The Office of Personnel Management published a proposed rule on Wednesday requiring every federal employee, current and future, to sign a governmentwide nondisclosure agreement covering "internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material." The 30-day public comment period opens today. The largest federal employee unions, First Amendment lawyers, and press freedom advocates say the form is built to silence the civil service, not to protect classified information.
Director Scott Kupor calls it a consistency upgrade. The numbers say it is a leash on roughly 2 million career civil servants.
What the NDA Actually Covers
The draft sits in the Federal Register as Docket OPM-2026-0100, four pages long, comment window closing June 26, 2026. OPM defines "Confidential Government Information" as "all non-public, confidential, or proprietary information," with an explicit, non-exhaustive list that sweeps in agency operations, personnel files, procurement records, and any "pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available."
That definition does not stop at classified material. It does not stop at trade secrets. It reaches into every internal email, every draft memo, every meeting recap, every line of advice a career staffer ever wrote to a political appointee. The signed form becomes part of the employee's Electronic Official Personnel Folder and follows the worker across agencies and across breaks in service.
Violations, per Federal News Network's read of the draft, can trigger "disciplinary action, including terminations or civil and criminal penalties." OPM also asserts the government would be entitled to "royalties" from any unauthorized disclosure, language Al Jazeera flagged because OPM has not explained what it actually means.
Why the Unions Are Calling It a Purge Tool
OPM's pitch is that the form is "optional" for agencies and merely restates existing law. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal workers, is not buying it.
"OPM claims the form will be 'optional' for agencies to use and merely restates existing law. We know that will not be true. OPM will pressure agencies to make the NDA mandatory and then fire employees who refuse to sign it. Federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment, and the public has a right to know about this administration's abuses."
The National Treasury Employees Union, the second-largest federal union, opposes the rule outright. Michael Fallings, managing partner at the federal employment firm Tully Rinckey, told Federal News Network the proposal is "broader than typical federal employee agreements" and warned that "if people are removed from their jobs for violating or allegedly violating this NDA, it will certainly lead to litigation."
Fallings put the political function in one line: "This is a continued effort to ensure federal employees are complying with this administration's rules and regulations. Any non-compliance could be seen as a cause for removal."
The Whistleblower Carve-Out Is Doing Less Work Than It Looks
Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation did not mince words to Al Jazeera.
"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. 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."
The draft NDA cites the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and claims nothing in the form restricts disclosures to Congress, inspectors general, or the Office of Special Counsel. Attorney Mark Zaid, co-founder of Whistleblower Aid, told NBC News the technical legal claim is accurate but misses the operational reality: "It would appear this new effort serves only the purpose of trying to induce fear and intimidate the workforce so as to stop unauthorized but lawful disclosures of information that has often resulted in negative publicity for the Administration."
The chilling effect is the point. A career civil servant who watches a colleague get marched out for an "allegedly violating" disclosure does not file the next whistleblower complaint. The lawyer for the next leak target signs a settlement instead of fighting it. The reporter who used to get a tip from inside an agency starts getting voicemail.
The Pattern This Fits Into
This NDA does not show up alone. It lands inside a now-familiar architecture of leak hunting that the Trump administration has been assembling since January 2025.
The Department of Homeland Security began administering polygraph tests to employees in 2025 to identify reporters' sources. The FBI under Director Kash Patel searched a Washington Post reporter's home in January 2026 as part of a leak investigation. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ran his own internal leak hunt at the Pentagon. The administration banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool and restricted press access at the Pentagon, both moves later challenged in court. OPM cites all of this approvingly in the draft notice as justification for the new form.
The OPM rule also locks into a parallel proposal already in motion. A separate OPM regulatory effort, first proposed in June 2025 under Executive Order 14210, would amend the federal suitability and fitness standards so that refusing to certify compliance with nondisclosure obligations becomes a fireable offense on its face. The two rules are designed to interlock. Sign the NDA, or fail the suitability standard. Fail the suitability standard, and you can be removed without the usual due process.
The Verdict
Federal employees already cannot disclose classified information, personal data covered by the Privacy Act of 1974, or material protected under the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch. Those laws have been on the books for decades and they carry criminal penalties. The argument that a new piece of paper is needed for any of this is not really an argument. The argument is that the paper is the mechanism: a fireable, litigable, paperwork-trail reason to remove the next career official who tells a reporter what is actually happening inside the agency.
OPM is taking comments through June 26. The comment portal is on regulations.gov. Career civil servants, unions, attorneys, journalists, and members of the public can submit them. They almost certainly will.
Sources
- Federal Register: Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement (Docket OPM-2026-0100), May 27, 2026
- Federal News Network: Trump administration pushes governmentwide NDA for federal employees
- NBC News: Trump administration floats requiring all federal workers to sign NDAs
- The Hill: Trump administration proposes asking federal workers to sign non-disclosure agreements
- Al Jazeera: White House proposes NDAs for all US federal workers
- AFGE: AFGE Blasts Administration's Proposed NDA Rule as Yet Another Attack on Non-Partisan Federal Employees
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