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.
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 writ