New
administration policies have thwarted the ability of
Congress to exercise its constitutional authority to
monitor the executive branch and, in some cases,
even to obtain basic information about its actions.
One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana,
became so frustrated with the White House's
refusal to cooperate in an investigation that he
exclaimed, during a hearing: "This is not a
monarchy!" Some see a fundamental
transformation in the past three years. "What
has stunned us so much," says Gary Bass,
executive director of OMB Watch, a public interest
group in Washington that monitors government
activities, "is how rapidly we've moved
from a principle of `right to know' to one
edging up to `need to know.' "
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The
White House declined repeated requests by U.S.
News to discuss the new secrecy initiatives with
the administration's top policy and legal
officials. Two Bush officials who did comment
defended the administration and rejected criticism
of what many call its "penchant for
secrecy." Dan Bartlett, the White House
communications director, says that besides the
extraordinary steps the president has taken to
protect the nation, Bush and other senior officials
must keep private advice given in areas such as
intelligence and policymaking, if that advice is to
remain candid. Overall, Bartlett says, "the
administration is open, and the process in which
this administration conducts its business is as
transparent as possible." There is, he says,
"great respect for the law, and great respect
for the American people knowing how their government
is operating."
Bartlett says that some
administration critics "such as
environmentalists . . . want to use [secrecy] as a
bogeyman." He adds: "For every series of
examples you could find where you could make the
claim of a `penchant for secrecy,' I could
probably come up with several that demonstrate the
transparency of our process." Asked for
examples, the communications director offered
none.
There are no precise statistics on how
much government information is rendered secret. One
measure, though, can be seen in a tally of how many
times officials classify records. In the first two
years of Bush's term, his administration
classified records some 44.5 million times, or about
the same number as in President Clinton's last
four years, according to the Information Security
Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives
and Records Administration. But the picture is more
complicated than that. In an executive order issued
last March, Bush made it easier to reclassify
information that had previously been
declassified--allowing executive-branch agencies to
drop a cloak of secrecy over reams of information,
some of which had been made available to the public.
Bait and switch. In addition, under three
other little-noticed executive orders, Bush
increased the number of officials who can classify
records to include the secretary of agriculture, the
secretary of health and human services, and the
administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency. Now, all three can label information at the
"secret" level, rendering it unavailable
for public review. Traditionally, classification
authority has resided in federal agencies engaged in
national security work. "We don't know yet
how frequently the authority is being
exercised," says Steven Aftergood, who
publishes an authoritative newsletter in Washington
on government secrecy. "But it is a sign of the
times that these purely domestic agencies have been
given national security classification authority. It
is another indication of how our government is being
transformed under pressure of the perceived
terrorist threat." J. William Leonard, director
of the information oversight office, estimates that
up to half of what the government now classifies
needn't be. "You can't have an
effective secrecy process," he cautions,
"unless you're discerning in how you use
it."
"Veil of Secrecy," a 
