Sponsors (10)
Introduced September 17, 2025 by Adam Schiff · Last progress September 17, 2025
The bill substantially strengthens transparency, congressional oversight, whistleblower protections, and anti‑influence rules—at the cost of increased disclosure of sensitive materials, greater litigation and compliance burdens, potential privacy/reputational harms, and constraints on rapid executive action.
All Americans (taxpayers and Congress) gain substantially greater transparency and routine oversight because the bill requires public disclosure or earlier delivery to Congress of OLC opinions, pardons-related materials, DOJ communications logs, visitor records, FEC ad records, and IG reports.
Congress (committees and subcommittees) gets stronger, faster enforcement tools to compel testimony and documents because it can sue to enforce subpoenas with expedited procedures and fee-shifting against willful noncompliance.
Federal employees and whistleblowers (including OIG and intelligence element staff and scientific researchers) gain clearer protections and faster remedies to report wrongdoing, including confidentiality rules, explicit petition/contact protections, expedited retaliation remedies, and protections for research‑related disclosures.
Classified, grand‑jury, or otherwise sensitive material could be exposed because the bill requires broader publication and mandatory disclosures of OLC opinions, DOJ investigative materials, emergency documents, and communications logs, which risks harming national security and privacy.
Officials, agencies, platforms, candidates, and small groups face materially higher litigation, compliance, and administrative costs because of new fines, personal penalties for managers, expedited litigation paths, longer records retention, and new reporting obligations.
Rapid public disclosures, bulk access to records, and short publication deadlines risk reputational harm and chilling of speech or legitimate activity because OSC determinations, ad sponsor data, and logs could name individuals before appeal or include personally identifiable information.
Based on analysis of 19 sections of legislative text.
Expands congressional oversight tools and transparency, adds enforcement and criminal penalties for certain presidential-pardon, subpoena, Hatch Act, and campaign foreign-contact issues, and limits some emergency and personnel powers.
Requires the Justice Department and other executive entities to provide more records and transparency to Congress on presidential pardons and related investigations, creates a new federal civil procedure to let Congress sue to enforce subpoenas with expedited court review and potential monetary penalties, and expands reporting, criminal, and administrative rules across the federal government to strengthen congressional oversight and limit certain executive powers. It also increases public access to Office of Legal Counsel opinions, narrows the President’s use of national emergency authorities, creates criminal penalties for serious Hatch Act violations, establishes new reporting of certain foreign contacts by campaigns, tightens limits on moving federal jobs into excepted service schedules, and adds multiple new oversight, reporting, and audit requirements for executive branch offices and inspectors general.