In a sadly predictable turn of events, the Environmental Protection Agency informed the House Oversight Committee today that it is has also lost emails the committee wants as part of a separate investigation.
CNN reports:
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told the Republican-led committee that the agency cannot access some e-mails belonging to a biologist who worked on a controversial mining project assessment. It is a hard drive problem, but McCarthy was careful to not call it a "hard drive crash" or destroyed hard drive.
"I don't believe this is a missing hard drive issue," McCarthy told the panel, "There is a challenge getting access to the data on it... I'm still hoping we recover all those e-mails."
"I heard similar testimony yesterday," replied Rep. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina, dryly referring to the committee's Tuesday hearing about a critical crashed hard drive at the IRS.
[...]
Meadows pressed McCarthy on whether the agency broke federal records-keeping law. "Were all his emails preserved according to the Federal Records Act or was a law violated?"
McCarthy answered that the EPA notified the National Archives and Records Administration about the hard drive problem Tuesday.
"I think we have notified the appropriate authorities that we may have some e-mails that we cannot produce that we should have kept."
(You can read the full article here.)
Surprised? You shouldn't be. As we discussed in a previous article, bureaucracies will always tend toward corruption and poor management. It's time we take real steps to limit the size and power of this country's bureaucracies, and a Convention of States is the best way to do it.
