NARA-DoD Loan Agreement

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have signed a loan agreement designed to facilitate final declassification review and resolution of all military equities in DoD records accessioned by NARA and stored at the National Archives at College Park (Archives II). This agreement was reached under section 3.7(e) of Executive Order 13526, which allows the creation of centralized facilities for declassification provided facilities and operations are coordinated with the National Declassification Center (NDC).

In order to accomplish this task DoD has established a Joint Referral Center (JRC) to be located at the Army Declassification facility. Because of resource limitations at Archives II NARA will loan accessioned military records to the JRC under tight controls, which will include two NARA staff members on site to monitor the process and ensure that archival records are properly handled and accounted for and that the results of the JRC reviews will be clear to NARA personnel processing records for public release. The work at the JRC will be coordinated with the multi-agency National Declassification Center at Archives II.

DoD components working in concert will resolve declassification review and referral issues more efficiently than if each component works the issues separately. When the records are returned to NARA, all DoD issues will have been resolved and NARA can then process the records for release to the public.