An influential group of journalists is pressing the leader of the Senate Armed Services Committee to make the panel’s mark-up of its annual defense policy bill open to the public.
The Standing Committee of Correspondents “respectfully requests that you reconsider the April 23 decision not to open Senate Armed Services Committee defense authorization markups of non-classified material to the media and the public,” the group wrote in a May 6 letter to panel chairman Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
“We believe the American public would be well served if the committee allowed them to see their lawmakers at work, beginning with the Airland Subcommittee markup scheduled for May 11,” according to the group, which composed of journalists from organizations like the Associated Press, Bloomberg and the Washington Post.
The Armed Services panel last month voted 17-9 to keep its deliberation behind closed doors.
“With defense authorization you quickly get into classified programs. So you have to clear the room. You know, ‘All right, everybody out till we get that one done, now everybody back in,’ ” McCain told reporters at the time.
“We only get a couple days” and an open markup could impede “the process of getting the bill done,” he said.
The national defense authorization acts serves as a policy roadmap for all Defense Department programs and efforts.
Half of the Senate committee’s subpanels — Readiness and Management, Emerging Threats and Capabilities and Personnel — will be open to the public when they begin crafting the bill next week, according to its web site. But three others — Airland, Seapower and Strategic Forces — will be classified.
The committee is not alone in its criticism, as other transparency groups, most notably the Project On Government Oversight, have lobbied Armed Services members to open deliberations.
“In recent years, subcommittee chairmen have opened about half of their markups. We have been encouraged by these efforts to bring more transparency to the committee’s legislative process. That transparency has enabled reporters to understand and inform the public of the committee’s priorities and decision making process,” the panel wrote.
The journalists noted that the House Armed Services Committee holds its markup of the defense policy blueprint in public.
“The process of making decisions should itself be visible to the American people in real time – as it is in most other corners of Congress,” the panel wrote. “We are hopeful that you will consider our point of view ahead of next week ‘s markups.”