President Donald Trump in February ordered the U.S. government to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” files on extraterrestrial life, as reported by the BBC. The directive came shortly after former President Barack Obama told a podcast host that aliens “are real,” while noting he has not “seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51,” according to a second BBC report.

“There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama said.

Trump was reportedly angered by the disclosure, telling reporters that Obama “made a big mistake” with his claim. “He's not supposed to be doing that,” said of Obama's statement.

The administration began declassifying the UFO files in May. In June, Trump tapped controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to lead a team studying the national security risks posed by UFOs.

According to a new report by Politico, however, little movement has been seen since among the group “tasked with reviewing and testing existing government-collected data to determine whether aliens or their technology are on Earth” — more than seven months after Trump's February order set the process in motion.

Loeb had hoped that a July directive from Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas would “get the ball rolling” on intelligence sharing between agencies, military branches and the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Science Advisory Council. “But he had received no new data then or since,” Politico reports.

“It's just amazing to think that months into this, we've gotten nothing,” one team member who attended the July meeting with Lukas told Politico. Still, the member said they “[believe] that's about to change.”

A persistent doubt underscores Loeb's mission: whether the government will actually release the data it has been holding. “It's been months already with little to show,” Politico writes. “Will Trump force reluctant intelligence agencies to relinquish what nearly everybody across academia involved in the scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life believes is meaningful raw data? Will that material be made public? How will any revelations be communicated to the public?”

Loeb suggested the answer may lie within the government itself. “There is the possibility that they are baffled by the data,” he told Politico. “Or, it could be they are using me.”

Politico described UFOs as “the kind of deep state-countering, coastal-elite-upsetting, conspiracy-adjacent rabble-rousing that the second Trump administration has a record of responding to.” One UAP expert argued Trump “knows more about it than people thinks he does,” noting that the president seems to believe the government has evidence of non-human technology and wants the truth to come out. “It's enough to leave him disturbed about what to do,” the expert said.

Some “members of the council worry they may be risking their reputations by participating.” Others say the CIA is stymieing efforts at public disclosure. Devesh Nandal, a Harvard postdoctoral council member, called the agency a “nemesis,” while fellow member Peter Skafish told Politico, “My government sources always point back to CIA.”

“These claims about the CIA are completely false,” a White House spokesperson told Politico. “All relevant agencies have worked cooperatively with” the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) “in order to identify records that are responsive to the President's initiative and of interest to the American public.” The dueling accounts leave open the central practical question of the review: whether the council created to examine the data will actually receive it.

There are also concerns that Trump might announce the “deep state” is aware of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence on Earth, with “UFO people” hoping such disclosure comes before the November midterms, Politico reports, pointing to a recent New York Times column.

Loeb scoffed at the suggestion his council could serve as a tool for the president's midterm prospects. “If there is clear evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for alien tech, this will constitute the biggest scientific discovery ever made and the most important milestone in human history,” he said. “The relevance to the midterm elections is secondary.”