Officials question cost, scope of e-mail storage measure

A House bill to force the White House and federal agencies to improve e-mail retention received general support Wednesday from the National Archives, GAO and public advocacy groups, but the organizations diverged on whether the measure is too strong or toothless.

Many experts agreed that with executive branch officials increasingly making decisions through online collaboration, an outdated hodgepodge of paper-based systems that agencies use to keep key e-mails threatens the ability of historians to reconstruct important deliberations.

How aggressively Congress should push remains in question.

Introduced last week by three House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Democrats, the bill would update the Federal Records Act by mandating that agencies create systems for storing e-mail electronically. Many now use "print and file systems," deemed inadequate by the committee and GAO.

The measure takes aim at the Bush White House's inability to locate hundreds of days' worth of e-mail. The bill would hand National Archives power to set standards for White House e-mail retention. Now, under the Presidential Records Act, sitting presidents oversee White House records before passing them to the Archives when they leave office.

At a House Oversight and Government Reform Information Policy Subcommittee hearing Wednesday, National Archives officials backed the bill's goals, but urged reining it in.

"The potential costs of this proposed legislation are enormous," National General Counsel Gary Stern testified. He said an apparent requirement that agencies keep not just e-mail but electronic records such as instant messages could cost billions of dollars.

A requirement that records remain "accessible through electronic searches," would add other costs, Stern said.

Paul Wester, director of NARA's modern records program, raised constitutional questions. "To the extent the bill would assert NARA in a formal way is overseeing records management over the president, it's not clear ... whether it would be permissible under the constitution," Wester said.

Meanwhile, public advocacy groups want the bill beefed up. Patrice McDermott, director of the OpentheGovernment.org, an umbrella organization of nonprofits pushing for government transparency, said the 18 months the measure gives agencies to create e-mail storage systems is too long.

McDermott also urged financial incentives to force department heads to make records management a priority. "Agencies are going to need to be forced," she said.

Linda Koontz, GAO director of information management issues, said money used to review paper documents to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests would be reduced if electronic records could be quickly searched online.

House Oversight and Government Reform Information Policy Subcommittee Chairman William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., said "it will take a lot of work" to address concerns about the bill.

But Clay said the measure will be marked up soon by the subcommittee. He said the timeline for agencies to develop new e-mail record storage systems may be altered.