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Trump Directs Agencies to Waive UAP Nondisclosure Agreements

The White House, Washington, D.C.  ·  21 July 2026  ·  Government and Disclosure · United States

Official White House presidential portrait of Donald J. Trump. This is a real photograph of the official who issued the directive, not an image of the memorandum. No image of the memorandum exists publicly, because its text has never been released.
Official White House presidential portrait of Donald J. Trump. This is a real photograph of the official who issued the directive, not an image of the memorandum. No image of the memorandum exists publicly, because its text has never been released. (The White House (official presidential portrait, published on whitehouse.gov))

On 21 July 2026 Fox News Digital reported that President Trump had ordered the Department of War and the intelligence community to abrogate the nondisclosure agreements of former officials and contractors holding UAP information, routing them to AARO or the PURSUE task force. Congress had already done much of this by statute in December 2022, the directive grants no immunity, and the presidential memorandum's own text remains unpublished, though the ODNI guidance implementing it was released on 1 August 2026.

What did witnesses see at The White House?

This is a policy event rather than a sighting, so the thing observed is a document that nobody outside the executive branch has actually seen. What is genuinely on the record is narrow and worth stating precisely.

At 11:43 AM EDT on 21 July 2026, Fox News Digital published an exclusive by politics reporter Morgan Phillips reporting that President Donald Trump had directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to waive the nondisclosure agreements signed by former government employees and contractors who hold information about unidentified anomalous phenomena. The instrument described in the reporting is a national security presidential memorandum. The same copy was syndicated to Yahoo News at 3:43 PM UTC on 21 July, which is the same moment converted to UTC, and Just the News ran its own writeup that day crediting Fox as the original source. IBTimes UK followed on 22 July 2026 at 9:47 AM BST under the byline Crisnel Longino, and UNILAD Tech ran a version by Rebekah Jordan the same day.

Every substantive detail in that reporting comes from unnamed officials. A senior administration official is quoted saying that "President Trump recently directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to allow former government employees or contractors, that have relevant information about the disclosure of UAP, to come forward to meet with designated government representatives" and to "have their prior NDAs abrogated." The named channels are AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon, and PURSUE, described as the President's UAP task force, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The mechanism is a meeting: a former official or contractor sits down with cleared designated officials, and inside that authorized setting any applicable nondisclosure agreement is waived so the person can speak without breaching it.

Two further quotes from officials define the intent. On why the directive exists: "People who believe that they have information have expressed reluctance in coming forward. We are eliminating that source of reluctance." On what happens to whatever comes in: "Any information that is received that sheds light on the UAP mystery will ultimately be made public." Asked who might actually walk through the door, an official answered, "You don't know what you don't know."

The limits reported are as important as the grant. Officials stressed this "was not a declassification directive" and that it only permits people to come forward through government channels, not to go public on their own. Anything handed over still runs the existing declassification review before any release. The subject matter scope was described as covering incidents "that remain unexplained, rather than known foreign technology, classified U.S. programs or natural phenomena."

What was not observed matters just as much. As of 26 July 2026 the memorandum has no published number, no published signature date, and no published text. It does not appear in the presidential actions listing on whitehouse.gov, which for the surrounding period carries NSPM-11 on artificial intelligence in the national security enterprise dated 5 June 2026 and NSPM-12 on cybersecurity of national security systems dated 12 June 2026, and nothing on anomalous phenomena. No accompanying press release from the Department of War or from AARO has surfaced. The entire public evidentiary base for this event is one outlet's exclusive sourced to anonymous officials, plus the syndications and aggregations that followed it.

What is the official explanation?

The official architecture this memorandum sits on top of is documented, and it predates the memorandum by more than three years.

Congress already abrogated UAP nondisclosure agreements by statute. Section 1673 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, Public Law 117-263, division A, title XVI, enacted 23 December 2022 at 136 Stat. 2959, is codified at 50 U.S.C. 3373b under the heading "Unidentified anomalous phenomena reporting procedures." It directs the Secretary of Defense to establish "a secure mechanism for authorized reporting" of UAP events and of any federal or contractor activity or program relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, administered by "designated and appropriately cleared employees." The operative sentence is unambiguous: an authorized disclosure "shall not be subject to a nondisclosure agreement entered into by the individual who makes the disclosure." The same section forbids officials to "take or fail to take, or threaten to take or fail to take, a personnel action" against someone for making an authorized disclosure, and it names "revocation or suspension of security clearances, or termination of employment" among the reprisals barred. It also requires the Secretary to notify the congressional defense and intelligence committees within 72 hours of determining that a disclosure concerns an unreported restricted access program. The cross reference to this mechanism appears again in 50 U.S.C. 3373, subsection (k)(1)(B)(xvii).

The 2026 disclosure push that surrounds the July memorandum begins on 19 February 2026, when Trump posted on Truth Social that he would direct the Secretary of War and other departments and agencies to "begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters." DefenseScoop reporter Brandi Vincent covered the announcement and the reaction on 20 February 2026.

That direction produced PURSUE. On 8 May 2026 the Department of War published the first tranche of a public UAP archive at war.gov/ufo, describing a government wide effort supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to find, review, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP records. The Department framed the task as spanning "dozens of agencies and tens of millions of records, many of which exist only on paper." Release 01 carried roughly 160 files, including Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 mission imagery, FBI infrared captures from September and December 2025, and military incident reports from the United Arab Emirates, Greece, Africa and near Japan. Release 02 followed on 22 May 2026 with roughly 64 more files. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the material had "long fueled justified speculation." The archive was announced as a rolling program with new tranches every few weeks. By July 2026 Avi Loeb was writing about four tranches.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who wrote the legislation that created AARO, issued a statement on 20 February 2026 through her Senate office saying, "This is good news, and I am encouraged to see the president lend his support to this effort," while pressing the administration to follow through on actual releases.

The July memorandum therefore has to be read against an existing statutory shield, an existing reporting mechanism, an existing public archive and an existing declassification pipeline. The official position, as relayed by the anonymous officials to Fox, is that the memorandum extends the invitation, adds executive weight, and opens PURSUE as a second door alongside AARO, while changing nothing about classification.

One small piece of the executive branch's disclosure activity is a matter of public record rather than anonymous sourcing, and it is worth setting beside the memorandum for contrast. On 17 March 2026, according to federal domain records, the White House registered two new .gov domains, alien.gov and aliens.gov, both hosted on Cloudflare and neither connected to a live website at the time. DefenseScoop reported the registrations on 18 March 2026. Asked what they were for, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly replied to DefenseScoop with two words, "Stay tuned!", plus the same alien emoji that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had used when reposting the President's February promise to publish previously undisclosed records. The registrations went through while the government was not otherwise accepting new .gov domain requests because of a lapse in federal funding.

That episode is a useful calibration for this case rather than a substitute for evidence. It shows the administration doing disclosure-adjacent things that leave a documentary trace a member of the public can check, which is precisely what the nondisclosure waiver memorandum has not done. A domain registration is a trivial act with a permanent public record; a directive relieving former officials of nondisclosure obligations is a consequential act whose text remains unpublished. The contrast does not make the memorandum less likely to exist, but it does mean the archive cannot treat the two on the same evidentiary footing.

UPDATE, 3 August 2026: part of the documentary gap described above has now closed, and the archive is updating this case rather than leaving the earlier assessment standing.

On 29 July 2026, Rep. Eric Burlison (MO-07) published a statement on his House website confirming the directive and describing its status from the inside of the oversight process. He wrote that "Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas has stated that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will soon issue guidance to ensure that the intelligence community implements the president's directive," and that his own office "has requested to see the directive to understand how this process will work." He also flagged an unresolved legal question that no other source had raised: "we are uncertain whether the abrogation of NDAs will apply to testimony received by Congress before referral to the executive branch," and advised prospective whistleblowers to have an attorney and a member of Congress present. On the same page he called on ODNI to issue its guidance publicly.

That guidance then arrived, and Burlison released it. On Saturday 1 August 2026 he shared a memorandum from Aaron Lukas, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, dated 31 July 2026. As reported by NewsNation's Michael Ramsey on 1 August, the memorandum states that the Department of War and intelligence agencies will implement a system to protect current and former government employees and contractors with "relevant information on UAPs." Federal intelligence agencies are to inform employees that secrecy agreements no longer apply to UAP disclosures made through approved channels. The approved channels are named: authorized government representatives of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or members of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters Task Force. The memorandum sets a timetable, quoted directly: "Detailed reporting procedures will be disseminated to IC components within the next 30 days," which places the operative procedures at the end of August 2026.

Two things follow. First, the directive is no longer attested only by anonymous officials speaking to reporters: a named senior intelligence official has signed a dated implementing memorandum, and a sitting member of Congress has put it into the public domain. Second, the waiver is narrower than the early coverage implied. It is not a general release from secrecy; it relieves obligations only for disclosures made to two specific bodies through channels that did not yet exist in published form when the memorandum was written.

What did the witnesses think it was?

Marco Rubio, Eric Burlison, Anna Paulina Luna, Kirsten Gillibrand, David Grusch, Avi Loeb, Christopher Mellon, Tim Gallaudet, and unnamed senior administration officials

Is the Trump Directs Agencies to Waive UAP Nondisclosure Agreements real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one, the entirely ordinary reading. There is a version of this event in which nothing legally changed at all. Congress abrogated UAP nondisclosure agreements on 23 December 2022 in section 1673 of the FY2023 NDAA, and the language at 50 U.S.C. 3373b is not vague: an authorized disclosure "shall not be subject to a nondisclosure agreement entered into by the individual who makes the disclosure." AARO has been receiving protected reports under that authority for years and its own reporting materials say so. On that reading, the July 2026 memorandum restates existing law, adds a second intake door at PURSUE, and gets a headline. Second, a waiver is not immunity. Nondisclosure agreements are contracts. The criminal exposure that actually silences people sits in the classification system and the espionage statutes, and none of that is touched by abrogating a contract. Burlison and Luna have both said as much, and the administration itself confirmed the boundary by insisting this "was not a declassification directive." Third, the flow is inward, not outward. A witness talks to cleared officials in a cleared room, and anything they say enters the same declassification pipeline that has already been slow. The promise that material "will ultimately be made public" is an aspiration voiced by an anonymous official, not a deadline, not a statute, and not a reviewable commitment. Fourth, and this is the plainest problem, the instrument itself is invisible. There is no memorandum number, no published text, no signature date, no entry in the whitehouse.gov presidential actions listing, and no confirming release from the Department of War or AARO. One outlet, one reporter, unnamed sources. That absence has now been rechecked and it persists. As of 27 July 2026, six days after the reported directive, the whitehouse.gov presidential actions listing carries nothing on anomalous phenomena or nondisclosure agreements for July 2026 at all. What it does carry for the surrounding days is an executive order on the Smithsonian Institution dated 24 July 2026, Section 301 trade memoranda dated 23 July 2026, nominations sent to the Senate on 21 July 2026, and a run of tariff proclamations and an executive order on defense supply chains dated 20 July 2026. So the listing was actively updated across the exact window in question, including on the day of the reported directive itself, and the memorandum still does not appear in it. Everything else in circulation is downstream of that single story.

Pass two, if the action is substantive, what is it. Read at face value, the memorandum does three things the 2022 statute does not clearly do on its own. It reaches beyond the Department of Defense to the intelligence community as a whole, which is where the alleged compartmented programs are said to sit. It reaches contractors explicitly, which is the population Grusch alleged holds the material. And it puts a presidential instruction behind a channel that until now depended on an individual's willingness to trust a Pentagon office. The scope carve-out is the most interesting sentence in the whole story, because of what it presumes. Officials defined the target as incidents "that remain unexplained, rather than known foreign technology, classified U.S. programs or natural phenomena." That is an administration drawing a boundary around a residual category and inviting people to talk about it, which is only a coherent thing to do if someone believes a residue exists. Layer that against the 72 hour congressional notification trigger in 50 U.S.C. 3373b, which fires whenever a disclosure is determined to relate to an unreported restricted access program, and there is a real procedural tripwire attached to whatever walks in.

The honest position is that the significance of this event is not yet measurable, and it will be measured by outputs, not by announcements. The tests are concrete and checkable: does a named waiver ever get executed, does a congressional notification ever fire under the 72 hour rule, and does any material sourced to a waived witness ever appear in a PURSUE tranche. As of the date of this file none of those has been publicly demonstrated.

On tiering. This entry is not an object, so the archive's Verified Unexplained tier does not apply, since there is no photograph, no radar track and no craft to authenticate. Neither disputed tier applies either, because nobody has advanced a counter-explanation with a shown method. Nobody is arguing the reporting is false. The gap here is not a debunk, it is an absence: the primary instrument has never been published, so the event rests on credible journalism sourced to officials who would not put their names to it. That is exactly what the Unknown tier is for. The action is documented, the surrounding statutory and archival record is solid and citable, and the thing itself remains unverified at the level of the document. Tier: Unknown.

UPDATE, 3 August 2026. The reasoning above was written when the only evidence for the directive was reporting sourced to officials who would not be named. That is no longer the whole record. The Lukas memorandum of 31 July 2026, released by Rep. Burlison on 1 August, is a dated instrument from a named official, and it moves the documentary floor of this case substantially.

It does not move it all the way. The President's underlying directive itself is still unpublished; what has surfaced is the intelligence community's implementing memorandum, which is downstream of it. The memorandum's own text has been quoted in reporting rather than posted in full facsimile, and the "detailed reporting procedures" it promises within thirty days had not been issued as of this update. Burlison's unanswered question, whether the waiver reaches testimony given to Congress before it is referred to the executive branch, is a live gap with real consequences for anyone deciding whether to come forward.

The tier stays Unknown, but for a narrower reason than before. The action is now documented well past the point of doubt that it happened. What remains unverified is its scope and its effect: whether a waiver routed exclusively through AARO and the PURSUE task force, with congressional coverage unclear, actually frees anyone to say anything they could not say in July.

UPDATE, 4 August 2026. The gap described above has closed. On 31 July 2026 the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lukas, signed a two page unclassified memorandum, serial ES 2026-00818, titled "Preliminary Guidance for Implementation of NDA Waiver," and on 1 August 2026 the office of Rep. Eric Burlison published it in full with the administration's authorization. The memorandum confirms the substance of the reporting on this page: NDAs, agreements, oaths or commitments are waived for current and former employees and contractors "when speaking with authorized government representatives" of AARO or PURSUE, and the destination of the material is the PURSUE Task Force "for review and declassification." It also confirms the limits recorded here. There is no grant of immunity in its text, no reference to prosecution or civil penalties, and no authorization to speak publicly. The statement above that the memorandum's text has never been published described the position as of late July and is superseded by that release. The presidential memorandum itself, as distinct from the ODNI implementing guidance, still has no published number, signature date or text. The implementing document is covered in full at /cases/odni-uap-nda-memo-2026.

UPDATE, 6 August 2026. The listing check has been run again and the result is unchanged, which by now is the finding rather than a caveat. As of 6 August 2026 the presidential actions listing on whitehouse.gov runs through an executive order of 3 August 2026 establishing the President's Military Spouse Commission, and behind it a quartz surface products proclamation of 31 July, two presidential memoranda of 30 July, the Smithsonian executive order of 24 July, Section 301 memoranda of 23 July, nominations sent to the Senate on 21 July and a run of tariff proclamations of 20 July. Sixteen days after the directive was reported, and six days after the intelligence community's implementing memorandum was signed and published, the listing carries no national security presidential memorandum on anomalous phenomena and nothing at all on nondisclosure agreements. The implementing document exists and can be read. The instrument it implements still cannot.

Sources

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