in 2025, the next archivist may well be among the most important appointments President Donald Trump will make. Why? Because the federal government’s ability to function transparently, legally, and accountably now depends almost entirely on fixing a catastrophic, decades-long failure in electronic records management — a failure that no other agency but the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which the archivist heads, has the authority to repair. //
Most Americans have no idea how bad the situation is. And that’s not their fault. If the government had been managing its electronic records as required by law, we would all have access to the information needed to understand how decisions are made, money is spent, crimes are investigated, and power is used.
Instead, we now have more than two decades of abject information chaos — a level of dysfunction that threatens the very foundations of democratic governance. NARA’s dysfunction has damaged transparency, as seen with Jan. 6, Russiagate, and Arctic Frost, to name a few. On oversight, it has contributed to the Pentagon’s inability to account for trillions of missing taxpayer dollars. With cybersecurity, it has resulted in the loss of more than 25 million classified electronic records, as demonstrated by the Office of Personnel Management’s data breach. Lastly, it has made it difficult to hold anyone accountable for federal health agencies’ misconduct. //
In 1997, NARA endorsed the Defense Department’s DoD 5015.2-certified electronic records repositories as the official solution for managing federal electronic records. The problem? Those systems were designed by professional records managers who — through no fault of their own — had little to no understanding of electronic information management. The result was predictable: applications that were theoretically compliant on paper but fatally flawed in practice.
Federal agencies spent millions purchasing these certified systems. Yet not a single agency ever successfully deployed one in a production environment. The reasons are detailed in a stunning investigative report by the Epoch Times, which chronicles how these failures have cost taxpayers billions, compromised national security, and endangered the lives of innocent Americans. But the bigger story is this: because the DoD 5015.2 systems never worked, federal agencies never managed electronic records in accordance with the Federal Records Act at all. //
If agencies and vendors fail to demonstrate a solution’s compliance with these requirements, NARA can reject it as a suitable solution for managing agency information. Thus, NARA effectively became the government’s default IT regulator — a role for which it was neither trained nor equipped.
As a result, the archivist of the United States, a position once considered ceremonial, suddenly became responsible for overseeing the digital infrastructure of the entire federal government. //
In February, President Trump fired the previous archivist, historian Colleen Shogan. Given her lack of technical experience, her support for her predecessor’s participation in the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, and her questionable political independence, I fully supported that decision.
But it has left a vacuum at a time when NARA desperately needs leadership with vision, technical expertise, and the ability to rebuild trust across partisan divides. The president has not yet nominated a replacement. //
The person who steps into this role will carry responsibility for ensuring the U.S. government can function in the digital age. If the next archivist fails, the consequences will cascade through every policy domain — from national security to public health to economic oversight. //
The failure of federal electronic records management has already cost billions of dollars, jeopardized transparency, and eroded public trust. It has allowed agencies to operate in the shadows, shielded from accountability by systems too broken to track what they do. //
The archivist of the United States is now the guardian of every recorded action of our government — and therefore the guardian of the public’s right to know.
