As private corporations gain unprecedented control over public data, Americans are losing access to the information that underpins democracy and critical aspects of their lives. D. Victoria Baranetsky argues that this rise of secrecy—driven by the rising value of data and government privatization—demands not just transparency, but a bold commitment to anti-secrecy as essential to democratic governance.
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This year, the United States—and the world—will generate more data than ever before. Yet, Americans are facing a crisis of access to it. As federal agencies continue to outsource core functions at record levels, data about our government’s operations and our lives are hidden from public view. This includes information as basic as facts about our drinking water, our land, and our resources. Property records, for example, which are historically one of the most open types of information in the American legal system, are secret. Source code calculating criminals’ recidivism is secret. Even data about our taxes from the Internal Revenue Service are all concealed. New tools of secrecy have been developed and advocated by the government and its contractors to hide this wealth of information. This withholding of information does not even capture the swaths of data that the Trump administration has started to outright delete, in part for corporate benefit, including “disappearing” historical data, removing the Census’ diversity data, and failing to collect crucial climate data.
The driving force behind this secrecy is the soaring value of data. Over the past decade, data has become not just the new oil, but the new plutonium – immensely valuable and even more dangerous when concentrated in private hands. In 2013, McKinsey & Company declared Big Data “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.” A decade later, the data economy is estimated to be worth $348 billion. As law professor Julie Cohen writes in Between Truth and Power, building on political economist Karl Polanyi’s ideas, data now represents the “fourth and final enclosure of property”—the last chapter in a long history of privatizing the commons. Corporations like SpaceX, Palantir, Amazon, and Lockheed Martin are all vying for dominance in this economy, gaining access by securing government contracts—and the datasets that come with them. Meanwhile, the government facilitates these deals in the name of efficiency and small government. This growing alliance between a data-sharing state and power-hungry tech giants fosters corruption, abuse, and an alarming erosion of democratic accountability.
This deepening merger between public and private spheres was on full display at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, when industry leaders from tech, automotive, banking, healthcare, and fossil fuel sectors gathered to curry favor with the incoming administration. Many of these companies, soon to fall under federal oversight, made record-breaking donations to the event—their generosity coinciding with their ambition for lucrative federal contracts. For example, the Department of Defense awarded Palantir a $217.8 million contract shortly after CEO Alexander Karp donated $1 million to the inauguration committee. Others attendees, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have competed aggressively for government contracts that often represent significant portions of their financial portfolios. When Amazon lost a Pentagon contract during the first Trump Administration, it was a reportedly 10 million dollar blow that reshaped Bezos’ view of Trump and his editorial direction at the Washington Post.
The pattern is clear: as agency operations are increasingly outsourced in the name of government efficiency, corporations monopolize the data these services generate. This grants contractors vast financial and political power as the sole holders of critical public knowledge—power than depends entirely on keeping the data secret. The political economy of this arrangement deposits the costs of secrecy on the backs of Americans.
As general counsel at The Center for Investigative Reporting, I have witnessed firsthand the rise of this opacity. Our organization has repeatedly sued the government to access information, sent inquiries for comment, and requested transparency, only to be met with silence, redactions, and legal arguments for withholding public information. After more than a decade of observing, documenting, and litigating against this trend, I have seen two forces driving this crisis: the skyrocketing value of data and the consolidation of corporate and governmental control. This article explores these two ideas and concludes that, while a general commitment to transparency is an imperfect solution, a distinct anti-secrecy value should be reinstated.
Data obsession breeds secrecy
As data’s value has grown, so have the tools used to obscure it. As sociologist Brooke Harrington writes in Offshore Stealth Wealth, “Wealth and secrecy go hand in hand… [Secrecy makes] it possible for some corporations…to escape constraints the rest of us take for granted.” More than just a legal shield, secrecy enhances profit in multiple ways. Data kept private becomes a monetizable commodity—its exclusivity driving up its worth. Conversely, the right of the owner to “exclude competitors from using it” become more powerful as secrecy deepens.
Multiple new mechanisms have emerged to enforce data secrecy and its resulting profits. One commonly used tool is the law of trade secrecy. As I and other academics like Sonia Katyal, Chris Morten, Hannah Bloch-Wheba have written, there has been a recent trend to expand the legal definition of trade secrecy to benefit corporate wealth. In my own litigation practice, I have seen reporters at CIR investigating issues related to health and the environment who have been stonewalled by aggressive claims of “trade secrecy.” We have had to argue in case after case that public information like work-injury reports, diversity reports, and environmental hazards are not proprietary trade secrets.
Another tool corporations have increasingly exploited is a special exemption under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that allows them to bypass the public records law. Although FOIA presumes openness, its third exemption permits withholding records if another statute “specifically” authorizes it. For example, the Toxic Substances Control Act bars the EPA from disclosing trade secrets and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act allows applicants to designate information as a trade secret. Such statutes have grown in number over the past decade. The Department of Justice reported that the use of this exemption has more than doubled between fiscal years 2012 and 2019. In one case I argued, CIR successfully challenged an National Rifle Association-backed law blocking gun data from being released by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. However, in another case, we failed to obtain Treasury Department records shielded by a different Exemption 3 statute.
Yet a third secrecy tool is perhaps the smallest but mightiest. Over the past decades, companies have increasingly employed shell companies, limited liability corporations (LLCs), foundations, and other opaque structures to conceal ownership and evade accountability, akin to Russian nesting dolls. Reporters in our newsroom have in recent years increasingly reported on stories involving wrongdoing that dead-end with LLCs. For instance, our reporters recently wrote about Guo Wengui, a Chinese tycoon who has engaged in sprawling fraudulent schemes by relying on what one bankruptcy court described as a labyrinth of finances, including moving funds through 500 accounts held by at least 80 entities.
In another example, Hannah Levintova reported on private equity firms buying up hospitals and their property through LLCs to financially benefit themselves while negatively impacting patients. Similarly, as Nathan Halverson reported in our Emmy award-winning documentary The Grab, LLCs are buying up land around the U.S. to clandestinely usurp natural resources like water. While we have tried to file lawsuits to unearth information in some cases, the information often remains effectively hidden.
Hyper-privatization
Beyond the explosion of data and efforts to hide it, hyper-privatization of government services is the second major driver of secrecy.In 2024, the federal government spent nearly $755 billion on contracts, as compared to the $447.6 billion spent ten years earlier in 2014 (a 68% increase in one decade). During the middle of that decade in 2017, an academic calculated that four out of ten government workers were private contractors. Today, private contractors now outnumber federal employees by more than two to one, moving power from the administrative state to this shadow workforce. And as more data has shifted to private hands, the public has been left in the dark because contractors are not subject to the same transparency requirements.
Since America’s founding in 1776, the government has relied on contract workers to execute its responsibilities. However, it wasn’t until after the expansion of the administrative state in the 1950s that this practice began to raise serious concern. In his 1961 farewell speech, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex and its “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power…[in] every office of the federal government.” The term “privatization” emerged in 1969 to describe this post-war shift of government functions to private hands. By the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, core government services like prisons, the military, and education were increasingly turned over to the private sector. Over the past decade, this shift has accelerated and in many ways reached completion. As a comparison, in 1984, there were 9,794 million federal workers, and 49% of those were grant or contract workers. By 2020, out of the 10.9 million federal workers, 62% held grant or contract positions. Echoing Eisenhower’s concerns, President Joe Biden warned in his January 15, 2025 farewell address of this growing dynamic. “Extreme wealth, power, and influence…literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.” “I’m…concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex.”
Today, this concern is visible in powerful private entities that operate with limited public oversight. Consider SpaceX, for example, which holds enormous influence over the U.S. space program with little public oversight. (Elon Musk’s influence extends even further after his time in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has reportedly hoovered up vast amounts government data since Trump took office in January.) Boeing’s recent high-profile failures and its entanglement with federal regulators offer another warning sign. Similarly, Palantir, a company that is aggregating data from various agencies to conduct surveillance, represents yet another troubling convergence of state power and private control.
This transfer of public responsibilities to private entities not only consolidates power in corporate hands but also erodes fundamental legal safeguards. Privatization eliminates the government’s obligation to uphold civil rights protections and undermines accountability. For example, private ICE detention centers have routinely evaded the standards imposed on government-run facilities, resulting in human rights violations that were hidden from the public unless fought for through legal means. In public records cases, government attorneys frequently argue that disclosing contractor records could violate trade secrets and expose the government to litigation or lost contracts without acknowledging the broader cost to the public. This form of hyper-privatization results in secrecy ultimately overriding the rule of law, while private interests consolidate unprecedented influence over the machinery of government.
Conclusion
The true cost of this secrecy is unmistakably high and has nothing to do with ownership but real bodily injuries. In her book Backroom Deals, Miranda Spivack details the story of firefighters dying from cancerous forever chemicals in their uniforms, fathers poisoned by municipal water, and students killed in car accidents all due to the government failing to release information. As Americans lose access to information about our health, environment, public safety and numerous other government services—our ability to hold our government accountable and participate meaningfully in democracy erodes.
Anti-secrecy must become a core democratic value at this juncture in American history. Legal scholars like Margaret Kwoka, Hannah Bloch Wheba and David Pozen have written about the failures of transparency and how it abets corruption or other democratic principles. An anti-secrecy principle would demand targeted transparency particularly where power has coalesced into overlapping entities and at a minimum acknowledge failed checks and balances. As I have argued elsewhere, due process protections might account for this, as a small number of courts have recently begun to recognize, but broader legal and cultural reform is needed. And we need this change more than ever. As former BBC correspondent Natalia Anteleva recently said in a panel at an investigative journalism conference discussing authoritarian politics encroaching on America, “Killing context and depth are the greatest signs of authoritarianism.” That is the danger we face.
Author Disclosure: D. Victoria Baranetsky works for the The Center for Investigative Reporting. A list of the CIR’s funders for 2023 can be found here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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