Rep. Burlison Welcomes Former U.S. Air Force Officer David Grusch as Special Advisor

On 2025-03-27, a press release issued in D.C. Washington announced that David Grusch had been appointed Special Advisor to Eric Burlison, a Republican member of the United States Congress representing Missouri’s 7th district.¹² The release describes Grusch as a decorated former United States Air Force officer and senior civilian intelligence official.³ In his new advisory role, Grusch is stated to contribute his expertise to Burlison’s efforts to promote transparency regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and to support Burlison’s work on the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.⁴

The release provides a summary of Grusch’s military and intelligence career. He served 14 years in the Air Force, attaining the rank of Major,⁶ and completed a combat tour of duty in Afghanistan supporting counter-illicit finance, drug, and arms-trafficking operations alongside the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).⁷ He subsequently held senior intelligence officer positions at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO),⁸ and from 2019 to 2021 officially represented the NRO on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).⁹

In 2022, while employed at the NGA, Grusch filed a federal whistleblower complaint — the David Grusch 2022 whistleblower complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General — with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG).¹⁰ That complaint was subsequently found to be credible and urgent, qualifying it for reporting to the Congressional intelligence committees.¹¹ The following year, Grusch gave sworn testimony recorded in the David Grusch 2023 Congressional testimony on UAP before the House Oversight & Accountability Committee, in which he alleged that elements of the US government had thwarted Congressional oversight and withheld information from proper Executive Branch officials.¹² The release also notes that in this testimony Grusch alleged the illegal concealment of programmes tied to the recovery and reverse engineering of craft of non-human origin.¹³ Grusch had previously provided sworn testimony before the United States Congress on the federal government’s UAP activities.⁵

The press release includes a statement attributed to Grusch expressing his intention to help United States Congress restore full oversight and to enable the Legislative Branch to investigate and hold accountable those alleged to have broken the law and lied to Congress, the Executive Office of the President, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Department of Justice.¹⁴