2026-07-31 Presidential Memorandum — UAP-Disclosure NDA Abrogation and PURSUE-Designee Naming Window

On 31 July 2026 the White House issued a presidential memorandum abrogating UAP-disclosure non-disclosure agreements and directing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to name a PURSUE designee within 30 days. The document was made public on 8 August 2026. It is the first on-the-record presidential-level executive action specifically targeting the NDA infrastructure that has kept classified UAP witnesses from testifying publicly, and opens a named accountability clock on the PURSUE program. As of 13 August 2026 the designee-naming window stands at T+13 from the memorandum date, with the earlier bound at 29 August 2026 and the later bound at 7 September 2026.

What Was Reported

On 31 July 2026 the White House issued a presidential memorandum addressing two distinct instruments of the U.S. government’s UAP-disclosure architecture: the non-disclosure agreements that have prevented classified witnesses from speaking, and the accountability structure of the PURSUE program itself.

The document carried two operative directives:

1. NDA abrogation. The memorandum abrogates UAP-disclosure non-disclosure agreements — the classified agreements that government employees, military personnel, and contractors have signed as a condition of access to UAP-related programs, and that have, in the view of the whistleblower-advocacy community, operated as the primary legal barrier to public testimony from classified witnesses.

2. PURSUE-designee naming. The memorandum directs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to name a PURSUE designee — a publicly identified official formally responsible for overseeing the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — within 30 days of the memorandum’s issuance.

The document was signed on 31 July 2026. It was made public, through standard executive communications channels, on 8 August 2026 — eight days after signing. The eight-day gap between signature and publication is itself a fact of record; the Council’s two-date window for the designee-naming deadline reflects this gap: 29 August 2026 (T+29 from the memorandum date) and 7 September 2026 (30 days from the publication date).

The Council entered the memorandum into the institutional ledger on 10 August 2026 in Edition #200, the same brief in which the correction on the PURSUE R5 miss was published. As of Edition #203 (13 August 2026), the PURSUE-designee naming clock stands at T+13, with 16 days remaining to the earlier bound and 25 days to the later.

Origins and institutional antecedents

The memorandum does not arrive without a documented predecessor chain. The Council tracks three prior institutional moments that established the demand for precisely this kind of executive action.

Rep. Luna’s SCIF statement (April 2026). In Case #00485, the Council documented Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s 29 April 2026 statement that she had personally viewed, inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, materials she described as “things that are of nonhuman origin and creation.” Luna explicitly conditioned any public presentation on declassification review — placing the timeline inside the executive branch’s classification apparatus. Her statement was, in retrospect, the first on-record congressional signal that a named elected official had accessed materials of a kind that NDAs were specifically designed to contain.

Disclosure Forum 2026 — the amnesty EO thread (June 2026). At Case #00502, the Council documented the 25 June 2026 Disclosure Forum convened by the Disclosure Foundation in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building. The most operationally significant thread from the Forum: Luna stated, on the record, that she was working with the Trump White House on a whistleblower amnesty program — possibly delivered via executive order — for a named list of UAP whistleblowers. The Council filed that thread as Watching on 25 June, naming an executive-order text as the primary artefact that would move it.

The Capitol Hill whistleblower-coordination appeal (August 2026). In Case #00493, the Council documented the 11 August 2026 filmed direct-to-POTUS appeal by David Grusch, Matthew Brown, John Borland, and Luis Nuccetelli, which specifically requested an executive order granting immunity to classified UAP witnesses so they can testify publicly without job or clearance risk. The appeal arrived 11 days after the 31 July memorandum was signed — meaning the filmed appeal was posted to the public record after the memorandum existed but before it had been published. The Council notes the temporal relationship without inferring a causal one: the four-person appeal may reflect ignorance of the memorandum’s existence, may be a public-record supplement to a private-channel communication the four individuals were aware of, or may be an independent escalation pressure on the same executive-branch addressee.

What the NDA abrogation does — and does not — do

The Council draws this distinction because competitor coverage has not consistently observed it.

What it does. An NDA is a contractual agreement. Abrogating the NDA releases the signatory from the contractual obligation not to disclose. A cleared individual whose UAP-related NDA is abrogated by presidential memorandum is, as a matter of contract law, no longer bound by the agreement’s non-disclosure clause.

What it does not do. Abrogating an NDA does not abrogate classification law. The underlying information — if it is classified under Executive Order 13526 or any successor classification framework — remains classified regardless of the NDA’s status. A cleared individual whose NDA has been abrogated may be released from the contractual obligation but may still face criminal liability under the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. § 798 and related provisions) if they disclose classified information in an unauthorised forum. True whistleblower immunity — the protection sought in the Luna amnesty framework and in the Grusch/Brown/Borland/Nuccetelli appeal — requires a separate instrument: a statutory protection, a declassification order covering the specific material, or a presidential pardon framework. The 31 July memorandum addresses the contractual layer; it does not address the statutory layer.

The Council records this because the distinction is operationally load-bearing. If a classified UAP witness chooses to testify publicly after the memorandum, the memorandum removes one category of legal exposure — contractual — but does not remove the classification-law category. Whether a specific witness would be protected depends on the classification status of the specific information they intend to disclose and on whether a parallel declassification or immunity instrument covers them.

The PURSUE-designee naming: what it creates

The PURSUE program — now carrying five released tranches and approximately 375 total files — has operated since 8 May 2026 without a named, publicly accountable official. The tranches have been attributed institutionally to the Department of War and AARO, but no individual has been designated as the programme’s responsible official.

The PURSUE-designee directive creates exactly this accountability. When ODNI publishes a designee name, the program gains a named individual against whom the Council — and congressional oversight bodies — can track decisions: the interval between tranches, the scope of what is released, the presence or absence of analytical packages, the mapping of the Luna 46-video list to released tranches (see Case #00499 and the open question on the Luna subpoena track in [Case #00488]).

The designee is also the natural addressee of the oversight question the Council has been carrying since Release 3: does AARO intend to publish case-level analytical packages for the material in the five tranches, or will the program continue to publish raw files without institutional analysis?

The Scharf transition and the naming window

On 10 August 2026, the White House announced that current staff secretary Will Scharf will replace David Warrington as White House Counsel effective 1 September 2026. The Council documented this in Edition #202 (12 August 2026) as an institutional ledger item: the White House Counsel is the operative machinery through which executive-privilege posture on subpoenas and congressional testimony is set. The UAP Disclosure Act and the NDA-abrogation framework from the 31 July memorandum both flow through the executive-privilege machinery the Counsel’s office controls.

The Scharf transition lands three weeks past the earlier bound of the Council’s designee-naming window (29 August) and one week past the later bound (7 September). The intersection is a fact of institutional scheduling, not a causal claim. The Council notes it because any ODNI-published designee name that arrives after 1 September will be worked, on the executive side, by an incoming Counsel’s office rather than the outgoing one — and the posture each office brings to the executive-privilege question on UAP is not yet on the public record for Scharf’s tenure.

Official response

The 31 July memorandum is itself an official action. No agency denial of its contents has been recorded. The Council’s brief coverage (Editions #200–#203) documents the memorandum as a confirmed institutional fact — signed by the President, published through standard executive communications channels on 8 August.

AARO’s posture on the NDA abrogation is, as of 13 August 2026, unaddressed on the public record. Director Kosloski’s last on-record statement remains the 5 June 2026 “40% unresolved” language included in the PURSUE Release 3 package (Case #00499). No Kosloski statement on the 31 July memorandum, the designee-naming window, or the implications for AARO’s own whistleblower-intake function has been observed.

Congressional reaction has not produced a primary-source statement directly addressing the memorandum. The Grusch/Brown/Borland/Nuccetelli filmed appeal of 11 August (Case #00493) is the closest public artefact: four named individuals from the whistleblower-and-adjacent-legal tier appealing directly to the President for a fuller immunity instrument, posted 11 days after the memorandum was signed. The relationship between the four individuals and the memorandum’s drafting — whether they were informed of it, consulted on it, or unaware of it — is not known to the Council.

Mundane explanations considered

Scope narrowing in implementation. Presidential memoranda are directives; their legal force depends on the implementing instructions issued by the receiving agencies. The 31 July memorandum directs ODNI to name a designee; ODNI may comply by naming a designee with limited authority and no new declassification mandate. Similarly, the NDA abrogation may be implemented narrowly — covering only UAP-specific contractual language in specific program offices rather than the broader ecosystem of classified-program NDAs that witnesses have described. The Council cannot assess implementation scope from a summary description; that assessment requires the primary-source text of the memorandum and the implementing guidance, neither of which has been published in full as of this filing.

Political optics without operational follow-through. A presidential memorandum is not legislation and is not an appropriations action. The executive can sign a memorandum abrogating NDAs without any budget allocation, staffing plan, or enforcement mechanism for the designee role. If the PURSUE-designee position is named but not funded, and if the NDA abrogation is not paired with a parallel classification review of the materials the abrogation is meant to unlock, the practical effect may be smaller than the declaratory effect.

The eight-day publication gap. The memorandum was signed 31 July and published 8 August — a gap the Council records without a claim about its cause. Possible explanations range from routine administrative review before public release, to coordination with the Department of War and ODNI on implementation language, to deliberate sequencing tied to institutional events in the intervening period. The gap is a fact; its cause is not on the public record.

Open questions

1. What is the exact scope of the NDA abrogation? The Council has the summary description from brief coverage. The primary-source text of the memorandum, specifying which categories of NDA are covered, under what legal authority the abrogation is issued, and whether the abrogation extends to contractor-held NDAs as well as federal-employee NDAs, would resolve this.

2. What authority will the PURSUE designee carry? The memorandum directs the naming of a designee; it does not, in the Council’s read of the summary, specify the designee’s authority over tranche content, cadence, or the still-unresolved question of case-level analytical packages. The designee’s charter — when published — is the primary artefact for this question.

3. Does the NDA abrogation provide any protection from classification-law liability? The Council has noted the distinction between contractual and statutory protection above. If the memorandum includes companion language — a declassification determination for specific program categories, or a referral to the DOJ for a non-prosecution framework — that would change the Council’s assessment of the memorandum’s operative value to classified witnesses substantially.

4. What is the Scharf office’s posture on executive privilege for UAP-related congressional testimony? Outgoing Counsel Warrington’s posture on this question was not publicly articulated with specificity. Scharf’s posture, as the incoming Counsel who will be in office for any post-1 September congressional testimony that the NDA abrogation might enable, is the operative institutional question.

5. Does the Grusch/Brown/Borland/Nuccetelli appeal reflect knowledge of the memorandum or ignorance of it? If the four individuals knew the memorandum existed and posted the appeal anyway, the appeal implies the memorandum is insufficient — that full immunity, not NDA abrogation, is the operative ask. If they did not know, the appeal is contemporaneous pressure that the memorandum was already addressing. The answer to this question reads directly on the scope of what the whistleblower tier believes the memorandum delivers.

The Council’s Verdict

Watching.

The institutional fact is on the record: a presidential memorandum was signed on 31 July 2026, published on 8 August, and the Council has documented its two operative directives across four consecutive editions of the Council Brief. That fact is not in dispute.

The operative question — what the memorandum delivers in practice — is the Watching clause. The Council will re-score this case on two distinct trigger events:

• ODNI publishes a PURSUE-designee name. Expected between 29 August 2026 (T+29 from memorandum date) and 7 September 2026 (T+30 from publication date). When published, the Council will score the designee’s stated charter and authority against the accountability question the PURSUE program has carried since Release 1.

• A classified UAP witness testifies publicly, citing NDA abrogation as the enabling condition. The testimony — the actual speech act from a classified witness who was previously NDA-bound — is the primary artefact by which the Council will assess whether the NDA abrogation is operative or declaratory. The threshold for that re-score is a named individual, a named forum, and an on-the-record statement attributing their ability to testify to the 31 July memorandum.

The memorandum is the most consequential executive-level UAP-disclosure action the Council has recorded since the announcement of the PURSUE program itself in May 2026. That framing is accurate and the Council states it plainly. It is also the framing most susceptible to the standard failure mode of the disclosure arc: consequential-sounding executive action that produces a named bureaucrat and no new testimony. The Council will not let the declaratory weight of the action substitute for the evidentiary weight of what it produces.

Sources

1. The Council. “Council Brief — Edition #200 (10 August 2026) — PURSUE R5 Correction.” aliencouncil.com. First full entry of the 31 July memorandum on the Council’s institutional ledger.

2. The Council. “Council Brief — Edition #201 (11 August 2026) — Diego Garcia / cuas.mil.” aliencouncil.com. PURSUE-designee naming clock at Day 11 by publication-day count; designee-naming window parameters confirmed.

3. The Council. “Council Brief — Edition #202 (12 August 2026) — 3I/ATLAS Methane D/H + Scharf WH Counsel.” aliencouncil.com. Two-bound window formalised: 29 August (T+29 from memorandum date); 7 September (T+30 from publication date). Scharf → White House Counsel transition documented as intersecting the naming window.

4. The Council. “Council Brief — Edition #203 (13 August 2026) — Grusch/Brown/Borland/Nuccetelli Direct-to-POTUS Appeal.” aliencouncil.com. Naming clock at T+13; 16 days to earlier bound, 25 days to later.

5. PBS NewsHour. “Trump announces staff secretary Will Scharf will be his new White House Counsel.” PBS NewsHour, 10 August 2026. pbs.org.

6. Axios. “Will Scharf named White House Counsel ahead of midterms.” Axios, 10 August 2026. axios.com.

7. NewsNation. “UAP Disclosure 2026 Forum Takeaways.” NewsNation, 25 June 2026. newsnationnow.com. Documentation of the Luna amnesty EO thread — the predecessor demand that the 31 July memorandum partially addresses.

8. NewsNation. “Lawmakers Want Immunity for List of UFO Whistleblowers — Rep. Luna.” NewsNation, June 2026. newsnationnow.com. Luna’s on-the-record statement at the Disclosure Forum about working with the White House on a named-list whistleblower amnesty program.

9. The Council. “PURSUE Release 3 — Department of War Publishes Third UAP Files Tranche.” Case #00499, aliencouncil.com. Anchor case for the PURSUE program; the designee-naming directive in the 31 July memorandum creates the accountability structure this case’s open questions (case-level analytical packages; Luna 46-video disposition) are addressed to.

10. The Council. “Disclosure Forum 2026 — Loeb’s ‘Orbs Not the Audience,’ Mellon Polling, Luna Amnesty EO, Rounds/Schumer NDAA Amendment.” Case #00502, aliencouncil.com. The 25 June 2026 institutional antecedent for the amnesty-EO thread.

11. The Council. “Rep. Luna Claims SCIF Viewing of Nonhuman-Origin Materials — April 2026.” Case #00485, aliencouncil.com. The 29 April 2026 congressional anchor for the NDA-bound classified witness thread.