a Better Bubble™
President Joe Biden still has time to issue a new executive order that could help fix the U.S.’s bloated and outdated classification system. He should. And soon.
The failures of the current classification system are well known. Its biggest offenses include decade-long delays when declassifying records; overclassifying records, even when they are publicly available; and agencies refusing to share important information with one another because their security rules encourage excessive secrecy.
Biden administration officials have testified repeatedly since 2021 that they are working on revising the executive order to fix these problems.
Yet, with less than two months remaining in Biden’s term, there’s nothing to show for these efforts, and the standing EO still dates to the first year of the first Obama administration.
Sens. Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran are calling on Biden to publish the EO his team has allegedly been working on before time runs out.
Their recent letter to the president says, “Completing the work of modernizing the Executive Order and fundamentally reforming the country’s broken classification and declassification system would be a historically significant part of your legacy.”
He should take Wyden and Moran’s advice.
What are the necessary fixes?
To be effective, the new Biden EO should include the following reforms:
Why now?
If Biden issued the new order, even during his final days, agencies would immediately have to begin changing their classification policies, and these new guidelines could be used when conducting oversight or making classification challenges.
One way to help ensure a Biden EO wouldn’t be immediately (or ever) rescinded by President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office would be to incorporate some of the ideas put forth in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 chapter on intelligence.
The author of that chapter, Dustin Carmack, says a new EO should include tighter restrictions about what can be classified, reducing the number of people who can classify records, and improving metrics for tracking classification decisions.
These are all improvements that transparency advocates across the political spectrum have been urging the government to adopt for years.
An eleventh-hour EO from Biden, especially one that includes some of the suggestions from The Heritage Foundation, makes it less likely that Trump’s national security team would prioritize the laborious task of crafting a new executive order from scratch.
This would be a good thing, because while Trump’s EO could include some of The Heritage Foundation’s reasonable fixes, it’s equally possible it would include bad things, like harsher punishments for whistleblowers who leak classified information for the public’s benefit, or for the press they leak the information to.
If Biden really has been drafting a new EO to fix classification, he should issue it now and ensure fixing the system is part of his legacy.
stLouIST