Federal agencies reported a 30 percent increase in the number of pages declassified in fiscal 2015 in response to Executive Order 13526 of 2009, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Of 87.1 million pages reviewed for declassification, 36.8 million were declassified.
The number of federal employees with classification authority also fell, by about 4 percent to 2,199, slightly below half of the number of 2008. Original classification action rose to 53,400 in 2015 from the 46,800 of 2014, but that was still well below the 204,000 of 2008.
“Derivative” classifications–incorporat¬ing, paraphrasing, restating, or generating in a new form information that is already classified—fell from 71.5 million to 52.8 million—well above the 23.2 million of 2008 but down from the peak of 95.2 million in 2012.
The order also requires agencies to conduct self-in¬spections. “We are seeing that some agencies’ self-inspection programs are very strong, while others still need to improve. Agency self-in¬spection reports include narrative self-inspection program descriptions and summaries of findings, as well as data-centric responses to specific questions about core program requirements. In nearly all of these areas agencies reported improvement in com¬pliance from last year,” it said.
