Presidential Records Act Requires Modernization, Lawmakers Say

Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked Brook Colangelo, the Executive Office of the President’s CIO, if he had seen anybody using iPads in the White House. “Are any of these carried into the White House?” Issa asked while holding up an iPad. Colangelo said he had seen iPads being used in the White House. Issa said White House correspondence transmitted via iPads or other communications devices is not being adequately recorded and new legislation is needed to address technological changes. “Clearly policy is not getting the job done,” he said.

Banning the use of personal email accounts by White House staffers should be part of the PRA update, said Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, D-Md. “We must ensure that records of official communications are preserved,” he said. In the last Congress, Cummings introduced HR-1144, the Transparency and Openness in Government Act, which included amendments to modernize the 33-year-old Presidential Records Act. The bill died before reaching a full vote.

The White House implements strict policies and training to guide staffers on PRA compliance, said Colangelo, and it uses filters to block access to Web-based email services and social networking sites. Use of Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger and Skype are forbidden to all but 2 percent of White House staffers, he said. The 2 percent are lawyers and staffers on the White House media team tasked with maintaining President Obama’s social networking accounts. The White House has official profiles on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, Flickr, iTunes and UStream.

All White House tweets and any replies are automatically archived in an RSS feed that’s converted into an email and preserved by the White House email archiving system, said Colangelo. The White House Office of Records Management also saves screen shots of wall posts to the White House Facebook account. Colangelo admitted that direct messages sent to and from the White House Facebook account are not recorded or saved. Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., said lawmakers should address the gap in the White House’s Web archives in order to preserve important official correspondence. “We've got a large volume and a lot of interactions with constituents and people in the White House that is not being tracked,” said Lankford. “We need to find a solution to that.”

The retention of records is another problematic issue, said David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. Right now many agencies have a 30-year retention policy, something which Ferriero testified was “incredibly dangerous.” “Because of changes in technology, 30 years to retain records in an agency is a very long time,” he told the committee. “There is a great risk of loss of records in 30 years.” Ferriero said he was supportive of the policy changes outlined in Cummings’ bill and asked that lawmakers address data retention issues in their proposed amendments.

Stearns Probes Visitor Logs

The usefulness of public White House visitor logs came under GOP scrutiny in a simultaneous hearing Tuesday morning of the House Commerce Oversight Subcommittee. Issa has cited the logs to raise concerns about the number of White House meetings made by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, and specifically their timing in relationship to major events in the agency’s net neutrality rulemaking (CD April 20 p9). Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., shares Issa’s concerns about the Genachowski visits, he told us after the hearing.

Only 1 percent of logs of 500,000 meetings from Obama’s first eight months in office have been released, and two-thirds of the 1 million names released are people on guided group tours, Stearns said during the hearing. White House visitor logs don’t show who actually took part in meetings, and “thousands” of known visitors, including numerous lobbyists, are simply missing from the logs, Stearns said. Administration officials have also allegedly avoided disclosure by having meetings at the White House conference center and at a nearby Caribou Coffee and requiring lobbyists to sign confidentiality agreements, Stearns and other subcommittee Republicans said.

The visitor logs have limitations because they were built for the U.S. Secret Service to ensure visitors pose no threat to White House security, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “They are not an analog to appointment calendars and datebooks” that might be kept by White House officials, she said. The logs aren’t designed for full disclosure, agreed Sunlight Foundation Policy Director John Wonderlich.

Stearns berated the Obama administration for not testifying at the hearing. Brad Kiley, director of the White House Office of Management and Administration, didn’t accept the subcommittee’s invitation, he said. “This failure to send any witness to a hearing about White House transparency, while depriving the public of the administration’s perspective, is revealing in its own way about the administration’s true attitudes,” Stearns said.

Democrats said Obama has been more voluntarily transparent than former President George W. Bush. And they criticized the hearing as politically partisan. If the Commerce Committee wants to “fully understand White House policies and practices, it makes little sense to have a hearing without a White House representative present,” complained Ranking Member Diana DeGette, D-Colo. Stearns gave the White House only six days notice, after the White House already provided a witness to the Issa hearing taking place at the same time, she said. Full committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., agreed: “I must say, it’s hard to take this hearing seriously."

The request for a White House witness “came very late and did not leave sufficient time to prepare,” a White House official told us when asked for comment on Stearns’ remarks. An administration witness already was testifying before Issa’s Oversight Committee that morning, the official added.