Senators take another crack at solving over-classification

Lawmakers in the Senate have renewed efforts to modernize the federal government’s document classification system, which officials claim is antiquated and impedes both transparency and cross-agency cooperation.

The topic of overclassification received new interest last year, after both former President Trump and President Biden were enmeshed in investigations into the two leaders’ retention of classified records from their tenures in the White House and the Naval Observatory, respectively. Trump has since been indicted for his alleged refusal to return those documents.

Following a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on the subject last spring, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced two bills aimed at modernizing the classification and declassification processes. Though the Sensible Classification Act, which establishes training on “sensible” classification and boosts staffing at the Public Interest Declassification Board, was enacted as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act last December, the other bill’s momentum has stalled.

But Cornyn is back with a new effort, this time with Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Classification Reform for Transparency Act (S. 4648), introduced this month but announced Monday, would establish a new presidential task force to “streamline” the government’s classification system by narrowing the criteria by which a government record can be classified and reducing the number exemptions agencies can use to avoid the automatic declassification of records.

Federal agencies would be required to justify their classification decisions in writing, including identifying the specific harm that disclosure would cause, and would create a “drop-dead” time limit for a document to be classified at 50 years.

Unnecessary classification of government documents costs upwards of $18 billion per year in maintenance costs, and inhibits information sharing across federal agencies, Peters said in a statement.

“Our current classification system is not just costly, outdated and inefficient—it’s a growing crisis that undermines both our national security and government transparency,” Peters said. “We are facing an overwhelming backlog of hundreds of millions of pages awaiting declassification and experts telling us that 50 to 90% of classified materials could be made public without risk to our national security. This overclassification obscures truly sensitive information and erodes trust in government. My bipartisan bill will address this issue by updating the classification system to enhance our ability to safeguard critical information, while promoting the transparency that is so vital to our democracy.”