In January 2020, a Washington Post reporter noticed blurred protest signs in an image of the 2017 Women's March at the Archives' public exhibit. Some of the edited signs contained potentially offensive language, and some mentioned president Donald Trump. Besides censoring language, the changes altered the meaning of some protest signs.

In December 2019, the National Archives approved record schedules for federal records created by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which documented detainee sexual abuse and assault, death review files, detention monitoring reports, detainee escape reports, detainee segregation files, and Detention Information Reporting Line records. The schedules permitted ICE to destroy the records when they were no longer needed for business use.[58] The schedules were approved without changes despite public outcry when they were first proposed in the Federal Register.[59] A lawsuit was brought against the National Archives by several plaintiffs, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the American Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

They been fidgeting around with all the control dials for ages.