The Invisible Trillion · Who Decides

The Civics Version, and Where It Breaks

The textbook account is clean. In a democracy with a market economy, companies make commercial decisions under executives accountable to shareholders; governments make the rules under officials accountable to voters; courts settle disputes; the press informs the public; the public votes; the cycle turns. Messy in detail, coherent in shape.

What the account leaves out is that, for the decisions that matter most in this industry, the substantive choices are made before any of those public processes begin — and the public processes mostly ratify what’s already settled. The clearest way to see it is to ask, for any given decision, a simple pair of questions: who was in the room when it was actually made, and who only found out afterward?

The answers rhyme across every mechanism, so it’s worth walking the main ones.

The Secrecy

The first room is the one sealed by a non-disclosure agreement, and it’s the single most consequential decision-making instrument in the industry. The earlier chapter on legal tactics described how NDAs work in data center siting; the thing to see here is what signing one does to a decision-maker.

When a developer approaches a town, a utility, an agency, or a landowner, the first document the lawyers produce is an NDA, and it binds the other party not to reveal who the developer is, what’s proposed, or — often — that any discussion is happening at all. A municipal official who signs it can still vote on the eventual project. What the official can no longer do, until the formal announcement, is tell constituents what’s being weighed, or ask whether they’d support it, or even confirm that talks are underway. By the time the gag lifts, the substantive terms are settled and the window for organizing has closed.

That is the whole mechanism. The decisions get made in rooms the NDA defines, with the participants it limits, on the timeline it sets; the council vote and the public-comment period come afterward, to bless what’s already been decided. None of it is illegal — each NDA is a standard contract any competent lawyer would draft. It becomes consequential only when it’s run routinely, by well-resourced parties against under-resourced ones, on decisions with large public stakes. When five elected officials across five counties told NBC News in 2025 that the agreements they’d signed barred them from informing their own constituents, they weren’t failing their duty. They were the mechanism working exactly as designed — and NBC found that design in the majority of the proposals it reviewed across fourteen states.

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