Classified Documents Scandals Point to Far Bigger Problem

It was only a few weeks ago that there were headlines about the latest batch of classified documents found in President Joe Biden's home/garage/nonprofit. It came on the heels of discoveries of secret documents in former Vice President Mike Pence's possession, not to mention the cache of secret files former President Donald Trump left the White House with.

There was much chin-pulling and gnashing of partisan teeth about how all of this put the nation's security in grave danger (possibly). Or worse, was used for personal gain (maybe). Investigators will sort all of this out in their own good time. In the meantime, it's worth remembering that there really is a secrecy problem in government, and it's only getting worse.

How bad is it? Writing in Foreign Affairs, Patrick Radden Keefe says:

In 2017, the federal government spent over $18 billion maintaining this classification system, almost double what it spent five years earlier. But precisely because so much government work now transpires behind a veil of secrecy, it is necessary to grant clearances to an ever-larger cadre of federal employees. Some 1.3 million Americans now hold top-secret clearances, roughly double the population of the District of Columbia.

That's a recipe not just for allegedly secret information to get leaked – intentionally or not – but also raises a key question: why is so much stuff the government does secret?

Columbia University's Matthew Connelly wrote a book about it. His conclusion: secrecy is a power play that often has little to do with actual secrets:

“It turns out that, from the very beginning, what's secret has been whatever serves the interests of the president and all those around him who are invested in executive power,” [Connelly] writes. In any bureaucracy, the ability to render something secret becomes an irresistible trump card—a way to evade oversight, tout parochial priorities, and obscure shortcomings. “After conjuring the power of secrecy, and setting it loose, presidents found that it had a power all its own,” Connelly continues. “Thousands more people, many career civil servants, began creating their own secrets, and jealously protecting them, making it harder to identify and protect what mattered to the president personally. At the same time, they could leak whatever they liked, undermining the president's ability to manage the news cycle.” Connelly is particularly scathing about the role of military leaders, such as Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay, who “employed leaks and spin no less than secrecy to protect their perquisites and push their agendas,” lobbying to expand military spending and outright defying civilian authority. In 1978, he notes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stopped preserving notes from their meetings, “as if America's most senior military leadership were running a numbers racket, committing nothing to paper.”

The piece is worth reading in full, not only to get a deeper sense of how secrecy has become a threat to national security.

Does any of this absolve politicians from taking secret documents with them when they leave office? Absolutely not. The laws governing secrecy are what they are and should be followed. But does the federal government need to wean itself off its secrecy addiction? Yes, absolutely. There are some things that should be kept secret, of course. But making everything a secret damages oversight, accountability and keeping the things that are actual secrets safe.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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