As the Justice Department hunts for the latest batch of missing federal e-mails, the officials who oversee spending of $71 billion a year for information technology got a big raspberry Friday for a 14-year-long failure to ensure that government e-mails are preserved.
For all the spending it oversees, the Federal Chief Information Officers Council is virtually unknown to the general public. Now it has “won” this year’s Rosemary Award for the worst open government performance.
The Rosemary is bestowed by the National Security Archive, a private group that publishes declassifed government information and files lawsuits and many Freedom of Information Act requests for federal records. The award is named for former President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods, known for re-enacting her claim to have accidentally erased 18 1/2 minutes of a White House tape recording when she stretched to answer a phone.
Comprised of the chief information officials from 28 departments and agencies, the council was established by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and written into law by Congress in 2002. It describes itself as the “principle interagency forum for improving practices in the design, modernization, use, operation, sharing, and performance of federal government information resources.”
The archive, however, said neither the council’s founding documents, its 2007-2009 strategic plan, its transition memo for the Obama administration, nor its current Web site even mention the challenge of managing e-mail records.
“The CIO Council has a bad case of attention deficit disorder when it comes to the e-mail disaster in the federal government,” said archive director Tom Blanton, author of a book on an e-mail lawsuit against the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. “We hope this year’s Rosemary Award will serve as a wake up call to the government officials who have the power, the money and the responsibility to save the e-mail sent in…