The depressing thing is that even within a very narrowly professionalized kind of nonpartisanship, NARA could do a lot more with College Park and the Presidential libraries to be friendly to research users and the transition out of pandemic precautions is a good time to be thinking about that. I haven't worked at College Park for a while, so maybe things have changed, but on the whole it is a much harder environment to do basic discovery work than the UK National Archives in Kew. But there's no hope for doing that kind of thinking while the agency is under assault simply for being a repository of documents in the first place by people who have now comprehensively rejected the idea that democracy requires some form of access to information about government actions and decision-making (which is just a corollary of their wider rejection of democracy itself).
The depressing thing is that even within a very narrowly professionalized kind of nonpartisanship, NARA could do a lot more with College Park and the Presidential libraries to be friendly to research users and the transition out of pandemic precautions is a good time to be thinking about that. I haven't worked at College Park for a while, so maybe things have changed, but on the whole it is a much harder environment to do basic discovery work than the UK National Archives in Kew. But there's no hope for doing that kind of thinking while the agency is under assault simply for being a repository of documents in the first place by people who have now comprehensively rejected the idea that democracy requires some form of access to information about government actions and decision-making (which is just a corollary of their wider rejection of democracy itself).