COVERT COSTS

You knew that Uncle Sam's pockets were deep, but did you ever figure he

could be keeping secrets that cost $5.6 billion a year to keep? That's

enough to run the Environmental Protection Agency for a year; enough to run

the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and

the Secret Service for more than a year; twice what's spent on operating

subsidies for public housing or on Head Start.

And CIA spending isn't included in the tally! The CIA, in case you hadn't

guessed, considers what it spends to classify documents to be ''Top Secret.''

Credit Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., with releasing the figures compiled by

the Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives and Records

Administration.

Just $15 million to $25 million is spent on declassification. Once a

government secret, always a secret, or so it seems.

It's no surprise that the Department of Defense is the biggest spender, at

$2.5 billion, or that the Department of Energy spends $98 million. There's

always a national-security argument to be made when nuclear weapons and

military actions are concerned, even though both agencies have been known to

stretch the argument to cover up their mistakes.

Actually, the suspicion is that most of the money spent by most federal

agencies is aimed at covering up mistakes or at defusing accountability. Why

should the Interior Department be spending $2.5 million on secrecy;

Agriculture, $1.1 million; the General Services Administration $1 million?

Congress by legislation, or the president by executive order, ought to take

away most agencies' ''Top Secret'' stamps. And let's have Congress pass

legislation automatically declassifying documents more than, say, 20 years

old. (What a boon that would be to historians!) Government secrecy has become

far more costly than taxpayers imagined or want to pay for.

Miami Herald