Rep. Luna announces House hearing on MK-Ultra scheduled for next month
OAN Staff Lillian Mann and Brooke Mallory
2:49 PM – Thursday, April 30, 2026
Florida GOP Representative Anna Paulina Luna announced on Wednesday that the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets will convene a hearing on May 13th to investigate the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra program.
This Cold War-era initiative, which began in 1953, involved a series of illegal experiments conducted on unwitting American and Canadian citizens to explore methods of mind control and behavioral modification — often through the administration of psychoactive drugs.
By revisiting this dark chapter of intelligence history via an official X post, Luna signaled a renewed legislative effort to uncover long-hidden details and address the legacy of the program’s ethical and legal violations.
Launched at the height of the Cold War, Project MK-Ultra was a clandestine CIA directive characterized by unethical experiments on unwitting subjects that resulted in enduring psychological trauma for many participants.
The full scope of the program remains shrouded in mystery since Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time, ordered the systematic destruction of all relevant records in 1973.
However, interest in the program’s legacy was recently reignited when Luna highlighted a report regarding documents detailing these covert drugging experiments, which were officially integrated into the CIA’s public library last year.
“I think our next task force hearing will be on MK Ultra,” she teased on X.
During a joint hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in August 1977, the late Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) issued a stark confirmation regarding the breadth of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.
Inouye formally acknowledged that the agency had systematically drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent, a practice that violated fundamental ethical and legal standards.
He further clarified that these covert operations often exploited the prestige of academic institutions, utilizing university facilities and personnel who were frequently unaware of the true nature of their work.
This deceptive framework extended to the program’s financial operations, as the CIA funded leading researchers who remained oblivious to the fact that their scientific contributions were being channeled into a secretive government project aimed at behavioral modification.
“These institutes, these individuals, have a right to know who they are and how and when they were used,” Inouye continued. “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 … It seems to me to be a fundamental responsibility to notify those individuals or institutions, rather. I think many of them were caught up in an unwitting manner to do research for the agency.”
During the 1977 proceedings, lawmakers also received formal testimony from then-CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who appeared alongside other agency witnesses to address the fallout of the MK-Ultra revelations.
Turner’s involvement was particularly significant as he worked to navigate the aftermath of the discovery of several boxes of financial records that had survived the earlier destruction of the program’s files.
By providing high-level administrative context and answering legislative inquiries, Turner and his colleagues assisted the committees in piecing together the scope of the agency’s past activities and its impact on public trust.
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