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U.S.A.I.D. Official Orders Employees to Shred or Burn Classified and Personnel Records
(www.nytimes.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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This is the year 2025, and you all are worried about paper records?
Stop to think...where does a paper classified record come from? If "printed from a classified computer" didn't cross your mind, I suggest you check your underinformed outrage. Anything old enough to be historical should already be at the National Archives.
USAID is moving out of all its offices, so getting rid of paper copies of records falls squarely into Federal records retention policies.
There's likely a ton of shit from before personal computers were ubiquitous, that was never digitized.
That was all digitized during the Obama administration. NAR has it all.
FOIA your face off, see how much you end up with. It'll be plenty.
Specifically USAID classified files? I ask because I worked with a different segment of the US government during the Obama years and we sure as shit didn't have everything digitized.
My understanding was nearly everything that wasn't digitized internally by around 2013ish was with the Archives and in their remit to digitize as of was already with them anyway. Everything after that is all electronic so it can fill out the Development Clearinghouse (DEC). It's a whole lofty academic library aspiration, except that the DEC is a black hole because the search function sucks. Sucked. It's gone now.
Also, let's not divulge too much personal info in public by asking the right questions, OK? It'll be worth it.
Is USAID large enough that, being co-located with another large agency in 99% of its overseas locations, and working closely with that agency which manages numerous annexes with scifs around DC, that it should warrant its OWN classified system? Can you find any documents supporting that?
Is there already a well-established practice and policies of formal reporting from USAID using that other agency's system for unclassified documents?
Hint: https://fam.state.gov/fam/05fah02/05fah020440.html
What is the name of the classified system that other large agency, large enough to be a department, uses? Hint: it's a basic portmanteau in the document above.
Is that the same name as is found in this public document as showing that a small agency with only a few hundred or maaaaybe a thousand staff with S or higher clearances, producing very few classified documents per year per this same document, might be using? https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2018-06/9-000-16-001-p_0.pdf
Anyone who knows about this stuff in detail has zero feelings about shredding documents because they had to do that anyway to clean out their desks over the last month.
Thanks for the thorough response. It makes sense that different groups do things differently and the group I was working with was less forward-thinking/forward-mandated.
Also, shout-out to Archives for doing the thankless task of storing, organizing, and making accessible everyone's collective history.