The Michigan House on Tuesday approved bipartisan legislation to ban lawmakers and staff from signing nondisclosure agreements that prevent taxpayers from understanding how their money is spent.

While all Republicans and many Democrats voted in favor of House Bills 4052 and 4053, more than half of House Democrats opposed the tie-barred legislation.

HB 4052 cleared the lower chamber on a vote of 80-28, while it was 91-17 for HB 4052.

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“This is legislation that I think should make it all the way across the finish line,” Rep. Steve Carr, R-Three Rivers, who sponsored the legislation alongside Rep. Dylan Wegela, D-Inkster, told Michigan Advance. “This is common sense, bipartisan, broad support, from me being the chair of the [Michigan] Freedom Caucus to Representative Wegela being a Democratic socialist and in between.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and select lawmakers have increasingly relied on NDAs to shield details of billion-dollar development deals from the public in recent years.

The secret spending included some of the largest taxpayer-funded subsidies in the state’s history, with many aimed at supporting Whitmer’s forced transition to electric vehicles.

The most contentious involves a secret $715 million deal with Gotion Inc. to build an EV battery component factory near Big Rapids that has since stalled amid widespread national security concerns and public opposition. U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, and others have repeatedly called on Whitmer to nix the deal with Gotion, citing the company’s strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party and recent incidents involving Chinese nationals spying and voting illegally in Michigan.

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The Gotion deal included NDAs for then U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, and other top Democrats, an issue that played into the 2024 election. An investigation by The Detroit News in 2023 found one in five Michigan lawmakers have signed NDAs.

“They’re using tax dollars to fund these projects,” Carra told WEMU. “And then the idea that we as legislators would be complicit in that process and signing secrecy pacts, saying we cannot disclose the conversations we’ve had is a reckless form of governance.”

“Over the last several years, we have seen the increasing use of NDAs around projects that give millions of public tax dollars to multimillion and multibillion dollar corporations. It is important for us to remember that these are public dollars and that we are public officials, and that the public has a right to know how their money is being spent,” Wegela said on the House floor.

“The current practice is that in order to learn about the full scope of a project, legislators need to sign an NDA, and then doing so traps legislators in a cone of silence around said project,” he said. “These nondisclosure agreements stop us representatives from fully and transparently communicating with our constituents and this practice has to end.”

Whitmer’s MEDC, meanwhile, is defending the use of NDAs as it reviews the legislation to “ensure our people, places and projects can make it in Michigan,” spokesman Otie McKinley told Michigan Advance.

“It is important to note that in our experience, those seeking to make a significant investment are increasingly requiring NDAs, given the financial and proprietary information being shared. Further, no decisions are made until an investment opportunity is voted on by the bipartisan and bicameral appointees of Michigan Strategic Fund board in a public setting,” he said.

Democrats who oppose the ban on NDAs offered a similar perspective.

“Non-disclosure agreements are critical for competitiveness, our ability to attract new jobs, cutting edge technology. And we should be involved in far more serious ethics issues than what I think here is largely a nothing burger,” Skaggs, D-East Grand Rapids, told WEMU.

Wegela disagrees.

“I think if corporations want public tax dollars, they should do their business in public. And that should be part of the discussion. Right?” he said. “We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars going to multi-million dollar and multibillion dollar corporations.”

HBs 4052 and 4053 now move to the Senate, where odds of passage remain unclear.

Democrats in the lower chamber attempted unsuccessfully to tie bar the bills to Senate Bills 1 and 2, to expand the state’s Freedom of Information Act to the executive and legislative branches, that cleared the upper chamber last month.

Rosie Jones, spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, told Michigan Advance the Senate would review the House NDA ban, but made it clear SBs 1 and 2 are a higher priority.

“FOIA is the gold standard for government transparency, and the House has been sitting on those important, bipartisan, bills for almost a month,” Jones said.

House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Twp., last month panned the “watered-down FOIA bill” he planned to refer to the House Government Operations Committee, where legislation typically goes to die.

Democratic representatives who voted against the bills include:

Joey Andrews, Brenda Carter, Tyrone Carter, Jennifer Conlin, Kimberly Edwards, Morgan Foreman, Kristian Grant, Peter Herzberg, Kara Hope, Jason Hoskins, Tullio Liberati Jr., Sharon MacDonell, Jasper Martus, Donavan McKinney, Tonya Meyers-Phillips, Cynthia Neeley, Amos O’Neal, Veronia Paiz, Natalie Price, Ranjeev Puri, Julie Rogers, Helena Scott, Phil Skaggs, Will Snyder, Samantha Steckloff, Joe Tate, Jimmy Wilson Jr., and Stephanie Young.