None of your business.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The weight of the evidence - that is, the evidence anyone can pry loose - is that the Bush administration is addicted to selective secrecy. The compulsion to withhold information permeates the president's management culture so completely that mid-level bureaucrats no longer need to be told to clam up.

The latest manifestation of the administration's "don't ask, don't tell" information policy apparently affects any agency that has "national" in its name. That's got to be the reason the National Park Service has ordered its superintendents to cut back on services to save money - without telling anyone about it.

Residents in the Northeast might want to call ahead before motoring off to a national park or historic site on a holiday. According to a memo leaked by former park service employees who are critical of how the cuts are being handled, park supers are going to consider closing smaller historic sites a couple of days a week, closing some parks on Sundays and Mondays and shutting down visitor centers on federal holidays.

Of course, the National Park Service's entire $2.56 billion budget is chump change compared with the $151.5 billion the administration apparently failed to inform Congress about during debate on the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Evidence continues to mount that nine months ago, Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, estimated the 10-year cost of the prescription drug benefit at $551.5 billion. At that time, the White House had given Congress a $400 billion estimate.

Foster went public with his June estimate last week, saying that he believed he would have been fired had he released his figures earlier without White House permission. Democrats are pressing for hearings and threatening to sue administration officials for information.

Increasingly, courts may be the only way to access certain kinds of information, because the Bush administration is classifying documents at an impressive clip. Three times as much information was deemed confidential by the administration in 2002 as was classified by the Clinton administration in 1999.

According to the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the White House deleted cautionary information and added reassuring language to an Environmental Protection Agency statement that declared the air and water outside ground zero in New York to be safe. An inspector general's report showed that the White House sought to reassure rather than to protect New Yorkers and that the EPA did not have sufficient information to claim the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe.

The sad thing is that such revelations neither shock nor surprise nearly enough people. The combination of post-Sept. 11 paranoia and a deplorable apathy among much of the public about the need for open government has made it possible for the Bush administration to become the most secretive since Richard Nixon was in the White House.

Americans will get the kind of government they are willing to accept. Unless citizens demand greater transparency from their elected representatives, government officials will continue to yield to the powerful urge to keep things hidden.