The National Archives got 6% smaller this year. It still runs the vault of every veteran's discharge papers.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is a small agency with an outsized job: it holds the paper trail of the federal government, from the Constitution to the discharge document a veteran needs to prove they served.▸ Its own FY2027 Congressional Justification, filed April 3, 2026, shows the agency's staff falling from 2,796 full-time positions in FY2025 to 2,628 in the FY2026 enacted budget — a loss of 168 positions, 6.0% of the workforce — and its total discretionary budget authority falling from $474.2 million to $454.3 million over the same period, a 4.2% cut. The FY2027 request asks for $419.7 million, a further $34.6 million reduction, while holding staffing flat at the FY2026 level.

NARA reports its Operating Expenses appropriation across five "program activities."▸ The FY2026 enacted total — $421.0 million — splits unevenly: Citizen Services, the activity that funds the Research Services organization and public access to archival records, is the single largest piece at $136.97 million, ahead of Legislative, Presidential and Museum Services ($127.67 million), Agency and Related Services ($64.83 million), Facility Operations ($61.53 million), and the Electronic Records Initiative ($30.0 million).

Citizen Services is also where the cutting has been sharpest in dollar terms.▸ It fell from $156.23 million in FY2025 to $136.97 million in the FY2026 enacted budget — a 12.3% drop — and the pending FY2027 request would take it to $131.43 million, 14.9% below the FY2025 level.

Agency-wide FTE tell a similar story: roughly flat through FY2025, then a sharp step down for FY2026, held flat into the FY2027 request even as the dollar figure keeps falling — meaning any further FY2027 cuts would come out of non-labor costs, or the flat staffing level will not hold.

The budget line has a name and a date behind it.▸ On June 13, 2025, NARA told staff in an internal notice — quoted in a grievance American Federation of Government Employees Council 260 filed against the agency on July 21, 2025 — that its "workforce reduction would be limited to less than 3% of its workforce." Three days later, on June 16, NARA issued reduction-in-force notices to roughly 15 bargaining-unit employees; on June 30 it issued notices to roughly 32 more — about 47 people total, separated from federal service effective mid-to-late August 2025 unless they resigned or retired. Before either round, the agency had already reassigned more than 90 bargaining-unit employees to different divisions, shielding them from the RIF; the union's grievance alleges — a claim NARA has not adjudicated as of publication — that the reassigned group skewed younger and the RIF'd group skewed over 50, a pattern it says violates the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The rest of the 168-position gap between FY2025 and FY2026 reflects retirements, buyouts, and attrition not backfilled, on top of the formal RIF.

One of NARA's six major program offices, alongside Research Services and the Federal Register, is the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis — "the central repository of personnel-related records for both the military and civil services of the United States," in the agency's own description.▸ According to NARA's facility fact sheet, more than 600 staff work there, processing about 1.5 million records requests a year — 5,000 to 6,000 a day — out of holdings that include more than 56 million individual military personnel files. Roughly 1.1 million of those annual requests, more than 4,000 a workday, are specifically for military service records, NARA said in a January 2024 announcement that it had eliminated a pandemic-era backlog that had grown past 600,000 unanswered requests. Clearing it took about two years and, in the agency's own words, "added staff," "expanded work hours," and more "contract labor" — the same categories of capacity now being reduced agency-wide.

NARA's physical footprint is shrinking alongside its headcount.▸ In June 2026, the agency told staff it would close or transition out of three Federal Records Centers — in Chicago and San Francisco/San Bruno, and moving out of Seattle — relocating temporary and permanent records to other sites. AFGE Council 260 has filed formal notice of its intent to bargain over the impact on employees at those three facilities; as of the closures' announcement, the union said NARA had not yet told it how staff there would be reassigned.

Figures reflect NARA's FY2026 and FY2027 Congressional Justifications and the AFGE Council 260 grievance as filed; the grievance's legal claims are allegations, not adjudicated findings, and NARA's FY2027 request is pending before Congress, not enacted law, as of publication.