U.S. News has released a detailed story following a five-month investigation of the Bush administration's extraordinary penchant for secrecy. Nut graph: "For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters. The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government while making increasing amounts of information unavailable to the taxpayers who pay for its collection and analysis."

Not only has the Bush administration classifed as many documents in two years as Clinton did in his last four, Bush also has made it easier to reclassify documents so that information once public has gone behind the shroud again.