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President Joe Biden still has time to issue a new executive order that could help fix the U.S.’s bloated and outdated classification system.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:

• Require agencies to report annually how many secrets they keep, both in number of pages and bytes of data, and how much these secrets cost. We currently do not have reliable estimates for any of these figures. Without them, there will be no practical way to measure how successful efforts are (or aren’t) to rein in overclassification.
• Specifically state that violations of law may not be classified at all. The current EO says material may not be classified with the specific intent of hiding wrongdoing, but agencies can still classify records showing they broke the law so long as they are not classifying information specifically to hide that fact. This loophole should be closed.
• Clearly define what “damage to national security” means. The vagueness of this phrase, which is used to justify classification levels in the standing EO, gives agencies too much latitude when making classification decisions. This has led to a classification environment where documents are needlessly stamped classified between 75% and 90% of the time. Egregious overclassification examples range from the absurd, like the Defense Intelligence Agency classifying information showing that Chilean General Augusto Pinochet’s favorite drink was a pisco sour, to the serious, like the government hiding its report on the CIA’s torture program.

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.

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County Executive Page Announces his choice For Prosecuting Attorney to Replace Wesley Bell County Executive Dr. Sam Page today (Dec. 3) announced that Cort VanOstran will be his choice for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney once Wesley Bell leaves office. VanOstran will fill the unexpired term of Bell, who was elected to the United States […]

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