The Gallagher Amendment provides a mechanism to talk about UAP knowledge regardless of NDAs
US Representative Mike Gallagher of the House Armed Services Committee asked several probing questions in May’s congressional hearing on UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
Now he’s proposed an amendment to the existing UAP legislation that, if passed, would allow someone with knowledge of a secret UAP program or similar to come forward and share this classified information with the UAP office. Such knowledge is usually restricted by a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), but this Gallagher Amendment would act as a waiver and an assurance that there’d be no liability, prosecution, or other reprisals for speaking out.
The Rules Committee meets this coming Tuesday to decide which amendments can go forward to a full vote by the House of Representatives on Thursday 14th July.
The UAP office would be obliged to inform the various relevant committees in the House and Senate. The monitoring of the implementation and compliance to the proposal would be the responsibility of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.
This additional piece of legislation won’t force anyone with classified knowledge to come forward, as different from offering full protection to anyone who does so of their own accord to share information. It rightly would exempt anything related to a Special Access Program (SAP) that has already explicitly and clearly been reported to Congress. It would lift the current means to hide behind an NDA, allowing elected lawmakers to potentially increase some degree of transparency.
We’ll update this article with a note at the bottom over the coming week.
Written by Callum Cushen, 9th July 2022
UPDATE: The Gallagher Amendment has smoothly passed through the House. Final legislation will have to be reconciled with the Senate’s version later this year - as part of the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) - and it’s likely that they, too, will add something useful. The President will then need to sign it off.