Alex Lovit:  There’s a whole alphabet soup of federal agencies most Americans are familiar with, the FBI, CIA, IRS, CDC, NASA, FEMA. But there’s one that doesn’t have the name recognition it deserves, it’s a clearinghouse for the American story, how we understand ourselves today and how the American story will be told to future generations. Today on the show what is NARA and why should we be worried that it’s struggling? You’re listening to The Context, it’s a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that’s so hard to do. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. Today, we’ll be talking about NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA serves an important function in our democracy, its job is to preserve documents from the White House and federal agencies so journalists, and historians, and citizens can understand the federal government. It’s not the only government agency where transparency matters, but it’s an important one. Because we, the people, own the government. We’re entitled to know what it’s up to, and NARA is keeping the receipts.

My guest today is the former head of NARA, Colleen Shogan. Colleen was appointed to that position by President Biden. Her title, Archivist of the United States. That’s traditionally been a nonpartisan position that people hold across changes in administrations, but a month into his second term as president Donald Trump fired her, out of the blue, and she was never given a reason why. These days Colleen is the CEO of In Pursuit, an initiative to teach history and civics from the democracy organization, More Perfect. As we head into 2026, when we’ll celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, it’s a good time to reflect on how we preserve our history, how we understand it, and how we teach it. Colleen Shogan, welcome to The Context.

Colleen Shogan: Thank you for having me.

Alex Lovit:  So you’ve been Archivist of the United States, which is about as high profile and prestigious a position as exists in the archival field, but a lot of our listeners probably haven’t thought a lot about archiving and may not even be aware that this position existed. So first, tell us what is an archivist and why does the United States need them?

Colleen Shogan: Archivists preserve history all across the United States, and do so for all kinds of different archives. The National Archives preserves the records of our federal government, both records from our federal agencies as well as presidential records, and have a hand also in preservation for congressional and judicial records as well. But in general archivists could be preserving records in state and local government levels, there’s private archives, there’s company archives. And really the reason why we have archivists is for a way in which we can have access to our history and assess things like accountability and transparency.

Alex Lovit:  Can you tell a story or give an example of how the National Archives have provided accountability and transparency?

Colleen Shogan: Sure. I mean I think things people would be very familiar with would be things like the Pentagon papers, the records from the 9/11 Commission, the Nixon Watergate tapes. But I mean for Americans on the ground, one great example is the veterans records that the National Archives holds and trusts for veterans. So after people serve in the military they can come to the National Archives and access their veteran service records, and those are needed for all kinds of reasons to access benefits, for honors and medals, for different things like end of life burial status. Veterans obviously have a tremendous amount of benefits that they are due, and the laws are always changing concerning those benefits, and access to the records is very important for that population.

Alex Lovit:  As we said, you have served as the Archivist of the United States, you were fired from that position by Donald Trump. There’s a fairly long list at this point of folks that have been treated similarly. Archivist of the United States not traditionally a partisan position, how did you find out that you were being relieved of your duties?

Colleen Shogan: Actually, it was on social media. So a senior colleague of mine saw it on social media and called me to let me know that had been posted, and then I looked at my work phone and I saw that I had an email stating the same from the head of White House personnel.

Alex Lovit:  My understanding is you were never provided an official reason for that, what’s your understanding for what happened?

Colleen Shogan: I don’t have an understanding because I was never provided a reason for why I was fired. I certainly did my job with an attention to nonpartisanship, I followed the law, followed the regulations in front of me. So I don’t think that there’s any substantive reason for my dismissal.

Alex Lovit:  So there was speculation that it might’ve been connected with the Mar-a-Lago White House records, if that was the case it wasn’t anything you really had any role in, you weren’t even in the position when the raid on Mar-a-Lago happened. And I know you can’t comment too specifically on that case but can you just generally say why is it important for government officials to turn records over to NARA when they leave office?

Colleen Shogan: Well, I mean there’s a records law, there’s the Federal Records Act and then the Presidential Records Act, but it really contributes to a legitimacy of government. You can’t have a democracy without having that legitimacy of government. And the archives and records provides that, first through transparency, and then transparency of those records then lead to accountability, and accountability then leads to legitimacy. So I think it’s a necessary underpinning of a democracy. If you start to undermine that legitimacy and accountability then you weaken the ties of democracy.

Alex Lovit:  The current archivist of the United States is Marco Rubio. He’s got some other things on his mind as well, he’s also the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Rubio has no professional experience as an archivist. Having served in this role and having thought a lot about all the things that NARA needs to be thinking about, are there things that you’re worried aren’t being addressed right now?

Colleen Shogan: I felt like the job was more than a full-time job. I think I worked every day that I was in the job, except for maybe the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think it’s a full-time job that does require attention because there’s always things to be reviewing such as record schedules. There’s many, many facilities across the United States that the National Archives maintains, including records facilities outside of Washington DC, and of course all of the presidential libraries from Herbert Hoover forward, and almost 3,000 employees, at least when I was there, work at the National Archives. So there were many, many challenges to confront and like I said, I think it was a full-time job, and more so than a full-time job.

Alex Lovit:  Are there any initiatives that come to mind, things that you were really focused on in the role that you wonder that might require a full-time attention?

Colleen Shogan: Yes. I mean I think the one thing that is concerning is that the National Archives is not prepared for the deluge of born electronic or born digital records that will be coming their way very soon. Federal records are now being produced in digital format, and in fact once the record schedules plays out they’re not going to be accepting those records in analog or paper format any longer. So everything that the National Archives accepts down the road will be born digital or electronic. That will mean that the number of boring digital records, which are now in the millions, will go very quickly into the billions, and then the billions will turn into trillions of born digital records.

And you can imagine that that’s not a small enterprise to be able to handle, you need a technology system to be designed that will perform at least three functions. First is the transfer of those digital records from the agency that produces them to the National Archives, then an effective space for archivists to work with and provide access to those records, and then thirdly, most importantly for American people, you need an application in which users can then search billions, and eventually trillions, of these records for the records that they’re looking for.

Alex Lovit:  So it sounds like NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, kind of at a pivotal moment of trying to make this transition from primarily paper document storage to primarily digital document storage, kind of a tricky time for someone to be in that role who it doesn’t have their full attention. So I want to talk about a few different challenges of archiving, and obviously that’s the biggest one I think right now at this historical moment is this fundamental generational shift in the technologies of how we’re keeping records. But let’s talk just first of all about budget, about money. So NARA’s budget is more than $400 million, that sounds like an awful lot. You’ve said that that’s not enough, and I think a lot of people that work in NARA say that’s not enough. So where does the money go and how would it be helpful to have more of it?

Colleen Shogan: The National Archives has responsibility that is government-wide for the accessioning and preservation of records. And once the records come into the National Archive System it’s not like we just get rid of them 100 years from now, or 200 years from now, or 50 years from now. The idea is when those records are permanently accessioned they’re there for the duration of the Republic. So this is a very, very big undertaking at the National Archives. And not only is the National Archives responsible for these records, like I said, there are facilities all across the country, so that over $400 million in appropriated money supports those facilities, supports the preservation of those records, and most importantly supports access for those records. It does not support the creation of a technology system that would provide access to, as I said before, the billions and eventually trillions of born digital records that would be coming into the system. We needed to grow the budget responsibly to be able to construct that system.

Alex Lovit:  Is there a backlog at NARA?

Colleen Shogan: Oh, yes. There’s backlogs for Freedom of Information Act requests, and probably the FOIA backlogs are the highest at presidential libraries.

Alex Lovit:  And is that a problem?

Colleen Shogan: Well it is a problem for people that are waiting for the records. So yes, it’s absolutely a problem. It’s hopefully a problem, as we digitize for example the presidential records that are at presidential libraries, how much will artificial intelligence and technology enable us to make Freedom of Information Act requests? How will that reduce the wait time for those requests? Now that’s not saying that we would just take a record and just release it after an AI bot went through and looked at it, but it would be able to perhaps flag areas in which an archivist then would be able to look at a particular record, and then evaluate much more quickly about whether or not there would be restrictions applied to that particular record. I did add to the presidential library staffing so that we could have more people reviewing those records so that they could actually be released quicker and reduce those backlogs.

Alex Lovit:  So speaking of this digital transition, does that change the kind of volume of information that NARA’s receiving? Is it a case where now you’re getting every email where maybe not everything was a paper record back in the day?

Colleen Shogan: That’s true. I mean just think about how we interact in ways that we produce a lot more information because of digital transmission than we did in the 1950s, and 1960s, and the 1970s where everything had to be typed out in a memo format and memos went all over the office. That took a lot of work to write a memo, it takes a lot less to write an email or send an instant message, and people are producing a lot more records than they did 15 or 20 years ago.

Alex Lovit:  So if you’re looking for the needle in the haystack the haystack’s getting a lot bigger?

Colleen Shogan: That’s correct.

Alex Lovit:  Let me ask about one more challenge of archiving as a field, and I don’t know how much you think about this at NARA, but archives exist to preserve documents, preserve records from any time so that people in the future can look at it, can figure out what happened. But of course there’s a bias in what kind of records exist to be preserved. Highly educated people write more and have more written about them than people with less education, or rich people have more written about them than poor people, white people than Black people. As an archivist, how do you think about that problem?

Colleen Shogan: I mean that’s a real problem, and unfortunately when people weren’t really thinking about that as a problem we can’t go back and reconstruct those records, we have what we have for example from the time period before the Civil War. And so we know African-American families in the United States find it oftentimes very difficult to reconstruct their genealogy much before the Civil War because there simply isn’t the records that are able to support that genealogical research. So yes, of course archivists think in those terms. At the National Archives it might be a little bit different because all presidential records are permanent records at the National Archives, so there’s no discrimination made there with presidential records. All records that are created in the execution of the Office of the Presidency become permanent accessioned records of the United States.

Alex Lovit:  Well let’s talk about civic education and history education, so that’s a field you’re working on right now with your project In Pursuit as part of the organization More Perfect. So civic education I think is pretty direct in terms of helping citizens understand how their government works. If you don’t understand how government works you won’t be able to apply pressure, you won’t even necessarily understand why things are going wrong, who to blame. But history education is a little different than that, can you make an argument for why it’s important to know history for effective citizenship or for democracy?

Colleen Shogan: Well I think that actually history and civics go hand in hand with each other, you really can’t understand civics if you don’t understand some of the decisions that were made previously in the United States in our history that lead us up to the governing situations that we find ourselves in today. So I don’t think you can actually have one without the other. And that’s critically important because how can we evaluate our current leadership without that knowledge of the past, and also what we’ve inherited from our past?

Alex Lovit:  And can you talk a little just about In Pursuit and what your plans are for next year?

Colleen Shogan: After I left the National Archives I was happy to be invited to lead this project, which is a project of More Perfect, an alliance of 45, 50 organizations who are very interested in strengthening the ties of democracy in the United States. And one of the main pillars of More Perfect is to strengthen civics education. In pursuit is the signature 250th initiative for More Perfect, and what we’re doing is we’re looking back at all of our presidents in the United States, and select First Ladies, and we’ve asked prominent previous public officials, we’re asking noted historians, journalists, other thought leaders to write very short essays, only 1,200 words. And each essay asks the same thing, what is one lesson we can learn from this person’s leadership that can inform our present and future?

Alex Lovit:  We’ll put a link to that project in the show notes, and it’s launching in full form in 2026 but there’s a roadmap for what you have planned, some pretty prominent names on that list. Former presidents, also some very prominent historians, you’ve got really the creme de la creme of historians as well.

Colleen Shogan: Well it’s interesting, when I went out and explained what we were trying to do, and we were doing it in a way that was nonpartisan and without ideology. And we just simply wanted to argue that we can do history in this very politicized time, no one is arguing that this isn’t a politicized time of hyperpartisanship and polarization, but we could still engage in a historical enterprise that would be meaningful for many Americans. The response was really overwhelming, people were really excited to hear that there was a project like this that was being undertaken.

Alex Lovit:  So history is a pretty big topic. So when you’re putting together something like In Pursuit, also at NARA, NARA primarily is an archive but they also do some museums, some history education, so you can’t cover everything, no one can know everything that happened in the past. So when you’re thinking about what to include and what to leave out how do you think about those kinds of decisions?

Colleen Shogan: It can be challenging, particularly when you’re talking about public displays with the idea that when Americans come to visit a place like the National Archives my question was, will people see something in themselves at the National Archives? Will they feel a kinship? Will they feel like, yes, the National Archives represents me as a citizen of the United States? So we wanted to have that type of inclusivity, and we also wanted to try to have a level of comprehensiveness as much as possible.

Alex Lovit:  And how do you think about how to present the darker sides of American history? How do we tell those stories?

Colleen Shogan: I feel as though we have to tell those stories so that we can ensure what I would say would be an accurate and fair representation of history. When I try to explain this to also people about In Pursuit, because I’m often asked that question as well, well is this just going to be 70 essays celebrating all the great things that first ladies and presidents have done and not confronting the failures that we’ve seen in American history? And the answer to that is absolutely not because we can’t appreciate our successes without understanding the times in which we didn’t live up to the ideals and the principles that the United States promises.

Alex Lovit:  Yeah, well if you’re going to have essays about every previous president there’s going to be some that are hard to write histories of success about. So I’m thinking about a shared history of something that binds the country together, something that we can all invest in to some extent, whose responsibility is it to teach history? I mean is this something the US government should be doing? Is this something schools should be doing? Parents should be doing? Who should be teaching history?

Colleen Shogan: That’s a really good question. I don’t think the federal government should be teaching history per se. I think the federal government, at least from my vantage point of cultural institutions like the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian, we should be providing access to the records, to the books, to the films, to the maps, to the artifacts. We can provide a lot of instruction about how to interpret primary source material, which I think places like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Archives do quite well. So that is a form of history education, providing the lens in which you can look at history. But I don’t think we should be, and I said this over and over as Archivists, it wasn’t my job to be interpreting history for Americans.

Actually, the job of interpreting history is the job of citizens themselves, and that’s a pretty heavy job, it’s a lot we place upon citizens of a democracy that they have the responsibility to understand their history. But that is, I think, very, very important. But yes, of course, I mean schools have a role in helping to teach history. And I would argue that it’s terrific if parents engage in teaching history to their kids, history and civics. My parents were not historians but my dad really liked history, and so he took myself and my brother to a lot of different historical sites and locations within driving distance of where I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. And that was really formational for me because I got to see not just something that I was reading about in a book, but actually seeing it in real time as a kid, and that was very exciting and helpful.

Alex Lovit:  We’re going through a difficult period in the politics of our country right now, and I’m thinking about someday historians are going to write about our current moment, and I’m wondering who will be the central actors in those accounts? Is this a story about Donald Trump? Is this a story about the Republican Party? A story about the citizens of America and what they did or didn’t do? Do you have thoughts on that?

Colleen Shogan: Well it’s probably going to be all of those things, but I mean it’s not just about Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn’t just appear out of nowhere and find this political landscape and that was it. There was a lot of changes and a lot of developments that started to occur 20 years, 30 years, 40 years before he was ever elected that actually influenced his election as President of the United States. And certainly other institutions like political parties, and other agencies, and other actors, including how citizens responded to what was happening, will all be part of the story.

It’s really hard, I will say this as a political scientist who is trained in the use of history as data, that enterprise is not very good at forecasting. It’s very good at looking backwards and then making sense of a certain social movement, or looking at the development of an institution, or the development of a particular policy, it’s very good tools to be able to look at that with an analytical lens. It’s not very good at figuring out what is in store for us in the future or how we will look backwards upon this time because it’s not just looking at one moment in time, it’s looking at one moment in time encapsulated with what happened before it, and also what subsequently will come after it. Context.

Alex Lovit:  Sure, the name of the show. Thinking about history and kind of its political uses today, the Trump Administration has paid a lot of attention to this, so you’re firing may or may not have been part of this but the 1776 Project in the first administration, this go round they’ve written a memo to the Smithsonian trying to influence how history is presented there, trying to influence how history is presented in school curriculum across the country. Why do you think Trump is so concerned about how we tell and understand the American story?

Colleen Shogan: I hate to intuit motives of almost any political actor without having been able to ask that particular person, but in general historical narratives are very powerful, not only for understanding the past but also understanding the possibilities of the current moment and understanding the possibilities of the future. So narratives are not just powerful to influence what kids learn in history class or they learn this versus that or whatever, but what they learn will actually impact how they look about the country, the possibilities of the country, the prospects that they will inherit. So in some ways, I mean history is extraordinarily powerful. We know this from for example the Soviets and the communist regime did a lot to excise people from their archives. People went back and took whole people out of history. They disappeared from photographs, they disappeared from records, all those types of things. So if people go away and you’re not presented that full representation of history, that really changes how you think about your current circumstances and how you can think about the future.

Alex Lovit:  So thinking about what listeners to this show should take away or what they can do, so one thing they could do is call their Congressperson and say fully fund NARA, one of the problems is it doesn’t really have a constituency. But thinking about this problem of historical erasure, how we tell and understand our story, is there anything listeners should take away that they could do to help preserve stories and memories that might otherwise be getting lost or kind of papered over?

Colleen Shogan: National institutions are important, don’t get me wrong, and we should be concerned about our national institutions today and their functionality. But I think a lot of what impacts most Americans is what actually happens in their community. So if you are interested in these matters then go and support your local library, your public library. Make sure library funding is preserved in your community. If you have a local historical society or archive support what they’re doing, and preserve the independence of your museums and other cultural institutions that exist in your community. I mean the independence is really what matters.

We’ve kind of grown a little complacent in the United States with this, we’ve enjoyed an independent National Archives, we’ve enjoyed an independent Smithsonian, an independent Library of Congress, these cultural institutions, they’ve been free. Yes, there’s been attempts to try to politicize them in the past, but they’ve largely been resistant. So it is important, I think, to talk to your member of Congress if you have the opportunity to be able to speak with that person or make your views available because as you said, there’s a limited audience for some of these cultural institutions that preserve our history collectively. Millions of Americans consume the products that come out of people that use the archives in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, but we should be very concerned about the fact that if we don’t act, we don’t take it seriously, some of this independence and nonpartisanship that we have taken for granted could be lost.

Alex Lovit:  Well, Colleen Shogan, thank you for all your work to preserve our national history and our memory, and thank you for joining me on The Context.

Colleen Shogan: Thank you for having me.

Alex Lovit:  I have a PhD in American history, it’s a subject I’ve thought a lot about, but Colleen Shogan still said some things that surprised me. I’m used to thinking about archives as tools for historians, where you go for research if you’re writing a history book. But Colleen pointed out all the other people who rely on the National Archives, citizens researching family histories, veterans trying to access their benefits, journalists investigating the government through the Freedom of Information Act. There are a lot of ways that government should be transparent before records go into the National Archives. To hold government accountable we need to know what it’s doing today, not just what it did last year or last decade. But it also helps that politicians and bureaucrats know that they’ll face history’s judgment, that their decisions and actions will be part of the public record of our country. That’s why backlogs at NARA are actually a problem, those are delays in understanding what our government has done in our name.

The other thing Colleen said that surprised me was about her goals for the Civics Education Project, In Pursuit. She said she wants to tell a story of our country that all of us can see ourselves in, that includes our successes and our failures, and that is nonpartisan. History has become so politicized lately that seems almost impossible. History is more than just facts, some level of interpretation is always involved, and it’s hard to tell a story everyone will agree with. But I’ll be following In Pursuit over the next year. As we celebrate the United States 250th birthday we need people like Colleen to help us understand our shared national story. Thanks for listening and happy new year.

The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn, Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Teo Clyburn, Jasmine O’Lare, and Darla Minich. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I’m Alex Lovit, I’m a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering, thanks for listening.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests, they’re not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation’s support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.

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