(The Center Square) – Seven-and-a-half months after Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson said he was implementing a six-month suspension of a policy that, for years, let state agencies auto-delete Microsoft Teams messages every seven days, Ferguson hasn’t announced if the auto-deletion policy has been reinstated or if the suspension continues.
Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based software application that enables users to communicate, schedule meetings, and share files within a workspace environment, typically via email.
“No update yet, will let you know when there’s more,” Ferguson spokesperson Brionna Aho emailed The Center Square last week in response to an inquiry about the status of the suspension.
In February 2025, the governor temporarily suspended the auto-deletion of internal electronic messages, including Microsoft Teams chats, for state agencies. The six-month suspension, which expired on Aug. 17, was pending a review following a $225,000 settlement with the Department of Children, Youth & Families for illegally destroying public records.
“We haven’t heard a single word from him,” said open government advocate Jamie Nixon in an interview last week about Ferguson’s failure to announce a new policy.
Nixon said the Public Records Act is designed to protect the content of records, not the platform upon which they are conveyed.
“So, anybody who thinks through the idea of a record only existing for seven days could probably understand the potential for abuse from people who might want to act unethically or illegally, or even just the possibility of lost evidence,” Nixon said. “So, if you’re somebody who’s got a complaint with the state or your state agency trying to defend the good work that you’re doing, you probably want to have those records around.”
In 2024, Nixon filed a lawsuit against the state over the seven-day retention policy for Teams messages and other alleged violations of Washington’s Public Records Act, including lawmakers’ use of legislative privilege.
One of the defenses from those who contend the auto-deletion policy is justified suggests the messages are “transitory” and don’t pertain to anything relevant for public documentation.
“One person’s transitory chat is another person’s Exhibit A,” Nixon said. “There’s no reason to simply go destroying it. And again, there’s no review or audit of what is being destroyed. It’s automatically destroyed without review of the content. It’s setting up this weird, perverse incentive for agencies to simply destroy before people request.”
Nixon said state lawmakers could promote legislation that would require state agencies to retain Teams chat messages for an extended period.
“The Legislature could step in,” he noted. “That would be nice, but I’m skeptical if the Legislature wants to take a bite of this apple because they themselves are fighting to work in secret. They want to have legislative privilege so they can redact whatever they want.”
It’s not clear when lawmakers halted the destruction of emails or what initially prompted it, but according to the Washington Coalition for Open Government, records officers’ emails indicated that “email storage had become burdensome as a result of a 2017 court case filed by The Associated Press and other news organizations that established that legislators are subject to the Public Records Act.”
In 2019, the state Supreme Court confirmed that individual legislators are subject to the state’s Public Records Act. This decision, stemming from a 2017 lawsuit filed by news organizations, ended decades of lawmakers claiming exemption and led to an increase in the volume of emails and other documents that must be stored for potential public release.
Nixon said Ferguson’s failure to respond regarding the Teams chat auto-deletion policy is a symptom of how his administration is operating.
“By continuing to not respond, this is not serving him well. Leadership is about guiding policy, but it’s about reporting to the public what’s going on,” Nixon said, noting he’s been hearing from many reporters that Ferguson is not being transparent about his schedule and communicating much at all with reporters. “Are we going to sit around here for another three and a half years and not have him tell us anything? It’s very strange. And I hope that he comes around and realizes that he has to, once in a while, stand at a podium and let you guys have a chance to ask him some tough questions.”
