National Declassification Center (NDC)
The center at the U.S. National Archives that coordinates and streamlines the declassification of permanently valuable classified federal records.
The National Declassification Center (NDC), established at the National Archives, coordinates the declassification of permanently valuable classified records across the government. It was created to bring order and efficiency to a process that involves enormous volumes of aging records and multiple agencies’ interests.
The NDC manages the interagency workflow for records that have reached the automatic declassification threshold — including resolving equities (where more than one agency has an interest in the information) and preparing released records for public access at the Archives. By centralizing and streamlining this referral-heavy work, the NDC helps the government keep pace with the steady flow of records crossing the 25-year mark and open historically significant material to researchers and the public.