Who Validates the Validator?

The federal government now allows agencies to destroy permanent records based on their own validation. The public record reveals what happened during the first year of that experiment.

In April 2021, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) opened a file on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The allegation was simple: USPTO had destroyed permanent hard-copy trademarks after digitizing them. Three years later, NARA closed the case with a single word: Founded. The agency had, in fact, destroyed permanent federal records it was not authorized to destroy.

Two and a half years after that first file opened, a second one landed on a different desk. In October 2023, four months after a new federal digitization standard took effect, a routine call between NARA appraisal staff and the records team at U.S. Customs and Border Protection surfaced something similar: CBP’s Office of Trade had been digitizing and destroying records under a disposition schedule that was still pending NARA’s approval, records that had already been identified as appropriate for permanent retention. NARA closed that case Unfounded. But the sequence it describes, destruction running ahead of an approved authority, is the same sequence that produced USPTO’s Founded case two years before it.

Both cases sit inside a regulatory structure the federal government built quickly, under deadline pressure, in the months surrounding 2023. That structure, General Records Schedule 4.5, allows an agency to validate its own digitization against 36 CFR 1236, Subpart E, and destroy the paper source without NARA first conducting a record-by-record or project-specific inspection of the physical originals. It is not that NARA has no role: NARA wrote the standard, approves the underlying records schedules, and can investigate after the fact. But once an agency invokes GRS 4.5, the judgment about whether a specific digitization was done well enough to justify destroying the only original belongs to the agency, not to an outside archival authority reviewing the physical record before it disappears. That is the sharpest point of difference identified in the comparative regulatory analysis previously published here, comparing the American approach with those of the Netherlands, France, and Spain, each of which still requires an external archival determination tied to the physical record before authorizing its destruction.

This piece asks a narrower question about that difference: how reliably was the validation actually done, in the specific window when the rule requiring it collided with a compliance deadline that had already been extended once.

A deadline that arrived before its own rulebook, then almost caught up

OMB and NARA jointly issued Memorandum M-19-21 in June 2019, setting a deadline of December 31, 2022, for agencies to manage all permanent federal records electronically. That deadline came and went with the digitization standard for permanent paper records still not published. On December 23, 2022, eight days before it expired, NARA and OMB issued M-23-07, extending the deadline to June 30, 2024.

The rule that was supposed to govern how agencies met that extended deadline, 36 CFR 1236 Subpart E, was published May 4, 2023, and took effect June 5, 2023. GRS 4.5, the schedule that lets agencies destroy paper originals once digitization is validated against that rule, was finalized the same month. From the standard’s effective date to the deadline, agencies had just under thirteen months. From the date the rule was published, just under fourteen.

That is not the same failure as the original deadline arriving with no standard at all. It is a narrower and in some ways more consequential problem: a firm, standard-based deadline, and well under fourteen months to interpret a brand-new regulation, build a validation program around it, and apply that program to an existing backlog of paper, all at once.

What agencies said about themselves while the clock was running

Three federal agencies’ own 2023 compliance filings, the annual Senior Agency Official for Records Management reports each agency submits to NARA, describe programs still catching up to the rule during exactly this window.

The Department of the Navy’s 2023 report describes the Navy as still evolving its currently implemented digitization program into a FADGI-compliant digitization program, language that puts the compliance work in progress rather than finished at the moment deadline pressure was highest. The Department of the Air Force’s 2023 report states that the DAF Records Office has yet to incorporate NARA’s digitization standards into Air Force Instruction 33-322, the Air Force’s own governing document, attributing the delay to administrative reasons, while noting the older version of that same instruction already required staff to digitize permanent records before transfer.

Neither report quantifies how many records were digitized under these conditions, and neither is direct evidence that a specific digitization was destroyed without adequate validation. What they document is narrower and still notable: policy incorporation lagging behind an active compliance obligation, at two of the largest paper-record holders in the federal government.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 2023 report describes something more pointed: live uncertainty rather than a completed transition. According to the report, NRC received assurances from NARA’s appraisal archivist and NARA’s policy office that its records would be grandfathered, but NARA’s new guidance was silent on agencies with prior permission to destroy source records. In 1999, NRC had been authorized to digitize permanent records and destroy the paper under an earlier, NARA-approved schedule. The report states it would be impossible to rescan the more than four million records digitized since then, because the paper no longer exists. The reassurance described in the report was informal, offered by individual NARA staff rather than written into the new rule, at the exact moment that rule’s silence on legacy destroy-authorizations was creating real uncertainty for an agency holding four million records digitized under an earlier authorization and left in an unclear relationship to the standard that superseded it.

The number NARA published about itself

NARA’s own governmentwide data puts a figure on the same gap. The 2024 Federal Agency Records Management Annual Report found that 86 percent of agencies reported using NARA’s digitization standards under Subpart D and/or Subpart E. Only 71 percent reported having a validation process in place to confirm the digitized versions actually comply with those standards. NARA’s report names the gap directly: there is still a disconnect between those using the standards and those validating whether the digitized versions comply with the standards, and without that validation, valuable records and information may be lost.

That statistic asks agencies whether a validation process exists. It does not ask, and NARA’s report does not claim to measure, how rigorous those validation processes actually are, and it does not establish that any specific unvalidated digitization was followed by destruction of the source. What it shows is narrower and still significant: reported use of the standard runs meaningfully ahead of reported validation of it, across the entire federal government, in the same year the compliance deadline landed.

This investigation is part of MetaArchivist's continuing examination of records policy, digital preservation, and archival practice. Paid subscriptions support the time required to research government records, trace primary sources, and produce independent analysis like this. Thank you for supporting the work.

Two cases, one closed and one still unsettled