A federal judge in Washington, D.C., stepped in today to stop several parts of the Trump administration from throwing away or hiding official documents. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia gave emergency relief to two groups, American Oversight and the American Historical Association. The groups had filed a lawsuit because they were worried the administration was trying to get around the Presidential Records Act, which is a law that says the government must save its papers and messages for history.
Judge John D. Bates began his order with a famous quote from George Orwell’s book 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
The judge decided to grant part of what the groups asked for, while turning down other parts. The new rules will officially start at 9:00 a.m. on May 26, 2026. The emergency order comes after the groups filed a lawsuit last month. They went to court because the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote an opinion claiming the Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional and telling President Trump he did not need to follow it anymore. The lawsuit argued that the administration’s stance was unlawful and went against past Supreme Court decisions made after the Watergate scandal.
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The new court order forces the White House Office, the National Security Council, the U.S. DOGE Service, and all presidential advisors to follow the record-keeping law completely. Under the order, they must save all presidential and vice presidential records. They are also banned from creating or sending official records through text messages or apps that delete messages automatically, unless they copy an official government account to save the message.
Additionally, the offices must hand out copies of this court order to their employees. They have until May 28, 2026, to file a formal note with the court explaining exactly what steps they took to follow the judge’s instructions.
This court order applies to a long list of specific people and offices inside the White House, who are being called the “Enjoined Defendants.” This list includes White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the Office of Records Management and its director Philip Droege, the National Security Council and its executive secretary Catherine Keller, and the Homeland Security Council alongside Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller. It also names the Council on Economic Advisers and its chair Pierre Yared, White House Chief Usher Robert Downing for the Executive Residence, Intelligence Advisory Board Chair Devin Nunes, the Office of Administration and its director Joshua Fisher, and Vice President Chief of Staff Jacob Reses. The newly created U.S. DOGE Service and its acting administrator, Amy Gleason, are also required to follow the order.
However, the judge did not put these specific restrictions on every single person named in the lawsuit. The President, the Vice President, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Archivist, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Attorney General are not included in this specific part of the block.
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Chioma Chukwu, the Executive Director of American Oversight, released a statement about the case.
“Today’s ruling is an important victory for presidential accountability and for affirming what decades of law and practice already established — the constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act,” Chukwu said. “The court recognized the serious danger posed by the administration’s attempt to cast aside longstanding federal law governing presidential records and replace it with a system dependent largely on presidential discretion and public trust. This case has always been about something larger than records management. It is about whether a president can treat government records as personal property — deciding for himself what will be preserved, what will be disclosed, and what can simply be destroyed. The court’s decision helps ensure that the American people — not the White House — retain ownership over the historical record of the presidency. It reaffirms a basic democratic principle: presidents do not get to decide unilaterally what history will remember and what the public will never see.”
Dr. Sarah Weicksel, the Executive Director of the American Historical Association, also released a statement explaining why the decision matters to the public.
“This ruling reaffirms the essential place of presidential records in documenting our nation’s history and a core principle of the Presidential Records Act: that these records belong to the American people, not to any one individual,” Weicksel said. “Historians—and the public who engages with and learns from the histories we write and curate—rely upon the integrity of the historical record. Americans deserve the ability to understand the entirety of their history. By requiring continued compliance with the Presidential Records Act, this preliminary injunction is an important step forward in ensuring that the documents that tell our nation’s history are preserved for future generations.”
The legal battle over how White House files are managed and preserved will continue to move forward in the federal court system.
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