# Federal Records Act **Status: stub — expand.** **Enacted September 5, 1950; 44 U.S.C. chs. 21, 29, 31, 33.** The statute governing the creation, preservation and disposal of records by **federal agencies** — as distinct from the White House, which is covered by the [[Presidential Records Act]]. Agency heads must establish recordkeeping programs adequate to document the agency's functions, decisions and essential transactions, and may not destroy records outside an approved disposition schedule. ## Why it recurs in this vault The FRA is the hook for litigation over officials conducting government business on **personal devices and ephemeral commercial apps**. Because it binds agency heads by name, plaintiffs can sue the Secretary of Defense or the Director of National Intelligence directly and ask a court to order preservation — which is exactly the posture of the 2025 [[American Oversight]] suit over the Signal chats. Auto-deletion is the recurring fact pattern: a message set to vanish in a week is, in the government's own framing, never a record at all. See [[Signalgate Timeline]] for the sequence, and [[Hegseth Signalgate]] for the episode. ## See also - [[Presidential Records Act]] - [[American Oversight]] - [[Hegseth Signalgate]] - [[Signalgate Timeline]] - [[National Archives]]