Federal Manager's Daily Report

The bipartisan leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have asked 55 agencies to describe their policies on conducting official business on non-official electronic accounts including email, text messaging and social media.

Information requested includes what policies are in place to ensure that such communications are “properly captured and preserved as federal records,” how the agency complies with FOIA requests that may require searching such accounts; and the names of any senior officials who had used a non-official account to conduct official business since the start of 2016.

The committee meanwhile is set to advance to the full House two bills related to federal agency record-keeping requirements:

HR 745 requires the firing of an employee found to have willfully and unlawfully altered, removed, or destroyed a federal record; prohibits individuals covered by the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act from using non-official electronic communications unless they submit those communications for proper archival storage within 20 days; and requires agencies to publish on their websites a description of records that have been lost, altered, or destroyed.

HR-1376 would instruct the Archivist of the United States to issue regulations requiring agencies to electronically capture, preserve, and manage electronically created federal records; and require agencies to report to the Archivist on compliance with the new regulations and make the reports publicly available on the agency’s website.