National Declassification Center issues progress report
The National Archives National Declassification Center (NDC) has issued its fifth biannual Report on Operations of the National Declassification Center, covering the period of January 1 through June 30, 2012. The report is available is online at www.archives.gov/declassification.
Report highlights include:
On August 3, 2012, the Washington Post published an article entitled, “Obama administration struggles to live up to its own transparency promises.” The Post concluded, “Some of these high-profile transparency measures have stalled, and by some measures the government is keeping more secrets than before.”
The Post article cited the National Declassification Center’s performance in this regard. The NDC was tasked by the Administration with reviewing and declassifying a 371 million-page backlog of records by December 2013. However, the status report shows the NDC will be hard pressed to come close to meeting that deadline. As of June 30, 2012, only 51.1 million pages have completed all processing and of that number 41.8 million pages have been released to the public.