What secrecy regimes do best is chop up the federal government into self-contained pockets of activity that are officially deemed no one else's business. The Pentagon's secrets are kept from the CIA, the State Department's from the National Security Council, the Navy's from the Air Force, and so on. The cost of these systems has grown exponentially over the past two decades. But these estimates only take into account the costs of physical safeguarding of secret information and background checks for people obtaining security clearances. The true costs of the secrecy systems are at least 10 times larger, according to those who manage them for the defense and intelligence agencies.
Secrecy prevents government officials from talking to each other, preventing budgeting efficiencies.
It requires employees to wait for security clearances, raising labor costs. Outside personnel security experts estimate that the extra costs of labor in highly compartmentalized operations are four to seven times higher than they would otherwise be. The case began in 1988, after two employees at the Lockheed Missile and Space Division plant in Sunnyvale, Calif., gave up on trying to persuade Lockheed and government supervisors to correct what they felt was a practice of deliberate overcharging by Lockheed on government contracts since 1979. The employees, Margaret Newsham and Martin Bloem, hired Guy T. Saperstein, a prominent California plaintiffs' attorney. They sued Lockheed under the federal False Claims Act, which allows citizens to sue on the government's behalf.