From politico.com
The CDC has likely been violating federal law for years by systematically deleting lower-level employees’ emails, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras came in a lawsuit brought by a legal group allied with former President Donald Trump and was accompanied by an order forcing the public health agency to immediately halt the erasures.
“The Court concludes that CDC’s policy and practice of disposing of former employees’ emails ninety days after the end of their employment is likely unlawful,” Contreras wrote in a 36-page opinion.
Contreras, an Obama appointee, found that the agency had been employing a records-retention policy that had not been approved by the National Archives. That policy led the agency to delete lower-level employees’ emails 90 days after their departure from the agency, rather than the three-to-seven-year retention required by standard National Archives procedures.
The judge said the CDC, along with all other Department of Health and Human Services agencies, had adopted a National Archives protocol known as Capstone that calls for senior officials’ emails to be preserved permanently and sets retention periods of between three and seven years for messages in the accounts of lower-level employees. CDC maintained it only signed on to part of the Capstone approach, but Contreras said the agency appeared to have embraced the whole plan and then abandoned part of it without permission.
“The available evidence suggests that CDC did indeed commit to manage and dispose of its employees’ emails pursuant to the [Capstone] schedule,” Contreras wrote. “Because CDC disposed of former employees’ email records pursuant to a schedule that was not approved by the Archivist, it is likely that … records removed or deleted under the CDC’s unapproved policy were removed or deleted unlawfully.”
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