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I remind my friends all the time to pay attention. I plead with them to vote, but they just don't care. They think everyone is corrupt and nothing matters. I'm the only one in my friends group that gives a damn. Honestly, I think this country is cooked. I don't see any way other than pain to cure this apathy.

Grab em by the ~~pussy~~ complete and utter lack of morality.

I generally agree with that, but sometimes government officials have to perform official duties that require confidentiality.

If they're intervening on behalf of a constituent and it involves medical or otherwise personal information, then they should be required to maintain confidentiality. Whether that requires an NDA or something else is a different question.

Contract law is a branch of the civil law and breach of contract gives rise to civil liability.

Let's talk about legal bribes vs illegal bribes.

A "legal bribe" would be something like offering some crazy incentive to a councillor that is tied to the project being approved, like saying "We're thinking about donating $100,000 to your re-election campaign" or "Your son should apply for our data analyst position with an annual salary of $100,000". There is no explicit agreement, just a wink and a nod. But the person being bribed knows that the receipt of the reward is contingent on their acting according to the bribe offerer's wishes. This form of bribery is legal in the United States and actually constitutionally protected according to the infamously fucked-up Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. If the councillor doesn't do what the data centre company wants, they'll simply not receive the donation or their son won't get the job.

An "illegal bribe" is just a classic bribe: an agreement that we will pay you X dollars cash if you do Y. That's illegal in the US and carries strict penalties. But since it's illegal, if the money has already been paid and the bribe recipient doesn't do what was agreed, or the bribe offerer doesn't pay after the bribe recipient does what they're told, there is absolutely no recourse to the legal system because courts will not enforce contracts for illegal activities.

The NDA is probably a legal bribe. The company invites the councillor to discuss the data centre project at the fanciest restaurant in town, makes them sign an NDA that "all details of the meeting will remain confidential", then discusses the possibility of the campaign donation or nepo job offer at the meeting. Then the company pays for the meal on the company card. All of that is technically legal, but of course, it's horribly corrupt so if the locals caught wind of it, they'd run the councillor out of town. Entire municipal councils have been recalled from office before as a result of unpopular data centre projects.

Breach of contract is a civil action.

Exactly, corporations care not for the legality. It's just that the very existence of a signed NDA opens up the power to suit, countersuit or in general drown a person in so many administrative fees that they are condemned to eternal poverty anyway. Whether the actual text is legal or not is irrelevant. An NDA is a weapon in many other ways.

It has to be a specific trade secret AND cause actual damages.

If you leaked the secret recipe to coca cola and now competitors don't just make cokealikes, but literal coke for half the price, you get nuked from orbit.

If I help a company develop machine learning I can talk about my implementation, the problems I solved, how I did it, what design decisions I made .etc because all of that is reasonable to an experienced software engineer. If I had some novel idea nobody else had that company would have patented it, or specifically named it as a trade secret and not just "it's all a trade secret plz don't talk or we SLAPP you with a dumb lawsuit"

They're up against the constitution's 1st amendment in the US. In my home country of Canada we have the same or stronger protections for workers. My second example literally happened to me. I was on a ML project and signed an NDA and the only thing that NDA and a non-compete and all that really covers is me giving info to competitors while I worked there basically... Once I no longer work for them it's an uphill battle to even prove the basis of a lawsuit to go after me for the NDA or NC.