Watchdog group gives Obama mixed review on openness

An annual report card on secrecy in the federal government indicates the Obama administration has taken promising steps toward becoming the most open White House ever, while still criticizing the new president for spending billions of dollars creating and securing classified material, according to the authors of the study.

"The elections of 2008 were viewed by many as a referendum on the secrecy and unaccountability of the Bush administration, and the country elected a president who has promised the most open, transparent and accountable federal executive branch in history. The record to date is mixed, but some indicators are trending in the right direction," said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of watchdog associations that posted the report on Tuesday.

OpenTheGovernment.org began measuring executive branch secrecy in 2003, the year the United States invaded Iraq. The first report card, released in 2004, found President Bush's policies generated the largest jump in the production and protection of classified documents in at least a decade. The most recent study is not a full assessment of the Obama administration's work, since it also includes the last three months of the Bush administration.

President Obama established a declassification center within the National Archives and Records Administration to coordinate interagency efforts aimed at expediting the process of declassifying information, according to Tuesday's report card. The center is developing an information technology system to track classified records from the time they are accessioned by the Archives to when they are publicly released, according to department officials.

The study's authors noted agency reported statistics on compliance with the Freedom of Information Act should become easier to compare because departments now are submitting their results in file formats that Web tools can analyze.

The Obama administration also changed the way agencies count secrets that are exchanged via e-mail to more accurately reflect the amount of classified material produced. Tallies now must also include messages that forward classified content to additional parties or reply to senders of classified material. Previously, agencies were not asked to measure what are called derivative classification actions.

McDermott said by not including classified e-mail messages in past reports, the Bush administration greatly understated the amount of classified material in the federal government.

Still, the Obama administration spent a substantially larger amount of money on securing secrets than declassifying them, according to the report card. Declassification represented only 0.5 percent of security classification costs overall, or the equivalent of one-half of 1 cent of every dollar spent on maintaining secrecy. In other words, the government paid $196 to hold on to old secrets for every one dollar it spent declassifying documents.

In total, the cost of sustaining secrecy increased by 2 percent in fiscal 2009 to $8.81 billion, according to the report.

The previous year's marks showed the government spent almost $200 safeguarding secrets already on the books for every dollar it spent declassifying content.

An open government directive the administration issued in December 2009 overlooks some policy wrinkles that could stymie FOIA advances, Tuesday's report card stated. The goal of the memo is to entrench a culture of information disclosure, civic engagement and public-private collaboration into every agency through a series of prescribed steps.

OpenTheGovernment.org noted while the directive focuses on compliance with FOIA, it does not address a lack of training, funding and a commitment from senior managers to remind federal employees the public will demand they overturn classification decisions.

Office of Management and Budget officials were unavailable to comment on Tuesday.