As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to reshape the U.S. government’s digital infrastructure—scrapping websites, eliminating jobs, and dissolving entire departments—archivists have been racing to preserve a vanishing record of public history.
For months, volunteers have worked to undo the damage caused by DOGE’s mass deletion and rewriting of federal websites. But now they face a different challenge: not destruction, but misguided innovation.
Earlier this month, DOGE announced on X it would save $1 million annually by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes of government records into “permanent modern digital records.” The problem? No digital medium is truly permanent—and the tapes DOGE discarded were already well-suited for long-term storage.
Unlike past changes to government archives, this move doesn’t appear to be malicious. Instead, it seems driven by a tech-bro fondness for the new and a disregard for the old. (Musk did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)
Many assume cloud storage is infallible, but it still relies on physical hardware—hardware that can fail. “Typically in my experience . . . you do this kind of decision based on a cost-benefit analysis, which I’m not seeing,” says Roberto Di Pietro, professor of computer science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. “The saving is $1 million, but what is the cost [of the overall project]?” (One commentator likened it to archiving the Declaration of Independence on CVS receipts to save ink.)
Cloud systems experience 1% to 2% hardware failure annually, with hard drives wearing out in three to five years. In contrast, magnetic tapes have error rates four to five magnitudes lower than hard drives and last around 30 years. “Tapes have a very long life. If you have SSDs, data decays much faster,” Di Pietro says. “Every five years you need to move data . . . and that’s a cost.”
Others say DOGE’s announcement lacks clarity. “When it comes to archiving, you well may have different goals,” says Peter Zaitsev, cofounder of the open-source software developer Percona. Offline magnetic tapes are more secure and long-lasting, but harder to access than cloud storage. “For data which must be kept ‘forever’ but also needs to have easy on-demand access, storage both in the modern cloud . . . as well as on tape may well make sense.”
The digitization push may come from the same enthusiasm that led DOGE to announce plans to rewrite government systems still running on COBOL, a 1950s-era computing language. “It may turn out that taxpayer money gets spent on buying new equipment that is . . . not an actual upgrade,” warns Mar Hicks, historian of technology at the University of Virginia. “Just because a system is old doesn’t mean it needs to be replaced.”
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