The Trump Administration Wants to Frighten Would-Be Whistleblowers

Early in Donald Trump’s second term in office, the White House declared itself “the most transparent administration in history.” The federal government has continued to insist on this slogan, even as it has barred journalists from the Pentagon, administered polygraph tests in an effort to ferret out leakers, and fired independent inspectors general tasked with hunting down corruption and mismanagement. Now the administration has announced yet another effort to stem the free flow of information—a plan that would push all federal workers to sign a nondisclosure agreement.Last week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management published a draft proposal for rolling out NDAs across the executive branch. The NDAs would ostensibly forbid federal workers from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” outside the government, including with the press. Exactly what constitutes such information remains unclear, as does the proposal’s legal validity. The draft NDA itself acknowledges that the administration cannot go beyond the restrictions of existing law. And to the extent that the government seeks to add new constraints anyway, the proposed NDA would be a clear violation of First Amendment protections. Legal or not, though, the NDA will likely further intimidate federal workers, many of whom are already demoralized by the Trump administration’s efforts to torment the civil service and drive government employees to quit.“As I see it, the goal of the NDA is to chill employees who would otherwise whistleblow on unlawful activity or mismanagement,” Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who studies the civil service, told me. The proposal, in his view, is “an additional threat on top of dozens of other threats” to federal workers who have already suffered from mass layoffs and reductions in civil-service protections.The proposal frames the draft NDA as a necessary response to recent “unauthorized disclosures” to the press, pointing to reporti