Trump Fires Librarian Of Congress And Top Copyright Official In Same Week, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The People Guarding America's Books And Copyrights Did Not Report To Him

WASHINGTON. President Trump late on a Thursday night this month removed Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, by way of a two-sentence email, ending the nine-year tenure of the first woman and first African American to hold a post previously regarded as roughly as controversial as the building it oversees. The White House explained that Hayden, an Obama appointee, had pursued diversity initiatives and permitted inappropriate books into a library, a structure whose central function is the storage of books.

Within 48 hours, the administration extended the housecleaning one floor down, dismissing Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights, who runs the Copyright Office housed inside the Library. The timing drew brief notice, as Perlmutter's office had two days earlier released a lengthy report questioning whether artificial intelligence companies may freely train their models on copyrighted books, music, and art without permission or payment. Administration officials characterized the sequence as coincidental, noting that the President fires a great many people and cannot be expected to track which of them had recently inconvenienced the technology industry.

To run the Library of Congress, an institution that belongs to the legislative branch and answers to Congress, the President named Todd Blanche, who until recently served as his personal criminal-defense attorney and currently serves as Deputy Attorney General. Constitutional scholars observed that the Library is not part of the executive branch and that the President's authority to staff it is, at best, contested. The administration treated the objection as a scheduling matter.

"The President believes the people who safeguard the nation's creative works should report to the President," said one source within the administration, declining to specify which clause of the Constitution vests him with a national library. "It is really a question of efficiency."

Perlmutter sued, pointing out that the Register of Copyrights is appointed by and accountable to the Librarian of Congress rather than the White House, an arrangement that had functioned without incident since long before the arrival of the technologies now eager to ingest the nation's copyrighted catalog. A federal appeals court would later rule that she was entitled to keep her job, a determination the administration absorbed with its customary equanimity.

At press time, the artificial intelligence companies whose business model depends on the unsettled meaning of "fair use" had expressed full confidence that the Copyright Office, once properly staffed, would arrive at the correct interpretation.