ON FEBRUARY 7, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP fired Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, on the job for only 632 days, without notice or cause. By statute, Deputy Archivist William “Jay” Bosanko automatically became the acting archivist, leading the National Archives and Records Administration. Less than a week later, the White House sent Jim Byron, the president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation—one of the private nonprofit groups that builds and supports presidential libraries—to give Bosanko an ultimatum: resign or be fired.
Bosanko resigned, and the Trump administration has made temporary arrangements for operation of NARA, designating Marco Rubio the acting archivist (his third concurrent role, in addition to secretary of state and administrator of whatever husk remains of USAID). The president is expected to nominate a new archivist, but the timing is as yet unclear.
By law, that appointment must be free of political affiliation and made on professional qualifications alone. But this has not stopped some prior presidents from nominating—or tentatively floating—individuals clearly for their politics. And in the agency’s history of eleven permanent and seven acting1 archivists, the two confirmed archivists who have been the most explicitly political turned out to be the most disastrous: Allen Weinstein and Don Wilson.
If their tenures are any indication of how badly a politicized appointment can damage the agency, the current widespread alarm among stakeholders and NARA employees is well founded.
The Weinstein debacle
IN NARA’S NINETY-YEAR HISTORY, only one other president has removed an archivist: President George W. Bush forced the eighth archivist, John Carlin—whom President Bill Clinton had nominated almost a decade earlier—to resign so that Bush could nominate the already-vetted and reliable political operator Allen Weinstein.
According to Carlin, the push to get him out began early, during the 2000–01 transition between administrations. “A member of the transition staff called,” Carlin told me in a phone interview. “And he asked when I would resign. I said I wanted to stay. I explained the law—that the president could replace me, but he’d have to communicate to Congress as to the reasons why. I never heard back from that young man.”
A few years later, though, Carlin got another call—this time, from White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. “He said, ‘I’m just the messenger, but the folks here would really like you to resign,” Carlin recalled.