Trump Administration Proposes Making All Two Million Federal Workers Sign NDAs, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A Civil Servant Could Still Tell The Public What Its Government Was Doing

WASHINGTON. In a proposed rule published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the Office of Personnel Management moved to require the roughly two million people who work for the federal government to sign a single, standardized nondisclosure agreement, resolving a long-standing concern that an employee of the public could still, on occasion, inform the public.

The new government-wide NDA would cover information relating to internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, and any material deemed sensitive, pre-decisional, or deliberative, a set of categories that administration officials described as routine and that career officials described as the entire working contents of a functioning government. OPM characterized the agreement not as a new restriction on speech but as a convenient opportunity for two million Americans to acknowledge in writing obligations they were assured they already had.

"In much of the private sector, employees handling sensitive business or customer information are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements, and the federal government should not be held to a lower standard," OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement, comparing the National Weather Service and the nation's disease trackers to a company guarding its customer list. The proposal, he added, would reinforce accountability while helping agencies better protect against unauthorized disclosures.

The agency cited recent leaks about immigration raids and a secretive U.S. military operation in Venezuela as evidence that the silence of federal workers had grown dangerously incomplete. It did not mention the most widely reported disclosure of the second term, in which the Secretary of Defense shared the timing of a planned airstrike on Yemen in a group chat that happened to include a journalist, an episode the administration appears to have filed under the category of leaks that do not count.

Pressed on whether the agreement might discourage employees from reporting fraud, waste, or abuse, the administration noted that workers would retain their whistleblower protections, a reassurance offered alongside a separate proposal under which refusing to sign could cost an employee their job or bar them from federal work entirely. The public has been invited to comment on precisely what penalties should apply, a window that remains open through late June, after which it may be unwise to say much of anything.

At press time, the only figure in the executive branch confirmed exempt from the new pledge of silence was the President himself, who has spent the better part of a decade demonstrating his personal philosophy on the safekeeping of classified information.