Trump brings “catch and kill” into the federal government.
The man who built his political career on silencing inconvenient witnesses just proposed a government-wide gag order on two million federal workers.
Donald Trump wants to treat all federal employees like he’s treated his victims: putting them under a gag order for the rest of their lives. And it’s creepier than you think.
For years, in a locked safe at American Media, Inc. in midtown Manhattan, the publisher of the National Enquirer reportedly kept a collection of stories he’d bought and never printed. The arrangement was simple. David Pecker, a friend of Donald Trump, would learn about a woman with a story to tell like Karen McDougal, the Playboy model who said she had had an affair with the candidate, or Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress with a similar account. Pecker would then buy the exclusive rights to her story (as if he was going to publish it) with the purpose of burying it.
The technical term, as a Manhattan jury would eventually learn, is “catch and kill.” You catch the story by purchasing it. You kill it by locking it in a safe. The witness is paid, a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) is signed, and the inconvenient truth simply ceases to exist as a matter of public record. The women may even think their story is about to be told to the world, only to realize it’s been taken away by someone who never intends to publish it and, indeed, who will sue them if they utter a word.
That’s the world Donald Trump comes from. As damning stories keep spilling out of his presidency, it’s clearly a world he misses. And on Tuesday, his Office of Personnel Management quietly posted a notice on the Federal Register proposing to extend that world to the entire civil service of the United States.
The proposal is a government-wide NDA that would apply to every existing and incoming federal employee at every agency that elects to adopt it — which, given how this administration operates, will eventually be all of them. The form would be filed in the employee’s permanent personnel folder, follow them across administrations and agencies for the rest of their careers, and bind them to silence on a category of information so broad it includes “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material” relating to internal agency operations.
In other words, federal workers would be forbidden from talking about almost anything they see or do on the job, including things Trump or his subordinates order them to do. If ever there was a sign that the Trump administration knows it’s engaging in illegal conduct — and wants to ensure not witness can ever testify to what really happened — it’s this.
OPM insists the agreement creates no “new” restrictions and merely documents existing law. This is the legal equivalent of a magician asking you to keep your eye on the wrong hand. The real mechanism in all of this is buried in Executive Order 14210, the DOGE workforce order Trump signed in February 2025, which directs OPM to make refusal to certify compliance with nondisclosure obligations a basis for firing federal employees on grounds of “suitability.” The form is “optional.” The refusal to sign it is not.
So this is a magic trick to fire people who don’t promise to keep Trump’s secrets.
I write this as someone the president has already attempted to silence. In fact, for telling the world about the wrongdoing I witnessed in the first Trump administration, the president signed an executive order directing the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies to investigate me, strip my security clearance, and hold me accountable for “treason,” in his words. The unfortunate problem for him is that I never signed a blanket NDA.
People like me who worked in the national security community are obligated to protect classified information, yes, but it’s not “classified” when the president says something stupid, orders you to do something illegal, or mismanages his job so spectacularly that you’re unable to do your own. Unfortunately for Trump, disclosing the stupidity of your boss is what we call First Amendment protected speech. And short of getting rid of the First Amendment altogether, he wants to find every way possible to keep federal employees from embarrassing him again.
By sheer volume, this revenge-and-intimidation campaign has consumed a large portion of the second Trump presidency. He’s stripped security clearances from dozens of former officials — Bolton, Brennan, Clapper, Blinken, Sullivan, Vindman, Cheney, Hill, Monaco, and even Mark Zaid, the whistleblower attorney whose only offense was representing the people Trump wanted silenced — and yanked taxpayer-funded protective details from Bolton, Pompeo, Milley, and Esper even amid credible Iranian threats, telling reporters they could hire their own security. That machinery then ground forward with prosecutions against Comey and Bolton, and with sprawling investigations underway against others who spoke out against him.
Should we assume it’s just a coincidence that fifteen former federal officials who’ve written books critical of Trump are all now either under investigation or have been threatened by Trump?
To clear the field of anyone else who might decide to sound the alarm in his second term, Trump already fired 17 inspectors general, decapitated the Office of Government Ethics, and removed the head of the Office of Special Counsel — the very agency tasked with protecting whistleblowers. Unsurprisingly, retaliation against whistleblowers has since surged, with documented cases from the Department of Energy to the EPA. At FEMA, employees who exposed life-or-death misconduct inside the administration were swiftly placed on administrative leave or fired. Meanwhile, the White House is quickly trying to strip protections from federal workers to forbid them from blowing the whistle in the first place.
Taken together, it’s the most systematic presidential effort in American history to punish dissent and bend the civil service to personal loyalty. And the message to anyone still inside government could not be clearer.
According to the Partnership for Public Service’s survey of more than eleven thousand federal employees, the percentage of government workers willing to report illegal activity has gone from 72 to 22 since Trump came back into power. That’s right. Only 22 percent of federal workers now feel confident they could report a violation of law or regulation without retaliation.
Max Stier, who runs the Partnership, put it plainly:
“We have every red light blinking across the federal government. Morale is as low as imaginable. This workforce has been fundamentally traumatized in the way that this leadership team said that they intended to do at the outset.”
Nearly four out of every five federal employees, by their own account, are already afraid to tell the truth. The administration’s response isn’t to ask why or to try to fix it. No, no, no. This was the whole point, and it’s working. They’re just trying to finish the job by demanding that everyone sign NDAs, especially that pesky one-fifth of federal employees who still have the guts to even think they can report illegal activity.
Donald Trump and his lieutenants want to “catch” every single story that federal workers might be able to tell the world about what they’ve seen. And they want to “kill” it. But first, they need to coerce those employees into signing something.
That’s why the catch-and-kill arrangement Trump perfected with David Pecker (in which a powerful man coerces witnesses into signing a contract in order to make the “seeing” of misconduct into a liability) is being reconstructed at federal scale. The powerful man is the same, of course. But now the witnesses are two million civil servants. And the safe is OPM’s Electronic Official Personnel Folder, where the signed agreement will sit for the duration of every federal employee’s career. Even if they quit and talk about something Trump or his team did that was wrong, they could be sued into oblivion.
So what’s left of “transparency” inside the federal government if this happens? What is left when you’ve investigated every former official who asked questions, fired the inspectors general, gagged the press, purged the dissenters, and now contractually bound every remaining federal employee to silence? I’ll tell you. What’s left is a shell of a republic. What’s left is an executive branch in which nothing illegal can ever be reported, because the people who would report it have signed a paper saying they will not, and the people who refused to sign have been removed for unsuitability.
The catch is assured. The kill is complete.
It’s been said before, but I think it bears repeating in light of this story. We’re witnessing the slow conversion of the United States government into the kind of organization Donald Trump has run his entire life. America is becoming a private business where the boss doesn’t get questioned, the witnesses are paid to disappear, and all the documents that might prove otherwise are locked away in a safe or shredded out of sight. We have a name for that kind of country, and it’s not the one we were raised to believe we lived in.
If you want to let the Trump administration know what you think about the proposed governmentwide NDA, the public comment period should open later today, here. According to the announcement, you can also email SuitEA@opm.gov and let them know what you think.
But if you want to fight back even harder against this, then tune into DEFIANCE Daily at 5pm ET. Because we’re not going to fold our hands nicely on our lap while the president tries to place duct tape over the mouths of federal employees. Tonight, in fact, we will give them a megaphone.
Your friend, in defiance,
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Can a new (lawful, not lawless) administration roll these measures back, so those who have been forced to sign NDA’s can talk? We need to fully expose what is happening if we are to prevent it from ever happening again.
I’ve decided to upgrade because $6 a month is doable as long as my Social Security continues to arrive. The horrible details of our destruction must be exposed. Thank you, Miles, for getting into the weeds.