Current Classified Document Scandals Show The Government Is Still Classifying Way Too Many Documents
Maybe the problem isn't the stacks of classified documents sitting around the houses of presidents, vice presidents, and other administration officials. Maybe the problem is the system that declares all these pieces of paper too secretive to be handled carelessly or hoarded impertinently.
That's the thrust of David Dayen's excellent piece for The American Prospect, which argues the government's obsession with classifying nearly anything for nearly any reason is the real villain here.
America has a problem with classified information. But this problem isn't the one you've been hearing about for the past few weeks, with the revelations of President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence turning up documents improperly stored in their homes and offices. It's also different from the problem of Donald Trump hoarding classified information at Mar-a-Lago-though the circumstances of Trump asserting the right to take the documents and obstructing the efforts of the Archives to take them back make what he did qualitatively different, and far worse.
No, the problem with classified information is that there's so much of it, so much useless, meritless, groundless classified information. Tens of millions of pieces of paper are so labeled, millions of people can see them, and yet the vast majority of such material would not remotely endanger the nation if it entered the wrong hands. In fact, much of it is just plain embarrassing to the government, or worse, a cover-up of illegal acts.
The current scandals aren't making anything better. Every instance is an opportunity for opposing party members to engage in whataboutism while downplaying their favored parties' indiscretions. Left untouched is the root issue: the casual classification of innocuous or politically inconvenient documents.
Case in point: in 2012 the Defense Department classified its memo on avoiding over-classification of non-sensitive documents. And, while it's true, the Defense Department may house more sensitive information than most federal entities, the problem isn't limited to those most directly engaged in national security.
The DOJ does it, too, despite its agencies doing their work on the home front, rather than engaging America's enemies elsewhere in the world. An oversight report showed the DOJ made 95 million classification decisions" in 2012, a 25% increase over the number made in 2010, a not insignificant 77 million. Ironically, 2010 was the year Congress passed the Reducing Over-Classification Act (ROCA). Two years after its passage, the DOJ showed a 25% increase from its already over-classified, pre-ROCA era.
In addition to the embarrassment it's causing for the nation's top government officials, over-classification is causing a problem that may never be solved. Even if the federal government wanted to declassify documents, it can't declassify no longer sensitive information as quickly as it's being classified.
The (overwhelmed) agency that monitors classification within the government, the Information Security Oversight Office, has testified repeatedly that overclassification is rampant. There were 49 million classification decisions in fiscal year 2017 and this was seen as a decrease. As former ISOO employee Evan Coren has written, the agency's staff was cut in half from 2011 to 2021. The ISOO currently has 620 people working on classification issues-as compared to nearly three million people who have security clearances making around 50 million decisions per year.
That's an insurmountable problem. And it would remain insurmountable even if the government had any interest in surmounting it. But, as can be inferred by the constant cuts to declassification efforts, the government doesn't want fewer classified documents. The public may want that, but the public's desires are often diametrically opposed to those of their so-called public servants.
Fewer classified documents would just lead to more transparency. More transparency leads to more accountability. That's a slippery slope the government doesn't care for. And, at least for the moment, the mere existence of seemingly omnipresent classified documents has become a handy tool for partisan politicking, something politicians love almost as much as opacity and power freed from the burden of responsibility.