A proposal to push federal workers to sign nondisclosure agreements is part of a bigger effort to hide government secrets.
Early in Donald Trump’s second term in office, the White House declared itself “the most transparent administration in history.” The federal government has continued to insist on this slogan, even as it has barred journalists from the Pentagon, administered polygraph tests in an effort to ferret out leakers, and fired independent inspectors general tasked with hunting down corruption and mismanagement. Now the administration has announced yet another effort to stem the free flow of information—a plan that would push all federal workers to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Last week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management published a draft proposal for rolling out NDAs across the executive branch. The NDAs would ostensibly forbid federal workers from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” outside the government, including with the press. Exactly what constitutes such information remains unclear, as does the proposal’s legal validity. The draft NDA itself acknowledges that the administration cannot go beyond the restrictions of existing law. And to the extent that the government seeks to add new constraints anyway, the proposed NDA would be a clear violation of First Amendment protections. Legal or not, though, the NDA will likely further intimidate federal workers, many of whom are already demoralized by the Trump administration’s...
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