It's Past Time to Fix Overclassification. Here's Where to Start.

The classification system was designed to protect legitimate secrets, not to shield government agencies from public scrutiny. Yet rampant overclassification, compounded by a broken declassification system, remains one of the most pernicious failures of modern governance—and one of the least addressed. Together, these breakdowns deprive the public and lawmakers of vital insight into government conduct, including whether actions are lawful, effective, or financially responsible.

These twin crises have plagued—and been exploited by—Democratic and Republican administrations alike, demonstrating that the challenge is not partisan, but structural.

It is past time for reform. Here are four ways to start.

1. Congress must stop deferring to the executive branch on classification

One of the classification system’s shortcomings is that it is governed almost exclusively by executive order. (Nuclear weapons information governed by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 remains the most notable exception.) Decades of overclassification show that leaving secrecy rules solely to executive discretion leads to too many secrets being created, with too few opportunities for oversight by the judicial or legislative branches.

Nearly three decades ago, the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy studied this very problem. It found that the “culture of secrecy” was so deeply entrenched in the executive branch that Congress must enact statutory reform and pass legislation mandating that records only be classified if there was a demonstrable need, along with other improvements.

That recommendation was largely ignored, and the culture of secrecy remains deeply embedded within agencies. Congress must finally take up the Moynihan Commission’s recommendation to set classification rules.

2. Standardizing definitions and incentivizing individual accountability

Most classification decisions are subjective. It is not unusual for the State Department to approve a document for declassification, only to be overruled by the CIA, which insists the material must remain secret. This is caused by a lack of objective standards across (and within) agencies that leads to reflexive secrecy as a matter of routine.

Congress can fix this in two ways:

• Clearly define classification standards in statute: Legislation should establish an interagency task force, led by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), charged with strictly defining the vague phrase "damage to the national security." The Classification Reform for Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in 2024, introduced something similar, and its proposals should be built upon.
• Incentivize leadership and penalize abuse: Legislation should compel agency leadership to proactively fix classification. This could include imposing financial penalties to be incurred by senior leadership for agencies that habitually overclassify information, and could be coupled with a financial award program for agency personnel who successfully lodge good-faith classification challenges.

3. Quantify the size and cost of the problem, then impose a 10% "declassification tax"

The biggest practical hurdle in reining in overclassification is that there are no reliable metrics on the size and cost of the classification system.

The numbers problem is so bad that the last fiscal year for which we have data on the number of original and derivative classification decisions is 2017, when ISOO reported 58,501 original classification decisions and 49 million derivative classification decisions. Since then, ISOO has not reported government-wide classification decisions because agency data was notoriously poor and inconsistent, making the data effectively useless and leaving policymakers without a metric to evaluate secrecy reform ever since.

New legislation should institute:

• Mandatory audits and standardized metrics: Agencies that classify information should adopt standardized data tracking for original and derivative classification decisions, including accounting for the explosion of derivative decisions generated by new technologies on classified networks, to be reported annually in public-facing audits. This, coupled with a clearly defined statutory basis for classification, should improve classification decisions off the board.
• The 10% declassification tax: Part of this audit must address the ever-growing costs of classification. Reforms should require every agency to calculate its total annual classification costs—accounting for the costs of security clearances, SCIF maintenance, classified IT infrastructure, such as SIPRNet and JWICS, and other relevant metrics. Once tabulated, 10% of that publicly-reported total should be invested in agencies’ declassification programs. This idea has been broached before, and it should be put into law.

4. Empower NARA to declassify other agency records and double its budget

Legislation must also address the primary bottleneck in historical declassification: the endless interagency referral loop. Currently, these releases stall for decades in large part because NARA does not have the authority to declassify other agency records in its possession and must refer files back to the originating agency, which in turn may refer portions of those requests to numerous other agencies, which must all conduct their own, time-consuming reviews.

To fix this Congress must:

• Grant the Archivist of the United States and the National Declassification Center the authority to declassify records in NARA's custody that are 25 years or older. By stripping originating agencies of their power to keep historical files secret, the statute will eliminate the referral loophole that keeps history hidden.
• Double NARA's Budget. NARA is already woefully underfunded. For the agency and its components like ISOO and the NDC to be successful, it needs an influx of funds for staff and to acquire modern technology capable of working with all of the different kinds of classified records that intelligence and defense agencies possess and transfer to it. This will have the added benefit of boosting NARA’s other mandates, including ensuring that agencies are properly creating and preserving the records they are required to retain.

Critics of congressional involvement in classification will point to the disaster that was the Kyl-Lott Amendments of the late 1990s, which made declassification of historical nuclear-related documents even more cumbersome. While it's clear the executive branch needs legislative guidance to improve overclassification, any new legislation must learn from these amendments’ mistakes and prioritize clear, quantifiable standards over vague and retroactive mandates.

Finally, classification reform is not a stand-alone issue. It overlaps with records management and transparency requirements, and fixing one issue while ignoring the others will ultimately fail. For example, Congress must also account for senior officials who willfully destroy records to keep them from the public and consider punitive measures to deter this growing threat. To do so, it could make intentional records destruction (or overclassification) a disqualifying factor for running for public office or have such offenses result in the immediate revocation of security clearances.

Reducing overclassification and restoring meaningful oversight of classification decisions requires moving beyond executive orders. Codifying metrics, establishing a declassification tax, narrowing the definitions of damage to national security, and granting NARA authority to end forever secrets, will shrink the universe of government secrets and restore public trust.

Lauren Harper is the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF).