NEWS

‘Save that email!’ Mark Meadows bill says

Mark Barrett
ASH

Deleting emails that are supposed to be preserved would become a firing offense for federal employees under a bill sponsored by 11th District U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows.

The bill winning approval in the U.S. House last week would also require that federal workers who use personal email accounts or other electronic communications like texts or instant messaging for official business ensure that the messages are kept for posterity — or the next congressional investigation.

Meadows, a Jackson County Republican, says the legislation stems in part from his frustration at the disappearance of thousands of emails at the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS issue surfaced when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Meadows sits on investigated the IRS investigation of the tax-exempt status of tea party and other groups active on political issues.

“We heard that emails were not being kept. More importantly than that, a lot of the communication that goes on is with instant messaging and other forms of communication” that are not typically archived, Meadows said Monday.

It appears the bill would not tamper with Congress’ exemption from key laws governing public access to and preservation of records. Although getting the records often takes months, federal law does require that the executive branch allow anyone who asks to see many records. The law does not apply to the House, Senate or the judiciary.

Meadows’ bill would require suspension and eventual dismissal of employees found to have willfully destroyed records. It would direct that the National Archives write specific rules on retention of electronic records.

Federal law requires that many government records be preserved permanently and sets up a schedule agencies use to decide when to dispose of less important ones.

People at nonprofits in the Washington, D.C., area that advocate for more government openness said the federal government for years has done a poor job of keeping email and other electronic documents.

“We see all the time that valuable records are being lost, partially through poor technology and partially because federal employees don’t respect the importance of documents of historic value,” said Nate Jones, Freedom of Information Act Coordinator for the National Security Archive. The archive obtains government records relating to security issues and makes them publicly available.

A June letter sent by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to congressional leaders on the issue cited issues with the administrations of President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush as evidence of the need for changes.

Patrice McDermott, executive director of Open the Government.org, said agencies do not make keeping electronic records a high priority.

“The agencies have fallen down as far as providing guidance to employees as to how to properly maintain email and instant messages and that sort of thing,” she said. “It’s a failure government-wide (and) ... a massive, massive problem.”

There are cases in which workers deliberately destroy records, but it is more common for employees to either not know what to do with the records or for an agency not to set up reliable methods for keeping them, she said.

Meadows said it seems like it should be fairly easy to save emails, but many parts of government don’t have the proper technology.

“A lot of the agencies are operating on 1990s (email) backup systems,” he said.

Some agencies tell their employees to print out emails and put the paper documents in a file, he said, but that system is cumbersome and not always followed.

Getting emails needed for some of committee investigations has “been harder than the average, Main Street American taxpayer would ever imagine,” he said.

The bill passed the House on a voice vote Wednesday and was sent to the Senate. The number of days Congress will be in session this year is dwindling, but Meadows said he hopes the bill can become part of another bill affecting the IRS he expects to be passed in a “lame duck” session after the November election.