Don’t Confirm Bradford Wilson to Run the National Archives

When you vote on Bradford P. Wilson to lead the National Archives, please vote No. Congress set a clear test for this job decades ago. The Archivist is supposed to be picked for one reason only—that the person is genuinely qualified to do the work—and explicitly not for their politics. That rule exists because the National Archives is where the country's official memory is kept: the records that say what the government did, the documents historians and courts rely on, the certification that makes a constitutional amendment real. Whoever runs it has to be trusted by everyone, regardless of party. Wilson doesn't fit what the role demands. His background is in partisan political scholarship, not in the actual craft of archiving—preserving records, managing declassification, keeping documents accessible to the public. Putting an ideological pick in charge of the nation's records is precisely the outcome the law was written to prevent, and it invites exactly the fights over what gets saved, sealed, or quietly lost that an independent Archives is meant to be above. This office should be filled by a records professional chosen on merit, not handed out as a political favor. I'm asking you to reject this nomination and hold out for a qualified, nonpartisan Archivist.