Mike Rounds
Mike Rounds (born October 24, 1954) is a Republican U.S. Senator from South Dakota (elected 2014, re-elected 2020) and former Governor of South Dakota (2003–2011) — relevant to UAP disclosure as the co-sponsor, with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 (incorporated as an amendment to the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act), which would have established a presidentially-appointed review board with authority to access and declassify government records related to UAP, modeled on the JFK Records Act review board.
UAP Disclosure Act co-sponsorship
Rounds partnered with Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat-NY) to draft the UAP Disclosure Act as a bipartisan initiative drawing on the legislative model of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which created the Assassination Records Review Board. The bill established procedures for an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Review Board that would have 25-year declassification authority over records held by any government entity. The provision was included in the Senate version of the FY2024 NDAA but was substantially weakened in conference with the House before final passage — stripping the board's authority to compel access to records held by private contractors, which David Grusch and Karl Nell had identified as the most critical access gap.
The Rounds-Gillibrand legislative strategy reflected the framework proposed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Lee, who separately introduced a broader UAP declassification provision. Schumer stated publicly: "The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena." The Schumer-Lee amendment went further than the Rounds-Gillibrand provision in asserting that any UAP materials held by private entities would be presumed to be government property subject to mandatory disclosure, a claim that the defense contractor lobby mobilized against and succeeded in removing from the final bill.
Senate Armed Services Committee
Rounds serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, giving him access to classified UAP briefings and oversight authority over DoD UAP programs. He has stated publicly that he received classified briefings on UAP matters that he found significant and that motivated his legislative work, without disclosing specifics.
The Senate Armed Services Committee also maintained jurisdiction over the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), established by the FY2022 NDAA, which was placed under joint DoD/ODNI oversight. The committee's classified posture reviews of AARO — which Rounds and others attended — formed the basis of their assessment that existing oversight mechanisms were insufficient to reach the full scope of UAP-related programs. Rounds explicitly cited the waived special access program architecture as the mechanism by which UAP information had been withheld from appropriately-cleared congressional members.
2023 congressional hearing participation
The July 26, 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing on UAP — featuring testimony from David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and Commander David Fravor — reflected the legislative momentum that Rounds and Gillibrand had built in the Senate. The hearing's significance for Rounds' legislative effort lay in Grusch's specific testimony about Special Access Programs: "In 2019, the UAP Task Force director asked me to identify all special access programs and controlled access programs, also known as SAPs and CAPs. We needed to satisfy our congressionally mandated mission... I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. To which I was denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it."
This testimony directly supported Rounds' legislative argument: that the review board needed authority specifically over waived SAP programs, since those are the tier where Grusch and others alleged the most notable UAP materials resided. The House hearing's impact on Rounds' concurrent Senate effort was to shift the legislative framing from "transparency about sightings" to "congressional access to specific concealed programs."
DNI oversight and Tulsi Gabbard
The DNI position — as the statutory head of the intelligence community — carries particular significance for the Rounds-led oversight effort, because UAP program concealment alleged by Grusch operated across multiple intelligence community agencies simultaneously. Former AATIP director Luis Elizondo has noted that the DNI, in theory, should be the "super user" with access to all programs, but that operational reality diverges from this statutory role: "In theory she should be a super user, be read on to everything, both title 50, title ten programs, covered action, clandestine, everything in between. The reality is that doesn't always occur."
Rounds' legislation attempted to create an additional access mechanism — the presidentially-appointed review board — that would function independently of the DNI chain and therefore not be subject to the same compartmentalization barriers. The stripping of contractor-record authority from the bill was interpreted by Rounds and co-sponsors as evidence that the entities with the most to lose from disclosure had successfully lobbied the conference process.
Grusch endorsement and legislative significance
David Grusch, the intelligence community whistleblower whose public testimony helped precipitate the UAP Disclosure Act, specifically named Rounds as one of the co-sponsors of what Grusch called "the most notable legislation for transparency in American history," alongside Senators Schumer, Young, Gillibrand, and Rubio. Grusch stated he had been aware of the amendment months before going public and that his decision to testify was partly motivated by knowing the legislative effort was underway, calculating that public testimony would push the Senate to act.
Attorney Daniel Sheehan, who has served as legal counsel to multiple UAP whistleblowers, characterized the eminent domain provisions within the UAP Disclosure Act — which Rounds co-authored — as the central point of controversy with the private aerospace industry, noting that the Fifth Amendment provides clear authority for government seizure of contractor-held materials but requires just compensation, a legal reality the defense contractor lobby leveraged to weaken the bill in conference.
Political background
Rounds served as Governor of South Dakota from 2003 to 2011, where he built a centrist Republican record. In the Senate, he sits on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee in addition to Armed Services. His UAP legislative work is considered anomalous relative to his otherwise mainstream Republican profile — he has attributed it explicitly to the substance of the classified briefings he received, and has stated that the UAP issue is non-partisan, driven by national security imperatives rather than ideological commitments.