Transparency With(out) Accountability: Open Government in the United States

The administration of Barack Obama has been marked by its stated quest for transparency. On his first full day in office, President Obama signed the Open Government Memorandum, declaring that he was "committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government" and that he aimed to "promot[e] accountability and provid[e] information for citizens about what their Government is doing." Following this ambitious commitment, the Obama Administration engaged in a frenzy of transparency-related activities, bringing to light thousands of data sets that contained previously unavailable information in a wide variety of regulatory domains. Dozens of other countries have enthusiastically followed the American example, vowing to release unprecedented amounts of regulatory information to the Internet.