White House employees who try to enforce nondisclosure agreements signed by their colleagues could have their pay slashed by Congress, The Washington Post reports.
President Donald Trump’s White House has forced employees, including interns, to sign NDAs, as were workers on his 2016 campaign, at the Trump Organization, and on his TV show “The Apprentice.”
Congress, thanks to a relatively unknown provision, can restrict the executive branch’s “payment of the salary” of a federal employee who seeks to keep a fellow federal employee from communicating with Congress, according to the Post.
Writers Irvin McCollough and Tom Devine, the Government Accountability Project’s national security analyst and legal director, respectively, note that “Congressional communication is a legally broad term… Because members of government, including Congress, read the news, speaking to the news media (or writing a book) can be construed under whistleblower laws as communicating with the government.”
They add that “Any member of Congress can recognize that appropriations law forbids paying a salary to any White House staffer who gags another staffer’s right to communicate with Congress. This member can request that the Government Accountability Office analyze whether the law was violated. The GAO… would review the statute, compare it with the White House staffer’s actions and issue a report on its findings.”
The two predict that the GAO would agree that the NDAs “plainly interfere with congressional communications and, thus, that paying salaries of White House aides involved in the NDAs is a violation of the law.”
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