Cuomo’s Rule on Purging State Email Roils Albany

Maggie Miller, newly appointed as New York state’s chief information officer, faced a barrage of questions on a newly delicate matter: Why had Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration put in place a policy of automatically deleting state workers’ e-mails after 90 days? “All I can say is that I fully support the policy,” she said. One state lawmaker asked her whether “any other government, anywhere” had a comparable policy; she cited no government, nowhere. And she was also asked: Who came up with the idea in the first place? “It was already in place, I’m afraid, so I don’t know,” she replied. Frustrated at the meager explanation and alarmed at the prospect of a virtual incineration of records, government watchdog groups have demanded that the Cuomo administration rescind its policy.

Albany reacted in a way that only Albany can. It began with the introduction of two separate, but somewhat similar, bills seeking to preserve emails from deletion for at least seven years.

The office of the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, announced it would suspend its policy of automatically deleting e-mails while it considered a different approach.

Finally, the governor’s office weighed in, indicating it would be willing to adopt a new email retention policy for the state, as long as it also included Freedom of Information Law requirements that would apply equally “to all state officials and agencies.” (The Legislature is subject to the Freedom of Information Law in only a limited manner.)