This story was produced in partnership with the Springboard Project at Type Investigations.
Like any executive, whenever Gov. Jeff Landry makes a decision, reviews legislation, weighs a policy proposal, or schedules a meeting with a company his administration hopes to convince to set up shop in Louisiana, there’s a team of people behind him.
Chiefs of staff advise and manage the flow of information. Press secretaries control the message. Lawyers navigate legal questions. Regional directors implement policies across the state. Interns and student workers fill in around the edges, cutting their teeth on government work.
But in an apparent break from the previous administration in Louisiana, at least 121 of Landry’s employees — from the most senior aides to the most junior temps — have signed a strict confidentiality agreement with the governor’s office binding them to secrecy about what they learn on the job, records obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations show.
Top aides, including former Chief of Staff Kyle Ruckert, Executive Counsel Angelique Freel, and deputy chief of staff for communications Kate Kelly all signed, along with state agency heads, regional directors, press secretaries, and members of the first lady’s administration. Even a deputy executive counsel responsible for the governor’s office’s public records requests who provided the records for this story signed one.
Several other senior officials who are no longer working at the governor’s office also signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), including Millard Mule, Landry’s former policy director, who left the administration in January 2026 to start a private consulting firm.
One of Mule’s lobbying clients is Meta, the tech company developing a $50 billion data center campus in Richland Parish. Landry personally signed an NDA with the company’s data center subsidiary in April 2024, according to records obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations.
Records show Landry personally executed a “Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement” in April 2024 with Laidley LLC, the data center subsidiary of Meta Platforms.
Employees can be fired or sued — even after leaving state government — for violating the governor’s office NDAs. The documents’ broad language could encompass discussing internal deliberations with a former colleague, confirming a policy detail to a reporter, or answering a lawmaker’s question without the governor’s sign off.
Legal experts and former senior aides of the governor’s office warn that the NDAs could create a culture of fear and chill employees’ constitutionally protected speech.
The document amounts to “basically a gag order,” said Eric Holl, a top adviser to former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards who reviewed an agreement at the request of the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations.
“I don’t see this being used as anything other than a tool of intimidation and control.”
The use of confidentiality agreements in Landry’s office is the latest example of an expanding secrecy apparatus taking hold across Louisiana under his administration. Since taking office in January 2024, Landry has moved on multiple fronts to limit public scrutiny of his administration.
He signed a law allowing officials to ignore public records requests without any consequences. His senior aides — including several who signed the governor’s office NDAs — had their home addresses scrubbed from financial disclosure forms required by state law. And NDAs with elected officials are now standard procedure for Louisiana Economic Development (LED), the state agency tasked with attracting businesses to the state, as the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations revealed in March.
Landry’s office did not respond to direct questions about the agreements. In a statement, Freel, Landry’s executive counsel described the NDAs as a good governance effort to prevent employees from sharing sensitive information with lobbyists or other private parties not covered by the state’s ethics laws.
The confidentiality agreement “protects both the integrity of the Governor’s decision making, as well as public trust,” Freel wrote. The agreements are also meant to keep employees from releasing any records the office is not strictly required to make available under the state’s public records law.
“Voluntary disclosure of protected information by an individual employee can waive an otherwise-valid exemption or privilege,” Freel added, and requiring employees to go through authorized channels ensures that the office’s records custodian “decides what is released and what is properly withheld.”
‘A culture of fear’
The identical agreements, titled “Employee Confidentiality Agreement — Office of the Governor,” define “Confidential Information” as “information of any nature whatsoever” acquired through employment — explicitly including the governor’s deliberative process; legislative privilege; attorney-client privilege; and legal, administrative, security, financial and personnel matters.
Employees who sign agree not to disclose the information “either directly or indirectly” without the governor’s prior written consent, and commit to signing additional, unspecified agreements whenever the governor’s office requests them. The restrictions survive their departure from state government indefinitely — binding a former intern to the same silence as a former chief of staff, for the rest of their lives.
Bruce Hamilton, director of the First Amendment Clinic at Tulane Law School, reviewed the agreement and said its definition of confidential information has such a “breathtakingly overbroad scope” it becomes effectively meaningless.
“I’d say it goes far beyond protecting ‘confidential information’ and instead stifles and chills the speech of any employee compelled to sign it,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton described several of the NDA’s other provisions as unnecessarily punitive and potentially legally unenforceable, including the prohibition on “indirectly” divulging information and the clause committing employees to sign future agreements. The indefinite nature of the NDA’s restrictions is also problematic, he said.
“It effectively chills speech around a vast, ill-defined area — an unlimited group of topics and information — forever,” he said. “I see that as a severe infringement on free-speech rights that is likely unconstitutional.”
Three former senior officials who served under Edwards, whose administration directly preceded Landry’s, told the Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations that they didn’t see the practice being used during Edwards’ eight years in office. (The Louisiana State Archives, which maintains records from prior administrations, was unable to complete a search of the Edwards archive in time for publication.)
“I never saw or heard of anyone sign a non-disclosure agreement when I was working for Governor Edwards,” said Mark Cooper, who served as chief of staff for most of Edwards’ two terms. While Cooper said he wasn’t involved in every legal decision made by the office, he wasn’t aware of employees being required to sign confidentiality agreements.
Matthew Block, Edwards’ executive counsel until 2022, similarly said he never signed an NDA and wasn’t aware of anyone else in the governor’s office doing so.
Holl, who was deputy chief of staff over communications for the last two years of the Edwards administration, attributed the absence of confidentiality agreements during his tenure to a “culture of trust” within the office rather than any policy decision. Staff exercised discretion around sensitive topics, he said, including ongoing legislative negotiations and economic development talks, without needing a signed agreement to enforce it.
“It was never, ‘You better not be out there talking about X, Y and Z, or I’m going to have your ass,'” he said. “It was always, everybody understood when something was sensitive.”
Holl reviewed an agreement signed by Kate Kelly, whose role as Landry’s deputy chief of staff for communications is the same job he held under Edwards. He highlighted language requiring the governor to personally authorize, in writing, any disclosure of information “acquired or known” by working in the governor’s office. That wording, he said, covers “everything.”
“It would have been impossible for me to do my job and adhere to an agreement like this,” Holl said.
Holl said he has no direct knowledge of how Landry’s office currently operates and can’t speak to the administration’s motives for requiring the agreements. But he questions why any governor’s office would need one at all.
“The only reason to have folks sign an agreement like this is to create a culture of fear,” Holl said. “And you don’t have any reason to make your own staff afraid of you if you’re serving the state honestly and legally and treating your staff with basic decency.”
The governor’s directive
The governor’s office is now the second state agency under Landry known to routinely require NDAs.
The Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations first reported that at least 50 elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with LED, from the time Landry took office until December 2025.
As of June, that tally has risen to at least 54 elected officials, according to additional agreements obtained from LED. The leaders of both legislative chambers have signed NDAs, along with 77% of the entire Louisiana Senate and 13% of the Louisiana House, according to a Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations analysis of the records.
State officials who defend LED’s NDA’s say they allow lawmakers to review sensitive negotiations before they become public. And the scope of those agreements are often narrower than the ones issued by the governor’s office.
LED has used NDAs under governors of both parties for decades, the agency’s spokesperson Emma Wagner wrote in a statement. Landry, however, has expanded their use to bring legislators, local officials, and other state agencies into project discussions earlier in the process.
LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois told the Gulf States Newsroom that LED uses a mix of “general” and project-specific NDAs. Some are tied to a single deal and expire at announcement. Others are broader, “more blanketed” agreements covering any LED project a lawmaker might be involved in, which can last their entire term in office.
When a company like Meta prefers its own legal terms, Bourgeois added, it may use its own NDAs. And some officials sign confidentiality agreements with multiple entities.
Records show that Elizabeth Crochet, Landry’s press secretary, signed an NDA with the governor’s office as well as a second one with Meta, which is building its largest-ever data center in Louisiana. The Meta agreement bars Crochet from “confirming or commenting on any information, public or otherwise, concerning Meta or its business” without the company’s prior written permission.
Ryan Daniels, public affairs manager at Meta, wrote in a statement that confidentiality agreements are a standard part of competitive site selection and are intended to prevent speculation about projects that may never materialize.
Daniels said the company does not prohibit public officials from disclosing where a data center will be located or discussing its environmental impacts once projects advance, and that it works closely with state and local officials on permits, tax agreements, and other approvals.
But according to the documents’ language, by signing both agreements, Crochet would need written approval from both Landry himself and Meta, a trillion-dollar private tech company, in order to discuss anything related to the company, including its ongoing data center project.
According to the company’s agreement, Crochet, who did not respond to questions for this story, can’t even confirm she signed an NDA with Meta — or that discussions were happening at all.
Landry entered into a confidentiality agreement of his own. Partially redacted records show the governor personally signed a mutual NDA, effective April 23, 2024, on behalf of the “Office of the Governor” with an LLC. LED released the document in response to a request for records involving Meta or Laidley LLC, Meta’s data center subsidiary.
The mutual agreement binds both sides: It bars either party from making “any public announcement or other disclosures” related to the agreement or their discussions — including to reporters, blogs, trade organizations, or “any other public audience” — without the other’s prior written approval.
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.
