OPM proposes government-wide NDA for federal workers, with civil and criminal penalties for press disclosures

On May 26, 2026, the Office of Personnel Management posted a notice in the Federal Register proposing a draft non-disclosure agreement for federal agencies to use with "both new and existing employees." The draft would expose signatories to civil and criminal penalties — and would entitle the U.S. government to any royalties they receive — for disclosing information the administration deems confidential to journalists. After employees leave federal service, the draft requires "written permission from an authorized agency official" before former employees may speak to the press about that information. OPM's framing in the notice is that the form "does not create new substantive restrictions on employee speech or disclosure rights" and "expressly" preserves employees' rights to make disclosures authorized by law, including protected whistleblower disclosures through statutory channels such as inspectors general and Congress.

OPM's stated rationale points squarely at press disclosure. The notice cites recent leaks about planned immigration enforcement actions, internal rulemaking and policy-development communications, and reporting by the New York Times and Washington Post on a January 2026 U.S. military raid in Venezuela as evidence that "unauthorized disclosures" are eroding agency operations. The agreement's definition of "confidential government information" sweeps in internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, and any "sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material" not yet public. The carve-out for inspectors general and Congress preserves the statutory whistleblowing channels on paper, but the targeted disclosure channel — the press — is precisely the channel federal employees use to expose conduct the administration prefers not to be reported.

Federal-employee union leaders quoted in the primary source — the National Federation of Federal Employees' Steve Lenkart and AFGE president Everett Kelley — argue that federal workers also have constitutional and statutory rights to communicate with journalists about official misconduct, and that the chilling effect on those rights is the practical aim of the proposal. The OPM filing generalizes a pattern of agency-specific anti-leak instruments — the Pentagon's revised press-access regime and Hannah Natanson's seized devices in the FBI's leak investigation are recent precedents — into a government-wide NDA covering the entire federal civil service.