I think it's possibly not an untrue statement, but not the whole story. Daily backups are only part of a proper backup scheme.
I could see them doing incremental daily backups and keeping 6 month's worth of those daily tapes, and then doing a full backup at 6 months. The full backup tape would be archived offsite and not overwritten. Then repeat the cycle in the second half of the year (re-using the 6 months of daily backup tapes) and sending a year-end full system backup to the archive.
Most use grandfather,father, son schemes which decreases the size of the backups and allows for fill recovery at any point. The tapes are reused, but the records are archived off site. The retention of all government records is governed by Federal law and I don’t know any IT pro who would be willing to destroy ANY data under their control.
Hard drives and hardware is regularly destroyed—complete physical destruction is required for all secure systems. However, the data always backed up.
Hardware is not really considered an issue anymore. The inherent redundancy makes it impossible for any one component to cause a major loss of data. The largest possible loss would be one day’s data, but I would find it hard to believe that they are not running log backups every hour.