The United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) recently announced a hearing for presidential nominations, including the confirmation hearing for Bradford P. Wilson's appointment as Archivist of the United States. The hearing will take place on June 17 at 9:00 a.m. ET in the Dirsken Office Building SD-562.
Earlier this spring, SAA sent a letter to the chair and ranking member of the HSGAC outlining the need for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to have strong, expert leadership. SAA has now also sent a list of questions (see below) for the HSGAC to ask of the nominee.
Raise your voice for archives! Contact your Senators to share your thoughts about the nominee, as well as NARA's need for strong leadership to ensure that it is able to meet its mission and responsibilities, now and well into the future.
SAA's Questions for the AOTUS Nominee:
- Priority Area 1: Presidential Records Act
- What changes, if any, would you support to the Presidential Records Act?
- How would you address potential violations of the Presidential Records Act?
- What is your view on the enforcement changes necessary to the Presidential Records Act?
- Priority Area 2: Agency Records Management
- Priority Area 3: Electronic records
- Over the last decade, NARA led the Federal government's transition to an electronic records environment. What would you do to ensure agencies meet these standards and how would you continue these efforts?
- Priority Area 4: Advocacy for NARA's funding and independence
- What is your view on NARA's current budget?
- What is your perspective on NARA's continued status as an independent agency?
- Priority Area 5: Increasing Access to NARA records
- The declassification backlog across many groups of records is many years long.1 In addition, NARA's Strategic Plan calls for the digitization of 500 million documents by September of 2026. How would you prioritize limited resources to accomplish all that NARA must undertake?
1 See National Coalition for History, Working Group on the National Archives, A Program to Support and Strengthen the National Archives, May 2024, pp. 8-10; as well as specifically p. 4: "NARA's National Declassification Center faces a backlog of thousands of declassification review requests, with anticipated wait times as long as twelve years;" and p. 12: "Figures provided by NARA show that, as of December 31, 2023, the National Declassification Center has a backlog of 1,448 presidential library FOIA requests, and 4,537 Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests, figures that don't account for the Johnson and H.W. Bush requests. The same data also shows a backlog of 437 FOIAs across the presidential libraries that have not had their classified records transferred to NDC, and 16,371 pending MDRs."
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Society of American Archivists
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saahq@archivists.org------------------------------