Nobody in the Federal Government Will Ever Be Held Accountable for Their Response to the COVID Epidemic
Nobody. Ever. HHS agencies have no systems that support the public's Constitutional right to accountability and transparency.
Even before the Federal Records Act was passed in 1950, agency records management - executed in good faith - was the sole source of the American public’s right to hold the government accountable for its behavior. This has always been true, even after the government transitioned from agency information recorded on paper to records maintained throughout their lifecycle in an electronic format.
Given the government’s highly dubious response to the COVID-19 epidemic, electronic records management at the agencies that fall under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services will be critical to holding the government accountable for any mistakes it made in - and any potentially criminal behavior during - its response to the epidemic.
But, shockingly, none of these agencies have complied with any of their records management requirements since the early 2000s.
Here’s proof from one of these agencies, the Food and Drug Administration, where I worked for IBM supporting electronic records management for nearly two years, ending in April 2018.
As any qualified records management professional will tell you, the very first step in developing a records management system is conducting a comprehensive records inventory. After all, you can’t manage your records if you don't know where they are.
Here is a screenshot of the Statement of Work I consulted under at the FDA in Silver Springs, MD:
Notice the SOW refers to an FDA records inventory as “foundational work”. This is because an inventory is foundational to the future development of an enterprise-wide electronic records management solution.
Also notice the last sentence states that “the completion of an inventory will enable the agency to pivot toward Electronic Record-Keeping technology more readily.” My work at the FDA began in the second option year of a four-year Period of Performance. The last option year of the inventory was scheduled to be completed in August 2019. The agency was at least a year behind schedule on this inventory while I was there. But even if they completed it on schedule, that would have meant that the agency was just starting to “pivot toward” electronic records management the very same year that the COVID epidemic began.
Still not convinced? Take a look at this:
This is a screenshot of a draft document created by the FDA’s Risk, e-Discovery, and Records Managment (RERM) team in response to questions they received from Dr. Michael Ortwerth, then-Director of the Advisory Committee Oversight and Management Staff. Dr. Ortwerth had expressed his concern to the RERM team that he believed the FDA had no electronic records management system, and that ACOMS was in violation of its legal responsibility to ensure the American people could hold the FDA’s Advisory Committees accountable for the critically important decisions they make.
Note the two comments on the right of this draft document, written by RERM team members. In the first comment, the RERM team member explains Dr. Orwerth’s original question asking if the FDA has an agency-wide records management system that his ACOMS teams should be using. The RERM team member explains that he responded to Dr. Orwerth’s question by informing him of RERM’s efforts “to develop a uniform electronic [records management] process and mutually agreed upon system that would satisfy the entire agency.” The important word used here is ‘develop’.
In the second comment, the RERM team member admits that, to her knowledge, “no agency-wide records management repository has been established.”
There are similar comments throughout this document, but these two alone make it clear that Dr. Orwerth’s concerns were valid.
The FDA, like all other HHS agencies, has no system in place to manage the lifecycle of electronically born agency records in compliance with any of the dozens of records management laws and regulations it is subject to. This means they are incapable of proving the authenticity, integrity, and provenance of any agency information they provide in response to FOIA requests, civil or criminal litigation, or Congressional investigations. And any records they do provide are inadmissible by the government’s own evidentiary standards.
The bureaucrats at the FDA don’t want to be held accountable for how they responded to the pandemic or how they tested and approved vaccines that may prove more deadly than the virus they failed to prevent. But even if they had the moral courage to defend their actions during an unprecedented time of worldwide crisis, any claim they make can never be proven - or disproven - and we will never know the truth about what the government has done over these last few very difficult years.