THE ODNI NDA WAIVER MEMO

WHAT THE DOCUMENT IS

The document is a single page of text plus a distribution page, marked UNCLASSIFIED at top and bottom, carrying the control number ES 2026-00818. It is headed “MEMORANDUM FOR DISTRIBUTION” and its subject line reads “Preliminary Guidance for Implementation of NDA Waiver.” It is signed and dated 7/31/26 by Aaron Lukas, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. On August 1, 2026, Rep. Eric Burlison released it through his House office, stating that the administration had authorized his office to distribute it publicly. That provenance matters: this is not a leak and not a paraphrase, but a government memorandum released by the government's own arrangement.

WHAT IT SAYS

The memorandum has three short paragraphs. The first states its purpose: preliminary guidance for the release of “all Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) information” to the PURSUE Task Force “for review and declassification.” The second is the operative waiver. Consistent with what the memorandum calls Presidential Direction, the Department of War and the intelligence community will implement a process ensuring that current and former government employees and contractors with relevant UAP information “shall have prior non-disclosure agreements (NDA), agreements, oaths, or commitments waived when speaking with authorized government representatives of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) or PURSUE.” The third paragraph sets the implementation machinery in motion, and it is where the deadlines live.

THE 30-DAY CLOCK

Every member of the intelligence community is directed, within 30 days of receiving the memorandum, to coordinate with ODNI to establish a PURSUE designee and to inform its workforce of the President's order. Agencies are then to make sure staff understand that “any previous or existing NDAs prohibiting disclosure to the President, or designees like PURSUE, are no longer in force,” and that anyone holding UAP knowledge “should report all such information to AARO, or to an authorized PURSUE representative.” The memorandum promises that detailed reporting procedures will follow to IC components within the same 30 days, and that the Department of War and ODNI will separately issue departments and agencies detailed implementation guidance “for the broader PURSUE transparency project.” Counting from the July 31 signature, that window runs to roughly the end of August 2026. As of August 28, 2026, with that window now essentially closed, no list of agency PURSUE designees and no detailed reporting procedures had been published. Nothing in the memorandum required either to be made public - the designations and the procedures are internal to the intelligence community - so their absence from the public record is not in itself evidence that the deadline was missed. It does mean the only publicly checkable part of the memorandum's follow-through has not yet appeared, and that remains the thing to watch next.

WHO RECEIVED IT

The distribution page is the clearest signal of scope. Eighteen offices are listed: the directors of the CIA, DIA, NGA, NRO, NSA and the FBI; the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security at the Department of War; the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at Homeland Security; the Assistant Secretaries for intelligence at State and Treasury; the Chief of Intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Director of the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy; and the senior intelligence officers of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard. That list is worth comparing against the PURSUE releases themselves, which have so far drawn files from the Department of War, FBI, CIA, NASA, State, the Department of Energy and the Executive Office of the President. The memorandum reaches considerably further into the community than the published record has.

WHAT IT IS NOT

Three limits are visible in the text itself, and reading the news honestly depends on them. First, the waiver is directional, not general. It frees a person to speak to authorized representatives of AARO or PURSUE. It is not authorization to talk to the press, to publish, or to post the contents of a classified program online, and nothing in the memorandum says otherwise. Second, it is not a declassification. Information flows to the PURSUE Task Force expressly “for review and declassification,” which is a process with an outcome nobody has yet seen, not a release. Third, the memorandum calls itself preliminary and defers the actual mechanics to guidance that had not appeared at the time of writing. A witness reading it today learns that a channel is being built, not that the channel is open.

One further point of precision: the memorandum implements what it describes as Presidential Direction, but that underlying directive has still not been published. The reporting of July 21, 2026 remains sourced to officials rather than to a signed executive order anyone can read. What changed on July 31 is that the direction now has a documented, attributable, unclassified implementation order behind it.

WHY IT MATTERS

For years the practical complaint from Capitol Hill has been that nondisclosure agreements, not classification alone, were what kept firsthand knowledge out of official investigations. David Grusch told Congress in 2023 that he could only partly detail his claims in open session, and the Pentagon has said it found no verifiable evidence supporting them. The UAP Disclosure Act, which the House adopted into the FY2027 defense bill on July 22, 2026, carries whistleblower provisions aimed at the same bottleneck. This memorandum is a narrower instrument than a statute: it is an executive-branch order that a future administration could revise, and it creates a reporting channel rather than standing legal protection. But it is the first piece of the 2026 disclosure push that exists as a citable document with a signature and a date on it, and its real test is whether anything witnesses carry through that channel survives declassification review and reaches the public file.

READING THE RECORD IN UMBRA

This memorandum is about testimony, and testimony is upstream of files. Umbra is an unofficial reader of the public PURSUE record: it indexes every declassified tranche published at war.gov by agency, type, date and location, makes the whole archive searchable, and pushes a notification the moment a new release goes public. If the channel this memorandum describes produces new declassified material, the archive is where it will surface, file by file, with each document's own assessment left intact.