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July 15, 2026 / 7:06 PM EDT
/ CBS News
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Washington — The Pentagon is asking Congress for broad new authority to withhold unclassified records from the public, a proposal that transparency advocates say could significantly reduce the public's ability to scrutinize the nation's largest federal agency and understand how billions of taxpayer dollars are spent. The legislative proposal seeks to create a new section of federal law allowing the defense secretary to exempt certain "controlled unclassified information," or CUI, from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act if the U.S. military determines the records concern national defense vulnerabilities and concludes that the harm from disclosure outweighs the public interest. Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy, told CBS News in an email that for decades, there has been "a massive overclassification problem throughout the executive branch." "The last thing the government needs is a new power to withhold information under the FOIA," Kaufman wrote. Controlled Unclassified Information was established under an executive order during the Obama administration to replace dozens of inconsistent "For Official Use Only" markings that agencies had developed over decades. The CUI system was designed to standardize how agencies safeguard sensitive but unclassified information. Importantly, CUI itself does not create authority to withhold records from the public. The National Archives, which oversees the government's CUI program, has repeatedly emphasized that designation as CUI does not affect whether records may be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Agencies like the Defense Department must still rely on one of FOIA's nine statutory exemptions to prevent the public disclosure of documents.
