Public employee unions have their sights set on cloaking municipal pension systems in secrecy – and allies among elected officials are cooperating in a horrendous assault on the public’s right to know.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Controller John Liu and four of the five borough presidents have broken faith with the principle that everyone gets to inspect how the city spends money, why the city spends money and who has received payment.

This tenet of open government explains why the public has access to city salaries, from the mayor to cops to teachers to clerks, as well as why taxpayers can review every check issued by the city, from payment for a multibillion-dollar contract to an expense account item for a sandwich.

You want it, you got it. No questions asked. Except, now, in the case of pension payments. The unions want to release only the amounts paid to retirees while concealing the names of recipients, depriving the public and the press of vital data.

Should the unions succeed, for example, they would bar anyone from checking whether a former cop or firefighter who won a three-quarter disability pension is truly disabled. No more would the public learn about the all-too-common case of the ex-cop who claimed he was incapable of duty yet competes in triathlons.

The police pension fund started this retreat into secrecy by refusing to give the names of retirees to the Empire Center, a taxpayer watchdog that intended to post the data online.

Preposterously, the fund claimed that pensioners’ security could be jeopardized. Even more preposterously, a Manhattan Supreme Court justice agreed that the Freedom of Information Law did not apply. That lunacy has been appealed.

Meantime, other pension funds – including the largest, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System – have taken the same stance. Attempting to roll back that move, Mayor Bloomberg’s representative on the fund’s board forced a vote on releasing pensioners’ names.

De Blasio and Liu abstained and, even worse, four borough presidents voted no: Helen Marshall of Queens, Ruben Diaz of the Bronx, Marty Markowitz of Brooklyn and Scott Stringer of Manhattan. Only Jim Molinaro of Staten Island voted for healthy and lawful transparency.

Both de Blasio and Liu were elected with union support and have tilted toward labor in office. They explained their abstentions by saying the vote was rushed and that they needed more time to consider security concerns. De Blasio added that city lawyers had recommended abstention.

None of which amounts to a hill of beans. Public records are public records, and de Blasio, Liu, Marshall, Diaz, Markowitz and Stringer ought to get through their heads that New York does not have a Freedom from Information Law.

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