I am a records management specialist at the Department of the Interior, twenty-two years in, and this morning I woke to learn that I am either a criminal or a figment. Whistleblowers have told House Democrats that paperwork on the President’s Washington construction projects is gone ahead of the new majority. My Department’s reply ran to two words and a numeral: “100% false.” I drafted nothing, shredded nothing, and am delighted to explain why both statements can be true at once. People imagine my profession is about keeping things. It is about disposition. Every document born in this building is assigned a lifespan the day it arrives: three years, seven years, permanent. An archivist who only preserves is a hoarder with a pension. The art lies in knowing when a piece of paper has completed its service to the Republic and may be released. I regard the cross-cut shredder the way a sculptor regards the chisel. Michelangelo did not destroy marble. He applied a retention schedule to it. So when I say no record was destroyed, I ask you to admire the craftsmanship of the sentence. For a thing to be destroyed as a record, it must first have been a record. A draft is a preliminary thought. A text message is a mood. A cost estimate scribbled beside a rendering of a 250-foot arch is a doodle, and doodles enjoy no federal protection. Someone must decide which is which. I have a cubicle, a schedule, and a rubber stamp, and I have never been busier. Our spokesperson added one sentence I have since had framed. We follow our records obligations, he said, “as directed by the Department’s ethics officials.” Read it again, slowly, the way I read a finding aid. The Federal Records Act is a statute. The ethics officials are colleagues. One of these can be reached by phone. You should understand the pace we keep. Over the next sixty days the arch, the fencing at Lafayette Square, the East Potomac golf course, and a Tidal Basin plan containing the Garden of American Heroes all advance. Sixty days is how long the calendar gives us until the gavel changes hands. The planning commission approved the arch last Thursday over testimony that it insults the dead at Arlington, and a parks advocate complained that the historic preservation studies had been “cut short.” I prefer “concluded early.” A study that ends ahead of schedule generates less paper, and paper is where the trouble lives. The arch itself is a filing triumph. It stands one foot tall for every year of American independence, which means the design brief fits on an index card. The price has been reported at $400 million, double the first figure, though I would caution against trusting any number you cannot find in writing. The golf course may run to $49 million by one document a network managed to read. When that figure surfaced in September, we called speculation about it “premature and irresponsible.” I felt for that document. It had been seen. In my field that is how a file dies: someone looks at it. East Potomac is my favorite project, speaking purely as a professional. When the East Wing came down to make room for the ballroom, the trucks hauled the dirt across town and tipped it onto the golf course. Ours may be the only department in government that archives one presidential project by burying it under another. The provenance is flawless. The chain of custody is a dump truck. The ballroom, I am told, is nearly topped out. The President autographed its last steel beam the day after the midterms, before it went up. I mention this with envy. It is the only signature on any of these projects that I am certain will be preserved, because it is forty feet in the air and made of steel. Now the incoming chairman, Mr. Huffman of California, has sent letters. Interior received one. So did the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Agriculture Department. So did Lockheed Martin and John Deere, who gave generously to the President’s projects and must now hunt through their own cabinets. Nobody says they shredded a thing. They are simply learning what the rest of us know, which is that a gift to the government comes with a folder. The letters ask us to certify that we have suspended deletion and will “identify and recover any deleted information.” I have read that clause forty times with the tenderness one reserves for the naive. Recover it. As if disposition were a coat check. A congressman believes that somewhere in this building is a drawer marked THINGS THAT ARE GONE, and that I have the key. I have something better. I have the form that says the drawer was never issued. He promises subpoenas and a hearing early in the new year, with the golf course and the arch at the top of the list. He says his committee can go to court. He has also worried aloud that the law might let the Secretary sell the course and “hand-pick buyers through a private solicitation.” I cannot comment on a transaction that has no file. I can only observe that the thinnest folders in this Department tend to sit beside the largest numbers. I am not concerned. I have appeared before oversight bodies in four administrations, and the testimony never varies. They ask where the document is. I ask them to define document. We break for lunch. A triumphal arch, historically, commemorates a victory. Historians two centuries from now will stand beneath ours and ask which one. They will go to the archives for the answer. They will find a beautifully organized finding aid, a box labeled in my handwriting, and inside it a single index card. Records management is the only branch of history written in advance. The work is 100% complete.
— Peter Girnus 🦅 (@gothburz) November 10, 2026
I am a records management specialist at the Department of the Interior, twenty-two years in, and this morning I woke to learn that I am either a criminal or a figment.
Whistleblowers have told House Democrats that paperwork on the President’s Washington construction projects is gone ahead of the new majority. My Department’s reply ran to two words and a numeral: “100% false.” I drafted nothing, shredded nothing, and am delighted to explain why both statements can be true at once.
People imagine my profession is about keeping things. It is about disposition. Every document born in this building is assigned a lifespan the day it arrives: three years, seven years, permanent. An archivist who only preserves is a hoarder with a pension. The art lies in knowing when a piece of paper has completed its service to the Republic and may be released. I regard the cross-cut shredder the way a sculptor regards the chisel. Michelangelo did not destroy marble. He applied a retention schedule to it.
So when I say no record was destroyed, I ask you to admire the craftsmanship of the sentence. For a thing to be destroyed as a record, it must first have been a record. A draft is a preliminary thought. A text message is a mood. A cost estimate scribbled beside a rendering of a 250-foot arch is a doodle, and doodles enjoy no federal protection. Someone must decide which is which. I have a cubicle, a schedule, and a rubber stamp, and I have never been busier.
Our spokesperson added one sentence I have since had framed. We follow our records obligations, he said, “as directed by the Department’s ethics officials.” Read it again, slowly, the way I read a finding aid. The Federal Records Act is a statute. The ethics officials are colleagues. One of these can be reached by phone.
You should understand the pace we keep. Over the next sixty days the arch, the fencing at Lafayette Square, the East Potomac golf course, and a Tidal Basin plan containing the Garden of American Heroes all advance. Sixty days is how long the calendar gives us until the gavel changes hands. The planning commission approved the arch last Thursday over testimony that it insults the dead at Arlington, and a parks advocate complained that the historic preservation studies had been “cut short.” I prefer “concluded early.” A study that ends ahead of schedule generates less paper, and paper is where the trouble lives.
The arch itself is a filing triumph. It stands one foot tall for every year of American independence, which means the design brief fits on an index card. The price has been reported at $400 million, double the first figure, though I would caution against trusting any number you cannot find in writing. The golf course may run to $49 million by one document a network managed to read. When that figure surfaced in September, we called speculation about it “premature and irresponsible.” I felt for that document. It had been seen. In my field that is how a file dies: someone looks at it.
East Potomac is my favorite project, speaking purely as a professional. When the East Wing came down to make room for the ballroom, the trucks hauled the dirt across town and tipped it onto the golf course. Ours may be the only department in government that archives one presidential project by burying it under another. The provenance is flawless. The chain of custody is a dump truck.
The ballroom, I am told, is nearly topped out. The President autographed its last steel beam the day after the midterms, before it went up. I mention this with envy. It is the only signature on any of these projects that I am certain will be preserved, because it is forty feet in the air and made of steel.
Now the incoming chairman, Mr. Huffman of California, has sent letters. Interior received one. So did the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Agriculture Department. So did Lockheed Martin and John Deere, who gave generously to the President’s projects and must now hunt through their own cabinets. Nobody says they shredded a thing. They are simply learning what the rest of us know, which is that a gift to the government comes with a folder.
The letters ask us to certify that we have suspended deletion and will “identify and recover any deleted information.” I have read that clause forty times with the tenderness one reserves for the naive. Recover it. As if disposition were a coat check. A congressman believes that somewhere in this building is a drawer marked THINGS THAT ARE GONE, and that I have the key. I have something better. I have the form that says the drawer was never issued.
He promises subpoenas and a hearing early in the new year, with the golf course and the arch at the top of the list. He says his committee can go to court. He has also worried aloud that the law might let the Secretary sell the course and “hand-pick buyers through a private solicitation.” I cannot comment on a transaction that has no file. I can only observe that the thinnest folders in this Department tend to sit beside the largest numbers.
I am not concerned. I have appeared before oversight bodies in four administrations, and the testimony never varies. They ask where the document is. I ask them to define document. We break for lunch.
A triumphal arch, historically, commemorates a victory. Historians two centuries from now will stand beneath ours and ask which one. They will go to the archives for the answer. They will find a beautifully organized finding aid, a box labeled in my handwriting, and inside it a single index card.
Records management is the only branch of history written in advance. The work is 100% complete.
Replies
I love it.