Top Federal Health Official to Spokesperson While Obamacare Website Crashes: “Please delete this email…”

On
October 5, 2013, just days after Obamacare’s exchanges
officially—and disastrously—launched, Marilyn Tavenner, the head of
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), sent an email
to Julie Bataille, a spokesperson for CMS who frequently
represented the administration in press calls dealing with
Obamacare.

Tavenner’s email to Bataille was a forward of an email from
Jeanne Lambrew, a key White House health policy adviser, about some
of the issues that Obamacare’s newly launched exchange system was
having processing health insurance applications.

But what’s most interesting about the email exchange isn’t the
particular content of that discussion. It’s the first four words of
Tavenner’s note to Bataille, her spokesperson and subordinate:
“Please delete this email.”

The email was
released by the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which
has requested documents related to the botched launch of
Obamacare’s online health exchange last fall.

It raises a number of questions about the administration’s email
retention policies, and its interest in keeping certain discussions
out of the public eye: Was it common for senior officials to
instruct employees to delete emails? What else might have been
deleted? And how does this fit in with the agency’s recent apology,
in a letter to the National Archives, that some of its
communications may have been lost due to deletion as a
result of “extremely high volume of emails”?

The gist of the defense from CMS is that there’s no need for a
fuss because obviously the email
was retained and made available to the House Committee as
requested. But that’s hardly reassuring. If the practice was
common, and other emails were deleted and are now irretrievable,
then there’s no telling what’s missing, and what those looking into
the administration’s botched management remain unable to
see.