Unclogging the Government’s Declassification System

​We’ve long chronicled the downward trajectory of EO 13526, President Barack Obama’s 2009 executive order that boldly sought to stem the tide of excessive government secrecy. President Obama imposed checks on the government by forbidding classification decisions that are made to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency, and by boosting the ability of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to lead a declassification program.
 
“My administration is committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness,” the president declared. At the time President Obama swept his pen over this order, there were 55 million classified documents. And how has that worked out? Today 75 million classified documents have piled up. Some of them date back to the Truman administration.
 
A report released Tuesday by the National Coalition for History makes public the inside grips of NARA in trying to fulfill its mission. The report states that NARA’s flatlined budget leaves its National Declassification Center (NDC) short-staffed and unable to cope with thousands of pending Freedom of Information Act requests. We filed one such FOIA of our own asking a slew of federal agencies in effect if “they’ve done anything to comply with President Obama’s executive order?” Some FOIAs, the History Coalition reports, sit in 12-year queues.
 
But the bigger problems for declassification involve perverse incentives.
 
The History Coalition reports: “Even highly skilled and experienced NDC staffers lack the authority to reverse agency decisions that they disagree with, a dynamic that perpetuates the over-classification problem.”
 
No one ever got fired for refusing to declassify something. No one should be surprised, then, that when you ask the agency that classified a document if it should remain classified, the answer will almost always be “yes.” Another revelation from the History Coalition’s report is that the NDC lacks a secure electronic transmittal system to send classified records for agency referrals. Instead, they are sent on digitized diskettes through regular U.S. mail.
 
You would think that if a document is so sensitive it must remain secret that sending it back with a postage stamp would be a non-starter. That laxity, more than anything, is a sure sign that what is at work isn’t the protection of vital national secrets, but bureaucratic backside covering, the only perpetual motion machine known to physics.
 
What can be done? A good place to start is the History Coalition’s reform proposal to vest the NDC “with the authority to declassify information subject to automatic declassification without having to refer the records back to the originating agency.”
 
Sounds like a good idea to us.