DC Mayor Muriel Bowser unveiled her proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year on Wednesday. While Bowser’s plan avoids difficult furloughs and drastic service cuts because House Republicans blew a hole in the District’s budget in March, it could, if adopted by the DC Council, scrap plans for a new building to house the DC State Archives.
Currently, the more than 45,000 cubic feet of documents are shelved in an old horse stable in Shaw, a repository that is small and inaccessible to the public. The city planned to construct a new, fancy facility at the University of the District of Columbia’s Van Ness campus, but the mayor’s proposal eschews this project in favor of splitting the archives between the Charles Sumner School and a warehouse.
Trudy Peterson, an archivist and a former acting director of the National Archives, says carting the records, which include everything from birth certificates, DC’s electric chair, and the original wills of Fredrick Douglass and Alexander Graham Bell between the warehouse and the public-facing Sumner School could damage them. The distribution would also render the archives much less accessible to the public.
During her budget presentation, Bowser, whose office declined to comment, explained at her budget event that DC had to change its plans due to new estimates that the UDC building would cost an extra $50 million on top of the $100 million already budgeted. She also announced the efforts to demolish the previous building won’t go to waste—UDC will build student housing on the site for $21 million. The Sumner renovations and warehouse construction were budgeted to cost the District just under $28 million.
Kimberly Bender, president of the DC Archives Foundation, disputes the switch is about saving money and points to the additional appropriation for student housing. She tells Washingtonian the city was close to breaking ground on the building and had already poured considerable amounts of money into studies and planning.
“It went from being this jewel at UDC, state-of-the-art facility, to let’s just shove it into the Sumner School,” she says. Mostly Bender is frustrated because it feels like whoever made the decision isn’t an archivist. “I think that this is something someone thought up in the shower,” she says.
