The Trump administration last month quietly fired members of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, a nonpartisan body tasked with publishing a record of U.S. foreign policy.
“On behalf of President Donald Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” read one of the April 30 termination emails from Cate Dillon, the White House liaison to the State Department, according to The Washington Post.
A senior State Department official told the Post “there is a plan in place to maintain the committee” but did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment on the firings.
The nine-member panel is tasked with reviewing records to make recommendations to the State Department’s Office of the Historian and Foreign Service Institute for its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, which documents major U.S. foreign policy decisions.
The first volume was published in 1861 to document former President Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. To date, more than 450 volumes have been printed. The office had begun research on the Clinton administration, according to its website.
However, past chairs of the Historical Advisory Committee (HAC) speculated the entity was discontinued in an effort to skew U.S. history for partisan purposes.
“You would have to try very hard to even know the HAC existed,” Melani McAlister, a George Washington University professor of American studies and international affairs who served on the committee, told the Post.
“When people start targeting the telling of history, that becomes very dangerous for democracy,” she added.
The group meets quarterly to discuss the declassification of documents at least 30 years old. Some speculated the firings may have been accidental casualties in Trump’s broader cuts to government.
“Right now, the office is still trying to get volumes out from the Reagan era. There’s no work that’s being done here regarding the current administration,” said James Goldgeier, a professor and former dean at the American University School of International Service, who served as chair of the HAC before it was terminated.
“It just seems to me like they just got a list from all the [federal] agencies. I can’t imagine they looked much into what any of the particular ones did. And I don’t know that they understood that this one is congressionally mandated,” he added.
The Foreign Relations Authorization Act signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 established the HAC, composed of six members from the country’s top historical associations and societies, in addition to three at-large members. Each member is paid a stipend of $250 per quarterly meeting.
Meetings are routinely documented and open to the public.
The website currently displays all seats as vacant with the last meeting minutes posted from March.