The Trump administration just took its war on leaks a step further. On Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management filed a proposal with the Federal Register to require all federal workers to sign NDAs.
Current and future employees must sign a sweeping non-disclosure agreement before they can do their jobs.
It’s not aimed at intelligence officers. It’s not aimed at people with security clearances. It’s aimed at all of them. The mail carrier. The Social Security claims processor. The VA nurse. The park ranger. Anyone on the federal payroll.
And the timing is not subtle.
What the Proposal Actually Does
The draft NDA would cover what OPM calls “Confidential Government Information (CGI),” a category the agency defines so broadly it functions as a catch-all. According to the Federal Register notice, CGI includes “all non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” related to “internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available.”
Read that again. Pre-decisional material. Deliberative material. Personnel matters. Internal operations.
That is not a definition of national security information. That is a definition of almost everything a federal worker sees in a given day.
OPM, the federal government’s human resources arm run by Project 2025 author Russ Vought, says the form is “intended to document Federal employees’ acknowledgment of, and agreement to comply with, current legal obligations to safeguard non-public, confidential, or proprietary information.” The agency insists the NDA preserves the right to make disclosures “authorized by law.”
But here’s the catch. Federal employees are already barred from improperly disclosing private information under the Privacy Act of 1974. They are already prohibited from using nonpublic information for personal gain under the Standards of Ethical Conduct issued by the Office of Government Ethics in 1993. The legal architecture protecting genuinely sensitive information has existed for half a century.
So what is this NDA actually for?
The leaks they want to stop
OPM’s filing is unusually candid about what motivated this proposal. The notice cites specific leaks that embarrassed the administration — including news outlets reporting on drafts of regulations and on OPM’s own proposal to weaken job protections and make it easier to fire career federal workers.
That’s the giveaway. The administration is not citing the disclosure of nuclear secrets or the names of covert operatives. It is citing reporters finding out that OPM was planning to fire more federal employees.
The notice also points to FBI and Department of Homeland Security leaks about immigration enforcement operations, and to leaks to The New York Times and Washington Post regarding the January raid that captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in Caracas. Both outlets, the administration acknowledges, delayed publishing what they knew until after the operation took place to avoid endangering U.S. troops.
They did the responsible thing. The administration is using their restraint as a justification anyway.
The Maduro raid is the cover story. The OPM workforce cuts are the real motive.
Who pays the price?
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents roughly 820,000 federal workers, didn’t mince words. AFGE National President Everett Kelley called the proposal exactly what it is.
“This proposed NDA is another attempt by the administration to purge the civil service of nonpartisan career employees and replace them with loyalists who won’t speak out against waste, fraud, and abuse,” Kelley said.
The federal workforce has already lost more than 300,000 civil servants in the past year under this administration. OPM has separately proposed gutting seniority protections, instituting forced performance ratings, and stripping away independent review of layoffs.
The administration has also moved to terminate collective bargaining agreements at most agencies and decertify federal unions entirely.
Now comes the NDA. Sign this, or we will find a reason to fire you.
Why this matters beyond the federal workforce
Whistleblowers are how the public learns about the things the government does not want the public to know. The administration just spent months attacking journalists, raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter in January as part of a leak investigation, and threatening prosecution against anyone who talks.
This NDA closes the loop. It tells every federal employee that the act of speaking — even about waste, even about abuse, even about the dismantling of their own agency — is now a contractual violation on top of whatever else the government might charge them with.
The federal employees who have leaked under this administration are the ones who told the public about the gutting of agencies, the politicization of hiring, the disappearance of inspectors general, the conditions inside ICE detention facilities, the dismissal of career staff.
They are the people who let the rest of us see what the government is doing in our name.
That is what this NDA is designed to stop. Not espionage. Not threats to national security. Accountability journalism. Inconvenient truth.
OPM says it will accept “all public comments” on the draft for 30 days after publication in the Federal Register on Wednesday. That comment period is the only formal opportunity the public has to push back before this becomes the standard condition of federal employment.
A government that needs its own workers to sign gag orders is a government that has something to hide. The question is no longer whether this administration intends to dismantle the nonpartisan civil service.
The question is whether the rest of us will be allowed to find out how.
