Michigan’s Automatic Deletion of Government Chats: A Threat to Transparency and Accountability

How can Michigan citizens trust their government when key communications vanish within weeks? At the heart of this question lies a troubling policy quietly eroding public oversight: automatic deletion of state employees’ Microsoft Teams chats after just 30 days.This practice means that crucial conversations—like those among economic development officials during a June raid tied to alleged embezzlement—are permanently erased from public records. Worse yet, these messages disappear even though emails remain accessible for seven years under existing protocols.Is Michigan Sacrificing Transparency for Convenience?The state defends this fast deletion as a mere technical necessity—"storage reasons," they say—not an attempt to hide...