Advisory government transparency committee terminated

Updated: 12:45 p.m., Feb. 26 

President Donald Trump’s administration has terminated the General Services Administration’s Open Government Federal Advisory Committee, according to the panel’s chair.

Daniel Schuman, an expert focused on federal government accountability and transparency, on Tuesday afternoon received an email from GSA that the committee was axed pursuant to a Trump executive order that directed agencies to identify “unnecessary” government advisory councils. 

"The Trump Administration's war on open and accountable government claimed another casualty: the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee," Schuman said in a statement. "The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee's mission was to provide expert advice to the U.S. government on adopting plans to create a more open and accountable government, but that conflicted with the Trump administration's mission of tearing down our democratic government."

The 15-member committee, which was established in 2024, was tasked with matters such as “efforts to increase the public’s access to data, engage the public in the regulatory process, make government records more accessible and improve the delivery of government services and benefits.”

The advisory panel was associated with presidential open government plans, five of which have been issued across the previous administrations of Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden. 

The committee’s aims would seem to align with some of Trump’s priorities. The president has ordered the declassification of records regarding the 1960s assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. And Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative is officially charged with modernizing federal technology and software.

A GSA spokesperson provided the following statement to Government Executive: "On February 19, 2025, the President issued an Executive Order, Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, which set forth the Administration’s policy of reducing the size of the federal government in order to minimize waste, fraud, abuse, and inflation and to promote American freedom and innovation. The President’s order directed the termination of several federal advisory committees and ordered the identification of additional unnecessary federal advisory committees for termination. GSA has taken immediate action to fully implement all current executive orders and is committed to taking action to implement any new executive orders."  

This story has been updated with a statement from GSA.