Businesses enjoyed a no-bid process for 26 percent, or $107.5 billion, of the federal government's business last year.

President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements challenging 1,149 provisions of laws passed by Congress. Before 2000, presidents had signed fewer than 600 statements over the nation's 211-year history.

The Defense Department has more than doubled in real terms the amount it spends on classified weapons acquisitions since 1995. While the number of classification decisions actually dropped by 10 percent to 231,995 last year, the number of documents related to each one of those decisions ballooned to 20.3 million, up by 43 percent.

And those figures do not include the untold number of documents that are locked away by federal agencies in categories known as "pseudo-classification." These are unclassified documents that government bureaucrats deem too sensitive for public consumption. There is no oversight of these categories to ensure that the documents should be removed from the public domain.

The report also found that the Bush administration has invoked a legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.

Between 1977 and 2000, administrations used the privilege 59 times. Over the past six years, the White House has invoked the privilege 38 times, more than double the rate of administrations during that time frame.

Government secrecy is a bipartisan problem. Open government advocates say it has worsened under the Bush administration because government bureaucrats feel empowered to conceal more information in the name of "homeland security." At the same time, the Democratic-controlled Congress has only just begun to exercise its oversight authority.

The state secrets privilege cannot be found in the U.S. Code, the code of federal regulations or the Constitution. Instead, it is a part of common law, the body of laws and precedents created over centuries of legal decisions. When the government believes that a civil suit might reveal secrets injurious to the country, the head of the appropriate government agency must review the matter and submit a signed affidavit attesting to the danger of the lawsuit or documents that might be disclosed.

Judges almost invariably agree to such requests, according to William Weaver, a law professor and senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

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