Bureaucracy Unbound

As a freshman Congressman from California, Democrat John Emerson Moss Jr. sought some information from the U.S. Civil Service Commission--and was turned down. A quiet but combative former businessman, Moss complained to fellow Representatives, discovered that they too were being denied routine requests for facts by federal agencies. Appalled at such self-serving censorship by a Government that supposedly serves the people, Moss determined to do something about it.

That was in 1953. Last week, Moss's unremitting campaign to open bureaucratic files finally paid off. By a roll-call vote of 307 to 0, the House passed a bill that goes farther than any previous legislation toward ensuring the citizen's right to know what his Federal Government is doing.

Moss, now 53, won his first round in 1955 when, at his suggestion, a special House subcommittee on Government information was created--with Moss as chairman. The subcommittee quietly launched an exhaustive investigation that yielded countless case histories of secretive bureaucracy. The subcommittee discovered, for instance, that a bow-and-arrow weapon devised by a Pentagon civilian employee during World War II had proved useless--but by 1958 was still classed as a military secret. Moss forced many agencies to discard meaningless security precautions and marshaled bipartisan support for revision of the 1946 law that permits federal officials to clam up merely by decreeing that disclosure of data is not "in the public interest."

Burden of Proof. There would still be multitudinous exceptions, notably bona fide security secrets, Government-employee records, geophysical data that could be used for commercial advantage, and FBI investigative manuals, which would be of compelling interest to the underworld. Moreover, the new law would support the tradition of "executive privilege," by which the President has the final right to withhold any information. Nor does it apply to Congress, itself one of Washington's most notorious practitioners of secrecy.

All the same, the burden of proving that information can be justifiably suppressed would fall for the first time on federal officials, who could be haled into court to defend their decisions. Shouted through the Senate last fall, the bill last week went to the White House. President Johnson, though less than enthusiastic about the measure, was nonetheless expected to sign it--if only to demonstrate that the Great Society can be candid as well as creative.

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