IT politics killed White House email project
Data archiving in the White House is a serious business mandated by the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was passed following the Watergate scandal. The Act requires the White House to maintain an historical archive of its activities, policies, and decisions. Despite this law, the White House email archiving system is a model of poor IT practice and has been called "primitive," "inadequate," and "not robust." The system fails to fulfill its most basic requirements: enabling reliable backup, storage, and restore capabilities.