House Dems cite ‘fundamental conflict’ of Rubio’s acting appointments atop USAID and National Archives

The top Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday demanded information about Marco Rubio’s “triple hatted” appointment at the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Archives and Records Administration in light of the destruction of documents at USAID earlier this month.

In a letter to Secretary of State Rubio, who was confirmed to that post by the Senate earlier this year but since then has been appointed acting USAID administrator and acting archivist, Reps. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., and Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., called the arrangement “grossly inappropriate,” given the three agencies’ statutory independence and separate missions.

“As you know, the archivist of the United States is chiefly responsible for overseeing federal government records management and preservation, including the planning, development and administration of federal policies and procedures for such federal records,” Connolly and Meeks wrote. “Your temporary appointment to NARA represents a fundamental conflict of interest that undermines Congress’ intent with the Federal Records Act and the integrity of NARA.”

This conflict was in stark relief earlier this month, when a memo to some of the small fraction of remaining on-duty USAID employees on March 11 called on them to collect classified documents from safes across the agency’s headquarters and destroy them, using both shredders and burn bags.

In a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s effort to shutter USAID, unions at the agency and foreign aid non-profit organizations requested a new temporary restraining order in light of the planned document destruction. But after assurances from the Trump administration that the documents at issue were not pertinent to the case—and that the administration would inform the plaintiffs in advance if any records are slated for destruction—the organizations dropped that motion.

Those assurances were not enough for the lawmakers, however, who raised concerns about omissions from USAID’s court filings on the matter.

“In the March 12 filing, [Acting USAID Executive Secretary Erica] Carr did not present comments regarding the full and complete scope of documents marked or destroyed in the March 11, 2025, document disposal, nor did she provide a copy of the email she alleges was sent ‘directly to 34 staff assisting in this matter to retain any originally classified USAID documents if they had not met their retention requirement in accordance with the disposition schedule’ approved the NARA, nor any documentation that such a directive was followed.”

At issue is the fact that NARA negotiates the schedule upon which agencies may destroy old and unnecessary documents with each individual agency. And if the Trump administration’s appointees to USAID wish to revise that schedule, Rubio can effectively greenlight his own request.

“The independence and performance of NARA demands a clear division between the regulatory authority of an agency (NARA) and regulated agencies (e.g., USAID and the State Department),” Connolly and Meeks wrote. “Your triple-hatted role is not only logistically and ethically incoherent, it undermines public trust in all three roles to which you are supposedly devoting the full attention required. NARA requires a fully engaged archivist whose sole focus is maintaining the agency’s vital independent status and essential services which include, as you know, ensuring that veterans have timely access to their service records.”

Last week, a federal judge in a different lawsuit challenging the role of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency, sided with 26 anonymous current and former USAID employees and contractors, finding that DOGE’s influence on the decimation of the agency is likely unconstitutional.

Since then, Peter Marocco, who had been serving as acting deputy USAID administrator, returned to his role within the State Department, making way for DOGE operative Jeremy Lewin to assume the job, also on an acting basis. Lewin previously oversaw plans for a reduction in force at the National Institutes of Health.

But U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang denied the administration’s request to exempt Lewin from those barred from exerting influence over USAID in an order on March 20.

“The definition of the class of individuals bound by the injunction was carefully crafted to not include all individuals who could potentially be bound, in that it arguably could have included all or most of the personnel at USAID, but it specifically includes all individuals with a past or present affiliation with defendants or DOGE to address the most likely perpetrators of constitutional violations and to prevent the circumvention of the injunction, whether intentional or not, through the movement of such individuals to other roles,” Chuang wrote. “Excluding Lewin from this class would undermine these purposes."