Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) announced Wednesday that the House Oversight Taskforce on the Declassification of Federal Secrets will convene a hearing next month to examine the CIA's notorious MKUltra program, a Cold War-era mind control research effort that involved drugging unwitting American citizens.
“Hearing on May 13. MKUltra. House Oversight Taskforce,” Luna, who chairs the panel, wrote on X. The task force, created under the current Congress, focuses on pushing the executive branch to release classified records on sensitive government programs.
Project MKUltra, launched in 1953 and shuttered in 1973, aimed to study behavioral modification through techniques including drug-induced interrogation, according to University of Louisville archives. The program has long been a source of bipartisan outrage over its ethical violations.
In August 1977, the late Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) detailed the scope of the abuses during a joint hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. “The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent,” Inouye said. “It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge.”
Inouye argued that the agency had a “fundamental responsibility” to notify the institutions and individuals unwittingly drawn into the research. “These institutes, these individuals, have a right to know who they are and how and when they were used,” he said. “As of today, the Agency itself refuses to declassify the names of those institutions and individuals, quite appropriately, I might say, with regard to the individuals under the Privacy Act.”
Luna’s renewed interest in MKUltra was sparked by a February Daily Mail report noting that the CIA added a new document on the program to its reading room last year. She has also linked the secrecy around such programs to broader ethics failures in Congress. In a February post on X, she wrote: “Congressional ethics is a joke. They have so much dirt on members of Congress, and they do nothing. There is even a slush fund they use to pay people off with your tax dollars. This is part of why the system is so broken.”
She added that the intelligence community “is sitting on reports, and if someone steps out of line, isn’t it ironic how they leak them, threaten to leak them, or time it for right after Election Day?” She said the pattern largely revolves around sexual misconduct allegations.
The hearing comes amid a broader push by House Republicans to scrutinize intelligence agencies, including a contentious hearing on Pentagon spending and Iran war costs that erupted earlier this week. Luna’s task force is also expected to examine other declassification matters, echoing the partisan tensions over stalled investigations like the Epstein probe.
The May 13 hearing will likely feature testimony from former CIA officials and experts on the program’s legacy, as lawmakers press for full transparency on the agency’s past misconduct.
