Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Task Force on Controlled Unclassified Information

The President's Memorandum of May 27, 2009 on Classified Information and Controlled Unclassified Information, directed a Task Force, led by the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General, to review the Controlled Unclassified Information (“CUI”) Framework established in 2008 for the management of Sensitive but Unclassified1 (“SBU”) terrorism-related information. The Task Force undertook a 90-day study of the CUI Framework, the current regimes for managing SBU information in the Executive Branch, and, by extension, the sharing of that information with our non-federal information-sharing partners.

The Task Force concluded that Executive Branch performance suffers immensely from interagency inconsistency in SBU policies, frequent uncertainty in interagency settings as to exactly what policies apply to given SBU information, and the inconsistent application of similar policies across agencies. Additionally, the absence of effective training, oversight, and accountability at many agencies results in a tendency to over-protect information, greatly diminishing government transparency.

Although the CUI Framework is intended to improve the sharing of only terrorism-related information, the Task Force concluded that a single, standardized framework for marking, safeguarding, and disseminating all Executive Branch SBU is required to further the goals of:

-standardizing currently disparate terminology and procedures (represented by over 107 distinct SBU regimes);
-facilitating information-sharing through the promulgation of common and understandable rules for information protection and dissemination; and
-enhancing government transparency through policies and training that clarify the standards for protecting information within the Framework.