Excellent news! Now. About those consequences for the scrubbers…
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Netflix materiel here. Just have to come up with a title 
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Won’t matter unless people are held to account for breaking the rules. How many drump WH staff were using personal accounts for goverment work and using things like encrypted chat? And yet I don’t hear of even a whisper of those rules being enforced.
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“Guilty verdicts were reached?”
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Why the f don’t they just have a WhatsApp style texting app that all govt employees use for govt communications? Or have archiving software on all govt phones that is always posting texts to an archive server?
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God-emperors never make mistakes. It’s part of the job description.
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Ted Cruz will soon be telling us why retaining messages is federal tyranny.
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Admit. The verb is “admit.” 
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Somebody’s been reading their Old Testament!
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Agree!
The only question I have is whether they intentionally did it this once vs. intentionally doing it all the time to cover more crimes & indiscretions. At this point, I suspect the latter.
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Because most e-mails, texts and other stuff are not official records falling under the requirements to retain them. Only a small percentage of the stuff actually falls under it.
A lot of other material in day-to-day business is supposed to be destroyed after certain periods of time.
So you’ve got a mish-mash of rules, “keep this, delete that”, all applicable to the same devices.
I blame Congress. They could clean up the disconnects of things like the Privacy Act and where there are conflicts with the records retention stuff, but Congress being Congress, good luck with that ever happening.
And for certain they’re not going to push extra funding to Agencies to pay for just blanket backing up of everything.
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Each person likely has a laptop that is assigned to them, as well as their agency provided phone. Why not use a program that would back up messages from the phone onto the hard drive of the laptop every time the phone is connected to the computer? That way every time the phone was connected to the computer to charge it the messages would be archived.
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Part of it might just be government inertia. The idea of text communications that can be stored on a server is relatively new, and apparently there is no law about preserving government employee phone records after they leave employment, or when phone systems are upgraded. Nothing like the Presidential records act. Looks like that will be changing now.
Another thing is compartmentalization between agencies. I would assume the Secret Service needs a more robust and secure way to communicate than other agencies. Especially when on protection duty overseas. I doubt they’re going through local telecoms on those trips. They’re probably using their own encrypted telecom channels and servers.
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I don’t know if it’s that unlikely. The R’s will want to scrape info from government employees on their bogus investigations as soon as they get back in power, so they might go for it.
I’m not sure privacy would be an issue. Everyone issued a government phone also carries a personal phone these days. So it can be assumed, if not always followed in practice, that the government phone is used for government business with no privacy issues.
As for the cost, phone text and email files take up very little room on a server. Keeping full backups should be trivial, easily automated.
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Perhaps not deleting them would work.
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My cell phone backs up automatically to the cloud. Automatic backups are not high-tech. This is a standard feature that’s easy to use on all phones. Certainly the government could design a server for backups with the requisite security.
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OT but…
Every GOPer in the House and Senate ought to be fired.
What lesson does this send? To not pay your bills on time??
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And it happened that…
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Not their privacy, the privacy of others. If you’ve had to deal with a government agency on a problem, like through a congressional complaint or whatever, your information quite likely has passed through someone’s inbox out there. And stuff like that generally is excluded from those records retention things, and can (like when including health information or SSNs or like) even have requirements for deletion after some period of time.
Then you’re going to run into the encryption thing, that things are encrypted to individuals, so mass backups don’t do an agency much good at all if the individual has left-- they’ve just got a useless full-disk-encrypted hard drive or device that’s not going to tell them anything. So you’d have to set up something that takes it out of that environment (and without violating all of the other rules, can’t have it just sitting out there accessible to anyone depending on what data are therein).
Solvable? Yes. Gonna take legislation and a bunch of money and some big contracts? Also yes.
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If it’s a government-run phone server and not going through a standard telecom, then there shouldn’t be a problem with the sysadmin having a master key to open encrypted phone data. I don’t know how much of the government’s phone systems are set up that way though.