Trump’s Unprecedented Government-Wide Gag Order Is Designed to Silence Whistleblowers and Shield His Administration’s Corruption
The Trump administration has proposed a government-wide nondisclosure agreement requiring every federal employee to sign a gag order. The move is unprecedented in scope, and conveniently timed to coincide with one of the most corrupt periods in modern presidential history.
The Washington Post explains:
The draft notice uses an expansive definition of privileged information, beyond typical classified and unclassified designations. Under the terms of the draft, employees would be blocked from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available.”
The draft NDA says that signing it is “voluntary,” but there’s a hefty caveat: “Failure to sign may result in removal from federal service and potential debarment for refusal to certify compliance with applicable non-disclosure obligations.” …
“Such broad gag orders would leave the public in the dark about how the government works, preventing the kind of informed debate that is critical to democratic accountability,” ACLU’s Esha Bhandari said. “The government can’t shroud itself in secrecy in a democracy.”
Federal law protects whistleblowers precisely to prevent this kind of institutional self-sealing—and this NDA, despite its nominal carve-outs, is designed to make employees too afraid to invoke those protections.
The administration’s stance is clear: let Trump do whatever outrageously corrupt and illegal things he wants, or lose your job.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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