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

Proof by counter example: I've been to NARA II at College Park dozens of times, researching and writing various papers or games I have worked on as side projects. So for example I did a lot of research on WW2 era naval damage control for a video game I was working on that never actually got out of the prototype stage.

Depending on exactly how this is enforced it could be nothing or could be a big deal. It depends entirely on how much you trust the people who will be setting and enforcing the policies, and right now there have been a lot of withdrawals and very few deposits into the organizational trust of the US Government supply.

sounds like a business purpose to me, and also, how much do you want to bet if you were to do that today, you'd find all the naval damage control information on chatgpt.

So you think that ChatGPT is a substitute for primary source research?

no, but you have two avenues - you have a business purpose and for what you were building, a video game, could probably be best approximated through chatgpt.

If you're a historian writing a non-fiction book, then visit the fucking archives.

the point I'm making is that everyone is making this a thing, when it is not.

This is classic TDS. Everyone is attributing everything wrong with anything to Trump, his administration. And it's just insane.

The point of the video game was to have a better model for naval damage control than the classic, Star Trek-style "10% damage" that you normally see in naval games. To do that I wanted to model actual WW2 ships, room by room, with the free-surface effect, meta-centric height, etc. respected, and then put you into the role of a DC officer on a ship that was attacked in various scenarios.

That level of detail is impossible to get without these primary sources- and the only people who would be interested in a game like this would be the ones for whom that accuracy is a selling point.

This is just one of my side projects, but it is one that shows the wide variety of projects that NARA II supported, beyond just historians.