Group Gives Obama Mixed Grade On Government Openness
September 7, 2010
| 10:32 AM
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, Nextgov.com reports.
"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 then-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. To read more, click here.
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