This is not a routine matter of facilities management, and it should not be treated as one. The regional archives are not a real estate line item to be trimmed in pursuit of a leaner portfolio. They are public infrastructure of the most fundamental kind — the places where the American people go to examine the documentary record of their own government and their own families. When a regional archive closes, the federal government does not merely vacate a building. It withdraws from the people of an entire region their practical ability to see the evidence of their history. That is a loss no efficiency calculation can justify, and it demands the immediate attention of both the Archivist and the Congress.
The heart of the problem is simple: the overwhelming majority of the records held in Chicago and San Bruno exist on paper and nowhere else. NARA's own digitization efforts, however earnest, have reached only a small fraction of its regional holdings, and many of these materials — fragile case files, oversized bound volumes, brittle onionskin, records still under review — cannot be safely or feasibly digitized at scale within any realistic timeframe or budget. For these records, physical access is the only access. Relocating them to distant facilities does not consolidate them; it removes them from public reach. The National Archives at Chicago serves researchers across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. San Bruno serves northern and central California, Nevada, Hawaii, and the Pacific territories. These facilities sit in major metropolitan areas precisely because that is where the public can reach them — by transit, on a day trip, on a working person's schedule. A teacher in Milwaukee, a tribal historian in Minnesota, a family in Oakland tracing a grandfather's immigration file cannot make regular research visits to a warehouse two thousand miles away. For them, relocation is indistinguishable from destruction of access.
What is at stake in Chicago is the recorded life of the American heartland. The Chicago facility preserves 140,000 cubic feet of archival material recording the maritime logs, customs records, and lighthouse and life-saving service files that document commerce and catastrophe on the Great Lakes — the freshwater arteries on which the industrial Midwest was built. It holds records of federal relations with Native nations across the Great Lakes region: enrollment records, agency correspondence, and treaty-era documentation that tribal governments and citizens rely upon today for enrollment, land, and sovereignty matters. And it safeguards the federal court and agency records that chronicle the great labor history of the Midwest such as Pullman, Haymarket-era prosecutions, the steel and stockyard organizing drives, the litigation through which working people secured their rights. These are not regional curiosities. They are national history that happens to live in the Midwest, and the people of the Midwest are entitled to reach it.
The National Archives was founded on a radical and simple idea: that in a democracy, the government's records are the people's property, and the people must be able to see them. A national archive that retreats from the nation, that consolidates the public's history into a handful of distant buildings, keeps the paper but breaks the promise. We are not asking for anything new. We are asking that a promise made to every American, be kept, in perpetuity.
Raise your voice NOW, it will make a difference.
Write your senators: https://www.senate.
Write your Congress: https://www.house.
Sign the petition: https://www.change.
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