White House Secrecy Starts to Give

Shown with Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has said of the White House, "By trying to keep secret information that doesn't need to be secret, it invites skepticism of all of its secrecy claims." (By Alex Wong -- Getty Images)

But most of the secrecy measures emerged from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when efforts to keep government decision-making closely held drew few objections from Congress and a frightened public.

Early in 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft issued a memo urging government agencies to use whatever legal means necessary to reject requests for public documents allowed by the FOIA. Later, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. directed agencies to restrict access to "sensitive but unclassified" information.

Days after Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, the House and Senate passed H.R. 1, which implemented the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The bill includes a provision to improve congressional oversight of the intelligence community by making the nation's annual intelligence budget figure public. The Directorate of National Intelligence released the $43.5 billion figure Oct. 30.

Congress subsequently revived efforts to speed up the release of public documents and activists used lawsuits in an attempt to pry loose White House correspondence and other material, particularly related to the war.

"The administration has brought these challenges on itself," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who favored the disclosure of the intelligence budget. "By trying to keep secret information that doesn't need to be secret, it invites skepticism of all of its secrecy claims."

This year, Congress took aim at a years-old logjam created by delays in responding to public records requests. The White House opposed the Open Government Act of 2007 and enlisted allies in Congress to block it. But in December, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) lifted his hold on the bill. On New Year's Eve at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., Bush signed it.

The law penalizes agencies that take months or years to meet FOIA requests by denying them the right to charge research or copy fees for documents released after the 20-day deadline, among other provisions.

In 2006, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) drafted a bipartisan bill requiring the White House budget office to put government contract information online. The bill eventually passed, and Bush signed it. The site, USASpending.gov, went online last month.

The administration, however, has won other battles over secrecy.

Last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to release documents on the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. A bill overturning Bush's executive order on the release of presidential records remains mired in Congress. And the White House continues to refuse congressional demands for information about detainee interrogation methods.

Open government advocates see last week's court order that the White House reveal whether it has backup records of millions of deleted e-mails as the next big battle in the disclosure war.

The National Security Archive and Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which are seeking the records, say they cover about 10 million e-mails deleted from White House databases from 2003 to 2005. Federal law requires the White House to retain such records.

Fratto said the e-mails were inadvertently deleted, and their number is uncertain. "It was a problem we announced, admitted to and will remedy," he said.

By attacking White House efforts at secrecy now, advocates also hope to put such tactics beyond the reach of future administrations.

"Once a precedent is set and an administration not sufficiently rebuked, this kind of secrecy becomes a permanent option," said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.