Before classified documents were found at the homes of President Biden and former President Donald Trump, most people only knew of the National Archives because of the movie “National Treasure.” 

Both men held onto records when they left the vice presidency and presidency, respectively, that should have been sent to the National Archives. Keeping documents from the public impedes historians, oversight entities, and the American people from understanding history, Deputy Archivist Jay Bosanko, who runs day-to-day operations at the National Archives, said. 

“When an individual controls the records, they control the story,” Bosanko said. “They control what the American people can know or not know about their presidency.”

Watergate and presidential records

Records used to belong to the presidents who created them until after the Watergate scandal, when burglars tied to then-President Richard Nixon’s campaign committee broke into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building. 

In the aftermath of the 1972 incident, when President Nixon sought to have audio tapes holding evidence of potential crimes destroyed, Congress acted to protect presidential records. The Presidential Records Act was signed into law in 1978. The act also governs the official records of vice presidents.

“Starting with President Reagan, now the records of a presidency belong to the American people and not to the president,” Bosanko said. 

Trump, Biden and presidential records

Trump tested the law in 2021 when he took dozens of boxes of presidential papers, including almost 340 documents bearing classification markings, to his home in Florida. Trump was eventually charged with 40 felonies, including for allegedly refusing to turn over some of the papers.

The case was dismissed this past July, but the Justice Department is appealing. 

Biden was also investigated over more than 80 documents with classification markings that he had, from when he was vice president and a senator. He cooperated with the investigation and was not charged.

Jay Bosanko said that the National Archives are simply custodians of the records all presidents are required to turn over, and that enforcing the law is up to the Justice Department.

Deputy Archivist Bosanko explained what he thinks is lost when presidential records are not transferred at the end of an administration.

“That strikes at the very heart of the historical record, the completeness of it, the ability to understand decisions,” Bosanko said. “And so it’s important for historians, and ultimately the American people to understand all of the pieces that came in and made up that decision making.”

Public access to federal records 

Those pieces of history start to become available to reporters and scholars at the 15 presidential libraries in the National Archives system five years after a presidency ends. 

“When that five-year window hits, almost immediately we have a backlog of thousands of FOIA requests that we can’t possibly respond to within the 10 days under the Freedom of Information Act,” Bosanko said. 

When Archivist Colleen Shogan was sworn in last year, she inherited a flat budget and a mountain of FOIA requests. At the George W. Bush Presidential Library, for example, a FOIA request might come back with a 12-year wait.

Shogan explained that’s because of the extreme interest in those records. 

“I think the way that we are really going to make headway on this in the near future is going to be through technology,” she said. 

The National Archives aims to scan and digitize all 13-and-a-half billion paper records in their collection. Currently, only 2 percent of their holdings are available online. In a recent memo draft obtained by 60 Minutes, senior leaders at the agency wrote they are concerned limited resources have put the National Archives at “serious risk” of “mission failure.”

Shogan says the National Archives can handle the challenge. 

“We’re going to have to reprioritize, we’re gonna have to look at our budget,” she said. “But we will rely upon our institutions, upon Congress, and of course upon the executive branch to support us along the way.”

Although a federal district judge has blocked a Federal Trade Commission ban on non-compete agreements, FTC Chair Lina Khan said the fight to bar the contractual clauses is not over.

“We firmly believe that we have the legal authority to do this, and we’re willing to keep making that clear to the courts,” she told correspondent Lesley Stahl in an interview for 60 Minutes. 

Non-compete agreements can prevent an employee who is leaving a job from starting — or even working for — a company in the same industry, and the agreements are often bound by time and geography. For example, a doctor may be prohibited from working for another hospital within 50 miles of their current job for a year after leaving.

The FTC estimates that non-competes restrict 30 million people, or roughly one in five American workers.

The agency in April had narrowly voted to ban nearly all of the contractual clauses. When the rule had been proposed in January 2023, the FTC said it had received more than 26,000 comments during the public comment period, with more than 25,000 comments in support of the ban on non-competes.

But shortly after the FTC announced the ban, Dallas tax services firm Ryan LLC sued to block the rule, and another lawsuit was filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable.

A federal court in Texas threw out the ban in an August ruling, with Judge Ada Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas writing that the FTC had overstepped its authority.

One issue critics of the ban raise is that getting rid of non-compete agreements would put companies’ confidential information at risk and enable competitors to poach valuable employees. 

In her conversation with Stahl, Khan said the FTC has accounted for the issue of sharing company secrets. 

“One of the questions we posed when we first proposed this was, ‘What are the risks, and are there alternative ways to address those risks?'” Khan said. “We have in this country trade secrets law. And so, if you have an employer that is illegally taking a company’s trade secrets elsewhere, that’s something that can already be reached under the law.”

Another major issue critics question is whether the FTC has the legal power to draw up such a wide-ranging ban, arguing the agency far overstepped its authority in this case.

When Stahl asked why the FTC did not narrow the rule it announced in April, either by certain kinds of workers or in specific geographical areas, Khan said the agency purposely kept it broad.

“Once you start cutting some people out and keeping some people in there are actually additional legal risks that you take on because companies or people can say, ‘Well, that’s an arbitrary, that’s a capricious law.”

If the FTC appeals the Texas court decision, the agency may face an uphill fight in higher courts. A recent Supreme Court decision has narrowed interpretation of regulatory power by executive branch agencies compared to what had been established for the last four decades. 

In June, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine in a 6-3 decision, ending nearly 40 years of judicial deference to federal agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. The ruling significantly shifts power from executive agencies to the judiciary. As a result, courts will no longer automatically defer to an agency’s interpretation when setting rules and will instead require a more rigorous review of the agency’s rationale.

For the FTC, this means that, if the ban on non-competes reaches the Supreme Court, the justices may end up undermining the FTC’s authority in areas beyond simply the ability to ban non-compete agreements. 

When asked if she was risking the power of the FTC, Khan told Stahl she believes it is important for the agency to be “faithful to the law.”

“And what it means to be faithful to the law is to look at the words that Congress wrote in our statute and understand what are the authorities that those words are giving us,” she said. “And that’s exactly the approach we followed here.”

She told Stahl she brings cases to court when she feels the law is being violated, and in her view, non-compete agreements are being used illegally to trap American workers. 

“We’ve moved forward with the non-compete rule. We have a whole set of other rules that we’re moving forward with,” Khan said. “And we firmly believe that we have the authority to do this, and we’ll keep defending them.”

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann. 

This week on 60 Minutes, Norah O’Donnell takes a trip through America’s past by going inside its archives. Functioning like the country’s safety deposit box, the National Archives stores the priceless original records that made America what it is, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

But beyond the founding documents students read about in history books, the National Archives also preserves less well-known artifacts that tell the story of America — and all its citizens. 

Among the more than two billion documents that are stored at Archives headquarters in Washington, D.C., 60 Minutes saw petitions from two famous American women who played prominent roles in the Civil War. As the documents show, the women later beseeched the U.S. government to pay them what they felt they were owed.

One petition is from Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln and the first widow of an assassinated president. In 1869, she wrote to then-Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax to explain that she should receive a pension from the federal government, just as Civil War soldiers’ widows were given one. Up to this point, no former first lady had ever received a pension. 

The following year, Congress passed an act granting her a $3,000 a year pension and establishing a precedent for widowed future first ladies to receive an annual payment from the federal government, regardless of whether their husband died while in office. Presidential widows today are granted $20,000 annually, based on a 1958 federal law. 

A second Civil War-era petition 60 Minutes saw had been filed by Harriet Tubman. An abolitionist who brought enslaved people through the underground railroad, Tubman acted as a nurse, a scout, and a spy for the Union Army. But more than two decades after the Civil War ended, she had to ask for help from the nation she had served.

In the petition Tubman filed with the federal pension office, she explained that she was destitute and, at 67 years old, still working odd jobs to support herself. She was, she said, in debt for everyday essentials like groceries and coal. 

Prominent American women in the Archives 

Her request was for an increase in the meager pension she had begun receiving after her husband died. Because her husband, Nelson Davis, had served in the Civil War, Tubman was eligible to receive a widow’s pension. Now she was asking to be compensated for the work she had done in service to the country during the Civil War herself.  

After further petitions to Congress, both from Tubman and other prominent Americans, Congress in 1899 passed a bill upping her pension to $20 a month in consideration of her service as a nurse during the war. 

Finding your family in the National Archives

But the pages in the National Archives do not just tell the stories of famous Americans; they also preserve the records of everyday citizens. Within the 13.5 billion paper documents, just about everyone can find records from their own family history.

In the microfilm reading room, Norah O’Donnell saw a name meaningful to her within the passenger lists of the S.S. California: her grandmother, Mary Monaghan, who immigrated from Belfast when she was 23 years old. A hem stitcher with just $20 in her pocket, Monaghan planned to visit an aunt in Jersey City — information that O’Donnell learned for the first time.  

Any American who wants to explore their own family’s history can use the National Archives. To start the research, go to archives.gov, which explains how to explore the different types of genealogy resources. Think of the ways your ancestors may have interacted with the federal government, like serving in the military, appearing in the census, or buying and selling land.

For the United States’ Archivist Colleen Shogan, making these documents accessible is a vital part of protecting the nation’s story — whether it’s a petition from a first lady, or just the first stop on an immigrant’s journey in America.

“It enables the public to learn about the history of the United States,” Shogan told 60 Minutes. “And that can be someone learning about their personal history, their local history, their community history. It can be someone that wants to learn about a particular era of American history or a particular president. We want to be accessible not only for professional researchers, which are very important to us, but also to the high school student.”

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.