Taxpayers Pick Up Tab For Being Kept In The Dark

The federal government - not counting the CIA spent at least $5.6 billion last year keeping secret documents secret, a member of the House Intelligence Committee reported.

That figure is surely an underestimate, said Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., who is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The CIA refused to submit a public report on its own spending on keeping classified documents. And security officials cannot say for certain how many pages of classified documents exist, though the figure is well into the billions.

Less than 1 percent of the $5.6 billion is being spent on declassifying documents, Skaggs said. A billion-page backlog has built up of documents that are more than 25 years old and thus by law are ready for declassification and release to the public. Some documents predate World War II, and others detail CIA covert operations and State Department cables from the 1950s.

The Pentagon consumed nearly 90 percent of the $5.6 billion spent on keeping secrets last year. But some unlikely agencies also spend money keeping classified documents from becoming public, reports Skaggs show.

They include the Department of Agriculture ($1,153,000), the Federal Reserve Board ($305,000), the Federal Communications Commission ($156,000) and the little-known Marine Mammal Commission ($1,000). During the Cold War, the Marine Mammal Commission trained dolphins as possible saboteurs.

The $5.6 billion figure, a sum roughly twice the combined annual budgets of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, reflects “a document classification system stuck on autopilot, indiscriminately stamping ‘Top Secret’ on thousands of documents every year,” Skaggs said.