Sen. Gary Peters Introduces Bill to Increase Declassification of Government Documents

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) has introduced legislation to streamline the declassification of government documents, increasing transparency and information-sharing across government agencies.

“Our current classification system is not just costly, outdated, and inefficient—it’s a growing crisis that undermines both our national security and government transparency,” Mr. Peters, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement on July 29.

The Classification Reform for Transparency Act, introduced on July 9, is co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (D-Texas). The bill would establish a presidential task force to oversee the declassification process and remove some exemptions that prevent documents from being automatically made public.

It would also allow public requests for declassification of documents and require government agencies to expedite those requests if they come from members of Congress. The legislation further narrows what documents may be classified and includes a “drop-dead date” that automatically declassifies documents after 50 years.

Mr. Cornyn and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) successfully pushed similar legislation last year. That bill, the Sensible Classification Act, was piggybacked onto the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2023. It authorized training for declassification procedures, mandated the development of technological solutions to the declassification problem, and authorized the hiring of 12 new staff to the Public Interest Declassification Board.

But the release of classified documents is still in a deep backlog, partly because the process to declassify remains complex and time-consuming.

Process Remains Complicated

During a May 2023 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Elizabeth Goitein, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said the problem of making government documents public remains convoluted, despite efforts to simplify it.

She referenced a 2009 executive order by President Barack Obama that required all documents “of permanent historical value” to be declassified after 25 years, even if they had not been reviewed.

But she said documents often don’t get sent to the National Archives until the agencies perform their own manual, line-by-line review, containing nine possible exemptions. She also said the process was “pass-fail,” with some documents being withheld based on a single word rather than the word being redacted and the records sent to the Archives.

The National Archives’ Declassification Center stated in April that 38 projects went through that process between January and March, consisting of more than 4 million pages.

Mr. Peters said the number of remaining classified documents is unknown but estimated to be in the billions; an estimated 50 million new records are added each year.

In his testimony at a 2010 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, estimated that between 50 and 90 percent of classified materials could be made public “with little or no damage to real security.”

In his announcement of the bill, Mr. Peters said overclassification “obscures truly sensitive information” and erodes public 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,” he said.