Darrell Issa: “In closing, I just want to hit two points that I think are noteworthy. Historically, agencies kept their records for 30…”

“In closing, I just want to hit two points that I think are noteworthy. Historically, agencies kept their records for 30 years, the presumption they would keep them for 30 years before turning them over to the National Archives. With the ranking member's assistance, this piece of legislation also eliminates that presumption. We, as a committee, felt very strongly that the sooner an agency turns over its records to the Archivist, the sooner they are broadly available and the better off it is. In an electronic era, where it is a push of one button to transfer data, this piece of legislation not only eliminates that presumption, but highly encourages data be transferred, rather than mountains of paper or what is called a PDF, a print to file, if you will. This is a significant improvement and something that minority and majority were able to work on together, along with the Archivist who was personally involved in this. Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the ranking member. In this bill, the amendment he mentioned is included, but the ranking member also signed on to a letter asking that H.R. 5170 be taken up by the Senate, a more explicit attempt to change the recordkeeping outside of official use within the government. This has been an area in which multiple different Cabinet positions under multiple Presidents have found themselves with some very embarrassing failure to store and maintain the data.…”