# National Archives The **National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)** is the custodian of federal and presidential records and the agency charged with enforcing the [[Federal Records Act]] and the [[Presidential Records Act]]. It has been an independent agency since 1985; before that it was a unit of the General Services Administration. It is led by the **Archivist of the United States**, a Senate-confirmed post that the President may remove at will. The only requirement is that he tell Congress why. ## Why its enforcement power is weaker than it looks When an agency destroys records or never creates them, the Archivist's recourse is to notify the agency head and, if that fails, to **ask the Attorney General to sue**. Every link in that chain is appointed by the same President whose administration is the subject of the complaint. In practice, enforcement in the vault's cases has come from outside: [[American Oversight]] and a federal judge in the 2025 Signal litigation ([[Signalgate Timeline]], [[Hegseth Signalgate]]). The Archives' role there was to receive notice. The exception proves the rule. In 2022 NARA's referral of the missing Mar-a-Lago boxes started the [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]]. That referral made the Archives a MAGA target. ## 2025–2026: an agency run by acting officials | Date | Event | |---|---| | Feb 7, 2025 | Trump removes Archivist **Colleen Shogan** without stated cause. She learns from a post on X, confirmed by [[Sergio Gor]]. | | Feb 2025 | Deputy Archivist William Bosanko acts briefly; then Secretary of State [[Marco Rubio]] is designated **acting Archivist** while keeping his other jobs. That is why Rubio is a defendant in the Signal records suit. | | Feb 2026 | Rubio gives up the role as his time under the Vacancies Act runs out. Senior adviser **James Byron** now "performs the duties" of Archivist. | | Mar 2026 | A senator argues that Rubio overstayed the Vacancies Act limit, putting his acts as Archivist in question. | As of September 2026 there is **no Senate-confirmed Archivist and no nominee** in the sources checked. The census data-access crosswalk marks the seat *unconfirmed* for that reason ([[Census Data Access Crosswalk]]). ## What the Archives still does automatically Some functions run on statute and calendar rather than on leadership. The best example is the **72-year rule**: individual census records open to the public 72 years after the count, which is how the 1950 census was released on April 1, 2022 ([[Title 13]]). What needs judgment, like enforcement, referral and preservation demands, is where an acting-run agency has gone quiet. ## See also - [[Federal Records Act]] · [[Presidential Records Act]] · [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]] - [[American Oversight]] · [[Signalgate Timeline]] · [[Hegseth Signalgate]] · [[Marco Rubio]] - [[Title 13]] · [[Census Data Access Crosswalk]] · [[Age Search Service]] · [[Federal Vacancies Reform Act]]