The Government's Records Management System Was Dismantled to Retain and Grow Its Power
By eliminating the disposition of Federal records - which are now defined as "all recorded information" - the government has increased its power to levels not seen in human history.
With an estimated net worth of $394 billion dollars, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world - but he is not the most powerful.
At this point in his life, it is meaningless to Musk if he earns another billion dollars. Or if he loses it. It is meaningless to him because there is very little incremental change in what he can do with that money given what he already has.
It is different with information. In the age of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, the metaverse, deep fakes, and algorithms that control every aspect of our lives, the power that the accumulation of additional information provides never diminishes.
Today information - not gold, not the dollar, not bitcoin - is the world’s most valuable currency. And the man who has access to the most information is the most powerful person in the world.
Like all powerful tools, information in the wrong hands (corrupt governments, in particular) can have disastrous, even horrific, consequences. This was the thinking behind the Hoover Commission’s recommendation to include the ensured destruction of all agency records as a requirement in the bill sent to Congress that led to the creation of the Federal Records Act (FRA).
With the passage of the FRA in 1950, all agency records must be destroyed after they are no longer (legally) useful to the Federal government. (Technically, this doesn’t apply to the 2%-3% of agency records that are considered to be of historical value and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for permanent preservation. However, once those records have been transferred to NARA, the agency loses custody of them and any versions of those records remaining at the agency must be forensically destroyed.)
In his terrifically prescient 2015 article for The Atlantic, “If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy”, Walter Kirn wrote about his trip in “knee-deep” snow and freezing temperatures just to see, in person, the National Security Agency’s massive Utah Data Center that maintained records the NSA had “silently collected - the phone logs, e-mails, browsing histories, generated by a population engaged in the treasonous business of daily life.”
Kirn suggested these NSA records could be used by the government to sell the American public on any number of things, including, “Policies. Programs. Maybe even wars.”
Does any of that sound familiar a decade later after the COVID epidemic, the crisis at our borders, and the countless proxy wars spread all over the globe?
The NSA records that Kirn was so concerned about were collected at least 10 years ago. By now, most of these records - possibly all of them - should have met their NARA-approved retention requirements and been destroyed in compliance with the FRA. After all, what justification could the NSA possibly have for keeping innocent Americans’ phone records for more than a few months, much less than an entire decade?
But the government completely dismantled the Federal records management system during the first few months of the Obama administration, beginning with the appointment of David Ferriero as Archivist of the United States. Since that time, no Federal agency has been in compliance with the Federal Records Act, the Privacy Act, or any of a multitude of other Federal records management laws and regulations.
And no Federal agency has defensibly destroyed even a single Federal record.
The NSA records Walter Kirn wrote about ten years ago are still maintained at the NSA’s Utah data center. As are the millions - possibly billions - of additional records the NSA has collected since. The reason they are still there is the same reason no other agency is complying with the FRA: the more information the agency has, the more powerful the Federal Administrative State becomes.
Every government watchdog, on both sides of the political aisle, publicly champions government records management as the primary means for holding the Federal government accountable. And they are right to do so. What they’ve missed over the last 16 or so years is that dismantling the Federal records management system was done as a means to increase the government’s power over the American people.
Eluding accountability was only an added bonus.
The Department of Government Efficiency recently announced plans to audit Ft. Knox. This would be prudent given that the gold stored there belongs to the American people and we have every right to know how it is being managed.
But the gold stored at Ft. Knox is estimated to be worth less than half a trillion dollars. All information the Federal government creates also belongs to the American people and it is impossible to put a price on the power controlling it provides.
If Elon Musk and his team at DOGE want to limit the power of the Federal Administrative State and protect the public’s Constitutional rights, the next agency DOGE audits must be National Archives and Records Administration.