Sponsors (3)
Introduced December 15, 2025 by Chris Pappas · Last progress December 15, 2025
The bill centralizes and accelerates public access to historical military and civilian personnel records—offering families, veterans, and researchers greater transparency and potential closure—while imposing substantial new costs, operational burdens, privacy risks, and national‑security disclosure tradeoffs that agencies and taxpayers must absorb.
Families of missing service members, veterans, and civilian personnel gain substantially improved access to historical personnel and missing‑person records, increasing chances for closure, benefit claims, and accountability.
The federal government centralizes records at the National Archives with a presumption of declassification, clearer disclosure standards, public posting, FOIA preserve, and regular reporting — increasing transparency and public accountability about missing personnel and historical records.
Creates an independent, bipartisan Review Board with subpoena powers, ethics/conflict‑of‑interest checks, advisory support, and judicial enforcement routes to push agencies to find and disclose relevant records.
The bill creates substantial open‑ended and potentially significant costs and administrative burdens for NARA, executive agencies, and a new Review Board because many obligations are unfunded or lack explicit dollar limits and funds may 'remain available until expended'.
Unsealing, centralized disclosure, and expanded subpoena powers increase the risk that legitimately sensitive national‑security, intelligence, or law‑enforcement information could be disclosed, potentially harming operations and sources.
Collecting, processing, and publishing large volumes of personnel records raises meaningful privacy risks for living individuals and confidential sources and could expose personal or operational details if redactions or substitutes are inadequate.
Based on analysis of 15 sections of legislative text.
Creates a Review Board and National Archives collection requiring federal agencies to locate, transmit, and publicly disclose records about missing Armed Forces and civilian personnel, with narrow exceptions.
Creates an independent Review Board to identify, collect, and publish federal records about missing U.S. Armed Forces members and civilian personnel and to place those records in a new National Archives collection. Federal agencies must search for, preserve, copy, and transmit missing-persons records to the Archivist; the Board will set review schedules and disclosure rules, and disclosure can be postponed only under narrow national-security, privacy, or clearly articulated harm exceptions. The law requires agencies to certify searches under penalty of perjury, forbids destruction or reclassification of already-public information, allows the Attorney General to seek court unsealing (including grand-jury materials) on the Board’s request, and directs diplomatic outreach to foreign governments that may hold relevant records. It authorizes necessary funding, establishes oversight and reporting duties, and includes timelines for Board formation, review starts, and Archivist actions tied to the Board’s quorum and member swearing-in.