Prepared Statement by Congressman Lee H. Hamilton
Hearing on the Final Report of the
Commission on Protecting
and Reducing Government Secrecy
Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs
May 7, 1997
IntroductionMr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to appear before the Committee on Government Affairs this morning, and I commend you for holding this hearing.
I appreciate the seriousness with which you and your Committee are reviewing the report and recommendations of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. I stand ready to help the Committee in any way I can.
Before I talk about the Commission report, I want to commend Senator Moynihan and Congressman Combest for their superb leadership. It is no small achievement that a group as diverse as ours could agree, without a single dissent, on such an ambitious set of recommendations. Chairman Moynihan and Vice Chairman Combest deserve great credit for this outcome.
Senator Moynihan has already outlined for you how American leaders have thought about secrecy over the decades, and how bureaucrats have carried out government policies on secrecy. He has made a compelling case for viewing official secrecy as a form of regulation, and for reducing unnecessary secrecy as a way to make our government more democratic, more efficient, and more accountable.
I would like to concentrate on the Commission's work in the areas of classification and declassification.
General Approach of the Commission
I think it is fair to say that every member of the Secrecy Commission believes that secrecy is anessential component of effective diplomacy and military strategy. None of us wants to restrict the ability of national security officials to keep certain information secret from adversaries -- which often means keeping it secret from Americans.
Our approach to these issues was guided by our understanding of what the American people want: They want us to protect secrets. But in giving government the authority to keep secrets, the American people also expect us to ensure that only information whose disclosure poses an identifiable threat to national security is kept secret. The Secrecy Commission tried to follow these principles.
Problems in the Current System
Like many of you, I have read thousands of classified documents and spent hundreds of hours in classified briefings. Most of this information has deserved to be secret, but some has not.
Too often I have had the impression that information has been classified not to protect national security, but rather to protect national security officials from embarrassment or inquiry. As our report documents, the U.S. government classifies too much and declassifies too slowly:
We declassify too slowly because agencies:
Why Should We Care if Secrecy is Excessive?
Why should we care about problems in our classification and declassification systems?
First, too much secrecy undermines our democracy and weakens accountability. Information is power. Information and open debate are the lifeblood of democracy. Each time something is unnecessarily classified, a piece of information that could be vital to the development of sound policy is taken out of circulation.
Excessive secrecy concentrates power in too few hands. It means that:
The staggering backlog of decades-old documents awaiting declassification also harms our policy-making process.
More than one billion pages of classified documents older than 25 years sit today in U.S.government warehouses. Many of these documents still probably require some protection, but the overwhelming majority undoubtedly do not. In an open society like ours, it is unacceptable that so much of the official record of government policy remains inaccessible to the public. But it is also harmful: the quality of current and future policy depends in part on how well we understand our past.
Second, excessive secrecy costs a fortune: Last year the U.S. government and private industry spent $5.2 billion to protect classified information. Tens of thousands of U.S. government officials spend large portions of their time classifying several million new documents each year.
President Clinton's Executive Order
With his Executive Order 12958, President Clinton has taken giant strides to reform the system for handling national security information. Unfortunately, some of the President's reforms have not been fully implemented because of resistance in some national security agencies.
Key Commission Recommendations
Obviously, more needs to be done. As Senator Moynihan and Congressman Combest have indicated, we recommend that Congress enact a statute setting out broad principles for classificationand declassification, leaving the details of definition and implementation to the President.
This is the most important recommendation of the Commission. When you stop to think about it, it is really astounding that this great and powerful country has never enacted a statute to govern its system for protecting information. It has all been left to presidential executive orders. The Congress, which is powerfully influenced by information, simply lets the President determine what is a secret, what should be classified, and what information should be made public.
Let me turn to some other key elements of the Commission's recommendations.
First, like the President's Executive Order, we recommended that information not be classified if there is significant doubt that it needs protection.
Second, the Commission recommended that a single Executive Branch agency be put in charge of coordinating and overseeing classification policies government-wide. This agency must have the authority to demand compliance with Administration policies. Pursuant to President Clinton's Executive Order, an interagency body now coordinates policy in this area. This body has accomplished a lot, but it can't knock agency heads together, which is sometimes necessary in this business.
Third, we proposed new ways of approaching classification decisions. We proposed that officials trained to consider the benefits of openness, the costs of secrecy, and the risk of disclosure when they make classification decisions. We also propose that classifying officials provide a detailed justification when documents are classified for the first time.
Fourth, we proposed to strengthen individual accountability in the classification system. Under the current system, officials are not really accountable for their decisions. There certainly are no penalties for over-classification. To change that, we propose that officials should always be required to identify themselves on the documents they classify and should be evaluated in part upon how well they perform classification.
Finally, we proposed the creation of a National Declassification Center, which would declassify documents and coordinate declassification policy across the government. This proposalis also included in our draft bill.
The Commission found that agencies have been reluctant to devote sufficient resources to meet the President's five-year goal of declassifying documents older than 25 years. Our proposed Center would take on some of the burdens of declassification for those agencies that choose to take advantage of its services.
We do not propose creating a new layer of bureaucracy in the federal government. On the contrary, the proposed Center would be established within an existing government agency. Agencies that send material to the Center for declassification would reimburse the Center out of funds they currently spend on declassification. We believe that, over time, the Center would be able to declassify more documents, at a lower average cost, than can individual agencies each with its own program.
Conclusion
The Cold War required us to take extraordinary measures abroad and at home -- including restricting the access of most Americans to information about their government's activities. With the end of the Cold War we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to review these measures, and to change those that no longer fit current circumstances. I think the report of the Secrecy Commission seizes that opportunity and fulfills that responsibility.
Thank you.