j.r. leonard

Maybe? I think there's a reasonable logic behind giving the president final authority to declassify things while not giving him final authority on weather reports. They are really, really different things

The law was written with the idea that the President would exercise judgment about declassifying things with an eye towards the public benefit (balancing the needs of diplomacy, security, and public dialogue) rather than grift, personal pettiness, or recklessness.

I think it’s more basic than that. The authority to classify belongs to the president and is exercised through his designates. I imagine (but don’t know) that most functions of the executive work the same way

It's plausible to me that a competent president might face a situation where he knows the right thing to do is to declassify something; he has the whole picture. It's not plausible to me that there is a situation in which the right thing to do is to change a weather forecast

Similarly, I don't think he should be able to, for example, say that the census actually found 300 million people live in Alabama and that's how elections will be determined from now on because he's the president and has ultimate say so

The particulars are going to lie in the relevant legislation. Lots of authorities vested in the executive are explicitly given to “the president and his designates.” But often Congress directs the executive to follow certain guidelines, which I imagine is the case with the census