Work has begun on a new DC Archives building.
But Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed cutting the project from the FY2026 budget, despite the fact that DC has already sunk $44 million into the project.
The new archives building has been in the works for at least a decade, and an obsolete building is already being pulled down in preparation for construction on the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) campus. Architects Hartman Cox, specialists in archival design, and builders Gilbane Building Company are signed to the project team. Permits have been secured and plans fully approved. Completion was set for summer 2026.
But all of those plans are now in jeopardy as the entire project was cut in the FY2026 budget now before DC Council, potentially putting an end to a project twenty years in the making that had finally gotten off the ground.
When she presented her budget, Bowser justified the cut, arguing that costs for the new archives building will skyrocket to $150 million from $103 million.
“When I was thinking about the additional $50 million in capital investment, I had to compete it with other things,” Bowser said in May.
But an archive building is sorely needed, said Hill resident Trudy Huskamp Peterson.
Huskamp Peterson is a former acting Archivist of the United States and was named Chair of the DC Archives Advisory Group when it was created in 2021 to advise DC Council on the preservation of materials and the creation of the new building.
Currently, the District’s archives are split between several locations. DC Archives staff work out of a former horse stable at 1300 Naylor Court NW while they records they preserve and provide public access toare stored in various storage facilities including the National Archives and Records istration (NARA) facility in Suitland, MD.
The new building could finally house the historic records from all District agencies under one roof, including schools and even police and fire, as well as temporary records created and used by the city government in the course of doing business. The holdings of the new Archives facility would also include the archives of UDC and the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives.
“So close, so close,” said Huskamp Peterson, who has been pushing for the project for more than twenty years. “I mean, when you walk through the demolition site —when you look at the final plans, when you look at all the permitting — it’s just breathtaking that the mayor would pull out at this time.”
Peterson had already started planning for the opening ceremony, suggesting to the city archivist that dignitaries use shovels from historic groundbreakings now stored in the archives.
History At Risk
“This decision puts the most important collection of DC history at significant risk,” said Kimberly Bender, President of the DC Archives Foundation, the non-profit organization that provides philanthropic to the DC Archives. “To fund a half billion-dollar stadium and at the same time eliminate this project as being too expensive is a sad reflection of our city’s values.”
The Mayor has allocated $850 million in District funding towards an NFL Stadium for the Washington Commanders at RFK, a deal that is also before DC Council.
Every state or territory has a dedicated archive, said Carl Bergman —except DC. Bergman is a former Deputy DC Auditor who became interested in the DC Archives project while he was working for Councilmember David Grosso beginning in 2014, around the same time as project planning began. He’s now a member of the Friends of the DC Archives.
“It [the Naylor Court archives] is the worst facility under the American flag for archives,” said Bergman, who has visited several. That’s despite the fact that many of the documents in the DC Archives are national treasures, including the electric chair once used at DC Jail, the will of Frederick Douglass and the marriage license for Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, the couple at the center of the landmark Supreme Court Loving v. Virginia case which struck down anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional.
“This is not a collection of parking tickets or water meter readings,” Bergman said. “There are things there that you won’t find any place else.”
Send them to Sumner
The Mayor’s Office referred requests for comment to the Office of the City (OCA). “The project had become too large and too expensive to continue in its current form,” OCA said, citing the $150 million pricetag. “As we explored more cost effective options, we learned that the Sumner School could be a great fit and would allow us to move forward on a new DC Archives that was more affordable and provide an excellent opportunity for UDC to achieve its top priority simultaneously, which is new student housing.”
In place of the existing plan, the Mayor proposes to split the archive, putting a front office at Charles Sumner School, currently home to the DC Public School Archives and Museum and a “state of the art warehouse.” The FY2026 budget allocated $28 million for this project, including $4.9 million in improvements to the school, which was built in 1872 and was last renovated in 1986.
The Archives foundation said that amount insufficient to renovate the space, pointing out that space at Sumner is already limited. The building lacks a loading dock which would berequired to intake documents daily.
Further, the archivists say that $23 million won’t pay for an archival annex let alone a “state of the art facility”.
“An archive is not a warehouse;” the DC Archives Foundation noted in a press release. “It preserves irreplaceable historical paper documents and thus has specialized security, HVAC, and public access needs.” If this plan is followed, operational costs for off-site storage and retrieval would skyrocket, both Huskamp Peterson and the DC Archives Foundation say, as records would have to be hauled back and forth.
That’s already happening, and it’s unclear how much DC is spending on archival storage. According to the Office of Secretary, off-site record storage at NARA alone cost DC more than $900,000 in FY2025.
But full storage costs for District records are hard to calculate. Rent is often paid by District agencies who originally generated the records, meaning amounts are scattered across multiple budget lines.
Student Housing?
Instead of an archive at UDC, Bowser has proposed allocating $25 million towards construction of student housing on the site allocated to the DC Archive building, although it is not clear how the Mayor’s Office arrived at that amount.
It is also unclear if UDC prefers on-campus housing to the archives project; the university did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
But DC OCA says that “student housing is a top priority for UDC,” and reported that university s were “excited” to have the site repurposed for that purpose.
$5 million is allocated in the Capital Improvement Plan for student housing planning and design. OCA said they will have better estimates for that project in the coming year.
It’s true that UDC does not currently have on-campus housing, instead providing housing options at two nearby apartment complexes. But the population of non-resident students is relatively small. In Fall 2024, UDC reported a total full-time enrollment of 3,211 students. Of those, fewer than 600, or 18 percent, lived outside of the DMV.
“I’ve asked the university for a couple of years to do a better job at making the case for student housing,” DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson said at a legislative briefing on June 2. “But we still need an archive,” Mendelson said, calling the current state of the DC Archives “unacceptable”.
The Council Chair also said he didn’t buy the cost argument for cutting the project, pointing out that the $150 million estimate provided by the Mayor is “unvetted [and] untested” and calling for a cost analysis. “To say that jettisoning the whole proposal is more economically beneficial to the city,” Mendelson said, “when we’ve already spent a lot of money going down this road, that for several years was touted as the best approach, is wasteful.” Rather than axe the project, Mendelson said the city could look at the plans and see if the costs can be reduced.
OCA says that is what they’re doing now by putting front-facing archives at Sumner and creating another facility for materials not on display. “We are scaling back the project,” a representative wrote, “reducing the costs and allowing UDC to pursue its top priority.”
Huskamp Peterson is all for a reduction in the current building plan, pointing to several places in the plan where costs can be cut, such as pacing the installation of steel shelving over several years. She also suggests DC build a single- rather than multi-floor structure, but prepare the building for a future addition.
She says there are ways to fund the stand alone archives building. DC could take a cue from the UK, which allocates a portion of the lottery revenues to archival preservation and operation. In DC, those funds currently sent to the general fund.
Finally, Huskamp Peterson suggests DC look for private philanthropic contributions, suggesting the city assess the interest of noted philanthropists like former Kennedy Center Board Chairman David M. Rubenstein. “So Mr. [David] Rubenstein, how about helping us with this project? Happy to name the David Rubenstein Research Facility,” mused Huskamp Peterson.
Huskamp Peterson, the Friends of the DC Archives and the DC Archives Foundation are fighting to keep the project alive. Multiple archival organizations have ed in the chorus.
In a letter to Mayor Bowser opposing the project cancelation, Joy M. Banks, Executive Director of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) said the investment would preserve the complex history of the capital and its residents. “At a time when public access to information of all types is in jeopardy,” Banks wrote to Bowser, “you have the opportunity to be at the forefront of care for the history of not just the District, but our Nation.”
Get background on the project, see timelines and more information at dgs.dc.gov/page/dc-archives-
This story has been updated to include comments from the City .
An earlier version of this story stated that Carl Bergman was a member of the DC Archives Advisory Group. He is not; he is actually a member of the Friends of the DC Archives. The Hill Rag regrets the error.
