Judge Grants Emergency Order Blocking Trump Administration From Disregarding Presidential Records Act

Wednesday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted emergency relief in American Oversight and the American Historical Association’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s effort to evade the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

The injunction, which takes effect at 9:00 a.m. on May 26, enjoins the White House Office, the National Security Council, the U.S. DOGE Service, and all advisors to the president to comply in full with the PRA. The order specifies that compliance includes preserving all presidential and vice presidential records as defined by the Act, refraining from creating or sending any presidential or vice presidential records via text or ephemeral messaging accounts without copying an official account to preserve the records, and maintaining records retention policies that are in full compliance with the PRA. Defendants are also required to circulate a copy of the order to covered employees, and file a notice with the court on or before May 28, 2026, describing steps that have been taken to comply with the court’s order.

In response to the ruling, American Oversight and the American Historical Association released the following statements:

Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight:

“Today’s ruling is an important victory for presidential accountability and for affirming what decades of law and practice already established — the constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act. The court recognized the serious danger posed by the administration’s attempt to cast aside longstanding federal law governing presidential records and replace it with a system dependent largely on presidential discretion and public trust.

This case has always been about something larger than records management. It is about whether a president can treat government records as personal property — deciding for himself what will be preserved, what will be disclosed, and what can simply be destroyed.     

The court’s decision helps ensure that the American people — not the White House — retain ownership over the historical record of the presidency. It reaffirms a basic democratic principle: presidents do not get to decide unilaterally what history will remember and what the public will never see.”

Dr. Sarah Weicksel, Executive Director of the American Historical Association:

“This ruling reaffirms the essential place of presidential records in documenting our nation’s history and a core principle of the Presidential Records Act: that these records belong to the American people, not to any one individual.

Historians—and the public who engages with and learns from the histories we write and curate—rely upon the integrity of the historical record. Americans deserve the ability to understand the entirety of their history. By requiring continued compliance with the Presidential Records Act, this preliminary injunction is an important step forward in ensuring that the documents that tell our nation’s history are preserved for future generations.”

Today’s ruling centers on a request for emergency court intervention we filed last month, seeking the court to block the Trump administration from disregarding the PRA and to prevent the destruction or loss of presidential records. The motion argued that without urgent court intervention, records documenting presidential decision-making could be “lost to history.”

The request for an emergency court order came just days after the groups filed suit challenging a sweeping opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declaring the PRA unconstitutional and advising that President Trump “need not further comply” with its requirements. 

The motion argued that the Trump administration’s position is clearly unlawful, pointing to binding Supreme Court precedent that has already upheld Congress’s authority to require the preservation and eventual disclosure of presidential records. It emphasized that the OLC’s opinion relies on virtually no legal precedent and instead attempts to override settled law by declaring the PRA unconstitutional in its entirety — a conclusion the Supreme Court squarely rejected when it considered the constitutionality of the PRA’s predecessor after Watergate.

Because the administration now has OLC’s approval to disregard the PRA, the motion warned that there is an immediate risk that records documenting official actions could be permanently lost.

Additionally, the motion emphasized that the Trump administration has refused to commit to preserving all presidential records during the course of the litigation, including records created on personal devices or sent or received on encrypted messaging platforms. The administration’s failure to commit to its basic recordkeeping obligations is especially concerning given its position that it is no longer bound by the PRA’s requirements. Without those safeguards, key records documenting government actions could be deleted, destroyed, or never captured in the first place. Because the PRA establishes that these records belong to the United States and must be preserved for eventual public access, the motion argued that any loss would cause irreparable harm that cannot be remedied after the fact.

The filing also underscored that the administration’s position could have sweeping consequences beyond the current presidency, threatening access to records from prior administrations and undermining the ability of historians, journalists, Congress, and the public to understand and evaluate government decision-making. In our motion, we asked the court to order the administration to comply with the PRA, preserve all presidential records, and prevent any destruction or loss of materials while their case proceeds.