The current declassification system is a “crisis that undermines both our national security and government transparency,” according to Senator Gary Peters (D-MI). On July 9, Peters, who serves as the Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the “Classification Reform for Transparency Act of 2024” (S.4648) to combat overclassification in the government’s current system of classifying and declassifying documents.
In his announcement of the bill, Peters stated that “our current classification system is…costly, outdated, and inefficient.” Up to 50 million classified documents are created every year, but the speed of declassification fails to keep up with this pace. Experts estimate that anywhere from “50% to 90% of classified materials could be made public without risk to our national security” while the management of the billions of pages costs taxpayers over $18 billion a year.
The classification system received renewed scrutiny after President Biden and former President Trump were investigated for mishandling classified information after improperly stored documents were found in their respective Delaware and Mar-a-Lago homes. Some claim that these incidents are symptoms of a larger issue that highlights the weakness of our government’s classification system, which is fragmented, unclear, and inconsistent. Alissa Starzak, the chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an advisory board established by Congress, stated, “we can do a better job protecting secrets if we have a smaller number of things that are kept secret.”
In addition to calling for more automatic declassification of materials and narrower definitions of categories, the newly introduced bill requires the president to “establish a task force” to streamline the classification system. The task force would include members selected by the Director of National Intelligence, the Archivist of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General.
Among the task force’s proposed responsibilities is to “phase out” the use of the “Confidential” classification level. Currently, the government’s three main classification levels—Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential—as laid out in Executive Order 13526, are broad. The Top Secret category is reserved for information “expected to cause exceptionally grave damage” to national security, the Secret category for information “expected to cause serious damage,” and the Confidential category for information “expected to cause damage.” Media outlets and organizations—from The Washington Post to the PIDB—have advocated for getting rid of the “Confidential” category entirely. Ultimately, it is hoped that simplifying classification into two categories would make the system more “usable” and “prod agencies to reexamine the current broad definitions of information that qualifies for classification.”
Additionally, document category determination is currently up to the discretion of thousands of individuals which often leads to inconsistent categorizations and inefficient declassification rollout. As highlighted by the National Security Archive’s own analysts, “objections [from the Department of Defense] led to the withholding of key parts of a Kissinger-to-Nixon memo” that had been fully published by the State Department’s Office of the Historian nearly a decade earlier. By introducing penalties or rewards for government employees to incentivize more stringent reviews, the bill seeks to address such issues. In an interview with NPR, Oona Hathaway, former special counsel at the Pentagon, explained that under the current incentive framework, because mistakenly declassified intelligence could put “lives, programs, or missions at risk,” there are no ramifications for unnecessarily classifying information, but the opposite is true for declassifying documents with sensitive information.
While it may be less apparent, it is important to note that there are consequences to excessive classification as well. For example, the 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004, found that the U.S. Government’s inability to prevent the terrorist attack was in part due to a lack of information sharing between high-level security officers. The report described an environment that “nurture[d] overclassification and excessive compartmentalization,” and cited an example of “undistributed NSA information” that could have identified Nawaf al Hazmi, one of the five hijackers, in January 2000. The report asserted that a belief, borne of “Cold War assumptions,” that “the risk of inadvertent disclosure outweighs the benefits of wider [information] sharing” is “no longer appropriate.”
Meanwhile, legislators, journalists, and academics have advocated to improve our classification and declassification system for decades. As early as 1997, Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) proposed legislation to refine the classification system by requiring government officials to justify documents labeled as “Top Secret” and declassify most documents after 10 years. More recently, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial “2025 Presidential Transition Project” contained a section on overclassification in which it advocated for “more accountability at the OCA [Original Classification Authority] level” and “tighter definitions for categories of classification.” The conservative think tank stated that the government is close to reaching a point at which “manual review [of documents] is impossible” and called for “investments in IT” as well as the usage of Big Data, cloud services, and artificial intelligence to utilize “machine interpretation of…text and data.” Despite the group’s stated goal to “dismantle the administrative state,” the report acknowledged the need for human expertise to operate implemented technology and wrote that “agencies will require more people” and “varied skill sets” to keep up with electronic records.
Overclassification makes it more difficult to hold the government accountable and threatens American democracy. As characterized by Evan Gottesman, a staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the issue is one of “basic good governance,” an issue so bipartisan that it is “almost nonpartisan.” It is universally understood that the ever-growing sea of “classified” documents and unchecked government secrecy undermine our democratic system and compromise safety. At a time when public trust in the government continues to fall, tackling the “overclassification” problem may be a start to the solution.
UNREDACTED: The National Security Archive Blog 