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Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a hostile takeover of the Library of Congress — an agency that is part of the legislative branch and functions as its research arm in addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings.
While the takeover has been framed as part of Trump’s broader purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content, it is the latest effort by the president and his team to subsume the role of Congress and ensure it cannot do its job.
An expert on the Library of Congress tells Rolling Stone that Trump’s takeover attempt is “dangerous,” given that the library’s sub-agencies provide confidential legal advice to members of Congress and help police misconduct by lawmakers.
The expert says the Trump administration is actively trying to place a landing team at the Library of Congress, noting that when Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has done this elsewhere, the first thing that team does is hoover up and gain control over as much sensitive data as possible.
Last week, the Trump administration attempted to fire the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, before the end of her 10-year term — and today, Trump moved to install Todd Blanche as interim director of the Library of Congress. Blanche, who’s currently serving as a U.S. deputy attorney general, is best known for representing Trump during his New York hush-money trial, in which the president was convicted on all counts.
Today, current interim director Robert Newlen wrote to staff that Blanche’s appointment has not been recognized. “Congress is engaged with the White House and we have not received direction from Congress about how to move forward,” Newlen wrote in an internal email obtained by Politico.
Over the weekend, the administration also removed Shira Perlmutter, head of the U.S. Copyright Office, days after the agency issued a report clarifying that tech companies’ efforts to train AI models on data scraped from public websites could run afoul of American copyright law and the intellectual-property rights of the data’s original creators.
It is disputed what legality, if any, there is for Trump’s ongoing power grab at the Library of Congress. According to two sources familiar with the matter, even before the internal message was sent, library staff were told by superiors this morning to refrain from recognizing Trump’s new pick at this time, describing the power grab as possibly illegal.
The expert on the Library of Congress says Perlmutter’s firing may be illegal — and more emphatically, that Trump “cannot name an acting librarian of Congress, because it’s not an executive-branch agency.”
“Inside the Library of Congress, they’re all congressional staff, and congressional staff are protected under the speech or debate clause in the Constitution,” adds the expert, whom Rolling Stone agreed not to name.
Moreover, they note that the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an agency within the Library of Congress, “provides confidential advice to Congress, including confidential legal advice, and there is a database that has all the questions that every member has asked for the last 50 years and the answers. That cannot be made available.”
Even amid Trump’s broader takeover of the federal agencies — and all of their sensitive data and systems — this effort stands out in that it poses significant risk to Congress, according to the expert.
“This is going in the inviolate congressional space to access their information,” the expert says. “We know that when Trump and the DOGE people have gone elsewhere, the first thing done is they exfiltrated their data. How can a member of Congress ask CRS for legal advice or other advice when the administration can get their hands on it — or they can direct the answer?”
Other sensitive systems may be at risk of incursion by Trump officials. In a repetition of a now well-established pattern faced by other agencies and offices, the U.S. Copyright Office reportedly denied entry today to two men claiming to be Trump’s new appointees to the office. Sources told Wired that Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, who appear to work at the Justice Department, told Copyright Office staff they were the Copyright Office’s new acting director and deputy librarian, respectively.
The abrupt dismissals of Hayden and Perlmutter have Library of Congress staff on edge. The unease began right after officials in the White House communicated to library higher-ups that Trump would be installing a political appointee and replacement for the librarian, two people with knowledge of the matter say. One of these sources describes the mood among staff as being “on high alert,” with several expecting the worst, given Trump’s attempts at purging and cultural takeover of different American nonpartisan institutions, such as the Kennedy Center.
The president has made no secret, since day one of his second administration, that he is seeking a top-to-bottom throttling and remolding of the federal government, largely to rid it of whomever he deems an anti-Trump subversive. Trump’s firing of the librarian, in particular, was so sudden that the move caught several of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill off guard, according to the two sources, with some GOP lawmakers who help conduct oversight of the Library of Congress unaware that the White House was going to do it; they learned about the firings in the media and elsewhere.
Another source familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it tell Rolling Stone that for weeks, Trump and other senior administration officials have wanted to examine and potentially ideologically reshape the library’s vast catalog, and to overhaul the types of events it has put on over years.
Last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Hayden had been fired because “there were quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”
The library does not actually lend out books and materials, and in reality, the administration’s efforts to seize control of the institution have little to do with its crusade against diversity-related materials.
Trump and his lieutenants arrived at their decision after, among other factors, close allies to the president flagged for him past events in which the library had hosted several authors and historians who Team MAGA considers anti-Trump, two people say. This upset the president and further inflamed his desire to start remaking the Library of Congress in his own image.
“This is a takeover of a major component of the legislative branch,” the expert tells Rolling Stone. “There’s no reason that they’re going to stop there.”
