When I was doing research for a book in the 1990s, I needed some particular data about crime in India. I called the Indian agency that had it and was told they had it all, in hard-copy files in a warehouse, and I was free to come and look whenever I was in the country.
While that would have been an expensive and time-consuming experience, it was at least a possibility. Governments don’t just govern; they are repositories of information, as well. What governments store is part of our shared history as citizens of the country. Indeed, since we paid for its collection one way or the other, we are entitled to examine that shared history, even if it might mean jumping through some hoops, such as Freedom of Information Act procedures.
Over the years, U.S. citizens have even successfully sued the government for the right to access records they felt were unreasonably classified. In a sense, one hallmark of democracy is that your government acknowledges that you have a right to access unclassified government records. You can be sure that no citizen in Russia, China or North Korea has that right.
In the United States, this is an expansive right, or at least it has been historically. My office overlooks the Bush Presidential Library, where all of the records of the George H.W. Bush administration are stored — memos, photos, emails, audio tapes, reports, you name it. It is a massive collection; indeed, the staff has only cataloged about 60% of the material that was collected a quarter of a century ago. The work is ongoing.
Successive administrations in the digital age have also ensured that the webpages of preceding administrations are digitally archived. Want to see President Barack Obama’s remarks to the nation on May 1, 2012, concerning Afghanistan? It’s at the government-hosted archive of his administration at obamaarchives.whitehouse.gov.
I am sorry to tell you that the situation has changed dramatically in the second Trump administration. Your government records are disappearing. Congressionally mandated reports are either not being published, or are omitting major sections. Whole data collection centers and their reporting have been terminated. Government libraries have been shuttered, their contents thrown to the winds. To add insult to injury, the administration’s Department of Justice this week issued an opinion that the president does not need to preserve his communications. But we sort of already knew that, because President Donald Trump announced his presidential library in Florida would not actually have a library at all, though it will apparently have a tremendously large gold-gilded statue of the president.
I was first alerted to these unnerving developments early in 2025, shortly after the inauguration. My capstone team was doing a history of the U.S. implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017, one that Trump signed into law during his first tenure in office. I woke up one morning to find that one of the government documents we had been using had vanished from the internet. Poof. Completely gone, overnight. We started checking the other WPS reports — gone, all gone, as if they had never existed. Fortunately, for the most part, enterprising souls had archived these at the Internet Archive, to which I donate every year for this very reason. But there was one document that no one had archived before it had been removed; that one is gone for good.
That was only the beginning. The annual Trafficking in Persons report is supposed to be presented by the State Department to Congress every June 30. But in 2025, the staff that produce this report was slashed by 70%, and only after intense congressional pressure was a report finally delivered in September. The State Department’s annual country Human Rights Reports now omit the section on the human rights of women, which had been a standard part of the reporting since its inception. Our government has decided it will no longer let you know these things.
There’s more. NASA’s library, held at the Goddard Space Center, has been shuttered, its staff eliminated, and its contents thrown out. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, arguably a crown jewel of the U.S. research efforts on weather patterns, is to be closed and its headquarters building sold. So not only can we not know what we used to know, we cannot know any new things as well. The Special Investigator General for Afghan Reconstruction had to ensure all of its reports were archived at the “CyberCemetery” of the University of North Texas before they could be wiped by the Trump administration — which they promptly were.
This unfortunate trend has fallen hard on women. While Trump trumpeted his support for women in declaring the reality of material sex and opposing inclusion of males in women’s sports and women’s prisons, his administration seems to not support any other attention paid to women. Any Department of Defense webpage extolling the accomplishments of women in the armed services is gone. The New York Times reports that, “A medical trade publication warned scientists to avoid words such as ‘female’ and ‘women’ in grant applications. After Texas Sen. Ted Cruz released a list of supposedly ‘woke’ National Science Foundation grants last year, ProPublica found that some were included merely because their project descriptions included words like ‘female.’”
But it was this week’s legal opinion that takes the cake. According to the Justice Department, the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires presidents and major players in the executive branch to retain all of their communications for safekeeping by the National Archives and Records Administration, is unconstitutional. And until and unless forced to comply by the judiciary, the Trump administration will not keep any of its communications.
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, in concert with the National Security Archives, is attempting to maintain a chronology of what has vanished. The list is heartbreaking: everything from the Department of Agriculture’s “Household Food Security Report,” a long-standing annual survey that provides data on the lack of access to adequate nutrition for low-income Americans (which is now gone and no new reports will be created) to 195 webpages of the HHS (which were restored upon successful judicial action), to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency stating that none of the Signal app conversations about military strikes were kept (as they should have under PRA requirements) but rather wiped in their entirety.
Let us be plain here. This action by the Trump administration to erase knowledge, erase records, and to cease knowledge acquisition and record-keeping by the federal government is a blow against American democracy that will have implications far into the future. Some of what we, the American people, have lost, will never be regained. In this, as in other matters, the administration has weakened America, not strengthened it. This is patently not making America great again, but the opposite. For shame.