Under an Obama-era executive order that retained a Bush-era order, vice presidents have the authority to classify and declassify documents — just like presidents. There is some ambiguity about whether they have the power to order departments and agencies to declassify material deemed secret by those agencies, but the scope of this power has never been tested. In January 2023, after news broke that federal documents pertaining to U.S. President Joe Biden's tenure as vice president were uncovered at his former office and Delaware home, critics pushed the erroneous notion that he didn't have the authority, while serving under Obama, to declassify those files. Nonetheless, the matter was irrelevant to the U.S. Department of Justice's review of Biden's handling of such files.