Executive Order 13292

Executive Order 13292 was an executive order issued by United States President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, entitled "Further Amendment to Executive Order 12958, as Amended, Classified National Security Information." The Executive Order modified the manner in which sensitive information was handled at the time as set out by President Bill Clinton's 1995 executive order.

Clinton's order set declassification deadlines for classified material and made it harder for politicians to classify information. Bush's order appears to allow much more information to be classified and for longer periods; the wording is hard to decipher in some areas. It also appears to give more power over classification to the Offices of the President and Vice President, but the wording used was not properly defined in the listing of relevant definitions now consolidated into their own section in Part 6 of the Executive Order.

Among the various changes made to the 1995-based regulations, Executive Order 13292 notably:

A more extensive analysis of the changes from the previous executive order was compiled by the group Public Citizen.

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney said in a February 15, 2006, interview, "There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President." This was based in the then newly added but undefined and untested wording stipulating the Vice President's ability to exercise classification authority rested “in the performance of [his] executive duties,”. The phrase no longer appears in Executive Order 13526 though the Vice President is directly listed rather than amended in separately via a standard Order.

Byron York of the National Review noted, "Throughout Executive Order 13292, there are changes to the original Clinton order which, in effect, give the vice president the power of the president in dealing with classified material....Executive Order 13292 is further evidence of real power in the vice president's office."

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