Who owns what: foreign-held farmland, shell structures, university donors, grid owners, and healthcare roll-ups, merged deliberately as one ownership-tracing thread.
The United States runs on 1.38 terawatts of generating capacity, and the federal filings say who owns every megawatt. Computed from Form EIA-860: independent power producers now out-own the investor-owned utilities on your bill; the federal government is one of the largest owners in the country; and a quarter-terawatt is jointly owned through capacity shares most customers have never heard of.
Section 117 requires American universities to disclose foreign gifts and contracts — but for most of the record, not who they came from. Computed from the federal file: 97 percent of the 62 billion disclosed dollars carry no source name, because the statute asks only for a country. The anonymity is not evasion; it is the design. What the law collects, what it hides, the 2019 enforcement spike, and what the DETERRENT Act fight would actually change.
Since 1981 American universities have disclosed 62 billion dollars in foreign gifts and contracts under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act — 117,152 transactions at 528 institutions. A reading of the federal ledger: who received it, which countries and governments sent it, how it concentrates at the top, and what the disclosure regime does and does not reveal.
Since 2020, export controls, CFIUS, outbound-investment screening, and the ICTS rules have all treated Hong Kong as part of China. The federal farmland register still counts it separately — which is why the most famous Chinese-linked land purchase in America sits outside the China total the debate cites. One territory, five federal answers, and 144,000 acres in the gap.
We took the largest conduit-flagged and no-country blocks in the US foreign farmland register and traced every ownership chain through public documents, with adversarial verification and a defamation review. Sovereign funds behind quiet flags, blank filings that resolve to Munich Re and the French state, a wall of fund structures whose investors no record names, and ghost entries carried for decades. The full map, chain by chain.
Between 2023 and 2025, most US states enacted or strengthened laws restricting foreign ownership of land — but the statutes disagree on who counts as a foreign adversary, whether Hong Kong counts as China, whether leases count as ownership, and who checks. What the laws say, the single completed enforcement action, and the broken federal register they all lean on.
State laws ban farmland ownership tied to foreign adversaries, but enforcement leans on a federal register that records only the first ownership tier. Computed from the government files: most register-flagged secondary Chinese interests sit behind holdings attributed to Singapore, Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong; one ChemChina-owned seed group appears under two country labels in a single file; and the acreage attributed to no country at all has grown six-fold since 2010.
Foreign persons report holding 46.3 million acres of US agricultural land — 3.6 percent of privately held farmland, nearly double the 2010 figure. Thirty state legislatures are writing laws about the number while almost nobody reads the register it comes from. A sourced walk through the AFIDA data: who holds American farmland, what held really means, and why the condition of the register is the sharpest finding in it.
Consolidation is the defining force in American healthcare, but it leaves its fingerprints across four separate CMS records that do not share a key. This is a field guide to bridging the provider-ownership files, the change-of-ownership transactions, and the Care Compare quality datasets through the enrollment-to-CCN crosswalk — turning who owns a facility, the deal that changed it, and the staffing and outcomes that followed into one traceable, facility-level story.
EIA Form 860’s ownership schedule records who actually holds the equity in every US electric generator — the regulated utilities, merchant producers, public power authorities, and financial investors — and the joint-ownership percentages that untangle who controls how many megawatts across the fleet. A field-level guide to the ~5,400-record ownership file, joint ownership in baseload coal and nuclear plants, parent-company rollups, and the Python to aggregate owned capacity and flag co-owned plants.
CMS publishes the full ownership filings for every Medicare-enrolled hospital — naming the health systems, private-equity firms, and real-estate investment trusts with a direct or indirect interest in each facility, keyed to the hospital’s PECOS enrollment and associate IDs (not the CMS Certification Number, which the file does not carry). A field guide to the ~147,000-record hospital all-owners file: the disclosure rule behind it, the schema and role codes, how to trace an opco/propco/REIT chain, the Steward–Medical Properties Trust collapse, the joins to change-of-ownership data and, through an enrollment-to-CCN crosswalk, to quality data, a worked Python walkthrough, and the caveats of self-reported ownership.
When a hospital or nursing home is sold, the new owner usually inherits the seller’s Medicare provider number, compliance history, and liabilities — and that transfer leaves a CHOW record. The roughly 5,900-row CMS change-of-ownership dataset is the transaction-level ledger of healthcare consolidation: who bought which facility, from whom, and when.
For nearly every nursing home, home health agency, hospice, and hospital that bills Medicare, the federal government now publishes who owns it — the holding companies, management firms, real-estate trusts, and private equity funds stacked behind the name on the door. The CMS all-owners files under 42 CFR 455.104 are an X-ray of who controls American institutional care, with roughly 280,000 ownership records for nursing homes alone plus home health, hospice, and hospitals.