I think the news is overblowing this. The issue is that until now, an aircraft was registered once and it had an N-number for life.

Active aircraft have annual inspections and are in the records. Aircraft that have been crashed, salvaged, taken apart and stored in barns and garages and locked up hangars, mounted on poles and abandoned at private airports have not be kept track of as well as they should have been, as no one was required to report than an aircraft was inactive. Crashes and aircraft parted out were suposed to be on the records, but I known that the occasional private aircraft has been wadded up on the owners land and not always reported and that paperwork is often misplaced.

I wonder is the FAA has done a data pull from the NTSB accident database to see how many N-numbers that are known to have been destroyed are still on their database.