( Tomdispatch.com) – In these first 100-plus days of the nation’s 47th presidency, President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk have cast a frightful spell over the country. As if brandishing wands from inside their capes — poof! — offices and their employees, responsibilities and aims, norms and policies have simply disappeared. The two have decreed a flurry of acts of dismantlement that span the government, threatening to disappear a broad swath of what once existed, much of it foreshadowed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for drastically reorganizing and even dismantling government as we know it during a second Trump administration.
To my mind, the recent massive removals of people, data, photos, and documents remind me of the words of Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his classic novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Dismantling the Institutions
By the middle of March, the new administration had already eliminated dozens of departments and offices, as well as thousands of staff positions, with the supposed goal of “government efficiency.” Buyouts, layoffs, reassignments, and a flurry of resignations by those who preferred not to continue working under the new conditions all meant the elimination of tens of thousands of government workers — more than 121,000, in fact, across 30 agencies. The affected agencies included the Department of Energy, Veterans Affairs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service, as well as multiple offices within Health and Human Services, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Education lost nearly half its staff. And then there was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). By the end of March, the administration had closed its offices and reduced its staff from approximately 10,000 personnel to 15.
The gutting of such offices and their employees is — I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn — expected to cripple significant government services. At the Department of Education, for example, billions of dollars of institutional aid as well as student loans will be affected. Cuts at the Office of Veterans Affairs, which faced one of the largest staff reductions, are predicted to deprive veterans and their families of healthcare services. USAID’s end will cut programs that addressed poverty, food insecurity, drug trafficking, and human trafficking globally. At the Department of Health and Human Services, the availability of vaccines, the tracking of infectious diseases, and all too much more are threatened and could, according to the executive director of the American Public Health Association, “totally destroy the infrastructure of the nation’s public health system.”
But, as novelist Kundera reminds us, the toll won’t just be to government officials and the positions they’re leaving in the dust of history. The cuts also include a full-scale attack on the past.
Records Gone Missing
As part and parcel of this bureaucratic house-clearing, an unprecedented attack on the records of government agencies has been taking place. Basic facts and figures, until recently found on government websites, are now gone. As I wandered the Internet researching this article, such websites repeatedly sent back this bland but grim message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.”
Many of the deletions of facts and figures have been carried out in the name of the aggressive anti-DEI stance of this administration. As you’ll undoubtedly recall, in the first days of his second term in office, Donald Trump declared DEI programs to be “illegal” and ordered the elimination of all DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) “policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” A Pentagon spokesperson then tried to explain such acts this way: “History is not DEI.”
And indeed, at the Pentagon’s website, at least 26,000 portraits, ranging from a World War II Medal of Honor recipient to the first women to graduate from Marine infantry training, were scheduled for removal in the name of the administration’s anti-DEI agenda. In addition, articles were deleted from the site, including a story on baseball great Jackie Robinson, who had served in World War II, as well as mentions of women and minorities. On the website of Arlington National Cemetery, information about Blacks, Hispanics, and women went missing as well. At the Smithsonian Institution, where Vice President JD Vance was put in charge of the world’s largest museum enterprise, consisting of 21 separate museums and the National Zoo, the mandate similarly became to “remove improper ideology” from those museums, as well as from the education and research centers that its portfolio includes.
Following a storm of protest, some efforts at restoration have occurred, including the material on Jackie Robinson, the Washington Post reports that “the categories ‘African American History,’ ‘Hispanic American History,’ and ‘Women’s History’ no longer appear prominently.” Yet some information and artifacts, officials predict, have been lost forever.
The attack on history is perhaps most strikingly apparent in the disruption of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the institution whose mission is precisely to preserve government records. As the Associated Press summed it up, “As the nation’s recordkeeper, the Archives tells the story of America — its founding, breakdowns, mistakes and triumphs.” The attack on NARA has come in the form of staff reductions, including the firing of the Archivist of the United States and the departure, owing to firings, buyouts, or resignations, of half of that office’s staff. (Remember, NARA was central to the federal criminal case brought against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, a case which was eventually dismissed.) Notably, the Department of Justice reportedly removed a database which held the details surrounding the charges and convictions that stemmed from the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
At USAID, an agency founded more than 60 years ago and now utterly eviscerated, the destruction of past records has been a top-line item. As ProPublica first reported, and other news sources later detailed, employees at USAID were ordered to destroy classified and personnel records. “Shred as many documents first,” the order read, “and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.” Meanwhile, massive layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are expected to drastically curtail the access of Americans to public records. At the CDC, cuts have included gutting the public records staff (though HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has claimed that he plans to reverse that).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the assault on the facts and figures of the past includes an adamant refusal to keep records for the future, a tendency that also marked the first Trump administration and has already proved striking in the first 100 days of his second term.
The Signalgate scandal is a case in point. In the group chat held by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz on the Signal app, instead of a designated classified communications channel, discussing an imminent attack on Yemen, national security officials communicated classified information outside of approved channels. In addition to violating norms and laws governing communications involving classified information, the fact that the app was set to auto-delete ignored the law that mandates the preservation of official records.
Nor was Signalgate a one-off. Trump administration officials have reportedly taken to using Gmail, while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been relying on Google Docs for the drafting of government documents, in each case attempting to bypass laws regulating the archiving of public records by potentially “failing to preserve all iterations of its drafts as well as comments left on shared documents.”
Of course, the president’s aversion to creating records in the first place long predates the present moment. During his first term, for example, he had a tendency to rip up documents as he saw fit. “He didn’t want a record of anything,” a senior official told the Washington Post. Notably, he refused to have notes taken at several meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, after one encounter with the Russian president at a Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, he confiscated the interpreter’s notes.
Evading the Law
In such an ongoing obliteration of the records of government activities, the violations that have already taken place have essentially rendered the law invisible. The Federal Records Act, as Lawfare reminds us, requires any federal agency to ”make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency.” And when it comes to presidential records, the Presidential Records Act categorizes them as the property of the United States and requires the president to take “all such steps as may be necessary” to preserve those records.
There is, however, a giant carve-out to that requirement. During his tenure in office, the president can seek to withhold certain records on the grounds that the documents have ceased to have “administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value.” In order to make such a decision, however, the president must first consult with the national archivist, a position that at present belongs to the now four-hatted Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is currently the acting head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and USAID, as well as the National Archives. It’s worth noting that there is no enforcement mechanism in place to address a decision to dispose of documents, or to challenge the legality — or even the wisdom — of such a decision. The law, as one scholar argues, remains essentially “toothless.”
Why History Matters
Historians like me are particularly sensitive to the destruction of government records. Archival materials are our bread and butter. Who knows what new information we might find and what new insights we might gain from a fresh look at the letters of John Adams on the eve of the outbreak of the American Revolution or the records of the dissenters in George W. Bush’s administration in the run-up to the War in Iraq? With the new insights that documents and records provide can come new understandings of who we are as a country, what ills our leaders have (or haven’t) addressed, what tragedies might (or might not) have been avoided, what successes might (or might not) have been more likely to come about. In sum, the records of the past hold innumerable lessons that could guide us into a more sustainable and just future.
That documentary record helps — or at least until this fragile moment, helped — us understand the pathways that have brought us here in both moments of glory and times of trouble. The record feeds us, inspires us, and allows us to feed and inspire others. It’s through the telling of history that we have come to understand our collective selves as a nation, our individual selves as actors, and our leaders’ decisions about the future.
All that is, of course, now changing and the spell cast by the administration’s ongoing destruction of those records, the emptying or altering of the nation’s cache of documents, has been enhanced by another spell — that of suspicion over the contents of what documents remain, based on accusations that the record itself is partisan and tainted, and so deserving of eradication.
For historians and the public we serve, when record-keeping is marred or even annihilated by a political agenda, as is happening today, such acts can carry special interest for scholars of the past. After all, purposeful deletions from and false additions to the historical record offer a truly grim possibility: the creation of what could pass for a new history of this country. As of now, the Trump administration is functionally acting to rewrite the prevailing narratives of our past — a past of progress towards equal rights, fact-based education, and lessons learned from mistakes and achievements. In sum, to alter or erase the historical record amounts to erasing our knowledge of ourselves.
David Corn, in his newsletter Our Land, recently posted a piece entitled “Trump’s War on History.” In it, he quotes George Orwell from his classic dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As Corn points out all too ominously, expunging history was an early tactic of the Nazis, who sought to turn the clock back to a time before the French Revolution and its values altered the course of history. As Corn puts it, for the Nazis, “the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed.”
For Orwell, as for Kundera, owning history with a firm grip is a power of immense consequence, never to be lightly dismissed. Memory and the records that sustain knowledge of the past are essential to humankind’s struggle against the worst sort of naked power grabs, never more so than now.
Copyright 2025 Karen Greenberg
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