News Network. “This decision, based on a thorough review, reflects a commitment to prioritizing American interests under the current administration in support of our values or strategic goals.”
The OGP’s latest assessment of U.S. progress, published at the end of 2025, found the Trump administration “had reversed or weakened” some early achievements, including by revoking executive orders that included commitments on issues like equity, data transparency and law enforcement accountability.
In a statement on the U.S. withdrawal, the OGP said its members “retain full control over whether, how, and to what extent they participate, including the content of any reforms they choose to pursue. Participation in OGP does not create legal obligations, nor does it limit national sovereignty.”
But even with its formal withdrawal, the United States would still be able to rejoin in the future.
“We remain hopeful that the United States will rejoin the Open Government Partnership at the right moment, bringing energy and commitment back to this shared endeavor of making government better through domestic and global collaboration,” Aiden Eyakuze, CEO of the OGP, said in a statement this week.
‘No bite’
The United States was one of eight nations that founded the OGP in 2011. Its creation came amid the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative, which led to Data.gov and other efforts to have agencies release more data to the public.
The OGP was aimed at creating a multilateral initiative to secure national commitments to pursue openness, combatting corruption and improving governance. Under the partnership, member governments are responsible for co-creating their own two-year “national action plans” in conjunction with civil society groups in their respective countries. The goal is to pursue “ambitious reforms,” according to the group.
OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) issues reports and recommendations to evaluate each country’s progress against their respective national action plan.
Schuman said countries are ultimately responsible for the effectiveness of their plans under the OGP.
“The [Trump] administration is complaining on one hand that they don’t want to be subject to the foreign dictates,” Schuman said. “And on the other hand, because there is no bite to this partnership process, the U.S. government could do whatever it wanted. It wasn’t in any way limited or controlled by other folks. And as a general rule, it didn’t commit to doing a whole lot.”
The United States created five national action plans under the OGP and had been in the process of creating a sixth prior to the Trump administration. U.S. commitments in recent years – under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration – were criticized for not involving civil society enough and for reflecting ongoing administration initiatives, rather than substantial open-government reforms.
“The commitments are overall vague, making it challenging to understand how their implementation will contribute to achieving their intended aims,” the IRM wrote in a review of the 2022-2024 U.S. National Action Plan.
But there had been more engagement with civil society groups in the second half of the Biden administration, according to both Schuman and Susan Harley, managing director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.
Harley also pushed back against GSA’s characterization of OGP’s ineffectiveness.
“I think for us to say it was not maximally effective is absolutely not a reason to say, ‘Let’s not continue to improve the process and work together to have very strong reach goals that will move our country further toward these internationally held goals of more open and responsive and participatory government,’” Harley said in an interview. “We still had quite a ways to go to get to that ideal, but we were on the road toward that during the previous administration.”
Open Government in America
In 2023, GSA established the Open Government Secretariat to lead implementation across the federal government. And in late 2024, GSA also launched an Open Government Federal Advisory Committee.
That committee, led by Schuman, had been developing recommendations for a sixth national action plan. But the Trump administration terminated the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee as part of a broader purge of advisory boards last year.
In its final meeting last January, the advisory committee had been discussing a range of ideas for new U.S. commitments, including those related to anti-corruption, access to information, and fiscal openness.
Schuman noted the advisory committee was “composed only of Americans focused on open government in America,” further pushing back against the idea that OGP and international groups were dictating U.S. policy requirements.
Civil society leaders said they see the withdrawal from partnership as part of a trend of the Trump administration not just pulling back on international partnerships, but flouting accountability and transparency. They pointed to examples ranging from the firings of inspectors general and removing federal website data to ceasing publication of the White House visitors log.
“I believe this is just yet another example of the Trump administration stepping away from these global norms of democracy and open government,” Harley said. “And so for us, it’s more of a really clear signal. I think a lot of the things that we have seen are happening behind closed doors: Less attention paid on open government issues, getting rid of people in key positions, taking down information from government websites … but to say we no longer want to participate in an international desire to push ourselves to be more open, is proof in the pudding in where they really stand on these issues.” https://federalnewsnetwork.com/open-datatransparency/2026/01/gsa-ends-u-s-participation-in-open-government-initiative/
