Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy
The Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy set out to answer a question that had gone unexamined by statute since 1957: how much of what the United States government hides from its own citizens actually needs to stay hidden? The Commission's formal name was the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, and it took its common name from its chairman, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was a bipartisan statutory body, created under Title IX of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1994 and 1995. Its mandate was sweeping: investigate everything related to classified information and security clearances, then submit a final report with recommendations.
By the time the Commission got to work, the scale of the secrecy system was staggering. Senator Moynihan reported that approximately 400,000 new secrets were being created every year at the highest classification level alone. The government had accumulated over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that were at least 25 years old. The Commission's unanimous final report, issued on the 3rd of March 1997, would argue that this mountain of secrets was not protecting the country. It was, in important ways, harming it. One of the most striking consequences of the Commission's work was forcing into the open the VENONA project, a long-classified intelligence program that would rewrite public understanding of the early Cold War.
Senator Moynihan's Commission opened its report with a finding that cut against instinct: secrecy, it said, is a form of government regulation. Like any regulation, it carries costs when applied too broadly. The Commission identified three specific harms from excessive secrecy. Policy makers who lack full information make avoidable mistakes. Governments that operate in the dark cannot be held accountable. And citizens who do not know what their government is doing cannot participate in informed debate.
The Commission did not argue that secrets should be abolished. It acknowledged that some secrecy is genuinely necessary, particularly to protect weapons system design details, to shield ongoing security operations, and to give public servants room to consider policy options without premature public criticism. But it drew a sharp distinction between that necessary core and the vast accretion of secrets surrounding it.
At the heart of the problem, the Commission found, was the absence of any governing law. Apart from nuclear energy, which fell under the Atomic Energy Act, the federal government had no statute defining what could be classified. In practice, secrets were whatever anyone with a stamp decided to stamp secret. The Commission warned that this inevitably produced errors, and that even the President of the United States could make mistakes that a more open system might have prevented. The Commission called for a new statute to establish clear principles governing what may be declared secret, and it argued that protecting the most important secrets actually required reducing the overall volume of classification.
On the 29th of May 1946, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to a high administration official reporting what he described as an enormous Soviet espionage ring operating in Washington. The memo named Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson at the top of its list. That placement was false. But its falseness had a consequence: President Truman, who already distrusted Hoover and suspected him of playing politics, found the entire memo discredited. Other names on the list who were genuine targets, including Alger Hiss and Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, got swept aside along with Acheson.
Truman was never told about the VENONA project, a classified program in which the Army Security Agency had begun breaking into Soviet espionage communications. In late August or early September 1947, the Army Security Agency informed the FBI that it had started cracking those messages. Still, Truman went to his grave believing Republicans had manufactured the loyalty controversy for political gain. The VENONA intercepts would have told a different story.
The prosecutors who tried the internal-security cases of the 1940s, including the Rosenberg case, did not know they had not been given the best available government evidence. The VENONA materials would have been conclusive in identifying the participants in Soviet spy networks. Because those materials stayed classified, critics were able to construct theories about frame-ups and cover-ups. When the Secrecy Commission forced the disclosure of documents, the newly revealed secrets showed that the government's case in the Rosenberg and Hiss matters was stronger than it had appeared, not weaker. Scholar Ronald Radosh observed that the Rosenbergs' defenders had loudly demanded the release of government documents, only to deny their significance once those documents were made public.
The classification system that would produce such tangled results had a specific origin point. The three-tiered framework of Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret appears to have been adopted by the U.S. military from British forces in France in 1917, and was institutionalized through the Espionage Act of the same year. Long before that, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, created by the Pendleton Act in 1883, was already barring federal employees on loyalty grounds as late as 1921.
The formal federal loyalty apparatus took its modern shape in March 1947, when President Truman signed Executive Order 9835. That order established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, created uniform investigation standards, and authorized Loyalty Review Boards across the government. The order rested on the findings of an interdepartmental committee established in 1946. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower promised to root out security risks he suggested had been tolerated too easily under Truman.
In April 1953, Eisenhower replaced the Truman framework with Executive Order 10450, which required that every civilian government employee be subjected to investigation and placed on each agency head the personal responsibility for ensuring that no one whose retention was inconsistent with national security remained employed. Senator Joseph McCarthy praised the new order. The New York Times reported at the time that it would require a new investigation of many thousands of employees who had already been investigated, plus many more thousands who had never been checked at all.
Legislation passed in 1950 had already extended this logic further, permitting the summary suspension of civilian officers and employees across multiple departments. Beginning in March 1948, the Attorney General's List was published on a regular basis, and membership in any listed organization could cost a person their federal job, their position in defense industries, and their right to a U.S. passport. In November 1953, Attorney General Herbert Brownell alleged in a speech that Truman had knowingly nominated Harry Dexter White, a senior Treasury Department official accused of Soviet ties, to serve as U.S. Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund. On the 3rd of December 1953, President Eisenhower directed that a blank wall be placed between J. Robert Oppenheimer and classified data, beginning the process that led to the Atomic Energy Commission's suspension of Oppenheimer's security clearance later that month. The Commission voted 4-to-1 on the 28th of June 1954 against restoring it.
The membership list of the Moynihan Commission reads as a deliberate cross-section of the institutions that had built and operated the secrecy system. John M. Deutch had served as CIA Director. Martin C. Faga had led the National Reconnaissance Office and served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space. Alison B. Fortier directed Missile Defense Programs for Lockheed Martin. Richard K. Fox was a career foreign service officer in the State Department.
The legislative branch was represented across party lines. Larry Combest, a congressman from the 19th district of Texas, served as Vice Chairman. Lee H. Hamilton was the Ranking Democratic Member of the House International Relations Committee. Jesse Helms had been Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Academia and civil society brought a different set of perspectives. Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard professor who directed the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and chaired the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, was best known as the author of the Clash of Civilizations. Ellen Hume served as Executive Director of PBS's Democracy Project. John Podesta, who sat on the Commission, was Clinton White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Maurice Sonnenberg held a seat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
The breadth of that roster shaped the weight of the final report. A unanimous finding from a body that included a former CIA director, a Lockheed Martin executive, a State Department veteran, and senior members of both parties in Congress carried a kind of authority that a report from any single institution could not have claimed. The Commission's call for a new statute governing classification was not a fringe position; it was the consensus judgment of people who had spent careers inside the system they were now critiquing.
The Commission's work took place against a backdrop of executive action already in motion. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12958, which updated the national security classification and declassification system. That order established a mechanism to automatically declassify information more than 25 years old unless the government took specific steps to continue protecting a particular document or group of documents.
The Commission built on that framework by pushing for statutory grounding. The Commission's investigation was the first authorized by statute since the Wright Commission on Government Security issued its report in 1957, nearly four decades earlier. That gap itself was part of the story the Commission told: the secrecy system had grown for a generation without any legislatively mandated review of whether it was working or whether it had exceeded its proper scope.
The Commission's report, issued unanimously on the 3rd of March 1997, pointed toward a specific institutional remedy. The Commission quoted the German sociologist Max Weber, whose observation the report found directly applicable: every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping knowledge and intentions secret, and bureaucracy naturally welcomes a poorly informed and hence a powerless parliament, insofar as ignorance serves the bureaucracy's interests. The Weber quotation was not decorative. It was the Commission's diagnosis of why the secrecy system had expanded without restraint and why a statutory remedy, rather than continued reliance on executive orders alone, would be needed to hold the tendency in check.
Common questions
What was the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy and when was it created?
The Moynihan Commission, formally the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, was a bipartisan statutory commission created under Title IX of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1994 and 1995 (P.L. 103-236). It was chaired by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and issued its unanimous final report on the 3rd of March 1997.
What was the VENONA project and how did the Moynihan Commission relate to it?
VENONA was a classified U.S. program in which the Army Security Agency broke into Soviet espionage communications. A major effect of the Moynihan Commission was forcing the declassification of the VENONA project, which revealed that many Americans who had spied for the Soviet Union were never prosecuted because prosecution would have required disclosing what the government knew.
How much classified material did the U.S. government have when the Moynihan Commission investigated?
In 1994, the U.S. government was estimated to hold over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that were at least 25 years old. Senator Moynihan also reported that approximately 400,000 new secrets were being created annually at the Top Secret level alone.
What were the key findings of the Moynihan Commission on secrecy?
The Commission found that secrecy is a form of government regulation, that excessive secrecy harms national interests by keeping policy makers uninformed and shielding government from accountability, and that protecting the most important secrets requires reducing the overall volume of classification. It also found that outside the Atomic Energy Act, federal law set no clear standard for what could be classified.
Who were the members of the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy?
Members included former CIA Director John M. Deutch, former National Reconnaissance Office Director Martin C. Faga, Lockheed Martin executive Alison B. Fortier, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, Clinton White House Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta, Congressman Larry Combest (Vice Chairman), and legislators Lee H. Hamilton and Jesse Helms, among others.
What happened to J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance and how does it connect to the Moynihan Commission's findings?
On the 3rd of December 1953, President Eisenhower directed that a blank wall be placed between Oppenheimer and classified data. The Atomic Energy Commission suspended his clearance later that month and voted 4-to-1 on the 28th of June 1954 against restoring it. The Moynihan Commission examined this episode as part of its broader inquiry into how the Cold War security and loyalty programs operated.
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