Cold War End Doesn’t Ease Secrecy Trend : Bureaucracy: The government spends billions and employs a small army to safeguard national security secrets.
WASHINGTON — The Cold War may be over, but the task of keeping millions and millions of government documents away from the prying eyes of America’s enemies still keeps more than 32,397 workers employed full time, according to the first-ever tally by government agencies.
And the government may be spending more than $16 billion a year to safeguard a growing stockpile of national security secrets created or managed by these workers, industry estimates and the new accounting for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) show.
Eighty-one percent of this cost, or an estimated $13.8 billion, reflects what defense contractors told the federal government they were billing Washington for classification expenses in 1989. No contractor estimates have been made since then, but experts said last month they believe the costs may still be in that range despite a decline in defense spending.
An additional $2.28 billion reflects what federal agencies told OMB this spring they will spend this year to protect classified information. And $200 million more reflects what the intelligence community recently estimated it is spending on security, a classified figure that many government officials and independent experts describe as an understatement.
About 31,000 of the full-time employees safeguarding classified documents, enough to populate a small city, are attached to the Defense Department. But even the Department of the Interior has the equivalent of 30 full-time workers assigned to protect secrets related to national security, according to the OMB report.
Like several other departments with mandates that would seem of scant interest to foreign spies--such as Agriculture or Health and Human Services-- Interior told the OMB that it spends thousands of dollars annually on alarms, special copying machines, shredders, secure telephones, security clearances and costly office equipment with suppressed electronic emissions.
The preliminary data “shows that we are spending one heck of a lot of money on protecting paper,†said Rep. David E. Skaggs (D-Colo.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who demanded the OMB accounting in legislation enacted last year.
“My judgment all along has been . . . that a good deal of what is classified is classified for reasons other than national security,†including bureaucratic inertia and attempts to prevent political embarrassment, Skaggs said. As an example, he cited the CIA’s decision last year to classify agency expenditures on wheelchair ramps and other measures the agency took to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Jeanne Schauble, director of the records declassification division of the National Archives, reported recently that more than 325 million pages of classified records are in its holdings, “with more coming in all the time.†Most of the documents are more than 30 years old, although they include more recent vintage Army documents from the Vietnam War and State Department records from the 1970s.
Schauble said the archives’ total classified holdings are 2 1/2 times larger than they were in 1984. Safeguarding the holdings requires the equivalent of 110 full-time employees and $9.5 million annually, according to the OMB report.
The Clinton Administration has vowed to reform classification procedures and promote more openness by shrinking the number of secret documents produced and retained by the government. But in its first year, the Administration actually classified documents at a higher rate than the George Bush Administration did in 1992, according to the 1994 annual report of the government-wide Information Security Oversight Office, a branch of the General Services Administration.
The difference was only 1%, but the total number of federal classification actions in 1993 was so high--6.1 million--that it means President Clinton’s team effectively created 60,000 more bits of classified data than President George Bush’s team did in 1992.
At the same time, Clinton’s appointees also supervised the declassification of 30% fewer pages in 1993 than Bush appointees accomplished in 1992, producing a net growth of “many more millions of classified pages,†according to Steven Garfinkel, director of the oversight office.
“This means that unless you are a Russian spy, there is more and more information becoming inaccessible,†said Federation of American Scientists analyst Stephen Aftergood, alluding to the recent guilty plea to conspiracy to commit espionage by former CIA employee Aldrich H. Ames. “The situation is basically out of control; more information is classified today than there was when the Berlin Wall was torn down.â€
Documents may be stamped “classified†by authorized officials who determine that they contain information vital to national security. The lowest level of classification is “Confidential†and reflects a judgment that some damage to national security would occur if the document were disclosed. “Secret†is used if serious damage will result and “Top Secret†only if “exceptionally grave damage†will occur. The categories apply to a vast range of government records.
The OMB report indicates that a substantial chunk of the cost of maintaining classified information is self-sustaining; that is, it pays for managing and improving classification procedures.
The Defense Department, for example, is spending $252 million this year on classification guides, cost accounting, couriers and other document-handling or disposal activities performed by an estimated 4,917 full-time employees, according to the OMB tally. It is spending an additional $88 million for classification oversight, which means watching those who are watching the documents.
Even the Interior Department is spending $128,560 for classification “policy development,†or roughly $87,500 more than it spends for the guard force at facilities where its trove of national security secrets is stored. An additional $76,517 is spent by the department on classification oversight, including “self-inspections.â€
But the Education Department, which seemingly would have a hard time keeping secret the operations of public schools, probably tops the security layer cake by allocating $7,378 to write a classification guide and installing $7,264 worth of secure telephones this year.
An Education Department spokesman had some difficulty finding someone who knew what the phones were for, but finally said they were needed for discussions of travel plans by “foreign education officials†and reports to other federal agencies about student loan defaults. “This is national security with a lower case,†the spokesman said.
Most federal agencies told OMB they plan to spend less for safeguarding national secrets next year, although the Department of Energy cautioned that “we will have to invest additional resources in order to reduce costs in the future.â€
But no one knows exactly what the intelligence community spends now or plans to spend in the future to safeguard documents. Nor is it clear how many thousands of intelligence community employees are involved in the effort (the number was not included in OMB’s tally). When members of the Joint Security Commission created by the CIA and the Defense Department asked for this data last year, they got back “incomplete, inconsistent†answers, according to their February report.
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