Has there been research on the effects of the Presidential Records Act
on White House decision making?
Several academic research papers have examined the Presidential Records Act, although the way that it has impacted Presidential behavior, for example, by disfavoring written communications, has been addressed only tangentially or in passing.
For example, Bruce Montgomery, "Presidential Materials: Politics and the Presidential Records Act" 66(1) The American Archivist 102–138 (2003), the abstract of which states:
President George W. Bush's Executive Order No. 13,233, issued on 1
November 2001, marked the latest attempt by the executive branch to
circumvent or otherwise nullify the key provisions of the Presidential
Records Act. Congress passed the Presidential Records Act in 1978 in
the wake of the Watergate scandals to assure public ownership and
control over presidential materials. Nonetheless, starting with the
presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was the first president to be covered
by the act, the executive branch has repeatedly attacked the statute
through various regulatory schemes and overly broad claims of
executive privilege. Indeed, with their historical reputations and
legacies at stake, presidents have never fully accepted the concept of
yielding control over their presidential materials. This article
reviews the troubling history of the Presidential Records Act and the
implications of the latest attempts to restrict access to presidential
papers.
It is also examined in the Congressional Research Service report of Wendy Ginsberg, "The Presidential Records Act: Background and Recent Issues for Congress" (2014), although it largely focuses on official Executive Orders issued about this PRA rather than investigating in any depth the impact it has had on Presidential behavior. But it does establish that there is no indication that there has been a decline in the generation of written Presidential records:
Pursuant to the PRA, presidential records are provided to NARA at the
end of each presidential administration. As a result, NARA has tracked
the increasing volume and varied electronic formats employed by each
administration.
According to NARA’s Report on Alternative Models for
Presidential Libraries, “Presidential Libraries … experienced an
explosive growth in the volume of electronic records, especially White
House email.” The report continued:
Presidential Library holdings in
electronic form are now much larger than the paper holdings. Indeed,
the email system for the George W. Bush Administration alone is many
times larger than the entire textual holdings of any other
Presidential Library. These electronic holdings bring new challenges
to processing and making available Presidential records. The sheer
volume exponentially increases what archivists have to search and
isolate as relevant to a request, a lengthy process in and of itself
before the review begins. Once review begins, the more informal
communication style embodied in Presidential record emails often
blends personal and record information in the same email necessitating
more redactions.
In that same report, NARA noted that the
Administration of William J. Clinton provided NARA 20 million
presidential record emails at the conclusion of the President’s
eight-year tenure.
In June 2010, the Government Accountability Office
(GAO) submitted testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and
National Archives on “The Challenges of Managing Electronic Records.”
GAO stated that the “[h]uge volumes of electronic information” were a
“major challenge” in agency record management.
"Electronic information
is increasingly being created in volumes that pose a significant
technical challenge to our ability to organize it and make it
accessible. An example of this growth is provided by the difference
between the digital records of the George W. Bush administration and
that of the Clinton administration: NARA has reported that the Bush
administration transferred 77 terabytes of data to the [National]
Archives [and Records Administration] on leaving office, which was
about 35 times the amount of data transferred by the Clinton
administration."
On April 25, 2013, a NARA blog post provided
additional details on the records being transferred to the George W.
Bush Library and Museum in Dallas, TX—“more than 70 million pages of
textual records, 43,000 artifacts, 200 million emails (totaling
roughly 1 billion pages), and 4 million digital photographs (the
largest holding of electronic records of any of our libraries).” This
amounts to a 3,500% increase in the volume of electronic records
created when comparing one two-term administration to the next—an
eight-year period.
The rapid increase in the volume of electronic
presidential records does not present challenges in terms of demands
on physical space for storage. Electronic records, however, may
present challenges in terms of the collection of and perpetual access
to the diverse and often ephemeral platforms used to create the
records.
It is also examined tangentially in the book by GA Risetter, "Nixon's Ghost: The Impact of the Presidential Records Act on the National Archives and Records Administration" (2016), which looks at efforts by Presidents to have records classified a personal rather than Presidential, in the course of its larger review.
A law review note by Jessica L. Roberts, "#280 Characters of Legal Trouble: Trump, Twitter, and the Presidential Records Act" U. Ill. J.L. Tech. & Pol'y 489 (2019), focuses on the PRA as applied to Twitter activity by Presidents, and largely concludes that the PRA is ineffectual and an "Empty Promise."
Another relevant law review article is Kimberly Breedon, "Pandemics, Public Trust, and Presidential Records: Amending the Presidential Records Act to Minimize the Risk of Public Corruption during Times of National Crisis" 67 Wayne L. Rev. 1 (2021-2022). The body text of that article notes that:
This Article explores one such institutional weakness: the lack of
oversight and enforcement mechanisms in the Presidential Records Act
(PRA). More specifically, this Article seeks to fill a gap in the
current literature by exploring whether Congress—to protect against
the risk of increased government corruption during the next pandemic
or other crisis—should consider amending the PRA to delineate
additional requirements for presidential discretion regarding
destruction of records, to include enforcement penalties for
non-compliance, to provide broader scope for judicial intervention, to
exercise greater oversight of records retention and management
practices, or to adopt some combination thereof. The need for
potential changes to the implementation of the PRA came to light, at
least in part, because the White House’s response to the pandemic
included forming a “shadow coronavirus task force” that used encrypted
electronic messaging and unofficial email accounts, raising questions
about whether task force members were complying with the requirements
of the PRA.
