James Byron, president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, is now performing the functions of Archivist of the United States.
Let that sink in.
Byron was injected when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 300-day tenure as acting archivist silently expired on February 4, 2026 under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
Byron’s previous organization was a disinformation spigot that spent decades attacking archives, fighting against accurate portrayal of Watergate. The Nixon Foundation used its radical activist money to prevent a Nixon Library exhibit that depicted the scandal as it happened. Byron sums up Nixon like this:
…inspirational — he never gave up… anything that increases interest in President Nixon is a good thing.
Anything?
People serving the “foundation” side of presidential libraries are not involved with archival content for a reason. That reason is NARA’s mandate to preserve and protect historical records. Byron is thus the opposite mandate, to destroy records.
He is not Senate-confirmed. He was not nominated. There is no nominee. By design. It has been a year and the enemy of American archives is in control of them.
Byron has no graduate degree, no archival training, no scholarly publications, and no experience working with primary sources in a professional capacity. His only authored work is a lightweight gift shop souvenir guide with a foreword by Nixon’s daughters and a blurb from Newt Gingrich.
His formative professional experience was in marketing and fundraising for an organization whose explicit purpose was rehabilitating a disgraced president’s reputation, a job he began at 14 and never left. His mentor, Hugh Hewitt, is a radical right-wing talk radio host.
One of Byron’s first personnel decisions was firing the respected historian whom NARA had installed as the Nixon Library’s first federal director specifically to impose professional standards on an institution that had operated as a family-controlled shrine. Byron couldn’t handle the truth and pushed out Dr. Timothy Naftali.
In October 2025, Byron unveiled a permanent National Archives exhibit called “The American Story” featuring what NARA described as AI document slop, the curatorial equivalent of letting algorithms hallucinate the historical record.
This is not a person who has been trained to evaluate evidence, assess provenance, or understand the ethical obligations of institutional stewardship. This is a marketing intern who has been trained by radical activists to shape fundraising narratives for audiences. He now shapes which national records survive.
How Trump Dictated It
In February 2025, Trump fired Archivist Colleen Shogan. Federal law required Deputy Archivist William Bosanko, a career civil servant, to assume the role. Byron, newly installed as “Senior Advisor to the Acting Archivist,” gave Bosanko a choice: resign or be fired. Bosanko resigned. The legal succession was overridden by a political appointee with no statutory authority to do it.
Trump then named Rubio, already destroying State Department and USAID, as acting archivist. The appointment was never officially announced. Rubio’s portrait appeared on NARA’s website two weeks later. Staff were not informed because they didn’t matter and many would be fired.
On February 4, 2026, Rubio’s Vacancies Act clock expired. Trump designated Byron to perform the duties of archivist. Staff were again not informed, because they matter even less and many will be fired. The portraits came down silently. A NARA spokesperson confirmed the change to Federal News Network only when asked.
The Rubio Devastation
The acting head of the National Archives, as the person responsible for enforcing federal records preservation, was simultaneously a participant in the Signal thread organized by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz to discuss Yemen airstrikes.
Waltz enabled auto-deletion of messages. The person who reasonably should know that officials were destroying federal records was one of the officials destroying federal records.
During Rubio’s tenure, House Democrats documented the “rushed disposal” of USAID records, violating law. Rubio was also acting head of USAID. He oversaw the destruction of records at one agency while he was serving as the head of the agency responsible for preventing the destruction of records.
This is the men of Nixon trying to do what Nixon wanted.
American Oversight sued Rubio and other officials for violating federal records laws through Signal use. The lawsuit is ongoing.
What Has Happened to NARA
The FY2026 budget request cuts NARA by nearly $60 million, a 10% reduction, and eliminates 136 positions. The Electronic Records Initiative, NARA’s system for managing digital federal records, takes a specific funding cut so it can’t keep records. The Office of Innovation, which ran NARA’s online catalog and digital access programs, receives zero funding. Its 50 staff are eliminated.
NARA already had approximately 150 employees pushed out since January 2025 to reduce its ability to function. Senior legal staff with records management expertise have left or retired. According to a current employee, the impact has been “horrendous,” with “bare bones” processing, reference, and records management teams.
Experienced legal staff of the Archives have left or retired, leading to little oversight of federal records management requirements.
By design. By the men of Nixon.
NARA’s budget has been essentially flat in real dollars for thirty years. At current funding, it would take over 600 years to fulfill pending declassification requests at just two of fifteen presidential libraries. A single FOIA request at the George W. Bush Library takes twelve years. The new budget cuts target the infrastructure for electronic records specifically, because it’s the format in which evidence of current government activity exists.
Trump’s Destructive Pattern
Rubio’s toxic role at NARA is not isolated, it’s one of many examples.
OMB Director Russ Vought also serves as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency the administration is trying to shut down. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is acting IRS commissioner. Frank Bisignano, head of the Social Security Administration, holds an invented “chief executive officer” role at the IRS overseeing daily operations. Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling heads the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a small agency the administration tried to eliminate before courts blocked its closure.
Federal News Network reported officials “holding several top jobs.”
This is the systematic placement of loyalists atop agencies to be neutralized or shut down, by using the Vacancies Act as the legal vehicle.
Holding multiple jobs is the Trump signal that none of them matter anymore, all of them are being devalued and collapsed.
What Next
The permanent archivist position is becoming a joke. The names floated include people who hate the archives the most. Hugh Hewitt, the radio host who told Trump on air that his “problems in Florida at Mar-a-Lago started because the Archivist complained to the DOJ” and suggested appointing someone to ensure “we don’t have to do this again” is top of the list. Also mentioned: John Solomon, a far-right reporter who advanced baseless conspiracy theories about former Presidents.
Jason Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, has stated the obvious: a confirmed archivist is imperative to ensure White House records are properly transferred into NARA custody at the end of this term, “and the sooner the better.”
There is no indication that such a nomination is possible when the men of Nixon are back in power.
Nixon’s presidency ended because he couldn’t destroy the tapes. The 18½-minute gap required physically erasing a recording in a building full of people who knew it existed. The modern version is ensuring the records never get created, never get preserved, or never get funded for retrieval. Worse, it’s ensuring propaganda replaces reality.
The man from the organization that spent fifty years trying to corrupt what just the Nixon archive said now controls all of them.
The foxes already ate the chickens and it may be too late to save the eggs.
