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Christopher Bing, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Annie Waldman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. When President Donald Trump announced his marquee government cost-cutting initiative, he left no doubt about whom he intended to run it: Elon Musk. Still, questions about the scope of Musk’s authority have hounded the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency ever since. As DOGE began to order massive budget cuts and layoffs, and those affected by the moves began to raise questions in the press and in court about their legality, administration officials equivocated on Musk’s exact role, asserting he was simply a senior adviser to the president and had no official position in DOGE. Five weeks after its creation and under pressure from a growing cascade of lawsuits, the White House revealed in late February that an obscure bureaucrat named Amy Gleason had been acting as DOGE’s administrator since nearly day one. However, ProPublica has found that she does not appear to be running the budget-slashing group, according to interviews with six current and former government officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. “I get the sense that Amy is in the role of scapegoat,” said one source who had been in meetings with Gleason. The exact chain of command at DOGE is not clear to most federal employees who brush up against the team. But sources told ProPublica that longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, a former executive of Musk’s Boring Company and SpaceX, appears to be administering day-to-day operations. And at times, Musk himself issues commands from inside the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, said a person familiar with the matter. “I don’t know who Amy Gleason even is,” said one person who’s worked closely with DOGE’s leadership in a federal agency. “Davis runs the show.” Musk, Davis and Gleason did not respond to requests for comment. Since DOGE was created by executive order on Jan. 20, the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to put legal distance between Musk and the entity, saying he is neither an employee nor its head. And even though the order creates the role of an administrator — someone to coordinate with the White House and help place DOGE teams inside agencies — the Trump administration deflected questions about who was in that position for over a month. The arrangement has confounded judges overseeing challenges to DOGE’s authority. “The whole operation, it raises questions,” remarked U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, adding that the lack of clarity was “highly suspicious.” This setup could make it more difficult to prove that Musk has violated conflicts of interests laws, which generally bar federal employees from getting involved in government matters that impact their own business interests. By denying that Musk is the legal DOGE administrator “it gets him more removed, and it could make it harder to prove a violation,” said Richard Painter, a former top ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. In an interview with Fox News, Musk dismissed concerns about conflicts, saying, “I’ll recuse myself” if issues arise. The announcement that placed Gleason in between Musk and DOGE’s daily operations appeared haphazard: Gleason was on vacation in Mexico when Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, named her as acting administrator to a group of reporters in Washington. Gleason told colleagues the White House had not coordinated the announcement with her. Other parts of the rollout were equally perplexing: Leavitt asserted Gleason had been the administrator since nearly its inception — but colleagues said Gleason only began running staff meetings about a month into the administration with a small group of career technologists that predated the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Gleason told her former colleagues back in Nashville, Tennessee — where she recently worked as a health technology executive — she was planning on returning there in a few short months. One government worker who has been in meetings with Gleason described her as “someone with little to no actual decision-making” responsibilities. She revealed as much to colleagues in meetings in recent weeks, where she made clear she was not deeply involved in the DOGE budget cutting that has put humanitarian programs in peril and forced thousands of employees out of work, sources who were in those meetings told ProPublica. One reason it’s so difficult to pin down who is in charge of DOGE: It contains two separate teams that are almost entirely walled-off from each other. In forming DOGE, Trump folded the entity into the existing U.S. Digital Service, a small unit of tech experts housed within the White House focused on improving government software platforms. While DOGE, on paper, has a similar mission, the actual work of Musk’s group has been far more expansive, such as cutting funding to programs and gaining access to sensitive agency data systems, as ProPublica and other media have reported. In recent weeks, many holdover digital service workers have resigned or been laid off, and only a small group of a few dozen federal technologists remain. Gleason is only in charge of this smaller group, the sources said. Officials who worked with Gleason, who served in the Digital Service during the prior Trump and Biden administrations, spoke highly of her dedication to the mission. One noted she helped upgrade health care technology across government, such as digitizing COVID-19 test results during the pandemic. “My sense of her initial expectations was that USDS was going to have a synergy with DOGE … while also making government work better,” a former colleague said. “She was not expecting DOGE to come in and dismantle USDS.” The secrecy surrounding Gleason’s appointment extends to all of DOGE. The Trump administration has offered scant information about its employees — except when compelled by lawsuits. In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of how the group operates, ProPublica has spent weeks identifying and profiling its staff. Among them are engineers, lawyers, technology executives and consultants. Many were recruited from Musk’s businesses, including SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink, or from firms owned by his business associates. Today ProPublica is adding 20 names to our running list, bringing the total to 66. None have responded to requests for comment. Some have been enlisted to oversee cuts at the very agencies that conducted oversight of the industries where they’d previously worked. DOGE assigned Tyler Hassen, an energy industry executive, to the Department of the Interior. Scott Langmack and Michael Alexander Mirski — two executives from real estate firms — have been seen at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And former Tesla lawyer Daniel Abrahamson has worked for DOGE at the Department of Transportation — an agency reportedly in the midst of several investigations over the safety of Teslas. Tesla has defended the safety of its vehicles. None of the DOGE staffers replied to requests for comment. The Interior Department said it doesn’t comment on personnel, adding that there were no “DOGE staffers” at the agency, and the Transportation Department did not respond to a request for comment. Three of the names ProPublica is adding to our tracker are engineers from Musk’s SpaceX who have been issued ethics waivers by Trump administration lawyers to do work that could potentially benefit one of Musk’s companies. SpaceX, which includes internet satellite service Starlink, and Verizon are reportedly competing for control of a $2.4 billion Federal Aviation Administration contract, according to The Washington Post. SpaceX responded to that reporting in a post on X. “Recent media reports about SpaceX and the FAA are false,” it wrote. “There is no effort or intent for Starlink to ‘take over’ any existing contract.” The FAA did not respond to a request for comment. Publicly, Musk continues to champion DOGE’s mission. “The people voted for major government reform,” he said, “and that’s what the people are going to get.” Kirsten Berg, Al Shaw and Andy Kroll contributed reporting.
Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Saying the Trump administration is sabotaging civil rights enforcement by the Department of Education, a federal lawsuit filed Friday morning seeks to stop the president and Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out the mass firing of civil rights investigators and lawyers. Two parents and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, jointly filed the class-action lawsuit. It alleges that decimating the department’s Office for Civil Rights will leave the agency unable to handle the public’s complaints of discrimination at school. That, they said, would violate the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The complaint comes three days after the Education Department notified about 1,300 employees — including the entire staff in seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices — that they are being fired, and the day after a group of 21 Democratic attorneys general sued McMahon and the president. That lawsuit alleges the Trump administration does not have the authority to circumvent Congress to effectively shutter the department. The complaint filed on Friday argues that the “OCR has abdicated its responsibility to enforce civil rights protections” and that the administration has made a “decision to sabotage” the Education Department’s civil rights functions. That, the lawsuit alleges, overrides Congress’ authority. It names the Education Department, McMahon and the acting head of OCR, Craig Trainor. “Through a series of press releases, policy statements, and executive orders, the administration has made clear its contempt for the civil rights of marginalized students,” the lawsuit says. The parents’ lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It asks the court to declare the “decimation” of the OCR unlawful and seeks an injunction to compel the office to “process OCR complaints promptly and equitably.” A Department of Education spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the department has said it would still meet its legal obligations. The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. It alleges the firings are “so severe and extreme that it incapacitates components of the Department responsible for performing functions mandated by statute.” It cites the closing of the seven regional OCR outposts as an example. Each year, the OCR investigates thousands of allegations of discrimination in schools based on disability, race and gender and is one of the federal government’s largest civil rights units. At last count there were about 550 OCR employees; at least 243 union-represented employees were laid off Tuesday. The administration plans to close OCR locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The lawsuit brought by the parents and advocacy group reveals concerns by students and families who have pending complaints that, under President Donald Trump, are not being investigated. There also are concerns that new complaints won’t get investigated if they don’t fall under one of the president’s priorities: curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students. After Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, the administration implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work. Although OCR investigators were prohibited from working on their assigned discrimination cases, the Trump administration launched a new “End DEI Portal” meant only to collect complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. It has said it is trying to shrink the size of government, including the Education Department, which Trump has called a “big con job.” Trump’s actions so far have led many to wonder “if there is a real and meaningful complaint investigation process existing at the moment,” said Johnathan Smith, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Smith is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. “They are putting the thumb on the scale of who the winners and losers are before they do the investigation, and that is deeply problematic from a law enforcement perspective,” Smith said. The lawsuit is perhaps the most substantive legal effort to require the Education Department to enforce civil rights since 1970, when the NAACP sued the agency for allowing segregation to continue. That lawsuit resulted in repeated overhauling of the OCR and 20 years of judicial oversight, with the goal of ensuring that the division fairly investigated and enforced discrimination claims. Students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their schools or colleges. Both individuals named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit are parents of students whose civil rights complaints were being investigated — until Trump took office. One of the plaintiffs, Alabama parent Nikki S. Carter, has three students and is an advocate for students with disabilities in her community. Carter is Black. According to the lawsuit, Carter filed a complaint with OCR in 2022 alleging discrimination on the basis of race after her children’s school district, the Demopolis City Schools, twice banned Carter from school district property. When reached by ProPublica, the district superintendent said he’s not aware of the lawsuit or the civil rights complaint and could not comment; he is new to the district. The district has said it barred Carter after a confrontation with a white staff member. But Carter has said that a white parent who had a similar confrontation wasn’t banned, leading her to believe that the district punished her because of her advocacy. She said it prevented her from attending parent-teacher conferences and other school events. The other parent, identified by the initials A.W., filed a complaint with OCR alleging their child’s school failed to respond properly to sexual assault and harassment by a classmate. Investigations of both families’ discrimination complaints have stopped under the new OCR leadership, according to the lawsuit.
Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Ellis Simani, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Texas lawmakers and an advocacy group representing charter schools harshly criticized a tiny charter school network that has paid its superintendent up to $870,000 annually, making him one of the highest-paid public school leaders in the country. The criticism came after ProPublica and the Texas Tribune published a story last week about Valere Public Schools, revealing that the district had only reported paying its superintendent, Salvador Cavazos, less than $300,000 per year. In fact, bonuses and one-time payments roughly tripled his income for running a district that has fewer than 1,000 students across three campuses. Lawmakers brought up the story during a critical Texas House of Representatives committee hearing on March 6 to discuss how much funding the state should provide traditional public and charter schools in the coming years. Legislators repeatedly pressed Bryce Adams, the vice president of government affairs for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, about Cavazos’ compensation and asked why charter schools need additional state funding if they use it for high administrator pay. “You got a report in The Texas Tribune today about one of your guys making $800,000 a year,” said State Rep. John Bryant, a Democrat from Dallas. “None of our superintendents at the public level who have 100,000, 150,000 kids make anything close to that.” State Rep. Terri Leo Wilson, a Republican from outside Houston who previously served on the Texas State Board of Education, called Cavazos’ bonuses “ridiculous, unheard-of, outrageous.” In response, Adams said his organization is also opposed to the superintendent’s high compensation. He handed out copies of a letter the charter association had sent to the three members of the Valere Public Schools board stating they should pay Cavazos less. The association said it rarely questions a district’s actions but described the additional $500,000 to $600,000 the board awards Cavazos on top of his annual salary as “completely out of alignment” with the market. The letter urged the school board to tie Cavazos’ bonuses to specific metrics. “This behavior will cast a shadow over the public charter school system in Texas and could be detrimental to TPCSA’s ability to advocate on behalf of its members and the students they serve,” the association’s board members wrote in the Jan. 22 letter. The association sent the letter to Valere after learning about the newsrooms’ findings but before the article was published. ProPublica and the Tribune also shared that two other charter school systems pay their superintendents hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of their base salaries. The association did not answer questions about whether it also reached out to those schools. The strong public rebuke of Cavazos’ compensation comes as leaders from traditional public and charter schools are lobbying legislators for more money after going years without increases to their base funding. That push has intensified given lawmakers’ ongoing efforts to implement a voucher-like program this legislative session, which would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private schools. Legislative budget experts found that doing so could take money away from public schools. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has championed the voucher program. Since charter schools are considered public, not private, lawmakers questioned whether taxpayers could be confident that additional spending on public education would go to students’ needs rather than into the pockets of administrators like Cavazos. Valere Public Schools’ board members provided no direct response to legislators’ concerns about Cavazos’ pay in an emailed reply to the news organizations’ questions this week. They also wrote they had not answered the letter from the charter association and said the association has “no regulatory or other authority over Valere.” Cavazos has declined multiple interview requests. Board members have defended his compensation, explaining that he is also the charter network’s CEO and his contributions justify his pay. The members also said that a “significant” part of Cavazos’ compensation comes from private donations, but they would not provide evidence to support their claim. Bryant, the Dallas representative, told the newsrooms in an interview that Valere Public Schools’ actions show why the state needs stronger oversight of its charter schools. He said legislators must tighten the Texas Education Agency’s current reporting requirements. The agency mandates districts post all superintendent compensation and benefits on their website or in an annual report. Districts must also send information about the superintendent’s annual salary and any supplemental payments for extra duties to the state directly, but the state education agency did not clarify if that includes bonuses. It told the newsrooms it does not check whether districts follow the first requirement unless a potential violation is flagged. “We need to put it in the law that they have to report it and that there’s a penalty for failing to do so,” said Bryant. “Otherwise, it’ll continue to be obscured.” The Texas Education Agency did not respond to questions the newsrooms sent after the legislative hearing about the state’s current oversight of charter schools and superintendent compensation. Nor did Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows or Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who set the legislative priorities for state lawmakers. Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for Abbott, sent a written statement to the news organizations scolding school districts that spend the state’s funding on “administrative bloat instead of the teachers they employ and the students they serve.” Abbott will work with lawmakers to ensure public dollars go to “students and teachers, not systems and overpaid administrators,” Mahaleris wrote. He did not mention specific bills or solutions. Lawmakers have submitted at least five bills during this legislative session that would restrict superintendents’ salaries, but most would not have applied to the vast majority of Cavazos’ compensation because the proposals don’t limit bonuses. State Rep. Carrie Isaac, a Republican representing counties between Austin and San Antonio, filed a proposal that would restrict superintendents’ pay to no more than twice that of the highest-earning teacher in the school district. Isaac’s current proposal does not account for superintendents’ bonuses. After learning about the Valere School Board’s method of awarding Cavazos hefty payments on top of his base salary, she said she was “absolutely” open to revising her bill to include bonuses. “I don’t see any justification for that,” Isaac said in an interview. “I would like to see superintendents that pursue their role out of a dedication for student success, not a means to secure these excessive salaries.” Despite the outcry from lawmakers and experts inside and outside the charter school sector, the Valere board has so far stood behind its decisions. Asked by the newsrooms whether it had any current plans to make changes to the pay that Cavazos receives on top of his base salary, the board sent a one-word response: “No.”
Anjeanette Damon ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. If you ask a National Park Service ranger how the Trump administration’s cost cutting will affect your next park visit, you might get talking points instead of a straight answer. A series of emails sent late last month to front-line staff at parks across the country provided rangers with instructions on how to describe the highly publicized staff cuts. Park leaders further instructed staff to avoid the word “fired” and not blame closures on staffing levels. On Feb. 14, at least 1,000 park service employees were terminated as part of broad reductions to the federal workforce by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. As a result, visitor centers have reduced hours, tours of popular attractions have been canceled, lines have spiraled, bathrooms may go uncleaned, habitat restoration has ceased and water has gone unchecked for toxic algae. Meanwhile, rangers have been ordered to describe these cuts — or “attrition” and “workforce management actions,” according to the talking points — as “prioritizing fiscal responsibility” and “staffing to meet the evolving needs of our visitors.” They also should tell visitors the parks will continue to ensure “memorable and meaningful experiences for all.” If asked about limited offerings, one park’s rangers were instructed to say “we are not able to address park or program-level impacts at this time.” The guidance mirrors other measures instituted by the Trump administration to dictate how federal employees communicate with the public. This month, employees at the National Cancer Institute were told they needed approval for any communication dealing with 23 “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” issues, including peanut allergies and autism. Agencies across the federal government have begun compiling lists of words to avoid because they could conflict with Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, The New York Times has reported. The guidance handed down to park employees puts rangers in a particularly difficult position, said Emily Douce, deputy vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy organization for the parks. Rangers pride themselves on knowledge of their parks and their responsibility to accurately educate the public about the habitats, wildlife and geology of those special places. “They shouldn’t be muzzled to not talk about the impacts of what these cuts mean,” Douce said. “If they are asked, they should be truthful on how federal dollars are being used or taken away.” An NPS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that any assertion that park staff are being “silenced is flat-out wrong” and that talking points are a “basic tool” to “ensure consistent communication with the public.” “The National Park Service is fully committed to responsible stewardship of our public lands and enhancing visitor experiences — we will not be distracted by sensationalized attacks designed to undermine that mission,” the statement said. The spokesperson also criticized park staff who spoke with a ProPublica reporter. “Millions of hardworking Americans deal with workplace challenges every day without resorting to politically motivated leaks,” the spokesperson said. One park ranger, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the talking points prevent rangers from telling the public the truth. Some employees have delivered the statements in an exaggerated “monotone” to convey to visitors they are toeing the company line but there’s more to the story, the ranger said. “We have a duty to tell the public what’s going on,” the ranger said. “If that’s saying, ‘We just don’t have the staff to stay open and that’s what these firings are doing,’ I think the people have a right to know. Every person we lose hurts.” In the immediate aftermath of the firings, parks quickly closed visitor centers, ended tours and altered other services. Some parks were clear on social media that the staffing cuts had resulted in the closures. But recently parks have been more vague in discussing the impact and not offered explanations for particular closures. The administration has reinstated about 50 NPS employees and announced it will proceed with the hiring of seasonal employees, a workforce that is essential to park operations during the busy summer season. The hiring process, however, has been delayed, which may lead to operation disruptions. And more cuts are likely coming. The Hill recently reported that the administration is considering a 30% payroll reduction for the NPS. The cuts come as the parks are seeing increases in visitation, which hit a record in 2024 for the first time since 2016. Although the new data was released on the park service’s website last week, the administration didn’t publicize that milestone with a news release as it has in the past. The terminations also come amid staffing shortages across the service. Aviva O’Neil, executive director of the Great Basin National Park Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports a small park in a remote corner of Nevada, bristled at the idea put forth in the talking points that parks can continue to provide the same level of “memorable experiences” with the cuts. When the park lost five of its 26 permanent employees in February, it was forced to close tours of a signature attraction, Lehman Caves. To help restore services, the foundation raised the money to temporarily hire the terminated workers. “How do they do their day-to-day operations when they don’t have the staff?” she said.
Taylor Kate Brown ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists. Two inches of raw sewage. Persistent chemical leaks. Pipes insulated with asbestos. A bat infestation. Black mold. “It kind of blows my mind some of the things I found in public schools,” says Emily Schwing, a KYUK reporter and ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Recently, we published her investigation of dangerous conditions in deteriorating public schools in Alaska’s rural villages. Schwing, who reported this story while also participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship, spoke to dozens of sources, including local resident Taylor Hayden, who showed her concrete footings that had been reduced to rubble in one village school. ProPublica has previously reported on how restrictive funding policies in Idaho have contributed to similarly dangerous school conditions. In Alaska, a unique set of circumstances means the responsibility for school repairs in many rural villages rests exclusively on the state Legislature. Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, even though the state owns these buildings. As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. The impact is felt most by Alaska Natives. For Schwing, the “record scratch” moment came when she realized some school districts were spending their own money, in one case $200,000, in a desperate effort to rank higher up the funding priority list, even going as far as hiring a lobbyist. Other districts told her they couldn’t do so without cutting teaching positions. “Why are public school districts paying a lobbyist to convince lawmakers to invest in public schools, and even more so, to invest in infrastructure that the state owns?” she thought. I called up Schwing to talk about the process of reporting this investigation and how different going to school can be for students across Alaska. Our conversation has been condensed and edited. I travel a lot to rural communities in Alaska, just by virtue of the things that I cover. And usually when you are traveling to villages, you stay in the school. I have always been surprised by the things that I’ve experienced there. On the Chukchi coast, there’s a school where you can’t see out the windows anymore because they’re so pitted from the wind. There was a school that I was in last year during a sled dog race that I was covering where I could smell the bathrooms from down the hall. That’s not normal. So I was keeping a list of things that were strange for public schools. Then Taylor Hayden called me and told me what’s going on at the Sleetmute school. So I went out there. He showed me [the conditions] in the wood shop. And then we went under the building and I thought: “Oh my God. This is crazy.” It took off from there. I want to tell you about these two little kids I met, Edward and Loretta [in Sleetmute]. They’re in fourth grade. I’m in their school, and they’re giving me a tour: “This is our library, and this is our piano in the kindergarten room, and this is my favorite book.” They’re showing me their artwork. Never once did these kids say, “This is where the moldy part of our school is.” It made me sad to think that they think that this is normal for their school, but it also made me so proud of them for just being fourth-grade kids. You can throw out numbers and statistics and do an investigation into these state records, but until you’re in the building, I don’t think the reality of how awful things are hits you. The kids are doing their homework at the lunch tables, or the high school kids are doing some really cool science projects, but they’re sitting in a school where if the wood shop collapses, it also takes the water system, the heat system, the HVAC, like all of the critical infrastructure, the electricity that keeps that school usable. I have visited over 45 villages off the road system in Alaska at this point in my career, and the school is the center of these communities. It’s the largest building. They’re one of two buildings with a guarantee that there will be running water. They’re places where people get together, where people socialize. They have pickup basketball nights and fundraisers. Public schools in rural Alaska also serve an emergency management function that is often overlooked. If there is some sort of natural disaster — a flood, a giant storm, a severe drop in temperature — or if there’s some sort of other piece of critical infrastructure that’s having problems — the water plant burns down or the electricity goes out or the heating fuel doesn’t get delivered — people will go seek shelter in the school. Wildland firefighters and the National Guard will be based out of these buildings if they’re responding to a disaster. But in order for it to be an effective emergency management tool, you have to have it safe and operational. There are so many more functions that the public school serves than just school. There’s so much conversation around operational funding, to pay for textbooks and teacher salaries. Currently in our Legislature, it’s all the lawmakers can talk about. The people who are offering testimony to lawmakers from urban areas are all about funding curriculum and keeping teachers. Then you hear public testimony from people in rural communities who can’t even get that far, because there are pots and pans on the floor to catch the leaks from the roof, or there’s a bucket of oil next to them in their classroom and there’s one in the hall. There’s a very clear boundary between what rural constituents are experiencing and what urban constituents are experiencing with respect to education. It’s very easy to forget the hundreds of villages that exist in Alaska off the road system, because they are so small. That’s where the real problem lies — when you don’t notice, then you have a roof that leaks for 20 years, and then it turns into a real public health and safety crisis. There are over 50 villages on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta that KYUK serves. It’s the predominant dialect spoken on the delta, and there are a lot of elders who speak Yup’ik as their first language. The vast majority of KYUK’s audience is Yup’ik. The other thing that you’ll notice in this story is the vast majority of the population that is served by rural public schools are Indigenous. So the largest impact from a lack of investment in school infrastructure is on Alaska Natives. So I think it’s really important to the most affected people that we would deliver a story like this in their Indigenous and often first language. This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR’s Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism.
ProPublica’s feature documentary “Before A Breath,” directed by Nadia Sussman, will have its YouTube premiere on Thursday, March 20, at 8 p.m. Eastern. “Before a Breath” is a tender, infuriating and ultimately hopeful story of three mothers who have lost children to stillbirth and are now striving to make pregnancy safer. The film explores an experience shared by thousands of families in the U.S., where more than 20,000 stillbirths occur each year. At least a quarter of those losses are probably preventable. After the stillbirth of her daughter, Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya goes to Washington. She finds herself battling entrenched political inertia as she fights to pass the SHINE for Autumn Act, legislation named for her stillborn child. Kanika Harris, a maternal health advocate, takes change into her own hands, telling the story of Kodjo and Zindzi, the twins she lost, as she trains a new generation of Black birth workers. The stakes for making birth safer crystalize as we meet Stephanie Lee, a nurse administrator in Manhattan who, while seeking answers about her daughter Elodie’s stillbirth, takes the ultimate leap of faith. We follow her as she prepares to give birth again, under the care of the Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai, which offers specialized care for parents who have experienced these losses. Inspired by Duaa Eldeib’s groundbreaking reporting, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, this film shines a light on the aftermath of stillbirth, an experience often shrouded in silence. “Before a Breath” will also be distributed by The WNET Group. The film is a production of ProPublica. It is executive-produced by Almudena Toral and produced by Sussman, Lisa Riordan Seville and Liz Moughon, who is also the director of photography. It was edited by Margaret Cheatham Williams, with additional editing by Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi. Where and how to watch After the film’s debut on YouTube on Thursday, March 20, “Before a Breath” will be available to stream on ProPublica’s YouTube channel and at youtube.com/ThirteenWNET and thirteen.org. There will also be a number of free and open-to-the-public screenings at cinemas and other venues across the country. Join us for a virtual discussion about the film Join us on Wednesday, April 2, at 4 p.m. Eastern for a panel discussion with the filmmakers as they welcome the film’s main participants to share their powerful insights and experiences surrounding the stillbirth crisis. Reporter Duaa Eldeib and director Nadia Sussman will be joined by Kanika Harris, Stephanie Lee, Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya and Dr. Joanne Stone, founder of the Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai.
ProPublica ProPublica announced on Wednesday that Cassandra Garibay and Ashley Clarke have joined the crowdsourcing and engagement reporting team. “I was so heartened by the incredible applicant pool for our engagement reporter position,” said Ariana Tobin, ProPublica’s crowdsourcing and engagement team editor. “Our field has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, and we are so excited to have hired two journalists working at the cutting edge of it. Ashley and Cassandra have both done exceptional, thoughtful, creative work reporting on and with communities facing some of the most pressing issues of our time. I can’t wait for people to see how they level up our coverage of housing, education, immigration and more.” Garibay is a Bay Area-based engagement reporter who plans to work on community-sourced investigations related to issues like housing and health equity. She comes to ProPublica from the bilingual news outlet El Tímpano, where she was a senior housing reporter, leading investigations into topics including how exposure to lead-based paint has impacted Latino communities in Oakland, California. Her work there was driven by citizen-fueled science, text message outreach, data analysis, research partnerships and community events. Before her time at El Tímpano, Garibay was the California engagement editor at the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism, working with journalists across the state to center the communities they covered and reach audiences in innovative ways. She previously reported on housing, health and local government for the Fresno Bee, Fresnoland and the San Luis Obispo Tribune. “I am thrilled to join the team and excited to help crowdsource investigations and center communities at the heart of important issues across the country,” said Garibay. Clarke plans to cover issues that impact low-income individuals and families, particularly those living in urban communities, focusing on topics like housing insecurity and homelessness, education, transportation and environment. She comes to ProPublica from Bloomberg Industry Group, where she covered law firms and worked with a product team to test and write prompts for machine learning tools designed for reporters. Prior to her time at Bloomberg, Clarke worked as an audience engagement editor at the Center for Public Integrity, where she both reported and worked with reporters to build relationships with communities. She also managed collaborations between CPI and local newsrooms, including the award-winning investigation “Unhoused and Undercounted,” which focused on the lack of support for public school students experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. She was named the Institute for Nonprofit News’ 2023 Nonprofit Newcomer of the Year for shaping how the CPI reports on impacted communities. Clarke began her career in local television news at NBC in Washington, D.C., where she continues to be based. She is an adjunct professor at American University’s School of Communications and serves on the board of the Washington Association of Black Journalists. She will be with ProPublica through at least this fall. “I’m honored to be working alongside such a talented team of journalists who are committed to doing work that drives impact and changes lives,” said Clarke. “I’m so excited to dig in and contribute to the mission.”
Charles Ornstein ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists. In February, my colleague Ken Schwencke saw a post on the social media network Bluesky about a database released by Sen. Ted Cruz purporting to show more than 3,400 “woke” grants awarded by the National Science Foundation that “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” Given that Schwencke is our senior editor for data and news apps, he downloaded the data, poked around and saw some grants that seemed far afield from what Cruz, a Texas Republican, called “the radical left’s woke nonsense.” The grants included what Schwencke thought was a “very cool sounding project” on the development of advanced mirror coatings for gravitational wave detectors at the University of Florida, his alma mater. The grant description did, however, mention that the project “promotes education and diversity, providing research opportunities for students at different education levels and advancing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities.” Schwencke thought it would be interesting to run the data through an AI large language model — one of those powering ChatGPT — to understand the kinds of grants that made Cruz’s list, as well as why they might have been flagged. He realized there was an accountability story to tell. In that article, Agnel Philip and Lisa Song found that “Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.” Among them: a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best Philip and Song could tell, the project was flagged because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team. Another involved developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It included the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.” Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation responded to our requests for comment for the article. The story was a great example of how artificial intelligence can help reporters analyze large volumes of data and try to identify patterns. First, we told the AI model to mimic an investigative journalist reading through each of these grants to identify whether they contained themes that someone looking for “wokeness” may have spotted. And crucially, we made sure to tell the model not to guess if it wasn’t sure. (AI models are known to hallucinate, and we wanted to guard against that.) For newsrooms new to AI and readers who are curious how this worked in practice, here’s an excerpt of the actual prompt we used: Background: We will be showing you grants from the national science foundation that have been targeted for cancellation because they contain themes as identified by Republican Senator Ted Cruz's office as involving woke ideology; diversity, equity, and inclusion; or pro-Marxist ideology. We are looking to analyze themes of the award descriptions in this list to determine what may have terms or themes that would be considered "woke" or related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). It is your task to determine whether or not the text contains these themes and tell me about what you've found. Only extract information from the NSF grant if it contains the information requested. -- As an investigative journalist, I am looking for the following information -- woke_description: A short description (at maximum a paragraph) on why this grant is being singled out for promoting "woke" ideology, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda. Leave this blank if it's unclear. why_flagged: Look at the "STATUS", "SOCIAL JUSTICE CATEGORY", "RACE CATEGORY", "GENDER CATEGORY" and "ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE CATEGORY" fields. If it's filled out, it means that the author of this document believed the grant was promoting DEI ideology in that way. Analyze the "AWARD DESCRIPTIONS" field and see if you can figure out why the author may have flagged it in this way. Write it in a way that is thorough and easy to understand with only one description per type and award. citation_for_flag: Extract a very concise text quoting the passage of "AWARDS DESCRIPTIONS" that backs up the "why_flagged" data. Of course, members of our staff reviewed and confirmed every detail before we published our story, and we called all the named people and agencies seeking comment, which remains a must-do even in the world of AI. Philip, one of the journalists who wrote the query above and the story, is excited about the potential new technologies hold but also is proceeding with caution, as our entire newsroom is. “The tech holds a ton of promise in lead generation and pointing us in the right direction,” he told me. “But in my experience, it still needs a lot of human supervision and vetting. If used correctly, it can both really speed up the process of understanding large sets of information, and if you’re creative with your prompts and critically read the output, it can help uncover things that you may not have thought of.” This was just the latest effort by ProPublica to experiment with using AI to help do our jobs better and faster, while also using it responsibly, in ways that aid our human journalists. In 2023, in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, a Local Reporting Network partner, we used AI to help uncover patterns of sexual misconduct among mental health professionals disciplined by Utah’s licensing agency. The investigation relied on a large collection of disciplinary reports, covering a wide range of potential violations. To narrow in on the types of cases we were interested in, we prompted AI to review the documents and identify ones that were related to sexual misconduct. To help the bot do its work, we gave it examples of confirmed cases of sexual misconduct that we were already familiar with and specific keywords to look for. Each result was then reviewed by two reporters, who used licensing records to confirm it was categorized correctly. In addition, during our reporting on the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained a trove of unreleased raw materials collected during the state’s investigation. This included hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, which were difficult to sift through. The footage wasn’t organized or clearly labeled, and some of it was incredibly graphic and disturbing for journalists to watch. We used self-hosted open-source AI software to securely transcribe and help classify the material, which enabled reporters to match up related files and to reconstruct the day’s events, showing in painstaking detail how law enforcement’s lack of preparation contributed to delays in confronting the shooter. We know full well that AI does not replicate the very time-intensive work we do. Our journalists write our stories, our newsletters, our headlines and the takeaways at the top of longer stories. We also know that there’s a lot about AI that needs to be investigated, including the companies that market their products, how they train them and the risks they pose. But to us, there’s also potential to use AI as one of many reporting tools that enables us to examine data creatively and pursue the stories that help you understand the forces shaping our world. Agnel Philip, Ken Schwencke, Hannah Fresques and Tyson Evans contributed reporting.
Alec MacGillis ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In 2008, as the Great Recession was starting to take hold, my travels reporting on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign took me to one American city after another that was reeling from major layoffs. I visited places such as Kokomo, Indiana, which was losing so many jobs at its Chrysler and Delphi plants that by year’s end it was labeled one of America’s fastest-dying towns, and Lorain, Ohio, where Obama visited a National Gypsum plant that closed four months later. After each trip, I would return to my home in Alexandria, Virginia, in the metro Washington, D.C., area, and be struck by how removed the nation’s capital seemed from the pain being felt in so much of the country. Not only was it insulated because of its high proportion of government employment, it actually prospered as a result of the recession, since so much of the federal economic stimulus ended up staying with the Beltway contractors who administered the spending. When my growing family started looking for a larger home in 2009, we left our corner of Alexandria. As prices in every other metro area in the country were declining, they were still rising in the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia. The situation now is sharply reversed. As a result of Elon Musk’s relentless scythe, the Department of Government Efficiency, the big layoffs are in and around Washington. In the week ending Feb. 22, unemployment claims in the District of Columbia rose 25% from the week prior and were four times as high as one year earlier — and that’s only the beginning. The district’s chief financial officer has predicted that the city, where the federal government accounts for roughly a quarter of all wages, could lose as many as 40,000 jobs over the next few years, more than a fifth of its total, which he estimates would cost the city more than $1 billion in revenue. The fallout is spreading through the DMV — D.C., Maryland and Virginia — a region where nearly a tenth of all jobs are with the federal government, not to mention the tens of thousands of people working for contractors dependent on federal spending. The losses are already manifest beyond the numbers: in the resumes from highly educated professionals flooding LinkedIn, in pleas from laid-off young people seeking others to take over their apartment leases, in hushed discussions about this or that family pulling up stakes and leaving town. It is also manifest in the very landscape of the city. The Trump administration briefly placed the headquarters of many government departments on a list of “non-core” properties that are slated for offloading because they are vacant or underused — among them the departments of Justice, Labor, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Energy and Housing and Urban Development. This conjures the prospect that those hulking Brutalist and Classic Revival buildings constructed in the 20th century could one day stand vacant, just like the abandoned 19th-century factories looming over so many of the country’s postindustrial cities. All of this raises a question that was unfathomable until recently: Is the nation’s capital, so long blessed by being the government’s company town, at risk of a fate resembling that of so many other company towns through the years? And if it is, why aren’t people beyond metro Washington more concerned about it? When Detroit was in free fall, Obama intervened to bail out the auto industry, deciding a great American city needed help. But now, the administration in power is itself delivering the fateful blow to a major city. It is hard not to detect in this turnabout some resentment on the part of Trump allies and supporters from regions that have not been faring well in recent times. By 2012, when the country was finally emerging from the recession, seven of the 10 wealthiest counties were in metro Washington; the area’s number of high-net-worth households, with investable assets of more than $1 million, had risen by 30% since 2008. While Midwestern communities such as Vice President JD Vance’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio, were being crushed by the opioid epidemic, the Aston Martin dealership in Tysons Corner, Virginia, was selling hundreds of the bespoke James Bond car for about $280,000, and home prices in the District were approaching a 400% increase from the early 1990s. There is also more recent fuel for schadenfreude over Washington’s pain: Federal workers were much slower than those in other industries to return to the office after the pandemic, making it easier for the Trump administration to cast the entire lot of them as cosseted and unproductive. The persistence of remote work in the federal government had in recent years given downtown Washington a desolate feel, as it contributed to the closure of countless fast-casual lunch locales, retail shops and a major movie theater. There is no small irony in the fact that Trump’s return-to-office order has brought more life to downtown streets at the very moment that the city is so imperiled by impending layoffs. The DOGE cuts will not do all that much harm to the region’s true economic elite. There will still be lobbyists raking in six-figure contracts. Trump has done precious little to threaten that aspect of the so-called swamp; if anything, the DOGE assault has led many sectors, such as higher education, to spend more on lobbyists. There will still be Beltway-bandit consulting firms soaking up some of the work previously done by government workers and national security contractors lining the soulless highway approach to Dulles airport. The actual target of the cuts will be a more modest sort: career civil servants who, in many cases, could have been making more money in the private sector, or security guards and office cleaners returning every evening to working-class neighborhoods in Anacostia or Prince George’s County. It’s these people — from housing finance analysts to food-safety researchers and administrative assistants — who are now frantically looking for other work or considering leaving the region altogether. The cuts will fall especially hard on the region’s Black residents, who have long relied on federal employment as a ladder to the middle class. (Black people make up a disproportionately large share of the national federal workforce.) Watching all of this unfold, I can’t help but be put in mind of another company town: my own hometown, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It once held three major divisions of General Electric, which at its mid-20th-century peak employed more than 13,000 people in a county of about 130,000, sustaining broadly shared prosperity in a city with stellar public schools and a bustling main street. But by the time I reached high school in the late 1980s, the company was scaling back operations at a rapid clip under the leadership of Jack Welch, who had himself come up through the ranks in Pittsfield. My classmates and I watched as, one by one, the families of engineers and managers moved away and empty storefronts proliferated downtown. Ultimately, many of us decided to build our careers elsewhere. Pittsfield’s population has fallen a quarter since 1970, and only 1,000-odd people remain employed at the company that took over one of the rump G.E. units, General Dynamics. Washington is unlikely to suffer so stark a fate, given the many barnacles that have attached themselves to its economy beyond the bureaucracy. Tourists will still come by the thousands to admire the monuments, even if some of the big stone buildings turn vacant, like the ruins of the Roman Forum. But the experience of Pittsfield and so many larger company towns is a reminder of how wrenching the disruption is when the biggest employer in town takes a big hit and the ladder rungs toward upward mobility start to crumble. The echo of all those other cities’ plights is reason to offer some sympathy, or at least recognition, as the Beltway now absorbs its blows.
Lomi Kriel, Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The text came from inside a Panamanian government outpost, set hours away from the country’s capital, on the edge of the Darien jungle. It had been written by a migrant who’d managed to smuggle a cellphone into the facility by hiding it in his shorts. He said authorities had detained him without providing him access to a lawyer or any means to communicate with relatives. He was hungry because all he was being fed were small portions of bread and rice. His cellphone was all he had to try to get help. I am Hayatullah Omagh, from Afghanistan, 29 years old. I arrived in February, 07 in USA. They took me to the San Diego detention center and on Feb, 12 they deported to Panama. Now we are like prisoners. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the hundred or so other migrants who were being detained with him had no way to communicate with the outside world. They’d been sent to Panama as part of President Donald Trump’s high-profile campaign to ramp up deportations. In addition to Afghanistan, the migrants had traveled to the U.S. from Iran, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Vietnam, India and China, among other countries. Some told reporters that they had only recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border when they were detained, and that they were hoping to seek asylum. But, they said, American authorities refused to hear their pleas and then treated them like criminals, putting them in shackles, loading them onto military airplanes and flying them from California to Panama. Three flights, carrying a total of 299 migrants, including children as young as 5, landed in Panama in mid-February. For the following three weeks, amid an international outcry over what critics described as a stunning breach of U.S. and international law, the migrants who had not committed any crimes were held against their will. As public pressure on Panama mounted and immigrant advocates filed suit against that country, authorities there released the migrants over the weekend, on the condition that they agree to make their own arrangements to leave within 90 days. Their release has hardly settled matters, however, among those groups that consider themselves part of the international safety net charged with providing migrants humanitarian support. Among them is the International Organization for Migration, which helped Panama return migrants who chose to go home rather than remain in detention. The IOM said it participated in the effort because it believes that without its presence the situation for migrants would be “far worse.” Critics charge that the group’s role shows how much the safety net relies on the United States and as a result can easily come undone. “I appreciate that some individuals hold the view that providing a more humane detention and deportation or voluntary return is better than a less humane version of those unequivocal rights violations,” said Hannah Flamm, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal advocacy group in New York. “But in the context of egregious unlawful conduct by the Trump administration, this is a moment that calls for deep introspection on where the line of complicity lies.” She added, “If everybody abided by their legal and ethical obligations not to violate the rights of people seeking protection in the U.S., these third-country removals could not happen.” Since taking office, Trump has signed several executive orders that eliminated options for seeking asylum at the border and deemed all crossings illegal, broadly authorizing the removal of migrants encountered there. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups sued over the orders. The United States has not responded to the lawsuit in court. The proceedings against Panama, in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, are not conducted in public. But at a press conference on the day after the first planeload of migrants landed last month, the country’s president dodged, reassuring the public that the migrants were only passing through Panama on their way elsewhere. Their stay would be brief and cost nothing, he said, and added that it had all been “organized and paid for by the International Organization for Migration.” The IOM, founded in the aftermath of World War II and now part of the United Nations, typically plays a critical, but low-profile, role helping migrants including those who, when faced with deportation, seek instead to voluntarily return to their homes. It provides everything from advice to governments managing sudden mass refugee movements to travel documents, food and lodging for individual migrants. And its mission statement charges it with upholding the rights of people on the move. However, its role in support of sending home asylum-seekers who’d been expelled from the United States without the opportunity to make a case for protection from persecution has exposed just how easily the safety net can come undone. In response to the Trump administration’s litany of threats against Mexico and Central America — including imposing tariffs, cutting off aid and, in Panama’s case, seizing its canal — those governments have taken extraordinary steps that upend international and diplomatic norms by agreeing to allow the Trump administration to turn their countries into extensions of the U.S. immigration enforcement system. President Rodrigo Chaves Robles of Costa Rica, whose government has historically gone to great lengths to uphold itself as neutral in regional conflicts and strife, also allowed U.S. migrant flights to land in his country. In a public event last month, he made the stakes plain. “We’re helping our powerful economic brother in the north,” he said, “because if they impose a tax on our export zones, we’re screwed.” Meanwhile, groups like the IOM are just as vulnerable to U.S. pressure. Some 40% of the donations that have funded its work come from the United States. And in recent weeks, the organization was forced to lay off thousands of workers after Trump froze billions of dollars in foreign aid. What that means, according to a former Biden administration official who worked on migration issues, is that when the United States makes a request, even ones that risk going against the IOM’s mission, “there is not a lot of space to say no.” Speaking of the IOM, the official added that it “almost can’t exist without the U.S.” Without the legal protections established under international law, asylum-seekers like those that the United States transported to Panama have been left to fend for themselves. By the time many of them had made it to the United States, they had little more than the clothes on their backs and the money in their pockets. And U.S. authorities expelled them exactly as they’d come. Upon landing in Panama, authorities confiscated any cellphones they found in the migrants’ possession. Omagh was one of the few who’d managed to keep his phone from being discovered. The situation in the Darien Forest is extremely difficult. There are security guards everywhere and they are very vigilant. They even watch us when we go to the bathroom. Distressed texts like those provided the only information about what the migrants were going through while they were in detention. Before being sent to the Darien camp, Panamanian authorities kept the migrants under 24-hour watch by armed guards at a hotel in downtown Panama City. But when scenes of them standing in the hotel windows with handwritten pleas for help, some scrawled in toothpaste on the glass, triggered an international outcry, IOM officials quickly moved to fly out more than half of the migrants who agreed to be sent home and the Panamanian government shuttled the rest to the remote Darien camp. On at least two occasions, Panamanian officials offered to allow journalists into the camp to speak with the detainees, but they canceled both times without explanation. Since then, they have declined multiple requests for interviews. Panamanian lawyers said they were also denied access to the migrants. Secret cellphone chatter filled the void, offering glimpses of the conditions inside the camp. Migrants wrote that bathrooms and showers had no doors for privacy, and that they were held in sweltering temperatures without air conditioning. One migrant had gone on a hunger strike for seven days. Omagh wrote that when he and others complained about the quantity and quality of the food, authorities offered to buy more if the detainees paid for it. We immigrants, each of us, have no more than $100, and some don’t even have a single dollar. How long can we buy ourselves? On Friday, the Panamanian government announced it would release the 112 migrants left. The authorities said that those migrants who stayed beyond the three-month time limit risked being deported. Migrants said they were also told they would only be allowed to leave the camp if they agreed to sign a document saying they had not been mistreated — potentially making it hard for them to file legal claims later. The following day, IOM and Panamanian officials entered the camp again and told the migrants that they would be asked to vacate the premises in a matter of hours, setting off a new wave of pandemonium and anxiety among the detainees, most of whom speak no Spanish and have no contacts or places to stay in Panama. Omagh, who understood what was happening because he’d picked up some Spanish when he migrated to the United States through Mexico, texted about the upheaval. I asked, if we go to Panama City, what will happen there? We are refugees. We don’t have money. We do not have nothing. The IOM told me ‘it is your responsibility.’ I don’t know what will happen there, but I’m sure that IOM, they will not help us. When asked about these comments, the IOM said that because its staff helped Panamanian officials with interpretation, migrants in the camp often confuse who is who. Jorge Gallo, a regional spokesperson for the IOM in Latin America and the Caribbean, defended his group’s involvement in Panama. He said the agency’s work “empowering migrants to make informed decisions, even in the face of constrained options, is preferable to no choice at all.” He and other IOM officials said the organization helps migrants find “safe alternatives,” including helping them go to other countries where they can obtain a legal status if they don’t choose to go home. The State Department and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about the expulsions. However, a State Department spokesperson expressed gratitude to those countries that had agreed to cooperate, saying they showed that they are “committed to ending the crisis of illegal immigration to the United States.” Within the human rights community, advocates are at odds with one another about what to do. As the Panamanian government prepared to move migrants out of the Darien camp, IOM officials reached out to faith-based shelter managers seeking places for the migrants to stay. Elías Cornejo, migrant services coordinator for the Jesuit ministry Fe y Alegría in Panama City, said some of the managers hesitated because they worried that anything that gave the appearance that they were advancing policies that run contrary to the law could taint their reputation. The IOM, Cornejo said, might be trying to do the right thing, but its actions can have unintended consequences that would be hard to undo. He said the agency was “whitewashing” Panama’s collusion and “dirtying its own hands” by participating in an improvised effort “without control and without the possibility of doing something good for the people.” As the migrants at the Darien camp scrambled to figure out what they’d do after leaving, they felt free to openly use their phones and to share them with one another. Tatiana Nikitina got a message from her 28-year-old brother, who’d migrated to the United States from Russia. He had been detained after crossing the border near San Diego, but her family hadn’t heard from him for days and was panicked that he might be forced to return home. Not knowing where to turn for answers about his whereabouts, his sister sought information in public chat groups and then began communicating with ProPublica about her desperate search for him. Her brother, Nikita Gaponov, using Omagh’s phone, also communicated with ProPublica and explained why he fled home. I am LGBT. My country harass these people. I cannot live a normal life in my country. It’s impossible for me. He said he spoke with IOM representatives about his fears. They said, We are sorry we cannot help you. I also do not know my USA status like it was deportation or not In USA they show me zero documents. No protocols or nothing. Omagh, too, said he was terrified about the prospect of returning to Afghanistan. He said he is from an ethnic minority group that is systematically persecuted by the ruling Taliban and that he’d been briefly jailed. They will execute me without hesitation. I want to apply for asylum, but I don’t know where I can apply for asylum, in which country, and how. I cannot go back to my country, never, never, never. Lexi Churchill contributed research.
Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. With a mass email sharing what it called “difficult news,” the U.S. Department of Education has eroded one of its own key duties, abolishing more than half of the offices that investigate civil rights complaints from students and their families. Civil rights complaints in schools and colleges largely have been investigated through a dozen regional outposts across the country. Now there will be five. The Office for Civil Rights’ locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco are being shuttered, ProPublica has learned. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The OCR is one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, investigating thousands of allegations of discrimination each year. That includes discrimination based on disability, race and gender. “This is devastating for American education and our students. This will strip students of equitable education, place our most vulnerable at great risk and set back educational success that for many will last their lifetimes,” said Katie Dullum, an OCR deputy director who resigned last Friday. “The impact will be felt well beyond this transitional period.” The Education Department has not responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In all, about 1,300 of the Education Department’s approximately 4,000 employees were told Tuesday through the mass emails that they would be laid off and placed on administrative leave starting March 21, with their final day of employment on June 9. The civil rights division had about 550 employees and was among the most heavily affected by Tuesday’s layoffs, which with other departures will leave the Education Department at roughly half its size. At least 243 union-represented employees of the OCR were laid off. The Federal Student Aid division, which administers grants and loans to college students, had 326 union-represented employees laid off, the most of any division. On average, each OCR attorney who investigates complaints is assigned about 60 cases at a time. Complaints, which have been backlogged for years, piled up even more after President Donald Trump took office in January and implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work. Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw the OCR under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden said: “What you’ve got left is a shell that can’t function.” Civil rights investigators who remain said it now will be “virtually impossible” to resolve discrimination complaints. “Part of OCR’s work is to physically go to places. As part of the investigation, we go to schools, we look at the playground, we see if it’s accessible,” said a senior attorney for OCR, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not laid off and fears retaliation. “We show up and look at softball and baseball fields. We measure the bathroom to make sure it’s accessible. We interview student groups. It requires in-person work. That is part of the basis of having regional offices. Now, California has no regional office.” The OCR was investigating about 12,000 complaints when Trump took office. The largest share of pending complaints — about 6,000 — were related to students with disabilities who feel they’ve been mistreated or unfairly denied help at school, according to a ProPublica analysis of department data. Since Trump took office, the focus has shifted. The office has opened an unusually high number of “directed investigations,” based on Trump’s priorities, that it began without receiving complaints. These relate to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students. Traditionally, students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their school districts. The process is free, which means families that can’t afford a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit may still be able to seek help. When the OCR finds evidence of discrimination, it can force a school district or college to change its policies or require that they provide services to a student, such as access to disabilities services or increased safety at school. Sometimes, the office monitors institutions to make sure they comply. “OCR simply will not be investigating violations any more. It is not going to happen. They will not have the staff for it,” said another attorney for the Department of Education, who also asked not to be named because he is still working there. “It was extremely time and labor intensive.” The department said in a press release that all divisions at the department were affected. The National Center for Education Statistics, which collects data about the health of the nation’s schools, was all but wiped away. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the layoffs “a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.” In addition to the 1,300 let go on Tuesday, 600 employees already had accepted voluntary resignations or had retired in the past seven weeks, according to the department. Trump and his conservative allies have long wanted to shut the department, with Trump calling it a “big con job.” But the president hasn’t previously tried to do so, and officially closing the department would require congressional approval. Instead, Trump is significantly weakening the agency. The same day Congress confirmed McMahon as education secretary, she sent department staff an email describing a “final mission” — to participate in “our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service” by eliminating what she called “bloat” at the department “quickly and responsibly.” Education Department employees received an email on Tuesday afternoon saying all agency offices across the country would close at 6 p.m. for “security reasons” and would remain closed Wednesday. That led many workers to speculate that layoffs were coming. Then, after the workday had ended, employees who were being laid off began receiving emails that acknowledged “the difficult workforce restructuring.” Emails also went to entire divisions: “This email serves as notice that your organizational unit is being abolished along with all positions within the unit — including yours.”
Eli Hager ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere. Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.” But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.” Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more. “I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.) At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.” Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained. Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment. Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year. The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported. Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said. And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said. “Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff. In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.” “Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.” Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency. “I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.” He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers. Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.” Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic. “I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”
Audrey Dutton, ProPublica, and Kelcie Moseley-Morris, States Newsroom ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. With a steady but urgent cadence, Dr. Jim Souza told reporters what would become one of the most cited talking points in a protracted legal fight over Idaho’s abortion ban: Without a court order protecting emergency room doctors from prosecution, his hospital system was sending patients to nearby states when certain pregnancy complications meant termination might be necessary. It was April 2024. Souza said Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System had airlifted six pregnant patients in a span of four months to states where abortion was a legal treatment option in health emergencies. That happened once in all of 2023, a time when a court order kept Idaho from enforcing the ban in those cases. Souza, the hospital system’s chief physician executive, said Idaho’s law was a looming threat to hospital workers and quality health care. St. Luke’s delivered about 41% of Idaho babies last year. “Fear is the problem. Fear of prosecution,” Souza said at the time. “And even if it doesn’t occur, it doesn’t fix the jeopardy that is actively eroding our system of care.” Less than a year later, St. Luke’s is the one major institution — other than advocacy groups — standing in the way of restrictions on emergency abortion care in Idaho, a state with one of the most absolute abortion bans in the country. The Justice Department on March 5 dropped a lawsuit brought under President Joe Biden that claimed Idaho’s ban, which does not allow abortions to protect a patient’s health, violated a federal law mandating access to emergency medical care. St. Luke’s administrators, who made the same claim in their own lawsuit in January, vowed to press on. A temporary court order in the St. Luke’s case will allow emergency abortions to take place for now. The abortion lawsuit is the latest controversial stance for a hospital system operating in a state whose political climate treats public institutions — hospitals, libraries, schools, health departments — not as the basic infrastructure of society but as ideological battlegrounds. St. Luke’s defended its medical staff during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when residents objected to masks and vaccines. It took on Ammon Bundy, one of the state’s flagbearers of far-right extremism, whose followers protested against hospital employees caught up in a child welfare case involving the grandchild of one of Bundy’s friends. St. Luke’s administrators declined to speak with States Newsroom and ProPublica for this story, citing the ongoing litigation. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, who is defending against the abortion challenge, has accused health care providers of deliberately misconstruing the ban’s prohibitions. Labrador, whose career was built on being to the right of mainstream Republicans, also has said, without providing evidence, that the reason doctors are leaving Idaho is because they made “the vast majority of their money on abortions, or they wanted to live in a place that allowed abortions.” The state lost 22% of its OB-GYN workforce and more than half the specialists who handle high-risk pregnancies in the 15 months after the Supreme Court abortion decision, according to a report from the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare. Odette Bolano, the former CEO of Saint Alphonsus Health System, a St. Luke’s competitor, said health care institutions have historically been reluctant to take on anything with political implications. They often stay neutral because they care for all patients regardless of politics. But Bolano, who led the Catholic-based system for six years, said everything seems to have taken on political undertones in recent years. She said health systems now have to take difficult positions when they feel something keeps them from delivering safe care. “The price in reputation — regardless of whatever stance you take and steps you take to safeguard patients, visitors and the community at large — could be significant. It could land you in a very bad place,” she said, “but values, integrity and ability to deliver on commitments have to take precedence.” In a small state like Idaho, where the population just crossed 2 million, St. Luke’s is a behemoth. It has eight hospitals and ranks among the state’s largest employers, with a workforce of 18,000 and more than $4 billion in revenue. It’s also a nonprofit and unaffiliated with any national chain or any church, despite its name. During the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Luke’s took in a crush of critically ill patients. Some had ignored public health advice and listened to people who said vaccines were harmful — including a local pathologist who promoted COVID-19 vaccine skepticism and ineffective treatments, then won appointment to a public health board alongside Labrador. Leading St. Luke’s through the pandemic turmoil was Chris Roth. Roth joined the system in 2007. He led its Boise-area operations, worked as the system’s chief operating officer, then became CEO when his longtime boss retired in February 2020. The next month, Idaho went into shelter-in-place mode with the rest of the world. Blaine County, anchored around the Sun Valley ski resort and a tiny St. Luke’s hospital, became one of the nation’s early COVID-19 hot spots. Roth and other St. Luke’s leaders spoke out in support of public health measures while a small but loud contingent of Idahoans made a show of defying those measures: burning masks at the state Capitol, staging aggressive protests at the Boise region’s health department and showing up at the homes of that agency’s board members. Souza, who worked as a critical care doctor and pulmonologist in addition to his leadership role at St. Luke’s, gave sobering warnings about the grave reality he saw in the hospital. In the lead-up to the 2020 holiday season, Souza went on a conservative talk radio show and urged listeners to heed public health advice. When health care organizations including St. Luke’s announced they would require COVID-19 vaccines for employees, anti-vaccine groups set up protests outside hospitals and clinics belonging to St. Luke’s and others. Roth described a sense of helplessness and anxiety in a 2021 interview with the Idaho Capital Sun: “We’re deeply concerned about our front-line caregivers, and they are just going through hell. Every day. And then they go out to the community, and it’s business as usual — rodeos, fairs, football games, debates in the school boards.” He spoke of St. Luke’s doctors who faced laughter from the audience at a school board meeting when they described the scene inside hospitals. “It’s like we’re seeing the de-evolution of humanity, right in front of our eyes,” Roth said. As the nation was starting to emerge from the pandemic in 2022, another source of anxiety arose for St. Luke’s and its hospital workers: Ammon Bundy. The flashpoint was the hospital’s role in a child protection case involving the infant grandson of one of Bundy’s friends. After police responded to a child welfare report by the baby’s health care provider, the boy was taken to St. Luke’s, where a doctor determined he was malnourished and in need of care, according to the subsequent lawsuit by St. Luke’s and trial testimony. Bundy showed up at the hospital, demanding the baby be returned to his parents. (The baby was returned six days later. No one was charged with child abuse or neglect.) Bundy was arrested there and later pleaded guilty to trespassing. Bundy, a self-proclaimed defender against government tyranny, moved to Idaho from Arizona after prevailing against charges associated with the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge office in eastern Oregon and a 2014 standoff over his father’s unpermitted use of federal lands for cattle grazing in Nevada. During the pandemic, Bundy led a crowd that forced its way into the Idaho House of Representatives. He also founded the People’s Rights Network, an organizing apparatus for people with populist, anti-government and survivalist goals. Bundy, his friend and their followers took to blogs and social media after the friend’s grandson was taken to St. Luke’s, and they coordinated protests outside the hospital, where they were joined by dozens of people, including far-right legislators. Those protests came to a head one day when Bundy posted a now-deleted video urging people to go to the hospital and begin “making noise” because he believed the baby was about to be transferred to a foster placement and “we need to go back there and get this straightened out. … This is an emergency.” Court records say the hospital went on lockdown and sent ambulances elsewhere for an hour as an angry, armed crowd gathered outside. Callers flooded the switchboard and sent profane and threatening emails to hospital staff and executives. Roth would later read one of the emails from a protester aloud in court. It included antisemitic and homophobic slurs and said Roth was “getting strung up along with everyone else who is complacent in the medical tyranny.” The hospital system and some of its employees, including Roth, sued Bundy, his friend and their associated commercial operations in May 2022, alleging defamation. The lawsuit accused them of spinning lies that harmed St. Luke’s and its employees — whose names, photos and personal information spread online via Bundy’s allies and the People’s Rights Network. Roth, in a court filing, said he worried that parents wouldn’t bring in their children for care if they believed St. Luke’s “secretly vaccinates children and engages in child trafficking.” Citing armed protests against St. Luke’s, Roth said it was important for the health system to stand up to bullying and intimidation. “Inaction would signal that this type of behavior is acceptable in our community,” Roth wrote. “It is not.” The baby’s grandfather answered St. Luke’s lawsuit by repeating, without evidence, his allegations against the health system. Bundy told States Newsroom and ProPublica in a recent interview he personally didn’t make false allegations. He called someone else’s claim that St. Luke’s conspired to kidnap children “so ridiculous.” But in a still-public Instagram post, made while the lawsuit was active, Bundy accused St. Luke’s CEO of being “an accessory to child abduction.” Bundy decided not to participate in the defamation case against him. For more than a year, he ignored the court proceedings and didn’t show up to the trial to offer a defense. He thought the worst-case outcome would be a $50,000 default judgment, he told ProPublica. He was wrong. A jury rendered a $52 million judgment. Bundy and the People’s Rights Network were responsible for about half. His co-defendant filed an appeal, and the appeal request is pending. Although Bundy did not appeal, his tangle with St. Luke’s wasn’t over. Bundy had a history of defying legal orders. After state officials barred him from the Capitol, police arrested Bundy multiple times for violating that order. After a court sentenced him to community service, Bundy tried to say campaign events during his failed bid for governor counted as service. St. Luke’s was not going to let go of its courtroom win. When Bundy sold his property to a friend so that St. Luke’s would have no claim to it, St. Luke’s sued Bundy again — and it now owns the property. When he continued to defy court orders, St. Luke’s sought contempt charges. While Bundy was being arraigned, the judge threatened him with arrest if, once again, he failed to show up for a trial. Bundy didn’t show, and the judge issued a $250,000 misdemeanor warrant that remains active in Ada County. Bundy moved to Utah and, in July, filed for bankruptcy. Within days of the bankruptcy filing, St. Luke’s was on Bundy’s heels once more. The hospital system has since persuaded the bankruptcy court to order Bundy and his wife to show up and answer questions about their finances and assets. Bundy has called St. Luke’s actions “lawfare.” When asked for comment on his actions since the defamation suit was decided, Bundy said, among other things, “Sounds like another hit piece.” The public positions St. Luke’s took during COVID-19 and with Bundy were a precursor to its decision to take a stand on abortion as emergency treatment. “St. Luke’s is here because we care about the pregnant patients in our community, and we want them to receive the emergency care that is available to anyone who presents to an emergency room,” Peg Dougherty, deputy general counsel for St. Luke’s Health System, said outside Boise’s federal courthouse last week. Idaho’s trigger abortion ban was ready to go two months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade’s protections of abortion rights in 2022. It criminalizes the termination of a pregnancy at any stage. Penalties include prison time, and the physician’s medical license can be revoked. There are exceptions for documented rape and incest or to save a pregnant patient’s life, but not to preserve the patient’s health. Opponents say a health exception is essential in rare cases where emergency abortion is the best treatment option, such as when a patient’s water breaks before the fetus is viable. That can quickly cause a deadly infection. In a brief to the Supreme Court describing one such case, an abortion rights group said the doctor, whom it did not name, decided it was necessary to wait until the patient’s condition was life-threatening before feeling legally permitted to end the pregnancy. The group described the experience as “traumatic for the patient and torture for the doctor.” The Biden Justice Department sued the state in 2022. The agency alleged Idaho’s ban conflicts with a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requiring any emergency room that accepts Medicare to offer stabilizing treatment to every patient who comes through the door. A series of shifting appeals and court orders in the case left emergency abortion care in Idaho legal, then illegal, then legal again since June. Anticipating that the Trump administration would drop the Biden-era challenge, St. Luke’s sued in January, seeking a new order while the case proceeds. Senior U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill granted St. Luke’s request for a temporary order on March 5, keeping emergency abortions legal while Winmill considers a longer-term injunction. Dr. Caitlin Gustafson, president of the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare and a practicing family medicine obstetrician, said it is remarkable that St. Luke’s is willing to use its power so that patients and doctors don’t feel abandoned. “The need for EMTALA isn’t going away no matter what administration is there, and we’re still stuck,” Gustafson said. She also suspects the lawsuit could be a bulwark against further attempts by politicians and interest groups to dictate the decisions of health care providers. Physicians and advocates in other states are watching. Dr. Christopher Ford, an emergency room physician in Wisconsin, has seen the effects of an abortion ban on emergency care, when abortion was effectively prohibited in Wisconsin for 15 months. “We had patients presenting with partial surgical or medical abortions who were very apprehensive to seek care,” Ford said. “We had very young patients from age 16, up to age 41 or 42, who were essentially septic and at incredible risk of mortality and morbidity.” He said it seems atypical for a hospital system to take on a lawsuit of this nature, and he is glad to see it. “It’s definitely a testimony to how important this is and how other hospitals should follow suit,” he said. “Just reading it from the outside looking in, the hospitals are getting involved as a last-ditch effort as the only way to advocate for their patients sitting in front of them.” When health systems sue, it is typically over business matters. Individual doctors and patients are the usual plaintiffs in abortion cases, along with advocacy organizations like the Center for Reproductive Rights or Planned Parenthood. For those reasons, St. Luke’s stands out. “I think it’s a testament to them meeting the moment,” said Melanie Folwell, executive director for Idahoans United for Women and Families, which is organizing an abortion rights ballot initiative for 2026. “We are at an inflection point, and if they don’t act, who will?”
Vernal Coleman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The Trump administration has shut down a unit of the Department of Veterans Affairs created under President Joe Biden to address disparities in how the federal government provides disability compensation to military service members. The closure of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Office of Equity Assurance effectively hobbles internal efforts at the VA to investigate and eliminate long-standing racial inequities the department itself has acknowledged. The office was eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of programs broadly aimed at addressing diversity, equity or inclusion, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. But several VA sources said that the office was not exclusively focused on race, and that it takes on cases for a range of veterans to ensure no one is denied proper benefits — including for reasons of age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and geographic location. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, criticized the Trump administration’s action as “excessive” and “reckless.” “The closure of the OEA will undoubtedly have disastrous effects on the care we offer veterans,” Takano, former chair and now ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement to ProPublica. “This office was making it easier for minority veterans to access care and benefits. Its closure will directly impact the care and benefits received by minority veterans.” Richard Brookshire, co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, a nonprofit focused on rectifying discrimination faced by Black veterans, echoed Takano’s concerns. “It’s a first step toward gutting the second-largest agency in our federal government,” he said. “The consequences will be dire, wide-reaching and deadly.” VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz declined to say whether the agency would continue to study racial disparities. But he emphasized in a statement that newly installed VA Secretary Douglas Collins “treats all veterans and beneficiaries fairly and equally, so the Office of Equity Assurance is no longer needed.” He added: “The money saved by closing the office will be redirected to improve health care, benefits and services for Veterans, all of whom we treat fairly and equally. VA will always fulfill its duty to provide veterans, families, caregivers and survivors the health care and benefits they have earned. That is a promise.” The VA grew significantly under the Biden administration, with tens of thousands of employees added to beef up capacity in conjunction with the passage of the PACT Act. The 2022 law expanded health care and benefits for an estimated 3.5 million veterans exposed to toxic substances from burn pits and other chemicals. The Biden administration also created the OEA and several other initiatives to help analyze and rectify discrimination in the delivery of health care, benefits and other services. Those moves were seen as a direct response to long-standing complaints by minority veterans. The closure of the OEA is just one of several disruptive staff cuts at the VA in recent weeks. Around 2,400 VA employees have lost their positions since the Trump administration began slashing the federal workforce, with significantly more firings to come. The department currently employs around 470,000 workers. Kasperowicz said that the administration plans would shed nearly 15% of its workforce, dropping the total to roughly 398,000. Workers assigned to the OEA were informed on Feb. 14 via email that their positions were terminated immediately and that the office was being “liquidated.” The notices were sent to nearly all of the office’s employees, effectively dissolving the unit, sources familiar with the firings told ProPublica. The administration reversed at least some of the terminations later that month, according to correspondence obtained by ProPublica. Workers who were attached to the OEA have now been placed on administrative leave pending a possible reassignment within the VA or another federal department, according to sources familiar with the department who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “But even if they are reassigned, it won’t be to the OEA,” said one official familiar with the moves. “It’s definitely gone.” Black veterans and their advocates have long complained of a divide in how claims are handled. An ongoing suit filed by the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress against the government gave the suspicions new life. The group’s case was bolstered by data unearthed through Freedom of Information Act requests from the Black Veterans Project, which found that the VA was far more likely to reject applications for service-related disabilities by Black veterans than their white counterparts. Attorneys for the federal government asked the judge overseeing the suit to dismiss the claims, stating that only the VA secretary has jurisdiction to decide disputes over award benefits and that the court lacks the jurisdiction to hear them. A 2023 U.S. Government Accountability Office report also concluded that there were disparities. It found that the department approved compensation applications for service-related disabilities like hearing loss, impaired limb movement and post-traumatic stress by Black veterans at lower rates than veterans of other races. The report found that between 2010 and 2020 the approval rate for benefit applications made by White male veterans was 3% to 22% higher than Black male veterans for the selected medical conditions. The OEA’s demise is just one part of an ongoing rollback of the racial equity programs the Trump administration has called “radical and wasteful.” Since Trump entered office, a webpage detailing the VA’s work to address equity and diversity appears to have been scrubbed from its website. In January, the administration fired the heads of internal advisory groups formed to address the concerns and needs of minority and female veterans. One of those groups, the Center for Minority Veterans, worked in conjunction with the OEA to address racial disparities in disability compensation. Between 2013 and 2018, the advisory group raised its concerns over the Black veterans’ lower rate of claims approval to VA leadership five times, according to the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress suit. Mariela Roca, a former Republican congressional hopeful, took over as director of the advisory group last week. It’s unclear what specific strategies the group will pursue to advance the needs and concerns of minority veterans under new leadership. Roca did not respond to a request for comment.
Callie Ferguson and Erin Rhoda, Bangor Daily News, and Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. On a Monday last month, after a conservative Maine legislator expressed outrage on Facebook about a transgender girl winning a high school pole vaulting event, the hammer of the federal government began to swing. By Friday of that week, Feb. 21, President Donald Trump singled out Maine’s governor during a White House event and threatened to cut off the state’s federal funding. “See you in court,” Gov. Janet Mills shot back. Then came a barrage of investigations and threats: The U.S. Department of Education opened inquiries into the Maine Department of Education and the student’s school district, alleging they had violated federal civil rights law. The same day, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services targeted the Maine Education Department, too, as well as the state’s university system. The U.S. Department of Agriculture then launched an investigation into the university system; and on Tuesday, the university said the USDA had halted funding as the agency investigates “prospective” civil rights violations, records show. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter that “Maine should be on notice” that the agency was poised to sue. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration even pulled $4.5 million for marine research, but it didn’t touch the 33 other grantees who get similar funding. Then last week, the Social Security Administration briefly became the sixth federal agency to target Maine, canceling contracts that allowed hospitals to automatically report births and funeral homes to report deaths. Although the Social Security contracts were reinstated, and the state may reapply for the marine research funding, the moves had already wreaked havoc. Now, more federal agencies are pressing down on Maine than there are transgender girls competing in girls’ sports in the state. Only two transgender girls are competing this school year, according to the Maine Principals’ Association. “The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine,” said David Webbert, a longtime civil rights attorney in Maine. To Webbert, it’s as if Trump is saying: “‘Maine believes in transgender rights? Well, you’re going to see what happens to you.’” Some view Maine as a test case for how the Trump administration may try to force its policies on states, regardless of existing state laws. In public comments, residents have invoked the state’s motto to rally Mainers: “Dirigo,” Latin for “I lead.” “It’s Maine now, but what state is it going to be next? This is not just a Maine issue, but Maine spoke up. So right now, it’s, ‘Let’s make an example out of Maine,’” said Kris Pitts, executive co-director of the nonprofit MaineTransNet. State officials, thrust into the spotlight, have been trying to avoid becoming more of a target, carefully choosing their words and declining interviews with reporters. And Mills hasn’t challenged Trump again publicly on this issue. There are signs the administration is preparing to force other states to follow the president’s directives: The DOJ recently sent letters to California and Minnesota threatening to sue those states if they don’t ban transgender girls from athletics. The Trump administration also is taking a multiagency approach with Columbia University. On Friday, several federal agencies canceled a combined $400 million in grants and contracts because, the administration alleged, the university was not sufficiently combatting antisemitism. The press release announcing the multimillion-dollar punishment contained a caution for noncompliant institutions: “Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.” Nearly everything about the blitz of investigations in Maine, including how they’re being carried out, is not ordinary. Federal agencies that don’t usually enforce civil rights laws in schools launched inquiries. HHS, for instance, usually focuses on health care access for people with disabilities or language translation, and there’s no evidence it’s conducted an investigation of Maine in the past 20 years. Not only did it dive into Maine’s policies on transgender athletes, it reached a conclusion with unprecedented speed. Investigations like this typically take months, if not years, according to a review of federal investigation data and records by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. But just one business day after announcing the investigation, the federal agency decided the Maine Department of Education wasn’t giving girls equal opportunities and had violated Title IX “by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes,” according to a letter from HHS to the state. It sent that finding to the general inbox at the Maine attorney general’s office after interviewing no one from that office, the Education Department, governor’s office or officials from two high schools cited in the letter for allowing transgender athletes to compete against girls, according to those agencies and schools. The Maine attorney general’s office pointed out that the letter cited an incorrect sum of federal funding that flows to the state. Legal experts also viewed its interpretation of Title IX as problematic. Trump’s Feb. 5 “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order asserted that transgender girls can’t play girls’ sports under that federal law. But Title IX has never required schools to exclude them, and Trump’s order can’t rewrite federal law, said Deborah Brake, a professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law. “The president can put out an executive order saying anything he wants,” Brake said, but “there has never been a court decision interpreting Title IX to require the exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports.” The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine. In a statement, the agency reiterated that Maine could lose federal funding if it didn’t comply with its position. “HHS will investigate and enforce Title IX to the full extent permitted by law to uphold fairness, safety, dignity, and biological truth in women’s and girls’ educational athletic opportunities. Men have no place in women’s sports,” it said. The USDA investigation of the University of Maine, launched on a Saturday, the day after Mills’ exchange with Trump, also is unusual. In announcing the investigation, the department said $100 million to the university was at risk because of the state’s “blatant disregard” of Trump’s order; a university system spokesperson said that amount reflected multiple years of funding. Then came a series of questions, according to records obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. At 10:50 a.m. the following Tuesday, a USDA official sent a University of Maine official 10 yes-or-no questions about its transgender athlete policies — and gave her 1 hour, 10 minutes to respond. The officials agreed to discuss the questions over a Zoom call, and, about five hours after that call, the USDA sent a list of follow-up questions. The agency wanted those answers by 1 p.m. the following day. Sherron Jernigan, a USDA civil rights director for the animal and plant inspection service, sent the questions: “Does the University of Maine System provide sex-separated toilet, locker room, and shower facilities for male student athletes and female student athletes?” The university answered “yes.” “Does the University of Maine System permit a biological male to participate in individual or team contact sports with biological females?” The university answered “no.” The university’s Title IX coordinator told the USDA that none of the seven universities within the system has transgender athletes participating in NCAA-sanctioned sports. (Of the more than 500,000 students who compete on NCAA teams across the country, fewer than 10 are transgender, the league’s president recently told a U.S. Senate panel.) In her response to follow-up questions, Liz Lavoie, the university’s Title IX coordinator, added that the USDA had not given the university “any explanation as to the basis or scope of its inquiry, or the steps in the process.” “Further, we have been given mere hours to respond to both sets of questions and we are responding in good faith but find the approach concerning given the lack of official service and the informal nature that the questions and interview have been presented,” Lavoie wrote. The USDA did not issue any findings after the questioning, but the agency already is taking action. On Tuesday, the university said the USDA had frozen funding that could affect research on everything from the contamination of Maine farms by forever chemicals to the sustainability of Maine’s lobster industry. Last fiscal year, the USDA awarded nearly $30 million to the University of Maine. A USDA spokesperson said the agency would not comment on a pending investigation. Webbert, the civil rights attorney, called the federal government’s inquiries “a show.” “It’s a political move dressed up, very barely, with a legal process, but it’s a fake legal process. So it is very concerning because they’re not even trying to make it look like it’s due process,” he said. “It reeks of pure politics.” Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege. The federal government has made no effort to hide the ideological perspective that its various inquiries are seeking to enforce in Maine and the rest of the county, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. In announcing its action in Maine, HHS said it wanted to “restore biological truth to the federal government” and in its findings cited an article from OutKick, a Fox-owned conservative news site with a mission of “exposing the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism.” Meanwhile, the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education — which does have a mandate to investigate gender-based discrimination in schools and, with more than 500 people, dwarfs most of the nation’s civil rights enforcement divisions — seemed to conclude that Maine was violating Title IX before it finished investigating. The press release announcing the launch of the investigation quoted the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor: “It is shameful that Governor Mills refuses to stand with women and girls. Her rejection of the antidiscrimination obligations that Maine voluntarily accepted when it agreed to receive federal taxpayer dollars is unlawful.” Trainor linked to “credible local reporting” around the pole vaulter in his letter to Maine officials announcing the civil rights investigation. The report came from the Maine Wire, an online outlet founded by a conservative think tank based in the state. The office hasn’t made contact with Maine since it notified state agencies of its investigation, according to the Maine agencies. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment. Maine’s governor never believed her state would receive an impartial investigation. “I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined,” Mills said in a statement after the Education Department investigation began. She has since declined to discuss her view of Maine’s transgender athlete policy. But she has reiterated that Trump legally can’t force the state to violate its own law, the Maine Human Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on gender identity. Mainers aren’t sure what this full-court press will mean for their state; keeping up with it is hard enough. State Sen. Joe Rafferty, a Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s committee on education and cultural affairs, expressed disbelief when a reporter informed him that HHS’ investigation only lasted four days. He wasn’t aware it had officially started. “That is why I think part of this is a mirage,” he said of the various investigations. The eventual resolution, he said, is more likely to be settled in a courtroom. Indeed, HHS referred its finding to the DOJ, which can sue Maine to remove its federal funding. (The health agency also expanded its investigation last week to include the Maine Principals’ Association and the Maine high school where the pole vaulter is a student, according to the agency.) The results of that lawsuit could have significant implications, said Brake, the law professor. Not once since Congress enacted Title IX in 1972 has the DOJ ever cut off funding for a violation. All the federal attention has been unsettling to some Mainers, welcomed by others who don’t want transgender girls playing girls’ sports and disruptive to the 625-student Greely High School, which the transgender pole vaulter attends. “It’s just upsetting to everybody at school to be the center of attention and focus. It’s unnerving to go to school and the school is surrounded by police and reporters on every corner,” Gia Drew, who leads a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group called EqualityMaine, said of what she’s hearing from the community. “It’s hard to focus on a calculus test when your friends are under attack. It affects not just trans people but everyone who is part of a school system.” After state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican from Auburn, singled out the student on her Facebook page and brought Trump’s attention to Maine, parents in the school district planned to show support by displaying signs and handing out treats before classes began, said state Rep. Christina Mitchell, a Democrat who represents Cumberland, home to Greely High School. She’s also a school board member in the district. But there were television trucks and a police presence surrounding the school, so parents decided not to add to the commotion. The Bangor Daily News and ProPublica reached out to the family of the student athlete but received no response. Mitchell said other students, including the transgender student’s teammates and competitors, are supportive of her. “Nobody was making a fuss,” she said. And many in Maine don’t want a fuss. Even as Mills’ response to Trump made some proud — you can now buy “See you in court” T-shirts — others recognized that it launched Maine into the nation’s consciousness. “You watch it and feel like: ‘Oh, all eyes will be here. This will be something big,’” said Pitts, with MaineTransNet. Libby and other Republican lawmakers have welcomed the chance to amplify their viewpoint that allowing transgender girls in sports is unsafe and discriminates against girls. Another Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to the Legislature to require transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the gender they were assigned at birth. “All of the accomplishments of women over the years are being erased by men masquerading as women, erasing us from the history books,” Libby said in a weekly address from Maine House Republicans. While Libby has been censured by Democrats who control the Maine House for her initial Facebook post about the pole vaulter, she has continued to make appearances on right-wing media to urge the governor to stop supporting the right of transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. On Tuesday, she filed a lawsuit in Maine District Court against the state’s House speaker over the censure, accusing him of stripping her voting rights “in retaliation for protected speech on a highly important and hotly debated matter of public concern,” according to the complaint. Her party has rallied around her and her cause. “Allowing biological boys to compete with our girls, is not only unpopular, and unfair, but it is also illegal,” Republican House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham of Winter Harbor said in a written statement. “Governor Mills should abandon this indefensible position and uphold Title IX protections for our girls.” Maine institutions being targeted by the federal government have continued to follow state law. And at a regularly scheduled school board meeting at Greely High School on Thursday night, the board president pledged the district’s “unwavering support” of all students. Mitchell said that Maine may be the federal government’s target now, but other states could be next. “I think you have to stand up to it. Whatever you think is right, you have to stand up for it, because, if you don’t, it’ll just keep going and spread to other places,” Mitchell said. “We’re a small state, but if you give an inch, you know?” Eli Hager contributed reporting.
Eric Umansky ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In the fall of 2022, the New York Police Department began posting videos online to promote one of its latest initiatives: the Community Response Team, an elite unit formed under the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams. Punctuated by dramatic music and quick cuts, the first video, dubbed “True Blue NYPD Finest,” looked like the TV show “Cops.” Officers run and shout as they chase people joyriding on motorbikes and ATVs. One points a Taser at a motorcyclist and his passenger. Others tackle a rider, pinning him to the ground. Still others chase a motorbike onto the sidewalk, endangering nearby pedestrians. Within the NYPD, department officials were disturbed by what they saw. “I threw red flags,” said Matthew Pontillo, a former chief who noted what he called “constitutional concerns” in the footage. But Pontillo and two former department executives say that when they raised the videos and the officers’ conduct with one of the unit’s leaders, he pushed back and complained to an unlikely party: the mayor himself. If Adams was troubled by the unit’s actions, he hasn’t shown it. Instead, for more than two years, the mayor has repeatedly championed the CRT and his allies who run it, even as NYPD officials have warned its policing has been too aggressive. In 2023, for example, Pontillo wrote a scathing internal audit after finding that some CRT officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document the incidents. Weeks later, the mayor took to Instagram to boost the unit. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing a wide smile and khaki pants, CRT’s official uniform. The mayor has been so closely connected to the unit, former senior officials said, that at one point he had special access to a livestream of the team’s body-worn cameras. “The unit effectively reported directly to City Hall,” recalled a former top NYPD official with direct knowledge of the interactions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. “If you raised concerns, they would go directly to the mayor. All the time. It was insanity.” In a few instances, after getting a call from one of the unit’s leaders, the mayor questioned department lawyers who objected to officers’ actions, another former official recalled. In one case, the mayor demanded to know the name of the lawyer and asked whether they were stating the law or just their opinions. The CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, then ignored the lawyer’s objections, the official said. (Daughtry said he always cooperated with department lawyers.) The dynamic underscores a central irony around policing during the Adams administration: As a former police captain, Adams railed against the injustices of gung-ho policing; but as the mayor, he has embraced a unit that perpetuates it. Within the department, Adams’ views are clear. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” one of CRT’s other leaders, John Chell, told a local TV station in 2023, months after the promotional videos. The CRT has played a central role in carrying out Adams’ public safety priorities, from breaking up college campus protests to cracking down on illegal motorcycles and shuttering unlicensed cannabis shops. The fallout for New Yorkers has been significant. An officer chasing unlicensed motorcyclists killed a rider after swerving into him, body-camera footage shows. A commander punched a driver and kicked him in the head, according to cellphone video posted to social media. Officers stopped a young man without apparent cause, according to the audit, and, when he complained, a supervisor slammed him into a car window. Watch video ➜ The questionable conduct has sometimes extended into the bizarre. In November, a CRT officer repeatedly grabbed and squeezed a man’s genitals without searching him elsewhere, according to an investigation by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board that was obtained by ProPublica. Police then cited the man for littering. “When you put your thumb on the scale, it tips the culture,” Pontillo said. “And that starts with the mayor.” Adams declined to be interviewed for this story. A mayoral spokesperson provided a statement that said, in part, “While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to public safety and we are always working to improve operations, CRT has been an important addition to the NYPD’s mission to ensure community members are both safe and feel safe.” She added that the mayor has always instructed the team to follow the guidance of department lawyers. ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen former and current members of the NYPD, reviewed internal department records and watched video footage of several police encounters. As Adams faces calls to resign over federal corruption charges, our reporting provides a new window into how the mayor has wielded power — and whom he’s entrusted to carry out his vision for public safety. Among them are Daughtry and Chell, longtime leaders of the CRT. The two are allies of the mayor and were photographed with him at a group lunch in Washington in January around President Donald Trump’s inauguration. An NYPD spokesperson said they were part of a department contingent that was there “to assist with security efforts.” Within law enforcement circles, Chell and Daughtry have long stirred controversy. Chell shot a young man in the back in 2008, killing him. He was not criminally charged and has denied any wrongdoing. Chell said he fired by accident, but a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. He now holds the NYPD’s top uniformed position, where he oversees a wide swath of the department. (Chell did not respond to requests for comment.) Daughtry has been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have repeatedly engaged in misconduct, including for pointing a gun and threatening to kill a motorcyclist. Adams recently chose him to be deputy mayor for public safety, a role that will likely place him at the center of the city’s response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Daughtry did not respond to questions about his record. When the New York Daily News reported on it in 2023, he said, “At the end of the day, we have a job to do.”) Overall, more than half of the officers assigned to the CRT have been found to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of Civilian Complaint Review Board records. That compares with about 15% of officers across the NYPD. More than 40 have three or more cases of substantiated misconduct. The supervisor who shoved a man into the car window had 28. “It’s not like they’re taking the best of the best,” said a current senior officer who spoke with ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “They’re grabbing a bunch of cowboys and just letting them loose on the city.” A spokesperson for the NYPD touted the team’s record, saying it has confiscated nearly 4,000 motorbikes and ATVs, as well as hundreds of fake license plates and guns. But even department leaders have at times found it hard to track the team’s work. The 2023 audit of CRT, obtained by ProPublica, found that officers were going out on patrols even though they weren’t actually assigned to the team, making it difficult for commanders to track which officers were involved in particular actions. They were also frequently turning on their body-worn cameras too late to record full incidents, in violation of the patrol guide. A recent report by a city watchdog slammed the unit for its secrecy. Citing a “lack of public transparency,” the report noted CRT has no required training or policies on officers’ conduct. “The absence of clear rules,” the report concluded, “limits NYPD’s ability to effectively oversee CRT.” The NYPD spokesperson said Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who took office in November, is making changes. Among them, Tisch ordered hundreds of officers to return to their assigned units. “She will continue to review the department, including CRT, and make any changes necessary to ensure accountability and strengthen our ability to fight crime,” the spokesperson said. Watch video ➜ Samuel Williams died in 2023 after an encounter with the CRT that lasted about a second. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the Bronx man had gone riding on his motorbike after feeding his 6-year-old daughter breakfast and kissing her goodbye. He was crossing the University Heights bridge when CRT officers driving in the opposite direction spotted him. Unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in the city have long been a nuisance to New Yorkers and of particular concern to Adams. “We need to hold these drivers accountable,” Adams said when first running for mayor. That day on the bridge, CRT officer Raymond Perez decided to take drastic action. Body-camera footage shows that he swerved his unmarked police car across the yellow line and into oncoming traffic, hitting Williams head-on and sending him flying through the air. Officers found Williams splayed across the hood of a nearby car, suffering horrific injuries. His right leg was bent unnaturally — the tibia so badly broken it pierced his jeans, according to a report from civilian investigators. In the body-camera footage, Williams can be heard screaming in pain. “Why would you all hit me?” he asks between moans. “For a fucking dirt bike, are you serious?” Williams begged the officers for help. Instead, they pushed him against the car hood and handcuffed him. Perez did not respond to requests for comment, but the NYPD previously said the officer was trying to pull Williams over. Williams’ mother, Joyce Fogg, soon got a call that there had been an accident and her son was in the hospital. When Fogg arrived, she found police guarding Williams’ door and refusing to let anyone in. “They didn’t want nobody talking to him,” Fogg said. By the time Williams’ sister, Sha-Sha Prince, was allowed into the room, she recalled, “he was covered in a sheet.” After an autopsy, the New York medical examiner listed Williams’ cause of death as “complications following blunt injuries.” His family never heard from anyone at the NYPD. They did, however, get a bill from the city demanding $3,429.23 for the damage Williams caused to the police car when officers ran into him. (The bill was rescinded after the news organization The City reported it.) The family is now suing the city and the police. “It was CRT doing what they do, acting recklessly, and Sammy is not with us today as a result,” said their lawyer, Jaime Santana. (In a response to the suit, the city said Williams’ “culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part,” to his injuries.) The NYPD said Perez, as punishment, had forfeited 13 days of vacation. The department’s website shows the officer is still with the CRT. Adams has not always embraced aggressive police units. About 25 years ago, he launched a campaign to shutter one after its officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo. The killing was just the latest in a long trail of violence and abuse by the so-called Street Crimes Unit. Its motto was “We Own The Night.” At the time, Adams was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant and leader of a group of Black officers that spoke out against police brutality. To bring attention to the abuses, Adams orchestrated City Council testimony by a disguised officer who had been in the unit. He sat next to the officer as she laid out a pattern of rampant racism. The NYPD fired the officer an hour after her testimony. But Adams kept up his campaign, and the unit was eventually closed. In the years that followed, Adams continued to push for change. He gave key testimony in a historic lawsuit that challenged the NYPD’s use of a tactic known as stop-and-frisk, where officers were stopping, questioning and frisking residents without reasonable suspicion. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Adams spoke powerfully about how police leadership needs to step up. “We have to create a culture of zero tolerance,” Adams said. “That accountability really starts at the top.” But Adams had a different focus when he ran for mayor a year later. Amid concern over rising crime, Adams positioned himself as a former officer who would keep New Yorkers safe. One of his main proposals was to take guns off the streets by bringing back a refashioned Street Crimes Unit. “We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Adams said. “We can do it right.” After he took office, Adams announced the creation of new roving anti-crime units. “We will avoid mistakes of the past,” Adams said at a press conference. “These officers will be identifiable as NYPD, they will have body cameras and they will have enhanced training and oversight.” The units were dubbed Neighborhood Safety Teams, and officers in them did get more oversight. But a few months later, Daughtry, Chell and another Adams ally created the CRT. The unit was essentially off the books — it had never gone through the NYPD’s process for creating teams, there was no announcement at its debut and many of its members weren’t formally assigned to the group. “It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” said Pontillo, the former chief. Even top NYPD officials were kept in the dark. When they eventually learned of the CRT’s existence, they were befuddled, noting the launch of the similar much-publicized effort at nearly the same time. “What’s the difference between NSTs and CRTs?” said one of the former NYPD officials. “If you can answer that, lemme know.” Watch video ➜ The CRT began to make waves after the department started posting videos in the fall of 2022. In one 38-minute spot, Chell described how the team was created to address so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. “We attacked quality of life,” Chell says. “Our Community Response Team was all over the city of New York. And I’ll tell you this, it’s been highly, highly successful.” As he speaks, the video shows roughly a dozen CRT members, with Adams standing in the middle. By the spring of 2023, it was not only NYPD officials who were asking questions. Pontillo, a top department oversight official at the time, said the federal monitor’s office charged with overseeing the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk called him to ask about the CRT. Pontillo told ProPublica that he went to Chell, who told him, wrongly, the team was only a short-lived experiment. “There was an effort to conceal the reality and conduct of CRT,” Pontillo recalled. Neither Chell nor the NYPD responded to questions about the exchange. Another instance of secrecy involved body-worn cameras. Early in 2023, the team had purchased new models that allowed users to send live feeds to select individuals — including the mayor — but unit leaders had not informed others at the NYPD, according to an official’s notes from the time. For weeks, videos from the new cameras were not stored in the NYPD’s main database for footage, rendering it invisible to the department lawyers responsible for sharing evidence in criminal and civil cases. “Footage wasn’t being produced for discovery,” recalled one former department executive. “We lost our minds.” Jerome Greco, head of digital forensics at Legal Aid Society, said failing to turn over the footage “could get cases dismissed. It could have significant consequences, and frankly it should.” It was after the body-camera issue that Pontillo wrote his audit of CRT, which flagged the team’s aggressive policing. Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, ordered commanders to gather and discuss it. But the conversation didn’t go far. After meeting with the mayor that same day, Sewell resigned with no explanation. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But a former official close to her said she had grown tired of being undermined by Adams and his deputies. “I don’t think Sewell resigned because of CRTs,” the former official said. “But it was another thing on the list.” As for Pontillo, he said he was offered a choice: be demoted five ranks or retire. He chose the latter. The NYPD has not commented. The department previously told the news organization The City that leadership changes are common when a new commissioner arrives, as happened here. Over the past year, the CRT’s actions have often reflected the mayor’s priorities. Last spring, for example, Adams became the public face of opposition to demonstrations at Columbia University over the war in Gaza. Blaming “professional outside agitators,” he said, “This must end now.” That night, khaki-wearing CRT officers led the way in breaching a building that had been barricaded by protesters. The NYPD made a video of the operation, set to dramatic music. Days later, the mayor announced a new initiative to close down unlicensed cannabis shops. The CRT was again at the forefront of the operation. Surveillance footage from one store shows officers jumping over the counter to grab and arrest the shopkeeper after he had asked to see a court order. “When a cop tells you to do something, you fucking do it,” one officer said. It is difficult to tally the number of civilians who have had these types of encounters with the CRT. The NYPD does not disclose data about the team, as it does for most other units. But over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints of improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Among them was the incident with Williams, the motorcyclist who died. The similarly sized Neighborhood Safety Teams had about half as many complaints. Others have also been hurt by the team’s high-risk tactics. About a month after police ran into Williams, Daughtry and other officers pursued an alleged car thief into New Jersey, according to an internal report. Daughtry turned his car on the road in an attempt to block the driver, who slammed into it. The man was seriously injured after he fled the scene and jumped over the side of the highway. The report noted that Daughtry did not have his camera on during the chase. Chuck Wexler, who has studied chases as head of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, said Daughtry and the others shouldn’t have even started a pursuit. Given that there hadn’t been a violent crime, Wexler said, “why would you engage in a high risk chase that puts officers and civilians in danger?” Neither Daughtry nor the NYPD responded to questions about the incident. Tisch, the new commissioner, ordered officers in January to curtail chases. Meanwhile, Daughtry has not been punished, according to disciplinary records. Instead, he was promoted in July 2023, about two weeks after the chase, for what his official bio described as his “significant contributions as a leader and trailblazer.” “Let me tell you,” Adams said at a press conference last November, “Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, you don’t realize how much this young man has really changed the game of policing in this city.” In January, asked by an interviewer on YouTube about Daughtry, the mayor said: “Love Kaz, man.” Daughtry, just named as a deputy mayor, regularly boasts on social media about the CRT. One Instagram post from last summer showed dozens of officers posing in Central Park. “Your Community Response Teams own the night,” Daughtry wrote. It was an echo of the motto of the street crime unit that Adams had once fought to shutter. Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism. Do you have information about the NYPD or policing that we should know? Contact Eric Umansky at eric.umansky@propublica.org or securely on Signal at EricUmansky.04.
Richard A. Webster, Verite News This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination. Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing. Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die. There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan. Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18. Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations. Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry. And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states. “For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.” Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death. This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine. Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks. In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors. As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled. “It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand. The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries. In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job. West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home. In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.” Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him. “This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team. He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder. On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.” The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …” At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said. On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise. “I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.” Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective. He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl. “Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective. Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings. The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana. That charge would only stick for a few hours. Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival. At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said. Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter. On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization. Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls. Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.” West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.” In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death. The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings. West has said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com. At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t. By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.” The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.” Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning. West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him. When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project. Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub. After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana. Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter. A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them. Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police. Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names. Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated. In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time. West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney. A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human. Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project. Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases. When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that. West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method. Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison. “When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.” When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.” In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks. Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.” Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case. All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars. During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct. Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial. According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.” What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.” After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.” The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense. Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial. In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed. He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense. Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said. Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls. Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault. “There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams. Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures. When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died. None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded. In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show. Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team. Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.” One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.” Mariam Elba contributed research.
Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. The Connecticut legislature is working to overhaul the state's towing laws to protect consumers and lengthen the time before a towed vehicle can be sold. Drivers, landlords and towing industry leaders testified at the state Capitol on Monday during a public hearing before the state Transportation Committee. It is among the early actions that House Bill 7162 must undergo in the legislative process. The bill comes in response to an investigation by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that showed how state towing laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of vehicle owners. The news organizations’ reporting found that Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country between towing and the potential sale at 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500. People with low incomes have been disproportionately impacted by these laws, the news organizations found. “One single tow can have a profound snowball effect, forcing tenants to choose between paying for towing and paying their rent,” said Rep. Laurie Sweet, D-Hamden, testifying before the committee. The bill would overhaul Connecticut’s towing laws and address nearly all of the issues raised in CT Mirror and ProPublica’s reporting. The bill would lengthen the amount of time between a tow and the sale of a vehicle, require tow companies to post certain information about consumer rights and curb aggressive property management companies and towers who remove vehicles from private property. The proposed legislation would still let towers to seek permission to sell a car after 15 days, but they would not be allowed to actually sell a vehicle worth less than $1,500 until 30 days have passed. Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Tony Guerrera said Monday that sales typically take longer than 15 days right now, and the bill would clarify that process. Some car owners told CT Mirror and ProPublica that requirements to pay in cash and limited hours made it more difficult for them to get their vehicles back. Sometimes, they said, towing managers refused to release their cars despite showing ownership paperwork because the vehicle wasn’t yet registered in their name, an ambiguity in state law. The bill includes a slew of consumer protections including mandates that tow companies accept debit and credit card payments, make themselves “reasonably available” on weekends to allow people to get their cars back, issue a 24-hour warning ahead of a private property tow and require that companies accept a title or bill of sale to prove vehicle ownership. Under the bill, towing companies would also not be allowed to remove a vehicle from a private lot or garage for having an out-of-date parking permit unless it has been expired for more than 15 days. Melissa Anderson’s car was towed from her Hamden apartment complex parking lot in 2021 because her temporary parking permit had expired just two days before her appointment to register the car at the DMV. “This is awesome. It’s great news,” Anderson said when informed of the proposed legislation. “I wouldn’t have lost my car, and now maybe others won’t either.” Guerrera submitted testimony and spoke in favor of the bill on Monday, saying it contains “meaningful new consumer protection measures.” Guerrera’s written testimony also outlined administrative steps the agency has taken to address issues outlined in the news outlets’ reporting. He said it is updating forms and guidance around the vehicle sale process and has assigned more staff to do “spot field checks” of towing companies. Others who testified in favor of the legislation also highlighted the consumer protection aspects of the bill. People whose vehicles had been towed told lawmakers about the ways their lives had been impacted. Insurance companies said they’d also struggled with Connecticut’s policies. “This bill is long overdue,” said Rafie Podolsky, a legal aid attorney, in written testimony. “It makes a strong effort to identify and correct abusive practices in the towing industry that have had a serious and detrimental effect on motor vehicle owners.” Jack Boudreau, whose father and stepmother live in a Hamden apartment complex that was targeted by what residents said was predatory towing, testified Monday that his father had a truck sold under the system the bill seeks to change. “Due to ongoing fear and badgering from these towing entities, my siblings and I have been personally afraid and cautious to visit/stay with our family due to the ongoing threat of being falsely towed,” Boudreau said in his testimony. Jeniffer Perez Caraballo, a Hartford resident, told legislators about a time her car was towed from her apartment complex, which had a parking lot shared with other businesses. Her car was buried under ice and snow, and the fees quickly stacked up until she said it didn’t make sense to get it back. “It soon became easier to just let it go, because we were losing money every single day and we didn’t have a way to get to the place to actually pay,” Perez Caraballo said. “Why are we OK with people without means being a money generator for others?” she asked. The bill faces fierce opposition from the towing industry. About a dozen tow trucks lined the parking areas at the Capitol on Monday. Timothy Vibert, president of the Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said towers weren’t sufficiently involved in the drafting of the bill and asked lawmakers to create a working group to study the issue. Vibert, among other towers, also said the bill doesn’t address towing rates, which they said are too low. “I kind of chuckle about the bill of rights, about us towing people because we are getting inundated with abandoned motor vehicles,” Vibert said of the requirement that towers post information about consumer rights. And, he said, often the issue isn’t that people don’t want to pay, it’s that “they just don’t want the car anymore.” Landlords and property managers also opposed the bill, saying provisions such as the 24-hour warning would be difficult to maintain and impose unnecessary restrictions. They want to make sure their residents can park without any issues, they said. “Requiring a 24-hour written notice before towing an unauthorized or improperly parked car would inconvenience responsible tenants, disrupt essential operations like snow removal and create security risks,” Lauren Tagliatela, a member of the Connecticut Apartment Association, said. Legislative leaders on the Transportation Committee said they expect bipartisan support on the bill. “Let me be clear, these predatory towing practices are a direct attack on poor people and people who rent, and this bill seeks to address that in a holistic way,” Sweet said. State Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, also issued testimony in support of the bill. House Republicans on Friday called for a hearing into further reporting from CT Mirror and ProPublica that detailed how a DMV employee was able to sell towed cars and earn thousands. The lack of oversight at the state agency allowed him to trade favors for deep discounts on towed cars, an internal report found, but the agency didn’t take any action against the employee and he still works at the DMV. The employee said in an interview that he didn’t do anything wrong. “Calling the findings in this latest news report on towed vehicle sales ‘troubling’ would be a massive understatement,” said Friday’s statement from House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, and Government Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Carney, R-Old Saybrook. “State government is meant to serve residents, not exploit them. The fact that someone can brazenly use their taxpayer-funded position for personal gain is nothing short of outrageous.” Senate Republicans on Sunday issued a statement as well, calling for bipartisan reform to state law. “What this investigation has exposed is that consumers are not being properly protected and that the current system is unfair. Fraud and abuse is allowed to fester under the current system. Vulnerable residents are taken advantage of under the current system,” said the statement from Government Oversight Committee ranking member Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, General Law Committee ranking member Sen. Paul Cicarella, R-North Haven, and Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield. The Transportation Committee must vote on the bill by March 24 to move it along to the House.
Annie Waldman and Lisa Song ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism. While it’s not uncommon for the cancer institute to outline a couple of administration priorities, the scope and scale of the list is unprecedented and highly unusual, said six employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. All materials must be reviewed by an institute “clearance team,” according to the records, and could be examined by officials at the NIH or its umbrella agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Staffers and experts worried that the directive would delay or halt the publication of research. “This is micromanagement at the highest level,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. The list touches on the personal priorities of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who has repeatedly promoted medical conspiracy theories and false claims. He has advanced the idea that rising rates of autism are linked to vaccines, a claim that has been debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. He has also suggested that aluminum in vaccines is responsible for childhood allergies (his son reportedly is severely allergic to peanuts). And he has claimed that water fluoridation — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called “one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century” — is an “industrial waste.” In confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy said that he was not “anti-vaccine,” and that as secretary, he would not discourage people from getting immunized for measles or polio, but he dodged questions about the link between autism and vaccines. Another term on the list, “cancer moonshot,” refers to a program launched by President Barack Obama in 2016. It was a priority of the Biden administration, which intended for the program to cut the nation’s cancer death rate by at least half and prevent more than 4 million deaths. The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with — like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email. The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.” A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.) Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities. “This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.” During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process. Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity. Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles. The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”
Peter Elkind ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Lincare, a giant respiratory-device supplier with a long history of fraud settlements and complaints about dismal service, is facing its latest legal challenge: a lawsuit that claims its failures caused the death of a 27-year-old man with Down syndrome. The case, set to go to trial in state court in St. Louis on March 17, centers on the 2020 death of LeQuon Marquis Vernor, who suffered from severe obstructive sleep apnea and relied on a Lincare-supplied BiPAP machine to help him breathe while sleeping. The lawsuit, filed by his mother, accuses Lincare of negligence after the company took seven days to respond to her report that the device had stopped working. Lincare, the largest oxygen-device supplier in the U.S., with $2.4 billion in annual revenue, has long faced an array of legal issues, but it’s rare for a claim of wrongful death linked to its service and equipment to go to trial. The litigation over what happened to Vernor offers an unusual window into the company’s interaction with a vulnerable patient. This account is based on extensive court filings, including medical records, deposition excerpts and Lincare’s internal “customer account notes.” Vernor lived with his mother, who was 64 and on disability, in a tidy public housing apartment complex in Madison, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. He suffered from obstructive sleep apnea, a common problem among adults with Down syndrome that is often exacerbated by obesity. Just under 5 feet tall, Vernor weighed 280 pounds. Since 2015, Vernor had relied on a BiPAP (or bilevel positive airway pressure) machine, which delivers pressurized air through a mask. The device was prescribed after the Sleep Medicine Center at Washington University in St. Louis found that he repeatedly stopped breathing while he slept. “His airway is extremely crowded,” his doctor wrote in his medical notes at the time. Vernor, who was on Medicare, regularly used the device for 10 to 12 hours while he slept, according to his mother. He spent his days at New Opportunities, a local nonprofit that provides educational opportunities for people with developmental disabilities. “He was a happy young man,” said Kim Fears, executive director of the program. On Sept. 11, 2020, Vernor’s BiPAP suddenly started making “a loud buzzing or humming sound,” according to his mother, Sharon Vernor. She called the local Lincare office to report the problem, telling the customer service representative that the breathing machine wasn’t working and that it was “something that he needed” and “could not go without.” The Lincare representative told her that, because his machine was more than 5 years old, under Medicare rules her son was eligible for a replacement BiPAP but that Lincare would first need to obtain a new order from his doctor. This was required for Lincare to collect rental payments for the new device. The representative later recounted making a call that day to the doctor’s office that went unanswered, then faxing the office a request. (Lincare said it was unable to find a copy of the fax among its voluminous records related to LeQuon Vernor.) In the meantime, the representative suggested unplugging the malfunctioning BiPAP for 30 minutes. That didn’t fix the problem. The representative then promised, according to the account notes, to have a company respiratory therapist contact Sharon Vernor about the problem “until we get him a new machine.” But that never happened. No one from Lincare, which had an office about 20 minutes away, came out to fix the broken machine or assess LeQuon Vernor’s condition, according to testimony in the case. (Lincare hadn’t performed any home visits or maintenance on the BiPAP since 2015.) As the company acknowledges, Lincare also never offered to provide Vernor with a “loaner” BiPAP to use while waiting for a new device to arrive. Industry veterans say other companies commonly provide temporary replacements while a patient with a malfunctioning device waits for a repair or a new, permanent one to arrive. Without his BiPAP, Vernor struggled to sleep (and breathe), snoring loudly throughout the night. The Vernors got no further word from the company until seven days later, on Friday, Sept. 18. Late that morning, Lincare nurse Ann Marie Eberle called Vernor’s mother, explaining that she would be arriving later that day with his new BiPAP. The doctor’s order had finally arrived. Sharon Vernor prepared a breakfast of sausage and biscuits for her son, who hadn’t yet gotten up. She was surprised when he still didn’t appear; the smell of food usually roused him. About 2 p.m., she went upstairs to wake him up. She opened the door to find her son motionless in bed, with bloody fluid and foam coming out of his mouth and nose. His body was cold. The broken BiPAP sat on the dresser nearby. Frantic, she called 911. “I think my son’s dead! Oh Lord, please God, NO!” she screamed. “Please hurry!” An ambulance and police cars were still parked in front of the Vernors’ apartment when Lincare’s Eberle pulled up to deliver the new BiPAP machine. “It just gave you a sunken feeling when you saw that,” Eberle later testified. Sharon Vernor met her at the door in tears. Eberle’s notes state that she “SAT WITH MOTHER UNTIL FAMILY MEMBER ARRIVED. POLICE STILL PRESENT UNTIL CORONER ARRIVED WHEN I LEFT.” An autopsy completed two days later for the Madison County coroner found LeQuon Vernor’s lungs were a “maroon” color, heavily “congested and edematous” — filled with fluid that made it difficult to breathe. The report attributed Vernor’s death to “complications of obstructive sleep apnea.” In 2022, Sharon Vernor brought a wrongful death suit against Lincare and Washington University, now set for trial next week. Her case accuses Lincare of putting profits ahead of patient care by failing to make sure that her son got a replacement BiPAP quickly and refusing to provide “loaner equipment” in the meantime, because the company didn’t believe it could bill for it. “In short, when faced with information that LeQuon’s bipap was not working properly, Lincare did nothing,” a December 2024 filing alleged. The company took no action for a week, even though “Lincare knew this was a life-or-death situation for their customer LeQuon.” Johnny Simon, the Vernors’ St. Louis lawyer, said that “this was an avoidable, horrific tragedy.” (Sharon Vernor declined an interview request.) The suit also accuses the Washington University medical program of failing to respond “in a timely manner” to requests for a new BiPAP order. The clinic’s prescription for LeQuon Vernor’s new BiPAP was signed on Sept. 15 but not sent back to Lincare for two more days. The Washington University medical school declined comment through a spokesperson, citing the litigation. In a legal filing, the university denied the allegations in the suit. ProPublica has reported extensively on Lincare, which has a decadeslong history of Medicare-related misconduct, including multiple settlements regarding claims of billing fraud. And that misconduct continued even while the company was under government “probationary” agreements requiring it to provide enhanced compliance oversight. On the Better Business Bureau’s website, 939 customer reviews give the company an average 1.28 rating out of 5, offering lacerating complaints about dirty and broken equipment, delivery delays, nightmarish customer service, improper billings, and harassing sales and collection calls. In emailed responses to questions from ProPublica, Lincare offered its “sympathies” to the Vernor family but asserted that “the allegations against Lincare are false.” The company said that it is legally barred from providing even a loaner BiPAP until it receives a new prescription and suggested that it had no reason to believe LeQuon Vernor faced a life-threatening situation, because “a BiPAP is not a life-sustaining device.” The company added: “Lincare delivers a high level of care to millions of patients in a heavily regulated field. Our response to this case was consistent with legal requirements and our policies.” Lincare’s lawyers went a step further in a February court filing, blaming what happened on an alleged failure by Vernor’s doctors to provide the new order promptly. “Lincare did its job,” the company argued. “The moment Lincare knew that Decedent needed a new machine, Lincare reached out to Decedent’s medical provider. However, Lincare did not receive an updated prescription until one week later.” The company, they added, was “at the mercy of Decedent’s medical provider to supply an updated prescription.” Sharon Vernor’s lawyers dispute Lincare’s claim that it was barred from providing a loaner BiPAP without obtaining a new prescription. (A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declined to address the issue, citing a “pause on mass communications and public appearances” imposed by the new Trump administration.) LeQuon Vernor’s 2015 prescription, filled by Lincare, also specified that he had a “lifetime” need for a BiPAP. Two former Lincare managers told ProPublica that they were discouraged from dispatching temporary replacement equipment; at least one manager instructed staff to falsely tell customers “all our loaners are out.” One said that, acting on orders from her supervisor, she tossed CPAP and BiPAP devices marked by local offices as loaners into dumpsters. The respiratory companies they later worked for, both said, routinely provided loaner equipment to patients who relied on a breathing device while they awaited a repair or a doctor’s order required to replace it. As one of them put it, “We would make sure the patient is taken care of in that moment.” (“Lincare’s policy is to provide loaner equipment to its patients in accordance with our patient care standards and regulatory requirements,” the company responded.) In a deposition, Dr. Gabriela de Bruin, a Washington University neurologist who assessed Vernor’s sleep study in 2015, said allowing him to go a week without a functioning BiPAP posed a serious health risk, given the severity of his disease. Noting that Vernor had “severe sleep apnea,” she said, “Anytime we prescribe treatment for obstructive sleep apnea, our recommendation is that patients should use it nightly and should avoid being without their device if they can.” Asked whether Lincare should have understood that Vernor’s apnea created a risk of death, she said, “It’s very difficult for me to say there was this much risk that he could have died.” She added, “But certainly, I would be very concerned.” A judge in the case dealt Lincare a setback on March 5, ruling that the evidence presented by Sharon Vernor’s lawyers had met the state’s legal standard for seeking punitive damages. That, he wrote, would allow a “trier of fact” to reasonably conclude that “Lincare intentionally acted with a deliberate and flagrant disregard for the safety of others.” During deposition questioning, Pamela Karban, the manager of the Lincare outlet that handled LeQuon Vernor’s equipment, testified that “we should have referred the mom, if it was that serious, to take him to the nearest emergency room.” Asked whether the company was negligent for not providing Vernor with loaner equipment, she replied: “Yes. We failed to provide that.” Lincare subsequently submitted an affidavit, signed by Karban, stating that she didn’t understand the legal meaning of the term “negligence.” Doris Burke contributed research.
Matt Krupnick for ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Alexandria Ehlert has pursued a college education hoping to become a park ranger or climate scientist. Now she’s wondering whether she’ll ever finish her studies at College of Menominee Nation. The scholarship that kept her afloat at the tribal college in Wisconsin vanished in recent weeks, and with it her optimism about completing her degrees there and continuing her studies at a four-year institution. Ehlert is one of about 20 College of Menominee Nation students who rely on scholarships funded through a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. The Trump administration suspended the grant amid widespread cost-cutting efforts. Unless other money can be found, Ehlert and the other scholarship students are in their final weeks on campus. “It’s leaving me without a lot of hope,” said Ehlert, a member of the Oneida nation. “Maybe I should just get a warehouse job and drop school entirely.” Many staff and students at the country’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, which rely heavily on federal dollars, have been alarmed by the suspension of crucial grants early in Donald Trump’s second presidency. Even before he retook office, the schools essentially lived paycheck to paycheck. A 1978 law promised them a basic funding level, but Congress hasn’t come close to fulfilling that obligation in decades. Today, the colleges get a quarter-billion dollars less per year than they should, when accounting for inflation, and receive almost nothing to build and maintain their campuses. Water pipes break frequently, roofs leak, ventilation systems fail and buildings crumble. Other than minuscule amounts of state funding in some cases and a smattering of private donations, tribal colleges that lose any federal funding have few other sources of income. “You freeze our funding and ask us to wait six months to see how it shakes out, and we close,” said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies for tribal colleges in Washington, D.C. “That’s incredibly concerning.” At least $7 million in USDA grants to tribal colleges and universities have been suspended, Rose said. The schools’ concerns have been magnified by a lack of communication from federal agencies, which she attributed partly to many federal workers being laid off as the Trump administration has made across-the-board cuts to the federal bureaucracy. Staff at the College of Menominee Nation were seeking reimbursement for $50,000 spent on research and other work conducted in January, when a federal website indicated a grant from the USDA had been suspended. It was a technical issue, they were told when they first reached someone at the agency, and they needed to contact technical support. But that didn’t solve the problem. Then a few days later the department told the college to halt all grant activity, including Ehlert’s scholarship, without explaining why or for how long. The frozen grants are administered by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA. They stem from a 1994 law, the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act, which designated the tribal colleges as land-grant institutions. Congress created the land-grant system in the 19th century to provide more funding for agricultural and vocational degrees. The 1994 addition of tribal colleges to the list of land-grant institutions gave the schools access to more funding for specific projects, mostly focused on food and agriculture. Many grants funded food research and projects to increase the availability of food, which is particularly important in rural areas with fewer grocery stores and restaurants. “It’s really precarious for tribal colleges,” said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in North Dakota. Her college also lost access to NIFA funds that were paying for food research and a program that connects Indigenous farmers, ranchers and gardeners to each other. “We don’t have large endowments to fall back on.” Several other college presidents said they were preparing for the worst. Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota was freezing salaries, travel and hiring, said President Dan King. So was United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota, which paused renovation of a dormitory originally built as military barracks in 1900. ProPublica reported in October that tribal colleges need more than half a billion dollars to catch up on campus maintenance. “We’re hoping to get started soon, because we have a short construction season here,” said Leander McDonald, president of the United Tribes college. At Blackfeet Community College in northern Montana, a NIFA grant is helping to create a program to train workers for the Blackfeet tribe’s new slaughterhouse. The college has started construction on a new building, but President Brad Hall worries that without access to promised federal funds, he might have to pause the project. Like other tribal college leaders, Hall hasn’t been able to get clear answers from the USDA. Unlike some other schools, his college has been able to access federal funds, but he wonders for how long. “Without the clarity and without the communication, it’s very hard to make decisions right now,” he said. “We’re in a holding pattern, combined with a situation where the questions aren’t being answered to our satisfaction.” USDA spokespeople declined to answer questions. The agency emailed a written statement noting that “NIFA programs are currently under review,” but did not provide details on which grants have been suspended or for how long. The agency did not respond to requests for clarification. Some tribal college leaders theorized they were targeted partly because of the formal name of the 1994 land-grant law: the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. The Trump administration has laid waste to federal spending on programs with “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in the names. While “equity” often refers to fairness in relation to race or sex, in the 1994 bill, Congress used the word to highlight that tribal colleges would finally have access to the same funds that 19th-century laws had made available to other land-grant colleges and universities. A spokesperson for the organization that represents nontribal land-grant institutions, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said he was not aware of any USDA funds to nontribal colleges being suspended. Tribal colleges argue their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous resources, rights and assets. Cutting off funding to the tribal colleges is illegal, several university presidents said. “We were promised education and health care and basic needs,” said King at Red Lake Nation College. “The fact that we’re being lumped in with these other programs — well, we’re not like them.” The College of Menominee Nation was only a year into its game-changing $9 million USDA grant, which was funding workforce development, training students in local trades such as forestry, and improving food access for Indigenous people. The five-year grant was a “once-in-a-lifetime award,” said college President Christopher Caldwell. “We want our students to graduate and have healthy job opportunities,” Caldwell said. “Now it just kind of got cut off at the knees.”
A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, James Bandler, ProPublica, and Lukáš Diko, Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak This story contains references to homophobia, antisemitism and racism, as well as mass shootings and other violence. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram” is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica. The documentary premieres March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website. The teen entered the chat with a friendly greeting. “Hello lads,” he typed. “Sup,” came a reply, along with a graphic that read “KILL JEWS.” Another poster shared a GIF of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with Benito Mussolini. Someone else added a short video of a gay pride flag being set on fire. Eventually, the talk in the group turned to mass shootings and bombings. And so in August 2019, Juraj Krajčík, then a soft-faced 16-year-old with a dense pile of brown hair, immersed himself in a loose collection of extremist chat groups and channels on the massive social media and messaging platform Telegram. This online community, which was dubbed Terrorgram, had a singular focus: inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism. Over the next three years, Krajčík made hundreds — possibly thousands — of posts in Terrorgram chats and channels, where a handful of influential content creators steered the conversation toward violence. Day after day, post after post, these influencers cultivated Krajčík, who lived with his family in a comfortable apartment in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. They reinforced his hatreds, fine-tuned his beliefs and fed him tips, encouraging him to attack gay and Jewish people and political leaders and become, in their parlance, a “saint.” On Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with his father’s .45-caliber handgun, opened fire on three people sitting outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, killing two and wounding the third before fleeing the scene. That night, as police hunted for him, Krajčík spoke on the phone with Marek Madro, a Bratislava psychologist who runs a suicide hotline and mental health crisis team. “He hoped that what he had done would shake up society,” recalled Madro in an interview, adding that the teen was “very scared.” During the call, Krajčík kept repeating phrases from his manifesto, according to Madro. The 65-page document, written in crisp English and illustrated with graphics and photos, offered a detailed justification for his lethal actions. “Destroy the degenerates!” he wrote, before encouraging people to attack pride parades, gay and lesbian activists, and LGBTQ+ bars. Eventually Krajčík, standing in a small grove of trees alongside a busy roadway, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The next day, Terrorgram influencers were praising the killer and circulating a PDF of his manifesto on Telegram. “We thank him from the bottom of our hearts and will never forget his sacrifice,” stated one post written by a Terrorgram leader in California. “FUCKING HAIL, BROTHER!!!” The story of Krajčík’s march to violence shows the murderous reach of the online extremists, who operated outside the view of local law enforcement. To police at the time, the killings seemed like the act of a lone gunman rather than what they were: the culmination of a coordinated recruiting effort that spanned two continents. ProPublica and the PBS series FRONTLINE, along with the Slovakian newsroom Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak, pieced together the story behind Krajčík’s evolution from a troubled teenager to mass shooter. We identified his user name on Telegram, which allowed us to sift through tens of thousands of now-deleted Telegram posts that had not previously been linked to him. Our team retraced his final hours, interviewing investigators, experts and victims in Slovakia, and mapped the links between Krajčík and the extremists in Europe and the U.S. who helped to shape him. The Terrorgram network has been gutted in recent months by the arrests of its leaders in North America and Europe. Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews but in a statement said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.” The company also said that since 2023 it has stepped up moderation practices. Still, at a time when other mainstream social media companies such as X and Meta are cutting back on policing their online content, experts say the violent neo-Nazis that populated Telegram’s chats and channels will likely find an online home elsewhere. At first, Krajčík didn’t fit in with the Terrorgrammers. In one early post in 2019, he argued that the white nationalist movement would benefit from large public protests. The idea wasn’t well received. “Rallies won’t do shit,” replied one poster. Another told the teen that instead of organizing a rally, he should start murdering politicians, journalists and drag performers. “You need a mafia state of mind,” the person wrote. Krajčík had found his way to the Terrorgram community after hanging out on 8chan, a massive and anonymous forum that had long been an online haven for extremists; he would later say that he was “redpilled” — or radicalized — on the site. On 8chan, people posted racist memes and made plenty of vile comments. But the Terrorgram scene was different. In the Terrorgram chats people discussed, in detail, the best strategies for carrying out spectacular acts of violence aimed at toppling Western democracies and replacing them with all-white ethno-states. The chats Krajčík joined that summer of 2019 were administered by Pavol Beňadik, then a 20-year-old Slovakian college student who had helped create the Terrorgram community and was one of its leading personalities. A hybrid of a messaging service like WhatsApp and a social media platform like X or Facebook, Telegram offered features that appealed to extremists like Beňadik. They could engage in private encrypted discussions, start big chat groups or create public channels to broadcast their messages. Importantly, Telegram also allowed them to post huge PDF documents and lengthy video files. In his Terrorgram chats, Beňadik, who used the handle Slovakbro, relentlessly pressed for violent actions — although he never took any himself. Over two days in August, he posted instructions for making Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs, encouraged people to build radioactive dirty bombs and set them off in major cities, and called for the execution of police officers and other law enforcement agents. “TOTAL PIG DEATH,” he wrote. At the time, the chats were drawing hundreds of participants from around the world, including a large number of Americans. Beňadik, who was from a small village in western Slovakia, took a special interest in Krajčík, chatting with him in the Slovak language, discussing life in their country, and making him feel appreciated and respected. For Krajčík, this was a change. In his daily life outside of Terrorgram, he “felt completely unnoticed, unheard,” said Madro, who spoke with several of Krajčík’s classmates. “He often talked about his own feelings and thoughts publicly and felt like no one took him seriously.” Krajčík started spending massive amounts of time in the chat. On a single day, he posted 117 times over the span of 10 hours. The teen’s ideas began to closely echo those of Beňadik. In late September, two regulars had a friendly mixed martial arts bout and streamed it on YouTube. Krajčík shared the link with the rest of the chat group, who cheered and heckled as their online friends brawled. Beňadik encouraged Krajčík to participate in a similar bout in the future. “Porozmýšlam,” replied Krajčík: “I’ll think about it.” For Beňadik, the combatants were providing a good example. He wanted Terrorgrammers to transform themselves into Aryan warriors, hard men capable of doing serious physical harm to others. In reality, Krajčík was anything but a tough guy. A “severely bullied student,” Krajčík had transferred to a high school for academically gifted students, a school official told the Slovak newspaper Pravda. Two therapists “worked intensively with him for two years until the pandemic broke out and schools closed,” the official said. Beňadik created at least five neo-Nazi channels and two chat groups on Telegram, one of which eventually attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers. He crafted an online persona as a sage leader, offering tips and guidance for carrying out effective attacks. He often posted practical materials, such as files for 3D-printing rifle parts, including auto sears, which transform a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic weapon. “Read useful literature, get useful skills,” he said in an interview with a podcast. “You are the revolutionary, so act like it.” It was only a month after joining Beňadik’s Terrorgram chats that Krajčík first mentioned Tepláreň, the LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava he eventually attacked. On Sept. 18, 2019, he shared a link to a website called Queer Slovakia that featured an article on the bar. Beňadik responded immediately, writing that he was having a “copeland moment” — a reference to David Copeland, a British neo-Nazi who planted a nail bomb at an LGBTQ+ pub in London in 1999. The explosion killed three people and wounded nearly 80 others. “I DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO NAIL BOMB THAT JOINT,” Beňadik continued. He wanted to do something far worse. “Hell,” Beňadik wrote, would be less brutal than what he had in mind. Another Terrorgrammer offered a suggestion: What about a bomb loaded with “Nails + ricin + chemicals?” Krajčík sounded a note of caution. “Just saying it will instantly make a squad of federal agents appear behind you and arrest you,” he wrote. Beňadik responded by complaining that Slovakia wasn’t producing enough “saints,” implicitly encouraging his mentee to achieve sainthood by committing a lethal act of terror. Two days later, Krajčík posted photos of people holding gay pride flags in downtown Bratislava. They were “degenerates,” he wrote, repeatedly using anti-gay slurs. One chat member told Krajčík he should’ve rounded up a group of Nazi skinheads and assaulted the demonstrators. Then Krajčík posted a photo of Tepláreň. Beňadik responded that “airborne paving stones make great gifts for such businesses.” In the chat, Beňadik repeatedly posted a PDF copy of the self-published memoirs of Eric Rudolph, the American terrorist who bombed the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and several other sites before going on the run. The autobiography contains a detailed description of Rudolph’s bombing of a lesbian bar, which wounded five people. Urging Krajčík to read the book, Beňadik described it as “AMAZING” and a “great read.” Rudolph, he wrote, had created the “archetype” for the “lone wolf” terrorist. Eventually, Krajčík joined at least 49 extremist Telegram chats, many of them nodes in the Terrorgram network, according to analysis by Pierre Vaux, a researcher who investigates threats to democracy and human rights abuses. While Terrorgram started as a loose collection of accounts, by 2021 Beňadik and some of his fellow influencers had created a more formal organization, which they called the Terrorgram Collective, according to interviews with experts and court records from Slovakia, the U.S. and Canada. The organization began producing more sophisticated content — books, videos and a roster of potential assassination targets — and distributing the material to thousands of followers. Krajčík was a fan of the collective’s books, which are loaded with highly pixelated black-and-white graphics and offer a raft of specific advice for anyone planning a terror attack. By the summer of 2022, Krajčík had become a regular poster in a Terrorgram chat run by another alleged leader of the collective, Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, a quiet suburb of Sacramento. Humber went by a series of usernames but was eventually publicly exposed by a group of activists, and later arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses. ProPublica and FRONTLINE reviewed chat logs — provided by the anti-facist Australian research organization The White Rose Society — and other online materials, as well as court records, to independently confirm her identity. Beňadik was arrested in Slovakia and charged with more than 200 terrorism offenses. He pleaded guilty and would be sentenced to six years in prison. In his absence, Humber quickly slipped in as mentor and coach to Krajčík. She was explicit about her intentions, constantly encouraging followers in her chats and channels to go out and kill their perceived enemies — including Jewish and Muslim people, members of the queer community and anybody who wasn’t white. Her job, she wrote in one post, was to embrace disaffected young white men and guide them “through the end of the radicalization process.” On Aug. 2, 2022, Humber and Krajčík discussed a grisly incident that had occurred several days earlier: A white man had beaten to death a Nigerian immigrant on a city street in northern Italy. The killing, which was documented on video, was “fucking glorious,” wrote Humber, using a racial slur to describe the victim. “Please send any more pics, articles, info to the chat as more details come out,” she posted. Krajčík wrote that he didn’t know much about the circumstances surrounding the crime but was still convinced the murderer had chosen “the right path.” The killer, wrote Humber, would make an “ideal” boyfriend. “Every girl wants a man who would kill a [racial expletive] for her 🥰 how romantic.” Three days later, Humber’s chat was alive with tributes to and praise for another killer. Wade Page, a Nazi skinhead and former U.S. Army soldier, had murdered six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside of Milwaukee a decade earlier. (A seventh would later die of their injuries.) When police confronted Page, he began shooting at them, hitting one officer 15 times before killing himself. Humber was a big fan of the killer. Page, she wrote, planned the attack thoroughly and chose his targets carefully. “He even made a point to desocialize and cut ties with those close to him,” Humber noted. “No chance of them disrupting his plans.” “Page did his duty,” Krajčík wrote. During the same time period, Krajčík started doing reconnaissance on potential targets in his city, staking out the apartment of then-Prime Minister Eduard Heger, a Jewish community center and Tepláreň, the bar. He posted photos of the locations on his private Twitter account. And in a series of cryptic tweets, Krajčík hinted at the violence to come: “I don’t expect to make it. In all likelyhood I will die in the course of the operation.” “Before an operation, you will have to mentally deal with several important questions. You will have to deal with them alone, to not jeopardize your mission by leaking it.” “I want to damage the System to the best of my abilities.” Then, on Oct. 11, 2022, he wrote: “I have made my decision.” The next evening, after spending a half-hour outside the prime minister’s apartment, Krajčík made his way to Tepláreň. The bar sat on a steep, winding street lined with cafes, clothing boutiques and other small businesses. For about 40 minutes he lurked in a shadowy doorway up the hill. Then, at about 7 p.m., he approached a small group of people sitting in front of the bar and began shooting. He killed Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič and wounded Radka Trokšiarová, shooting her twice in the leg. Krajčík, then 19, fled the scene. He had just committed a terrorist attack that would shock the nation. In court records, U.S. prosecutors have linked both Humber and another alleged Terrorgram leader, Matthew Allison of Boise, Idaho, to Krajčík’s crime. The pair were charged last fall with a raft of felonies related to their Terrorgram posts and propaganda, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and soliciting the murder of federal officials. Krajčík “was active on Terrorgram and had frequent conversations with ALLISON, HUMBER, and other members of the Terrorgram Collective,” prosecutors allege in the indictment. In another brief, they say Krajčík shared his manifesto with Allison before the attack. Then, immediately after the murders, he allegedly sent Allison direct messages saying, “not sure how much time I have but it’s happening,” and “just delete all messages about this convo.” The Terrorgram posts cited in court documents corroborate our team’s reporting. Allison spoke with one of our reporters from jail against his lawyer’s advice. He said he did not incite anyone to violence and that prosecutors had misconstrued the communications with Krajčík. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and in a motion, his legal team indicated it would argue that all of his posts are protected by the First Amendment. Humber also pleaded not guilty. She declined to be interviewed and to comment through her lawyer. While Krajčík was at large, Slovakian authorities tapped Madro, the psychologist, to try to communicate with the young man. “After 12 text messages, he finally picked up the phone,” Madro recalled. The brief conversation ended with Krajčík killing himself. “The shot rang out and there was silence,” Madro said. Within hours, Humber was making celebratory posts. Krajčík, she exclaimed, had achieved sainthood. “Saint Krajčík’s place in the Pantheon is undisputed, as is our enthusiastic support for his work,” she wrote on a Terrorgram channel where she posted a picture of the victims on the ground, blood streaking the pavement. She and Allison also circulated his manifesto. In it, Krajčík praised the Terrorgram Collective for its “incredible writing and art,” “political texts” and “practical guides.” And he thanked Beňadik: “Your work was some of the first that I encountered after making the switch to Telegram, and remains some of the greatest on the platform.” While they were spreading Krajčík’s propaganda, the owner of Tepláreň, Roman Samotný, was mourning. The bar “was kind of like a safe island for queer people here in Slovakia,” he recalled in an interview. “It was just the place where everybody felt welcomed and just accepted and relaxed.” Before the attack, Samotný’s major concern was that some homophobe would smash the bar’s windows. After the murders, he said, “the biggest change is the realization that we are not anymore safe here. … I was never thinking that we can be killed because of our identity.” Samotný has closed the bar. The survivor, Trokšiarová, was left with lingering physical pain and emotional distress. “I was deeply confused,” she said. “Why would anyone do it?”
Jesse Coburn ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering taking a first step to using cryptocurrency, according to a meeting recording and other materials reviewed by ProPublica and three officials familiar with the matter. Two officials told ProPublica they believe the initiative may be a trial run for the use of crypto across the federal government. The discussions have sparked concern among some at the department, especially about the prospect of paying recipients of major federal grants in cryptocurrency, an uninsured digital asset associated with financial speculation, dramatic swings in value and transnational crime. The focus of the discussions so far has been experimenting with using the underlying technology that makes crypto possible — the blockchain — to monitor HUD grants. Blockchain advocates argue that the technology is valuable on its own for such purposes. But the primary use of blockchain, according to experts, is for crypto transactions. “It’s just introducing another unregulated security into the housing market as though 2008, 2009 didn’t happen,” one HUD staffer said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis. “I don’t see any way this will help anything. I see a lot of ways this could hurt,” said the official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The HUD discussions have covered the potential use of a stablecoin, a form of crypto that is pegged to another asset to avoid wild swings in value, although such swings have happened in the past. The blockchain idea is being pushed, a HUD official told colleagues, by Irving Dennis. Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, is a former partner at the global consulting giant EY, also commonly known by its original name, Ernst & Young. EY itself is involved in the proposal as well: An executive of the firm discussed the idea with HUD officials last month. The crypto industry has found an ally in President Donald Trump, whose administration has tapped industry boosters to lead federal agencies, backed off investigations into crypto firms and created a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.” (Bitcoin plunged $5,000 within an hour of the news of the reserve’s opening on Thursday.) Trump himself has significant financial interests in crypto. On Friday, the White House is scheduled to host a “crypto summit” with leading figures from the industry. The proposal at HUD indicates a new way that the administration may seek to bolster the industry: by incorporating blockchain and possibly cryptocurrency into the routine spending and accounting practices of federal agencies. It’s a move that would align with the apparent desire of Trump adviser Elon Musk to use the blockchain to monitor federal spending. Dennis and HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett both denied the accounts of their colleagues. “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin,” Lovett said. “Education is not implementation.” Robert Judson, the EY executive involved in the conversations, confirmed that they took place. “We as a firm were having discussions with select individuals at that agency,” he said when reached by phone. Judson told ProPublica he would seek EY’s approval for a full interview, then didn’t call back. The White House, EY and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. HUD officials held at least two meetings about the blockchain proposal last month. A list of attendees to the first meeting included staffers from the offices of the CFO and Community Planning and Development. CPD administers billions of dollars in grants that support low- and moderate-income people, including funding to develop affordable housing, run homeless shelters, support disaster recovery, relocate domestic violence survivors and build parks, sewers and community centers. It was the CFO’s office that called for the meeting, one person told ProPublica. Also listed as a meeting attendee was Judson from EY. For years Judson has advocated for the blockchain, a digital ledger of sorts that creates an immutable record of transactions saved across multiple computers. Boosters of the technology cast it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks and credit card companies out of financial transactions and make those transactions more transparent and secure. Judson has written that the blockchain can help organizations prevent money from being siphoned off for unintended purposes. “As digital assets such as stable coins or digital currencies take hold, more powerful applications will emerge for integrated value exchange,” he wrote. Dennis, who served as HUD CFO in the first Trump administration, also wrote, in a 2021 book, that the agency should use technology such as “blockchain, robotics, and next-generation financial management systems.” Stablecoins are backed by reserves including traditional currency, commodities and Treasury securities. That is supposed to ensure that their value — unlike that of, say, Bitcoin — doesn’t fluctuate. However, on several high-profile occasions, the value of stablecoins has done just that. At the HUD meeting, attendees discussed a “proof of concept” project in which CPD would begin to track the funding going to a single CPD grant recipient and possibly subrecipients on the blockchain. The need for the project was “not well articulated,” one attendee later wrote in meeting notes. Following the meeting, a HUD official wrote and circulated a memo within the agency panning the idea. “Without exaggeration, every imaginable implementation of this at HUD appears dangerous and inefficient,” the memo reads. HUD has no difficulty tracking grant spending, the memo contended, making the new technology unnecessary. Incorporating it would be time-consuming, complicated and require extensive training. And, if the project involved paying grantees in cryptocurrency instead of dollars, it would inject volatility and unpredictability into the funding stream, even if the currency was a stablecoin. In subsequent discussions with HUD staffers, the memo’s author described the proposal as a “beachhead” at HUD for the introduction of cryptocurrency, which the author compared to “monopoly money.” CPD officials continued to raise concerns in a follow-up meeting, a recording of which was reviewed by ProPublica. (Judson did not attend this one.) Some attendees saw merit in the blockchain idea, suggesting it could reduce inaccurate data from grant recipients and enable real-time reporting and monitoring of their spending. “Maybe there is something that we could learn from it,” one said, “especially if we feel like the broader federal government is moving towards some sort of stablecoin option in the future.” One official asked why the agency was considering the project. “Because it’s sexy,” someone replied. Another said, “Irv has asked us to pursue blockchain, so that’s why we are looking at it,” referring to Dennis. Many details were left unexplained at the meeting, including, crucially, whether the proposal would involve paying grantees in cryptocurrency. But some signaled that it would. “You can do it with what would be attached to a stable currency. That would be up to Treasury, and I think they’re already going that way, for what it’s worth,” one official said. “It would simulate the dollar.” Another added, “It would basically be a cryptocurrency that is linked to the U.S. dollar on a one-for-one basis.” A finance official suggested the idea could be applied more broadly across HUD. “We are looking at this for the entire enterprise. We just wanted to start in CPD,” he said. The agency is also considering the idea for the Office of Public and Indian Housing, he said, for “tenant eligibility and stuff like that.” That office serves the millions of people who live in public and federally subsidized housing. This is not the first time that federal officials have considered incorporating the blockchain into the work of the government. Agencies including the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce and even HUD have been involved in a study, a prototype and a working group in recent years. But those who monitor the crypto industry were not aware of as broad an application of the technology in the federal government as what HUD officials have recently discussed. Some crypto experts were dubious. “It’s a terrible idea,” said Corey Frayer, a former official at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where he focused on the crypto markets and financial stability. “It is absolutely wild that anyone with any sense would consider this.” Frayer, now at the Consumer Federation of America, warned that HUD grants paid in stablecoin could fall in value. He expressed greatest concern about the notion that the proposal could expand to other parts of the agency. If that included, for example, introducing stablecoin into the $1.3 trillion in mortgage insurance provided by the Federal Housing Administration, a fluctuation in the value of the stablecoin could have a major economic impact, he said. “Imagine a world in which all of the government involvement in the housing industry, all of the funds circulating in that environment, dropped in value by 13%,” he said, citing a 2023 episode in which a stablecoin briefly fell 13 cents below the dollar. “It’s hard to imagine that wouldn’t be catastrophic.” Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who researches financial regulation and technology, noted that some high-profile attempts to use the blockchain for purposes unrelated to cryptocurrency have failed. She expressed skepticism that the technology would fare better in the context of government grants, where bad outcomes could harm those who depend on HUD funding to survive. “Blockchain technology has been around for 15 years. No one wants to use it. And so now we have an attempt to force the government to use it,” she said, with “the most vulnerable people” serving “as guinea pigs.” Mollie Simon contributed research.
Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. The silver Jeep Wrangler that showed up at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles inspection station was missing all four of its wheels. Gone, too, were its doors. “Vehicle is absolutely stripped,” the Connecticut towing company wrote to the state DMV. That was why it was only worth $1,000, the company said on an official form that took advantage of a state law allowing it to sell vehicles it had towed. Photos submitted by the tow truck company showed the Jeep covered in fresh snow, but strangely, despite it having no doors, there was no snow inside the vehicle, suggesting the doors had recently been removed. The company also failed to mention that when it towed the stolen Jeep after a police stop three weeks earlier, it had stylish rims on its still-attached wheels and an LED light bar above the windshield, and the police wrote that the vehicle had “no visible damage.” The DMV approved the request to sell the vehicle, and a few months later, the Jeep was posted for sale — not by the tow truck company but on the Facebook page of a longtime DMV employee. The Jeep now had rims, wheels and a light bar like it had when police stopped it. The DMV employee sold the Jeep to a used car dealer for $13,500. After passing through several more hands, another dealership ultimately sold it to a customer for $28,781.44. The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica in January exposed how Connecticut’s laws favor towing companies at the expense of drivers. The state allows tow companies to seek the DMV’s permission to sell some vehicles after 15 days — one of the shortest such windows in the country. The system has resulted in a wide range of abuses with little oversight from the DMV. The case of the Jeep with the missing wheels, laid out in internal DMV records, is an extreme example of how the DMV has failed to monitor a process that has had severe consequences for some car owners with low incomes. CT Mirror and ProPublica have spoken to dozens of people who had their cars towed and never saw them again. Many said they were never notified that their car would be sold. Without strong oversight from the agency, someone who works for the DMV found a way to profit off that system without facing any consequences. The towing company’s sales to the DMV employee went on for several years. It was finally discovered when a document the employee had submitted to obtain the title for one of the vehicles two years earlier came to the attention of the DMV’s investigations unit. In total, DMV investigators found that from 2015 to at least 2019, the towing company, D&L Auto Body & Towing, in Berlin, Connecticut, sold 15 vehicles to an investment firm owned by a man named Dominik Stefanski, a document examiner then in the DMV’s main office in Wethersfield, outside Hartford. According to the DMV case report, whenever D&L employees went to the DMV office, they would make eye contact with Stefanski, who would then allow them to cut the habitually long, slow-moving lines. In exchange for this favor, the report said, Stefanski would spend his days off walking the company’s lot selecting vehicles that had belonged to other people only weeks or months prior. D&L would then undervalue the cars on DMV forms, investigators said, allowing Stefanski to buy them cheaply and resell them for a profit. DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera declined to answer specific questions about the investigation. But Guerrera, who was deputy commissioner during the investigation and became commissioner in 2023, said after reporters raised questions about the incident, “This issue has been escalated to the Office of Labor Relations for further review and to ensure a thorough assessment.” In an interview in the doorway of his home, Stefanski denied the investigators’ findings. He said he never let D&L cut the line, and when he was informed that D&L employees told investigators he purchased at least 15 cars from them, he scoffed, “Jesus Christ, probably not.” The investigators “tried, but nothing came up because they knew they had nothing,” Stefanski said. D&L issued a statement saying owner Kevin Harrison wasn’t aware of the scheme until DMV investigators asked about it. “The company’s manager at the time acted on his own and thought he was doing the right thing by selling in-operable cars,” the statement said. According to investigators, many of the cars were in good condition. The manager was fired, D&L said. “D & L Auto Body & Towing, LLC works with the Department of Motor Vehicle to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again,” the statement said. Ultimately, the DMV didn’t take any action against D&L or Stefanski, and Stefanski still works at the DMV. D&L first came into possession of the silver Wrangler in January 2018, when the Meriden Police Department called D&L to tow a Jeep that had been stolen from a car dealership in Pennsylvania and located during a traffic stop. Hector Luis Gonzalez, who was driving the Jeep, said in an interview that he was shocked when officers told him it was stolen. His uncle had bought the Jeep from a car dealer in the Bronx, and he had a title. Gonzalez said he had put a lot of money into the Jeep, purchasing new tires and rims that cost nearly $5,000 and buying a light bar in the front that cost more than $500. “I bought it from a dealer, so I didn’t expect that the car was stolen,” Gonzalez said. Once a car is towed, the towing company is supposed to notify the car’s owner within 48 hours. As days pass, storage fees add up, making it expensive for drivers to retrieve their cars. After 15 days, the tower can ask the DMV for permission to sell a car if they deem it to be worth less than $1,500. This gives companies an incentive to place a lower value on vehicles, as they would otherwise have to wait 45 days to sell. Gonzalez said he called D&L after the car was towed and staff told him that the dealer it had been stolen from had picked it up. But when investigators reached the dealership, Koch 33 Automotive, two years later, its management said it had no idea the car had been recovered and told DMV officials that the dealer still had an interest in it. “I have been under the assumption that the vehicle was still considered stolen,” a dealership employee told investigators. The company did not respond to calls seeking comment. The DMV is responsible for verifying the facts on the forms towers submit that state they tried to contact the owner. A vehicle search also should have shown the vehicle was stolen, which would have flagged the potential sale. Twenty-five days after the tow, D&L submitted a form to the DMV saying that it wanted to sell the Jeep and that it was only worth $1,000. In theory, the DMV had a way to catch tow truck companies that undervalued cars. Before approving a sale, DMV employees are supposed to check the book value and, if the declared value is lower, request more information as to why the tower believes the car is worth less. In this case, the National Automobile Dealers Association value for the Wrangler was $15,100, according to DMV records. But D&L was able to get around that by providing photos of the car without doors or wheels. It then brought the Jeep on a flatbed to the DMV, where an inspector noted the missing parts and stamped a form declaring it not legal for road use. Less than four months later, D&L sold the Jeep for $1,400 to JDM Investments, a company that Connecticut secretary of state business filings show was owned by Stefanski. Under state law, the profits from sales of towed cars are supposed to belong to the vehicle owners. Towing companies have to hold onto the proceeds for a year and turn over any remaining money, after subtracting their fees, to the state. But towing companies can get around that rule by selling cars for small amounts so there aren’t any profits left once towing and storage fees are deducted. In the case of the Jeep sold to Stefanski, investigators calculated that there should have been $390 left over, but D&L never paid that to the owner or the state. If it had sold the vehicle for the book value, there would have been about $14,000 in profits. After the sale, Stefanski, who has worked at the DMV since 1999 and earns $72,000 annually, applied for the vehicle’s title but said he wasn’t ready to register the car. That limited the paper trail: The DMV has no way to track unregistered cars. Curiously, records uncovered by investigators showed that five days before purchasing the Jeep from D&L, Stefanski had already sold it to a used car dealer, Toria Truck Rental & Leasing of Hartford, which also does business as South Green Automotive, for $13,500. After selling it to the dealer, Stefanski appeared to help Toria resell the vehicle by listing it on Facebook: “Selling my jeep 2010 only 73k miles clean title asking 23k$.” Two weeks later, the Jeep was sold at a public auto auction for $18,130 to a Groton dealership, which 10 days later sold it to a customer for $28,781, records show. According to investigators, Toria then sent Stefanski a commission check for over $2,000 for the sales of two cars, including the Jeep. Toria’s co-owner Edward Michaels said he and another employee, who no longer works for him, met with DMV investigators and they “were cleared.” The DMV did not pursue charges against Toria. When cars are sold, towing companies have to submit a form called an H-110 that tells the DMV who the new owner of the vehicle is and how much it sold for. But the DMV says it doesn’t have an efficient way to track those. If it did, it might notice trends like a large number of towed vehicles being purchased by the same company. Four months ago, CT Mirror and ProPublica requested six months’ worth of H-110s under the state public records law. The DMV said it could only search sales by specific vehicle identification numbers. CT Mirror and ProPublica requested forms on 18 vehicles that tow companies sought to sell. The DMV said it only had that information on two of them: the 2010 Jeep and a 2010 Cadillac Escalade that Stefanski bought from D&L about a year later. D&L towed the Cadillac from the Econo Lodge in Southington in November 2018. When the tower asked the DMV to sell the car, it wrote that the Cadillac was worth $750 because it had no key and had front end damage. According to the DMV report, the book value of the car was $17,500. The company sold the Cadillac to JDM Investments five months later for $1,000. Stefanski flipped the car to Toria for $17,500, which sold it at a public auction for $18,300 to a Putnam auto dealer that then sold it to a customer in October 2019 for $23,250. When it was initially towed, the Cadillac had belonged to Southington resident Daniel Rodriguez, who had left the car in the Econo Lodge parking lot after striking a guardrail on the highway. Rodriguez said in an interview that he had been battling an addiction at the time and “left it there.” “I was not in the right state of mind, and I just never went back,” Rodriguez said. Rodriguez said he never heard from any tow company or got any notice that his car was being sold until a DMV investigator contacted him in early 2020 after he’d moved to Texas. He wrote back “requesting any funds that may have been generated as a result of the sale of the vehicle.” But Rodriguez said he was told by DMV officials it was too late: “Somebody got back to me stating that so much time went by, and I wasn’t allowed any compensation.” That was incorrect. Because only eight months had passed since the sale, Rodriguez should have been able to claim any proceeds from the towing company. But in this case, there wasn’t any money to claim because of the way the transactions were handled. Until CT Mirror and ProPublica contacted Rodriguez, he said, no one had told him that his car had been purchased by a DMV employee and that it eventually sold for more than $23,000. “It’s like a thorn in the rear end,” Rodriguez said. The DMV spent more than a year, starting in February 2020, investigating connections between Stefanski and D&L. D&L eventually turned over records to investigators that showed it had sold JDM Investments 15 cars. The investigators’ report also showed they interviewed the owner of an auto body shop who admitted that a receipt for $1,071 worth of work on the Jeep was fabricated at Stefanski’s behest. Stefanski said he didn’t understand the allegation because the DMV would have reviewed the receipt when it issued him the title to the Jeep. During the investigation, one D&L employee described a conversation the employee had with Stefanski as investigators began to look into the case. “You’re fucked,” the employee said he told Stefanski. According to the employee, Stefanski replied that the investigators had questioned him about the Jeep. “Like an hour after I sold you the Jeep you had it for sale on Facebook,” the D&L employee responded. “You told me you needed all the vehicles for your family but that was bullshit.” Stefanski just told him not to worry. “I got receipts for everything,” he told the employee, according to the investigators’ records. “Don’t say anything to the officers. I got everything covered. I have representation in the union and they can’t do nothing.” During Stefanski’s interview with investigators, he denied doing any favors for D&L and told them he needed the cars for a real estate business. “I told you I don’t flip cars. I realized my business wasn’t working out so I sold it,” Stefanski said. In an interview with CT Mirror and ProPublica, Stefanski said fixing up cars is his hobby. The investigators questioned why Stefanski bought multiple vehicles, never registered them and then sold them. Did he realize his business wasn’t working out multiple times? “This makes absolutely no sense,” one investigator said, according to the DMV report. In January 2021, DMV investigators applied for arrest warrants seeking to charge Stefanski and at least two D&L employees, including its then-manager, with larceny and title fraud. But then-Assistant State Attorney Evelyn Rojas declined to file charges, citing “prosecutorial discretion” and “insufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” “The Department of Motor Vehicles is free to pursue whatever civil remedies it deems appropriate against the defendant and any other involved party,” Rojas wrote in a 2021 memo. Rojas, who now works at the state attorney general’s office, did not respond to questions about her decision. The DMV could have issued fines against D&L or even revoked the towing company’s license. The agency could have suspended or tried to fire Stefanski. But the agency did nothing to either of them. In an interview with reporters, Stefanski maintained that he hadn’t done anything wrong in the transactions when shown a copy of the unsigned arrest warrant investigators had drafted. “If it was something illegal, then why didn’t they sign it?” Stefanski asked. CT Mirror and ProPublica obtained Stefanski’s personnel records from 2018-23, and he received glowing reviews from his bosses. No mention was made of the investigation or his role in it. Stefanski still works as a document examiner, although he’s transferred to the DMV’s New Britain office. Since the investigation, Stefanski has tried to sell several cars and auto parts on Facebook, including posting an engine from a 2014 Audi for $2,500 in November. “I don’t understand why I can’t” make these sales, Stefanski said in an interview. The engine, he said, he got from a buddy.
Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. For a project explicitly designed to influence Congress, Steve Berger’s operation has left a scant paper trail. The archconservative evangelical pastor, who started a D.C. nonprofit a few years ago to shape national policy, does not file lobbying reports. His group does not show up in campaign finance records. There is a simple way to glimpse his effort’s expanding reach in Washington, however: Pay attention to who is walking out the front door of his Capitol Hill townhouse. New evidence suggests Berger may be running what amounts to a group house for conservative lawmakers, with multiple members of Congress living with him at his organization’s headquarters. The six-bedroom, $3.7 million home is owned by a multimillion-dollar Republican donor. Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican who is among President Donald Trump’s most aggressive allies in Congress, has been at the house on multiple days over the past two weeks, according to people who live in the area. Video reviewed by ProPublica showed Ogles leaving the townhouse with bags on Feb. 27. As he left, he locked up the front door and pocketed the keys to the house. As ProPublica reported last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson is living in the townhouse. And Dan Bishop, a former congressman from North Carolina now nominated for a powerful post in Trump’s White House, appears to have lived there until recently as well. Berger has said his goal is to “disciple” members of Congress so what “they learn is then translated into policy.” He has claimed to have personally spurred legislation, saying a senator privately credited him with inspiring a bill. Berger, Bishop and Ogles did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Johnson previously said the speaker pays fair-market rent for the part of the townhouse he occupies but didn’t answer questions about the specific rate. He said Johnson has not spoken to the pastor about “any matter of public policy.” Ogles is in only his third year in Congress, but he’s drawn attention for his bombastic displays of fealty to Trump. He recently introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution so that Trump could serve a third term as president. He’s filed articles of impeachment against multiple judges who’ve ruled against the new administration. (Last week, Elon Musk posted a video of Ogles touting his impeachment efforts, set to the beat from the rap song “Shook Ones, Pt. II.”) Ogles’ short tenure is also notable for the pace of scandal that’s followed it. He has faced allegations that he inflated his resume, claiming alternatively to have been an economist, a member of law enforcement and an expert on international sex trafficking, NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reported. (Ogles has acknowledged at least one mistake on his resume but said that “my body of work speaks for itself.”) Last year, the FBI seized his phone during an investigation and obtained a search warrant to review records associated with his personal email address. Federal investigators were seeking evidence related to potential campaign finance violations, according to a court filing. The scope of the FBI investigation remains unclear. Perhaps no one is more responsible for Ogles’ rise in politics than Lee Beaman, the Tennessee businessman who owns the Capitol Hill townhouse. When Ogles announced a short-lived Senate bid in 2017, Beaman said he planned to raise $4 million to support the run. Beaman, whose wealth derives from a large car dealership chain, then served as campaign treasurer in Ogles’ successful 2022 run for the House. Beaman and Berger have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, in areas including foreign affairs, fuel efficiency standards and removing barriers to firing federal employees. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results. (Beaman did not respond to requests for comment. ProPublica could not determine whether he and the pastor have discussed policy issues with Ogles during his time in Congress.) In sermons, Berger has devoted long stretches to attacking the separation of church and state, as well as COVID-19 vaccines. The pastor used violent language to describe his disdain for “LGBTQ+ Pride” parades and “drag queen story hour” during an interview for a podcast in 2022, according to unpublished footage obtained by ProPublica. “If I was left to myself, I’d take a baseball bat and beat the hell out of every single one of them. And not feel bad about it,” Berger said. “I have to go, ‘You know what? That’s probably not the will of God, is it?’ And obviously it’s not.” Beyond his ownership of the townhouse, Beaman’s role in the pastor’s influence project is unclear. After Beaman purchased the house in 2021, a lawyer sought to change it from a single-family dwelling to a “boarding house/rooming house,” according to Washington, D.C., property records. Around that time, Berger’s nonprofit group, Ambassador Services International, registered the home as its address. Members of Congress are allowed to live anywhere, as long as they pay fair-market rent, experts said. Discounts on rent are generally seen as improper gifts and prohibited by House ethics rules. Beaman has said he got to know Ogles when Ogles was the Tennessee director of Americans for Prosperity, part of the Koch brothers’ political network. Beaman and Ogles joined forces to fight a mass transit project in Nashville and reportedly worked together on a successful effort to repeal the estate tax in their home state. After leaving the Koch network, Ogles served four years as the mayor of a Middle Tennessee county with a population of roughly 100,000. He held that role until 2022, when he was elected to Congress. Ogles’ 2022 campaign was the subject of a blistering House ethics report released this year. The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics concluded that there is “substantial reason to believe” that Ogles’ campaign had accepted illegally large donations and then falsely reported that the funds had come from Ogles himself. Ogles has said he is “confident that any reporting problem was at worst an honest mistake.” (Beaman was not named in the report and has not been accused of wrongdoing.) The report said that Ogles refused to cooperate with the investigation. It recommended that the House Ethics Committee issue a subpoena to the congressman. Do you have any information we should know about Steve Berger, Rep. Andy Ogles or Speaker Mike Johnson? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.
Ellis Simani, ProPublica, and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Over the last three years, the head of a small charter school network that serves fewer than 1,000 students has taken home up to $870,000 annually, a startling amount that appears to be the highest for any public school superintendent in the state and among the top in the nation. Valere Public Schools Superintendent Salvador Cavazos’ compensation to run three campuses in Austin, Corpus Christi and Brownsville exceeds the less than $450,000 that New York City’s chancellor makes to run the largest school system in the country. But Cavazos’ salary looks far more modest in publicly posted records that are supposed to provide transparency to taxpayers. That’s because Valere excludes most of his bonuses from its reports to the state and on its own website, instead only sharing his base pay of about $300,000. The fact that the superintendent of a small district could pull in a big-time salary shocked experts and previewed larger transparency and accountability challenges that could follow as Texas moves to approve a voucher-like program that would allow the use of public funds for private schools. Cavazos’ total pay is alarming, said Duncan Klussmann, an associate professor at the University of Houston Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies. “I just can’t imagine that there’d be any citizen in the state of Texas that would feel like that’s OK,” Klussmann said. Details concerning Cavazos’ compensation, and that of two other superintendents identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, drew a sharp rebuke from the association that advocates for charter schools across the state. “It’s not acceptable for any public school to prioritize someone’s personal enrichment ahead of students’ best interests,” Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said in a statement. He added that any payment decisions made at the expense of students should be reversed immediately. “The public charter school community has long embraced strong accountability and transparency. That’s what Texans deserve, both for academic outcomes and taxpayer dollars,” he said. “To that end, the full picture of superintendent compensation at all public schools should be made clearer.” Texas lawmakers have filed legislation that would cap public school superintendents’ annual salaries, but most bills would not restrict bonuses. Those bills also don’t apply to private schools that stand to receive an influx of taxpayer dollars if lawmakers pass legislation this session approving education savings accounts, a type of voucher program. Private schools wouldn’t be subject to the same level of state oversight as public schools. Lawmakers who advocate for vouchers won’t be able to gauge whether the investments were worthwhile if they don’t mandate that private schools follow the same financial and academic reporting requirements as public schools, said Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami Department of Teaching and Learning. Cavazos’ compensation proves that even those reporting standards are “woefully inadequate,” Baker said. Texas school districts must post all compensation and benefits provided to their superintendent online or in public annual reports, according to rules set by the Texas Education Agency. They must also report superintendents’ salaries and any supplemental pay for extra duties to the state. But Valere excluded more than a dozen bonuses and additional payments it awarded Cavazos, some of which its board granted to him in perpetuity. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune uncovered the total amount the district paid Cavazos by combing through federal tax records that the charter network must file annually with the Internal Revenue Service to maintain its nonprofit status. The news organizations then gathered additional details through public records requests to the district and the state. Cavazos, who has overseen the charter district since 2014 and previously served as superintendent in two other public school systems, declined an interview and did not answer written questions for this story. Board members provided written responses to questions through attorney Ryan Lione, who serves as outside counsel for the district. In defending Cavazos’ compensation, they likened his role to that of a corporate CEO, which they said comes with “many more day-to-day duties,” including fundraising, overseeing expansion and guiding the charter through a 2020 split from its parent organization. “We believe that the benefits that Dr. Cavazos brings to Valere through his vast experience and knowledge justify the compensation that the Board has and continues to award him,” the Valere board’s statement read. Board members said that they did not believe the district had run afoul of any state reporting requirements because no one from the state had told them that they had. But Jake Kobersky, a spokesperson for the state’s education agency, said it does not monitor whether districts post their compensation information online and that it only follows up if it receives tips about violations. He declined to comment on whether the district’s omission of bonuses paid to Cavazos in its reporting to the state or on the district’s website was a violation, but after questions from the news organizations, Kobersky said the agency is now reviewing the district’s reporting to “determine what next steps, if any, are necessary.” At least two other Texas charter school districts have also paid their superintendents hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of what they publicly reported in recent years, our analysis found. Dallas-based Gateway Charter Academy, which serves about 600 students, paid its superintendent Robbie Moore $426,620 in 2023, nearly double his base salary of $215,100, the latest available federal tax filings show. Pay for Mollie Purcell Mozley of Faith Family Academy, another Dallas-area charter school superintendent, hit a high of $560,000 in 2021, despite a contracted salary of $306,000. She continued to receive more than $400,000 during each of the two subsequent years, according to tax filings. The districts didn’t publicly post the additional payments on their websites, and only Faith Family Academy has reported any extra pay to the state. Moore, Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Gateway Charter Academy did not address questions related to the superintendent’s compensation. Without providing any details, the statement said the district has made mistakes but is implementing “corrective measures.” Since it was contacted by the newsrooms, the district has updated its website with a new document that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore. The Texas Education Agency did not answer questions about either school district. Valere, however, stands out among the charter school districts identified by the news organizations. Board members have voted to increase Cavazos’ pay or other financial benefits in 14 of their 24 meetings since 2021. In one instance, the board granted Cavazos a bonus of $20,000 after taxes for every month that he continued to work for the district. The increase, described as a “retention incentive,” bolstered his take-home pay by an additional $240,000 annually. “It’s almost like they’re just convening just to keep giving away their school’s money to this individual,” said David DeMatthews, a professor at the University of Texas Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. “I don’t think teachers that work in that school would feel so great that rather than make those investments into their children, they’re making it into this gentleman’s bank account.” Board members defended their decision to dole out repeated bonuses to Cavazos, including payments totaling roughly half a million dollars to fully reimburse a withdrawal he made from his retirement fund in 2018 for a “personal emergency.” They declined to discuss the nature of the personal emergency but said the payments were “the right thing to do” to ensure that Cavazos could retire one day. Board members claimed that a “significant” portion of Cavazos’ compensation came from private donations but would not say how much or provide documents to support their assertion. The board also said that it rewarded Cavazos for his work leading the district through a “difficult” 2020 separation from its former parent organization, Southwest Key Programs, the Texas-based nonprofit that provides housing for unaccompanied minors who arrive at the southern border. The split came after The New York Times revealed that Southwest Key’s leaders, including then-CEO Juan Sanchez, had used money from the charter district and its for-profit companies to bolster their pay well beyond the $187,000 federal cap for migrant shelter grants. Sanchez, who also served on Valere’s school board at the time, received $1.5 million in 2017 as the charter struggled with debt and students contended with deteriorating buildings, the Times found. In response to the reporting, a Southwest Key spokesperson disputed that the nonprofit had unfairly taken money from the schools. Sanchez, who resigned in 2019, denied wrongdoing, saying in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that his salary did not come from the charter’s coffers. State records show that the state education agency closed an investigation in 2022 into “conflict of interest, nepotism, and misuse of funds” at Valere. The agency would not provide details on what prompted the probe or share information about its findings. To piece together Cavazos’ compensation, the newsrooms filed public records requests for payment records and meeting minutes, which the district had not posted online for years. On at least two occasions, Cavazos received payments that initially appeared to have no record of board approval. Minutes from a January 2024 meeting showed that the board did not vote on a $73,000 payment he later received. When the newsrooms asked about the discrepancy, the board said it provided the reporters with the wrong copy of the minutes and pointed to a different version the district had later posted online that included approval of both the payment, for a life insurance plan, and a car lease. Another bonus came after a November board meeting attended by a reporter from the news organizations who heard no discussion of the payment. Questioned about when the board approved the bonus, members said they had done so during a closed-door portion of the meeting. After the reporter pointed out that such an action was against state law, board members said they voted after ending the closed session but before allowing the public, including the reporter, back into the meeting room. Three academics who study school performance and compensation data said they have never seen a school board fully reimburse any employee’s retirement account or approve so many hefty bonuses in such a short period. Experts, including Klussmann, a former superintendent of a district in Spring Branch, Texas, said that the money should be put toward students’ education. The vast majority of Valere’s students qualify for free and reduced meals and more than a third are English-language learners, which education experts say are often clear indicators that students are at a learning disadvantage. Valere’s student performance on state exams also lags behind statewide averages, data shows. Last year, Valere teachers left at a higher rate than in most schools across the state. The turnover has been difficult for Marisol Gauna’s son, who has autism and ADHD. Gauna says he no longer has a special education teacher who works with him one on one to help overcome learning hurdles. As a result, she worries he could fail the eighth grade. A parent of three children in the district, Gauna was flabbergasted when she learned about Cavazos’ pay from ProPublica and the Tribune. Those funds, she said, could be used to retain teachers, improve sports facilities and provide healthier cafeteria food. “It should go to the school or even to the teachers so that way there can be good, responsible teachers that want to stay there,” Gauna said. Andrea Suozzo contributed reporting.
Sharon Lerner For decades, Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists have tried to chip away at the small program in the Environmental Protection Agency that measures the threat of toxic chemicals. Most people don’t know IRIS, as the program is called, but it is the scientific engine of the agency that protects human health and the environment. Its scientists assess the toxicity of chemicals, estimating the amount of each that triggers cancer and other health effects. And these values serve as the independent, nonpartisan basis for the rules, regulations and permits that limit our exposure to toxic chemicals. Now IRIS faces the gravest threat to its existence since it was created under President Ronald Reagan four decades ago. Legislation introduced in Congress would prohibit the EPA from using any of IRIS’ hundreds of chemical assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water. The EPA would also be forbidden from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. The bills, filed in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year, are championed by companies that make and use chemicals, along with industry groups that have long opposed environmental rules. If it becomes law, the “No IRIS Act,” as it’s called, would essentially bar the agency from carrying out its mission, experts told ProPublica. “They’re trying to undermine the foundations for doing any kind of regulation,” said William Boyd, a professor at UCLA School of Law who specializes in environmental law. Boyd noted that IRIS reports on chemicals’ toxicity are the first step in the long process of creating legal protections from toxic pollutants in air and water. “If you get rid of step one, you’re totally in the dark,” he said. If the act passes, companies could even use the law to fight the enforcement of environmental rules that have long been on the books or permits that limit their toxic emissions, environmental lawyers told ProPublica. The attack on IRIS has a good chance of succeeding at a time when Republicans are eager to support President Donald Trump’s agenda, according to environmental advocates who monitor Congress. The bills dovetail with the anti-regulatory efforts that have marked the second Trump administration, which has begun to dismantle climate protections, nominated industry insiders to top positions in the EPA and announced plans for unprecedented cuts that could slash the agency’s budget by 65%. Project 2025, the ultraconservative playbook that has guided much of Trump’s second presidency, calls for the elimination of IRIS on the grounds that it “often sets ‘safe levels’ based on questionable science” and that its reviews result in “billions in economic costs.” The policy blueprint echoes industry claims that IRIS does not adequately reflect all of the research on chemicals; there are sometimes significant differences between the program’s conclusions and those of corporate-funded scientists. IRIS has long been a target of industry and has at times been criticized by independent scientific bodies. More than a decade ago, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took issue with the organization, length and clarity of IRIS reviews; a more recent report from the same group found that IRIS had made “significant progress” in addressing the problems. IRIS’ work stands out in a world where much of the science on toxic chemicals is funded by corporations with a vested stake in them. Studies have shown that industry-funded science tends to be biased in favor of the sponsor’s products. But IRIS’ several dozen scientists do not have a financial interest in their findings. Their work has had a tangible impact on real people. The program’s calculations are the hard science that allow the agency to identify heightened disease risk due to chemicals in the air, water and land. And these revelations have, in some cases, led to stricter chemical regulations and grassroots efforts to curtail pollution. IRIS, which stands for Integrated Risk Information System, was created in 1985. Until that point, different parts of the EPA had often assessed chemicals in isolation, and their methods and values were not always consistent. At first, IRIS just collected assessments completed by various divisions of the EPA. Then, in 1996, it began conducting its own, independent reviews of chemicals. Its scientists analyze studies of a chemical and use them to calculate the amount of the substance that people can be exposed to without being harmed. IRIS sends drafts of its reports to multiple reviewers, who critique its methods and findings. As the tranche of assessments grew, so did its value to the world. States began relying on IRIS’ numbers to set limits in air and water permits. Some also use them to prioritize their environmental efforts, acting first on the chemicals IRIS deems most harmful. Countries that don’t have the expertise to assess chemicals themselves often adopt IRIS values to guide their own regulations. Today, IRIS’ collection of more than 500 assessments of chemicals, groups of related chemicals, and mixtures of chemicals is the largest database of authoritative toxicity values in the world, according to Vincent Cogliano, a recently retired scientist who worked on IRIS assessments for more than 25 years. From the beginning, industry scientists challenged IRIS with calculations that showed their chemicals to be less dangerous. “There were a lot of pretty bitter battles,” said Cogliano, who remembers particularly intense opposition to the assessments of diesel engine exhaust and formaldehyde during the 1990s. Critiques of IRIS assessments intensified over the years and began to slow the program’s work. “It took so long to get through that there were fewer and fewer assessments,” said Cogliano. In 2017, opposition to IRIS escalated further. Trump’s budget proposal would have slashed funding for the program. Although Congress funded IRIS and the program survived, some of its work was halted during his first presidency. Trump appointed a chemical engineer named David Dunlap to head the division of the EPA that includes IRIS. Dunlap had challenged the EPA’s science on formaldehyde when he was working as the director of environmental regulatory affairs for Koch Industries. Koch’s subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. (Georgia-Pacific has since sold its chemicals business to Bakelite Synthetics.) While Dunlap was at the EPA, work on several IRIS assessments was suspended, including the report on formaldehyde. IRIS completed that report last year. That assessment proved controversial, as ProPublica documented in its investigation of the chemical late last year. In calculating the risks that formaldehyde can cause cancer, IRIS decided not to include the chance that the chemical can cause myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. The EPA said IRIS made this decision because it lacked confidence in its calculation; the agency admitted that the omission drastically underestimated formaldehyde’s cancer risk. Still, some of IRIS’ assessments have made a huge difference in parts of the country. In 2016, IRIS updated its assessment of a colorless gas called ethylene oxide. The evaluation changed the chemical’s status from a probable human carcinogen to plainly “carcinogenic to humans.” And IRIS calculated the uppermost amount of the chemical before it starts to cause cancer, finding that it was 30 times lower than previously believed. The EPA used that information to create a map, which showed that people living near a sterilizing plant in Willowbrook, Illinois, had an elevated cancer risk because the facility was releasing ethylene oxide into the air. Once locals learned of their risk, they kicked into action. “That knowledge led us to be able to really activate the groundswell of community members,” said Lauren Kaeseberg, who was part of a group that held protests outside the plant, met with state and local officials, and testified at hearings. Not long after the protests, Illinois passed legislation limiting the release of the pollutant, the local plant shut down and the cancer-causing pollution was gone from the air. Around the country, the pattern has been repeated. After IRIS issues its estimate of the amount of a chemical that people can safely be exposed to without developing cancer and other diseases, the EPA uses that information to map the threats from chemicals in air. IRIS’ evidence showing that people have an elevated risk of cancer has sparked some hard-hit communities to fight back, suing polluters, shuttering plants and demanding the offending chemical be removed from their environment. In St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, residents had long felt as if they had more than their share of sickness. The small rectangle of land near the Mississippi River abuts a chemical plant that emits foul-smelling gases. For decades, as they breathed in the fumes, residents suffered from respiratory problems, autoimmune diseases, cancers and other ailments. In 2016, after IRIS assessed the toxicity of chloroprene, one of the chemicals coming out of the plant’s smokestacks, the people of St. John discovered the main source of their problems. The IRIS assessment showed that chloroprene was a likely carcinogen and caused damage to the immune system. With this information, the EPA concluded that St. John had the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the country. “I didn’t realize the depth of the poisoning that was taking place until EPA came to our community in 2016 and brought us that IRIS report,” said Robert Taylor, who has lived his entire life in St. John. When the agency representatives arrived, Taylor’s wife had cancer and his daughter was bedridden with a rare autoimmune condition. A lifelong musician who was then 75, Taylor began organizing his neighbors to demand a stop to the deadly pollution. (His wife died in December.) The assessments of chloroprene and ethylene oxide — and the activism they sparked around the country — eventually led the EPA to crack down. Last year, the agency announced several rules that aimed to reduce toxic emissions. The rules call for changes in how companies produce and release chemicals — the type of reforms that can be expensive to undertake. The Biden administration sued Denka, the company that owns the chloroprene-releasing plant in St. John, in an effort to force it to curb the amount of the chemical it released. But the Trump administration intends to drop that suit, according to The New York Times. For its part, Denka sued the EPA over one of the rules in July, asking the court for more time to implement the changes. The company argued that the agency was on a “politically motivated, unscientific crusade” to shut down the plant. Critics of IRIS have used similarly barbed language in their recent attacks. In his press release introducing what he calls the “No Industrial Restrictions in Secret Act” in the House, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., wrote that “Unelected bureaucrats in the Biden Administration have disrupted the work of Wisconsin’s chemical manufacturers and inhibited upon the success of the industry through the abuse of the EPA’s IRIS program.” The press release said the bill is supported by Hexion, which has a plant in his district. Hexion makes formaldehyde, a chemical that increases the cancer risk nationwide. Neither Grothman nor Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who introduced the Senate version of the bill, responded to questions from ProPublica, including how they think the EPA could regulate chemicals if the bill passes. The EPA did not answer questions for this story. The American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 companies, sent a letter to Lee Zeldin in late January calling on the EPA administrator to disband IRIS and prohibit the use of its assessments in rules and regulations. IRIS “has been increasingly used to develop overly burdensome regulations on critical chemistries,” the letter states, going on to argue that the program lacks transparency and “has often fallen short of scientific standards.” (The letter was first reported by Inside EPA.) The American Petroleum Institute, the Extruded Polystyrene Foam Association, the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association, the Fertilizer Institute and the Plastics Industry Association were among the dozens of organizations representing industries financially impacted by IRIS’ chemical assessments that signed the letter. Industry groups have also criticized IRIS for being slow and overstepping its authority. And they have noted that outside organizations have found fault with it. In addition to the National Academies criticism in 2011 about the clarity and transparency of its reports, IRIS has responded to recommendations from the Government Accounting Office, according to a report the congressional watchdog issued last week. The GAO, which monitors how taxpayer dollars are spent, placed IRIS on its “high risk list” in 2009. But the GAO did so not because it was vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse — the reasons some programs land on the list — but because the watchdog decided IRIS wasn’t doing enough assessments of dangerous chemicals. Since 2009, the GAO made 22 recommendations to IRIS, all of which have been implemented, according to the agency’s website. The new report acknowledged improvements but noted that the program’s current pace of finalizing assessments “likely cannot increase without more resources.” According to the GAO report, in 2023 and 2024, IRIS had reported needing 26 additional staff members to meet the demand for chemical assessments. Defenders of the program say the criticisms mask a simple motive: protecting industry profits rather than public health. “It’s blatant self-interest,” said Robert Sussman, a veteran attorney who worked at the EPA as well as for environmental groups and chemical companies. “What they’re really trying to do here is prevent the EPA from doing assessments of their chemicals.” While he has witnessed many attempts to scale back the EPA’s power in his 40-year career, Sussman described the current effort to eliminate its use of IRIS’ chemical assessments as “completely off the deep end.” Weaker bills targeting IRIS were introduced into both the House and Senate in February of last year but did not have the political support to advance. Now, after the election, the possibility of success is entirely different, according to Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that if it does pass Congress — and it now could — the president will sign it,” said Rosenberg. But Rosenberg added that he believes that if the public understood the consequences of doing away with the science at the core of the EPA’s work, people could potentially sway their lawmakers to stand up to the attack on IRIS. “The current political alignment is clearly very favorable to the chemical lobby, but their actual agenda has never been popular,” said Rosenberg. “There’s never been a case where people are in favor of more carcinogens in their environment.”
Audrey Dutton ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Idaho lawmakers are moving forward with modest efforts to improve the state’s system for investigating deaths, following reports by ProPublica and others that identified major problems. At the same time, counties are moving to shield from public view records that ProPublica relied on in its coverage. “Before you today is a bill that is a long time coming, and I say that because over the course of decades, since the 1950s, there have been attempts to reform our coroner system,” state Sen. Melissa Wintrow told lawmakers on Feb. 26, in a nod to ProPublica reporting last year. The Democrat’s bill would spell out new parameters that clarify a coroner’s role. Where current law says “suspicious” deaths should be investigated, the bill lists circumstances such as a suspected drug overdose or a death on the job. It also makes clear that a law enforcement investigation doesn’t take the place of a coroner’s investigation and that the two should happen in parallel. It requires autopsies to be done by a forensic pathologist, not another kind of doctor. The legislation crossed its first hurdle last week when it passed in the Republican-controlled Idaho Senate with broad support. Wintrow said coroners’ investigations must be done right. “If you’ve seen some of the news reports lately, there are families that are upset because we have not consistently been doing this across our state,” she told lawmakers, “and it is imperative that we do that.” Last year, a report commissioned by Idaho lawmakers highlighted faults in a system of elected coroners — a system dating to the 19th century — that is marked by limited training, almost no state funding and an absence of statewide standards. The report noted that Idaho ranks last among states for conducting autopsies in suspicious, unexpected and unnatural child deaths. ProPublica later reported on two grieving parents’ experience with a coroner who did little investigation to identify what caused their baby’s death. ProPublica also used legislative and newspaper archives to pinpoint numerous warnings about Idaho’s coroner system and failed attempts to reform it going back more than 70 years. What’s different this time is that coroners, a group that has opposed past efforts, drafted the legislation that Wintrow introduced. It’s been in the works since the February 2024 state report, by the Idaho Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations, that took aim at the coroner system. But the proposed legislation does not address some of the key problems identified by the state watchdog agency or ProPublica’s investigation. ProPublica’s review of hundreds of Idaho coroner reports found little consistency in what coroners did to investigate each death. Some coroners followed national standards; others didn’t. Some ordered autopsies in sudden infant deaths and unexpected child deaths; others didn’t. Other states spell out types of deaths for which an autopsy is required every time. Idaho requires only 24 hours of training every two years, but ProPublica found that 1 in 4 coroners repeatedly fell short. Other states impose consequences for skipping required training. Wintrow has tempered expectations about a rapid overhaul, saying her bill is not meant to be comprehensive. She called it a starting point that has the support of the Idaho coroners association. “Is this the end-all, be-all bill? No, but it is the best start we have had, and will increase consistency in our state,” she said on the Senate floor. Meanwhile, hearings on Wintrow’s proposal triggered an attempt by counties to wall off coroners’ records from public view in Idaho. One man testified that his teenage daughter, who had epilepsy, died while taking a bath and that his grief was compounded by knowing investigators possessed photographs taken in her death investigation. In response, Wintrow said she asked the Idaho coroners and sheriffs associations for a way to keep such materials private. (Although courts have ruled that the dead aren’t entitled to the same personal privacy protections as the living, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that the privacy interests of survivors justified withholding autopsy images from the public.) It turned out that the Idaho Association of Counties had a bill ready to go. But rather than simply protecting photographs of bodies, the proposal would make the entirety of a coroner’s investigation exempt from open records law. All the public could see would be a name, age, gender, hometown and cause of death — not the underlying steps coroners take to reach conclusions. According to the association, the idea came from the coroner of Ada County, home to Boise. Rich Riffle, the Ada County coroner, told ProPublica that a county attorney drafted the proposal based on Riffle’s goal to have Idaho treat coroner records more like law enforcement records. Police records are available for public inspection in Idaho, with exceptions, such as when police are still actively investigating a crime and releasing their records could imperil the case. “Although we are separate and independent from law enforcement, that doesn't mean we want to jeopardize a criminal case, and that’s essentially the bottom line,” he said in an interview Wednesday. Last year’s state watchdog report also recommended lawmakers consider ensuring disclosure of coroners’ records doesn’t impede a criminal case or violate a family’s privacy. It did not specify creating a broad ban. Ada County initially denied ProPublica’s request last year for coroner investigative records on the deaths of children, for whom Idaho conducts autopsies at a particularly low rate. Similar record requests went to nine other Idaho counties. After months of negotiation, Ada County began providing heavily redacted records once ProPublica agreed to pay more than $880 for them. In Bonneville County, which also resisted disclosure, such records revealed the coroner’s failure to follow national standards. The death of 2-month-old Onyxx Cooley, for example, was determined to be a sudden infant death — one with no explanation — after a terse, one-page report and no autopsy. The since-retired coroner, Rick Taylor, noted that state law didn’t set standards for investigations and said that he relied on an emergency doctor’s opinion. Most coroners approached by ProPublica released their records after attorneys redacted information they said was protected by state law. Photos weren’t included. In lending its support to exempting coroner records from disclosure last fall, the association of counties wrote: “While a person may be deceased, their reputation is still subject to harm. Next of kin may also be subject to harm by the release of their loved one’s private medical information, and sensitive information surrounding the circumstances of their death. Given these rights, there is limited public value in the release of detailed information in someone’s death.” Wintrow saw the draft bill during this year’s legislative session and agreed to sponsor it. But the bill’s future is uncertain. After fielding questions from ProPublica about the bill last week, Wintrow and a lobbyist for the counties said they want to revisit the legislation before they move forward. Wintrow said she wants coroners to be treated like law enforcement when it comes to open records laws. “My intention always as a lawmaker is to make sure there’s good balance with everything, so that privacy is maintained and the interest of the public is maintained as well,” Wintrow told ProPublica last week. Kelli Brassfield, a lobbyist for the counties association, said, “After some discussion, it looks like the language may need to be amended. We are currently working on this.”
Andy Kroll ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox. Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return. But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager. As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished. Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.” Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.” The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency. In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year. The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports. Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said. Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman. For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud. According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws. With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks. This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams. “These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.” Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said. These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysis published on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.) A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected. “The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said. Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings. Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica. The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.” The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury. “Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’” “When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”
Jeremy Kohler ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. In an unprecedented move to funnel more public tax dollars toward groups that oppose abortion, Republican lawmakers in Missouri are advancing a plan to allow residents to donate to pregnancy resource centers instead of paying any state income taxes. The proposal would establish a 100% tax credit, up from 70%, and a $50,000 annual cap per taxpayer. The result: Nearly all Missouri households — except those with the highest incomes — could fully satisfy their state tax bill by redirecting their payment from the state to pregnancy centers. The move comes four months after Missouri voters reversed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, and just as clinics have begun performing the procedure again after overcoming Republican obstacles. Supporters of the bill, which last month cleared a key legislative hurdle in the state House, say it gives taxpayers more control over where their tax dollars go and allows them to support organizations that help pregnant women and provide alternatives to abortion. Alissa Gross, CEO of Resource Health Services, which runs four pregnancy resource centers in the Kansas City area, told the committee in written testimony that tax credits have led to a surge in donations to her organization and that a 100% tax credit could bring in even more. “Our ability to impact more men and women for life as well as build healthy families has been substantial,” she said. Critics argue the state’s support for pregnancy resource centers, also known as crisis pregnancy centers, diverts tax revenue away from essential services such as health care and public education and becomes a funding stream for anti-abortion advocacy. They say many centers do little to actually help women; instead, they say they merely discourage women from getting abortions. “A 70 percent tax credit with no cap was excessive. A 100 percent tax credit is absurd,” Katie Baylie, a lawyer and reproductive rights advocate based in the Kansas City area, wrote in testimony submitted to the committee. “It is an insult to Missourians that our lawmakers are spending time even considering this bill.” Experts in tax policy and philanthropy said a dollar-for-dollar tax credit — for any purpose — is rare and could be much costlier for the state than intended, especially if pregnancy centers actively promote it. There is a big psychological difference for donors between a 100% tax credit and a 70% credit, the experts said. At 70%, donors still have to pay some taxes, but at 100%, there is no reason to make a donation less than their tax liability. “I could imagine a possibility where there’s a big publicity campaign by these centers, or a viral campaign, and massive numbers of conservative Missourians decide to effectively defund state government in favor of these pregnancy resource centers,” said David Gamage, a professor of tax law and policy at the University of Missouri law school. However, expansion of tax credits clashes with another Republican push to eliminate Missouri’s income tax altogether. Two proposals to replace it with a higher sales tax recently advanced in the state Senate, although it was unclear whether they could pass. If Missouri were to abolish state income taxes, tax credits would become meaningless. The bill represents one more expansion of a measure Missouri lawmakers have been growing for several years. Until 2021, Missouri taxpayers who donated to pregnancy resource centers were able to claim a 50% tax credit for their donations, meaning for every $1,000 in donations, a taxpayer’s bill dropped by $500. That’s when an expansion approved by the legislature in 2019 took effect and raised the rate to 70%. That shifted more of the cost of those contributions to the state, since tax credits work by directly reducing the amount of money a taxpayer owes to the state. Unlike deductions, which lower taxable income, tax credits are a dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax liability. When these credits are redeemed, they prevent the state from collecting that revenue, effectively reducing the total income available for public services. The legislature also removed a $3.5 million-per-year cap on the program and removed its expiration date. At the time, the change drew little attention because it was tucked into the same legislation that created Missouri’s trigger law to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned — a move that dominated headlines. And there were few warnings about how much it could cost. The bill’s official cost estimate, prepared by nonpartisan legislative oversight staff, projected only a modest increase in taxpayer expense. Raising the tax credit to 70% was expected to increase annual tax credits from $3.5 million to $4.9 million. That estimate assumed donations would remain steady. But they didn’t. The program has grown significantly, with $11.8 million in tax credits authorized in the past year alone. Still, it remains a small fraction of Missouri’s overall budget; Gov. Mike Kehoe has proposed a $54 billion spending plan for next year. Once again, legislative research is downplaying the potential impact on Missouri’s budget. The fiscal note for the bill accounts only for the jump from a 70% to a 100% tax credit, without considering the likely surge in donations that such an incentive would trigger — even though increasing giving is the entire point of the policy. The note says that it was “unclear” whether the enhanced tax credit would encourage more people to contribute and claim the credit, which would lead to more foregone tax revenue for the state. The legislative research staffer who authored the impact statement declined to comment, and the bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Christopher Warwick, did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Warwick, a Republican from Bolivar, in southwest Missouri, told the tax reform committee that his proposal empowers taxpayers to support important work without the state “trying to verify what programs work.” He said, too, that he would oppose requirements for pregnancy resource centers to report how they spend the money, saying he wanted to “limit the bureaucracy.” Warwick’s bill would also increase the tax credit for donations to maternity homes from 70% to 100% and for diaper banks from 50% to 100%. The state has not yet studied the impact of those changes. A matching bill has been introduced in the Senate but has not yet advanced. Rep. Steve Butz, a Democrat from St. Louis, argued the tax credit would effectively shift charitable giving from individuals to the state. “This will be the fourth bill I’ve heard that will reduce revenue, which I guess is clearly your goal here — to reduce the revenue to the state,” Butz told Warwick during a legislative hearing on the bill. He argued that if donors receive a full tax credit for their contributions, they aren’t really giving their own money — rather, the state is effectively making the donation for them. “So I don’t know that I’d consider that much charitable giving.” In an interview, Butz said he considers himself pro-life and has donated to pregnancy resource centers, receiving the 70% tax credit. However, he said he does not believe the program should take priority over others that receive less or no tax incentives for giving. Missouri’s approach to crisis pregnancy centers reflects a growing divide between red and blue states. While Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas and Tennessee have ramped up funding for pregnancy resource centers, states led by Democrats, including Massachusetts and California, have warned residents the centers mislead patients by posing as medical clinics while steering them away from abortion. Missouri is among the national leaders in per capita spending on pregnancy resource centers even before tax credits are factored in, according to data from states that fund them. Kehoe has proposed increasing direct state funding by almost 50% to more than $12 million in the fiscal year that starts July 1. In a statement, Gabby Picard, communications director in Kehoe’s office, said the governor “is committed to supporting services that help women choose to carry their unborn child to term, which is why his budget recommends increased funding” for abortion alternatives, including pregnancy resource centers. Missouri was the first state to use tax credits to fund pregnancy centers, becoming a model for other states looking to support the anti-abortion movement. One public health expert who has tracked the impact of pregnancy centers said Missouri has been a leader and innovator in this effort. “What Missouri is proposing really makes them an outlier at the top of the game,” said Andrea Swartzendruber, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Georgia. Warwick’s initiative follows sweeping changes to Missouri’s abortion laws. In November, voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion and other reproductive health decisions, effectively nullifying a near-total ban that had been in place since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The first abortion performed under the new amendment took place in Kansas City on Feb. 15, after a judge struck down restrictive licensing rules that had prevented providers like Planned Parenthood from resuming services in the state. In response, Republican lawmakers have introduced a wave of bills aimed at limiting the amendment’s impact. Among the measures is another proposed constitutional amendment that would restrict abortion and ban gender-affirming care for minors — an effort to combine something that voters support with something they don’t in the hopes it’ll turn off abortion-rights supporters. Some abortion-rights advocates in the legislature see the expanded tax credit as part of a broader push by anti-abortion lawmakers stung by the repeal of the abortion ban. After the amendment passed, those legislators “needed some wins,” said Rep. Kemp Strickler, a Democrat from the Kansas City suburbs. “But even if the amendment had lost,” Strickler said, “they probably would have been coming forward with these kinds of things.”
Robert Faturechi ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Earlier this year, the Air Force revealed that the general who oversaw its lobbying before Congress had inappropriate romantic relationships with five women, including three who worked on Capitol Hill. Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty’s colleagues told investigators the relationships were “highly inappropriate” as they could give the Air Force undue influence in Congress. “I honestly felt sick to my stomach,” one said, according to a report about the investigation, “because it just felt so sleazy.” The Air Force inspector general’s report redacted the names of the women who worked on the Hill. But one of the women whose relationship with Finerty was scrutinized by the inspector general was Sen. Joni Ernst, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The Iowa Republican and combat veteran is one of the most influential voices on the Hill about the military, and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon and plays a crucial role in setting its annual budget. Three other sources told ProPublica that around 2019 Ernst had a previous romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for a different branch of the military, the Navy. Ernst and the officials were not married at the time and Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates. But ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest, and other lawmakers have been criticized for such behavior in the past. A former legislative affairs official for the military told ProPublica that people in that role aren’t officially “lobbyists but for all intent and purposes that’s their job. ... From an ethics standpoint, it’s severely problematic.” A former Air Force officer who worked for Finerty said the perception in the office was that his relationship with Ernst “absolutely gave the Air Force undue influence.” Six sources who worked for the Air Force or in Congress told ProPublica that they had heard about a relationship between Ernst and Finerty and there had been concerns about it for years. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly or feared for their jobs. One source said that they were told about the relationship by one of the two participants. Two sources said they heard from witnesses interviewed by the inspector general that Ernst was a focus of the investigation. A spokesperson for Ernst would not address whether the senator had any relationships with military legislative liaisons but said the lawmaker maintained her independence: “The fake news media is clearly too busy gossiping to report the real news that Senator Ernst is focused on cutting waste at the Pentagon. Her votes and work in the Senate are guided by the voices of Iowans who elected her and her constitutional duty alone. Any insinuation otherwise by tabloid ‘journalism’ is a slanderous lie — full stop.” Finerty’s lawyer also declined to say whether the general had a romantic relationship with Ernst while he was advocating for the Air Force in Congress. “The IG report found no evidence suggesting anything remotely approaching either conflict of interest or undue influence involving General Finerty and anyone on Capitol Hill. Further, the IG report found no law, rule, policy or guidance prohibited any of General Finerty’s relationships. Any suggestion to the contrary would be defamatory.” (The inspector general report said Finerty “wrongfully engaged in inappropriate relationships with multiple individuals” in violation of the code of military justice.) In his interview with the inspector general, according to the report, Finerty defended relationships between people in his office and “members on the Hill” — a term used to describe members of Congress. The 41-page report documenting the inspector general’s investigation of Finerty was completed in September 2023 but was shared with Congress, and then the public, earlier this year in response to records requests. (The investigation summary, posted on the Air Force’s website, was reported first by Politico, without any mention of Ernst’s involvement.) At the time of the report’s release to Congress in early January, Ernst’s influence over the Pentagon was on full display, as she sat at the center of one of the Trump administration’s most contentious confirmation battles. Ernst had made statements suggesting she had reservations about President Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and though she had later made encouraging statements, she had refused to formally back him. Serving in the Iowa Army National Guard during the Iraq War, Ernst is the Senate’s first female combat veteran and has pushed to reform the military’s handling of sexual assault cases. Hegseth faced scrutiny over past allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he denied, as well as criticism for comments he made against allowing women in combat. Then in mid-January, Ernst reversed course under pressure from Trump allies and formally endorsed Hegseth. Her backing was considered pivotal in reviving what had appeared to be a flailing nomination. The report about Finerty is heavily redacted but provided the following details about the inspector general’s findings. Two of the five women worked for the Pentagon. They include a civilian employee who was married to another officer and an Air Force enlisted member significantly lower down the chain of command than Finerty. Finerty interacted with the three other women on Capitol Hill as part of his legislative affairs work, “mixing his professional and personal roles, thus creating the perception of a conflict of interest.” Finerty sexted two of those women in 2021. He sexted and had an “intimate relationship” with the third, though the report does not say exactly when. The nature of his relationship with the women varied, from suggestive messages to graphic sexting and photos to physical sex, according to the report. Sources told ProPublica that the inspector general asked witnesses about Ernst, but because of the redactions in the report, it’s unclear which sections, if any, refer to the senator. The report includes a stark example of Finerty’s legislative advocacy overlapping with his romantic relationship with one of the women on Capitol Hill. In June 2021, Finerty texted the woman “I was distracted by you being distracted.” Then he sent her a list of “top 5 things to protect if possible,” including a particular fighter jet, radar technology and a system to improve interoperability across the military’s branches. “What distraction?” the woman texted back. “If I was [redacted] would it be distracting?” She followed up with a series of what the inspector general report described as pornographic pictures. Finerty told investigators that his romantic relationships with the women on Capitol Hill were proper because all participants were unmarried. “Those weren’t Chris Finerty’s personal interest items. Those were the five things that were in the President’s Budget that we’re charged to go up there and ensure that we get across the finish line,” he said, according to the report. “I wasn’t saying hey, do me a personal favor and protect these five things. It was, these are the five things that the Air Force has in the President’s Budget that we’re trying to do that we need your help with.” Many of Finerty’s colleagues who were also working in military legislative affairs took a more negative view. In interviews with investigators, they expressed concerns about the relationships leading to undue influence, other military branches perceiving the Air Force as getting preferential treatment, and other congressional offices worrying they were less likely to receive sensitive information. The inspector general’s investigation found “several exchanges between Maj Gen Finerty and the women regarding legislative matters” but “no evidence of favors or exchanging of sensitive information by either party.” Regarding one of the Hill relationships, a colleague of Finerty’s told investigators, “Was there a perception in my office that it was unethical? Yes.” The colleague reported it affected morale and people were “talking about it all the time.” Another military legislative affairs official was more blunt, calling the relationships “totally unprofessional” because “I think it compromises the integrity of the entire Department of the Air Force.” The inspector general concluded Finerty had violated the code of military justice, including “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” for his “inappropriate relationships” with all five women. As a result, Finerty was demoted to brigadier general. He retired from the Air Force in November. Around the time Finerty was heading the legislative affairs office, from April 2019 to March 2023, Ernst publicly pushed for more money and championed projects for the Air Force on multiple occasions, including in at least one instance on a specific matter that Finerty was advocating for on the Hill. In June 2021, she pushed for more Air Force funding from the Senate floor: “While the Biden budget promises a bureaucratic buildup at the IRS, his proposal is far less generous to our armed forces. The Air Force would suffer a substantial cut in its number of aircraft.” In April 2022, she attacked then-President Joe Biden for a proposed budget that “shrinks the size of our Air Force.” “With Putin and his cronies invading Ukraine, China testing hypersonic missiles and threatening Taiwan, Iran enriching uranium, and the Taliban back in control of Afghanistan, it’s as critical as ever that we provide for a strong national defense,” Ernst said in a statement. Two months later, she pushed legislation to improve the Pentagon’s access to critical minerals, warning “the Air Force’s premier fighter jet, the F-22, is made with layers of titanium alloy, much of which is sourced from Russia and China.” In November 2023, several months after Finerty left his post, she introduced a bill to allow the Pentagon to connect weapons and technology across the various branches of the government, a concept known as Joint All Domain Command and Control — which was on the list of top priorities he texted to one of the women on the Hill he was romantically involved with. According to three sources, Ernst had an earlier romantic relationship around 2019 with an official from the Navy’s legislative affairs office. Ernst was on the armed services committee then as well. One source with knowledge of the situation said the relationship’s end created tension between Ernst’s office and the Navy legislative affairs office. Two sources said the Navy liaison was moved out of his post early. One of them said he was forced to depart his post earlier than expected because he had another romantic relationship with a Hill staffer and that Ernst was not cited by his boss when he was transferred. But the second source said senior officials were aware of the relationship with Ernst and that it played a role. A Navy spokesperson declined to comment. Ernst has once before been accused of being involved in a relationship that may have violated military rules. In a highly contentious divorce in 2019, her ex-husband alleged she admitted to an affair with one of her soldiers when she served as a company commander during the Iraq War. Ernst denied having an affair. Other elected officials have drawn scrutiny for their relationships with lobbyists and others who advocate for their employers before Congress. Former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt married a lobbyist for tobacco giant Altria Group, but he pledged to recuse himself from any matters affecting the company. Former Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Shuster was criticized for dating an airline lobbyist while he chaired the House’s transportation committee, a relationship he said was proper because she was not lobbying his office. In 2018, the married state Senate majority leader in Iowa, which Ernst represents, resigned abruptly after video surfaced of him kissing a lobbyist for the Iowa League of Cities. Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said of the relationships with officials advocating before Ernst’s committee: “It kind of takes your breath away.” The relationships, Canter said, make Ernst vulnerable to being extorted if people learned of them and could give someone undue influence over her. “It draws into question every position she’s taken that would affect his office,” Canter said. “You’re expecting her to represent her constituents’ interests every time she supports a policy or votes. Once she has engaged in that kind of relationship, you have to call into question her impartiality.” The military is particularly strict about romantic relationships, with rules against adultery, liaisons between employees of different rank, and various other types of relationships that could create ethical pitfalls. One former high-ranking Pentagon official said he thought some of the rules may be antiquated and overly strict, but that a relationship between an officer handling legislative affairs and a senator created too severe a conflict. “That seems way beyond inappropriate to me, somebody who’s there representing the U.S. military within the military chain of command with a U.S. senator on Armed Services, that makes it really bad.”
Amy Yurkanin ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Georgia recently relaunched its maternal mortality review committee after dismissing all 32 of its members last year. But state officials won’t say who the current members are. The dismissals were in response to ProPublica obtaining internal reports in which the committee detailed the “preventable” deaths of two women who were unable to obtain legal abortions or timely care after Georgia banned abortion. In September, ProPublica published stories on the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller. They were the first reported cases of women who died without access to care restricted by a state abortion ban. Before those stories, the state Department of Public Health had released the names of committee members to ProPublica. Now it’s saying that releasing the names would be a violation of state law. The law states that the work of the committee is confidential and that some records and reports obtained and created by the committee are not covered by public records laws. The law does not state that committee members’ identities are confidential. However, Department of Public Health spokesperson Nancy Nydam said the department’s review of the law “determined that the broad confidentiality protections directed toward the committee should be extended to the identities of the committee members.” She did not respond to questions about why the department could share committee members’ names in August but not now. The newly appointed committee, which reviews maternal deaths and makes recommendations to improve care for pregnant women, held its first meeting Feb. 21. If the public doesn’t know who is on a committee, it could create mistrust of its findings, said Elizabeth Dawes, director of maternal and reproductive health at the Century Foundation, a public-policy nonprofit. She has been an advocate for Black mothers, who die from causes related to pregnancy or birth at higher rates than other groups. “If everything is confidential, there’s no way to really be able to trust what comes out of it,” Dawes said. “They could completely ignore abortion. They could completely ignore race, racism, discrimination, and say what they want to say.” Dawes said those questions are particularly important in Georgia. The state has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal death, especially among Black women, who die at twice the rate of white women. The stories of Thurman and Miller sparked widespread outrage about the effects of abortion bans; Georgia law bans the procedure after six weeks. Thurman, who traveled to North Carolina and obtained abortion pills, died from sepsis after doctors in Georgia delayed the removal of infected tissue that remained in her uterus. Her case, and others identified in Georgia and Texas, show the dangers women face in states that force hospitals and doctors to weigh criminal laws against abortion before providing care. Less than two months after ProPublica published the stories, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, sent a Nov. 8 letter to all members of the committee stating that information had been inappropriately shared with an outside source. “Even though this disclosure was investigated, the investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information,” Toomey wrote. “Therefore, effective immediately the current MMRC is disbanded, and all member seats will be filled through a new application process.” That application process ended earlier this year. The Department of Public Health denied ProPublica’s Open Records Act request for the names of new members on Feb. 27, three weeks after the request was made. In a response, a staff member said 30 people had been appointed to the board and attached language from a letter inviting new members to the committee’s first meeting on Feb. 21. All 50 states, as well as other localities, have maternal mortality review committees. They examine the deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to identify gaps in care and provide recommendations to improve treatment. ProPublica recently found that the names of committee members in 18 states with abortion restrictions were publicly available, or accessible through a public records request. Recently, some states have come under fire for allegedly politicizing the work of these committees. The maternal mortality review committee in Idaho was allowed to go dormant in 2023 after conservative groups attacked its recommendation to expand Medicaid for postpartum women. The state has since revived the committee as an advisory body to the State Board of Medicine. Also in 2023, Texas lawmakers changed the composition of the state’s committee more than a year after a member spoke out about a delay in releasing a report. She lost her seat. Officials later appointed an anti-abortion obstetrician, Dr. Ingrid Skop, to the group. The Texas MMRC is also not reviewing deaths from 2022 or 2023, a period covering the first year and a half after Roe v. Wade was overturned. In the letter last year dismissing the members of Georgia’s committee, Toomey wrote that the shake-up of the board would not delay its work. Nydam said in February that Department of Public Health staff members have continued their work while the committee has been inactive. “The work of the MMRC has not stopped,” Nydam wrote in an email. “It has continued with our staff doing case abstractions, which they do regardless, before the cases go to the MMRC.” However, a person familiar with the committee’s work, who because of her continuing work with the Department of Public Health asked not to be named, said the full committee usually met every other month. Subcommittees met even more frequently to review cases. “There’s no way there’s not going to be a delay unless they are going to meet every week,” she said. The Georgia MMRC was beginning to identify deaths from 2023 when all members were dismissed. Kavitha Surana and Cassandra Jamarillo contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.
Emily Schwing, KYUK This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR's Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Nearly two dozen children in the tiny village of Sleetmute, Alaska, arrive for school each morning to a small brown building that is on the verge of collapse. Every year for the past 19 years, the local school district has asked the state for money to help repair a leaky roof. But again and again, the state said no. Over time, water ran down into the building, causing the supporting beams to rot. A windowpane cracked under pressure as heavy snow and ice built up on the roof each winter. Eventually, an entire wall started to buckle, leaving a gaping hole in the exterior siding. In 2021, an architect concluded that the school, which primarily serves Alaska Native students, “should be condemned as it is unsafe for occupancy.” The following year, Taylor Hayden, a resident who helps with school maintenance, opened a hatch in the floor to fix a heating problem and discovered a pool of water under the building, where years of rain and snowmelt had reduced several concrete footings to rubble. “Just like someone took a jackhammer to it,” Hayden said. The Sleetmute school, nestled on the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River, amid the spruce and birch forest of Alaska’s Interior, has few options. Like many schools in Alaska, it’s owned by the state, which is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance projects. Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, according to an investigation by KYUK and ProPublica. Local school districts are generally responsible for building and maintaining public schools in the United States and largely pay for those projects with property taxes. But in Alaska, the state owns just under half of the 128 schools in its rural districts, a KYUK and ProPublica review of deeds and other documents found. These sparsely populated areas rely almost entirely on the state to finance school facilities because they serve unincorporated communities that have no tax base. To get help for repairs, school districts are required to apply for funding each year, and then the state compiles a priority list. Since 1998, at least 135 rural school projects have waited for state funding for five years or more, an analysis of data from Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development shows. Thirty-three of those projects have languished on the state’s funding list for more than a decade. The state’s Indigenous children suffer the greatest consequences because most rural school districts are predominantly Alaska Native — a population that was long forced to attend separate and unequal schools. State education Commissioner Deena Bishop acknowledged that the state’s capital improvement program isn’t working. But she said her department is limited by state lawmakers’ funding decisions. Rep. Bryce Edgmon, an Alaska Native and speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, also said the program isn’t working. “I think the evidence speaks for itself,” he said after touring the Sleetmute school in October. “These bright young children show up every morning to go to school in a building that’s not fit for even anything but being ready to be demolished.” Edgmon, who co-chaired the House Finance Committee for the past two years, conceded he and other lawmakers could have done more and promised to “raise some Cain” in the state Capitol. This year’s legislative session has seen a lot of debate about education funding. Alaska has no statewide income or sales tax and instead relies on oil revenue, which has declined in recent years. As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. Over the past year, KYUK and ProPublica crawled under buildings and climbed into attics in schools across the state and found black mold, bat guano and a pool of raw sewage — health hazards that can cause respiratory problems, headaches and fatigue. The conditions exacerbate the risks for Alaska Natives, who already face some of the highest rates of chronic illness in the nation. In Venetie, a village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, exposed electrical wiring hangs close to flammable insulation. Thorne Bay, on an island in Southeast Alaska, has requested money to replace the fire sprinklers 17 times, without success. And in the Bering Sea coastal village of Newtok, the school’s pipes froze and broke, so for most of the last school year, kids rode a four-wheeler, known as the “bathroom bus,” twice a day to relieve themselves at home. After Hayden’s discovery in Sleetmute, the portion of the building that posed the most serious safety risk, which includes the wood shop, the boys’ bathroom and the gym, was closed. Now, kids ranging in age from 4 to 17 are confined to three classrooms and an atrium lined with portraits of the community’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders. “There’s not much we can do anymore,” said Neal Sanford, 17, who misses playing basketball and learning carpentry and woodworking. He left the village of fewer than 100 people after his sophomore year last spring to attend a state-run boarding school more than 800 miles away. In October, it was quiet outside the Jack Egnaty Sr. School in Sleetmute, save for a dog that barked now and then and the distant revving of a four-wheeler. The air smelled of wood smoke and two-stroke engine exhaust. Without a gym to play in, the kids bundled up for recess as temperatures dipped below freezing. “Cold hands,” said fourth grader Loretta Sakar, as she shook out her fingers after crossing the monkey bars. Her squeals and giggles echoed across the playground while other kids played soccer or spun on a tire swing. Watch video ➜ Andrea John, a single mom whose three kids, including Loretta, go to the Sleetmute school, said the state wouldn’t treat Alaska’s urban kids this way. “They should have helped us when we needed help in the beginning, not wait 20 years,” she said. “They are choosing to look the other way and say the hell with us.” When Alaska became a state in 1959, its constitution promised a public school system “open to all children of the State.” But for decades, it was far from that. Many Indigenous children attended schools owned and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Alaska’s plan was to eventually take over those schools, but the state repeatedly argued it didn’t have enough money to pay for them. The development of Alaska’s oil industry, starting in the 1960s, brought in revenue for education, but state officials noted that BIA schools were in bad shape and insisted the federal government fix them before the state assumed responsibility. Many Alaska children “go to school in buildings that should be condemned as fire traps or unsafe dwellings,” then-U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel said during a 1971 congressional hearing. It wasn’t until well into the 1980s that all BIA schools were transferred to the state. Yet even as the state began to take over, education remained inequitable for Alaska Natives. Many small villages didn’t have high schools, so students had to attend boarding schools or receive and submit assignments by mail. A group of those students sued the state in the 1970s to change that. Known as the Molly Hootch case, the suit resulted in a consent decree that forced the state to build 126 new schools in rural communities. In the early 1990s, the Alaska Legislature started a program to fund school construction and major maintenance projects. Schools districts would apply for grants, and the state education department would rank projects based on need. But the Legislature provided little money for the need-based program. Instead, a small group of powerful lawmakers allocated funding to projects in their own districts, favoring urban areas. In 1997, a group of Alaska Native parents sued the state, arguing that the funding system violated Alaska’s constitution and the federal Civil Rights Act. State Superior Court Judge John Reese agreed. “Because of the funding system, rural schools are not getting the money they need to maintain their schools,” he wrote in a 1999 order. “Deficiencies include roofs falling in, no drinkable water, sewage backing up, and enrollment up to 187% of capacity. Some rural schools have been at the top of the priority list for a number of years, yet have received no funding.” In another order, he called the state’s system “arbitrary, inadequate and racially discriminatory,” and said the state had a responsibility to provide education to Alaska Native children “even if it costs more in the rural areas.” A 2011 consent decree and settlement required the state to build five new rural schools, and the Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to more equitably allocate funds to rural districts. Yet more than a decade later, the problems pointed out by Reese persist. Every year, rural school districts make more than 100 requests, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Legislature funds only a tiny fraction of those projects. In five of the last 11 years, it has approved fewer than five requests. An analysis by KYUK and ProPublica shows that Alaska’s education department has received 1,789 funding proposals from rural school districts since 1998. But only 14% of them have received funding. This year, requests from rural school districts to the state’s construction and maintenance program stand at $478 million. Edgmon acknowledged that the Legislature’s funding decisions don’t come close to meeting the needs of Alaska’s rural public schools. “We have not upheld our constitutional duty to provide that quality of education that the courts have said time and again we’re bound to be providing,” he said. When pressed on why funding is so hard to secure, state education commissioner Bishop told KYUK last year that rural schools were good for the community. “But, at the same token, it’s unsustainable to have $50 million go to 10 students,” she said. “I mean, think about the unsustainability of that in the long run.” Allowing projects to sit on a waitlist for years also means they can become more expensive over time. The Kuspuk School District’s first request to repair Sleetmute’s school was for just over $411,000 in 2007. By 2024, the request had climbed to $1.6 million — more than twice the original cost, even after adjusting for inflation. “To me that’s neglectful,” Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said. “Our cries for help haven’t been heard.” Roughly 200 miles southwest, the coastal village of Quinhagak waited 15 years for a renovation and addition to its Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat School that would allow it to meet the state’s space requirements. The school serves 200 students, more than twice the number it was designed for. In addition to its fire sprinklers, Thorne Bay in the Southeast Island School District has asked the state 18 times to replace a pair of aging underground heating-fuel tanks that the district worries could start to leak. Superintendent Rod Morrison, whose district spans an area of Alaska’s southern archipelago that’s roughly the size of Connecticut, said his district’s list of maintenance needs is seemingly endless. “Education is supposed to be the big equalizer,” said Morrison. “It is not equal in the state of Alaska.” Rural school district officials say, given their scarce resources, the state’s construction and maintenance program creates burdens. The application for funding comes with a 37-page guidance document, loaded with references to state statute and administrative code. It also requires districts to include a six-year capital improvement plan. Meeting these requirements can be challenging in rural school districts, where administrative turnover is high and staffing is limited. To increase the likelihood that a project gets funded, some rural superintendents say they feel pressure to provide engineering inspections or site condition surveys with their applications. “There’s only a few needles that you can move,” said David Landis of the Southeast Regional Resource Center, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps school districts compile their applications for a fee. Landis said inspections and surveys are likely to increase the ranking for a project proposal, but “those documents are really foundational and expensive. They might very well be over $100,000.” The Kuspuk School District has spent more than $200,000 since 2021 to beef up its applications for the Sleetmute school, Aguillard said. It’s also paid tens of thousands of dollars to a lobbyist to persuade legislators to increase maintenance funding for schools the state itself owns. Some school districts said they simply can’t afford such costs. “We don’t have that ability,” said Morrison of the Southeast Island School District. “We’d have to cut a teacher or two to make that happen.” Last summer, Sleetmute got some good news. After ignoring 19 requests, the state had finally approved its roof repair after Alaska legislators passed a bill that boosted school maintenance and construction funding to its highest level in more than a decade. But it’s “too little, too late,” Aguillard said. The building’s condition has deteriorated so much that Sleetmute now needs a new school. As a result, the district has asked if it could use the roof repair money to shore up the school to prevent a collapse, to bring in modular classrooms or to have school in another community building. But, Aguillard said, Alaska’s education department has been reluctant to approve any of those options. Instead, she said, the department made a baffling request: It asked for proof that the state had never paid to repair Sleetmute’s leaking roof — something clearly outlined in state records — and that the neglect had caused the additional damage. In an email, the education department wrote, “This step was taken to ensure proper use of funds and to understand the full scope of work required.” Watch video ➜ A KYUK and ProPublica analysis found that in at least 20 cases, funding requests waited for so long that cheaper repairs morphed into proposals to tear down and replace schools. Those schools that were rebuilt cost the state tens of millions of dollars more than the initial estimates. The Auntie Mary Nicoli Elementary School project in Aniak, about 100 miles downriver from Sleetmute, started as a $9.5 million renovation in 2007. But after waiting 11 years, the state spent $18.6 million to replace it in 2018. A few districts are still waiting for schools they say need to be replaced. The first request for the Johnnie John Sr. School project in Crooked Creek, 40 miles downriver from Sleetmute, in 1998 was for a $4.8 million addition. But by 2009, the district was asking for a $19 million replacement. The Legislature failed to fund the project even after the district pared down its request. Unable to secure funding for a new school, the district is now trying to stretch $1.9 million it received from the state last year to make the most necessary repairs: upgrades to heating and electrical systems and the removal of hazardous materials. In most of Alaska’s rural communities, life often requires making do with what’s available: People keep piles of old machinery in their yards to mine for parts. In villages that aren’t on the road system, almost everything is either shipped in by barge or delivered by air. In Sleetmute, a 24-pack of soda costs $54 — about four times the price in the Lower 48. Watch video ➜ This is also why construction projects are extremely expensive: Skilled workers have to be flown in, housed and fed. Heavy equipment has to zigzag up the Kuskokwim River, which is frozen for half the year. The school district was hoping to reduce costs by sharing machinery with a project to upgrade the community’s runway. But when that project wrapped up this fall, the state transportation department shipped its equipment out of Sleetmute. So the school is left to make do. Everyone has to share one bathroom. A manila folder hangs from a pink thread on the door. It reads “Boys” on one side and “Girls” on the other to indicate whose turn it is. Sleetmute’s school is also full of black mold that covers the buckling wall in the wood shop, a gear closet in the gym and a huge section of drywall in the ceiling just above the door to the kitchen. This fall the community discovered another problem. Sheree Smith, who has taught in Sleetmute for 12 years, found herself swinging a tennis racket at a bat that swooped through her classroom as her middle and high school students sat reading quietly. The bats live above the gym bleachers in a small utility closet, where the floor is covered in guano. Without a gym, students miss out on events that connect the school to both the community and the outside world. Every year, the Sleetmute school would host basketball tournaments and movie nights to raise money for field trips to places like Anchorage and Washington, D.C. — a luxury for many families in Sleetmute and other rural communities in Alaska. The students “feel the pain of that, like just not having the extra opportunities,” said Angela Hayden, Sleetmute’s lead teacher. Over the holiday break, the school district reinforced the back end of the building with floor-to-ceiling supports to keep the woodshop from collapsing. But it’s only a temporary fix. The roof has been leaking since Hayden started teaching there 17 years ago. “When I come in the building, especially after a lot of rain or a lot of snow,” she said, “I just think, ‘OK, what am I going to have to deal with before I can deal with my classroom?’” If you have information about school conditions in Alaska, contact Emily Schwing at emilyschwing@gmail.com. Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism. Mollie Simon contributed research.
Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world. In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade. Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica. President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials. During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers. The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday. Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica. The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration. The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview. Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs. Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately. Following a series of lawsuits challenging their constitutional authority to lay off or place on leave thousands of employees and freeze nearly all foreign aid, Rubio and Marocco have defended their actions by arguing that the president has the right to cancel programs, and that they were conducting a careful review of the government’s foreign aid programs to make sure they aligned with Trump’s agenda. The administration says it is rooting out waste and fraud, while Musk has publicly vowed to destroy USAID altogether. However, as ProPublica reported Saturday, officials throughout the government say the process was actually cursory and haphazard, so much so that the programs’ contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts, had no idea what had been canceled or why. Enrich’s memos offer additional evidence calling into question the administration’s claims in court while projecting the dire consequences that will play out for both the U.S. and vulnerable people around the world. One of the documents said that the sweeping cuts to foreign aid promise to reignite outbreaks of preventable, deadly illnesses; fuel instability in war-torn areas; and put the U.S. at risk for outbreaks of infectious disease. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” it says. Take tuberculosis, which kills more than 1.25 million people a year and is already the deadliest infectious disease on the planet. New infections are expected to surge by 30% more as a result of the terminations, and disruptions to treatment will cause people to develop drug resistance, making any future treatment options far more difficult and costly, the memo said. That global surge will inevitably lead to more cases in the U.S. USAID staff forecast there would be around 80 additional cases of multi-drug-resistant TB here each year because of the cuts across USAID, the memo added. Even a few dozen cases would cost the U.S. millions in tax dollars; it takes nearly $500,000 on average to treat someone with the most drug-resistant forms of the illness, the memo notes. Enrich’s bureau also warned that the foreign aid cuts will destabilize entire regions around the globe. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.S. withdrawal of aid has led health services to collapse as an ongoing conflict flares, the memos noted. They said more than 400 mpox patients were left stranded and that more than a million people face critical shortages of food and water, supplies the U.S. has promised to provide. Malnutrition, cholera and measles are all projected to increase as well. Across the Sahel, the transition zone between Africa’s northern deserts and southern savannahs, malaria season is fast approaching. The U.S. has already purchased mosquito nets, diagnostic tests and treatments that cannot be delivered, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the programs. Canceled programs there and elsewhere are expected to cause between 12 million and 18 million additional malaria infections over the next year, the document estimates. And those infections are likely to be more deadly. Spread via mosquito, malaria is particularly lethal for children under 5. The U.S. was paying to help roll out drugs that are highly effective at preventing children from getting sick or dying. Those programs have been canceled. The potential for death and the spread of disease is not new to Rubio or his top aides who ordered the mass termination of nearly all foreign aid programs, according to the documents and interviews. USAID staff repeatedly lobbied to keep the most critical programs running, sharing specifics about patients served for individual programs and the likely harm of cutting them with political appointees, sometimes on multiple occasions. In response, political leadership “wholly prevented” staff from implementing Rubio’s promise to continue lifesaving aid, according to Enrich’s memo. In public statements and court filings, Rubio and Marocco have said there was a waiver exemption process in place for lifesaving programs to remain funded and online. But behind the scenes, the few employees remaining at USAID struggled to get basic information, like how to submit waivers to Marocco for approval. And when organizations did get an approved waiver, they couldn’t restart work because the administration still hadn’t paid them. (The Trump administration has refused to reimburse almost $2 billion to foreign aid contractors for work they’ve already completed.) Agency staff had no way to send payments to organizations because their access to the financial systems had been severed, one memo said. On Feb. 8, global health staff learned that Rubio planned to cancel many programs the bureau had identified as lifesaving. Those in the bureau appealed to Borkert and Mark Lloyd, an assistant administrator at the agency, to keep those operations alive. (Borkert and Lloyd did not respond to questions about this story.) Lloyd asked for more information. But that same day, staffers in the bureau also received a response from DOGE. “I am hearing that Global Health is conducting supplemental reviews of awards slated for termination by Secretary Rubio and Acting Deputy Administrator Marocco,” DOGE adviser Jeremy Lewin emailed Enrich, according to one of Enrich’s memos. “This is delaying the timely processing of these termination notices and is unacceptable. … Bureaus should not be conducting their own policy and program reviews before acting on these termination instructions.” (Lewin did not respond to questions for this story.) Enrich also said he received written instructions to pause approving waivers for lifesaving humanitarian assistance, a directive he passed along to the rest of his bureau, which had been working to identify the programs that needed money the most. In a subsequent exchange spelled out in one memo that illustrates the frequently conflicting guidance, Enrich said that two political appointees, Tim Meisburger and Laken Rapier, along with Bokert, shouted at him during a Feb. 13 meeting that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to draft another memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause” on the bureau’s waivers for lifesaving programs. (Meisburger and Rapier did not respond to questions about this story.) During a meeting on Feb. 24, Meisburger and Lloyd told those in the bureau to not bother trying to submit waivers for programs involving infectious diseases like mpox, polio and Ebola because they wouldn’t be approved, according to Enrich. Then, two days later, the administration suddenly terminated about 10,000 programs across the State Department and USAID. Agency staff responsible for maintaining those contracts say they were not consulted before the move. Enrich immediately reached out to Borkert and others to warn them of the “grave impacts on lifesaving activities,” he said in the memo. Borkert responded, indicating that many of the programs were terminated by mistake. “There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind,” Borkert wrote to Enrich. “We need to identify what those are.” In recent days, government officials and aid groups have told ProPublica that the administration appears to be trying to reverse-engineer its most sweeping actions to figure out which lifesaving operations were canceled. Staff have been told to report information about terminated contracts to agency leaders. It’s not clear what programs, if any, will be restored. “It is an incompetent mess,” one official said. ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.
Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. A new Illinois bill aims to add some oversight of families who homeschool their children, a response to concerns that the state does little to ensure these students receive an education and are protected from harm. The measure, known as the Homeschool Act, comes after an investigation by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica last year found that Illinois is among a small number of states that place virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children. Parents don’t have to register with any state agency or school district, and authorities cannot compel them to track attendance, demonstrate their teaching methods or show student progress. Under the new bill, families would be required to tell their school districts when they decide to homeschool their children, and the parents or guardians would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent. If education authorities have concerns that children are receiving inadequate schooling, they could require parents to share evidence of teaching materials and student work. Illinois Rep. Terra Costa Howard, a Democrat from a Chicago suburb who is sponsoring the legislation, said she began meeting with education and child welfare officials in response to the news organizations’ investigation, which detailed how some parents claimed to be removing their children from school to homeschool but then failed to educate them. The investigation documented the case of L.J., a 9-year-old whose parents decided to homeschool him after he missed so much school that he faced the prospect of repeating third grade. He told child welfare authorities that he was beaten and denied food for several years while out of public school and that he received almost no education. In December 2022, on L.J.’s 11th birthday, the state took custody of him and his younger siblings; soon after, he was enrolled in public school. “We need to know that children exist,” said Costa Howard, vice chair of the Illinois House’s child welfare committee. The legislation is more urgent because the number of homeschooled children has grown since the pandemic began, she said. “Illinois has zero regulations regarding homeschooling — we are not the norm at all.” The most recent numbers available at the time of the news organizations’ investigation showed nearly 4,500 children were recorded as withdrawn from public school for homeschooling in 2022 — a number that had doubled over a decade. But there is no way to determine the precise number of students who are homeschooled in Illinois, because the state doesn’t require parents to register. The bill would require the state to collect data on homeschooling families. Regional Offices of Education would gather the information, and the state board would compile an annual report with details on the number, grade level and gender of homeschooled students within each region. Homeschool families and advocates said they will fight the measure, which they argue would infringe on parental rights. Past proposals to increase oversight also have met swift resistance. The sponsor of a 2011 bill that would have required homeschool registration withdrew it after hundreds of people protested at the Illinois State Capitol. In 2019, a different lawmaker abandoned her bill after similar opposition to rules that would have required curriculum reviews and inspections by child welfare officials. The Home School Legal Defense Association, which describes itself as a Christian organization that advocates for homeschool freedom, said it plans to host virtual meetings to educate families on the bill and ways they can lobby against it. Kathy Wentz of the Illinois Homeschool Association, which is against homeschool regulations, said she is concerned about the provision that would allow the state to review education materials, called a “portfolio review” in the legislation. She said visits from education officials could be disruptive to teaching. “There is nothing in this bill to protect a family’s time so they can actually homeschool without interruptions,” Wentz said. She pointed to a 1950 Illinois Supreme Court ruling establishing that homeschooling qualified as a form of private education and that the schools were not required to register students with the state. The bill would require all private schools to register with the state. The Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica investigation found that it’s all but impossible for education officials to intervene when parents claim they are homeschooling. The state’s child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services, doesn’t investigate schooling matters. Under the proposed law, if the department has concerns about a family that says it is homeschooling, the agency could request that education officials conduct a more thorough investigation of the child’s schooling. The new law would then allow education officials to check whether the family notified its district about its decision to homeschool and compel parents to turn over homeschool materials for review. The increased oversight also aims to help reduce truancy and protect homeschooled students who lose daily contact with teachers and others who are mandated to report abuse and neglect, Costa Howard said. Some truancy officials said that under existing law they have no recourse to compel attendance or review what students are learning at home when a family says they are homeschooling. Jonah Stewart, research director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a national organization of homeschool alumni that advocates for homeschooling regulation, said the lack of oversight in Illinois puts children at risk. “This bill is a commonsense measure and is critical not only to address educational neglect but also child safety,” Stewart said.
Heather Vogell ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A high-ranking NASA official warned his employees Friday to “use discretion” in public when displaying badges or emblems that identify them as federal workers — part of an effort, the agency says, to protect its employees amid “stories of possible harassment” outside of work. “We are all very proud to work for the space program,” wrote Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer. “But in the current environment, with a lot of negative rhetoric coming in our direction, I want you all to please use caution.” Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration and allies have used strong language to disparage federal workers, whom they have been firing en masse. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job,” the president said on Feb. 26 during his first Cabinet meeting. Polk’s warning to employees came two days later, after receiving a report about an employee who was “assaulted” at a Starbucks. “This is probably one of the saddest emails I have had to write of late,” he said in the email, which was obtained by ProPublica. Polk wrote that Nicola Fox, an associate administrator at NASA, said at a meeting that an employee was confronted at a Starbucks by someone “because she was a federal employee.” The worker was working on her computer and was identified by her badge and a logo, he wrote. Reached Saturday, Polk said the email was not intended for anyone outside NASA. He said he did not have additional details about the incident and declined to comment on it or on his email to staff, which did not name the employee. Fox declined to comment. NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said the agency was “hearing stories of possible harassment toward employees, but not assault,” the term used in the email. “Our managers are hearing information thirdhand and using this as an opportunity to remind our teams to be mindful of their surroundings and to report any incidences to the Office of Protective Services,” she said. The White House did not immediately return a request for comment. It was not clear where the incident took place. The email was circulating among NASA employees, some of whom said they are concerned by the Trump administration’s rhetoric regarding government workers. The president, his advisers and his congressional allies have all sharpened their attacks on federal employees over the past week as the administration undertakes expansive efforts to reduce the size of the federal government Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who Trump named the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has been leading the way. A week ago, he demanded federal employees respond to an email asking them to list five things they’d accomplished in the previous week — or be fired. “What he’s doing is saying ‘Are you actually working’?” Trump said. On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said during a committee meeting that “federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.” And senior Trump officials on Wednesday sent out a memo on reducing the federal workforce that said, “The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024, by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.” NASA sidestepped expected layoffs in February, but it is still losing personnel due to a buyout plan. Polk urged his staff to stay vigilant. “Be aware of your surroundings and keep good situational awareness and operational security,” he wrote. “Use caution when on the phone in public places, and ensure you are aware of those around you.” If you’re a federal worker and you think you were harassed outside work as a result of your status as a government employee, ProPublica wants to hear from you. Contact our tips number on Signal at 917-512-0201. Here’s more detail on how to send us information securely.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that lifesaving operations would continue. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters in early February. Aid organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives, seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to continue operating. The administration conceded that many programs prevent immediate death and should remain online: field hospitals in Gaza, an HIV drug supplier for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syrian refugee food programs, health clinics that combat Ebola in Uganda and most of the landmark President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. In late January, Rubio and one of his top aides, Peter Marocco, said those programs and dozens of others could continue, granting them temporary waivers while the officials conducted what they have called a “targeted, case-by-case review” of all foreign aid programs managed by the State Department and USAID. That review, they said, would take three months. Four weeks later, on Wednesday, Rubio and Marocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. Now, as the administration faces multiple lawsuits challenging its actions, the court fights largely hinge on whether government officials deliberated responsibly before cutting off funding. The U.S. has also refused to pay almost $2 billion that the government owes aid organizations for work they’ve already completed. Rubio and Marocco appear to have taken their dramatic steps without the careful review they’ve described to the courts, according to internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen officials from the State Department and USAID, which raises fresh questions about the legality of President Donald Trump’s evisceration of the American foreign aid system. Current and former officials say that Marocco and Rubio cut critical programs without consulting contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts. “None of us believe that they’re conducting a careful, individualized review,” one official said. In an episode that highlights how cursory and haphazard their efforts appear to have been, Marocco and Rubio ordered the cancellation of contracts, including for cellphone service, at an office they do not control. The move stranded people in war zones without phones, according to multiple officials and internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica. On Wednesday, AT&T received a termination notice for a $430,000 contract with USAID’s Office of Inspector General. That office is meant to be independent from USAID so that it can effectively audit the agency. For more than 24 hours, OIG staff, including people in Ukraine and Haiti, did not have access to their government phones. No one at the OIG, including contract officers, knew it was coming, according to the officials. “This is an urgent issue for us, as we have OIG staff in warzones with no ability to receive security alerts,” a senior official in the agency wrote in an email to the company. Eventually USAID reversed the termination. Current and former officials throughout USAID and the State Department said the breakneck pace, lack of input from key officials, mistaken cancellations and boilerplate language in Wednesday’s termination notices undermine Marocco’s claims of a deliberative process. “It’s a pretext,” one USAID official told ProPublica. “The review was supposed to take 90 days. An actual review based on substance requires laying out a process with guidelines, identifying info on each project, and selecting working groups to review. Any review they did was fake.” If that turns out to be the case, legal experts and government officials say, the administration will have defied a federal judge’s order in a brazen gambit to continue dismantling USAID. The morning after the mass termination notices went out, a senior USAID official sent an email saying Marocco and Rubio had canceled awards for essential services that the agency now wanted reinstated, telling staff, “We need your immediate input on any awards that may have been terminated that contain essential services related to the safety, security, and operations of USAID staff,” according to a court filing. Since the initial decision to suspend foreign aid, humanitarian organizations and labor groups have taken the government to court, arguing that only Congress can dismantle USAID and that Trump’s blanket actions are unconstitutional. The government has told the courts that it has the right to cancel contracts, dismiss staff and reorganize USAID to align with Trump’s agenda. Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting USAID and the State Department from following Trump’s executive orders to stop all foreign aid and to force the agency to pay its bills. When it didn’t comply, the judge issued another order, giving the government until midnight Wednesday to pay what it owes to aid groups. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the last order over unpaid bills to conduct further legal review. That same day, aid organizations around the world began receiving termination notices. More than 90% of USAID’s global aid operations and half of those managed by the State Department received termination notices. The move is already putting children and refugees in gravely dangerous situations. The administration canceled almost 50 United Nations Population Fund projects worth more than $370 million, including programs to address maternal deaths and gender-based violence in Egypt, Nigeria and several other member nations around the world. In early February, the nonprofit Alight received waivers for its programs supporting refugees in war-torn Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. On Wednesday, they were all terminated. Alight runs six centers for extremely malnourished children in Sudan, where the organization treats babies and infants so sick that they will die within hours without ongoing care. The centers cost about $120,000 a month to operate. Alight is trying to fundraise to keep them open, knowing that the day they close their doors, children will die, CEO Jocelyn Wyatt told ProPublica. In the meantime, they have been forced to close other lifesaving programs. In Somalia, around 700 malnourished children visited Alight clinics every day for weight check-ins and to pick up special food. Thirteen health clinics and a mobile unit served around 1,200 patients a day. On Thursday, all of those clinics closed, Wyatt said. Alight also shuttered 33 primary health clinics in Sudan and stopped providing water to three refugee camps that house people displaced by decades of war. Alight had kept all those programs running these past five weeks, even though the organization hasn’t received any payments since Trump took office. “We believed when Rubio said that there was no intention of cutting emergency lifesaving services that would basically cause immediate death,” said Wyatt. “We trusted that those would be protected.” One of the State Department’s highest-ranking humanitarian aid officials, Jennifer Davis, stepped down this week, according to her resignation letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. During a meeting earlier this week, Davis, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s refugees bureau, told staff she believed she was bound by the judge’s order to restore programs and their funding, according to an attendee. “She was in tears about it,” the attendee said. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.) The State Department, USAID and the White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. The State Department did not make Rubio available for an interview. Marocco also did not respond to questions. By Thursday, hundreds of workers had returned to USAID’s former headquarters, where the name has been removed from the building facade, to collect their personal items. They left with boxes and suitcases. Some were crying. Dozens of people cheered and rang bells each time someone exited the building; many of them had recently lost humanitarian aid jobs as well. “This is more than lost jobs. We’re losing the sector,” a former USAID employee said through tears as she waited for her allotted 15-minute time window to pick up her belongings. “The U.S. government is losing its influence. We’re now more unsafe as a country.” In the early hours of Feb. 13 at a refugee camp in northern Syria, two armed men wearing masks and police uniforms broke into offices and a warehouse for the aid group Blumont, stealing more than $12,000 worth of laptops and other supplies the U.S. government had already paid for. Because the organization hadn’t received any funds since Trump took office, it no longer had personnel at the camp full time and had paused all its U.S.-funded work except a daily bread delivery. The armed theft was the result of the U.S. not paying its bills, the group told USAID officials, according to an internal agency email obtained by ProPublica. Shortly after the incident, the government started paying Blumont’s invoices and the aid group brought back staff and food services that had received a waiver. It is one of the few programs still online and receiving money. Prior to Jan. 20, the U.S. spent about $60 billion on nonmilitary humanitarian and developmental aid each year — far more than any other country in total dollars, but less than 1% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that money is managed by USAID and the State Department. A network of aid organizations carry out the work, which is funded by Congress. Since Trump took office, Marocco and Rubio have not only halted foreign aid, laid off thousands of workers and put many more on administrative leave, they have also stopped paying bills for work that has already been done. In one of several lawsuits related to the administration’s dismantling of USAID, aid groups are suing the federal government over the mass program closures and unpaid bills. It was that case that led federal district court Judge Amir Ali to order the administration to settle those bills, which by Feb. 13 totaled nearly $2 billion, according to figures Marocco gave the court. Almost none of it has been paid, the court filings show. U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for interest and damages from the unpaid bills and broken contracts, legal experts told ProPublica. Organizations have struggled to get through the opaque waiver process, and programs that succeeded were often so strapped for cash because the government hadn’t reimbursed them that they remained inoperative. Medicines that were already purchased by U.S. taxpayers are languishing in warehouses instead of being delivered to the people who need them, several contractors told ProPublica. On Wednesday, as Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the district court’s order to the federal government to pay its bills, the administration told the court it had terminated 5,800 of the 6,300 foreign aid programs that USAID administered. The government also shuttered 4,100 programs managed by the State Department, about 60% of the total. In Marocco’s own testimony to the court on Feb. 18 about the process, he said that senior staff and political appointees choose “specific awards” to be evaluated for termination or suspension. He said he personally examines the program and any potential consequences of terminating it before making final recommendations to Rubio. But USAID staff say that subject-area experts and key personnel who are responsible for the programs were not involved in many terminations, while most others had already lost their jobs. In the case of the phone contract for the OIG office, for example, the contract officers had no idea the termination notices were coming, officials said. Those officers are specially trained in contract law and regulations to manage these agreements and make sure the government is in compliance. But they were cut out of the process and only learned about it from AT&T, according to the officials and internal emails obtained by ProPublica. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.) The one-page notice to the telecom giant said that Rubio and Marocco had “determined your award is not aligned with Agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest.” The notice added: “Immediately cease all activities.” The notice came as an emailed PDF and not through the normal file management and correspondence system, which led multiple OIG officials to question whether anyone even looked at the contract’s basic information, like its statement of work, much less conducted a careful review. David Black, an attorney specializing in government contracts, said that the law requires contract officers to approve termination notices and that the episode with the OIG raises questions about Marocco’s claims in court about careful reviews. “It suggests the process was done very hastily,” he said. On the ground, in the places where the aid kept starvation at bay and deadly viruses in check, program directors say there will now be little to stop those threats. “What really bothers me is that we’re just looking at numbers, we’re not thinking about real people who are actually going to suffer the consequences of these terminations,” said Dr. Anja Giphart, the acting president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which had HIV programs terminated in Eswatini, Lesotho and Tanzania. Pulling treatment away from pregnant women means children will be infected with HIV in the weeks ahead, Giphart said. And doing it so suddenly means other governments and donors don’t have the opportunity to step in. Half of children who are undiagnosed and untreated for HIV die before their first birthday. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting months and months to get this back on track again,” she said. In Uganda, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, which is funded by USAID, treats tens of thousands of patients for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition, it has for years been one of the only organizations in the country that helps contain Ebola outbreaks — including the current one, which has so far killed two people and infected at least eight others. Earlier this month, the U.S. government issued the foundation a waiver and said it could continue its lifesaving work. So those who run the foundation were shocked to receive a termination notice hours later. The foundation’s executive director, Dr. Dithan Kiragga, told ProPublica his staff had just begun contact tracing patients with Ebola. He said they will likely now have to halt all U.S.-funded operations and hope that the Uganda health ministry can step in. “The patients will be told that we are closing,” Kiragga said. “They’ve relied on our systems and support for quite a few years. We saved lives.” ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131. Maryam Jameel and Ashley Clarke contributed reporting.
Gerardo del Valle, Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This video is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Less than a week after deporting Venezuelans detained at Guantanamo Bay, the Trump administration has again flown about two dozen migrants to the U.S. naval base in Cuba. This time, however, the migrants are from countries across the world, including from places that are willing to take them back, which has raised additional questions about whom the government is choosing to send there and why. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune interviewed Angela Sequera, the mother of one of the first migrants sent to Guantanamo. She described her fear and desperation upon learning that her son, Yoiker Sequera, had been transferred to the facility, which she knew only as a place where terrorists were held and tortured after the 9/11 attacks. On Feb. 9, Sequera was waiting for her daily phone call from Yoiker, who had been in an El Paso immigration detention facility since he was charged with entering the U.S. illegally late last year. When the phone finally rang, it wasn’t her son but another detainee who told her that Yoiker had been taken to Guantanamo. “It hit me like a bucket of cold water. I asked the man: ‘Why? Why? Why?’” Sequera recalled. She said the detainee told her that the federal government was trying to link Yoiker to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for migrant smuggling and other crimes in Latin America. She panicked. She couldn't understand why this was happening. She and some of the relatives of 178 Venezuelans who were among the first migrants transferred to Guantanamo by the U.S. government scrambled to try to establish contact with their loved ones, scoured the internet and exchanged messages on an impromptu WhatsApp group. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained records about Yoiker and two other Venezuelans taken to Guantanamo. A search of U.S. federal court records found that Yoiker and another man had no crimes except for illegal entry, while a third had been convicted for assaulting a federal officer during a riot while in detention. “My son is not a criminal. He has no record. He has nothing to do with gangs. He does not belong to any Tren de Aragua,” said Sequera, who shared documentation from Venezuelan authorities that stated he did not have a criminal history. On Feb. 21, after 13 days without hearing from her son, Sequera got a call from Yoiker. He had been released and was back in Venezuela, but he refused to discuss the time he spent detained at the naval base. “I think he does it to not make me worry,” said Sequera, who is among the plaintiffs named in a lawsuit filed by immigrants’ rights advocates seeking legal access to the migrants in Guantanamo. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said this week that nearly half of the Venezuelans originally detained at Guantanamo were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and that many had serious criminal records. DHS did not provide evidence to support that assertion. DHS also said in court filings this month that Guantanamo will continue to “temporarily house” migrants before they are “removed to their home country or a safe third country.” Migrants on recent flights to Guantanamo have come from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Guinea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Senegal, according to government data shared with ProPublica and the Tribune. DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the most recent transfers. “We continue to know very little about the conditions there, who the government is sending there and why this is happening,” said Zoe Bowman, an attorney with the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Watch the video: Mother Speaks Out Against Trump’s Detention of Her Son at Guantanamo Mauricio Rodríguez Pons contributed to the production.
Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate. House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica. The house is owned by a major Republican donor and Tennessee car magnate who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress. Over the past four years, Berger and his wife, Sarah Berger, have dedicated themselves to what they call their D.C. “ministry center.” In addition to Johnson, who is an evangelical conservative, the pastor has built close relationships with several other influential conservative politicians. Dan Bishop, now nominated for a powerful post in the Trump White House, seems to have also lived in the home last year while he was still a congressman, according to three people. A spokesperson for Johnson said that the speaker “pays fair market value in monthly rent for the portion of the Washington, D.C. townhome that he occupies.” He did not answer a question about how much Johnson is paying. House ethics rules allow members of Congress to live anywhere, as long as they are paying fair-market rent. The spokesperson added that Johnson “has never once spoken to Mr. Berger about any piece of legislation or any matter of public policy.” Berger and Bishop did not respond to requests for comment. The Bergers have described their mission as galvanizing political allies to take action. “It’s just iron sharpening iron,” Sarah Berger said on a podcast last summer, explaining the couple’s approach to political influence. “Like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I’m standing firm on this policy.’” Steve Berger claims to have personally spurred legislation. “It’s a humbling thing,” he said in a sermon in late 2022. “You get a text message from a senator that says: ‘Thank you for your inspiration. Because it has caused me now to create a bill that is going to further righteousness in this country.’” Berger’s interests extend beyond his staunch social conservatism. He and the donor who owns the house, Lee Beaman, have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, including a bill that would make it easier to fire federal employees and a regulation that would reduce fuel efficiency standards for the automotive industry. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that President Donald Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, did not respond to questions about how he ended up staying at the home. Beaman did not respond to requests for comment. The earliest date ProPublica was able to confirm Johnson being at the Berger house was in mid-December. A video reviewed by ProPublica shows Johnson visiting the home on Dec. 15 with two women who appear to be his wife and daughter. They lingered outside before entering, while Johnson pointed around the building and down to the basement entrance as if he was giving a tour. Two days later, Berger sent a note to his supporters on social media: “I so wish I could tell you all the massive doors that broke open this week.” Since the beginning of the year, videos and interviews show, Johnson has regularly left the house in the morning and returned in the evening. One day that Johnson was there recently, Berger was also at the home, opening the front door barefoot in pajama bottoms. (It appears Johnson may primarily be staying in the home’s two-bedroom basement.) Washington pieds-à-terre can prove a significant expense for members of Congress as they split time between the capital and their home districts. Johnson is less wealthy than many other lawmakers. He worked at conservative nonprofits before he entered public service, and on his most recent financial disclosure form he did not declare a single asset. When Johnson was elevated to the speakership in 2023, news reports indicated that rather than renting an apartment, he might be sleeping in his office. (Lawmakers must report debts, income and many financial holdings on disclosure forms but aren’t required to list living expenses like rent.) The Berger home is in an upscale D.C. neighborhood full of lobbyists and corporate attorneys. Though it’s not clear what the home’s basement would fetch on the open market, it’s not unusual for two-bedrooms in the area to rent for as much as $7,000 a month. Discounts on rent are generally prohibited by House ethics rules as improper gifts, experts said. In sermons and on social media, Berger has mentioned some of the topics he’s discussed with Johnson and other members of Congress. Last year, Berger, a passionate supporter of the Israeli right-wing, said he’d had “a great conversation” with the speaker about Israel. Recently, Johnson has described his conversations with Trump to the pastor, according to Berger. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Berger said in a sermon that he’d advised “some congressmen” to see the conflict through the lens of Ezekiel 38 and 39, parts of the Bible some see as prophesying a great war before the Second Coming. He did not specify what that meant from a policy perspective. An energetic 60-year-old with a white goatee and penchant for preaching in sneakers and jeans, Berger has strong views on a wide range of issues, including economic policy and public health. He is vehemently opposed to the World Health Organization, which Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from last month, and recently predicted that COVID-19 vaccines will result in “young people dropping dead all over the place.” He attacked the World Economic Forum at length in a recent sermon, accusing it of “taking advantage” of COVID-19 “to implement their satanic plot.” Berger is also against same-sex marriage, saying “it opens the door to all manner of sexual depravity and wickedness” — though he has said he has “friends who are practicing homosexuals, people I care about.” He opposes homosexuality and “heterosexual sin” in equal measures, he’s said, referring to acts like watching pornography and sex between unmarried adults. Berger’s operation is organized as a nonprofit called Ambassador Services International, which runs on a budget of around $1 million per year, according to tax filings. The home where it is registered in Washington — and where Johnson has been staying — was purchased in early 2021. Once the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and later housing the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, it was advertised at the time as a “four-level Second Empire-style townhouse of impeccable elegance and exceptional scale,” offering “bespoke tranquility in a coveted location.” The buyer was Crockett Ventures LLC. Corporate filings show its sole owner is Beaman, the donor and businessman, who built a fortune on a chain of car dealerships started by his father. He has given millions to Republican political groups, including large donations to the Trump campaign and political committees for the Heritage Foundation and the House Freedom Caucus. He’s also served as the treasurer of a congressional campaign. Beaman was once so fed up with the restrictions that came with owning a home on a “government-controlled lake” that he bought a sprawling property with a 50-acre private lake of its own, according to a profile in an architecture book. He became a fixture of Nashville media in recent years because of sordid allegations made by his fourth wife during their divorce, including that he made her watch what he called “training films” of him having sex with a prostitute. Beaman’s lawyers wrote at the time that his wife’s filing contained “impertinent and scandalous matter only meant to harass Mr. Beaman.” Beaman has attended a Tennessee church that Berger founded, but it’s not clear what role, if any, he plays in the pastor’s influence project in Washington. It’s also unclear whether the pastor’s nonprofit pays for the use of the Capitol Hill townhouse. Berger came to prominence in his home state as the longtime pastor of Grace Chapel, a large church outside Nashville whose members have included the current governor of the state. In 2021, Berger left the church and he and his wife launched their project in Washington. He soon began Bible study sessions with senators, representatives and congressional aides, according to the Bergers. Meanwhile, Sarah Berger spent her time “in relationship with and pouring into the lives of congressional wives,” tax filings say. Steve Berger quickly made connections at the highest levels of the Republican Party. “Listen, I have confessed things to Steve that I wouldn't normally confess to anyone else,” Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff in the first Trump administration who remains an important ally of the president, said at a 2023 event with Berger. “We have been praying together, having a Bible study each and every week. Not just me, but several members of Congress.” A group of congressmen gathered on stage together to speak at the pastor’s 60th-birthday party in October, including Bishop, Rep. Barry Moore, Rep. Andy Ogles and Rep. Warren Davidson. All four are current or former members of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus. (None of the four responded to requests for comment.) Evidence suggests that Bishop also recently lived at the Capitol Hill townhouse. Three neighbors told ProPublica that the FBI visited them this month asking about Bishop, seemingly as part of the background check for his White House job. “They said that address,” said one neighbor, adding that the agent showed a photo of Bishop. “They said: ‘He lived there up to a couple months ago. Do you know him?’” Trump has nominated Bishop to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, the powerful White House office that recently moved to freeze funding streams across the federal government. Berger celebrated the nomination on Instagram: “I want to congratulate my dear friend and brother, Congressman Dan Bishop, for accepting this incredible opportunity.” Jeff Frankl contributed research. Do you have any information we should know about Steve Berger or Speaker Mike Johnson? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.
Agnel Philip and Lisa Song ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he had uncovered $2 billion of science grants funded by former President Joe Biden’s administration that prioritized “radical political perspectives” or “neo-Marxist theories.’’ His aides on a congressional committee assembled the list by searching the project descriptions for 699 key terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture.” When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list. We found that Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee. Among them, for example, was a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best we can tell, the project ran into trouble with Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team. Other projects our AI assistant led us to included: Developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It seems to have caught the committee’s attention for using the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.” Creating biosensors to detect infectious diseases. The grant appears to have been tagged for the repeated use of “POC,” an acronym often used for “people of color” but in this context meaning “point of care” — that is, the place where people receive medical treatment — and “barrier,” referring to a part of the biosensor itself. Designing eye-tracking technology for diagnosing and treating concussions. It appears to have gotten flagged for referencing “traumatic” brain injuries and the “status,” meaning the condition, of patients. It’s “very frightening,” said Charlotte Lindqvist, a biology professor at the University at Buffalo who is conducting the research on mint plants. Lindqvist spends hours a day grinding up plant samples and analyzing their DNA to identify genetic differences between species. Studying plant diversity, she said, could help secure more resilient food systems. “We are really trying very, very hard ... to move our world forward, understanding it better through our sort of foundational, sometimes groundbreaking research,” she said, “and then you get flagged and blacklisted because there is a word like ‘female’ in your project.” Staff for the Republicans on the Senate committee assembled their report by examining all NSF grants awarded to projects that began between January 2021 and April 2024. Using their list of keywords, they flagged those earmarked for research that they said was “often based on neo-Marxist theories that identified merit by physical or ethnic attributes, not one’s talent, work ethic, or intellectual curiosity.” Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people. Cruz released the full database just as the Trump administration’s NSF said it was examining research grants to make sure they complied with the president’s executive orders terminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cruz said he requested “significant scrutiny” of the grants in his database. At the time, the NSF was using a similar list of keywords for its review. Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the committee responded to requests for comment. It’s not clear if approved projects that are still waiting for payments will get their money. A federal judge ruled last Friday that the administration can’t cancel or freeze grants for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When asked how it would respond to the judge’s preliminary injunction, an NSF spokesperson directed ProPublica to an agency webpage, which had not been updated with information about the court ruling at the time of publication. “NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a spokesperson told ProPublica in response to questions about its review process. The Senate committee’s list includes words like “diversify” and “biases,” which have technical meanings unrelated to social issues. Although the report’s authors worked to remove grants flagged for those reasons, some, like Lindqvist’s, slipped through. The lack of precision in the committee’s methodology is “obviously laughable,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional governments. But she also worries about what might happen if lawmakers take a more serious approach, such as trying to ban research on racial inequality, similar to how Congress severely limited studies on gun violence. The NSF evaluates grant proposals based on two factors. The first is intellectual merit. Every application is reviewed by a panel of experts — often other academics — who specialize in the same topic. They pore over detailed applications that include data, references and researchers’ qualifications, far more information than the brief summaries evaluated by the Senate committee. The other factor is “broader impacts,” which could include how the research might benefit societal well-being or make science more inclusive. Currently, federal laws require the NSF to support research at historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions that serve groups who are underrepresented in science. Congress also ordered the NSF to fund efforts “designed to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement” of members of these groups in scientific careers. “All of that is hard-wired into federal funding,” Scheppele said. “If anyone was ‘woke,’ it was Congress.” Laws passed by Congress have more legal weight than executive orders, so the NSF shouldn’t prioritize Trump’s order over its mandate to support underrepresented people in science, Scheppele said. The White House, she said in an email, is “literally asking the NSF to violate the law!” The committee report singled out some projects for simply acknowledging that people from certain demographics face unique challenges. That includes a University of Houston study of maternal mortality that examines why Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the U.S. are nearly three times as likely as white women to die during pregnancy or within the first year after childbirth. Another project, which involved using drones to deliver defibrillators to people suffering cardiac arrest, appeared to be flagged because it noted that emergency response times are slower in low-income and minority neighborhoods. In other cases, the keywords that caught the committee’s attention may have come from outreach efforts meant to broaden the impact of the research. A $6 million nuclear astrophysics project to study the origins of the universe includes a reference to attracting a “diverse group” of students interested in the subject and a summer school program for increasing interest in nuclear-science careers, “especially among women and minorities.” That’s in line with a 1998 law that ordered the NSF to develop “intellectual capital, both people and ideas, with particular emphasis on groups and regions that traditionally have not participated fully in science, mathematics, and engineering.” Congress recognized “you’re going to get better science” that way, said Melissa Finucane, vice president of science and innovation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. When you get different perspectives interacting and thinking about complex problems, she said, you’ll get different and new ways of solving a problem. The report’s “sledgehammer” methodology ignores the substantial scientific merit of these projects, many of which address “critical national needs in areas such as aerospace, agriculture, and computing infrastructure — as well as the need to broaden the talent pool,” a spokesperson for Democrats on the Senate committee said in an email. The email said that ranking Democrat Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington “understands that there is no way the United States can compete” with the rest of the world on innovation “without ensuring that NSF funding emphasizes the participation of women and minorities in STEM,” a reference to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Rice University professor Vicky Yao has seen firsthand how efforts to broaden participation can increase excitement and interest in science. When Yao applied for a research grant in 2022, she included outreach to community college students, many of whom are from underrepresented populations and don’t have access to research opportunities. When ProPublica informed Yao her $610,000 project was on the Senate committee’s list, she found it bizarre that such technical work on DNA methylation — a process that can affect cancer and neurological diseases — could be labeled as “woke.” The committee’s choice of keywords is so sweeping that shutting down the research that uses those terms would end not just diversity programs but also vast fields of research on social science (“Black communities,” “racial inequality,” “LGBT”), climate change (“net zero,” “climate research,” “clean energy”) and medicine (“white women,” “victims,” “trauma”). If any research related to women or minority populations is under fire, then “we’re talking about maybe 65% of the American population. So at that point, what’s left?” said Dominic Boyer, an anthropology professor at Rice University whose project on reducing flood risk was flagged by the committee. “Under what authority, or according to what philosophy, can a government invalidate or discredit research that’s focusing on two-thirds of the population?” Boyer received an award of $750,000 to use nature-based solutions like rain gardens to reduce flooding in Houston, where Hurricane Harvey displaced tens of thousands of people in 2017. His team has begun collaborating closely with residents from three neighborhoods: two lower-income communities where the residents are mostly Hispanic, Black or Asian, and a middle-income neighborhood with mostly Hispanic and white residents. He initially assumed that’s why his research was flagged. But it turned out that the triggering keywords may have come from boilerplate language that describes the specific NSF program that funded Boyer’s work: Strengthening American Infrastructure. The portions of the grant’s program description containing those keywords were written by the NSF during Trump’s first term. It used the words “socioeconomic” and “equal opportunity” to explain why infrastructure is important to society. The same description is found in more than two dozen other grants on the committee’s list. Boyer said it speaks to a kind of “Orwellian absurdity” that “these words can only have one meaning, and it’s the meaning that they would like to politicize.” Sharon Lerner contributed reporting and Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.
Jeremy Kohler ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. The last time Missouri took control of St. Louis’ police force was just before the start of the Civil War, when the state’s secessionist-leaning leaders were trying to prevent police officers from taking up arms against the Confederacy. The law that put the police department under state control was in effect for the next 152 years. In November 2012, nearly two-thirds of voters approved a statewide ballot measure, pushed by police reform activists and elected officials, that restored local authority and placed the department under the mayor’s jurisdiction. Now, the state’s Republican governor and GOP-led legislature are again pushing to take over the St. Louis Police Department. They argue that the Democratic-run city government is responsible for a drop in officer morale and that statistics that show a decline in crime are inaccurate. The Missouri House voted 106-47 last week to transfer control from the city to a state-appointed board this summer. The five-member board would be made up of the mayor and four commissioners appointed by the governor, essentially leaving the governor with the votes to control the police department. The state Senate is debating the measure, but a vote has not yet been scheduled. The attempt to reverse a measure overwhelmingly approved by state voters, albeit more than a decade ago, is part of a broader pattern of Missouri’s conservative-led government trying to override the will of the electorate, from repealing voter-approved redistricting reform to trying to reinstate an abortion ban even though voters approved a constitutional amendment last year legalizing the procedure. State takeovers of metropolitan police departments are rare; Kansas City, Missouri, remains the only major U.S. city with its police force under state control. Its arrangement dates to Reconstruction, when Missouri lawmakers, aiming to limit Black political influence, stripped the city of its oversight role. After a brief return to local control in the 1930s, the state reasserted authority over Kansas City police to weaken political boss Tom Pendergast, who had used the department for patronage and election fraud. Baltimore recently regained control of its police department after 160 years of state control. Republican-led states have taken away control of other aspects of government from local leaders in other cities with majority-Black populations. In Mississippi, officials have expanded the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police beyond government buildings into residential and commercial areas in Jackson, the state capital. They’ve also created a state-run court with appointed judges and increased police funding while the Black-led Jackson Police Department struggles to respond to calls. Texas and Missouri have intervened in local schools and city governments, leading to disputes about local control — though these takeovers have generally been temporary, with a path to restoring local authority. In Tennessee, the state comptroller backed down from taking over the majority-Black city of Mason after local officials agreed that a certified public accounting or law firm would help the town complete audits, balance its budget and train officials on proper use of tax revenue. It happens in states led by Democrats, too, but less frequently. “It really is removing this political power from residents, allowing them to have less authority, oversight and voice in how their system of public safety and policing operates,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a senior researcher at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. Some St. Louis leaders see the current effort there as echoing 19th-century efforts to limit Black political power. They argue that a majority-white, conservative government is again moving to strip authority from local officials and diminish Black influence over policing. State Sen. Karla May, a Black Democrat from St. Louis who has testified against the push for state control, said it’s no coincidence that the plan became an urgent matter for legislators, and is advancing, during the tenure of Mayor Tishaura Jones, who also is Black. May said the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the collective bargaining unit for city police officers, “does not want to be controlled by an African American mayor.” Representatives from the union did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Jones did not make her available for an interview. But the mayor said in an emailed statement that “I don’t think Republican legislators want to give a Black woman who is also a Democrat credit for dramatically reducing crime, increasing officer pay and building out successful public safety programs.” She said advocates for state control have never explained how it would improve public safety. The push to take control of the St. Louis police is a top priority for Gov. Mike Kehoe, a newly elected Republican whose State of the State address framed the issue in economic terms. He said what mattered was whether businesses felt “safe enough to invest in our cities.” Kehoe, who is white, frequently invokes his upbringing in St. Louis to push for state control. The House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Brad Christ, a white Republican from the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis, argues that calling his proposal “state control” is misleading because the governor’s appointees would be required to have lived in the city for at least three years. He noted that the effort to return the police to the state predates Jones’ term as mayor. A Black Democrat from St. Louis filed a similar bill that stalled in the House in 2019 during the tenure of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is white. Christ said in a text that this was “clear evidence that the wild assertion that this effort has been race motivated is completely false.” The Ethical Society of Police, a group that represents Black police officers in St. Louis, also supports a state takeover. Its president, Donnell Walters, wrote an opinion piece in 2023 with then-Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, calling for state control and alleging mismanagement and low morale under city control. Walters did not return messages seeking comment. Heather Taylor, a retired sergeant who led ESOP from 2015 to 2020 — and who later worked in the Jones administration before resigning in 2023 after criticizing the mayor and the department on social media — said she worries the department will suffer under state control. But, she said, ESOP members believe that the city lacks urgency in providing basic support for officers and that the state might do a better job addressing those needs. Jones has repeatedly pointed to city crime data showing a decline since she hired Robert Tracy as police chief two years ago. Notably, the city’s murder totals have plummeted. But many argue that the city’s statistics on other types of crimes don’t reflect the sense of lawlessness in St. Louis. Ness Sandoval, a professor of sociology and demography at Saint Louis University who studies crime trends, said he believes the city underreports crime and lacks transparency. “Most people who rely on the data believe there probably should be an asterisk,” he said. Jones has stood behind the crime numbers, saying they are accurate. Still, the mayor and her police chief maintain that state control does not necessarily reduce crime. In 2012, while the police were still under state oversight, Forbes magazine ranked St. Louis as the second-most-dangerous city in the nation. Kansas City, which is still under state control, continues to struggle with violent crime. Efforts to restore local oversight have never gained much traction there. Despite past studies and proposals — including a 1968 report listing local control as the top recommendation after police killed six Black residents during riots, and a 2013 mayoral committee vote for local control that failed by a single vote — no serious push has materialized.
Corey G. Johnson, design by Anna Donlan For years, some of America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on customers — without their knowledge or consent — to the gun industry’s main lobbying group. Political operatives then employed those details to rally firearms owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House. The strategy remained a secret for more than two decades. In a series of stories in recent months, ProPublica revealed the inner workings of the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s project, using a trove of gun industry documents and insider interviews. We also showed how the NSSF teamed up with the controversial political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge its outreach to gun owners and others in the 2016 election. Additional internal Cambridge reports obtained by ProPublica now detail the full scope and depth of the persuasion campaign’s sophistication and intrusiveness. The political consultancy analyzed thousands of details about the lives of people in the NSSF’s enormous database. Were they shopaholics? Did they gamble? Did women buy plus-size or petite underwear? This story contains interactive graphics that are not displayed here. Read the full story on our website. The alchemy had three phases. Some of the data, excerpted here, was basic information you might find on a census, like marital status or ethnic group. But the data also contained much more specific information about a person’s aesthetic preferences, purchasing habits and hobbies. Other data highlighted consumers’ personal opinions, histories and even vices. How Cambridge converted those tiny bits of data into massive political wins has never before been made public. Its methods raise disturbing questions about how our personal data can be used to manipulate us. “There is a natural desire to stay anonymous and keep your own information, and this is such a violation of that,” said Calli Schroeder, privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The NSSF has said its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.” Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, said the trade group’s 2016 voter outreach campaign involved only commercially available data. But Cambridge emails and a report on the NSSF campaign said the data included 20 years of information about gun buyers harvested from manufacturer warranty cards given to the NSSF. A contractor for the trade group also handed Cambridge a database of shoppers at Cabela’s, a popular sporting goods retailer. (The general counsel for Bass Pro, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said the company had been unable to find evidence of Cabela’s “sharing customer information that was not compliant with their privacy policies at or prior to the time of acquisition.”) Cambridge documents show the firm compared names and addresses in the NSSF and Cabela’s data against the same names and addresses found in a vast array of consumer purchase and lifestyle information, supplied by data broker companies. Next, analysts used an algorithm to profile and score each person’s behavioral traits based on the data and a psychological assessment tool called OCEAN that measures a human being’s openness to new and different experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. From those scores, Cambridge organized people into five groups it called risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Members of each group received Facebook ads tailored to their group’s psychological profiles. Below are political ads and descriptions of those personality groups pulled from Cambridge documents for the NSSF project. The ads include hypothetical messages along with the actual versions the firm sent for the NSSF’s election campaign, called GunVote. Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring high on the scale for neuroticism, risk-takers are “easily frustrated, disorganized, often late and more prone to addiction than others.” They are “attracted to risky situations,” known for “overreacting to various situations,” act “without thinking” and are “often perceived to be outsiders.” Keywords include “security,” “enemies” and “take action.” Persuasion Tactics: Messaging “could be constructed by first introducing negative scenarios, before providing a reassuring and authoritative solution.” Among examples Cambridge gave of ads targeting risk-takers is one that depicts a masked person breaking into a home with the message, “What would you do? Protect the Second Amendment.” The sample ad creates a negative scenario that spotlights the concept of enemies and taking action. The ad Cambridge sent to risk-takers conjures the specter of the Supreme Court turning into “an enemy to your gun rights.” Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring low on the neuroticism scale, go-getters are “efficient, productive, and focused on their goals,” often perceived as “self-assured, direct, welcoming and friendly,” as well as being “upbeat about the future.” They are self-aware, in control of their emotions and “like to keep busy and enjoy shared adventures with friends and family.” Keywords include “future” and “hope.” Persuasion Tactics: Go-getters are best persuaded with messaging that “clearly aligns with the goals to which they are already committed,” according to Cambridge documents. “Imagery should show people collectively taking actions to solve problems in a positive environment.” Cambridge’s example of an ad targeting go-getters focuses on shared adventures and a positive future by depicting young men hunting together with the message, “Help the next generation enjoy the hunt.” The ad Cambridge sent shows what appears to be a father and son on a hunt, wearing matching camouflage jackets with rifles slung over their left shoulders. The image urges the go-getters to “protect your future.” Cambridge Analytica Description: Primarily conscientious on the OCEAN scale, supporters are “relaxed and down to earth” and care about their communities, but “prefer not to be the center of attention.” They act judiciously and “react calmly in a crisis.” They are “rule followers” who “uphold traditional values” and “like their own space, which they share with a select few.” Keywords include “community,” “responsibility,” “reality” and “facts.” Persuasion Tactics: Because supporters value consistency and commitment, they will respond to messages that include “the concept of reciprocity.” Ads should focus on the idea that “helping is a question of responsibility” between the individual and the people they care about. The sample ad presents the phrase, “Protect your right to safe firearms use,” over the image of what appears to be a father and son standing in front of a picturesque, well-preserved landscape dotted by mountains. The image Cambridge sent features a couple who appear to be on a hunt, looking directly at the camera. Hoping to spur supporters’ leanings toward reciprocity, the message says, “Senator Burr is working hard to protect your gun rights.” Cambridge Analytica Description: Found primarily in the late 50s to early 70s age range, carers are “often led by their emotions but are reluctant to express them, directing their anger inwards against themselves.” They gain control in life through caring for others and focusing on their jobs. They “enjoy voluntary and hands-on activities.” Keywords include “family,” “community,” “cooperation” and “values.” Persuasion Tactics: Messaging should “appeal to their altruistic side” and should put forward concepts that “will enhance their family life or their lifestyle.” The carer is motivated by altruism, so messages should “appeal to their sensitivity and emotionality, directly leading to a ‘call to action.’” The sample ad shows multiple generations of a family spending time together, with a message that appeals to the carer’s focus on family values and emotionality: “You take care of your family. Now take care of your country.” The image Cambridge sent to carers depicts a happy family on a sunny day holding hands and surrounded by nature. The message refers to U.S. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina “protecting your family’s way of life.” Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring low in openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism, individualists are “stubborn,” “introverted homebodies” who “view others as potential enemies.” They “prefer the simple things in life and like to pursue activities alone.” Individualists tend to “lack empathy” and have “strong and unchanging beliefs about social norms and morality.” Individualists approach issues with “strict discipline and a ‘get-tough’ attitude.” Keywords include “traditions” and “concrete actions.” Persuasion Tactics: Messaging to individualists should be “direct and straightforward.” They respond with appeals to “their traditional side and their independent approach to life.” The sample ad shows a man holding a gun behind his back with the message, “If you can’t protect yourself, who will?” This approach focuses on the isolation and “get-tough attitude” that speaks to individualists. The ad Cambridge sent to individualists depicts rows of U.S. flags in a field, an image widely associated with military sacrifice and remembrances of war. The message emphasizes the Supreme Court’s role as “the last line of defense for your rights.” Cambridge found the targeted people on Facebook and delivered ads through the platform aimed at voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Each pop-up ad said it came from the NSSF’s GunVote page, but they were crafted by Cambridge. The ads sent to potential voters in key states from June 21, 2016, through July 1, 2016, promoted Republican Sens. Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Ron Johnson. Nearly 817,000 people saw the messages, according to Cambridge’s internal metric reports. For the next three months, Cambridge included voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada in the multistate blast of ads and videos on social media. Altogether, they garnered nearly 378 million views and drove 60,140,280 visitors to the NSSF’s website. Cambridge also mapped out the locations of people in the five personality groups in the key states and gave NSSF contractors lists containing their names and addresses. The contractors examined the numbers and locations of each persona on a county-by-county basis. Then they mailed to the potential voters’ homes messages designed to persuade them to cast ballots for the gun industry’s preferred candidates. Cambridge Analytica's maps show voters broken down by psychological groups. Ohio Wisconsin Missouri See a detailed view of voters grouped by persona in each of the states targeted by Cambridge.
Talia Buford ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. For the third year, ProPublica will invite up to 10 news editors from media companies across the country to participate in a yearlong investigative editing training program, led by the newsroom’s award-winning staff. Applications are now open for the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program. Submissions are due March 24 at 9 a.m. Eastern time. As the nation’s premier nonprofit investigative newsroom, ProPublica is dedicated to journalism that changes laws and lives and to advancing the careers of the people who produce it. The goal of this program is to address our industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. Building a pipeline of talent is a priority that serves us and our industry. “A great investigative editor can be a force multiplier for change; they not only make stories better, but journalists better,” said Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas, an architect of the editor training program. “Unfortunately, it’s one of the most difficult jobs to break into. Many who have succeeded learned from other investigative editors, so we created this program to seed those opportunities. We’ve been amazed at how well it’s worked.” This year’s program will begin in June 2025 with a weeklong boot camp in New York that will include courses and panel discussions on how to conceive of and produce investigative projects that expose harm and have impact. The editors will also get training in how to manage reporters who are working with data, documents and sensitive sources, including whistleblowers, agency insiders and people who have suffered trauma. The program also includes virtual continuing education sessions and support from a ProPublica mentor. This program is funded by the generosity of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports organizations in journalism, film and the arts whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy. The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program is designed to help expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, to help better reflect the nation as a whole. The program kicks off with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, which includes a series of courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors, veteran reporters and other newsroom leaders. The boot camp will include hands-on editing exercises and opportunities for participants to workshop projects underway in their own newsrooms. Afterward, participants will gather virtually for seminars and career development discussions with their cohort and ProPublica journalists. Each of the participants will also be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on story and management challenges or on how to most effectively pursue their own professional aspirations. How to evaluate story ideas and determine the right scope, length and time for getting the work done. How to manage a reporter through a complicated accountability story and communicate feedback in ways that build trust and confidence. How to edit investigative drafts, spot holes in reporting logic, organize a narrative and guide the reporter through the fact-checking process. How to work collaboratively with research, data and multimedia teams to elevate an investigative project. The five-day, all-expenses-paid boot camp will be held June 1 to June 5, 2025, in New York, with remote sessions via Google Meet throughout the year. We are planning for the 2025 boot camp to be held in person and will not have a virtual option. ProPublica will cover participants’ expenses for meals, travel and lodging during the boot camp. Up to 10 journalists. The program is open to all. The aim is to help broaden our industry’s investigative editing ranks to include journalists from a wide array of backgrounds. We encourage everyone to apply, including those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and rural news organizations, as well as women, people of color, veterans, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. Past participants have come from a wide range of news outlets across the country. The ideal participants will have: A minimum of five years of journalism experience, either as an editor or as a reporter primarily doing work with an investigative or accountability focus. A strong grasp of the basics of editing, storytelling, structure and framing. Experience managing a team of journalists or a complicated multipronged reporting project. An accountability mindset: You don’t have to have been on the investigative team, but we are looking for people with an eye for watchdog reporting and editing. No. The application period opens Wednesday and closes March 24 at 9 a.m. Eastern time. You can apply via this link. You can view playback of our informational webinar from 2024 here. The dates have changed, but the rest of the program information remains the same. Send an email to Assistant Managing Editor Talia Buford at talent@propublica.org.
Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press, and J. David McSwane, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In late 2020, St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, Montana, fired its oncologist, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, and took the extraordinary step of publicly accusing him of hurting patients. The hospital said the doctor overprescribed narcotics and gave chemotherapy to patients who didn’t have cancer, among other allegations. Despite being notified by St. Peter’s that it had revoked Weiner’s privileges, the Montana Board of Medical Examiners renewed his license in 2021 and 2023. This week, the board renewed his license again for another two years. Questions about whether Weiner would be permitted to continue practicing medicine intensified after a December ProPublica investigation exposed a trail of patient harm and at least 10 suspicious deaths tied to his practice. That investigation, which relied on thousands of pages of court records and dozens of interviews, detailed how Weiner built a high-volume business that billed as much as possible to public and private insurance while many of his patients received unnecessary, dangerous or substandard care. While it’s unclear what the medical board considered before renewing Weiner’s license, the investigation published by ProPublica and Montana Free Press caught the attention of law enforcement. Criminal investigators with the Montana Department of Justice launched an official inquiry this month, according to three sources directly involved in the matter. Weiner has denied mistreating his patients. He did not respond to a request for comment about his license being renewed and the Montana Department of Justice investigation. After St. Peter’s fired Weiner, he sued the hospital for wrongful termination and defamation. After a four-year legal battle, the Montana Supreme Court sided with the hospital in a ruling this month. The court wrote that the hospital’s peer-review process leading to Weiner’s dismissal was “reasonable and warranted due to the quantity and severity of Weiner’s inappropriate patient care.” After it fired Weiner, the hospital inspected the files of more than 2,000 patients to whom he had prescribed controlled substances. Court records show that medical reviewers hired by St. Peter’s highlighted the case of Sharon Dibble, a 75-year-old patient who died shortly after Weiner doubled her morphine prescription. That increase in morphine “led to respiratory arrest and the patient’s demise,” a medical expert hired by St. Peter’s concluded. Dibble’s son, Tom Stevison, called the medical board’s decision to renew Weiner’s license “ridiculous.” “There’s just too much evidence against him, pointing to wrongdoing, to recklessly relicense this guy,” he said, referring to the hospital’s allegations and ProPublica’s reporting. “I do believe he should be held accountable.” Weiner previously denied the allegation that he overprescribed patients, including Dibble, and was critical of the medical review. In the months after Weiner was fired, thousands of friends and former patients formed Facebook groups in support of him. They raised funds to rent a billboard in Helena that read, “WE STAND WITH DR. WEINER.” On Tuesday, Dayna Schwartz, who led that effort, posted on Facebook, “Congrats Doc on your license renewal!!” A spokesperson for the state Board of Medical Examiners referred a request for comment about Weiner’s license renewal to its umbrella agency, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry. An agency spokesperson did not respond to questions before publication. St. Peter’s did not respond to requests for comment on the renewal of Weiner’s license. The medical board does not typically release information about current or past investigations unless it substantiates allegations of professional misconduct. If it does, a doctor’s license can be suspended or revoked for many reasons, including billing fraud, unprofessional prescribing practices and failure to appropriately document patient care. The criminal inquiry, led by the Montana Attorney General’s Office, comes just months after the federal government settled with St. Peter’s for making false claims when it billed government health programs for Weiner’s services. The hospital agreed to pay back $10.8 million. The hospital has previously said it provides quality care and “this situation is isolated to a single, former physician, and we remain confident in the exceptional care provided by St. Peter’s medical staff.” Federal prosecutors also sued Weiner, accusing him of an array of fraudulent practices, including billing federal insurance programs for unnecessary treatments or more expensive treatments than were delivered. Weiner has denied the allegations and, through attorneys, has moved to dismiss the case.
Jesse Coburn ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has gained access to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development system containing confidential personal information about hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of housing discrimination, including victims of domestic violence. Access to the system, called the HUD Enforcement Management System, or HEMS, is typically strictly limited because it contains medical records, financial files, documents that may list Social Security numbers and other private information. DOGE sought access, and HUD granted it last week, according to information reviewed by ProPublica and two officials familiar with the matter. This is just the latest collection of sensitive personal information that DOGE has tried to access in recent weeks. It has also sought personal taxpayer data kept by the IRS and information on Social Security benefit recipients, and it attempted to enter the Treasury Department’s payment systems. DOGE’s stated mission is to modernize government technology and cut excessive or improper spending. The administration of President Donald Trump has argued that DOGE needs “direct access” to such systems to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.” DOGE’s data-gathering moves at some agencies have sparked forceful pushback, including lawsuits over alleged privacy violations and opposition from career officials who have resigned or retired following access requests. Judges have temporarily blocked DOGE from gaining access to records at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department. And, faced with resistance, DOGE agreed to view only anonymized taxpayer data at the IRS. Few records in the HUD system are redacted or anonymized, and many contain deeply personal material about those who have alleged or been accused of housing discrimination. Domestic violence case files can list addresses to which survivors have relocated for their safety. Harassment cases can include detailed descriptions of sexual assaults. Disability cases can include detailed medical records. Lending discrimination files could feature credit reports and bank statements. The names of witnesses who offered information — in some cases anonymously — about landlords accused of discrimination are among the files as well. HUD enforces numerous civil rights laws, including the Fair Housing Act and aspects of the Violence Against Women Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Such statutes collectively prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, disability and other characteristics. HUD officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, voiced concern that DOGE’s access to HEMS could violate the privacy rights of discrimination victims and potentially put them at risk if their information is mishandled or leaked. The episode is one of many roiling HUD, where the Trump administration is reportedly considering a 50% cut to the nearly 10,000-person workforce. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which combats housing discrimination, may see its roughly 500-person staff cut by as much as 76%, according to an unconfirmed projection circulating widely among HUD employees and viewed by ProPublica. Civil liberties advocates expressed alarm about DOGE’s access to the HUD data, saying it may violate the Privacy Act. “It’s difficult to see why a system dedicated to civil rights complaints would have any impact whatsoever on a department looking for inefficiencies in governmental spending,” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. Venzke suggested DOGE may use HEMS data as a basis for scaling back housing discrimination enforcement. “There is deep concern that DOGE is not there to identify government inefficiencies, but rather to shutter programs that the administration disagrees with,” he said. John Davisson, director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is suing DOGE and other federal agencies and officials over DOGE’s access, contended that the department had gained access to HEMS and systems like it “under the false pretenses of identifying fraud and abuse, when what’s really going on is DOGE is trying to gain control over these databases to direct the activities of federal agencies.” Spokespeople for HUD, the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment (including a question to DOGE about what it plans to do with HEMS). HUD’s Fair Housing office receives tens of thousands of housing discrimination allegations or inquiries annually and investigates — or assigns to state or local agencies — around 8,000 of them each year. Those investigations can last months or years and lead to financial settlements, compliance monitoring and policy reforms by landlords, mortgage lenders, local zoning officials and homeowners associations. Access to HEMS is usually limited to Fair Housing staffers, HUD attorneys and auditors, and state and local investigators. However, DOGE requested entry, and HUD granted read-only access last week to Michael Mirski, who has a HUD email address and whom officials at the housing agency have identified in internal discussions as being affiliated with DOGE. Mirski did not respond to a request for comment. Doris Burke contributed research.
Vernal Coleman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. In 2021, the number of people in Illinois killed from acts of domestic violence was growing at an alarming pace, and state legislators acted with a sense of urgency. In a near-unanimous vote, they passed legislation designed to blunt the trend. The state would establish a network of panels to review killings related to domestic violence and identify whether existing strategies for preventing them fell short. But since then the state has made only meager progress in implementing the plans laid out in that law, and the number of domestic violence killings continues to increase. The bill called for building the network over six years, but nearly four years after Gov. JB Pritzker signed it, only seven of the state’s 102 counties have helped establish fatality case review teams. The first reviews began only late last year, and key deadlines have been missed. An initial report of statewide policy recommendations based on reviews by the panels was expected to be delivered to lawmakers in April 2024. But that has yet to happen. The most glaring absence from the program is Cook County, which is home to Chicago and accounts for nearly 40% of the state’s population. Discussions between organizers of the initiative and agencies that could take charge of a local review panel in the county have failed to yield a commitment. People familiar with the effort say a lack of funding and a gap in leadership have slowed the initiative’s progress. The law does not provide money to staff the local review panels, hampering recruitment of people to serve. Moreover, a top state administrator in charge of developing the network abruptly left the project and was only recently replaced. Illinois Sen. Celina Villanueva, one of several sponsors of the bill creating the initiative, acknowledged the delays but expressed confidence in the overall direction. “My hope is that once everything is fully established, that it’s a strong working mechanism to be able to address the larger issues of why we passed this bill to begin with,” she said. Cristin Evans, spokesperson for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, the state agency that oversees the review effort, said that “the amount of time it has taken for teams to conduct their first review is not unexpected given the structure and complexity of the initiative.” The current teams are on track to complete a minimum of two cases in 2025, she added. Recent killings underscore the urgency of addressing breakdowns in the systems designed to protect people from domestic violence. In November, Chicago police found Lacramioara Beldie stabbed to death in an apparent murder-suicide at the hands of her estranged husband, Constantin. Court records that surfaced after Beldie’s death detailed a disturbing timeline. Six weeks before he allegedly killed his wife, Constantin Beldie appeared inside a Cook County court to face accusations he’d assaulted and held her inside a car against her will. Prosecutors did seek to detain Beldie ahead of his trial over the incident but failed to submit evidence of his alleged prior abuse. Judge Thomas E. Nowinski denied the state’s petition, noting that state prosecutors had failed to establish Beldie’s alleged history of violence toward his wife and concluded he was a “medium-low risk.” The judge released him on electronic monitoring. In a letter to the chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, nearly 30 Chicago-area elected officials, including several city alderpersons, blasted the “multiple systemic failures” that led to Beldie’s killing and called for Nowinski to be removed from domestic violence court. He was later transferred to municipal court, where he will oversee traffic and misdemeanor cases. But the chief judge has defended Nowinski, emphasizing prosecutors’ role in the hearing’s outcome. With the goal of learning from past failures, the fatality review legislation calls for a two-tiered approach, with county-based review teams and oversight from a statewide committee. The county teams are supposed to review the circumstances surrounding certain killings to assess how systems designed to intervene and prevent domestic violence performed. Just a few counties have joined review teams since 2021: Kankakee, Lake and Will, with joint teams operating in Madison and Bond counties as well as Winnebago and Boone counties. Those teams represent five of the state’s 25 judicial circuits. The statewide committee consists of representatives of law enforcement, academics and social service providers. Drawing on the local teams’ reviews, it is supposed to submit a report every two years outlining specific recommendations for “legislative, systemic, policy, and any other changes to reduce domestic violence and domestic violence related fatalities.” In its first report, in 2024, the committee revealed it could not yet provide recommendations because none of the local teams had been formed. Fatality review committees first appeared around 1995, as advocates and lawmakers around the United States began searching for new ways to stem the tide of domestic violence. In the years since, all but five states have established processes for reviewing fatal cases of domestic or intimate partner violence, according to the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative, an Arizona nonprofit that helps states develop review boards. Those who back these efforts say they’re a tool that can improve outcomes for the vulnerable people domestic violence prevention policies are intended to protect. A 2013 University of Washington study of outcomes in states that had established fatality reviews found that recommendations made by the panels had successfully prioritized issues related to their work. But prioritization alone “may not translate into organizational and institutional changes,” the study found. Other states have experienced similar difficulties to Illinois’, not only in establishing a review process but maintaining it over time. In South Carolina, implementation of the 2016 law establishing a review process of those killings has been “uneven,” said Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. The state’s apparatus is overseen by a central committee, with local teams operated by county-based district attorneys. But similar to Illinois’ law, the South Carolina law does not include new funding. With resources already stretched thin, that has led to spotty participation among local groups. Many of the local teams meet only infrequently, Barber said. “I don’t want to say that there hasn’t been progress, but there’s more that could be done,” she said. Even with all the attention the issue has received, not all states compile tallies of domestic violence-related killings. Tracking those numbers is notoriously difficult. Federal law requires law enforcement agencies to report general crime statistics. But determining whether there was domestic violence leading up to a killing requires collecting and analyzing records from disparate sources, something advocates say not all city or state governments require. That said, estimates made by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from death certificates, police reports and other sources reveal a steady increase in domestic violence killings across the nation. In 2017, 1,070 people were killed in the United States in circumstances involving domestic or intimate partner violence. By 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that number had skyrocketed to 1,800. Illinois’ own tally reflects the national pattern. The total rose from 34 killings to 49 over that same period, according to the CDC tallies. Lawmakers and advocates in Illinois continue to look for ways to address the problems. Last month, after three failed attempts, the Illinois General Assembly passed Karina’s Law, which will require police to confiscate firearms from anyone whose Illinois gun permit has been revoked because a judge issued an emergency order of protection against them. Pritzker signed the bill into law earlier this month. The bill is named after Karina Gonzalez, who in 2023 was shot to death along with her 15-year-old daughter in their Chicago home. Her estranged husband has been charged with the killings and has pleaded not guilty. Jesus Alvarez, Gonzalez’s son, said he believes it’s important not only to pass laws aimed at domestic violence, but to make sure they work as intended. There are obviously flaws in the system, Alvarez said. “But if you get these laws right, it should hopefully be a little bit easier for people, and they won’t have to face the same kind of situation that I faced.” With so many horrific examples of domestic violence taking place in Chicago and Cook County suburbs, the county’s omission from the review effort remains glaring. Nonetheless, it was not an initial target as the statewide program launched, said Sara Block, a managing director at the nonprofit social service provider Ascend Justice and volunteer co-chair of the statewide effort. “There’s just more dynamics to consider in Cook,” she said. “It’s not that it’s not a priority. We very much hope that every single circuit will have one in the end. But some just aren’t ready yet, and it will take more groundwork, it takes more education, more relationship building, before they are.” The law enforcement and social service agencies asked to lead efforts in Cook County and elsewhere are already stretched for time and resources, said Jennifer Greene, advocacy director for nonprofit service provider Life Span and a member of the statewide overseeing committee. “You have to have someone who can run that team — who can handle administration and making contact, and there’s just not any funding attached to it to do those things,” she said. Officials and advocates in Winnebago County, in northwest Illinois, have found a way to overcome those and other obstacles. When state lawmakers passed legislation calling for the review panels, the city of Rockford’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention saw an opportunity and took a leadership role. Forming a local committee wasn’t a hard sell, said Jennifer Cacciapaglia, director of that Rockford office, which is in Winnebago County. A foundation grant to pay for staff and research time helped ease concerns about capacity. “I think countywide there was a recognition that this could really create positive outcomes for people, so support has been wide,” she said. Last month, she joined a small group of county advocates and officials to conduct the county’s first reviews of domestic violence killings, focusing on two cases. Cacciapaglia said the panel’s goal is to continue examining cases through the end of the year and submit findings to the statewide committee. In early February, the statewide committee came together for its bimonthly virtual meeting. These gatherings begin with a moment of reflection, to pause and be reminded of what’s at stake by recalling a recent victim. “We do this simply to keep survivors and those who have died due to domestic violence in the forefront of our minds,” said Andrea Wilson, recently installed director of the committee, to the assembled group. The committee’s attention turned to Tanisha Weeks. A judge had granted the 41-year-old mother an order of protection against her ex-boyfriend last December. She was shot dead in January in an apparent murder-suicide in Chicago involving an ex-boyfriend. Because the killing occurred in Cook County, there is no panel to review the circumstances.
Mary Hudetz ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Museums, universities and government agencies continued to make headway last year toward repatriating the remains of thousands of Native American ancestors to tribal nations after decades of slow progress drew national attention. Nowhere was the shift more apparent than at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the agency charged with enforcing the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires items and remains taken from Indigenous gravesites to be returned to tribes. The department’s subagencies, including the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, collectively repatriated the remains of 1,366 Native American ancestors last year, more than a third of the number in its possession at the start of the year. The department’s efforts reflected an awareness, documented in an internal memo in late 2023, that it has a crucial leadership role to play under NAGPRA. Only the Illinois State Museum, an institution that ProPublica has reported on in-depth, came close to repatriating as many, with the transfer of more than 1,320 remains excavated from a single site. The emphasis on repatriation increased in tandem with reporting by ProPublica in 2023 about failures to comply with the law. “For too long ancestors and Tribal cultural items have been disconnected from their communities and resting on museum shelves,” Interior officials said in an October 2023 memo. In response to questions from ProPublica, an Interior spokesperson did not say whether the department’s focus on repatriation will continue under Donald Trump’s second presidency but pointed to new regulations finalized in 2023 that aimed to speed up the process. The regulations, which took effect last year, require institutions to defer more to tribal accounts of their histories and ties to the regions from which remains were removed; the rules also set new deadlines for institutions to comply with the law. In total, museums, universities and agencies across the country returned more than 10,300 Native American ancestors to tribes last year. The total makes 2024 the third-biggest year for the repatriation of ancestral remains under NAGPRA, according to an online ProPublica database that allows the public to look up the records of more than 600 museums and universities that must comply with the law. Today, ProPublica is updating the database to show repatriation progress through Jan. 6, 2025. Outside of the Interior Department and the Illinois State Museum, state universities also recorded significant progress. For example, California State University, Sacramento repatriated the remains of 873 Native Americans previously held in its collection. The progress made last year followed a record number of repatriations in 2023, when institutions returned 18,000 Native American ancestors. “The progress shows the regulations are working,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, the chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that advocates for Native American rights. Nearly 60% of ancestral remains reported as falling under NAGPRA over the years have now been repatriated, but that still leaves at least 90,000 that must be returned to tribes. The Interior Department has acknowledged that many of the human remains it must eventually repatriate have long been unaccounted for in federal inventories. Many of the department’s collections are scattered across the country in university and museum repositories over which the federal government has no oversight, officials said. Agency staffers also said last year that they would need continued funding for their efforts — a factor that may prove challenging under an administration focused on cutting spending and staffing. “We need to sustain this work until all of the ancestors that are in DOI control have been repatriated,” one Interior Department employee last year told the National NAGPRA Review Committee, a federal advisory board made up of museum, science and tribal representatives. Just over a year ago, the Interior Department had yet to repatriate more than 3,000 ancestors, many of which were excavated in 20th century archaeological digs and infrastructure projects on federal and tribal lands. The department’s progress repatriating 1,366 Native American ancestors last year comes after top officials sent directives in late 2023 instructing Interior agencies to prioritize the work. Some agencies also set aside more money for repatriation work. “If you look at previous budgets, we weren’t allocated any funding for NAGPRA,” Tamara Billie, the chief of cultural resource management for the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, told the National NAGPRA Review Committee last May. She estimated it could cost several million dollars over the next three to five years for the bureau to repatriate the hundreds of ancestors it has yet to reunite with tribes. Since Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, federal staffers have tried to locate the collections excavated on federal and tribal lands, but they have often found that museums and universities transferred their holdings to other institutions without leaving much of a paper trail. Last year, officials said only a handful of repositories, like the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, had gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government — an early step in the often long repatriation process. “Some have submitted very detailed, in some cases itemized inventory information,” said Bridget Ambler, with the Bureau of Land Management, during a National NAGPRA Review Committee hearing last year. “But to be honest, for the vast majority we’re not fully aware of what the nature of those collections are and if they include human remains or NAGPRA cultural items.” Under the new NAGPRA regulations, museums and universities had a deadline of January of this year to hand in lists of items in their facilities that should be included in federal inventories. The requirement resulted in museums and universities submitting roughly 1,000 new notices to the Interior Department, the manager of the National NAGPRA Program said during a recorded training last month. It’s not clear how many ancestral remains are accounted for in those notices. At the Illinois State Museum, which holds the second-largest collection of Native American remains, leadership was already focused on improving their repatriation record. Then, a new state law, along with the Interior Department’s updated regulations, went into effect. The state law, which followed ProPublica’s reporting, gave tribes more control over reburials. It also established a fund for repatriation work, such as paying for tribal members to travel to the museum to consult on collections, and for the reburials of remains. Many of the remains held by the state museum came from a burial mound dug up in the 1920s by Don Dickson, a chiropractor. He turned the burial site into a roadside attraction. Over the years, Native Americans, whose tribes had been forcibly removed to other states, protested the exhibit that later became the Dickson Mounds Museum, a branch of the Illinois State Museum. The state eventually closed the burial mounds exhibit, but the museum kept the human remains, maintaining that they could not be traced to living people and therefore would not be repatriated. That was until this past year. On Feb. 24, 2024, the Illinois State Museum published a notice in the Federal Register saying that 1,325 ancestors and thousands of items buried with them were available to tribes for repatriation. As of the start of this year, the Illinois State Museum held the remains of an estimated 5,800 Native American ancestors. Only the Ohio History Connection now holds more unrepatriated human remains, over 7,900 in total, according to federal data. In the roughly three decades prior to 2024, the Columbus institution had returned fewer than 20 ancestors to tribes. But it showed signs of progress last year in making more than 150 ancestral remains, or roughly 2% of its skeletal collection reported under NAGPRA, available to be repatriated. In an email, a spokesperson for the museum said it expects to complete more repatriations in consultation with tribal partners, who have asked the museum “not to rush this critical work.” As in Illinois, the Ohio institution’s collections largely originate from centuries-old burial mounds in a state where tribal nations were forcibly removed. More state support for repatriation also could be on the horizon in Arizona. Last month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced she would ask lawmakers for $7 million to support repatriation efforts at the Arizona State Museum. The museum on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson is a repository for the state and federal government. Over the years, records show, it has conducted repatriations but has yet to return more than half of its collection reported under NAGPRA — the remains of 2,600 ancestors total — to tribes mostly in the Southwest. “The hard-working staff at the museum have done their best to repatriate human remains and artifacts to tribes without any significant financial investment from the state,” Hobbs, a Democrat, said in prepared remarks to tribal leaders last month. “It is time for that to change. It is time for the state to take repatriation seriously.” One of the museums’ challenges in trying to reach full compliance with the law stems from the fact that it continues to receive human remains because of its status as a state repository. Arizona medical examiners have sent the museum human remains that they come across in their investigations, including the ancestors of Native Americans. In some instances, looters have surrendered items and bones unearthed from graves, according to Jim Watson, associate director at the Arizona State Museum. (Looting violates federal laws.) “We will receive an individual or remains in the mail or objects from private citizens, particularly when individuals pass away and their relatives are going through their stuff,” he told the NAGPRA Review Committee last spring. “They find a box in the garage or the attic, for example, and it says, ‘from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Phoenix’ or ‘ancestral remains.’ So, they will ship them to the University of Arizona, often without contacting us first.” He estimates the museum receives such packages two to three times per year. Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.
Craig Silverman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people. “BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called NO Filter Seeking Truth, adding, “Cash in folks.” Check Your Fact, Reuters and other fact-checkers debunked the claim, and Facebook added labels to posts warning that they contained false information or missing context. ICE has a tip line but said it does not offer cash bounties. This spring, Meta plans to stop working with fact-checkers in the U.S. to label false or misleading content, the company said on Jan. 7. And if a post like the one about ICE goes viral, the pages that spread it could earn a cash bonus. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduce the spread of false information. At the same time, Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook Content Monetization program is currently invite-only, but Meta plans to make it widely available this year. The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta, according to former professional Facebook hoaxsters and a former Meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety. ProPublica identified 95 Facebook pages that regularly post made-up headlines designed to draw engagement — and, often, stoke political divisions. The pages, most of which are managed by people overseas, have a total of more than 7.7 million followers. After a review, Meta said it had removed 81 pages for being managed by fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves as American while posting about politics and social issues. Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, declined to respond to specific questions, including whether any of the pages were eligible for or enrolled in the company’s viral content payout program. The pages collected by ProPublica offer a sample of those that could be poised to cash in. Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims. With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist. “The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added. In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.” Clayton said Meta’s community standards and content moderation teams are still active and reiterated the company’s Jan. 7 statement that it is working to ensure it doesn’t “over-enforce” its rules by mistakenly banning or suppressing content. Meta’s changes mark a significant reversal of the company’s approach to moderating false and misleading information, reframing the labeling or downranking of content as a form of censorship. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement. His stance reflects the approach of Elon Musk after acquiring Twitter, now X, in 2022. Musk has made drastic cuts to the company’s trust and safety team, reinstated thousands of suspended accounts including that of a prominent neo-Nazi and positioned Community Notes, which allows participating users to add context via notes appended to tweets, as the platform’s key system for flagging false and misleading content. Zuckerberg has said Meta will replace fact-checkers and some automated systems in the U.S. with a version of the Community Notes system. A Jan. 7 update to a Meta policy page said that in the U.S. the company “may still reduce the distribution of certain hoax content whose spread creates a particularly bad user or product experience (e.g., certain commercial hoaxes).” Clayton did not clarify whether posts with notes appended to them would be eligible for monetization. He provided links to academic papers that detail how crowdsourced fact-checking programs like Community Notes can be effective at identifying misinformation, building trust among users and addressing perceptions of bias. A 2023 ProPublica investigation, as well as reporting from Bloomberg, found that X’s Community Notes failed to effectively address the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Reporting from the BBC and Agence France-Presse showed that X users who share false information have earned thousands of dollars thanks to X’s content monetization program, which also rewards high engagement. Keith Coleman, X’s vice president of product, previously told ProPublica that the analysis of Community Notes about the Israel-Hamas conflict did not include all of the relevant notes, and he said that the program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.” Allen said it takes time, resources and oversight to scale up crowdsourced fact-checking systems. Meta’s decision to scrap fact-checking before giving the new approach time to prove itself is risky, he said. “We could in theory have a Community Notes program that was as effective, if not more effective, than the fact-checking program,” he said. “But to turn all these things off before you have the Community Notes thing in place definitely feels like we’re explicitly going to have a moment with little guardrails.” Before Facebook began cracking down on content in late 2016, American fake news peddlers and spammers based in North Macedonia and elsewhere cashed in on viral hoaxes that deepened political divisions and played on people’s fears. One American, Jestin Coler, ran a network of sites that earned money from hoax news stories for nearly a decade, including the infamous and false viral headline from 2016 “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” He previously told NPR that he started the sites as a way to “infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.” Coler said he earned five figures a month from the sites, which he operated in his spare time. When people clicked on the links to the stories in their news feed, they landed on websites full of ads, which generated revenue for Coler. That’s become a tougher business model since Meta has made story links less visible on Facebook in recent years. Facebook’s new program to pay publishers directly for viral content could unlock a fresh revenue stream for hoaxsters. “It’s still the same formula to get people riled up. It seems like it could just go right back to those days, like overnight,” Coler told ProPublica in a phone interview. He said he left the Facebook hoax business years ago and won’t return. In January, ProPublica compiled a list of pages that had been previously cited for posting hoaxes and false content and discovered dozens more through domain and content searches. The pages posted false headlines designed to spark controversy, such as “Lia Thomas Admits: ‘I Faked Being Trans to Expose How Gullible the Left Is’” and “Elon Musk announced that he has acquired MSNBC for $900 million to put an end to toxic programming.” The Musk headline was paired with an AI-generated image of him holding a contract with the MSNBC logo. It generated over 11,000 reactions, shares and comments. Most of the pages are managed by accounts outside of the U.S., including in North Macedonia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, according to data from Facebook. Many of these pages use AI-generated images to illustrate their made-up headlines. One network of overseas-run pages is connected to the site SpaceXMania.com, an ad-funded site filled with hoax articles like “Elon Musk Confronts Beyoncé Publicly: ‘Stop Pretending to Be Country, It’s Just Not You.’” SpaceX Fanclub, the network’s largest Facebook page, has close to 220,000 followers and labels its content as satire. One of its recent posts was a typo-laden AI-generated image of a sign that said, “There Are Only 2 2 Genders And Will Ban Atheletes From Women Sports — President.” SpaceXMania.com’s terms and conditions page says it’s owned by Funky Creations LTD, a United Kingdom company registered to Muhammad Shabayer Shaukat, a Pakistani national. ProPublica sent questions to the site and received an email response signed by Tim Lawson, who said he’s an American based in Florida who works with Shaukat. (ProPublica was unable to locate a person by that name in public records searches, based on the information he provided.) “Our work involves analyzing the latest trends and high-profile news related to celebrities and shaping it in a way that appeals to a specific audience — particularly conservatives and far-right groups who are predisposed to believe certain narratives,” the email said. Lawson said they earn between $500 and $1,500 per month from web ads and more than half of the traffic comes from people clicking on links on Facebook. The pages are not currently enrolled in the invitation-only Facebook Content Monetization program, according to Lawson. The SpaceXMania pages identified by ProPublica were recently taken offline. Lawson denied that they were removed by Meta and said he deactivated the pages “due to some security reasons.” Meta declined to comment. It remains to be seen how hoax page operators will fare as Meta’s algorithmic reversals take hold and the U.S. fact-checking program grinds to a halt. But some Facebook users are already taking advantage of the loosened guardrails. Soon after Zuckerberg announced the changes, people spread a fake screenshot of a Bloomberg article headlined, “The spark from Zuckerberg’s electric penis pump, might be responsible for the LA fires.” “Community note: verified true,” wrote one commenter. Mollie Simon contributed research.
Stephen Engelberg ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists. As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices. By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week. It’s also completely untrue. You might ask why it’s worth grabbing onto one particular false assertion when there are so many incorrect facts and figures flooding the zone of public conversation. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Musk shared a video of the briefing on X, saying it was the tip of the iceberg. Days later, the president doubled down, saying his administration prevented delivery of $100 million of “condoms to Hamas.” A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from the U.S. Agency for International Development showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; and it would mean more than 1 billion condoms for the roughly 1 million Palestinian males living in Gaza. It took Musk two weeks to disavow the condom claim, saying that “we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” A look at how the administration handled the quickly debunked and obviously wrong statement about who is working from home shows that correcting “mistakes” is far from standard practice recently for either the White House or prominent Republicans. The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support DOGE, and she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as wasteful spending. The claim was immediately picked up by The New York Post, commentator Sean Hannity and other Trump allies. Hannity tweeted “JOB FOR DOGE: Only 6% of Federal Employees work from an Office Full-time, Some not working at All: Audit.” The Post followed up hours later with an editorial that derided federal employees for their “privilege” and asked, “How many does the nation actually need?” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, “That is absurd, and it’s not something the American people will stand for.” Musk retweeted the Post story to his more than 200 million followers soon after it appeared. He said things were even worse than the report had found, asserting that “if you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.” The 6% figure struck me as highly implausible. I began my career at a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest Navy base. I thought about the number of people needed to staff an aircraft carrier battle group on deployments that last for many months. After Norfolk, I spent years covering national security. Given the restrictions on handling classified information, hardly anyone at the intelligence agencies, the State Department or the Pentagon can work from home. I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office. The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.” The editors said they had also added data from an August 2024 study by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that 54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices. In the world of journalism, this is how editors try to address egregious misreadings of their work. Jared Serbu, the deputy editor of Federal News Network, said he and his colleagues were taken aback by how his organization’s clearly unscientific survey had somehow been transformed into a defining statistic about federal employees. “It was a survey of our niche audience for our niche audience,” Serbu said. “Nobody’s ever been confused about it before this.” Later in December, a TV report cited the editor’s note and labeled the 6% number as “false.” At about the same time, PolitiFact looked at Johnson’s claim that only 1% of federal workers show up to work each day and labeled it “pants on fire,” the fact-checking site’s lowest rating for a statement that is “not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.” That should have ended the conversation. But it didn’t. On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, the White House issued a statement that obliquely referred to Musk’s coming assault on federal agencies. It said Trump was “planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.” A week after that, a senior administration official cited the 6% figure in explaining plans to slash the size of the federal workforce through buyouts. “We’re five years past COVID and just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office,” the official told Axios and NBC News. The quotation also appeared in a memo sent by the White House to Republican allies, the Daily Wire reported. I asked Ernst’s press secretary, Zach Kraft, whether the senator planned to correct the record or amend her report. He said neither was in the offing. “To set the record straight — If federal employees were indeed showing up in large numbers, then calling them back to work wouldn’t be controversial,” Kraft said in an email. He noted that a bill introduced by Ernst would require federal managers to “take daily attendance, so everyone knows who is showing up to work and who isn’t.” The White House did not respond to my questions about why its Jan. 20 statement cited a claim about federal workers that had been so clearly refuted. The portrayal of federal workers as lazy and indolent continues to be a central aspect of the president’s plans to slash government employment. On Wednesday in Miami, Trump said federal workers should “show up to work in person like the rest of us,” adding that: “You can’t work at home. They’re not working. They’re playing tennis, they’re playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard.” (Multiple news outlets noted that Trump had golfed on nine of his first 30 days in office.) It’s said that we live in a post-fact society, that everything is arguable and nothing is truly knowable. I vehemently disagree. Now, more than ever, facts matter, and ProPublica is going to continue to track how and when patently false statements are injected into momentous conversations about this country’s future.
Eli Hager ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. President Donald Trump was asked at a press conference this month if there were any federal agencies or programs that Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency wouldn’t be allowed to mess with. “Social Security will not be touched,” Trump answered, echoing a promise he has been making for years. Despite his eagerness to explode treaties, shutter entire government agencies and abandon decades-old ways of doing things, the president understands that Social Security benefits for seniors are sacrosanct. Still, the DOGE team landed at the Social Security Administration this week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments. DOGE has begun installing its own operatives, including an engineer linked to tweets promoting eugenics and executives with a cut-first-fix-later philosophy, in multiple top positions at the Social Security Administration. Their first wave of actions — initiating the elimination of 41 jobs and the closing of at least 10 local offices, so far — was largely lost in the rush of headlines. Those first steps might seem restrained compared with the mass firings that DOGE has pursued at other federal agencies. But Social Security recipients rely on in-person service in all 50 states, and the shuttering of offices, reported on DOGE’s website to include locations everywhere from rural West Virginia to Las Vegas, could be hugely consequential. The closures potentially reduce access to Social Security for some of the most vulnerable people in this country — including not just retirees but also individuals with severe physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as children whose parents have died and who’ve been left in poverty. The Social Security Administration, headquartered just outside Baltimore, has more than 1,200 regional and field offices — nearly a fifth of all of the federal government’s offices nationwide. There are 119,000 visitors to these brick-and-mortar facilities every business day. Many of them do not have high levels of computer and internet literacy and need someone to help them through all the legalese of a nearly century-old social program with a wonky user interface. This is also where elderly people can apply for Medicare, which doesn’t have physical outposts of its own. And it’s where hearings are held — due process provided — for beneficiaries who believe that they have been unfairly kicked off of desperately needed assistance. “It’s where people access government,” said Kathleen Romig, a longtime expert on the program at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who recently served at the Social Security Administration in a temporary capacity. In the event of more Social Security office closures like the ones that the Trump administration has begun pursuing — the president is broadly moving to close a range of offices and has even floated the idea of terminating every single federal lease — it is disproportionately poor people with lower levels of education who will become less likely to apply for and get help, research on past closures has found. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent Fox News interview, press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized “fake news reporters” for “fear-mongering” about Social Security’s future under the Trump administration. She said that Musk is only going after fraud and waste in the program. The roughly 15 million recipients of Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance benefits — many of whom are severely disabled and destitute, or are orphans — are among the least politically powerful people in the U.S. Many told ProPublica that the distance to their closest Social Security office is already long, and that wait times to get a representative on the phone or a claim or an appeal processed can range from hours to years. Even before Trump was inaugurated, the agency’s staffing levels were at a 50-year low due to a decade of budget caps and cuts authored by congressional Republicans. Several SSI and SSDI beneficiaries in rural areas told ProPublica that they have been watching with anxiety as Trump and Musk slash through federal agencies, knowing that any further office or staffing cuts to the Social Security Administration could be catastrophic for them. Bryan Dooley, a 34-year-old with cerebral palsy who lives outside of Winston Salem, North Carolina, uses a wheelchair and struggles with speaking (he communicated with me through a caretaker). He said that his Social Security benefits, which he receives directly because of his disability and because that disability entitles him to a portion of his late mother’s Social Security, were mistakenly cut off several months ago. As he fights to get the assistance turned back on, he has been depleting his savings account trying to pay his mortgage. “I really want to stay in the house where I lived with my mother,” he said. “Otherwise it’s a 24-hour care facility for me.” Dooley, who works part time for a nonprofit called Solutions for Independence that helps others with disabilities, said that “we’re all watching” the developments at the Social Security Administration. If his local office were to be closed, he noted, he might have to coordinate with a caretaker or family member to take him 100 miles to Raleigh for administrative hearings on his benefits; scheduling appointments, already extremely difficult, would become almost impossible. “It would be a nightmare for all of us,” he said. That nightmare is now on its way to becoming a reality in White Plains, New York, the site of one of the agency’s hearing offices on DOGE’s list of closures. According to a letter that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recently sent to the Social Security Administration, the White Plains office, which serves beneficiaries across seven counties, currently has more than 2,000 cases pending. Starting in May, elderly and disabled people across the region will have to travel up to 135 miles to the next-closest office, which for some of them will be in another state. “Does the Administration have plans to close additional SSA offices?” Gillibrand asked. The Social Security Administration declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about DOGE’s recent efforts at the agency, including the 10 office closures and staffing reductions. A spokesperson did provide a brief statement on the White Plains situation, saying that the agency had been informed by the General Services Administration that the White Plains office’s lease would not be renewed and that there are no plans to replace the office. Many hearings will take place online through video and audio, the spokesperson said. DOGE’s capture of the Social Security Administration began this week when Trump elevated to acting commissioner a low-level official named Leland Dudek. In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, Dudek acknowledged that he had been surreptitiously feeding information to DOGE before his promotion. “I confess,” he wrote. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE… I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” He added: “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.” After Dudek was put in charge of the agency, he told staff that he hoped to reassure them that “our continuing priority is paying beneficiaries the right amount at the right time, and providing other critical services people rely on from us.” He also rebutted some of Musk’s claims regarding widescale Social Security fraud. In a separate meeting, he told Trump administration officials and congressional staffers that one of his new ideas is to “outsource” the jobs of Social Security Administration call center employees, The Wall Street Journal reported late this week. Still, DOGE has proceeded more carefully with firings and layoffs at the Social Security Administration than it has at other agencies. Whereas aviation safety and nuclear security specialists, veterans affairs staff and firefighters, medical researchers and many others have all been forced out of their jobs by DOGE in recent weeks, it wasn’t until this Thursday that a much smaller number of recently hired or recently promoted Social Security staff started receiving emails saying that their jobs were not “mission critical.” According to emails shared with ProPublica, these staff members had eight hours to decide if they wanted to request another job within the agency, likely at lower pay and in another city (such a job would not be guaranteed, and relocation expenses would not be covered). These emails appear to have gone out largely to Social Security Administration policy staff and lawyers, including those who help administrative law judges write decisions in disability cases — decisions that may now take longer and potentially have more errors in them as a result, one agency official told ProPublica. “Claimants will have adverse effects in terms of delay and also losing benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Social Security disability cases already have huge backlogs at the hearing stage, often taking more than a year. Still, notably, employees “serving the public directly,” like those in field offices, were spared from these layoffs, at least for now. That said, staff at Social Security’s regional offices around the country were not listed as “mission critical,” reflecting a further misunderstanding on DOGE’s part of what disabled people in particular need from the agency, legal aid attorneys in multiple states told ProPublica. When a low-income SSI or SSDI recipient has a problem that a front-line rep at a field office can’t explain or fix, or is just too overloaded with cases to deal with, it is regional staff who can help resolve the situation. When a person with an intellectual disability doesn’t understand why their benefits are being cut off or why they haven’t received notices in the mail about their case, regional staff can look through the case file and figure out what to do. Regional staff do not yet appear to have been affected by DOGE’s layoffs, but many are now feeling on edge. One regional team leader, who also spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, said that “nobody knows how the RIF [Reduction in Force] is going to work” in the coming days, weeks and months. Offices could be closed at the same time that remote staff are ordered to return to an office, creating a situation in which some SSA employees will face multiple-hour commutes each way every day, all but forcing them to leave their jobs and thus stop serving beneficiaries. “We think that’s the plan, so that they don’t have to explicitly do as many layoffs” at an agency as popular and heretofore untouchable as the Social Security Administration, said Jessica LaPointe, a council president for the American Federation of Government Employees. LaPointe represents Social Security’s field office and teleservice workers. That’s not to mention the attrition that could result from the low morale that has been spreading across Social Security Administration employees’ Signal threads and blogs this week; the agency is already the most overworked and demoralized of nearly any across the federal government, surveys of federal workers have found. “And meanwhile the beneficiary ranks just keep exploding,” the regional team leader said. (The number of Social Security recipients has grown by over 13 million since 2010, as Baby Boomers surge into retirement.) Even maintaining level staffing, several Social Security experts told ProPublica, would, in population-adjusted terms, amount to a major reduction in the program’s ability to provide benefits and services to its clients. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who was commissioner of the Social Security Administration from December 2023 to November 2024 and also previously served as governor of Maryland, told ProPublica that he believes this week marked just the start of what might be a long four years for Social Security. “The American people through a lifetime of work earn not only these benefits but the customer service necessary to process these benefits,” he said. “Their money went to that, too.” Trump and Musk “are going to break the largest, most important social program in America,” O’Malley predicted — even if they have to do so gradually. In recent years, the Social Security Administration along with the U.S. Digital Service were working to make it simpler for people with disabilities to apply for Social Security benefits. Officials conducted surveys of poor, elderly and disabled SSI applicants about what would make the process less burdensome, and they then began creating a simplified application — with plain-language questions and some pre-populated answers — that would eventually be available to complete on paper, by phone or online. The goal was to reduce the time that applicants spend applying for benefits as well as the time that agency staff spend processing those applications. Or, in other words: government efficiency. Yet these efforts have been slowed now that Trump has renamed the U.S. Digital Service the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service. “In conversations with regular people about how Social Security could be more efficient, they usually say that they want more staff on the phone lines and taking appointments, and more office locations, so that they don’t have to wait 60 days after their spouse or parent died, or wait for months after developing a life-changing disability,” said Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Right now we’re hearing all these generalities about the government being too big, rather than a focus on individual people trying to access services from that government.” Which of these philosophies the Social Security Administration adheres to for the remainder of Trump’s time in office will depend in part on which is embraced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to become the permanent agency commissioner, who will replace Dudek once confirmed by the Senate. Bisignano’s attitude toward Social Security, its staffing, its regional and field offices, and its customer service hasn’t yet fully come into focus. He hasn’t yet been questioned at a confirmation hearing. What is known about Bisignano is that he’s an experienced finance executive who oversees a $20 billion company. And that during his time as CEO of Fiserv, the payment-processing giant, his company generated savings by closing about a hundred locations and terminating thousands of employees, providing them with the opportunity to apply for other roles.
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