As he aggressively seeks the sources of news media leaks of government secrets, President Obama might want to pay close attention to an important and overdue new report that he ordered on classified information from the Public Interest Declassification Board.

The report warns that an entrenched system of extreme overclassification of government information ultimately invites leaking. It further concludes that the current system of classifying and declassifying secrets is so dysfunctional and “risk-averse” that democracy suffers in its need for timely information about the workings of government.

The board, composed of government veterans and academic specialists, urged Mr. Obama to create a special White House committee with a mandate to reform a stultified, 70-year-old system in which the keeping of secrets is growing exponentially while declassification lags as an afterthought. From 1995 to 2011, 1.27 billion pages of information were declassified for the public — a drop in the bucket compared with the trillions of newly classified pages each year. One illustration of the backlog of information to review: George W. Bush’s presidential library has a digital archive 20 times larger than that of his father’s library.

“At its most benign, secrecy impedes informed government decisions and an informed public; at worst, it enables corruption and malfeasance,” the board reminded the president. The report urged far more transparency and a thorough shake-up of the bureaucratic inertia that favors overclassification. The board recommended that the current classifications of top secret, secret and confidential be cut to two categories and that supervisors be encouraged to assume “good faith” on the part of classifiers who, after weighing a document’s relative values, conclude no secret is at stake.