'Need to Know?' No Way

The Bush administration is treating energy policy and Social Security on a top-secret, need-to-know basis. Officials could tell you what they're planning, but if they did, they would have to kill you.

The General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, was getting ready to challenge the administration in court over the tight seal Vice President Dick Cheney put on what happened during meetings of his energy task force - Cabinet officers and private energy company executives. Now the GAO is rolling over. Meanwhile, the 16 private-sector guides leading Social Security into the foothills of privatization have split their commission in half to hold identical meetings separately in adjoining rooms so they never have a quorum. That way they can legally - but cynically - protect their private agendas from public prying.

Last summer, when Mr. Cheney was complaining that even listing the names of his energy advisers would be "the politics of personal destruction", Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the GAO, disagreed. He called the panel's secrecy "a very serious matter with significant potential implications for GAO, the Congress and the American people".

Well, it is. So why did Mr. Walker decide not to fight back? He put the lawsuit on hold after Sept. 11. That delay could be justified while the Vice President was in "undisclosed locations", but the country is supposed to be going back to normal business. What's more normal than fighting to protect the right of Congress - and the public - to know from secretive bureaucrats? Neither the administration's energy policy nor its Social Security intentions is new or has anything to do with homeland defense, even if members of Congress and the White House try to use Al-Qaeda as the excuse for the oil drilling in Alaska they always wanted.

Mr. Walker told The Washington Post that a fight over the Cheney energy plan seemed ill-timed because members of Congress are pushing him to find out what Tom Ridge's homeland defense office is up to. If Social Security is too secret for public consumption, the homeland must be, too. Indeed, some legitimate defense secrets may lie around Mr. Ridge's office, unlike the offices for the Social Security meetings.

Congress knows who let the dogs out, and Mr. Walker is claiming he can catch just one lonely mutt. If Congress doesn't lend a hand with the nets, the dogs of secrecy will run off with all of its authority.