Thomas Jefferson vs Alexander Hamilton on Data Center NDAs: Sunlight, Secrecy, and the Ledger Neither Man Can Complete
Two founding rivals debate whether a county government should ever be allowed to sign away its citizens’ right to know, and end up shouting at each other over how much either man can actually prove.
Why This Topic
Across the country right now, county commissioners and city councils are signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers before their own residents know a project exists. In Effingham County, Georgia, a development authority chief was bound to silence about an OpenAI data center until a week before the public vote. In Oklahoma, officials have briefed board members one or two at a time specifically to avoid triggering a public meeting requirement. In Virginia, twenty five of thirty one localities with a data center project have an NDA on file.
Underneath the headlines is an old philosophical question: does effective government sometimes require secrecy, or does secrecy always corrode the consent that makes government legitimate in the first place. That is not a new argument. It is, almost word for word, the argument Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had about the American republic itself.
We thought that made them the obvious pairing.
Why Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson built his entire political identity around the idea that self-government requires an informed public. He is the founder most associated with distrust of concentrated, unaccountable power, and with the belief that a free press and open information are not luxuries of government but the actual mechanism that makes it legitimate. His famous line that he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers is not a throwaway quote, it is close to the center of his political thought.
He also carried a lifelong suspicion of financiers, speculators, and moneyed interests operating at a remove from ordinary citizens, which maps uncomfortably well onto a modern hyperscale company negotiating quietly with a county development authority.
Why Alexander Hamilton
Hamilton gave the American tradition its clearest defense of executive discretion. In Federalist No. 70 he argued directly that decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch are qualities a good executive needs, and that too much openness in decision-making can actually weaken a government’s ability to act. He built the young country’s financial system from nothing, and he was comfortable with the idea that skilled administrators sometimes need room to negotiate without every term being public in real time.
The historical antagonism between these two men barely needs introducing. They built opposing political parties around exactly this kind of disagreement, over how much power, and how much discretion, government and its allies in commerce ought to be trusted with.
Who Else We Considered
Jeremy Bentham vs Walter Bagehot. Bentham is literally the philosopher of the publicity principle, the idea that openness in government is the primary check against misrule. Bagehot gave the classic defense of institutional mystery, arguing some government processes work better shielded from public view. We held this pairing for a future episode, since it is almost too on the nose for the NDA topic specifically.
Thomas Hobbes vs Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A more abstract but genuinely opposed pairing on the legitimacy of government secrecy in general. We passed for now because it works better as a debate about sovereignty itself than about a specific modern policy fight.
James Madison vs Alexander Hamilton. Madison wrote one of the sharpest lines available on this exact subject, that a popular government without popular information is a prologue to farce or tragedy. Madison is currently reserved for a future debate on presidential removal power, so we held this pairing back rather than use him twice in close succession.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Jefferson’s position is not invented for this debate, it is drawn directly from his consistent public writing. His suspicion of financial elites, his defense of a free press as a check on power, and his general discomfort with Hamilton’s entire financial architecture all point the same direction. Where the script gives him real difficulty is his own personal record on secrecy in his private life, which Hamilton uses against him directly. We did not soften that attack, because it is historically accurate and because Jefferson himself, in his more honest moments, acknowledged the gap between his principles and his conduct without ever abandoning the principles.
Hamilton’s position is equally well grounded. Federalist No. 70 is not a stretch, it is close to a direct citation. Where the script constrains him is that Hamilton was never actually a defender of officials hiding their own votes from constituents, only of executive discretion in matters of state. That distinction is real, and we built it into the debate rather than flattening Hamilton into a cartoon defender of every secrecy deal on the table. He concedes, accurately, that a public official gaming a quorum rule to dodge a public meeting is not statecraft, it is cowardice. That concession is historically authentic to how Hamilton actually argued, drawing sharp lines around where discretion applies and where it does not.
We also built in something neither man fully wins, on purpose. Every specific case in this debate, the Effingham County OpenAI deal, the Coweta quorum dodging, West Memphis, Spartanburg, Colleton County, is a documented instance, but it is still one instance. Jefferson’s whole case is strengthened by naming names, and Hamilton is right to keep pointing out that six or seven reported cases do not settle what happens in the thousands of NDAs nobody has investigated. But Jefferson has the sharper reply available to him here, and the script lets him make it, the secrecy itself is what prevents anyone, including Hamilton, from ever filling in the missing data either way. Neither man walks away from the fight easily. Jefferson never abandons the publicity principle. Hamilton never abandons the case for negotiated discretion. That is exactly the diametric opposition we look for in this format, now with neither side allowed to pretend its evidence is complete.
A Note on the Sources
Hamilton’s argument draws primarily from Federalist No. 70, where he makes his case for energetic, sometimes secretive, executive power. Jefferson’s argument draws from his correspondence on the free press, most famously his letter arguing that were it left to him to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter.
The specific NDA cases referenced throughout, Effingham County’s OpenAI deal, Coweta and Wagoner County in Oklahoma, and West Memphis, Arkansas, are drawn from contemporary investigative reporting rather than historical texts, since the underlying policy fight is happening right now. We were careful to keep the modern facts accurate even while the philosophical voices remain period appropriate.
Where the record is thin, it is on exactly what either man would say about a specific modern data center. Neither Jefferson nor Hamilton ever encountered anything resembling one. We extrapolated from their well documented positions on transparency, executive discretion, and financial power rather than inventing new commitments for either of them.
What Comes Next
We are holding Bentham vs Bagehot for a future episode on the publicity principle itself, and Madison remains reserved for the removal power debate. If this arc performs well, expect more founding era rematches built around modern transparency fights.
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