Technology

Academics have already run those numbers. It's already a decided issue among those who will actually do the preservation what the preferred method is, for which purposes. And no one is saying you can't have multiple purposes or preserve multiple formats, (in fact, that, too, is preferred) except those arguing cost, who, like they do with climate change, want to ignore established science as well as what those actual costs will be.

It's costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents

I cannot stress this enough, that is nothing. You're hand-wringing over an amount of money that falls under the scope of a rounding error in any first-world country's budget. If you want to talk about proper use of resources, a properly-functioning legislative body shouldn't even be able to afford to think about it, let alone discuss it, they should be dealing with a full session's-worth of projects that cost 100—100,000 times as much. If you want to talk about proper use of the taxpayers' money, it doesn't involve elected officials derelicting their actual duties to hem and haw over something that costs under $50 million on the national scale. For a government to have taken any action on this at all is a greater wastage than any potential savings. Seriously, imagine being paid by the public to ensure things are run properly, and then spending your time on the clock discussing whether or not the government should save $4.5M per year by switching brands of floor wax in all of the public schools. People have been tarred and feathered for less.