Scratching the Record

Since re-taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has engaged in an unprecedented assault on the knowledge infrastructure of the federal government. He has canceled billions of dollars in grants for research at institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities; moved to transform the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, galleries, and research centers into propaganda outfits dedicated to rooting out “wokeness” from the study of the past; taken over the Kennedy Center and pledged to purge it of “woke culture”; removed information from government websites; and dismissed the Librarian of Congress. Of particular concern to historians, Trump in February fired the Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, and many other staff members at the National Archives, entrusting control of this executive branch agency to his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Since the National Archives is tasked with overseeing the management and preservation of federal government records, many rightly fear that the administration is, in the words of the American Historical Association, “render[ing] it impossible for Americans to learn about and from the past.” 

Indeed, in seizing control of the National Archives, the Trump administration is taking aim at a central, widely shared if often unarticulated belief about the nature of public records preservation: that the bureaucratic past should be preserved and managed independent of political interference. As an op-ed in the New York Times recently argued, the public should have a “right to remember,” and “what gets preserved and what vanishes should not be decided based on ideology.” This belief is surprisingly tenuous: it has constantly been contested even from its initial articulation, and it is in no way bound up with the creation of American democracy. Rather, the idea that public records should be preserved and made available free of political ideology is a surprisingly recent development. Trump’s effort to manipulate the federal infrastructure of historical knowledge is a reminder that the past is a site of constant political contestation — and that the public must be vigilant and insistent that our archives are managed toward democratic ends.

There is nothing new about governments seeking to control records in order to protect their reputations and facilitate their preferred political outcomes. Centralized state archives began to emerge in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, as secular governments sought to consolidate control over territory against the competing authority of churches. Officials envisioned their purpose in what we would now consider explicitly political terms: as instruments to enhance, support, and bolster their own institutional power. At a time when the power of the ruler was considered to emanate from the sanction of God, and in which rulers made vast claims to control over the lives of those over whom they ruled, the collection, ordering, and preservation of knowledge was considered vital to the successful exercise of that authority. As one 17th century writer put it, “the entire force of an archive, and of its records, depends on the authority of him in whose power the archives are.” This was a world not made up of citizens bearing rights that governments were obligated not to violate, but instead of subjects who bore relationships of obligation and obedience to their sovereigns in exchange for safety against military attack. In the governing cultures of early modern states — which the historical sociologist Charles Tilly famously described in 1982 as “protection rackets” whose rulers’ penchant for coercively eliminating rivals both inside and outside their territories bore a striking resemblance to the operations of “organized crime” — there was simply no expectation that anyone but rulers and their authorized servants could dictate the terms on which the access and control of official records proceeded. Indeed, as recent scholarship has emphasized, the powerful have consistently sought to manipulate the past to defend their preferred political outcomes. Reacting against the Protestant Reformation, for example, Catholic authorities sought to censor books they believed challenged their authority. Sixteenth century rulers in Venice sought to suppress records of popular revolt. The English East India Company over the 17th and 18th centuries continuously invoked its archival holdings to defend its commercial sovereignty as rooted upon historical precedents. For much of history, it has been normal for elites to manipulate the past to protect their privileges. 

Today, by contrast, the idea of politicians controlling the terms on which the past is written may strike us as an affront to democracy — something we associate with authoritarian regimes elsewhere. Yet, the sanctity of archival practices was not part of the founding ethos of the United States. Even as early Americans across the hemisphere turned against the monarchies of Europe at the end of the 18th century, independence did not result in any widely accepted belief in the new United States that the public should have ready access to government archives — or that the management of these archives should be free from political manipulation. In 1789, during its first session, Congress passed the Records Act. It compelled the secretary of state to oversee the publication of congressional legislation for public knowledge and the preservation of such legislation for posterity, and to have “custody” over the papers and records of Congress and other government agencies. Yet, the Act said nothing about whether anyone else had a right of access to these records beyond what government itself chose to publish. Moreover, the federal government at times used records in highly political ways — perhaps most notably in its handling of compensation claims from Americans who had lost property in the aftermath of the Civil War and who appealed to the government for restitution. As the historian Yael Sternhell has demonstrated, government used records to deny claimants recompense by showing that they had supported the Confederacy. Subsequently, Sternhell shows, government officials at the War Department curated the publication of the multi-volume Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies in the closing decades of the 19th century, which presented a highly selective version of the war that diminished the accomplishments of African American veterans, contributing to the broader post-Reconstruction erosion of full African American citizenship.

Even the creation of the National Archives and the position of Archivist of the United States in 1934 did not mean that the preservation of government paperwork was now permanently free of political control. Only with the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, an effort to make government appear “responsible” in the face of concerns about the threat of fascism, were federal government agencies compelled to make their records publicly available. In 1949, control of the National Archives passed to the General Services Administration, limiting the institution’s autonomy. And the status of presidential records as “public records” — with the federal government, rather than presidents themselves, designated as their proper custodian — was only clarified after the Watergate scandal with the 1978 Presidential Records Act. The papers of members of Congress and those of federal judges continue to be considered the personal property of their creators. Even the autonomy of the National Archives itself is more recent than many think. In the midst of Watergate, Richard Nixon signed a now infamous agreement with the then-head of the General Services Administration, Arthur Sampson, allowing the president to retain control of his records. Partly in response to complaints about the National Archives’ politicization, Congress in 1984 passed the National Archives and Records Administration Act, which established the body as an independent government agency, and made it explicit that the Archivist of the United States should be appointed “without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office of Archivist.”

The legitimate outrage around Trump’s shocking decision to fire the Archivist nevertheless risks obscuring the relatively proximate development of policies clarifying the “public” nature of official records and the independence of the National Archives — and its limited applicability to Congress and the Judiciary, since both members of Congress and judges retain control over their own records. We may want to believe that the government’s responsibility to preserve its records without political bias — and the public’s ability to access those records — are fundamental aspects of American democracy and deeply rooted in the country’s founding principles. Yet history demonstrates that this is not true: both the political independence of the National Archives and the classification of many government records as “public” only emerged out of a long struggle. That said, there is no doubt that in firing Colleen Shogan and bringing the institution in-house, Trump has engaged in an unprecedented politicization of this government agency. Despite the precarious nature of the National Archives’ institutional autonomy, no president before Trump had ever fired the Archivist of the United States quite so obviously — although George W. Bush certainly came close. Nor has any president also embarked on the systematic dismissal of the National Archives’ staff, which Trump has also begun to do. While the administration gave no explicit reason for the firing of Shogan or the other staff members, despite the law stating that the president must “communicate” to Congress “the reasons” for the archivist’s “removal,” there are grounds to believe that Trump is motivated by political animus. Shogan had a difficult time getting confirmed as Archivist after the National Archives sought to retrieve government records that Trump had taken with him into his private custody after his first term ended in 2021, a development that eventually resulted in his criminal prosecution for violating the Presidential Records Act. Given Trump’s well-known penchant for revenge against anyone who defies his aspiration to absolute authority, it is not hard to imagine why he has taken aim at an agency he accuses of undermining him simply for insisting that he follow the law. 

In firing Shogan, however, Trump violates the fundamental requirement governing appointments to the position as clarified by the 1984 National Archives and Records Administration Act: that the Archivist should be appointed based on professional, rather than partisan qualifications. Instead, Trump seems to want to return to a world in which rulers treated archives as political tools. He seeks to erode the important developments that have, over the course of American history, both expanded access to the nation’s heritage and gradually established the relative independence of government records from political manipulation. The autonomy that the National Archives has until recently enjoyed was by no means foreordained: it emerged only out of political struggle, with far more proximate origins than we may think. Let’s fight to preserve this hard-won autonomy — for the sake of our past, but also our present and future.  

This piece was updated to reflect the fact that Colleen Shogan was not yet confirmed when the National Archives sought to retrieve documents from Trump after he left the White House.