Within hours of the State Department’s release of thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton’s private emails earlier this week, the agency quietly took the first steps toward implementing a system to keep track of its emails.
State Department officials sent out a request for information Monday in an effort to gather suggestions about how best to put together a system for managing official emails by the end of next year, a deadline imposed on all federal agencies by President Obama.
The new system would automatically separate personal emails from professional ones and permanently archive the official records. State’s presently outdated email network forces employees to print out hard copies of emails they are legally required to keep and file them away for posterity, NextGov reported.
The State Department has come under fire this year in the wake of a national political scandal over Clinton’s use of a private server to shield her official communications from the public while she served as secretary of state.
Agency officials have been reluctant to answer questions about who, if anyone, approved the controversial arrangement within the agency.
Clinton’s email imbroglio touched off a government-wide push to ban the use of private email for official communications.
Few State Department officials have followed instructions to print out and save official agency emails, the inspector general found earlier this year.
Agency staff retained just a fraction of their emails in 2011, when the watchdog found “employees created 61,156 record emails out of more than a billion emails sent.”
They printed and kept just 41,749 emails in 2013.
State’s request for information this week represents only the first step in what could be a long and costly process before the agency is slated to have the new system in place, which is on or before Dec. 31, 2016.
