Open government must be preserved

Dwight Shepard | By Dwight Shepard |
on September 10, 2008 at 6:00 AM, updated September 10, 2008 at 6:10 AM

The desire for official secrecy is not new. It did not start with the current president. And it did not have its beginnings when Richard Nixon was calling the White House home.

Those in power have long wanted to keep their daily doings from the populace. One of the true beauties of the American system, established so that power flows from the people to their governors, is the expectation that the citizenry be well informed.

In an 1822 letter, James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights in 1787 and president of the United States from 1809 to 1817, summed up the need for an informed people:


Fast forward 186 years. A "secrecy report card" from a coalition of government oversight groups finds that the farce is tragically well under way. Secrecy is on the rapid rise, with fewer and fewer government documents being made public and more and more meetings taking place in secret.

A couple of telling examples paint a very murky picture. The last decade has seen an 80 percent decrease in the number of government documents declassified. There were some 7,000 government advisory committee meetings last year, but nearly 65 percent of them were closed to the public. This runs exactly counter to a 1972 law on the workings of such committees.

We are moving dramatically in the wrong direction. How can a government of the people function when the people have no way of knowing what is going on inside the government? A farce, indeed. And a tragedy.

The next president, no matter who is elected in 55 days, must set to work to improve this. Quickly and decisively.

A United States without an open government is the United States in name alone. That must not be allowed to come to pass.