TLDR
There is no longer a Mandatory conflicts of interest review by the Office of Government Ethics for the board members, the director or staff. Congressional committees overseeing the board no longer would receive security clearances, only heads, ranking members, and congressional leadership would receive clearances equal to the board in the new version.
As many of you are aware, Congressman Robert Garcia, who has become quite active in the UAP domain, has now put forward 3 pieces of legislation with regards to UAP. One of these adds back in provisions stripped from last year’s final NDAA.
Mike Rounds has recently commented, as has Daniel Sheehan, that Senate Intel was also working on a new version of the bill but I found it interesting that Garcia has introduced a version from the house first.
I went through the new 47 page bill and compared it against the original UAP Disclosure Act proposed by Schumer and Rounds last year.
Included word for word was the eminent domain section as well as new and updated definitions for terms such as UAP (which vastly improves the poor definition from 2022) among 20 others including temporarily non-attributed object, prosasic attribution, non-human intelligence and more.
Nearly every other aspect of the bill is identical to Schumer’s original proposal aside from some key areas I will highlight:
Missing is the Mandatory Conflicts of Interest review by The Office of Government Ethics for board members, the executive director of the review board, and all staff How board members are voted in is slightly changed. In the old version nominations would be referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs of the senate for consideration, The new proposal goes into much more detail with specific timelines on how quickly the senate must vote on nominations. The new version also includes wording indicating the house and senate can choose alternate committees of jurisdiction for both voting in and removing board members The original version included provisions that would grant Security Clearances equal to that of the board including relevant presidential and department or agency special access and compartmented access programs to the chairman and ranking members of the committee on homeland security and government of affairs of the senate and committee of oversight and accountability of the house as well as the staff of such committees. The new version does not grant these clearances to the full congressional committees. Controlled Disclosure Campaign All records should be presumed made public unless there is reason determined by the government agency providing the record to be held back. These are the things that become part of the controlled disclosure campaign. Previously the full campaign was to be shared with the President, the national archives archivist and the relevant congressional committees. But in the new version the whole plan only gets shared with the President and archivist. However… Controlled Disclosure Campaign Briefs The board is still required to report activities and fully brief at minimum the President, Archivist, leadership of congress, chairs and ranking members of the appropriate committees on any records subject to review. Reports are to come every year or more frequently as warranted by new information.
Overall it seems like some things were tightened up, entire committees and staff are no longer granted full clearances and instead it is only congressional leadership, chairs and ranking members being briefed on the controlled disclosure campaign. It seems like they are limiting the number of people being read into the information.
However congress will still be kept in the loop via annual (or more frequent) briefings.
Most suspect to me was the removal of the office of government ethics review of conflict of interest for the board, director and the staff. All the previous qualifications, and timelines remain the same aside from the removal of this “background check”. I wonder what the omission of this could imply as the same criteria still exists elsewhere and the timeline is identical.
Also curious is the unchanged eminent domain section. My guess is that the Senate and House were working in parallel on different parts of the legislation and that this will be resolved in reconciliation later this year.
What do you all think this could mean?
I dissect all the newly proposed legislation from both the House and Senate including whistleblower protections, AARO accountability and more from the Senate’s Intelligence Authorization Act, as well as other relevant updates here:
submitted by /u/LuciD_FluX
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