When people think about a new presidential administration’s most consequential appointments, they imagine cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, or national security leaders. Almost no one imagines the archivist of the United States. Yet, 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.
The Collapse of Federal Electronic Records Management
To understand the magnitude of the problem, you have to start in the late 1990s, when the government first became responsible for managing the lifecycle of electronically recorded records. The policy was sound: NARA required that records born digitally must be managed throughout their lifecycle in their native electronic format — not printed to paper, not reduced to PDFs, but preserved as they were actually created or received. This mandate was intended to ensure transparency in the digital age. Instead, it exposed a fatal flaw in federal infrastructure.
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.
For 25 years, I have supported electronic records management across numerous federal agencies. In that time, I have encountered billions of electronic records. Not once — not one single time — have I seen an electronic record managed properly through its lifecycle in compliance with the law.
This is not a small oversight. It is a systemic collapse.
How NARA Became the Government’s Accidental IT Department
The structural problem worsened in 2014, when President Barack Obama signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments. Those amendments quietly and dramatically expanded the definition of a federal record to “include all recorded information.” This seemingly small technical change had massive consequences: suddenly every item of electronic information produced or received by every federal agency became a federal record.
Overnight, the government placed responsibility for the entire digital universe of federal information — the emails, chats, databases, shared drives, texts, cloud repositories — onto NARA.
This is because, unlike virtually every major organization on Earth, the federal government does not have a centralized information technology department. Instead, each agency purchases its own systems, often with little coordination. But because all recorded information is now a federal record, agencies (and solution vendors) must demonstrate to NARA that their solutions are capable of complying with critical federal electronic records management laws and regulations, such as the Federal Records Act.
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.
As a practical matter, the archivist now influences or determines every federal IT acquisition, every cloud solution, every system that stores or transmits information. This makes NARA a very powerful federal agency, with authority reaching into every corner of the bureaucracy.
A Leadership Vacuum at the Worst Possible Moment
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.
This is untenable.
The next archivist will face a monumental task: rebuilding a national records management system that has never functioned properly; untangling two decades of failed DoD 5015.2-certified solutions; bringing order to the government’s fragmented and chaotic electronic information environment; restoring legal compliance with the Federal Records Act, the Privacy Act, and Freedom of Information Act; and acting as the de facto head of the federal government’s IT oversight.
In a democracy, there can be no transparency without trustworthy records. There can be no accountability without reliable information. And there can be no functioning government when its records are in disarray.
That is the situation we face today.
What Kind of Archivist America Needs Now
This nomination must not follow the old pattern of appointing a mild-mannered historian or career archivist with ceremonial duties. The stakes are too high. The next archivist must be someone with proven nonpartisanship and deep expertise in information technology. He or she must also have a fundamental understanding of large-scale information governance, the courage to confront bureaucratic failures, and the credibility to drive modernization across hundreds of agencies.
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.
A Call to the President
President Trump has the opportunity — and the obligation — to appoint an archivist of the United States who can confront this crisis head-on. 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 next archivist must end this era of digital mismanagement and restore the integrity of the federal government’s information systems. This nomination will affect all agencies and the daily functioning of government.
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.
Mr. President, choose wisely. The future transparency of our democracy depends on it.
Don Lueders is a Certified Records Manager with more than a quarter-century supporting federal records management at all levels of the government. He is also a documented whistleblower who has exposed the government’s failed electronic records management systems and their costly, often tragic, consequences. Follow him on X @donlueders.
