House, Senate Republicans team up to crack down on FTC for destroying documents related to congressional probe
Top Republicans on Capitol Hill have vowed to crackdown on the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly destroying evidence related to a congressional investigation.
By deleting documents, it is likely that the FTC violated federal laws. The FTC also impeded Congressional scrutiny of recent, unprecedented FTC actions, such as its proposed rule banning clauses of non-compete, according to Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and the ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. This letter was dated Thursday and showed to Fox News Digital before its release.
“Congress and public deserve to know why the FTC destroyed records improperly, which records were destroyed improperly, and what will be done to prevent it from happening again,” Cruz wrote. He was joined by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of House Judiciary Committee and Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
The letter from Republican legislators came about a year after the FTC’s internal watchdog, Office of Inspector General(OIG), discovered multiple failures in the FTC’s record-keeping processes.
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The Republicans claim that the FTC has “incorrectly deleted” the documents Jordan requested regarding the new rule of the agency that will ban employers in the private sector from forcing employees to sign noncompete agreements that prevent them from competing or opening new businesses offering similar services.
Jordan said that the FTC did not quantify the costs of the rule.
Jordan stated that the rule “exceeds (the commission’s] delegation of authority and imposes an top-down, one size fits all approach which violates basic American values of federalism.
Jordan requested, at that time, documents related, for example, to litigation risks resulting from the rulemaking process, economic analyses related to rulemaking and communications between FTC and other parties regarding rulemaking.
The FTC informed the House Judiciary Committee in May that it “deleted materials likely to respond to the Committee’s request,” including the records of the FTC employee who was on detail at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and led the FTC rulemaking.
The top Republicans wrote: “The FTC’s deletion of documents that were responsive to a Congressional investigation underscores the OIG’s conclusion from 2022, which stated that ‘the FTC had not prioritized records-management nor embedded it as a valued in the agency’s culture’.”
It also suggests that the agency may not be committed to following the law and continue to delete relevant records for ongoing investigations. “This is not the way a federal agency should operate,” they wrote.
In their letter, the GOP trio states that “Federal Law imposes important requirements for recordkeeping on the FTC.”
Federal Records Act (FRA), requires that the head of each federal agency “make and preserve” records about their “functions and policies, decisions and procedures, and important transactions.” They must also “establish” and “maintain” a records scheduling process. This requires them to identify what records they have, decide how long the records are valuable for, and, when no longer needed, to request permission to destroy them or to transfer them to the National Archives.
The FRA notes that this recordkeeping is needed to “furnish information necessary to protect legal and financial rights for the Government and persons directly affected by agency activities”, the lawmakers note.
They write: “It turns our that the FTC struggled to comply the law.”
In a memo dated February 20, 2022, the OIG “alerted” the FTC leadership to two major issues regarding the FTC records management process: (1) the agency was not adhering the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records scheduling requirements and 2) the agency had not established “automated procedures for properly storing and disposing of documents in a timely manner throughout the agency.”
The lawmakers note that OIG noted that it was “[p]articularly notable” that “the Bureau of Competition, and Bureau of Consumer Protection don’t use a comprehensive system to manage their case files”, and that FTC Management had “no plan” to store documents on the FTC cloud platform instead of various shared drive folders.
In a letter, Republicans claim that the FTC is not doing enough to address concerns regarding its policy on record retention.
The agency has failed to explain how documents related to a rulemaking were deleted, despite the fact that it should have been known by the FTC that there would be litigation, FOIA requests and Congressional oversight. The FTC also hasn’t explained how records of senior advisors at the FTC, whether or not there was litigation or any other hold on them, could be deleted.
The FTC didn’t immediately respond to Fox News Digital when they asked for a comment about the letter.
The Republicans asked for an exhaustive list from the FTC, which included what documents it may have deleted as a result of 12 additional congressional investigations into the agency.
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