The administration has circulated a policy requiring all federal employees to sign confidentiality pacts that would legally prohibit them from describing the daily functions of the United States government.
The proposed non-disclosure agreements, which were first outlined in a government document released Tuesday, would require civil servants across all federal agencies to reclassify routine executive branch operations, interagency memos, and the president’s public statements as protected intellectual property. Under the new framework, federal workers who acknowledge basic departmental procedures to individuals without proper security clearance could face immediate termination and civil liability, according to a Reuters report on the draft policy.
The push for universal confidentiality follows a wave of mass dismissals last year, during which the administration terminated thousands of federal workers for "poor performance" before asking them to retroactively sign NDAs forbidding them from disclosing the specific nature of that performance. According to reporting by the Guardian, the majority of the ousted employees refused to sign the documents, which would have legally barred them from mentioning they were ever employed by the government on future resumes or unemployment filings.
We simply cannot maintain operational security with a workforce that feels entitled to walk out of a federal building and accurately report what they witnessed during their mandated working hours.
Administration officials have argued that the standard operations of the federal government constitute a highly sensitive competitive advantage that must be shielded from the American public. The latest iteration of the non-disclosure agreement expands upon previous drafts by explicitly forbidding employees from keeping written records of verbal directives, sharing unclassified workplace location data, or confirming the physical existence of certain cabinet secretaries, according to a 44-page enforcement addendum reviewed by reporters.
The Office of Special Counsel has declined to comment on whether the non-disclosure agreements violate federal whistleblower protections, citing a recent internal directive that classifies the existence of the Office of Special Counsel as a proprietary trade secret.