by Chris Marcum
Both dataindex.us and the Data Rescue Project care deeply about the preservation and public accessibility of federal data. While much of our attention has focused on making these data assets available to the public, motivated by the threat of data loss, we might also ask: how could agencies properly dispose of data assets under the law?
Federal data assets are, ultimately, federal records of information. The Federal Records Act (FRA) of 1950 is the principal statute governing how federal agencies must manage records throughout their lifecycle, including their final disposition. The FRA requires agencies to establish record management programs and to work with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to ensure that records documenting agency functions are retained and properly disposed of. It covers the creation, maintenance, and disposal of Federal records, whether in paper or digital/electronic form.
In the context of data removal, disposition refers to one of two possible outcomes allowed under the FRA: temporary or permanent based on its long-term value to the history of the United States. Temporary records are designated for eventual destruction after a specific retention period because they lack the historical or administrative significance to warrant permanent storage at NARA. Permanent records are those determined to have enduring value for the history of the United States. These records are never destroyed; instead, they are held by the agency until they are eventually transferred to the legal custody of the National Archives for perpetual preservation. While most records held by an agency are temporary (up to 98%) and will eventually be destroyed, nearly all federal data assets should have permanent disposition status.
Not only are federal data assets of high-value, the Open Government Data Act of 2018 (OGDA) and the associated Office of Management and Budget (OMB) implementation guidance makes justifying permanent erasure incredibly difficult. While the OGDA does not technically override the FRA, it does create a statutory "presumption of openness" (i.e., open by default) that effectively pushes a vast majority of federal data toward permanent public accessibility. While the FRA still determines if a record is temporary or permanent, the OGDA requires that as long as an agency "maintains" a data asset, it must be inventoried in the agency’s comprehensive data inventory and indexed in the Federal Data Catalog on Data.gov. Moreover, the OMB Peer Review Bulletin and Information Quality Act (IQA) guidelines state that, for "influential scientific, financial, or statistical information" disseminated by an agency, the associated data must have a high degree of transparency to facilitate reproducibility of analyses. For many agencies, the cost and public-facing nature of maintaining and disseminating data assets effectively transforms them into permanent historical resources.
Under the FRA implementing regulations (e.g., 36 C.F.R. Part 1220), agencies may only dispose of records that have disposition authority typically either through inclusion in a General Records Schedule (for administrative records) or a NARA-approved agency Records Control Schedule (for mission-related records, such as statistical and scientific datasets). NARA reviews, appraises, and approves records schedules, as well as any proposals to destroy records. Periodically, the Archivist of the United States issues a notice of proposed disposition in the Federal Register to allow for public comment on an agencies’ disposition requests before the Archivist makes a final determination about the request. This FRA process ensures that federal records are not destroyed or archived without public input and oversight.
The importance of public comments on data collections has been discussed before on dataindex.us from a Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) perspective. Typically, when public comments are solicited by an agency on data collections under the PRA they are done early in the lifecycle of the collection - either at its proposed initiation or for a change to how the data are collected. We feel that public comments on data are equally important in the context of the FRA, when the solicitations reflect what happens to datasets at the end of their federal lifecycle.
When Permanent Archiving Should be Supplemented with Perpetual Agency Retention
From a data preservation perspective, the FRA provides a pathway to ensure that valuable data resources are not arbitrarily deleted at an agency on the whims of political convenience. NARA archives are intended to be permanent afterall. However, from an access perspective, data permanently deposited in NARA can increase friction on the public seeking to find those records should an agency remove access to them from their original locations.
Permanent disposition of data assets means eventual transfer to NARA and provides for the legal pathway for the agency to remove data assets from their websites, data servers, and other information systems. Because the OGDA only requires agencies to include data assets that the agency maintains in its comprehensive data inventory, there is a risk that the metadata associated with those data is also lost and no longer findable in the Federal Data Catalog.
Not only are NARA archives difficult to search, it takes time for NARA to curate, deposit, and propagate records. That extra time can impede research, delay business decisions, or slow policymaking. Some records end up only available to access “in person” at one of the archive sites, adding significant cost and burden to anyone looking to review the records. Final disposition can also break things when agencies do not concurrently retain online records: because most agencies publish their data online, they get cited and used in situ, and permanent archiving through the FRA breaks links to the original source of data.
As a best practice, federal data assets should be continuously maintained by the agency in addition to being transferred to NARA. When the NARA records of transferred data assets become available, agencies should update their comprehensive data inventories by adding relevant disposition context, including a URL to the NARA record. This will ensure the public can continue to find the data assets in the Federal Data Catalog.
A Case Example from the Bureau of Economic Analysis
Recently, NARA posted a new notice in the Federal Register soliciting public comment on requests for changes to the disposition schedules of records held by eight federal agencies. Of special interest to us was the inclusion of a request by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to accelerate the disposition schedule of several of its statistical products, including their diamond open-access journal, The Survey of Current Business (SCB). Comments are due March 1st, 2026 and can be submitted through regulations.gov. Here, we provide some context that the public might find helpful in responding to the proposed changes to the SCB’s record schedule.
By the Department of Commerce’s own summation, as reported in the first article published in July of 1921, the SCB represents a significant source of economic and statistical data for the public:
“To visualize the current trends of business and industry monthly, the Department of Commerce has found it necessary to condense and compile a large volume of information. These facts have been of service to the Department in its attempt to grasp the changing business conditions. It is believed they may be useful to the business public and that the figures, in some measure, will assist in the enlargement of business judgment.
To concentrate such a mass of information in convenient form and to make it useful for study and comparison, the data have been coded into relative figures, or index numbers, where necessary. These index numbers enable the reader to see at a glance the general upward or downward tendency of a movement, which can not so easily be grasped from actual figures.”
Early entries in the SCB were attributed to the “Department of Commerce” and consisted largely of an executive summary followed by pages of tables of statistical data profiling aggregated business activity in the United States. The SCB is where you would go to find official data and analysis about a diverse range of topics, from updates to the major national economic accounts in 2025 to the income of dentists in the early 20th Century. Over time, the journal included more analysis and interpretation of data as well as attributions to individual contributing authors. Today, the SCB is published entirely online and features not just data tables, figures, and analyses, but also perspective articles, methods, tutorials, and infographics.
The SCB has tremendous value to researchers, businesses, and the public. Its research value is particularly significant; for instance, a 2022 SCB paper on unpaid household labor has been cited in 32 academic studies, while historical reports continue to shape modern analysis, like a 1977 paper cited nearly 400 times, including as recently as 2025. SCB data and analysis has been used by federal agencies, such as the Department of Energy to understand the energy utilization in American Samoa, the Federal Reserve in an analysis of lackluster productivity in the construction sector, and by BEA itself for preparing a Commerce report on the U.S. Space Economy. And it's helped inform more general audiences too: for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce regularly cites the SCB, including in its recent 2024 Transatlantic Economy report, and even bloggers have used the SCB to help answer important questions like, “Which States Have the Most Bars Per Person?”.
In the request to NARA, BEA wants to be able to permanently archive articles published in the SCB as soon as two years after publication. The previously approved records schedule permits the agency to archive the records every three years. Articles published between 2019 and 2023 would be the first tranche affected under the proposed change. Many articles are already deposited with NARA under older records regimes, including a publicly accessible collection of entire issues of SCB from 1995 to 2021. The accelerated disposition timeline would help BEA ensure that SCB products are protected in a more timely manner. While the proposal does not mention how long the agency plans to retain copies of articles published in SCB, BEA recognizes the historical importance of the journal and continues to provide free public access to the journal through its online archive.
BEA is doing the right thing by keeping the SCB on its website even as it requests accelerated permanent disposition of its records. Archiving under the FRA is a necessary but not sufficient data governance practice to sustain public access to highly relevant data assets and statistical products like the SCB. Concurrent persistent retention at the URLs where those records were originally published by an agency is essential. Ideally, a persistent digital identifier (such as a DOI) would be associated with those URLs and the data assets they point to, which would greatly enhance their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (e.g., their FAIRness). Notably, the SCB isn’t even listed as a public data asset in the BEA comprehensive data inventory, which adds a level of risk to its FAIRness.
Considerations Unique to Federal Data Assets for Public Comments
When NARA publishes a notice in the Federal Register for a proposed change to a records disposition schedule, the public has a 45-day window to provide comments. Because federal data assets have high-value to the public, agency disposition proposals should be particularly scrutinized when they’re invoked. Public comments help to ensure the agency receives feedback from the public on their value. Key factors to raise for the agency consider when drafting a response specific to data assets include:
Evidence-Based Policymaking: Determine if the data serves as the underlying evidence for active federal regulations, health guidelines, or economic projections. If any agency currently relies on this data for decision-making, its destruction could violate OMB’s Information Quality Act reproducibility standards.
Public Data Asset Status: Assess whether the records qualify as "public data assets" under the OGDA. If it is, then it needs to be added to the agency's Comprehensive Data Inventory and a "Temporary" schedule may contradict the statutory "open by default" mandate.
Scientific and Research Impact: Check if the data has been cited in peer-reviewed literature, used in metadata for open science platforms (like PubMed Central, OpenAlex, or CrossRef), or referenced in press coverage. Data with high reuse value in the scientific community often meets NARA’s criteria for historical significance.
Link Integrity and Persistence: Evaluate if the data is a "source of truth" frequently linked to by outside organizations. Moving records to NARA often breaks original URLs; if the data is a live resource for the public (e.g., genomic databases or climate sensors), emphasize the need for perpetual agency retention to maintain continuity.
Legal and Rights Protection: Consider if the data are necessary to protect the legal rights of individuals. Data assets that document civil rights, property claims, or toxic exposure typically require permanent status to ensure accountability across generations.
Findability and Friction: Highlight the potential "friction" of public access. If transferring the records to NARA would make them significantly harder to search or require in-person visits to an archives facility, argue that the administrative burden of transfer alone outweighs the benefits of agency-level deletion.
When we think about the life-cycle of federal data, permanent archiving is often considered its end stage. The public has a considerable interest in ensuring that agencies provide free public access with sustained FAIRness to critical Federal data assets even after they've been transferred to the National Archives. We encourage you to monitor the National Archives on the Federal Register and respond to notices posted as “Records Schedules; Availability and Request for Comments” to ensure both the Archives and the requesting agency know what you think about long-term data preservation and access. Public comments on records disposition requests will ensure agencies experiencing disruption, such as USAID, IMLS, and CFPB, have a voice of advocacy for permanence and public access to their data.