Oversight committee concerned about Trump deleting tweets

March 10 (UPI) -- The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said the White House could be violating federal records laws when President Donald Trump's deletes his tweets.

Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., on Wednesday sent a letter to the White House and 55 federal agencies, including all Cabinet departments, requesting information on how they are each complying with the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act.

In a statement, the committee said the members sent the letters because of reports "White House officials and federal employees are using various messaging applications to conduct official business" that could violate the records laws.

Such records and government transparency laws are designed to "ensure the official business of the federal government is properly preserved and accessible to the American public," the letter reads.

"Official business must be conducted in such a way as to preserve the official record of actions taken by the federal government and its employees," the members wrote in the letter. "Many of the messages sent from [Trump's twitter] accounts are likely to be presidential records and therefore must be preserved. It has been reported, however, that President Trump has deleted tweets, and if those tweets were not archived it could pose a violation of the Presidential Records Act."

The members said that to avoid such problems, former President Barack Obama's administration instituted auto-archiving capabilities on Twitter accounts.