Presidency: Bush’s Executive Order

A new executive order could make it substantially more difficult for the public to gain access to historically valuable presidential records by requiring the consent of both the incumbent President and the former President whose Administration generated the records.

Earlier this year, the White House had blocked release of records from the Reagan Administration that were supposed to have become public under the Presidential Records Act.

Now the new executive order 13233, signed November 1, will significantly increase the obstacles to disclosure of such records, since it allows either the current President or the former President -- or even the former President's family after his death -- to veto disclosure.

The new order replaces the 1989 executive order 12667, which also permitted a former President to request that records be withheld, but reserved to the incumbent President the right to decide whether or not to honor that request.

It should be noted that the new restrictions will apply only to unclassified information, since classified records are exempt from disclosure anyway, as are a myriad of other categories of information that are protected by statute.

Since classified, privacy, proprietary and other forms of information are already off the table, the new executive order invites the suspicion that it is intended to shield embarrassing information, a category for which an explicit exemption does not exist.

But the actual import of the new order will not be fully clear until it is applied in the months to come to the Reagan records which still await processing.

The new executive order 13233 is posted here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2001/11/eo-pra.html

The order was the subject of a rather testy exchange at the White House press briefing on November 1. See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2001/11/wh110101.html

"I don't see this as anything other than setting a set of procedures that I believe is fair and reasonable," President Bush said at a press availability on November 2:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2001/11/wh110201.html

Others disagree."This decree is not about protecting troops or homeland security," the Los Angeles Times editorialized today."Rather, the administration's sweeping refusal to release any documents from the Reagan era suggests a secrecy fetish." See:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000088720nov06.story

The House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Efficiency will hold a hearing on presidential records today.