The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that the General Services Administration converted 14,000 magnetic to digital records, and claimed the process saved a million dollars a year.

The problem is, magnetic tapes are regarded by storage and archivist professionals as being a stable, reliable, and safe medium for long-term data storage. Just because it’s a 70 year old medium doesn’t mean those records needed a massive overhaul to digital, that it will save any money in the long term, or that the new storage method is better.

Casual storage enjoyers might hear tape and think fragile spools of plastic that can rot or wear out. But digital storage is not necessarily a better option if you’re trying to keep information for years; digital storage rot, or “bit rot,” can affect a hard drive over years of storage, making the data corrupt or inaccessible. This happens when the electrical charge inside a solid-state storage device—like the kind of digital drive we can assume DOGE is talking about—leaks and causes the drive to lose performance.

Magnetic tapes are also a more cost and space efficient option at the scale the government would require to back up data. Tape requires someone who knows how to operate it, and the machines to read it, but as a storage medium it’s more compact and cheaper than comparably-sized digital drives would be. Modern tape cartridges can hold as much as 15 terabytes of data.

But perhaps most importantly, tape is a lot more secure than digital storage. Hackers can’t access what’s on a magnetic tape unless they have it physically in hand; digital storage, however, can be broken into remotely or accessed if it touches cloud storage at all.

Research also shows that tape media generates three percent of the carbon dioxide that hard disks do. Moving from tape to digital isn’t just more expensive, less efficient, and less secure, but also bad for the environment. When we’re talking about long-term storage, ideally you’re storing for a future that actually exists.

Considering DOGE’s track record of insecure and sloppy programming, habit of wasting public servants’ time with absurd busywork, and almost impressive ability to make most things it touches more expensive and inefficient, it’s not surprising that the department led by Elon Musk is proud to announce this unnecessary and wasteful flip to digital. But the irony of it making an otherwise perfectly stable archive suddenly unstable, while pulling what seems like a random million-dollar figure out of nowhere for the sake of a tweet—all while gutting important archives and forcing volunteers to save what they can—is almost too on the nose.

GSA did not respond to a request for comment.

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