The Disappearing Data Chronology documents fundamental changes to the federal information landscape under the Trump administration, including major data losses and restorations, legal challenges to information takedowns, and threats to archival collections.
Washington, D.C., March 16, 2026 – In 2025, the Department of Energy gave the National Security Archive 3 business days to clarify a Freedom of Information Request that had generated nearly 100,000 pages of potentially responsive material, otherwise the request would be “voluntarily withdrawn.” On August 21, 2025, the DOE Office of the General Counsel wrote:
Washington, D.C., March 19, 2026 - On August 10, 1973, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger placed a call to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to complain about U.S. officials who were participating in congressional hearings to investigate the secret bombing of Cambodia. As the Nixon administration’s cover up was unraveling, Kissinger was angry that “these @*%&* over there are acting as if it happened on the moon”; he demanded that Secretary Laird defend the original Nixon/Kissinger decision to launch clandestine attacks on Cambodia.
Washington, D.C., December 23, 2025 - The verbatim transcripts of Vladimir Putin's meetings and telephone calls with U.S. president George W. Bush from 2001 to 2008 opened to the public yesterday as the result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the National Security Archive.
The documents show that Russian president Putin was Bush's close ally in 2001 with their shared anti-terrorism focus, Putin's on Chechnya and Bush's on Al-Qaeda, to the point that Bush exclaimed "You're the type of guy I like to have in the foxhole with me."
Washington, D.C., December 10, 2025 - Almost 40 years ago, as White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver North was secretly running the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra operations, he became concerned about the activities of a unique, non-profit research center called the National Security Archive.
Washington D.C. December 4, 2025 - Fifty years ago today, Senator Frank Church convened the first public congressional hearing ever held on CIA covert operations to overthrow a foreign government, focusing on the case of Chile. His Senate Select Committee was taking this “unusual step,” Church explained, “because the committee believes the American people must know and be able to judge what was undertaken by their government in Chile.
Washington D.C., November 20, 2025 - Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination.
Washington, D.C., September 30, 2025 - Eight months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has fundamentally distorted the federal information landscape as it continues to rewrite and erase resources about climate change, environmental justice, and climate diplomacy.
Washington, D.C., July 16, 2025 - Early in the morning of 16 July 1945, 80 years ago, the U.S. Manhattan Project staged the first test of a nuclear weapon in the New Mexican desert. It was the first trial of a plutonium implosion weapon—the same weapon type that devastated Nagasaki a few weeks later. The explosion on the ground produced radioactive fallout contaminating over 1,100 square miles of the state, with some debris spreading as far north as Canada.
Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 - Just six months before the 1964 military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in Brazil, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Plans Richard Helms briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on CIA clandestine operations in South America’s largest country.