A paper shredding truck was seen outside the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C.
(twitter.com)
🏛️ PANIC IN DC 🏛️
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Admittedly a poor look in today's climate but I'd wager it's a standard and scheduled procedure.
The point is: it may be 'standard' procedure, what organization does not benefit from a good gettin' rid of ole' paper cleanout? But then transition between adversarial governments is not so standard. (Sidebar: most data is kept on computers these days).
The point is: What is it that they NEED to shred at this moment? Why not be lazy, go on holiday, and allow the next admin to clean up the records-room?
That would be no problem, if the work was standard and above board.
So maybe a rule ought to be changed at the legislative level. But then again, maybe that won't happen, because organizations are using less and less paper, so it is a diminishing problem.
However, last-minute file-shredding still has plausible deniability on a practical level, because paper tends to hang around like a bad smell, and needs to be cleaned out occasionally.
I think DRan has it correct. The big agencies in DC have contracts with shredding companies (maybe still Iron Mountain?). I was at the Pentagon for 5 years. Shredder trucks showed up once or twice a week (scheduled on the same days) at the east loading dock - no idea how many others went to other loading docks. My co-worker and I still both smoked and we would go out there for either a break or to clear our heads if we were hitting a brick wall in one of our penetration tests.
The trucks would be there for a couple of hours. Most weeks we would see them twice, but every once in a while they wouldn't be there on one of the days, so I bet they were called and told they weren't needed this time.
Now I'm sure more stuff is digital these days (as opposed to the late '90s) but the Pentagon went through a LOT of paper. I'd wager they still do. This doesn't mean the DOJ isn't trying to get rid of bad (to them) info, but the DOJ I'm sure has a ton of paper files/docs for use in court that would need to be shredded once used.