National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility

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Who knows, why should they feel obligated to supply any kind of rationale for their actions? [edit: /s]Here is the sum total of detail they have provided: “ All researchers must apply and present a researcher card, which may be obtained in Room 1000. This ensures that proper identification is on file for all individuals accessing the building to establish a legitimate business purpose. Abuse of any researcher registration to circumvent access by the general public may result in a trespass situation and a permanent ban from access to all NARA facilities.”

Abandon all hope, ye who seek reflective reasoning from this government.

But my guess is that less public access to national information helps, and does not hinder, a speed-run to autocracy.

Staffing cuts, most likely: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/06/trump-administrati...

How does adding a new bureaucratic vetting process in room 1000 make things more efficient? How does adding additional security, as stated, do that?

Every aspect of government should provide the public with rationale for its actions unless providing that rationale is an actual threat to national security or an individual's freedoms. And any time they can't provide rationale for those reasons, an independent agency should review them confidentially. You can't have government by the people, for the people, of the people without accountability.

> why should they feel obligated to supply any kind of rationale for their actions?

because it is a public service that we are all funding. why would you think anything otherwise?

I keep forgetting what I think of as plainly facetious could be someone’s actual belief.

I dunno. I'm very much not a Trump fan, but I don't see how restricting access to "national information" would help him. And if it would, how does restricting access to one of them help him?

I could more see this as being just random action without any real purpose, or aimed at petty revenge on someone, or something.

Everything they do is meant to sew mistrust. It doesn’t need to have any other benefit. I don’t think they are trying to hide anything, and I don’t think this is about staffing - they just want to wreck government and your trust in it.

Taking your points in reverse order:

> I could more see this as being just random action without any real purpose, or aimed at petty revenge on someone, or something.

This was essentially my first point, and I think we are in agreement.

> I dunno. I'm very much not a Trump fan, but I don't see how restricting access to "national information" would help him. And if it would, how does restricting access to one of them help him?

I did not intend to claim that the closure necessarily helps Trump himself. My point was that reducing access to public information (either wholesale, or by placing additional hurdles) hurts democracy and favors autocracy.

So the administration can decide who gets to conduct research.

I think if you take the view of "they just want to shut down the central government" you'll get answers to why they are doing things.

The first step in killing the national archive is making it worthless. Adding extra stupid barriers to access data helps with that goal. The harder it is to use, the more likely a Coca-cola archive sponsored by taco bell will be able to compete.

Yeah, I saw your edit. You can't use sarcasm on the internet anymore. How many downvotes did that cost you?

More broadly, ignorance and stupidity amongst the general population benefit some politicians.

This is the sort of bureaucratic nonsense people actually rail against.

You're assuming you'd get something truthful or informative out of that process, when in reality you'll get the opposite due to the inherit (dis)incentives.

It doesn't need to 'help him', he is sufficiently motivated to do stuff for the simple reason that it hurts people he sees as enemies.

He has a record as long as his public life of being capricious, vindictive, and petty. This is ancient, settled history by this point, as clear as the sun rising in the East.

Right, I guess we should throw up our hands and let the dictator of the week run things as he sees, with no oversight.

If it meaningfully impacts the public, the public should have input. The input doesn't need to be binding, but it needs to be taken into consideration. Representative government is not a once-every-four-years exercise, nor is it something that should only be accessible to the mega-rich.

There's an entire process for this among many rule-making agencies in every level of government, across the world. It serves as, at minimum, a public record of objections and concerns, and at times that public feedback identifies a problem that the rule-drafters failed to address.

It doesn't, and can't prevent outright malice by a capricious autocrat, who only works to make his backroom friends happy. But it does make a public record of that malice.

From their orientation page:

Protect the holdings of the National Archives from theft, damage, misfiling, and inappropriate disclosure of information.

> they just want to wreck government and your trust in it.

... and eventually, privatize the wreckage or cut even more services because it's obviously "not working out".

there's no oversight needed when the government does a lot less

If there's no loose budget, there's far fewer things that go into the black budgets.

I can see situations where there maybe someone considered a "Left" leaning PhD researcher may have access revoked due to lack of "business purposes". Can't have those pesky progressives looking up inconvenient facts.

You're assuming competence. They are simply not giving a flying s**t about many things, break stuff and cause chaos somewhere else (Chesterton's Fence applies), cut funding, and affected agencies now have to deal with it.

Sarcasm on the internet has always worked.

You know that the federal budget is set to grow enormously, right?

This is how Russia works. This is why the Russian government does what it does and why the people let it happen.

Because obviously nothing can ever change, so don't even try. How silly of of you citizen, to imagine even trying to fix corruption.

Who in their right mind ever assumed anything about the Trump administration was competent? You don't need to be competent to break things on purpose out of spite and malice and hate. That's easy!

That's not what I'm talking about. It's the notion that if you get the corrupt to justify their actions that you'll somehow avoid corruption.

Fixing corruption involves people refusing to put up with corruption.

These things create very subtle but definite opportunities for conflict. And conflict can be twisted very easily by media organizations.

Even if only four researchers out of a hundred or thousand who visit every year complain, if that complaint is caught on camara we have a "Liberal Karen exploiting and abusing federal employees just trying to do their jobs. Why can't she go through the approval process like everyone else?".

And maybe that woman just wanted to research, not be exploited to increase protection for federal services. Maybe she just wanted transparent processes for helping those employees and a public who respected those dedicated public sector workers who help us navigate the system.

Because increased funding for protection of federal workers by that kind of drama scenario does create conservative or authoritarian momentum. Even if it's not reflected as that affiliation on voting cards, it's a deep mindset.

I know in a dozen years the Karen stereotype will be seen as the sexist trope it is. But sometimes we create these feedback systems, inadvertently or purposefully, that reinforce those tropes.

Your political opinions about which parts of government should exist are entirely off-topic to this question.

Remember that the Trump administration are active enemies of open inquiry, justice and accountability - and they have done a solid job illegally dismantling the federal government due to extremist ideology.

If an organization is a source of inconvenient truth to a ruler, or serves the public without a profit motive, it will be ruined by this administration.

If you keep no records, require no process, then how do you even identify if corruption is taking place?

The entire reason with we have say, double-entry book-keeping, is because it makes it substantially more difficult to engage in corrupt activities without producing a record which can be used to hold people to account for their actions.

People declare "I think it's corruption" on the internet all the time with absolutely no evidence, which itself is indistinguishable to corruption in the first place (since the favorite tool of dictators and autocrats is to "discover" corruption in their political opponents when it is convenient to do so).