Directors Defend Gov't Funding Of Presidential Libraries, Archives

By Mario Trujillo

With $61 billion in potential spending cuts, directors of the Presidential Libraries testified before Congress to defend the necessity for these institutions and their $76.2 million budget.

Each president since Franklin Roosevelt has his own library. Under the Presidential Libraries Act, each library is constructed with funding from private foundations while the government picks up much of the operational costs once erected.

Thomas Putnam, director of the John F. Kennedy Library, said that it is the the task of the the government, not the foundations, to maintain records.

“Really it is the…federal government’s responsibility to preserve these records, to secure them, to process them and to declassify them,” Putnam said. “None of us get support from our foundations to do that. They do recognize that that is a federal responsibility.”

Each library has it’s own foundation, and David Ferriero of the National Archives said that consolidating the foundations into one group is worth exploring. Private funding and donations pour in most heavily soon after a president retires and slowly dwindles as time goes by.

Another panelist Martha Kumar, Professor of Towson University, said comparative research of presidents is vital, which requires access to all presidents’ archives not just the recent or popular ones.

Discussion also swirled around whether there is still a need for physical presidential libraries in an age of digital archives or if there should be a central library in Washington.

Ferriero said though all 13 libraries have begun digitizing records, there will still be a need for storage of the most important documents. He also said the impact of local communities would have to be taken into account if individual presidential libraries were done away with.