For years, in a locked safe at American Media, Inc. in midtown Manhattan, the publisher of the National Enquirer reportedly kept a collection of stories he’d bought and never printed. The arrangement was simple. David Pecker, a friend of Donald Trump, would learn about a woman with a story to tell like Karen McDougal, the Playboy model who said she had had an affair with the candidate, or Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress with a similar account. Pecker would then buy the exclusive rights to her story (as if he was going to publish it) with the purpose of burying it.

The technical term, as a Manhattan jury would eventually learn, is “catch and kill.” You catch the story by purchasing it. You kill it by locking it in a safe. The witness is paid, a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) is signed, and the inconvenient truth simply ceases to exist as a matter of public record. The women may even think their story is about to be told to the world, only to realize it’s been taken away by someone who never intends to publish it and, indeed, who will sue them if they utter a word.

That’s the world Donald Trump comes from. As damning stories keep spilling out of his presidency, it’s clearly a world he misses. And on Tuesday, his Office of Personnel Management quietly posted a notice on the Federal Register proposing to extend that world to the entire civil service of the United States.

The proposal is a government-wide NDA that would apply to every existing and incoming federal employee at every agency that elects to adopt it — which, given how this administration operates, will eventually be all of them. The form would be filed in the employee’s permanent personnel folder, follow them across administrations and agencies for the rest of their careers, and bind them to silence on a category of information so broad it includes “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material” relating to internal agency operations.