Transparency, Declassification, and the Obama Presidency (September 2012)

[ProSense]

Transparency, Declassification, and the Obama Presidency

By Lee White

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Steven Aftergood (Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and the publisher of the blog Secrecy News)

In retrospect, the Administration erred in making its early public statements promising unprecedented transparency. The President raised expectations so high that the ensuing disappointment was inevitable. The smarter move would have been to demonstrate openness in actions, not in words, and to exceed public expectations.

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Thomas Blanton (Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.)

There are obviously some differences of opinion on this subject. My own is that too often we conflate "the Obama administration" with actions of specific agencies or specific bureaucrats, when in fact the policy decision at the top has been pretty good, just stymied by ongoing bureaucratic obfuscation in the middle and the bottom. Or even worse, continuity by federal career employees of Bush policies that the White House has not succeeded in changing.

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Anne Weismann (Chief Counsel for Citizen's for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington-CREW)

In my assessment, the administration's record on transparency is mixed. Without question, President Obama put strong, pro-transparency policies in place that really set the benchmark for a more open government. The problem has been in implementing those policies at the agency level. Agencies have been encouraged to make proactive disclosures, but they have shown little regard for the quality of and public interest in the information they are posting. And the administration has not provided them much guidance on this front.

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Patrice McDermott (Executive Director of OpenTheGovernment.Org)

I think it is a very mixed bag. There are strong indications that the initiatives and efforts of the Obama Administration have begun to institutionalize changes in the attitudes of components of the Executive Branch, mostly in the area of domestic right-to-know. While the effectiveness of FOIA as a disclosure and accountability tool for the public continues to lag behind the promises the President and the Attorney General made, much more attention is being directed by agencies to improving the process, and agencies are putting more information out proactively (without requiring or waiting for a FOIA request)—and not just the usual stuff they want you to know. The greatest frustration on the domestic policy front has been the ongoing changes in policy personnel in the White House, creating problems of follow-through and consistency.

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- more -

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1209/Transparency-Declassification-and-Obama-Presidency.cfm

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