When governments destroy evidence: the story of the Trump administration

Historians rely on primary sources. Building hypotheses requires good judgement and (ideally) some powers of persuasion and a good writing style. But without evidence, they count for little - both because evidence provides the skeleton on which arguments get built. And evidence, of course, allow others to check your work.

The destruction of sources is therefore a serious matter. It often accompanies moments of political transition, turmoil or worse - during revolutions, for example, when those on their way out of power seek to conceal the horrors what they have done or the crimes they have committed, and want to make it harder for their successors to find out what they have done.

Sometimes, though, documents and data are deliberately destroyed for other reasons: out of spite, embarrassment, ideology, or simply because those responsible do not want them to survive.

From a historian’s point of view, that comes close to an unforgivable act: destroying evidence does not merely erase part of the past; it makes it harder for anyone in the future to establish what actually happened.

It beggars belief that we’re seeing some systematic efforts to do this at the moment - not in one of the world’s autocracies, but its greatest democracy.

In this post, I’ll explain what has happened, and their value.

Last year, the administration of Donald Trump set about dismantling USAID.

One of the consequences has been the disposal of 25 years worth of reports. It has emerged that almost 5,000 of there were deleted from the Development Experience Clearinghouse, USAID’s vast and decidedly unglamorous repository of evaluations, audits and other documents.