8-25-2026 10:22am

From Public Agenda

John Williams Editor

By Dr Shellie M Bowman Sr.

Public trust is often discussed as something government must earn. Less often discussed is what makes earning it possible.

Trust requires evidence.

Citizens cannot meaningfully evaluate the decisions of public institutions if they cannot see how those decisions were made, what information informed them, who participated in them, how public resources were used, and whether promised results were achieved. In that sense, government transparency is more than a communications practice. It is part of the infrastructure of public accountability.

The principle is deeply rooted in American government. The U.S. Department of Justice describes the basic purpose of the Freedom of Information Act as ensuring an informed citizenry, which is vital to democratic government and necessary for holding government accountable (U.S. Department of Justice, n.d.).

Yet access to information alone does not guarantee accountability.

A document can be technically public and practically inaccessible. A meeting can satisfy a notice requirement while remaining difficult for citizens to follow. A budget can contain hundreds of pages of accurate numbers without explaining what those numbers mean. A government can disclose what it has done without adequately explaining why it did it.

Transparency, therefore, should not be measured simply by how much information government releases.

The better question is whether the public can reasonably understand what its government is doing.

Transparency Makes Accountability Possible

Transparency and accountability are closely related, but they are not interchangeable.

Transparency allows people to see.

Accountability requires government to answer for what they see.

That distinction matters.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines accountability in open government as the government’s responsibility to inform citizens about its decisions and provide an account of governmental activities and performance. Transparency, meanwhile, involves disclosure and accessibility of relevant government information (OECD, 2020).

One enables the other.

Consider a major public expenditure. Publishing the final amount provides information. Meaningful transparency goes further. What problem was the government attempting to solve? What alternatives were considered? What assumptions supported the expenditure? Who authorized it? Were potential conflicts disclosed? What outcomes were promised? Did those outcomes occur?

Those questions transform information into accountability.

They also demonstrate why transparency should begin before a decision rather than after controversy arises.

When government provides understandable information during the decision-making process, residents, journalists, businesses, civic organizations, and other stakeholders have an opportunity to evaluate the evidence and participate meaningfully.

When information becomes available only after decisions are effectively complete, disclosure may satisfy a requirement without accomplishing the broader democratic purpose transparency is intended to serve.

Ethics Needs Visibility

Transparency also has an important relationship with public ethics.

Most ethical government is not produced by catching people doing something wrong. It is produced by institutions designed to make improper conduct more difficult and responsible conduct more likely.

Visibility helps.

Research and guidance compiled by the OECD recognize that transparency can discourage unethical behavior because awareness that conduct may be observed introduces accountability into decision-making. Open government, access to information, and open data consequently function as important tools for integrity as well as public participation (OECD, 2020).

This does not mean every government communication should be public.

Governments legitimately possess confidential personnel information, protected taxpayer information, sensitive law-enforcement records, cybersecurity information, privileged legal communications, and other material for which disclosure could violate individual rights or compromise legitimate governmental interests.

Ethical transparency therefore requires judgment.

The objective is not government without confidentiality.

It is government in which confidentiality has a legitimate purpose rather than becoming a convenient shield from scrutiny.

That difference is fundamental.

Transparency Is Also an Internal Discipline

There is another dimension of transparency that receives less public attention.

Government cannot reliably explain its decisions externally if it has not documented them internally.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government, commonly known as the Green Book, emphasizes reliable reporting, appropriate documentation, risk assessment, compliance, and internal controls designed to safeguard public resources. The 2025 revision further strengthened requirements involving documentation of risk assessments and responses to significant changes (U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2025).

Although the Green Book establishes standards for federal agencies, GAO notes that state, local, quasi-governmental, and nonprofit organizations may also use the framework.

The broader lesson is important.

Good documentation is not bureaucratic housekeeping. It preserves institutional memory and creates an evidentiary trail.

Who authorized the transaction?

What information was available at the time?

What risks were identified?

What assumptions were made?

Was the appropriate authority exercised?

Were expected results achieved?

A government capable of answering those questions is better positioned not only to demonstrate accountability but also to learn from its own decisions.

That is a form of stewardship.

Transparency Should Not Require Detective Work

Modern government produces enormous amounts of information. The challenge increasingly is not whether information exists but whether citizens can find, interpret, and connect it.

Meeting minutes may exist in one system. Contracts may appear somewhere else. Campaign-finance disclosures may reside with another government entity. Budgets, land-use applications, audits, performance reports, procurement documents, and financial statements may all be publicly available while remaining disconnected from one another.

Technically, government may be transparent.

Practically, the citizen may still need to become an investigator.

That should concern public administrators.

The OECD has emphasized proactive disclosure of public information that is clear, complete, timely, reliable, and relevant. It also reports a substantial relationship between accessible government information and public trust. Across countries examined by the organization, 51 percent of people who found information about administrative processes easily available reported trusting their national government, compared with 22 percent among those who did not find such information easily available (OECD, 2024).

Accessibility, then, is not merely a technological feature.

It is part of transparency itself.

Public institutions should increasingly ask whether residents can follow a decision from proposal to outcome. A person should be able to understand what was proposed, who advocated for it, what evidence was considered, how officials voted, what financial commitments were made, and whether the anticipated public value ultimately materialized.

That is a higher standard than placing a PDF on a website.

It is also a more useful one.

Transparency Does Not Require Agreement

Perhaps the greatest value of transparency is that it does not require citizens and government officials to reach the same conclusion.

Reasonable people can examine the same evidence and disagree about taxation, development, public investment, education, infrastructure, regulation, or almost any other consequential governmental decision.

Transparency does not eliminate those disagreements.

It improves their quality.

When evidence is available, public debate can move from speculation about what happened toward disagreement about what should happen. Officials can explain their reasoning. Citizens can challenge assumptions. Journalists and oversight institutions can verify claims. Mistakes can be identified. Decisions can be defended when they deserve defending and reconsidered when evidence demonstrates otherwise.

That is accountability functioning as it should.

Public officials are temporarily entrusted with authority that ultimately belongs to the people. Public money is entrusted money. Public institutions are entrusted institutions.

Transparency allows citizens to examine how that trust is being exercised.

Accountability requires government to answer for the results.

Ethics provides the standard against which that conduct should be judged.

None can completely substitute for the others.

A government that embraces all three does not promise that every decision will be correct. No institution can make that promise.

It makes a more credible commitment:

Our decisions can withstand being seen.

That may be one of the strongest foundations upon which public trust can be built.

References

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2020). OECD public integrity handbook. OECD Publishing.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2024). Anti-corruption and integrity outlook 2024. OECD Publishing.

U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). Freedom of Information Act. FOIA.gov.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2025). Standards for internal control in the federal government: 2025 revision (GAO-25-107721).

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