Pattern Hunters publishes long-form analyses of structural failure points in criminology, public policy, and community accountability. Subscribe to receive the work in your inbox, with companion mobilization pieces alongside the diagnostic.
Form Last Revised 2017: What Louisiana signed away in the dark, and who was standing there when it happened
I. What the Form SaysThere is a line printed at the top of the page that nobody has written about yet. Form last revised 2017. It sits in the corner of the mutual nondisclosure agreement Governor Jeff Landry signed by hand on April 23, 2024, with Laidley LLC, the shell company reporters identified as Meta’s. It is printed there the way a copyright notice is printed on a receipt. A boilerplate commercial template, seven years old at signing, pulled off a shelf and handed to the chief executive of a state. He signed it as written. He did not sign it as Jeff Landry, the man. The block reads Office of the Governor, Governor of Louisiana, P.O. Box 94004, Baton Rouge. The obligation attached to the office, and offices outlive the people who hold them. That agreement is not a rumor, and it is not a leak. Louisiana Economic Development produced it in response to a public records request from the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations, and WWNO published it and broke down its terms clause by clause. The full agreement can be viewed and downloaded here. Both links appear again in the references, so that anyone who wants to read the language can do it without taking my word for a single line of it. The company’s name is redacted in the copy the state released. Start with Section 2, because everything else follows from it. According to the agreement as published by WWNO, the recipient may use the confidential information only to evaluate whether to enter into a business relationship. Evaluating whether to enter a relationship is a thing an entity does. Two companies size each other up, decide whether the fit is worth the risk, and each answers to its own shareholders for the judgment. That is not what a state does. A state decides whether to permit something inside its borders, on behalf of people who live there, using authority those people handed over and can take back at an election. The moment that decision is recast as an evaluation between counterparties, the public stops being the party the government answers to and becomes a third party to a private negotiation about its own parish. Louisiana did not walk into that room as a government. Louisiana walked in as a counterparty. The error is upstream of every term that follows. It is in the definition. II. The Law We Could Not Reach ForWatch what the definition costs. Section 13 settles which law would govern if the parties ever fell out. Not Louisiana’s. The agreement is governed by the laws of the State of New York. A distinction has to be drawn here carefully, because it is the one most people get wrong, and getting it wrong hands critics an easy way to dismiss everything else. There are two separate things a contract can do about law. It can say where a lawsuit must be filed, which lawyers call forum selection. Or it can say which state’s rules a judge applies once the suit is filed, which lawyers call choice of law. This agreement does the second, not the first. A dispute could likely still be heard in a Louisiana courthouse, in front of a Louisiana judge. That judge would simply be required to decide it under the law of New York. Step back and focus on this for a minute, because it is worse than being sent out of state. A Louisiana judge, trained in the civil law, sitting in a Louisiana parish, hearing a matter about Louisiana marsh and Louisiana public money, would have to set aside the tradition she was raised in and rule by the common law of somewhere else. Louisiana law would be present in the room and irrelevant to the outcome. And the state would need lawyers who practice New York contract law to argue it, with Section 13 awarding attorney fees to whichever side prevails and Section 12 entitling a disclosing party to seek an injunction without posting bond. Louisiana is the only state in the country whose private law rests on the civil law tradition rather than English common law. Our Civil Code descends from the French and Spanish codes and, behind them, from Rome. It is the thing we teach ninth graders as the one claim no other state can make, the reason our bar exam tests a body of law no other state’s tests, the piece of Louisiana that survived every flag that ever flew over this place. And in the one document where it might have protected us, we cannot reach for it. That is the part that should bother any Louisianian the most. The tradition we are proudest of is not available to defend us here. It does not get overruled and it does not get argued down. It simply does not apply, because the state agreed in advance that it would not. Nobody had to take it from us. It was handed over on a form the state did not write, in the last paragraph of the agreement, under a heading that reads General. Here a fair reader will push back, so let the objection be stated plainly: Louisiana businesses agree to other states’ law constantly. A Baton Rouge firm dealing with a New York bank may well accept New York law. Nobody writes an analysis about it. The difference is what each signer is permitted to give away. A private company waives its own rights, because they belong to it. If the trade goes badly, the people who made the judgment are the people who bear it. A governor waiving Louisiana’s law, Louisiana’s disclosure posture, and Louisiana’s freedom to speak is waiving things that are not his. They belong to a jurisdiction built over two centuries, and they extend to people who were never asked and mostly never told. Offices do not have consent to give. They hold things in trust. And the trust runs past this governor. Section 4 permits either party to terminate on thirty days’ notice, so a successor can end the relationship. What she cannot end are the obligations attached to information already received. Those run five years, and perpetually for anything designated a trade secret. She can walk away from the agreement and remain bound about its substance, and if she wanted to change a term rather than exit, Section 13 requires the company’s signature to modify anything. Louisiana limits a governor to two consecutive four-year terms. This document contains a clause with no end date at all, which means a perpetual obligation now outlasts the limit the people of this state placed on the office that accepted it. III. Shareholders Get a VoteIf Louisiana wanted the standing of a company, hold it to what companies actually do. Corporations do not let one executive bind the enterprise to a material long-term obligation in private. Shareholders vote — on directors, on mergers, on charter amendments, on the decisions that outlast whoever occupies the chair. The vote exists because the people who bear the consequences are entitled to authorize them in advance. Meta’s shareholders hold that right over Meta. The people of Richland Parish held nothing comparable over Richland Parish. Louisiana already owns that mechanism. This state votes on constitutional amendments, on millages, on bond issues, on local tax propositions. Asking the public first is not an exotic idea here. The objection writes itself: no state puts an individual site negotiation to a referendum, and a company that cannot legally be named cannot appear on a ballot. Fair enough. But the vote never needed to be about the company. It could have been about the terms, which are the part that binds people and outlives the deal. Does this parish accept a twenty-year exemption on this class of facility? Does it accept a waiver of the right to sue over noise and emissions? Does it accept a withdrawal of this volume from its aquifer? Not one of those questions requires a name. The secrecy is what made asking look impossible. The secrecy was a choice. What happened instead ran the sequence backward. Agreement first. Disclosure second. Acceptance expected third. The public became an audience receiving news of a decision rather than the authority the decision required. And when a project is announced with live music and catered food, the only question left for a parish is whether to be gracious about it. IV. Built to Conceal ItselfThe concealment is written into Section 1, and it is the reason none of this reached anyone until it was finished. Confidential information includes the existence of the agreement and the fact or nature of the discussions between the parties. He was not permitted to say he had signed it. Victoria Pagán, writing in Human Relations in 2022, traced modern NDAs back to the scold’s bridle, the iron headpiece fastened over the mouths of women in England and Scotland from the sixteenth century forward, and later over the mouths of enslaved people in America. Her argument is that the continuum runs from the overt and embodied to the covert and epistemic, and that the effects remain embodied either way. She was writing about workplace misconduct. The instrument does not change when the signer holds public office. Only the scale of who gets bridled changes. Section 10 extends the reach. Neither party may make any public announcement without the prior written approval of the other, and the clause defines public announcement to include oral statements to media, publications, websites, or any other public audience. Constituents are a public audience. Prior approval sounds procedural. But approval only means something where refusal is possible, and refusal is most certain for exactly the speech that matters most. Routine statements sail through. A statement that reflects badly on the company does not, because the permission is being requested from the company the statement is about. So the clause works as a filter that passes everything harmless and stops everything else, and it rarely has to say no out loud. The speech dies at the asking stage, when the person weighs the likely answer and decides not to bother. Nothing lands in any file. From the outside, it looks like nobody had anything to say. Consider who normally reaches for a public statement. Usually someone who has already raised the matter privately, proposed alternatives, asked whether it could be done differently, and waited through meeting after meeting while nothing changed. Going public is what remains after the other roads close. Section 10 puts a gate at the end of that last road and hands the key to the party that has already declined to move. Two boundaries keep this precise. Section 10 binds the parties to the agreement, meaning the Office of the Governor and the company, not every state employee, who are covered by separate agreements. And Section 5 preserves disclosure required by law or court order, so a subpoena still functions. What carries no exception is the ordinary act of a governor telling Louisiana what he knows. A public official who must obtain a private company’s written permission before speaking has not stopped being accountable. He is simply accountable to someone else. V. Helping Them Litigate Against YouSection 5 holds the answer to the question every honest reader has already asked. If this is real, how is it lawful? The clause does not bar disclosure required by law. It does something quieter. When a Louisiana citizen files a public records request, the state must notify the company as promptly as possible, use diligent efforts to limit the disclosure, seek confidential treatment or a protective order, and allow the company to participate in the proceeding. The public records law was never suspended. The state agreed in advance, in writing, to help the company litigate against the citizen who invokes it. And Section 6 provides that upon termination or written request, the recipient must cease using the confidential information, return or destroy all copies, notes, and extracts within seven business days, and confirm compliance in writing. That clause is written mutually. Either party may trigger it. Either party must comply. On the page it is perfectly balanced, and the balance is the problem, because the two parties are not holding the same kind of thing. What the company holds is corporate information; if Louisiana demanded its destruction, nothing in anyone’s life would change. What the Office of the Governor holds is material generated in the course of governing this state, sitting inside a system of retention and public access built so Louisiana can look back later and reconstruct what its own government did. Identical obligations, opposite consequences. The company loses documents. The public loses the ability to check. Enforcement runs one direction too. Section 6 asks for written confirmation, which is a certification rather than an audit. Nobody in Louisiana can inspect a server in Menlo Park. But the state’s compliance is verifiable by anyone, because a citizen can file a request and discover the file is gone. And records requests tend to be filed after something has gone wrong, which is often after a relationship has soured, which is exactly when a return-and-destroy clause becomes available to use. Whether any of that can lawfully reach Louisiana public records is not a question this analysis can answer. The clause says what it says. What it can compel is for a court to decide. Someone who studies this for a living did read the agreement. David Cuillier, who directs the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, said requiring the government to make diligent efforts to limit disclosures otherwise required under public records law turns public record laws on their head, and that the protective-order requirement effectively means hauling people who exercise their right to request public records into court, which he called chilling. The publicity clause, he said, muzzles government officials from talking while giving the company veto power over any announcement the agency might want to make. The clause protecting the agreement’s own existence he called more reprehensible still, because it seeks to hide the fact that it is hiding information from the public. His sharpest point is the one easiest to miss. Louisiana law already lets agencies withhold genuine trade secrets from records requests. That protection existed before this document and did not require it. What the agreement adds, Cuillier said, is an extension into speech and other forms of communication. The company did not need an NDA to protect its trade secrets. It needed one to reach the things the statute left alone. Not everyone who looked at it reached the same place, and the piece is better for saying so. Steven Procopio, who leads the nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council, said agreements like this one are not inherently improper, but that they should be the exception rather than the default, and that as their use spreads we risk denying citizens the information they need to understand government decisions. VI. Nearly Three Hundred Is an InstitutionOne document is an incident. Nearly three hundred is an institution. The Times-Picayune and the Advocate built a database of close to three hundred NDAs signed by Louisiana Economic Development between January 2024 and May 2026. The Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations counted at least fifty-four elected officials, seventy-seven percent of the state Senate, both chamber leaders, fourteen of one hundred five House members including the Speaker, the Lieutenant Governor, and at least one official from every parish in Louisiana. Mayors. Council members. A sheriff. A school board superintendent. Inside the governor’s office, at least one hundred twenty-one employees signed confidentiality agreements running from senior aides down to interns, binding them under threat of termination or suit even after they leave state service. Many of the agreements never name the company. Officials signed for Project Gondor. For Project Fast and Furious. Grown legislators bound themselves to secrecy about a thing identified by a code name from a movie. In the last four years of Governor John Bel Edwards, not one elected official signed an NDA with LED. Not one. Eric Holl, a top adviser to Edwards, read one of the current agreements at reporters’ request and called it basically a gag order, a tool of intimidation and control. Diane Vaughan called this normalization of deviance. Not conspiracy. Drift. Each signature is individually defensible, each one makes the next ordinary, and nobody in the chain experiences the moment the line was crossed, because by the time anyone looks up, there is no line left to point at. LED’s own defense proves the drift rather than refuting it: the agency says it has used NDAs under governors of both parties for decades. What changed is who gets bridled, and the answer is everyone. The employee agreements deserve their own accounting, because something is being replaced there and most people will not notice what. Discretion used to be an understanding. You did not repeat what was said in the room, out of respect for the work and the people doing it. Nobody had to sign anything, because it ran on judgment, and judgment carries an exception inside it that no contract does. Every decent employee has always known the difference between office business and something that should not be happening. Discretion never covered the second one. A signed agreement removes the judgment. It cannot distinguish a half-formed policy idea from misconduct, because it operates on categories rather than circumstances. And the emphasis tells on itself. When discretion is understood, nobody writes it down. Writing it down, extending it to interns and student workers, and attaching termination and litigation to it means somebody anticipated a moment when the ordinary understanding would not hold. Enforcement does not get built for behavior anyone expects to get for free. The man who held one of those jobs said as much. Eric Holl was deputy chief of staff for communications in the last two years of the Edwards administration, the same role Landry’s deputy chief of staff for communications holds now. He attributed the absence of confidentiality agreements in his time to a culture of trust rather than any policy decision, and said staff exercised discretion around sensitive matters, including economic development talks, without a signed agreement to enforce it. It was never a matter of being warned not to talk about something, he said. Everybody understood when something was sensitive. Reviewing the current agreement, Holl said the only reason to have people sign one is to create a culture of fear, and that no governor has reason to make his own staff afraid of him if he is serving the state honestly and treating them with basic decency. The reach survives the job. Employees can be fired or sued after leaving state government, and the language is broad enough to cover confirming a policy detail to a reporter or answering a lawmaker’s question without the governor’s sign-off. So a legislator asking a state employee a question runs into it, which makes this a matter of oversight rather than gossip. The person best positioned to explain what went wrong is the person most exposed for explaining it. Whether these agreements could actually be enforced against someone reporting wrongdoing is unsettled, and it does not need to be settled to work. A twenty-four-year-old staffer does not consult a First Amendment attorney. She reads the paper she signed, sees termination and litigation, and says nothing. Whether she would have won in court never comes up, because she will never be in court. The deterrent costs the state nothing to obtain and costs her everything to test. A Louisiana scholar has said more than that. Bruce Hamilton, who directs the First Amendment Clinic at Tulane Law School, reviewed the employee agreement and said its definition of confidential information carries such a breathtakingly overbroad scope that it becomes effectively meaningless, going far beyond protecting confidential information and instead stifling the speech of any employee compelled to sign it. He called several provisions unnecessarily punitive and potentially unenforceable, including the ban on divulging information indirectly and the clause committing employees to sign future agreements sight unseen. Because the restrictions never expire, he said, the agreement chills speech across a vast, ill-defined range of topics forever, which he sees as a severe infringement on free-speech rights that is likely unconstitutional. The administration’s stated reason is preventing staff from passing sensitive information to lobbyists and private parties outside the reach of standard ethics law, which it calls good governance. That concern is not ridiculous. But ethics rules already address it; ethics rules carry public enforcement and public exceptions, and a private contract enforced by the governor’s own office carries neither. Of the available remedies, the one selected is the one where the governor decides what counts as a violation. A government employee does not stop being one of the people because she took a job. She stands on both sides of the arrangement. Silencing her means silencing a member of the public about her own government. VII. Who Prospers MostMolotch and Logan named what all this procedure serves. The growth machine treats land as the object of coalition among officials, utilities, and developers, and it permits a man to regulate a market he is also standing in. So ask the question before the ribbon is cut. If this succeeds, who prospers most? In Richland Parish, an appraiser watched ground move from three to five thousand dollars an acre to more than fifty thousand. A state senator co-authored the enabling legislation, voted for the incentives without recusing himself, signed an NDA, and then he and his partners sold roughly three hundred acres near the site to Entergy at a price he has not disclosed. A congresswoman signed with Laidley LLC on June 29, 2024, bought Meta and Nvidia stock, and did not disclose the trades until more than a year later, well past the forty-five days the STOCK Act allows. Her office answered that. A spokesman said she had no role in directing any of her trades, that the NDA played no part because she was unaware the trades were happening, and that a third-party broker managed the portfolio. A political scientist quoted in the same reporting noted that the explanation is common among members of Congress and difficult to verify from outside. Take her at her word about the broker, and the sequence still stands on its own: the broker did not sign the nondisclosure agreement, and the broker did not stand at the podium six months later championing the project. She did both. And the machine does not stop at land and stock. In at least two Public Service Commission proceedings, motions supporting large industrial projects that commissioners adopted as their own were written by an Entergy Louisiana executive. Reporters obtained the native Word file of a motion tied to the August 2025 vote approving Entergy’s settlement to build generation and transmission for Meta’s data center, and the metadata named Larry Hand, Entergy’s vice president of regulatory and public affairs, as its author. A commissioner received it two days before the vote with a note saying the attached motion was there to consider and would be revised as he saw fit. That is the growth machine caught in a file’s properties. The utility whose rates the commission sets wrote the commission’s words, and the commission read them into the record as its own. Not a bribe. Not a crime anyone has charged. A document passing quietly from the regulated to the regulator, and coming back out as public policy. The exemptions run twenty years. The teacher bonuses ran one. Nobody has to allege a crime to notice that the people standing inside the information did well. Stephen Ross gave us the frame in 1973. The principal delegates to the agent and must be able to monitor the agent. An NDA does not corrupt the agent. It blindfolds the principal. Everything after that follows, and it follows predictably, which is the only useful thing a criminologist has to offer anybody. Nathan Jensen and colleagues tested it empirically in Business and Politics in 2021, studying the Texas Enterprise Fund: a company was more likely to fight a public records request when it had quietly renegotiated its award downward to escape penalties for missing its job-creation promises. Firms resist transparency precisely when disclosure would trigger backlash. Secrecy is not incidental to the deal. It is a term of the deal. VIII. What the Silence Purchased in Holly RidgeLook at what the silence purchased in Holly Ridge, a Richland Parish community of fewer than two thousand where nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. Vehicle crashes rose six hundred percent after construction began, according to state transportation data. The elementary school sits in the corner where Highways 80 and 183 meet, and a fourth grader told reporters the trucks shake the classroom so badly he loses track of what the teacher said. An eighteen-wheeler tried to beat a train across the tracks. A dump truck driver died. A helicopter landed at the school. Then the water. Christopher Dalbom, who directs the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, put it plainly: there is no incentive to use less, because they do not pay for it and it is neither regulated nor reported. Frank Tsai at LSU ran a seventeen-year simulation and found that at maximum permitted daily withdrawal, groundwater beneath parts of the facility could fall more than sixty-five feet, with land subsidence and saltwater intrusion following behind. Three point three billion dollars in tax exemptions, which the analyst at Good Jobs First calls a conservative estimate. Richland Parish is twenty-four percent poor overall and forty-six percent poor among its Black residents. What the parish saw first were teacher bonus checks and photographs of teacher bonus checks. The bonuses were real. The exemptions were larger, and the arithmetic was performed in a room the parish was not in. That is the American Distraction operating through economic development, and it requires nobody to lie. It requires only that the receipt stay private. Fairness demands the other side in its own words. Meta says it is investing more than two hundred million dollars in local infrastructure and points to an Entergy agreement it projects will deliver about two billion dollars in customer savings. LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois argues that bringing legislators and local officials in early under confidentiality lets the state be more forthcoming, not less. LED spokesperson Emma Wagner drew the line this way: the agreements are for confidentiality, which is not the same as secrecy. Hold that sentence up to the light. Confidentiality is a promise between parties who chose each other. Secrecy is what the people who did not choose experience. The word changes depending on which side of the agreement you are standing on, and the people of Holly Ridge were never offered a side. Sen. Royce Duplessis of New Orleans, who declined to sign, asked the only question that matters: how do we ask the tough questions if we are under these restrictions? IX. The Same Machine, Run AgainNow watch the same machine run again, and understand it as method rather than accident. On August 25 of this year, SpaceX announced a hundred-billion-dollar spaceport at Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, roughly one hundred twenty-five thousand acres of coastal marsh where about a hundred people live year-round. Consider how that ground came free. Vermilion Parish and the state had sued ExxonMobil for coastal damages, one of dozens of suits alleging that oil and gas companies polluted the marshes and drove Louisiana’s land loss. A federal judge dismissed the case following a settlement days before the announcement. The terms were not made public. Exxon turns over land it has held since the 1950s, and SpaceX takes control of roughly a hundred thirty thousand acres by sale, long-term lease, or some other arrangement. Land damaged by one corporation, litigated over for more than a decade by the people who live beside it, settled on terms nobody outside the room has seen, and handed to a second corporation that arrives holding statutory immunity from suits over noise, emissions, and environmental disturbance. The remedy for the last extraction became the runway for the next one. The parish that brought the case will not be told what it received. And the Legislature had finished its work months before anyone would say the company’s name aloud. Act 190 created a twenty-year sales tax rebate for large aerospace facilities. Act 343 handed aerospace entities a special early-dismissal procedure, froze discovery while the motion sat, and awarded attorney fees to the prevailing party. Another act pulled aerospace records out from under the public records law. Another designated the facilities critical infrastructure. And an immunity provision stripped residents of the right to sue over noise, visual, and environmental disturbance, applying only to companies holding at least twenty thousand contiguous acres. Laws written for a company nobody would name, passed by legislators who were not permitted to say why. Representative Jacob Landry, whose district borders the site, signed an LED nondisclosure agreement in February. Senator Bob Hensgens, whose district contains Pecan Island itself, was asked in April and declined on transparency grounds. He believes that refusal is precisely why he was kept in the dark. There is the cost, named and priced. The NDA is not only a muzzle. It is the admission ticket. Refuse it, and you are removed from the room where your own constituents’ future is settled. A representative who will not be silenced is a representative who will not be informed. The community’s ability to object was legislated away before the community was told there was anything to object to. X. The State Disarmed ItselfEverything to this point could be read as criticism of one administration. The next part cannot, because the state has disarmed itself, and the person who will suffer most is whoever holds the office when something finally goes wrong. Follow it. A withdrawal exceeds what was represented. A commitment does not materialize. Rates move in a way nobody was warned about. The state’s natural response is to say so publicly, because telling the people the truth is the one power a government always holds and never has to request. That is the exact power Section 10 traded away. Before Louisiana can characterize the company’s conduct, Louisiana needs the company’s written approval. No company approves a statement about its own failure. Reputation is the asset, and refusing costs them nothing. So the state’s remaining remedy is litigation, under New York law, with counsel who practice it, against a party that may seek an injunction without posting bond, with attorney fees running to whoever prevails. That is the expensive road. The cheap road, the one every government has by default, was closed by contract. The trap has a second jaw. Louisiana signed as a party. The moment the state says the company behaved badly, the company can hold up the agreement and ask why Louisiana entered it, extended it, wrote statutes around it, and celebrated it with catering. A regulator can say a company failed. A partner saying it has to explain the partnership first. Louisiana did not merely accept the classification of an entity. It accepted a weaker position than any competent entity would have taken, because a company negotiating this would have had lawyers pricing the downside. Louisiana had a form last revised in 2017. XI. The Constitution Will Not Save UsMany readers will have reached this point certain that something here violates the First Amendment. The instinct is understandable, and it deserves a straight answer, because the answer is more troubling than the instinct. The First Amendment protects speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition. What it does not do is guarantee access to what the government knows. In Houchins v. KQED in 1978, the Supreme Court held that neither the First nor the Fourteenth Amendment provides a right of access to government information or sources of information within the government’s control. Chief Justice Burger put it about as plainly as it can be put: the Constitution is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act. The employee side is narrower still. In Garcetti v. Ceballos in 2006, the Court held that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, they are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline. Richard Ceballos was a prosecutor who reported a suspicious search warrant affidavit. He lost. A state employee who learns something troubling on the job and reports it through official channels holds less constitutional protection than a stranger who learned the same thing on the street. So the right to public records in Louisiana is not a constitutional inheritance. It is a grant, written by a legislature, and a legislature can carve pieces out of what it wrote. It just did, for aerospace. That is the real lesson, and it should alarm people more than a constitutional violation would. Nobody had to break a rule. The constitutional floor sits far lower than most citizens assume, which is exactly why the statutory protections carry the entire weight, and exactly why removing them by contract and by carve-out works so efficiently. No court is waiting to fix this on its own motion. That is not the last word, and Hamilton’s judgment above is the reason. Garcetti governs what an employee says in the course of doing the job. It does not settle whether an agreement this broad, binding a former intern to silence for life, survives a challenge. Nobody has brought one. One question remains genuinely open, and it will not be settled here. Louisiana’s own constitution speaks to public records, and a state constitution can protect more than the federal one does. Whether these agreements conflict with that provision is a determination for an attorney who practices Louisiana constitutional and public records law. It is not a determination a criminologist can make, and this analysis will not pretend otherwise. XII. The ReckoningScripture does not treat this as a modern problem, and it does not aim its judgment at thieves in the night. Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people. Isaiah wrote that against legislators. Men who wrote it down. Men who had the votes. Men who made the thing lawful first, and who could stand before any tribunal afterward and say, correctly, that they had broken nothing. Act 343 is a decree that writes grievousness and prescribes it. Isaiah understood that an act can be perfectly legal and still be an offense, because the law was drafted by the same hand that needed the offense permitted. Micah names the appetite exactly. They covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away. Fields. Marsh and farmland and three hundred acres near a data center. And Habakkuk answers the man who believes a confidentiality clause is a wall that will hold. For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it. The stone testifies. The beam agrees with the stone. Section 6 can order every copy destroyed within seven business days and certified in writing, and the ground will still remember what was built on it. Holly Ridge Elementary knows what the trucks did. The aquifer keeps its own record. There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. It took two years for that document to surface. It surfaced. XIII. Even the Ones Who SignedLouisiana being last is not news. We have been last on so many lists for so long that the ranking has stopped stinging. But this is not a case of falling behind, and the distinction matters. Falling behind is failing to act. Louisiana acted. This state wrote the immunity statute, wrote the records exemption, fast-tracked the permitting, and signed nearly three hundred agreements in twenty-eight months. On August 18, Pennsylvania’s governor signed an executive order barring nondisclosure agreements on data center projects outright, pulling those projects from fast-track permitting and requiring local approval first. Seven days later, Louisiana announced the largest such deal in its history. We are not trailing the country on this. We are out in front of it, headed the other way. Bills to ban these agreements have been filed in Michigan, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Ohio, and earlier efforts cleared a chamber in New York and Michigan on bipartisan votes. David Cuillier, who directs the Brechner Freedom of Information Project, told NPR this week that Louisiana ranks among the more secretive states in the country. And note how Pennsylvania did it. Not by statute. Shapiro’s standards had been pitched as voluntary and failed to win the state Senate, so he used executive authority instead. Which means the first half of what Louisiana needs requires no bill, no session, and no vote. A governor can bar his own agencies from signing these tomorrow morning. Two honest caveats travel with that: an executive order can be rescinded by the next governor, and agreements already signed would stand. It stops the next one. It does not undo this one. Some of our own have already moved. Senators Bill Wheat, Valarie Hodges, and Bob Hensgens, all Republicans, asked LED to terminate their agreements. Representative Joy Walters of Shreveport asked as well, after her constituents came to her about an Amazon data center. Hodges explained herself in one sentence: what she heard back from the voters was that they prefer transparency, so she withdrew her consent. Wheat said he understands protecting a company’s private information, and does not think it should be used as a method of not informing the people who will be affected. They were not compelled to do that. They chose it, and the choosing is the point. So the demand is not complicated, and it is not partisan. Bar any public official in Louisiana from signing a nondisclosure agreement concerning public land, public money, public water, or public power. Void the clauses obligating the state to work against its own citizens’ records requests, and the clauses purporting to order the destruction of state-held material. Repeal the aerospace records exemption. End the practice of binding legislators to code names. And require, before the incentive vote rather than after it, that the parish carrying the project be told what it is carrying. We were handed a form last revised in 2017 and told it was the price of the future. Nobody at Pecan Island was asked what the future was worth. Let government get back to the business of governing. Let business get on with the business of doing business. The trouble started when one agreed to be the other. XIV. ReferencesThe document itself. The nondisclosure agreement discussed throughout this analysis can be read in full at the first link below. It is placed at the top of these references deliberately, so that nothing in this analysis has to be taken on faith. The agreement and the reporting on it
Meta, Richland Parish, and the cost on the ground
SpaceX, Vermilion Parish, and the aerospace statutes
The national pattern
Peer-reviewed scholarship
Demographic data
Pattern Hunters LLC · patternhunters.com · Clarity. Advocacy. Power. |
Pattern Hunters, LLC
Pattern Hunters publishes long-form analyses of structural failure points in criminology, public policy, and community accountability. Subscribe to receive the work in your inbox, with companion mobilization pieces alongside the diagnostic.
On July 20, 2026, ESPN removed Ryan Clark from NFL Live during a commercial break. He did not come back for the final segment. The network called it a restructuring. He calls it a firing, not a layoff. What follows is not a sports media story. It is nineteen sections on what it costs a Black American to be excellent and to be himself in the same building — and who has always been asked to choose. Pattern Hunters | Clarity. Advocacy. Power. I. The Six Questions Who. Ryan Terry Clark, forty-six...
I. The Lead: Horn Island, July 4, 2026 Nolan Xavier Wells was 18 years old. He was a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College. He was supposed to report to training camp on Monday. He had his whole life in front of him. And on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — July 4, 2026 — he went to Horn Island, a remote barrier island ten miles off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, with a group of friends. His friends came back. Nolan Wells did not. Two days later, a...
WHO IS PAYING THE PRICE? Deliberate Indifference, Institutional Collapse, and the Death of Antonio Dukes at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center By Andrea Hagan, Criminologist & Founder, Pattern Hunters LLC June 16, 2026 | patternhunters.com A COMPANION POLICY BRIEF IS AVAILABLE BY REQUEST — andrea@patternhunters.com Antonio Dukes did not have to die on Christmas Eve 2025. He was 38 years old. He died inside Elayn Hunt Correctional Center from a suspected fentanyl overdose (WAFB I-Team, December...