White House proposes NDAs for all US federal workers

White House threatens legal action against employees who leak, aiming to curb information flow to journalists.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has proposed a guideline for federal workers that would require the employees to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from speaking to journalists without prior authorisation.

The new proposal, announced on Tuesday by the Office of Personnel Management, says that the White House could take legal action against workers who violate it.

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It also asserts that the US government would be entitled to “royalties” from disclosing information, but it is not clear what that means. The OPM did not immediately offer further explanation.

The document did not specify when the NDA would take effect. There will be a 30-day period for public comments once the rule is officially published in the Federal Register. Individual agencies would need to agree to implement the directive.

“This move is rooted in concerns that unauthorized disclosures of sensitive government information are disrupting agency operations and eroding trust across government,” said OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover.

The directive is the latest move by the Trump White House to exert more control over the flow of information to the general public, which has ranged from banning news outlets from the press room at the Pentagon to cutting funding for public media like PBS and NPR.

It is already illegal to make public secret government information. Trump faced criminal charges in 2023 over allegations of mishandling confidential government documents.

But the proposal expands the definition of confidential beyond the intelligence community’s classifications.

The NDAs would cover “information relating to internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law”.

The agreements would also cover former employees who sign them, requiring them to obtain written authorisation before speaking to reporters about such information.

Federal law prohibits government retaliation against federal workers who disclose fraud, abuse and misconduct in their workplaces to internal government watchdogs and Congress. The NDA would not apply to those disclosures, according to the draft agreement.

Since taking office for the second time, Trump has waged an aggressive campaign against news outlets and media figures he sees as too critical of him. He has filed lawsuits against news outlets, dismissed coverage as “fake news,” and personally attacked journalists.

“The proposal by the ‘most transparent administration in history’ that millions of federal employees sign a blanket NDA is not just absurd, it’s unnecessary and dangerously secretive,” Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) said in a statement to Al Jazeera.

“This policy, from a president who has previously attempted to impose oppressive, corporate-style confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements on federal employees, would kneecap whistleblower protections, undermine the First Amendment, and wrongly inhibit the public’s right to know.”

Trump has gone after voices that have been critical of him.

In April, Trump threatened to pull the licences of ABC stations after late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump.

The White House also banned The Associated Press from the White House press pool and restricted reporters’ access at the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US military, a rule which federal courts ruled is unconstitutional.

Last year, the Trump administration launched a crackdown to deport pro-Palestine student activists who live in the US but are not US citizens.