Austin American-Statesman | September 01, 2007
By Rebecca Carr and Ken Herman

Government secrecy is expanding at an unprecedented clip, despite growing public concern about barriers to information, a report expected to be released today found.

OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of conservative and liberal groups concerned about government secrecy, reports that stamping government documents secret cost American taxpayers $8.2 billion last year, a 7.5 percent increase over the year before.

The coalition found that for every dollar spent declassifying documents, the federal government spends $185 to conceal government documents. Classification costs 2½ times what it cost in 1997.

Open government advocates blame the policies of the Bush administration.

"The current administration has increasingly refused to be held accountable to the public," said Patrice McDermott, the coalition's director. "These practices lead to the circumscription of democracy."

Administration officials argue that fighting global terrorism and the war in Iraq requires precautions to prevent sensitive information from reaching the hands of those who might harm the United States.

"We try to be effective in protecting classified information and enforcing laws and regulations related to handling sensitive information," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman.

Among the findings:

• Businesses enjoyed a no-bid process for 26 percent, or $107.5 billion, of the federal government's business last year.

• The Defense Department has more than doubled the amount it spends on classified weapons acquisitions since 1995. Although the number of classification decisions dropped by 10 percent to 231,995 last year, the number of documents related to each one of those decisions ballooned to 20.3 million, up by 43 percent.

And those figures do not include the untold number of documents that are locked away by federal agencies in categories known as "pseudo-classification." These are unclassified documents deemed too sensitive for public consumption. There is no oversight of these categories to ensure that the documents should be removed from the public domain.

The report also found that the Bush administration has invoked a legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.

From 1977 to 2000, administrations used the privilege 59 times. Over the past six years, the White House has invoked the privilege 38 times, more than double the rate of administrations during that time frame.

"The bottom line of the report card is, Washington is flunking the open government test," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The coalition's report found that secrecy comes at a time when the public is more interested than ever in obtaining government records. The number of requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act last year rose to 21.4 million. By comparison, the public filed 1.9 million requests in 1999.