The investigations into the retention and mishandling of classified documents two years ago revealed a problem that wasn’t partisan—both Donald Trump and Joe Biden had classified material in their residences—and it wasn’t even just presidential, as former Vice President Mike Pence had also retained documents. But they also revealed a larger problem beyond having state secrets piled up in a garage or spare bathroom: Our classification system is broken.
Overclassification is the first, and perhaps biggest problem, because it creates other downstream issues. Our government produces about 50 million classified documents a year, according to the latest count of the Information Security Oversight Office some years ago.
Not only does the government produce an ever-increasing amount of information, executive branch personnel are incentivized to overclassify documents: Marking a whole batch of related material as classified is much faster than sorting through individual documents to see what meets the threshold. And no one wants to be the person who made the wrong decision, so it’s safer to err on the side of classifying.
Still, there are downsides: Maintaining the sheer volume of classified material costs taxpayers $18 billion a year, and Congress has found anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of these documents did not warrant classification. As an attorney for both the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees who regularly reviewed classified information for years on Capitol Hill, that number seems correct to me. I often found something I read in the newspaper days earlier or heard discussed on cable news among the classified information that I reviewed.
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