This story was produced in partnership with the Springboard Project at Type Investigations.
In November last year, Abigail Whittington heard there might be a data center coming to her hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.
She had concerns about how it might impact her community. The massive warehouse-like facilities that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and streaming services are notorious for their appetite for electricity and water, and for bringing noise, pollution, and heavy construction into the neighborhoods where they're built.
She wanted to know more. She tried asking elected officials, including her mayor and Bossier and Caddo Parish state senators and representatives. None of the officials she asked gave her an answer.
Many of them had signed nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) — legal contracts that prohibited them from disclosing confidential information.
On Feb. 23, she found out what they were hiding. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry announced Amazon is investing $12 billion in artificial intelligence data centers with multiple campuses in Shreveport and Bossier Parish. Landry called the project the “largest investment in the history of Northwest Louisiana.”
Prior to the Amazon announcement, the identity of the company and the nature of the development were concealed from the public.
“I think it's bullshit that any elected official can sign an NDA about a project that is coming to the people's city,” Whittington said. “And I think that all of our elected officials need to remember that they work for us and we voted them in.”
Elected officials signing NDAs is a new and emerging practice in Louisiana under the Landry administration.
Records obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations from Louisiana Economic Development (LED) — the state agency focused on business growth — show at least 50 public officials have signed an NDA since Landry took office. Not a single elected official signed an NDA with LED in the last four years of former Governor John Bel Edwards.
At least one official for every single parish in the state has signed an agreement, including state representatives, state senators and Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser, as well as local officials like mayors, city councilmembers, a sheriff, and a school board superintendent.
Economic development officials say the NDAs are necessary in order to attract businesses to Louisiana. Critics argue the agreements aren’t needed for economic development and only benefit corporate interests at the expense of the local communities where developments involving public money are planned without public knowledge.
Click on your parish to see who signed an NDA
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‘Maybe not a great thing’
The NDAs signed with LED use identical, broad language. They define “Confidential Information” expansively to include technical, financial, or business information shared about a prospective company. And they bar the official disclosing any information about the project.
LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois described the practice of elected officials signing NDAs with the agency as a “very intentional decision” under the Landry administration.
The NDA process in Louisiana operates on two tracks that can run simultaneously. LED uses its own standardized agreements to bring elected officials and state agencies into early-stage negotiations. But for some projects, companies often bring their own agreements drafted by their own legal teams.
Bourgeois confirmed Meta, for instance, required everyone involved in its Hyperion data center negotiations to sign a Meta-specific NDA before they could participate. LED's agreements, she said, cover the broad universe of project discussions, while company-specific ones govern the more sensitive details.
The NDAs are “fundamental” to economic development work, Bourgeois said, and without them, LED wouldn’t be able to successfully negotiate with businesses.
She gave several reasons why the agreements are necessary: a publicly traded company may not be able to disclose project plans to its shareholders before a formal announcement; a company scouting multiple states doesn't want Louisiana to know what, for example, Mississippi is offering, or vice versa; and a business may not want competitors to know it's eyeing a particular region at all.
Keeping those details locked down, she argued, is what allows Louisiana to stay competitive — and what makes the Landry administration's "whole of government approach" possible, bringing more officials into negotiations earlier without risking a leak that could cost the state the deal entirely.
“The irony is that we use NDAs not to be more cloaked,” Bourgeois told the Gulf States Newsroom and Type. “We use NDAs to be more forthcoming.”
But some officials have had a different experience. Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux, who told the Gulf States Newsroom and Type that he signed an NDA for the first time in his three-year tenure at the request of a company with a “major project”, said that he has previously participated in business discussions as mayor without having to sign NDAs. He would not identify the nature of the project or the company behind the agreement.
The Gulf States Newsroom made multiple attempts to ask all 50 officials who signed an NDA with LED about why they did so and whether they had concerns about the practice. Only two besides Arceneaux answered our questions.
State Rep. Joseph Orgeron, a Republican from Golden Meadow, said the NDA he signed — tied to the Hyundai steel mill in Ascension Parish — was the only one he’d ever signed as an elected official. He said he doesn’t regret it, but that it’s “maybe not a great thing” if “every courting of LED for a business requires NDAs.”
Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser said he signed one to participate in discussions about a potential golf tournament. That project turned out to be the LIV Golf tournament — a league backed by a Saudi Arabian wealth fund worth billions. Following those discussions, Nungesser said that at Landry’s request, the state legislature allocated $7 million to fund hosting the event.
Nungesser wrote that he’s “always believed in full disclosure to the public of any and all dealings with government unless it needs to be kept quiet when competing against another state or entity.”
Not everyone in Baton Rouge agrees. State Rep. Danny McCormick, a Republican who represents rural Caddo Parish — where the Amazon data center will be built — told the Gulf States Newsroom the NDAs exist for a simpler reason.
"They don't want the little people to know what they're doing until after they've done it," he said.
McCormick said even he didn’t know about the Amazon project before the announcement. He said he wasn’t asked to sign an NDA, likely "because they know my feelings on it," and he didn’t know other state senators and representatives in Caddo and neighboring Bossier Parish had signed them.
Under the agreements, officials are barred from disclosing not just the details of a project, but also the name of the company involved. Each project is assigned a code name, like “Project Gondor” or “Project Fast and Furious.” Bourgeois said LED and officials who sign the NDAs can “uncloak” the information “when the time is appropriate.”
Additionally, some state legislators — and Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser — signed “general NDAs” that are “indefinite” and cover any LED project discussions. Many of these legislators sit on committees where legislation that could benefit potential projects is discussed. Bourgeois said that if they were asked about LED developments at the legislature, they would not be able to discuss them.
When asked about cloaked projects by name, including “Project Lighthouse” and “Project Starfire,” Bourgeois said she could not answer, even when she knew the answer, because of NDAs.
Did my elected official sign an NDA?
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‘A muzzle on an elected official’
Critics say the NDAs do the opposite of what Bourgeois claims — not bringing more stakeholders to the table, but locking the public out of decisions that directly affect their lives.
“The actual goal is to prevent public input into what are often very contentious negotiations, to try and put off revealing to the public specific details about the project that they might not like until as late in the process as possible,” said Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project.
Louisiana is far from alone, Garofalo said. He’s tracked the practice for years, tracing the aggressive use of NDAs in economic development to Amazon's 2018 competition for a second headquarters, when the company required government officials in competing jurisdictions to sign one.
“The offers got into the billions of dollars because nobody knew what anybody else in other jurisdictions were doing,” Garofalo said.
Tech companies, he said, have normalized it across the industry ever since.
Garofalo also rejected the state’s argument that NDAs promote competition. By preventing officials from sharing what a company has offered in other states and localities, he said NDAs actually remove the ability to negotiate for a better deal, handing more leverage to the corporation and enabling a race to the bottom among competing jurisdictions.
The practice has faced backlash. Other states have taken steps to prevent public officials from signing NDAs. Last year, the Michigan house passed a bill that would prevent legislators from signing NDAs. California banned the practice.
Bruce Hamilton, director of the First Amendment Clinic at Tulane Law School, raised deeper concerns about what the practice means for democratic governance. He described the NDAs as “weaponizing a contract that puts a muzzle on an elected official.”
“Government business is the public’s business,” Hamilton said. “When NDAs are used in government to silence public officials or make the public’s business less transparent, everyone in Louisiana suffers.”
Large industrial projects in Louisiana do pass through several public-facing processes before they're final. Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality permits for major facilities require a public comment period, and the Louisiana Public Service Commission — whose members are elected — must approve energy service agreements before a large, power-hungry project can be served by the grid.
But in December 2025, the Public Service Commission voted 4-1 to adopt a new "lightning speed" rule that accelerates the timeline for approving power plants tied to industrial developments like data centers. That came on top of Governor Landry's September 2025 similarly named “Project Lightning Speed” executive order, directing state agencies to fast-track permitting broadly.
Hamilton said the combined effect of NDAs and accelerated permitting amounts to a systematic removal of public participation from the process.
“I think can only be a bad thing, ultimately, for local communities,” he said.
‘Too late for any sort of democratic involvement’
In response to questions about what recourse constituents have when their elected officials can’t answer direct questions because of NDAs, Bourgeois said no one should expect their representatives to disclose every detail of ongoing negotiations, and argued that communities who don’t want certain developments should simply zone against them in advance.
“If the concern is that a community doesn’t want a data center,” Bourgeois said, “then put those policies in place from the beginning, not when a project comes.”
Putting the burden on community members to anticipate developments in their area is simply unrealistic, critics say.
Hamilton said there is a meaningful difference between a constituent demanding a daily accounting of every negotiation and a constituent asking a direct question about a specific project that will be built in their neighborhood. The latter, he argued, is not an unreasonable expectation — it’s the minimum baseline of representative government.
“The fact that these NDAs are muzzling elected representatives means they can’t communicate at all,” Hamilton said. “So it's actually not that extreme as she portrayed it as residents needing day-to-day accounting, but the fact that we need more general feedback and input in the business of government.”
The zoning argument has its own problems. Hamilton noted that communities cannot reasonably be expected to proactively regulate against every type of development that doesn’t yet exist in their area — particularly when new industries, like large-scale AI data centers, emerge faster than local governments can respond.
Garofalo put it more bluntly. The zoning argument misses a more fundamental point: by the time a project is publicly announced, there is nothing left to negotiate. The deal is done.
“You are explicitly preventing that democratic feedback by signing one of these NDAs,” he said.
The practical consequence of that dynamic played out in Shreveport. Residents like Whittington couldn’t get answers from their elected officials about what was coming because they had signed NDAs.
And by the time Amazon’s $12 billion project was announced, the question of whether or not Shreveport wanted it had already been answered for them.
Sophia Anderson contributed data visualization for this investigation. This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
