Following troubling reports that Department of the Interior (DOI) employees have “routinely” shredded documents and used “disappearing Signal messages” amid a culture in which officials “are terrified of written records,” nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight today demanded immediate action to stop the destruction of federal records. In letters to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Acting Archivist Ed Forst and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, we called for compliance with the Federal Records Act (FRA), demanding the agencies to take immediate action to preserve and recover any lost or destroyed federal records in response to “any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal” or other destruction of records as required by the FRA.
Additionally, we sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to DOI seeking records related to the use of Signal and other disappearing messaging applications by Burgum and other senior Interior Department officials, materials documenting what records may have been destroyed or shredded, and other records.
“When government officials are terrified of leaving written records of their actions, the public should be deeply concerned about what they are trying to hide,” said Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight. “Federal officials should not be allowed to evade accountability by feeding documents into shredders or setting their messages to disappear. We are putting Secretary Burgum on notice: Federal records must be preserved, and any unlawful destruction must stop immediately. These records belong to the American people, and officials do not get to make them disappear simply because they may be embarrassing or damaging to the administration.”
The allegations of routine records destruction come amid separate questions about whether Interior Department officials withheld critical evidence from federal prosecutors investigating alleged vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro recently dropped charges against several individuals, including former Olympian David Hearn, after evidence showed that damage to the reflecting pool instead resulted from a “botched installation” by a contractor selected by President Trump. Pirro’s office claimed DOI had delayed turning over the evidence despite “dozens and dozens” of requests, asserting in a court filing that had “DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.” President Trump conceded earlier this week that there “was some contractor error” after he and Burgum had spent weeks blaming the damage on vandalism.
Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich have called for an investigation by DOI’s acting inspector general into what Interior Department officials knew about the alleged damage to the Reflecting Pool and whether evidence was withheld from the Department of Justice. President Trump recently nominated one of the authors of Project 2025 to be the inspector general after removing the previous inspector general during his first week in office.
