S 3885 Introduced – Non-Public Information

Last week, Sen Hagerty (R,TN) introduced S 3885, the No Government Contracts for Known Leakers Act of 2022. The bill would prohibit the letting of government contracts with persons or entities that had previously released ‘non-public’ information to unauthorized personnel.

The bill only defines three terms (‘entity’, ‘person’, and ‘unauthorized person’). The most important term in the bill, ‘non-public information’ is left undefined. Presumably the term refers to classified and sensitive but unclassified information, but it could interpreted to include any information that was not specifically made public.

While the bill is supposed to punish ‘leakers’ by disallowing their access to Federal contracts, the only actual punishment specifically mentioned in the bill is the $50,000 fine for the natural person who lets a federal contract to an entity that previously released ‘non-public’ information. The language in §2(b) even forgoes the typical legal waffle language of ‘knowingly violates’ or ‘willfully violates’. Nor is there any requirement for the leaker to have been convicted of releasing the ‘non-public’, or even to be aware that the information was ‘non-public’.

Hagerty is not a member (nor are his two Republican cosponsors) of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there is unlikely to be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. I do not expect that there would be sufficient support in Committee to adopt the bill because of the obvious problems discussed above. The bill will have no chance of making it to the floor of the Senate in anything approaching its current form.

I suspect that this is just another of those bills crafted by Staff to satisfy financial supporters of the sponsoring congresscritters.