Schumer Amendment
The Schumer Amendment — formally the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 — was a legislative amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and co-sponsored by Republican Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD). The amendment would have created a Presidential Review Board, asserted eminent domain over non-human intelligence artifacts held by private contractors, and established a mandatory declassification program for UAP-related government records modeled on the JFK Records Act. The Senate passed the amendment; the House of Representatives substantially gutted it before final NDAA enactment at the end of 2023.
Legislative background
The amendment grew from the wave of official UAP acknowledgment initiated by the 2017 New York Times disclosures and accelerated by David Grusch's June 2023 congressional testimony, in which Grusch alleged the existence of intact non-human craft held in private contractor facilities operating under unacknowledged special access programs. Schumer framed the effort as a tribute to the late Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader who had covertly funded the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) a decade earlier.
Schumer did not quietly insert the amendment into the bill — he made a floor speech announcing it and emphasizing the term "non-human intelligence," which appears more than 26 times in the legislative text. Additional co-sponsors included Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL).
Key provisions
Presidential Review Board
The amendment established a nine-member Presidential Review Board (PRB), modeled explicitly on the Assassination Records Review Board created under the JFK Records Act. The PRB was to be authorized to identify, collect, and declassify all government and government-contractor records relating to UAP and non-human intelligence, with a presumption of disclosure overriding routine classification.
Eminent domain over contractor-held materials
The amendment's most significant and controversial provision asserted that non-human intelligence artifacts held by private defense and aerospace contractors — regardless of how they were acquired — constituted federal government property subject to eminent domain seizure. George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell noted that the language included explicit carrot-and-stick provisions: contractors who voluntarily disclosed would receive amnesty, while those who did not would face funding cutoffs.
National Archives UAP records collection
The amendment directed the National Archives and Records Administration to establish a public UAP records collection analogous to the JFK assassination records collection, with a rolling declassification schedule and a presumption that records should be made available to the public.
JFK Records Act comparison
Schumer and his co-sponsors explicitly compared the UAP Disclosure Act to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 — legislation that created the Assassination Records Review Board and mandated the release of all assassination-related government documents. Hal Puthoff, who briefed both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) on UAP physics, described the analogy approvingly, noting that UAP files had been added to the list of records the Trump administration was considering releasing alongside the RFK files, MLK files, and Jeffrey Epstein files.
House gutting and aftermath
The full amendment passed the Senate but was stripped by the House before final passage of the NDAA in December 2023. According to Michael Salla, citing an aerospace engineer source, the gutting was orchestrated with White House involvement: senior Biden administration officials did not want President Biden to face UAP questions during an election year. The only provision that survived was a directive establishing a UAP records collection within the National Archives — without the PRB, without mandatory deadlines, and without the eminent domain provisions.
Schumer and Rounds returned to the Senate floor after the House gutting to announce they were not abandoning the effort. A revised version was introduced in 2024 and again substantially stripped. In 2025, another attempt to attach the UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the NDAA for 2026 was introduced.
James Fox, documentary filmmaker and author of The Phenomenon, read aloud a section of the passed UAP legislation on Joe Rogan's podcast and noted that the specific language — covering "material analysis, reverse engineering, research and development, detection and tracking, development or operational testing" — implied that lawmakers were informed about concrete programs beyond unidentified sightings. Fox further quoted the whistleblower protection provision — "protection for individuals making authorized disclosures... shall not be subject to a non-disclosure agreement entered into by the individual who makes the disclosure" — and characterized both clauses as direct responses to the Grusch allegations: "What prompted that language? What prompted the whistleblower stuff? It's pretty compelling stuff."
Significance
The Schumer Amendment represented the most ambitious legislative attempt in U.S. history to pierce the UFO secrecy structure from within the legislative branch. Its use of explicit language — "non-human intelligence," "non-human craft," "eminent domain over non-human artifacts" — was regarded by analysts as proof that the legislative sponsors possessed credible evidence, not merely secondhand allegations. Ryan Graves, executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, observed that Schumer and Garcia began changing their legislative language around UAP in response to mounting evidence from military aviators and intelligence whistleblowers.