The White House is planning to impose a sweeping nondisclosure agreement that would apply to all federal employees, part of an ongoing Trump administration effort to combat leaks to the press.
The Federal Register posted the proposed agreement on Tuesday, and the rule will be open to a 30-day public comment period.
In the draft notice, the Office of Personnel Management says the rule “will promote consistency across Government, better protect confidential information, and better inform Federal employees of their rights and obligations regarding confidential information.”
The new rule expressly protects the rights of federal employees to disclose information through channels “authorized by law” like the Whistleblower Protection Act.
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The OPM highlighted President Donald Trump’s broad authority to ensure employees are “suitable” for federal civil service. Congress has given the president the power to “prescribe regulations for admission to the civil service, to assess applicant fitness and character, and to regulate employee conduct in the executive branch,” according to the proposal.
The draft notice decried multiple instances of federal employees leaking information to the press — using the unauthorized disclosures as evidence to support imposing the NDAs.
“Such disclosures risk chilling candid interagency feedback, disrupting orderly decision-making, and weakening trust within and among Federal agencies,” according to the proposal.
Federal workers allegedly leaked information about the U.S. raid in Venezuela to The Washington Post and The New York Times prior to the operation. Even though both outlets held off on publishing information about the raid until it was already underway on Jan. 3, the OPM said the “leaks put the lives of members of the armed forces at risk.”
The OPM also asserted that the personal data leak impacting approximately 4,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees “jeopardized the safety of the agents.” A federal employee disclosed the ICE employees’ names, email addresses and phone numbers to ICE List, an online database independently run by immigration activists, in January.
The draft mapped out the precedent for the rule, citing the Supreme Court’s use of NDAs following the leak of the controversial abortion access decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who agreed with the majority in overturning the 50-year-old federal constitutional right to an abortion, faced harassment and an assassination plot following the decision. The OPM alleges “the would-be assassin was specifically motivated by the release of the leaked draft.”
While NDAs aren’t a routine requirement for the federal workforce, some agencies have expanded these measures since Trump started his second term. The Pentagon instituted NDAs in October 2025 in part to curb unauthorized disclosures of information regarding U.S. operations in Latin America — the same month that the Pentagon began conducting random polygraph testing for its staff.
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