More than half of federal agencies that deal with classified information have yet to issue policy implementing a December 2009 executive order from President Barack Obama meant to decrease the amount of classified information.

An annual report form the Information Security Oversight Office (located within the National Archives and Records Administration) dated April 15 and released publically April 22 says that as of March 15, only 19 of the 41 affected agencies have issued final implementing regulations.

Of those agencies, only one is from the military or intelligence community: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The State Department, which reported the most acts of original classification during fiscal 2010--154,872 of them, more than three times the agency with second greatest number, which was the Justice Department--has not issued final regulations.

The executive order, number 13526, calls on agencies to have in place by mid-September 2010 internal rules implementing the order, which tells classifiers that if there is "significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified."

It also directs agencies to undertake a "fundamental" review of classification guidance to ensure that classification practices are up to date and to identify information that could be declassified.

Lack of compliance with the executive order is "the biggest impediment to implementing the reforms called for by the President and as a real threat to the efficient and effective implementation of the overall classification system," the ISOO report states.

The amount of original classification activity during fiscal 2010 went against a 5-year trend of annual decreases, jumping up to 224,734 instances versus 183,224 the year before. 

The report questions whether all agency reported original classification decisions are truly so and whether some of them could be derivative classification decisions--i.e., not the creation of new secrets, but the perpetuation of existing ones.

The number of federal officials with the power to classify information is at a historic low, however--down to 2,378, the report says--whereas during most of the decade, the number had hovered around 4,000 individuals. The number was much greater in times past, being much closer to 7,000 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, for example.

For more:
- download the report (.pdf)

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