In fairness, the National Archives’ own inspector general has repeatedly warned that its information-technology systems are antiquated and unreliable. Mr. Ferriero himself announced that in two years the Archives will no longer accept paper records — it simply doesn’t have any more room for them. Everything must be digital, or the departments and agencies must use their own resources to scan them.

The C.I.A. alone had an estimated 160 million pages of paper records as of the late 1990s, and since then it has released less than 10 percent — fewer and fewer every year. It has not even reviewed the vast majority of the holdings of the clandestine branch for public release, claiming they are exempt from normal declassification review. The agency has a long history of destroying records related to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, mind control experiments and torture. Once the National Archives closes the door, does anyone know what will become of all the other secret documents hidden in locked file cabinets at the Pentagon, the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency?

What is driving this mad rush to delete or destroy the historical record, rather than preserve it for future generations? It is not just the Trump administration. For more than a decade Congress has simply been unwilling to pay for such preservation. Since 1985, the volume of archived paper records has more than tripled. The number of data records has gone from fewer than 13 million to more than 21 billion. But the National Archives has fewer employees now than it did then. Adjusted for inflation, it has a smaller budget than it did a decade ago, and Congress has cut that budget every year for the last three years.

Is it any wonder that, according to a new policy announced last year, the National Archives does not plan to maintain any more presidential libraries? At the George W. Bush Library, the last of its kind, approximately 158 million pages of records await review. With the current staff, it is estimated it will take nearly 250 years.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt established the first presidential library almost 80 years ago — his own, in Hyde Park, N.Y. — he called it “an act of faith.”

He wrote: “To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things: It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”

So what are we supposed to believe, when we no longer seem to have the capacity even to preserve a record of the past, much less learn anything from it? One thing is clear: When politicians, caught committing malfeasance, claim that they will let future historians judge, you can’t possibly believe them.

Matthew Connelly (@mattspast) is a professor of history at Columbia.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.