March 25, 2003: Bush Orders Public Documents Reclassified

President Bush signs an amendment to Executive Order 12958, giving government agencies broad new powers to reclassify documents already released to the public and having them removed from the public stacks of the National Archives. Archivist Allen Weinstein later estimates that some 25,000 documents and records will be removed from public access due to Bush’s decision. The reclassification program will eventually be shut down. Weinstein will later observe: “More than one of three documents removed from the open shelves and barred to researchers should not have been tampered with. That practice, which undermined the National Archives’ basic mission to preserve the authenticity of files under our stewardship must never be repeated.” The order also makes it much easier to initially classify a document or a record, resulting in over 15 million newly classified documents by the end of 2004. [Savage, 2007, pp. 162-163] A second, separate amendment to the order gives Vice President Cheney the power to unilaterally classify and declassify information (see March 25, 2003).