Looking live at the White House. What a beautiful building. Kind of peaceful, right? You know, sometimes it's easy to forget that—well, not for me and not for you probably—but the executive branch obviously is a lot bigger than the White House. The government is a lot bigger than the Capitol building. I mean, there are millions of employees all over the place, right? Some are in uniform, some are out of uniform, some like the president, some do not like the president, and some want to leak not only the president, but maybe their boss, maybe whatever. Take a look at this. It is a new policy that will hopefully—well, let's read it. They'll be receiving a form. This form is intended to document federal employees' acknowledgement of and agreement to comply with current legal obligations to safeguard non-public confidential or proprietary information created or obtained through their official duties while expressly preserving the right to make disclosures authorized by law. I think this is a non-disclosure agreement, which is pretty standard in American life. Some people are losing their minds over this because it's from the Trump administration, but Scott Kupor is the director of the US Office of Personnel Management. He's had that job for about a year now, almost. And Scott, welcome to the show. That's a big job, by the way. Before we talk about this form and the new initiative,
Just how big is your job?
Well, thanks for having me, Greg, by the way. So, we're responsible for about 2 million federal employees. So, it's, you know, big, I guess, by most standards. It's still, you know, compared to the total US workforce, it's probably about 1% of the US workforce, but we got a few things we're trying to do.
Yeah, well, that is huge, and you are the director, you're the man. So, why an NDA? And you know people are upset, but just take us through it. Why this, why now?
Yeah, well, I got to tell you, Greg, first of all, I thought, as probably you may have, that this would be the biggest nothingburger of a policy when we decided to put it out. But it turns out, as you know, kind of the mainstream media basically runs on leaks from federal employees. So, what we try to do is something that's very, very common, as you mentioned, in most companies, which is, look, you probably had a staff meeting before this show where you guys talk about what you want to do and what you're going to put on the air and what you're not. You probably don't want your team, right after that, just calling their favorite, you know, mainstream media reporter and telling them all the things that's going to be on the show. Like, that doesn't create a great environment for you to get good feedback, get good input from folks. And so, that's basically all we're trying to do. We're trying to remind people that, look, if we are talking about policy stuff, that's what's called predecisional, which means we're kind of trying to figure out what the right policy should be. Like, respect the fact that we want to have a good dialogue on it. We want people to be honest. We want people to tell us their ideas. And you know, it's really hard to do that when you feel like everything you say is going to show up on the front page of a newspaper, you know, within an hour of that meeting.
Yeah, yeah, I think about our regular activities in life. I remember somebody planning a wedding, and I imagine if reporters were reporting on your every move, like, you know, Meghan Markle's. And people in government go through that all the time. And it must make it—you made an analogy to my show, but in the real world, government, it's going to make it very, very difficult to govern if you're always worried about leaks.
Well, it's really hard. Again, all we want to do is, you know, look, I could sit in my office and make decisions without the benefit of any of my teammates, but that's not a very effective way to run the organization. What I want is to be able to talk about stuff, but people literally will chill their speech if they feel like everything they say is going to be, you know, kind of publicly reported. So, you know, the backdrop to this, by the way, you read some of the language, which I appreciate, is, as you well know in this industry, there's something called the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, right? Which is the process by which journalists or anybody else can obviously get information from government. And when Congress put those laws in place, they were very clear that anything that's what's called pre-decisional, meaning we're trying to figure out what the right decision is, is not available through FOIA. And all we've done is basically taken that exact same legal standard that exists and say, you should do the same thing for pre-decisional meetings or other things that happen in your organization. So, this is like, quite frankly, common sense that any normal organization would do in order to actually allow us to serve the American people.
