One long-standing complaint about the federal government is well-documented: It classifies far too many documents as secrets, and it keeps them secret far too long. A major reform ordered Tuesday by President Obama would go a long ways toward correcting that. It would also help the president fulfill a campaign promise to make government more transparent.
His executive order asserted that "no information may remain classified indefinitely." It laid out a sweeping overhaul of rules for classifying documents going forward, and for releasing currently classified documents that no longer merit secrecy.
The order should make it harder for agencies to justify restrictive classifications. It will also require them to regularly review the kinds of information they classify and to remove classifications that are no longer needed or justifiable.
The president's order called for a review within the next four years of a 400-million-page backlog of classified documents to determine which documents still need to be classified, and which can be made public.
As part of his order, the president also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to accelerate the work of declassification. The new center will enable staff to centralize reviews, rather than referring documents in sequence to separate agencies for their review of the need for classification.
His order reverses, happily in our view, the prior Bush administration's needlessly secretive policy that broadened the use of classified documents and authorized Washington's highest intelligent officers to control, and veto, decisions made by an interagency panel that had been established earlier to declassify documents.
The change in direction surely lifted the spirits of researchers, historians and daily advocates of open government and limited classification of current documents. Many of the records to reviewed and made available for public inspection involve federal documents concerning World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and more recent conflicts.
Access to such documents should be of immense benefit to scholars, historians, federal agencies and a range of organizations and citizens. Given the range of leaked documents over the years that revealed various follies and policy disasters, it's long been obvious that excessive classification of government documents is rampant.
Many officials much prefer to keep their mistakes secret by classifying selected documents based on their career interests, rather the public's interest. Any effort to mitigate such self-serving decisions and to further the goal of transparency in government is welcome.
The scope and implementation of the policy remain to be seen, but it points in the right direction. And it's about time the government took that path.