This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK Public Media and NPR’s Station Investigations Team. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon toured the public school in Sleetmute last fall, he called the building “the poster child” for what’s wrong with the way the state pays to build and maintain schools. The tiny community 240 miles west of Anchorage had begged Alaska’s education department for nearly two decades for money to repair a leaky roof that over time had left part of the school on the verge of collapse.

Seated at a cafeteria table after the tour, Edgmon, a veteran independent lawmaker, told a Yup’ik elder he planned to “start raising a little bit of Cain” when he returned to the Capitol in Juneau for the 2025 legislative session.

Other lawmakers said similar things after an investigation by KYUK Public Media, ProPublica and NPR earlier this year found that the state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings, including the Sleetmute school. Because of the funding failures, students and teachers in some of Alaska’s most remote villages face serious health and safety risks, the news organizations found.

Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, an Anchorage Democrat, called the investigation’s findings “heartbreaking” and said in an email during the legislative session earlier this year that “the current state of these schools is unacceptable.” Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, wrote to say that the “responsibility lies squarely on the legislature” and acknowledged “we do not do enough.” Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican from Fairbanks, wrote, “We are working to right the ship!”

Yet during a legislative session where money for education was front and center, lawmakers were only able to pass $40 million in school construction and maintenance funding, about 5% of the nearly $800 million that districts say they need to keep their buildings safe and operating.

In June, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than two-thirds of that, nearly $28 million.

“Basically, we don’t have enough money to pay for all of our obligations,” Dunleavy explained in a video posted on YouTube.

In the video, seated at an empty table in a darkened room and flanked by U.S. and Alaska flags, Dunleavy, a Republican, painted a grim picture of the state’s future. “The price of oil has gone down; therefore our revenue is going down,” he said.

The crisis Dunleavy described isn’t just a short-term problem. State officials have known for decades that relying on oil to fund the budget is risky as prices and production have declined. But year after year, they have failed to agree on a solution to finance school repairs and renovations. Alaska is one of only two states without an income tax or statewide sales tax.

Average annual spending on education facilities declined by nearly 60% after 2014, the year oil prices plummeted, according to a 2021 report by the University of Alaska Anchorage. Overall spending on rural facilities is now less than half of what the National Council on School Facilities recommends.

Sen. Löki Tobin, a Democrat from Anchorage who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said it’s hard to get “momentum” around various ideas to fund education, “let alone just getting folks to realize that we have been by attrition defunding our schools.”

Alaska’s Legislature seemed primed this year to address education funding. Several new candidates from both parties campaigned on education and won seats in November’s statewide election.

“We flipped an entire statehouse,” said Tobin, who was elected to the Legislature in 2022, “based on the question of adequate school funding.”

Lawmakers filed a bill to fund education before the session even began. And in the first months of the year, dozens of superintendents, students and school board members traveled to Juneau to testify before lawmakers and urge them to increase funding for curriculum, teacher salaries and other costs.

During one Senate Finance Committee hearing, panel co-chair Lyman Hoffman, who has represented rural Alaskan school districts for 38 years, raised the specter of a civil rights lawsuit similar to those the state has faced in the past over education in primarily Indigenous communities.

The prospect, he said, could be “more costly to the state than if we came forward and tried to do something about the condition of these schools.”

In April, Alaska’s House and Senate passed a bipartisan bill that would have offered the largest increase in nearly a decade in what the state spends on each student annually. It did not include capital funds for school construction or maintenance.

Days later, Dunleavy, a former superintendent and school board member, vetoed it. He said it didn’t include enough support for homeschooling and charter schools — policy changes that he’s long pushed for.

Before the legislative session adjourned in May, lawmakers passed a compromise bill that included less spending and eased regulations for charter schools. Dunleavy again vetoed it, but lawmakers overrode the veto. The next month, Dunleavy used his line-item veto power to slash 3% from the education budget, the largest cut to any department in the state.

This year’s total state budget came to $14.7 billion, about $1 billion less than the previous year. Some lawmakers have described it as “bare bones” and “flat funded.”

Among Dunleavy’s cuts was more than $25 million that was supposed to pay for school construction and maintenance. School districts have to apply to the state for those funds each year, and their proposed projects are then ranked. The reduction doesn’t leave enough money this year to pay for even the top three projects among the 84 maintenance proposals school districts submitted. Seventeen major construction projects, including the replacement of five rural schools, received no funding at all.

One of those projects is a new school in Stebbins, a Yup’ik village on the coast of the Norton Sound and the Bering Sea where the building burned down last year. More than 200 K-12 students now attend classes in about a dozen small temporary buildings. Mayor Sharon Snowball said several students left the community after the fire to attend boarding school or live with family in other communities.

Two hundred miles southwest in Mertarvik, a village that recently relocated due to climate change, the school district did not receive the funds it applied for to build a wastewater system for a school that’s set to open in 2026. The district said it couldn’t answer questions about how it will move forward with the project.

Dunleavy has called lawmakers back to Juneau on Aug. 2 for a special session to discuss reforming the state’s education system. It’s unclear whether maintenance and construction funds will be part of those discussions.

Alaska’s budget crisis has been detrimental to the state’s rural school districts, which rely almost entirely on the annual budget for funding to fix and maintain buildings because they serve unincorporated communities that don’t have the power to levy taxes.

The budget depends heavily on profits from the production and sale of crude oil, which go into the state’s Permanent Fund, a state-owned investment fund. Returns on those investments pay for more than half of Alaska’s operational needs each year.

Prices of crude oil from Alaska’s North Slope dropped by more than a third from 2014 to this spring, according to the Alaska Department of Revenue. The result is a budget deficit that some economists say will exceed $1 billion by next year.

State lawmakers have failed to address the warning signs of a budget crisis for decades. By the early 2000s, Alaska’s daily oil production had fallen by half from its peak in the 1980s. Last year, it was a quarter of that.

But for a time, high oil prices allowed Alaska to make it work. When Edgmon came into office in 2007, he said every day was a windfall.

“We put a ton of money into schools both operationally and capital budgetwise,” he said.

Legislators have weighed numerous options to fund the budget. They’ve considered whether to trim the annual dividend checks that Alaska pays to its year-round residents from the return on Permanent Fund investments. Last year, Alaskans received just over $1,700. Cutting payments is wildly unpopular, in part because research has shown the money reduces the number of Alaskans in poverty by up to 40%.

Lawmakers have dipped into the state’s dwindling savings accounts to cover the deficit, said Matt Berman, a University of Alaska Anchorage economics professor who co-authored a 2016 report that examined various deficit-reduction methods.

“The fact that the study was done 10 years ago and that absolutely no action has taken place since then speaks for itself,” Berman wrote in an email.

Some lawmakers have long called for Alaska to adopt a statewide income or sales tax, but neither idea has gained much traction. A bipartisan working group studied the possibility of enacting taxes in 2021. After a year on the working group, state Rep. Kevin McCabe, a Republican from north of Anchorage, said he wasn’t convinced taxes were the answer.

“We experimented with sales tax, maybe a seasonal sales tax, we tried an income tax, progressive income tax,” he said. “It’s just not gonna bring in the money that we need for all of our infrastructure deficit.”

Alaska used to have a special tax on every employed resident to help pay for education. But it was repealed in 1980 after the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which allowed the state to sell more oil from North Slope.

“I’ll never forget my first payroll check,” said Click Bishop, a former six-term Republican senator from Fairbanks. He said his boss went through the statement with him. “He gets down here on this line, and it says ‘education head tax $5,’ and he said, ‘Kid, that $5 is going to the state to help you get your education,’” he recalled.

Bishop, who is exploring a run for governor, has proposed reinstating an annual education tax. But his proposal would only raise about $14 million each year, hardly enough to scratch the surface on the state’s school maintenance needs.

Instead of taxes, McCabe and other lawmakers say a more long-term solution for both schools and Alaska’s overall budget would be to build a natural gas pipeline that would raise money from gas sales.

Estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey show the state is home to more than a hundred trillion cubic feet of untapped natural gas, but there’s no way to bring it to market.

Described by the industry as “big, expensive and complex,” the pipeline project has been in discussions for at least 50 years. In 2020, the Alaska Gasline Development Corp., an independent state corporation tasked with developing the infrastructure, estimated construction could cost close to $40 billion. Though an energy developer recently announced interest from dozens of international customers, it’s unclear who would foot that bill.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Schwing, KYUK.

This story contains videos and descriptions of violent arrests.

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A month into the new Trump administration, on the predawn streets of suburban Maryland, a high-ranking ICE official stood alongside a Mazda sedan that his officers had just stopped.

The official told a local TV reporter at the scene what was about to happen. “He can either give us a license,” he said, “or we’ll smash the fucking window out and drag him out.” Then, as the driver refused to exit the car, officers broke the glass.

It was one of nearly 50 documented instances of immigration agents breaking vehicle windows that ProPublica has identified from social media, local news accounts, lawsuits and interviews since President Donald Trump took office six months ago. Using the same methods, we found just eight in the previous decade. Neither number is comprehensive. The government releases no relevant statistics.

Use-of-force experts and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement insiders say the tactic was rarely used during previous administrations. They say there is no known policy change greenlighting agents’ smashing of windows. Rather, it’s a part of a broader shattering of norms.

There are arrest quotas, and they are increasingly aggressive. “There’s been an emphasis placed on speed and numbers that did not exist before,” says Deborah Fleischaker, who served as ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden.

Officers who break glass aren’t being disciplined — they’re being promoted. The official from Maryland, Matthew Elliston, now occupies a senior position at headquarters and oversees field operations on the East Coast. On the other side of the country, a Border Patrol chief who also embraced the tactic, Gregory Bovino, was put in charge of sweeps in Los Angeles. (Neither answered ProPublica’s questions.)

ICE says its officers use a “minimum amount of force” when making arrests. You can judge for yourself.

Watch video ➜

“She is pregnant!” a man yelled as his wife, a U.S. citizen, filmed from inside their Chevy. “Is pregnant! Is pregnant!”

Officers smashed through three windows to arrest Jeison Ruiz Rodriguez and his younger brother César in early March. The video was not the first under Trump — at least nine broken-windows arrests preceded it this year, some documented by Facebook posts or local reporters or Spanish-language TV.

Watch video ➜

On Mother’s Day in the Boston suburbs, ICE and FBI officers stopped a family on their way to church, threatening Daniel Flores-Martinez with what the family and a bystander believe was a gun. His three children and U.S. citizen wife sobbed in the car. Agents broke the window, forced Martinez to his knees, then slammed him roughly to the ground.

One of the children is a toddler. Another is a 12-year old with severe disabilities.

The incident was captured by then-high school student Kenneth Santizo, who was nearby waiting for his bus. “All I could hear was kids crying,” Santizo said.

Watch video ➜

Last month, a bystander filmed several masked agents using a baton to break a rear window of a white pickup truck, taking the driver to the ground and pressing his head forcefully into the asphalt. The man, last seen in the video bleeding from the head, has not been identified.

Watch video ➜

On a residential street in May, agents smashed through two windows of a Ford Focus to arrest the two men inside. A neighbor filmed from inside their home as one man, later identified by WBUR as Guatemalan immigrant Kiender Lopez-Lopez, struggled with masked agents. (He had previously been charged with domestic violence but was not convicted.) Several of them tackled him on the sidewalk while he screamed for help. The government released no information about the arrest, despite repeated requests from WBUR and ProPublica.

At least 10 people have said they were injured this year during broken-windows arrests. César Ruiz Rodriguez had an open wound at the back of his head when he arrived at detention from Spokane, Washington, his lawyer said, and X-rays showed glass in the knees of his brother Jeison. ICE claimed that the Nicaraguan-born brothers were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Both men have denied any gang affiliation. We found that the brothers had been accused of threatening a family member, but prosecutors dropped the charges.

In Kentucky, agents stopped Martin Rivera and his girlfriend, Jennifer Gribben, a U.S. citizen, while the agents searched for a fugitive. “You said you’re looking for Garcia,” Rivera said in a scene the couple broadcast on Facebook Live and have since deleted. One of the agents replied, “And I found you instead.”

Then they smashed through the car’s window. Gribben later wrote on Facebook that she was beaten “brutally in my head” and that officers broke Rivera’s arm. She pleaded not guilty to charges of resisting arrest and third-degree assault stemming from the incident.

Near Detroit, masked ICE officers dragged 49-year-old Veronica Ramirez Verduzco, an aide at an assisted-living center, out of her car through a window they broke. Ramirez Verduzco still had bloody, jagged scratches up and down her forearms five days later, her lawyer said.

ICE told ProPublica that agents are allowed to use force when civilians don’t follow their commands. But Ramirez Verduzco and others said they were given little time to respond before officers broke their windows.

“They didn’t give me a chance to understand what was going on,” she said in an interview shortly before she was ordered deported to Mexico.

Watch video ➜

This spring, ICE arrested Elsy Noemi Berrios after breaking her car window, scattering glass over her patterned dress. Her teenage daughter screamed and cried as she filmed with her cellphone. An officer helped Berrios shake off the glass and step out of the car. “Gracias,” she said. Then he put her in handcuffs.

After the video went viral and outrage spread, the agency put out a statement asserting that Berrios, a Salvadoran national, was a “known affiliate of the violent transnational street gang, MS-13.” Our review of judicial records — both federal and local — found no criminal history for Berrios and no other evidence to support this claim.

This July, in another widely circulated case, officers stopped an Iranian chiropractor and green-card applicant near Portland, Oregon. He was on his way to his toddler’s preschool. “There is a baby in the car,” the man said. They allowed him to continue to the school, then broke a window once the toddler was out. We found no criminal history for him.

Your car is a constitutional gray zone. It doesn’t have the same Fourth Amendment protections as homes. You can refuse to open the door of your home if officers don’t have a judicial warrant; you can’t refuse to step out of your car.

The Constitution still limits when officers can use force and how much they can use. But there are no firm rules. Should they shatter windows just minutes or seconds after making a vehicle stop? Should they drag someone through broken glass when they could wait to make the arrest another day?

“Use of force has to be objectively reasonable,” says Bruce-Alan Barnard, a retired Fourth Amendment instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where ICE officers train. The problem with “objectively reasonable,” Barnard says, is that “it’s an oxymoron. What’s reasonable to you might not be reasonable to me.”

Immigration officers are given little guidance on whether or how they should breach car windows, former federal law enforcement officials told ProPublica. The tactic was never prohibited. It was just rare.

It isn’t mentioned in the government’s use-of-force guidelines for immigration agents. And past instructors and students at the Georgia training center say it was never part of the curriculum.

Watch video ➜

In Massachusetts this spring, a tall ICE officer in a trucker’s cap swung a sledgehammer to arrest Juan Francisco Méndez, the Guatemalan asylum-seeker inside. Officers had stopped the car looking for an “Antonio,” his wife told the New Bedford Light. Méndez has no known criminal record.

He and his wife told officers they were waiting to exit the car until their lawyer could arrive. Before the sledgehammer swung, one of the officers threatened them in broken Spanish: “We can do it two ways. Hard or easy?”

An ICE spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “concurs with the actions deemed appropriate by the officers on the scene.”

Watch video ➜

In June, a 15-year-old girl and her mother watched as ICE agents stopped a work truck and roughly arrested several men.

“For the last time, are you opening this, or no?” an officer warned before he broke the glass. “I’m fucking blasting it right now.”

While the teenager yelled and asked the officers if they had a warrant, the driver turned toward her camera and said he was a U.S. citizen.

Early this year, border czar Tom Homan made one of his now-familiar threats to a sanctuary jurisdiction, promising to bring “hell” to the Boston area. To do that, his immigration officers needed help.

An ICE press release soon touted its collaboration with a half-dozen other federal agencies, including the Coast Guard and State Department, on a monthlong crackdown in the region, dubbed Operation Patriot. (The Coast Guard confirmed that it helped transport people arrested on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The State Department also confirmed its role. Neither commented further.)

In May, bystanders filmed in nearby Waltham, Massachusetts, as masked agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations, along with agents from unidentified agencies, questioned two men parked in a work van. “Show me you’re here legally and I’ll leave you alone,” said one officer, identified on his vest only as “federal agent.”

In the months since, federal officers from other agencies have continued to participate in immigration operations around the country.

What happens if officers cross the line? Usually very little.

Paths to suing federal officers are even more limited than for police officers, making it particularly hard for immigrants to hold officers accountable for any misconduct.

“The deck is stacked against them,” says Fleischaker, the former top ICE official.

Even if a judge decides to award damages, that usually won’t change what happens — or already happened — in the separate system of immigration court. Evidence of a violent arrest rarely stops a deportation, and if people have already been deported, it won’t bring them back.

In the instance of the family detained on Mother’s Day, they filed a complaint over “unlawful and excessive” actions — but the father has already been deported to Mexico. (The government has not responded to the complaint or to ProPublica’s questions about it.) A precursor to a full civil lawsuit, the complaint says their 3-year-old now tells people, “Police broke the window and threw daddy on the floor.”

Settlements in similar cases have been small. A California woman detained by Border Patrol in 2016 after agents broke her car window while her children screamed settled two years later for $25,000.

When we asked the White House detailed questions about the tactic and specific incidents, it stood by officers’ conduct. “ProPublica is a left-wing rag that is shamelessly doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens,” deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “ICE Officers are heroically getting these violent illegal aliens off of American streets with the utmost professionalism.”

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin also defended the tactic in response to questions about Border Patrol. Officers “may break vehicle windows” if occupants don’t follow their commands, she said. In June, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica, “Our officers follow their training to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve situations in a manner that ensures the success of the operation and prioritizes safety.”

Other agencies whose officers were involved in incidents we documented — FBI; DEA; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — did not respond or declined to comment on specific cases.

Watch video ➜

Bystanders who film these videos do so at no small risk to themselves.

Job Garcia, a 37-year-old Ph.D. student and U.S. citizen, was filming an immigration raid in June near a Home Depot in Los Angeles when Border Patrol agents broke the window of a truck to detain the man inside. Then, agents turned on Garcia.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a complaint against the federal government on Garcia’s behalf in July, alleging agents detained him in retaliation for recording and because he was Latino.

In response to our questions, DHS’ McLaughlin claimed Garcia “assaulted and verbally harassed” Border Patrol. (No assault is shown in the video.) McLaughlin added, “He was subdued and arrested for assault on a federal agent.”

Kayden Goode, the 15-year-old girl who filmed the arrest of the U.S. citizen in Rochester, New York, said she felt compelled to record despite the risk.

"I don’t think it was right,” Goode said. “Just because something is legal doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

Sometimes just the threat of window smashing is enough. One Afghan asylum-seeker who stepped out of a car after ICE threatened his window said in an affidavit, “It reminded me of the Taliban.”

But this all may be only the beginning. Shortly before Trump’s flagship domestic policy bill passed in early July, border czar Tom Homan told a conservative Christian conference that immigration agencies were just getting started. The law will triple the size of ICE and add thousands more immigration agents.

“You think we’re arresting people now?” Homan said. “You wait.”

Earlier this year, reporter Nicole Foy heard about Border Patrol officers near Bakersfield, California, smashing a car window. Reporter McKenzie Funk also noticed immigration agents using the tactic in Washington state. The federal government does not publicly track how often agents break car windows, nor did government officials agree to requests to speak about it.

In the months that followed, Foy and Funk documented dozens of cases by searching social media, local news and legal filings. They spoke to current and former law enforcement officials, experts in constitutional law and advocates across the country and contacted the agencies of officers involved in the incidents.

Along with research reporter Mariam Elba, they also looked into the backgrounds of the identified individuals whose immigration arrests are shown in this story. They searched for records in the criminal courts of the counties in which the arrest took place, as well as in the counties public records show the person previously lived in. We found one criminal conviction among those people: Veronica Ramirez Verduzco was convicted of reentering the country illegally.

The findings on criminal records are not comprehensive because there is no universal database of charges or convictions, and there was not enough identifying information for some people. When the government made claims about an individual, Foy and Funk asked them for supporting evidence. They did not provide any.

Do you have information or videos to share about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy via email at nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal at nicolefoy.27 and McKenzie Funk via email at mckenzie.funk@propublica.org or on Signal at 212-379-5757.

Design and development by Anna Donlan, visual editing by Shoshana Gordon, research by Mariam Elba and reporting by Rob Davis. Additional production by Lucas Waldron.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk.

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 have information about cases or investigations paused or dropped by either the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, contact Corey G. Johnson at corey.johnson@propublica.org or 917-512-0287.

The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.

The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.

Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.

Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.

Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.

“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”

The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.

The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.

The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.

Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.

The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.

“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.

A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.

The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.

In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”

A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.

Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.

“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”

In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.

Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.

He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.

Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.

“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.

Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.

Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”

“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.

Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.

“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.

Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.

William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.

“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”

South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.

After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.

The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.

South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.

Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.

Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.

“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.

South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.

After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.

South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.

His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.

Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.

“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Corey G. Johnson.

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Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.

Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.

Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.

“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.

These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”

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, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.

Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.

Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.

Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.

Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.

He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.

For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.

“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”

To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.

Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.

To examine those claims, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) launched an exhaustive investigation of the backgrounds of the 238 men on the list of detainees first published by CBS. Last week, we published a first-of-its-kind database that highlights our findings, including the fact the Trump administration knew at least 197 of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S. Nearly half the men had open immigration cases when they were deported, and at least 166 have tattoos, which experts have told us are not an indicator of gang membership.

When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.

He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.

“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”

The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.

Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.

“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.

Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.

They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”

The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.

Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”

Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”

Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.

The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.

Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. ... Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”

Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”

Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.

About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.

Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.

This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.

Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.

Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”

In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.

The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.

Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”

During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”

That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.

As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.

Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”

But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.

Do You Have Information About the CECOT Deportations? Help ProPublica Report.

Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu. Photo editing by Cengiz Yar.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Kali Larsen sat at her desk at Fruitland Elementary School in Idaho earlier this year, trying to read the test questions as her classmates silently worked around her. Her anxiety climbed as she stared at the paper. She asked to use the bathroom and left the room.

Her mother, Jessica Larsen, had been substitute teaching that day when she received a call from the front office, notifying her that her 9-year-old daughter was having a panic attack. Kali, now 10, has dyslexia and struggles with reading and writing, Larsen said.

“Wouldn’t you be anxious?” Larsen told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica.

For years, Larsen had been pleading with the Fruitland School District to get Kali qualified for special education for reading. Larsen, who herself was diagnosed later in life with dyslexia, had her daughter tested in first grade in 2021 by a private specialist who said Kali had the same disability. But a diagnosis doesn’t automatically qualify a student for special education. The school still wouldn’t evaluate Kali for help, saying she likely wouldn’t qualify, in part because her scores weren’t low enough, Larsen said.

Larsen grew more frustrated with each passing school year as her child — a shy girl who feels most confident when competing in rodeos on her horse, Pie — would cry after school and tell her she felt “dumb.” A year before her daughter’s panic attack in fourth grade, Larsen had filed a state complaint against the district, saying it refused to evaluate Kali for special education. A few months later, in March 2024, a state investigator agreed: The district had broken the law.

Parents of students with disabilities have increasingly resorted to filing complaints with the state over their schools’ failure to educate their children, alleging districts are violating federal law. Most of the time, state investigators have agreed and found that districts refuse to identify and evaluate children with disabilities, such as dyslexia or autism, and fail to follow plans to educate them fairly.

In Idaho, students with disabilities have performed worse in reading and math than many of their peers in other states, federal data shows. Idaho was among the states with the most founded complaints per capita in recent years, according to a national center that analyzes data on complaints and provides support to states. Over the past five years, investigators found in over 70% of the complaints filed in Idaho that districts had broken the law.

But the state often closes cases without making sure the districts have fully solved the problems, parents across Idaho told the Statesman and ProPublica.

Districts can resolve the violations without “really changing their ways,” said Amy Martz, a Utah-based attorney who has worked with families in Idaho. “There’s no teeth.”

State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield said the state Department of Education expects districts to make any corrections needed to be in full compliance with state and federal law, and that it has conducted listening sessions and piloted other programs to help meet the needs of students and parents.

Critchfield said the challenge with educating students with disabilities comes down, in part, to the way the state distributes funding, which is based on a flat percentage and not the actual number of students with disabilities in each district. She said staff members have large caseloads and districts lack trained staff and specialists.

Parents say it can take months for the districts to evaluate a child for services, and in some cases, districts have refused to provide the instruction or behavioral interventions students need.

Lawmakers have been reluctant to approve changes to the funding formula despite warnings from state officials about a shortfall between what districts spend on special education and what the state allocates. An independent oversight office this year estimated the gap to be over $80 million. Idaho routinely ranks last in the nation for funding per student overall.

Larsen said she didn’t want to get the district or teachers in trouble when she filed her complaint. But she said she risked retaliation, in a small community where speaking out can be damaging, because she intended to make public schools better for her daughter and other kids.

“We’re failing our kids. This is our future,” Larsen said. “Why are we failing them? And that’s my question to them, but they can’t answer.”

School districts nationwide are required to identify children who have disabilities or health impairments that could make it harder to learn, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or dyslexia, and evaluate them for special education services. A parent can also formally request an evaluation of their child. Under federal law, if the school has any reason to suspect a disability, it must provide that evaluation.

But when Larsen asked the district to evaluate her daughter, the school pushed back.

Records show that district officials over a period of 1 1/2 years provided numerous reasons Kali didn’t need or wouldn’t qualify for special education: Her low reading scores were mainly due to anxiety, rather than a disability; she needed to advocate for herself; she was “making progress”; a special education evaluation would take a long time; if she received special education services, she’d miss out on valuable instruction time in a general education classroom.

A few months after Larsen filed her complaint in 2024, an investigator contracted by the state Department of Education concluded that the district didn’t have procedures in place to make sure all students with disabilities were identified and helped, and that it hadn’t conducted a full evaluation of Kali, even after Larsen requested it. The investigators issued a corrective action plan and ordered the district to begin the evaluation process with Kali within about two weeks and to help her within two months if they found she qualified for special education.

Fruitland Superintendent Stoney Winston, who started in July 2024, after the state issued the corrective action plan, said the district has “made corrections” and is meeting current requirements. He said he can’t speak to what happened before he assumed his role.

Do you have personal experience with problems related to special education in Idaho or accessibility through the Americans with Disabilities Act in schools? We want to hear from you, whether you’re a student, a parent, an educator or an administrator. We will only use your name with permission. Reach out to Becca Savransky at bsavransky@idahostatesman.com or 208-495-5661.

Disability advocates have said the lack of funding makes it hard for school districts in the state to attract qualified specialists or special education teachers who fully understand the law, which can lead to improper education plans or other violations. High caseloads for staff members also mean less time for making or implementing specialized education plans, they said.

The state relies on a decades-old funding formula that assumes a set percentage of students in every district would qualify for special education: 6% in elementary school and 5.5% in middle and high school. State education officials acknowledged those percentages were never adequate. Officials said they don’t know how lawmakers first arrived at that formula.

“That 5.5 and that 6%, which was already insufficient back in 2016, is even more insufficient,” said Casey Petti, from Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluations, an independent oversight agency.

According to the most recent data, about 12% of students in Idaho qualify for special education services — the lowest in the country.

In 2009, that agency told Idaho officials to consider tying special education funding to the actual cost of educating those students. In 2016, the office came out with a report with the same findings.

That same year, the Legislature created a committee to research the issue and rewrite the state’s funding formula. The committee met for three years, and in 2019, lawmakers proposed legislation. While those proposals would have provided money for special education based on the number of students actually receiving services, state education officials and school administrators said they were left out of the process and the legislation would be difficult to implement. The state superintendent at the time questioned whether it would even adequately fund special education.

Nearly 75% of school districts that received state funding for special education programs spent anywhere from $640 to $19 million more than what the state provided during the 2023-24 school year.

In the years since, lawmakers have introduced other bills to revise the funding formula, but the Legislature did not approve any of them. The cost to investigate complaints overall has nearly tripled since the 2020 school year, according to the state Department of Education, with each investigation ranging from a few hundred dollars to $30,000.

This year, the Idaho Legislature approved adding another specialist to help handle complaints. During the 2023-24 school year, the state received 53 complaints and found districts were out of compliance in most of them.

But while the state has spent more money to investigate the problems, administrators said they have been given little to fix them. In Idaho, districts rely on local taxpayers to fund special education more than in many other states, according to a 2024 study by Bellwether, a nonprofit that analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics for the 24 states where it was available.

Boundary County Superintendent Jan Bayer described special education as an “unfunded mandate.” The district spends about $1.7 million from its general fund to educate students with disabilities and goes to its taxpayers every two years to ask for additional funding to provide other programs.

Other superintendents said it was difficult to meet the needs of every student in special education.

“While we provide the vast majority of our students with the services they need, we do have a couple of higher need students who need more services than we can provide,” Butte County Superintendent Joe Steele, who retired this summer, said in an email to the Statesman. But finding educators or specialists with the proper training, and paying for them, would be challenging in the remote area, he said.

Kendra Scheid watched her son struggle in a larger district with high caseloads and inexperienced staff. Scheid’s son, who is autistic and nonverbal, qualified for developmental preschool before moving into the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District in eastern Idaho. But the district told her that her son could attend preschool only two days a week for 2 1/2 hours each day.

Before her son started attending full-day kindergarten, Scheid asked the school for a meeting to put together a revised education plan for her son. But the district refused, according to the complaint investigation.

Scheid went to school with her son on the first days, where he was placed with other students with disabilities, and witnessed what she described as chaos: kids climbing on tables, students injuring themselves with no staff intervention and teachers restraining children in their chairs. “They had no idea what any of these kids needed, what any of these kids were like coming into the classroom,” she said.

Pocatello school district spokesperson Courtney Fisher said the district is committed to “proactively addressing parent concerns” and improving its special education services. That includes putting into place a plan that meets all state requirements and hiring more staff, she said, and trying to address any gaps in its system to prevent issues in the future.

I feel like a bad mom because I didn’t know this stuff at the time. And I feel like I let my son down.

After school on the second day, Scheid’s son came home crying and covering his ears, something she said he hadn’t done before. After day three, Scheid disenrolled her son from the district. For the rest of that year, he saw outside therapists and Scheid worked with him at home.

After she filed a complaint with the state, an investigator found the district had broken the law when it failed to create a plan that would work for her son and to ensure the teacher had his previous education plan before school started. The state said the district must create a new education plan for her son should he reenroll, but Scheid had lost faith. Instead, she entered and won one of the few available lottery spots in a charter school, which her son now attends.

“I feel like a bad mom because I didn’t know this stuff at the time,” reflected Scheid, who said her son is now doing well in a charter school that’s more accommodating. “And I feel like I let my son down.”

About 20% of Idaho districts have broken federal disability law multiple times in the past five years, and nearly 40% have violated the law at least once, according to data from the state Department of Education. When they do, the state, which enforces the federal law and corresponding state rules, asks them to fix the problems through corrective action plans.

The plans reviewed by the news outlets ask district staff to undergo training, and sometimes a child gets additional hours of education to make up for the time missed. But a Statesman and ProPublica review of corrective action plans and interviews with parents showed districts repeatedly receive training for the same problems and commit similar violations.

Critchfield, the state superintendent, said there are several factors that could play a role in whether training is successful for districts permanently, including staff turnover and access to resources.

“Compliance with state and federal law is the ultimate goal,” she said in an email. “As a department, we are always prepared to provide remedial training and intervention to address additional concerns as they arise.”

The Pocatello school district received 11 complaints over the past five years, according to data from the state Department of Education. The Garden Valley School District received 10. In both of these districts, federal investigators found systemic violations in special education law that impacted more than one student. The state Department of Education refused to provide the number of founded complaints per district, citing federal law on student privacy, though some other states publicly post much of their complaint investigations online.

Andrew Branham was among several parents who filed complaints against the Garden Valley School District over the past three years.

The Branhams wrote in the complaint that their daughter received “virtually no education” and was denied services, such as speech and counseling. At one point, they said a school resource officer called her parents threatening to arrest her. Her parents said they rushed to school to find her barefoot in the middle of the parking lot as several adults looked on. A state investigator concluded that the district in some instances had “relied” on the resource officer to address the student’s behavior.

Branham said the district was “unwilling” to meet the needs of their daughter. The Branhams elevated their case, hiring an attorney who presented it before a state-contracted hearing officer. The Branhams received a financial settlement with the district and moved to Washington to get their daughter a better education.

“It is a shame what Idaho is doing to kids in that state,” Branham said in December. “I would never move back there, and I would never recommend anyone live in that state, especially if you have special needs kids.”

After the Branhams filed their complaint and went public, more than 20 families shared similar experiences, they said. So they filed a complaint on behalf of other families that alleged that the district ignored state and federal laws meant to protect students with disabilities and denied them an education.

The resulting state investigations concluded that at least 13 of the allegations were founded. The district failed to properly construct education plans for students. It also didn’t have the proper plans for supporting a child with behavioral issues. The district did not gather or share the data it needed to assess student progress and could not adequately determine whether students were meeting their learning goals, the investigations found.

The state decided the district needed extra help, ranking Garden Valley in 2024 as one of three districts in need of substantial intervention. The state now requires the district to follow an improvement plan and monitors its progress — but the district’s funding remains the same.

The Garden Valley School District did not respond to requests for comment.

Families in other districts have also pulled their children from local schools. Some parents and advocates who talked to the Statesman said they are especially worried about President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and leave it to the states when Idaho has long struggled to provide an education to students with disabilities.

In Kali’s case, the state’s corrective action plan issued in 2024, in addition to requiring that the district start to evaluate Larsen’s daughter, also mandated that the district help teachers learn how to spot students who should be evaluated for special education and identify those with disabilities.

The state closed the case earlier this year, about a year after it was filed. Kali had been struggling without adequate help for three years before the district conceded she was eligible for special education services.

Kali now has an education plan, but Larsen said the district still isn’t giving her the help she needs. She just finished fourth grade and still hasn’t mastered reading and writing. As her daughter prepares for middle school, Larsen is considering pulling her from the district next year. But Larsen doesn’t plan on filing another complaint. It was too much stress with little to show for it, she said.

When Kali was moved to a different classroom each day to receive more specialized instruction, her teachers sometimes told her to sit and read quietly, Larsen said.

“She can’t read,” Larsen said, exasperated. “It’s so frustrating.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman.

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.

They went to a Las Vegas conference this month that promised pathways to an “unlimited lifespan.” But at least two attendees left in ambulances and were hospitalized in critical condition, requiring ventilators to breathe.

The two women, who are recovering, fell ill after receiving peptide injections at a conference booth. The doctor who ran the booth was a Los Angeles physician specializing in “age reversal” therapies who did not have permission to practice medicine or dispense prescriptions in Nevada. Public health investigators are trying to determine if anyone else who attended the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival experienced a similar illness.

The investigation comes as peptides grow in popularity, thanks in part to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promotion of the amino acid chains as a way to fight aging and chronic disease. Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has vowed to end the Food and Drug Administration’s “war on peptides” and other alternative health therapies. Kent Holtorf, the doctor overseeing the booth where the women became ill, also has called for less regulation of alternative therapies and has criticized the FDA for blocking compounds he sees as lifesaving.

Holtorf told ProPublica he is cooperating with the investigation. “Of course, I want to get to the bottom of it. But almost assuredly it will come out that it was not the peptides.”

He said he became convinced the peptides weren’t the cause of the severe reactions after plugging everything he knows about the incident into an artificial intelligence app, which he said gave him a 57-page report that “basically says that it is impossible it was the peptides.” He refused to comment on what the report attributed the illnesses to.

“I don’t think it was the peptides, but I don’t want to try and push the blame and say it wasn’t us,” he said. “We are reassessing everything we are doing.”

Holtorf acknowledged he is not licensed in Nevada but said he hired a practitioner who is and did not personally write prescriptions or administer therapies at his booth. “I knew what was going on but was not hands on,” he said.

He described the situation as “horrific” and “unacceptable” and said he’s “terribly sorry.”

The FDA has approved dozens of peptide-based medications for treating serious health problems such as cancer, obesity and diabetes. But peptide therapies for anti-aging and regenerative health are largely made by compounding pharmacists who use peptide components to formulate drugs that aren’t commercially available or approved for that particular use. Compounded drugs are not reviewed for safety and efficacy by the FDA. The agency also has found “significant safety risks” with at least 18 of the most popular peptide compounding components.

“Anyone who undergoes any sort of medical treatment, no matter how benign, needs to be very wary that even the most benign intervention can have fatal side effects,” said Dr. Amy Gutman, a Florida emergency room doctor who speaks about metabolic research and ketogenic diets and appeared at RAADFest. “And if you are in a hotel and don’t have lifesaving equipment near you, then that is a risk you have to be aware of.”

The two women, a 38-year-old from California and a 51-year-old from Nevada, received injections on July 13 at RAADFest, which is organized by an Arizona-based nonprofit that has built a community hoping to cheat death. According to a police report, both were injected at a booth run by Holtorf, who is licensed in California but not Nevada. Holtorf’s advocacy for alternative therapies has invited controversy in the past, including his criticism of the H1N1 swine flu vaccine in a Fox News interview in 2009. More recently, his practice was advised by the Federal Trade Commission to cease making claims on its website that his peptide therapies could treat or prevent COVID-19. Holtorf said he removed the claims from his website even though he still believes certain peptides can be beneficial in treating COVID-19 and other viral infections.

Both the Southern Nevada Health District and the Nevada Board of Pharmacy confirmed they are investigating what led to the hospitalizations after being notified by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police that possibly as many as seven people at the conference were hospitalized. According to the police report, detectives were unable to confirm whether additional attendees got sick.

Investigators are examining whether the illnesses were caused by an infection, contamination related to the injections or an issue with the medication itself, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. The two women who were taken by ambulance to the hospital reported feeling as if their tongues were swelling and had trouble breathing and increased heart rates. By the time they reached the hospital, one was already intubated and the other had lost muscle control in her neck and couldn’t open her eyes or communicate with doctors, according to the police report.

Holtorf said he was “so freaked out” by what happened because none of the women’s symptoms “made any sense.” In 30 years of providing such treatments, he said he’s never seen such a reaction.

Event organizer James Strole, an Arizona businessman who has built a 50-year career selling the promise of eternal life to followers, said the two patients are recovering after several days in the hospital. He said “it’s not clear the people got sick as a result of treatment from Dr. Holtorf,” adding he’s “anxious” for the illnesses to be “deeply investigated.” He said nothing similar has happened in the 10 years he has been producing RAADFest.

This is the first year Holtorf offered therapies at the conference, Strole said. He added that Holtorf provided the therapies to 60 people at the event and has attempted to reach them to learn whether they experienced any problems. Holtorf said only six patients received peptides.

Strole said the coalition’s science board scrutinizes therapy providers before granting them permission to operate a booth in the conference’s exhibition hall, which organizers referred to as a clinic.

“The big concern is safety,” he said. “We look at who is doing the administering, whether it’s an injection or supplement. We look at the person and the company itself, what the efficacy is, how they operate, their safety measures. We look at all that.”

Strole said peptides are considered “generally safe” when taken under the direction of a doctor, adding that he takes them regularly. Holtorf also said he believes they are safe and that they saved his life when he was a young man suffering from a severe illness.

A review by ProPublica of both the pharmacy and medical board license databases showed no Nevada licenses for Holtorf or his medical practice. Out-of-state doctors who come to provide care at a conference such as RAADfest are required to obtain a special event license from the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners. (As of Friday, 103 doctors had obtained such a license.) To dispense or possess pharmaceuticals, practitioners must also be licensed by the Nevada Board of Pharmacy. RAADFest’s organizers, however, said they were unaware that Holtorf is not licensed to provide medical care or dispense medications in the state.

“In order to practice medicine in the state, you must be licensed,” said David Wuest, executive secretary of the Nevada Board of Pharmacy.

The Nevada Legislature has passed stricter laws as alternative therapies have become popular outside traditional medical settings. In 2017, for example, the state banned so-called Botox parties, requiring the anti-wrinkle injections only be administered in a medical office or spa equipped to deal with life-threatening emergencies. But beyond its standard medical licensing requirements, the state doesn’t have rules governing an event like RAADFest, where attendees receive an array of anti-aging therapies including gene therapies, peptide injections, dialysis-like blood detoxification, bone scans and light therapy.

Strole said he wasn’t aware that providers need a special in-state license to provide the type of therapies Holtorf offered, which he described as “neutraceuticals.”

“I’ve never heard they had to get from the state permission to do that under the auspices of giving a treatment of that nature, that’s not actually treating some disease or something,” Strole said.

According to the police report, Holtorf contracted with a Nevada-licensed nurse practitioner, who administered the injection to one of the women. He also contracted with another doctor, who mixed the vials and administered the injection to the second woman, the report said. That doctor does not appear to have the necessary Nevada licenses.

Holtorf declined to comment on the practitioners he hired for the event, other than to say he had worked with the doctor in the past.

Wuest said multiple providers might be investigated, but he wouldn’t confirm whether Holtorf is a subject of the probe. The board also is investigating whether the therapy provided to the patients required a medical or pharmaceutical license. The FDA is assisting in the investigation to determine what was in the injections, including whether it was a manufactured pharmaceutical or a compounded medication, Wuest said.

Holtorf’s medical practice and the peptide company he founded are affiliated with an organization, Forgotten Formula, that asserts a constitutional right to provide treatments as they see fit. On its website, the private membership association warns “all bodies in the public sector” that they “do not have any jurisdiction” over their doctors. “All doctors, healers, and members are protected under the shield of this organization,” the website says. “We operate member to member. Ignoring this disclaimer can lead to legal consequences against the party at fault.”

According to the police report, Holtorf told officers he obtained the peptides dispensed at the festival from Forgotten Formula. In the interview with ProPublica, however, he denied that, saying he’s not sure which of the many manufacturers he works with provided the peptides used at the booth.

The women received different peptide concoctions, according to the police report. Both included at least one component described by the FDA as posing significant risks when compounded. Holtorf said it is difficult to keep up with which peptides are banned and which are still acceptable for compounding.

“There is so much gray area,” he said. “People know they just get patients better.”

Despite the FDA warnings, peptides were popular among RAADFest attendees who were promised “beautiful life-saving therapies” at the event’s clinic. Event organizers touted that 70 longevity experts would be on hand during the four-day event at the Red Rock Casino Resort Spa but did not list the vendors providing treatments on the event website.

“We have a RAAD clinic, where people will be able to come in at discounted prices and try and do these therapies safely with doctors,” Strole told a Las Vegas TV news program while promoting the event.

Strole is executive director of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Coalition for Radical Life Extension, one of a cluster of for-profit and nonprofit entities devoted to helping people achieve immortality founded by Strole and two “immortalist” business partners. Of the three co-founders, only Strole, who is in his 70s, is still alive.

Charles Brown, the original founder, claimed to have had a spiritual experience in the 1950s that showed him the path to immortality and proclaimed he could share that path with others, according to an Arizona Republic story. Brown died of Parkinson’s disease in 2014. His wife, Bernadeane “Bernie” Brown, who operated the for-profit People Unlimited with Strole, died of breast cancer in 2024. Her body is said to have been cryogenically preserved.

The nonprofit organizes the annual anti-aging festival, which charges more than $400 for a ticket, while People Unlimited offers monthly memberships for as much as $255 a month, according to its website. Members get access to weekly meetings, where Strole delivers motivational sermons on immortality and age reversal, as well as talks by guest speakers on wellness, discounts on “longevity protocols” and access to a community of people who “want you to live as much as they want to live.”

Gutman, the Florida emergency room doctor, spoke at the event earlier this month, her first time attending RAADFest. She left before the last day, when the two women were hospitalized, and hadn’t heard about the incident before a reporter called. But she said their symptoms — swollen tongue, trouble breathing, increased heart rate — sounded like an allergic reaction, which she said isn’t terribly common in peptide injections. But she cautioned that before injection the drugs are mixed with an agent that can sometimes pose problems.

Although she was skeptical of some of the therapies provided at the festival’s clinic, she said everyone she met there seemed to have “their heart in the right place” and genuinely wanted to help others “live their best lives.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anjeanette Damon.

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 the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that's my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

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Last week, a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the murder and kidnapping of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old New York boy who disappeared in 1979 in one of the most famous missing child cases in U.S. history.

The three-judge panel ruled that a trial court judge had given jurors “manifestly inaccurate” guidance regarding a confession Hernandez made before he had been advised of his Miranda rights. Jurors asked whether, if they decided the first confession was involuntary, that meant they should disregard two videotaped confessions that came afterward.

The trial judge said “the answer is no” and offered no further explanation.

The appellate judges, in their opinion, said that by doing so, “the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law.” They threw out Hernandez’s conviction and ordered that he be released or retried. He is now 64 years old and has served 13 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence in a case that has haunted New York City for decades.

The body of the 51-page decision echoed stories published by ProPublica starting in 2013, before Hernandez was convicted, that raised questions about the veracity and legality of his confessions.

We reported that Hernandez met many of the criteria of a person prone to making false confessions, a growing phenomenon and leading cause of wrongful conviction. We also discovered that Hernandez’s statements to law enforcement and others over the years were inconsistent and did not match the known facts of the case.

On the morning of May 29, 1979, Patz was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop two blocks away and then vanished. His disappearance ignited national concern around missing children, as he became one of the first “milk carton kids” and his image was plastered across New York City.

A massive search ensued, and law enforcement spent thousands of hours looking for him: Divers plunged into the East River searching for his remains following a tip from a psychic. Leads were chased as far as Israel. But no arrests were made. No charges brought.

In 2012, New York police and the FBI suddenly and very visibly took action on another lead, digging up the basement of a workshop near the Patz family home used by a carpenter who knew Etan and was briefly considered a suspect.

Nothing came of the dig, but the surge of media attention prompted one of Hernandez’s relatives to call police with a tip about rumors that he had a role in the disappearance of Patz.

New York police officers arrived at Hernandez’s home in New Jersey on the morning of May 23, 2012, and brought him to a local prosecutor’s office to question him. In the ensuing hours, Hernandez asked several times to go home, said the officers were trying to trick him, sobbed, clutched at his stomach, lay on the floor in a fetal position, had a fentanyl patch placed on his chest to treat his chronic pain, and mentioned his mental illness diagnoses. After more than six hours, he told officers that he “did it.”

He said he offered Patz a soda to lure him down into the basement of a bodega where he was working. He said he choked the boy, placed the body in a garbage bag, put the bag in a box and left it around the corner in broad daylight.

It wasn’t until after that confession that the officers read Hernandez his rights. They then had him repeat his statement in two video-recorded interviews over the next 24 hours. The stories he told contained several inconsistencies.

The federal court found that the trial court judge’s instruction to the jury about the confessions was “manifestly inaccurate,” that the jury should have been given more thorough instructions and that it could in fact disregard the recorded confessions.

The jury, which had asked about the un-Mirandized confession on the second of nine days of deliberations, was “clearly grappling with what weight, if any, to give to the confessions,” the appeals court wrote.

ProPublica covered the early phases of the case against Hernandez extensively, interviewing the people to whom he supposedly confessed over the years and speaking with a variety of legal and psychological experts about how police tactics can induce false confessions.

We found early on that Hernandez’s previous claims of having harmed a child not only conflicted with each other but bore little resemblance to the details of his confession to police. Once, for example, he said that he had killed a Black child. Patz was white.

We also learned that the bodega Hernandez was working out of had become a kind of police hub for the officers searching for Patz. Hernandez said in one of his confessions that he tossed the boy’s book bag behind a refrigerator there. It was never found.

Experts told us that a handful of factors are often at play in producing false confessions and that Hernandez’s situation contained many of them: He had low IQ, had a history of mental illness, and confessed to a high-profile crime where many of the details were widely known over the course of an intense, long interrogation.

The judges, in their decision, took note of many of these same characteristics, which, in their view, made it all the more important for the jury to have proper instructions to evaluate the confessions.

ProPublica also highlighted how the trial judge, Maxwell Wiley, held a hearing early in the proceedings to determine for himself whether Hernandez was properly informed of his rights and if he had the capacity to meaningfully waive them. He decided that the confession could be used. Later, Wiley, a former Manhattan prosecutor, limited the questions that could be asked about it and kept some subsequent hearings on the matter secret, drawing fire from several news organizations. Wiley, who is now retired, did not respond to calls for comment.

In an email, Cyrus Vance Jr., who handled the case against Hernandez as Manhattan district attorney, said it was “exceptionally challenging given the passage of time but also very strong.”

He said the recent decision came as a surprise, as other appellate courts had reviewed and sustained the confession and verdict.

“Clearly, the jury heard substantial expert testimony from both the prosecution and the defense, and considered both and the legal instructions by the court during deliberations and before the verdict,” he said, adding that he continues to believe Hernandez is guilty and that his “thoughts are with the Patz family and with Etan.”

Now Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, will have to decide whether to retry Hernandez for the third time. The first of his two trials ended in a hung jury.

In a statement from Bragg’s office, a spokesperson said only: “We are reviewing the decision.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Joaquin Sapien.

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The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on a generic drugmaker that was the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year, citing problems with safety tests that delayed the recall of a medicine linked to deaths in the U.S.

In December, ProPublica reported that a Glenmark Pharmaceuticals factory in central India was responsible for an outsized share of recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm American patients. Among the string of recalls, federal regulators had determined that more than 50 million potassium chloride extended-release capsules sold in the U.S. could be deadly. Yet, federal drug inspectors at that point hadn’t set foot in the Madhya Pradesh factory for more than four years, ProPublica found.

Seven weeks after that story was published, FDA inspectors showed up at the plant and found serious problems. Glenmark subsequently recalled an additional two dozen medicines made there and sold to U.S. patients.

Now the FDA has sent Glenmark a warning letter, a disciplinary tool the regulator uses to lay out significant violations of federal requirements and demand changes. If Glenmark fails to fix any of the problems outlined, the FDA warned, it may bar drugs made at the factory from entering the U.S.

What’s more, the FDA pointed out that the company had made similar serious mistakes at three other manufacturing sites and acknowledged that those factories had been the subject of previous warning letters from the agency since 2019. The problems at one were so severe that federal regulators blocked drugs made there from being imported to Americans. ProPublica’s December investigation highlighted this pattern, noting that three of the five factories where Glenmark made drugs for the U.S. market in recent years had been in trouble with federal regulators. Despite that track record, the FDA — backlogged from the pandemic — waited five years before sending its inspectors back to the Madhya Pradesh plant.

In his July 11 warning letter, the director of the FDA’s Office of Manufacturing Quality wrote, “These repeated failures at multiple sites demonstrate that management oversight and control over the manufacture of drugs is inadequate.” (The agency made the letter publiclast week.)

“You should immediately and comprehensively assess your company’s global manufacturing operations to ensure that systems, processes, and the products manufactured conform to FDA requirements,” he added.

A spokesperson for the company said in a written statement: “Glenmark is actively engaging with the U.S. FDA and has initiated corrective actions to address the agency’s observations. Patient safety, product quality and regulatory compliance are foundational to how we operate.”

Citing ongoing litigation the company faces, she declined to comment further.

ProPublica has been investigating the FDA’s oversight of foreign factories that make generic drugs for the U.S. market.

Since last year, ProPublica repeatedly has asked the FDA why it didn’t send inspectors to the Glenmark factory sooner, given the outsized share of recalls and the company’s troubled track record at its other plants. The agency hasn’t answered the question. After the inspection found problems this year, an FDA spokesperson said the agency can only discuss potential or ongoing compliance matters with the company involved.

Among the most serious violations outlined in the FDA letter to Glenmark was the company’s failure to promptly test pills to ensure they dissolve properly during their normal shelf life, the subject of ProPublica’s investigation last year.

Companies hold on to samples of pills from batches sold to U.S. customers and test them periodically until they reach their expiration date. Medicines that don’t dissolve properly can cause perilous swings in dosing. This flaw is what made Glenmark’s potassium chloride pills potentially deadly since high potassium levels can stop the heart, according to the June 2024 recall notice.

Glenmark’s backlogged testing “was overdue by 3 months or longer for a large proportion of your samples,” the FDA wrote in the warning letter. The failure to perform these tests on time held up Glenmark’s discovery of defective pills and delayed the needed recalls, the agency said.

In multiple instances, the FDA found that it took 100 days from the time Glenmark pulled samples of potassium chloride for testing until the company learned the capsules had failed to dissolve correctly.

A delay in that recall could factor into a lawsuit that alleges Glenmark’s potassium chloride pills were responsible for the death last year of Mary Louise Cormier, a 91-year-old Maine woman. A letter alerting Cormier that her pills had been recalled arrived three weeks after she died. In court filings, Glenmark has denied responsibility for her death. The company stopped making the drug for U.S. patients.

Between July and December last year, Glenmark told the FDA that it had received reports of eight deaths in patients who took the recalled potassium chloride, federal records show. The reports, which companies must file so the FDA can monitor drug safety, contained so few details that ProPublica was unable to independently verify what happened in each case. In general, these adverse event reports reflect the opinions of those who filed them and don’t prove that the drug caused the harm, the FDA says. The agency didn’t mention these deaths in the warning letter.

The FDA lambasted Glenmark for failing to thoroughly investigate why pills made at its Madhya Pradesh factory weren’t dissolving properly. The agency listed possible reasons that Glenmark failed to consider, but FDA censors redacted so many passages — citing the protection of trade secrets and confidential business information — that it’s impossible to discern what could have gone wrong.

Citing the same confidentiality provision, the FDA kept secret the name of another Glenmark drug that the agency said failed these same tests. When asked why consumers shouldn’t be told which medication had the problem, the FDA didn’t answer.

More broadly, the FDA’s warning letter criticized Glenmark for failing to validate the tests it relies on to prove that its drugs have the identity, strength, quality and purity that they’re supposed to have.

“Without evaluating the validity of methods, you lack the basic assurance that your laboratory data accurately reflects drug product quality,” the FDA wrote.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Patricia Callahan.

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One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.

In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.

When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”

Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.

By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.

Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.

In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.

Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”

In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.

But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.

Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”

That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.

The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”

When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)

D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.

It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.

That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.

The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”

But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”

During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.

Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”

Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.

In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.

In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”

The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”

After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.

Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”

He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”

When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”

Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”

According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.

“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.

In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.

“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.

Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.

The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.

With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.

The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”

Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.

In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”

Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.

Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.

“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.

Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”

Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.

Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.

Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN/Nashville Public Radio contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby.

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The continents are rapidly drying out and the earth’s vast freshwater resources are under threat, according to a recently released study based on more than 20 years of NASA satellite data. Here are the report’s key findings and what they portend for humankind:

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, examined changes to Earth’s total supply of fresh water and found that nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries facing a net decline in water supply, posing a “critical, emerging threat to humanity.”

According to the study, the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live.

Mined groundwater rarely seeps back into the aquifers from which it was pumped. Rather, a large portion runs off into streams, then rivers and ultimately the oceans. According to the researchers, moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers. Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst.

The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions. One such region covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. Since 2002, the sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss across the planet. Around 2014, the study found the pace of drying appears to have accelerated. It is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year.

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

Major groundwater basins underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including about half of Africa, Europe and South America. Many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. The researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse the loss of water “on human timescales.”

The accelerated drying, combined with the flooding of coastal cities and food-producing lowlands, heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order, the researchers warn. Their findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Graphics by Lucas Waldron

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by ProPublica.

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.”

The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.

Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers — underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans.

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions of people.

“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study.

Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says. Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere. Just like rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift: Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

People aren’t just misusing groundwater, they are flooding their own coasts and cities in the process, Famiglietti warns. That means they are also imperiling some of the world’s most important food-producing lowlands in the Nile and Mekong deltas and cities from Shanghai to New York. Once in the oceans, of course, groundwater will never again be suitable for drinking and human use without expensive and energy-sucking treatment or through the natural cycle of evaporating and precipitating as rain. But even then, it may no longer fall where it is needed most. Groundwater “is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all,” the study states, “at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations.”

That such rapid and substantial overuse of groundwater is also causing coastal flooding underscores the compounding threat of rising temperatures and aridity. It means that water scarcity and some of the most disruptive effects of climate change are now inextricably intertwined. And here, the study’s authors implore leaders to find a policy solution: Improve water management and reduce groundwater use now, and the world has a tool to slow the rate of sea level rise. Fail to adjust the governance and use of groundwater around the world, and humanity risks surrendering parts of its coastal cities while pouring out finite reserves it will sorely need as the other effects of climate change take hold.

1. The process starts when deep underground aquifers are tapped to make up for a lack of water from rainfall and rivers.
2. Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers.
3. Instead, most of the water runs off the land into streams, eventually flowing into rivers.
4. The rivers ultimately drain into the ocean, where fresh water becomes salt water. For that water to be usable again, it must either be industrially treated or return to the land as rain. But with climate change, these same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, lauded the new report for confirming trends that were once theoretical. The ramifications, he said, could be profoundly destabilizing. “The massive overpumping of groundwater,” Gleick said, “poses enormous risk to food production.” And food, he pointed out, is the foundation for stability. The water science center he co-founded, the Pacific Institute, has tracked more than 1,900 incidents in which water supplies were either the casualty of, a tool for or the cause of violence. In Syria, beginning in 2011, drought and groundwater depletion drove rural unrest that contributed to the civil war, which displaced millions of people. In Ghana, in 2017, protesters rioted as wells ran dry. And in Ukraine, whose wheat supports much of the world, water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.

“Water is being used as a strategic and political tool,” said Salzberg, who spent nearly two decades analyzing water security issues as the special director for water resources at the State Department. “We should expect to see that more often as the water supply crisis is exacerbated.”

India, for example, recently weaponized water against Pakistan. In April, following terrorist attacks in Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi suspended his country’s participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a river-sharing agreement between the two nuclear powers that was negotiated in 1960. The Indus system flows northwest out of Tibet into India, before turning southward into Pakistan. Pakistan has severely depleted its groundwater reserves — the region is facing one of the world’s most urgent water emergencies according to the Science Advances paper. The Indus has only become more essential as a supply of fresh water for its 252 million people. Allowing that water to cross the border would be “prejudicial to India’s interests,” Modi said. In this case, he wasn’t attempting to recoup water supply for his country, Salzberg said, but was leveraging its scarcity to win a strategic advantage over his country’s principal rival.

What’s needed most is governance of water that recognizes it as a crucial resource that determines both sovereignty and progress, Salzberg added. Yet there is no international framework for water management, and only a handful of countries have national water policies of their own.

The United States has taken stabs at regulating its groundwater use, but in some cases those attempts appear to be failing. In 2014, California passed what seemed to many a revolutionary groundwater management act that required communities to assess their total water supply and budget its long-term use. But the act doesn’t take full effect until 2040, which has allowed many groundwater districts to continue to draw heavily from aquifers even as they complete their plans to conserve those resources. Chandanpurkar and Famiglietti’s research underscores the consequences for such a slow approach.

Arizona pioneered groundwater regulations in 1980, creating what it called active management areas where extraction would be limited and surface waters would be used to replenish aquifers. But it only chose to manage the water in metropolitan areas, leaving vast, unregulated swaths of the state where investors, farmers and industry have all pounced on the availability of free water for profit. In recent years, Saudi investors have pumped rural water to grow feed for cattle exported back to the Arabian Peninsula, and hedge funds are competing to pump and sell water to towns near Phoenix. Meanwhile, four out of the original five active management areas are failing to meet the state’s own targets.

“They like to say, ‘Oh, the management’s doing well,’” Famiglietti said, but looking out over the next century, the trends suggest the aquifers will continue to empty out. “No one talks about that. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s an existential issue for cities like Phoenix.”

Both California and Arizona grow significant portions of America’s fruits and vegetables. Something has to give. “If you want to grow food in a place like California,” Famiglietti asked, “do you just bring in water? If we deplete that groundwater, I don’t think there’s enough water to really replace what we’re doing there.” The United States might not have much choice, he added, but to move California’s agriculture production somewhere far away and retire the land.

Chandanpurkar, Famiglietti and the report’s other authors suggest there are ready solutions to the problems they have identified, because unlike so many aspects of the climate crisis, the human decisions that lead to the overuse of water can be speedily corrected. Agriculture, which uses the vast majority of the world’s fresh water, can deploy well-tested technologies like drip irrigation, as Israel has, that sharply cut use by as much as 50%. When California farms reduced their take of Colorado River water in 2023 and 2024, the water levels in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, jumped by 16 vertical feet as some 390 billion gallons were saved by 2025. Individuals can reduce water waste by changing simple routines: shortening showers or removing lawns. And cities can look to recycle more of the water they use, as San Diego has.

A national policy that establishes rules around water practices but also prioritizes the use of water resources for national security and a collective interest could counterbalance the forces of habit and special interests, Salzberg said. Every country needs such a policy, and if the United States were to lead, it might offer an advantage. But “the U.S. doesn’t have a national water strategy,” he said, referring to a disjointed patchwork of state and court oversight. “We don’t even have a national water institution. We haven’t thought as a country about how we would even protect our own water resources for our own national interests, and we’re a mess.”

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Additional design and development by Anna Donlan.

July 25, 2025: This story originally included a quote from Jay Famiglietti characterizing Arizona’s water supply as facing total depletion by the end of the century. Famiglietti communicated a correction to that assertion to ProPublica, which failed to incorporate it before the story was published. The quote has been adjusted to reflect Famiglietti’s view that Arizona’s water supply will be diminished but may not disappear.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.”

The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.

Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers — underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans.

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions of people.

“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study.

Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says. Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere. Just like rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift: Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

People aren’t just misusing groundwater, they are flooding their own coasts and cities in the process, Famiglietti warns. That means they are also imperiling some of the world’s most important food-producing lowlands in the Nile and Mekong deltas and cities from Shanghai to New York. Once in the oceans, of course, groundwater will never again be suitable for drinking and human use without expensive and energy-sucking treatment or through the natural cycle of evaporating and precipitating as rain. But even then, it may no longer fall where it is needed most. Groundwater “is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all,” the study states, “at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations.”

That such rapid and substantial overuse of groundwater is also causing coastal flooding underscores the compounding threat of rising temperatures and aridity. It means that water scarcity and some of the most disruptive effects of climate change are now inextricably intertwined. And here, the study’s authors implore leaders to find a policy solution: Improve water management and reduce groundwater use now, and the world has a tool to slow the rate of sea level rise. Fail to adjust the governance and use of groundwater around the world, and humanity risks surrendering parts of its coastal cities while pouring out finite reserves it will sorely need as the other effects of climate change take hold.

1. The process starts when deep underground aquifers are tapped to make up for a lack of water from rainfall and rivers.
2. Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers.
3. Instead, most of the water runs off the land into streams, eventually flowing into rivers.
4. The rivers ultimately drain into the ocean, where fresh water becomes salt water. For that water to be usable again, it must either be industrially treated or return to the land as rain. But with climate change, these same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, lauded the new report for confirming trends that were once theoretical. The ramifications, he said, could be profoundly destabilizing. “The massive overpumping of groundwater,” Gleick said, “poses enormous risk to food production.” And food, he pointed out, is the foundation for stability. The water science center he co-founded, the Pacific Institute, has tracked more than 1,900 incidents in which water supplies were either the casualty of, a tool for or the cause of violence. In Syria, beginning in 2011, drought and groundwater depletion drove rural unrest that contributed to the civil war, which displaced millions of people. In Ghana, in 2017, protesters rioted as wells ran dry. And in Ukraine, whose wheat supports much of the world, water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.

“Water is being used as a strategic and political tool,” said Salzberg, who spent nearly two decades analyzing water security issues as the special director for water resources at the State Department. “We should expect to see that more often as the water supply crisis is exacerbated.”

India, for example, recently weaponized water against Pakistan. In April, following terrorist attacks in Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi suspended his country’s participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a river-sharing agreement between the two nuclear powers that was negotiated in 1960. The Indus system flows northwest out of Tibet into India, before turning southward into Pakistan. Pakistan has severely depleted its groundwater reserves — the region is facing one of the world’s most urgent water emergencies according to the Science Advances paper. The Indus has only become more essential as a supply of fresh water for its 252 million people. Allowing that water to cross the border would be “prejudicial to India’s interests,” Modi said. In this case, he wasn’t attempting to recoup water supply for his country, Salzberg said, but was leveraging its scarcity to win a strategic advantage over his country’s principal rival.

What’s needed most is governance of water that recognizes it as a crucial resource that determines both sovereignty and progress, Salzberg added. Yet there is no international framework for water management, and only a handful of countries have national water policies of their own.

The United States has taken stabs at regulating its groundwater use, but in some cases those attempts appear to be failing. In 2014, California passed what seemed to many a revolutionary groundwater management act that required communities to assess their total water supply and budget its long-term use. But the act doesn’t take full effect until 2040, which has allowed many groundwater districts to continue to draw heavily from aquifers even as they complete their plans to conserve those resources. Chandanpurkar and Famiglietti’s research underscores the consequences for such a slow approach.

Arizona pioneered groundwater regulations in 1980, creating what it called active management areas where extraction would be limited and surface waters would be used to replenish aquifers. But it only chose to manage the water in metropolitan areas, leaving vast, unregulated swaths of the state where investors, farmers and industry have all pounced on the availability of free water for profit. In recent years, Saudi investors have pumped rural water to grow feed for cattle exported back to the Arabian Peninsula, and hedge funds are competing to pump and sell water to towns near Phoenix. Meanwhile, four out of the original five active management areas are failing to meet the state’s own targets.

“They like to say, ‘Oh, the management’s doing well,’” Famiglietti said, but looking out over the next century, the trends suggest the aquifers will continue to empty out. “No one talks about that. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s an existential issue for cities like Phoenix.”

Both California and Arizona grow significant portions of America’s fruits and vegetables. Something has to give. “If you want to grow food in a place like California,” Famiglietti asked, “do you just bring in water? If we deplete that groundwater, I don’t think there’s enough water to really replace what we’re doing there.” The United States might not have much choice, he added, but to move California’s agriculture production somewhere far away and retire the land.

Chandanpurkar, Famiglietti and the report’s other authors suggest there are ready solutions to the problems they have identified, because unlike so many aspects of the climate crisis, the human decisions that lead to the overuse of water can be speedily corrected. Agriculture, which uses the vast majority of the world’s fresh water, can deploy well-tested technologies like drip irrigation, as Israel has, that sharply cut use by as much as 50%. When California farms reduced their take of Colorado River water in 2023 and 2024, the water levels in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, jumped by 16 vertical feet as some 390 billion gallons were saved by 2025. Individuals can reduce water waste by changing simple routines: shortening showers or removing lawns. And cities can look to recycle more of the water they use, as San Diego has.

A national policy that establishes rules around water practices but also prioritizes the use of water resources for national security and a collective interest could counterbalance the forces of habit and special interests, Salzberg said. Every country needs such a policy, and if the United States were to lead, it might offer an advantage. But “the U.S. doesn’t have a national water strategy,” he said, referring to a disjointed patchwork of state and court oversight. “We don’t even have a national water institution. We haven’t thought as a country about how we would even protect our own water resources for our own national interests, and we’re a mess.”

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Additional design and development by Anna Donlan.

July 25, 2025: This story originally included a quote from Jay Famiglietti characterizing Arizona’s water supply as facing total depletion by the end of the century. Famiglietti communicated a correction to that assertion to ProPublica, which failed to incorporate it before the story was published. The quote has been adjusted to reflect Famiglietti’s view that Arizona’s water supply will be diminished but may not disappear.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage.

But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found.

This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the U.S. government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.”

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC.

Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by U.S.-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department.

Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint.

“With so much data stored in cloud services — and the power of AI to analyze it quickly — even unclassified data can reveal insights that could harm U.S. interests,” he said.

Harry Coker, who was a senior executive at the CIA and the National Security Agency, said foreign intelligence agencies could leverage information gleaned from GCC systems to “swim upstream” to more sensitive or even classified ones. “It is an opportunity that I can’t imagine an intelligence service not pursuing,” he said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has deemed China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.” Laws there grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.

Microsoft declined interview requests for this story. In response to questions, the tech giant issued a statement that suggested it would be discontinuing its use of China-based support for GCC, as it recently did for the Defense Department’s cloud systems.

“Microsoft took steps last week to enhance the security of our DoD Government cloud offerings. Going forward, we are taking similar steps for all our government customers who use Government Community Cloud to further ensure the security of their data,” the statement said. A spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those steps are.

The company also said that over the next month it “will conduct a review to assess whether additional measures are needed.”

The federal departments and agencies that ProPublica found to be using GCC did not respond to requests for comment.

The latest revelations about Microsoft’s use of its Chinese workforce to service the U.S. government — and the company’s swift response — are likely to fuel a rapidly developing firestorm in Washington, where federal lawmakers and the Trump administration are questioning the tech giant’s cybersecurity practices and trying to contain any potential national security fallout. “Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X last Friday.

Last week, ProPublica revealed that Microsoft has for a decade relied on foreign workers — including those based in China — to maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems, with oversight coming from U.S.-based digital escorts. But those escorts, we found, often don’t have the advanced technical expertise to police foreign counterparts with far more advanced skills, leaving highly sensitive information vulnerable. In response to the reporting, Hegseth launched a review of the practice.

ProPublica found that Microsoft developed the escort arrangement to satisfy Defense Department officials who were concerned about the company’s foreign employees, given the department’s citizenship requirements for people handling sensitive data. Microsoft went on to win federal cloud computing business and has said in earnings reports that it receives “substantial revenue from government contracts.”

While Microsoft has said it will stop using China-based tech support for the Defense Department, it declined to answer questions about what would replace it, including whether cloud support would come from engineers based outside the U.S. The company also declined to say whether it would continue to use digital escorts.

Microsoft confirmed to ProPublica this week that a similar escorting arrangement had been used in GCC — a dynamic that surprised some former government officials and cybersecurity experts. “In an increasingly complex digital world, consumers of cloud products deserve to know how their data is handled and by whom,” Booth said. “The cybersecurity industry depends on clarity.”

Microsoft said it disclosed details of the GCC escort arrangement in documentation submitted to the federal government as part of the FedRAMP cloud accreditation process. The company declined to provide the documents to ProPublica, citing the potential security risk of publicly disclosing them, and also declined to say whether the China-based location of its support personnel was specifically mentioned in them.

ProPublica contacted other major cloud services providers to the federal government to ask whether they use China-based support. A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said in a statement that “AWS does not use personnel in China to support federal contracts.” A Google spokesperson said in a statement that “Google Public Sector does not have a Digital Escort program. Instead, its sensitive systems are supported by fully trained personnel who meet the U.S. government’s location, citizenship and security clearance requirements.” Oracle said it “does not use any Chinese support for U.S. federal customers.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke.

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On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base, a facility that will play a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.

Two people with direct knowledge of the award and two familiar with the company told ProPublica that Disaster Management Group would help build the new facility, receiving a substantial chunk of the more than $1.2 billion the government has allocated for the project.

“The idea that you could use illegal labor and then sell services to ICE, the irony is thick,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term and later under President Joe Biden, referring to the immigration case involving TentLogix, the company Albers once co-owned.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Disaster Management said that Albers and Disaster Management had been dropped from the DHS’ investigation of TentLogix and exonerated. Upon learning of illegal actions by TentLogix’s co-founder, the spokesperson said, “Mr. Albers parted ways as a minority and non-operating owner of TentLogix.”

The spokesperson didn’t directly answer questions about Disaster Management’s role in the detention camp at Fort Bliss, saying only that the company “is proud to support projects of national importance for nearly 20 years.”

The White House didn’t answer questions about Disaster Management or Albers, referring ProPublica to the DOD and DHS, neither of which provided comment.

The new migrant detention camp near El Paso, Texas, is expected to hold up to 5,000 people. The prime contractor is Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics, and people with direct knowledge of the work at Fort Bliss told ProPublica that Amentum, a major engineering and technology services contractor, will be another subcontractor.

Neither Acquisition Logistics nor Amentum replied to questions from ProPublica about the project.

Disaster Management specializes in building temporary structures. Since 2020, it’s won over $500 million in government contracting work, mostly to construct lodgings for a U.S. program to resettle Afghan refugees.

Last year, the Department of Labor announced that it had found Disaster Management and subcontractors it worked with on the Afghan refugee contract violated federal labor laws, including those on minimum wages and overtime. The agency recovered nearly $16 million in pay for workers, and Disaster Management signed a compliance agreement with the agency designed to prevent further violations. The company didn’t respond to questions about the case.

Albers’ ties to TentLogix wouldn’t have excluded him or Disaster Management from other government contracting work, explained Scott Amey, the general counsel at the Project On Government Oversight.

TentLogix reported its criminal conviction in the federal contracting database, but Albers and his other businesses are considered separate legal entities. Companies awarded federal contracts are required to certify that they operate with a satisfactory record of business ethics, but “a lot of things are not required to be reported,” Amey said. “I don’t even think this would appear on the radar of a contracting officer.”

Still, there’s a web of connections between TentLogix and Disaster Management. Albers was one of TentLogix’s two directors when it pleaded guilty to violating immigration law. The other, Gary Hendry, co-founded Disaster Management with Albers, and the two were once brothers-in-law. When immigration authorities raided TentLogix in 2018, it shared an address with Disaster Management.

The raid followed a 2016 Homeland Security Investigations audit of Tentlogix, which found the company had 96 undocumented employees on its books. According to court records, Hendry then attempted to deceive investigators by creating a shell company and transferring the undocumented workers to that entity to conceal them from Homeland Security Investigations auditors. But the agency discovered the scheme and found undocumented workers at the company’s site when officials raided it in 2018. That year, Albers was listed as one of four officers on the company’s corporate filings.

In 2019, Hendry pleaded guilty to immigration charges alongside another company officer and was sentenced to a year in prison. (He served a little over three months, then was granted an early release because of the pandemic.) TentLogix, the corporate entity, also pleaded guilty and was ordered to forfeit over $3 million. Although Albers was not personally charged, he signed off on the company’s guilty plea, court records show. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.

Hendry did not respond to a request for comment.

Disaster Management’s federal contracting work has been lucrative for Albers. Last year, he purchased a $30 million house in Jupiter, Florida, that then ranked as the area’s most expensive home.

Albers also has recently become a large donor to Republican campaigns, to which he’s given more than $150,000 in the last year alone. He and his wife spent election night at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 and once co-chaired a charity fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club with the president’s son, Eric, and his wife. They attended the “Crypto Ball,” a cryptocurrency event sponsored by Trump supporters in the digital currency industry; participants paid between $2,500 and $1 million for tickets. (The Trump Organization did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

Since late last year, Disaster Management has spent $210,000 lobbying Congress and the administration on immigration-related issues, including “funding related to temporary facilities.” The company had no prior history of lobbying, according to federal disclosures.

Disaster Management’s share of the immigration detention contract for Fort Bliss could rank among the company’s largest contracts.

The Fort Bliss award comes as immigration arrests have soared in recent months and ICE is running low on space to hold everyone it has detained. In the past, those arrested by ICE would mostly be housed in brick-and-mortar detention facilities.

But in its urgency to increase deportations, the Trump administration has turned to contractors to build so-called soft-sided facilities — tents with rigid structures inside — that can be set up much more quickly.

The administration has eyed military bases as locations to set up these new detention camps. In April, ICE announced a $3.8 billion award to build such a facility to Deployed Resources, which had operated the lion’s share of the soft-sided facilities used in the past to temporarily house immigrants entering the country along the southern border.

ICE abruptly canceled that contract just days after it was announced without explanation. Now it appears Disaster Management could do much of that work. An industry insider estimated to ProPublica that Disaster Management’s slice of the $1.2 billion contract at Fort Bliss could be worth hundreds of millions for the company in the next year, though it’s not clear how the three contractors will split the work. Bloomberg first reported the total value of the Fort Bliss contract.

The facility at Fort Bliss is expected to be the first of many. Earlier in the month, Trump signed a spending bill that allocates $45 billion to build new migrant detention sites. Experts estimate this could roughly double the country’s capacity for immigration detention from around 50,000 people to more than 100,000.

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting. Pratheek Rebala, Kirsten Berg and Mario Ariza contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Jeff Ernsthausen.

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We updated our Supreme Connections database with newly released financial disclosures from eight Supreme Court justices on Friday, covering the 2024 calendar year.

Supreme Connections is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them.

This update includes disclosures filed in May and made public late last month. Justice Samuel Alito received a 90-day extension, and his disclosure is expected later this summer.

The latest update details millions in book income, almost 40 trips and one gift.

Among the disclosures:

• Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2024 disclosure listed no gifts or travel reimbursements. In 2023, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Thomas was a frequent recipient of luxury travel and gifts from billionaire benefactors — and that he often failed to disclose them.
• Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported a $2.07 million advance from Penguin Random House for her memoir, “Lovely One,” published in 2024. She also disclosed more than a dozen reimbursed trips to cities including Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, mostly in connection with her book tour.
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor disclosed a $60,000 book advance and over $73,000 in additional royalty payments, also from Penguin Random House. She listed eight reimbursed trips from various universities, including international travel to Panama City, Zurich and Vienna, as well as a $1,437 gift from the Coterie Theatre in Kansas City, Mo.
• Justice Neil Gorsuch reported $250,000 in royalties from HarperCollins, plus income from teaching at George Mason University. He took at least six paid-for trips, including international travel to Germany and Portugal, and domestic stops in Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg, Virginia.
• Justice Amy Coney Barrett received $31,815 in teaching income from the University of Notre Dame and reported three trips, including travel to Malibu, California, and two visits to Notre Dame.
• Justice Brett Kavanaugh reported $31,815 in teaching income from Notre Dame and listed two trips there.
• Justice Elena Kagan reported a trip to New York City for a speech at New York University.
• Chief Justice John Roberts disclosed two reimbursed trips: one to Galway, Ireland, and another to West Point, New York, for events hosted by New England Law and the United States Military Academy, respectively.

We’ve also added new ways to view the justices’ investment holdings. Previously, investments were sorted by value. Now, you can group investments by account to see how justices structure their holdings, or you can sort investments by the order in which they appear on the original disclosure forms, making it easier to cross-reference our data to the original filings.

Browse the database to learn more.

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? 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 or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sergio Hernandez.

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One day in late May 2024, lawyer Zina Bash spent 6 1/2 hours working on a case against Facebook parent company Meta on behalf of the state of Texas. She reviewed draft legal filings. She participated in a court-ordered mediation session and then discussed the outcome with state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In her previous job as senior counsel on Paxton’s leadership team, that labor would have cost Texas taxpayers $641.

But Bash had moved to private practice. Paxton hired her firm to work on the Meta case, allowing her to bill $3,780 an hour, so that day of work will cost taxpayers $24,570.

In the past five years, Paxton has grown increasingly reliant on pricey private lawyers to argue cases on behalf of the state, rather than the hundreds of attorneys who work within his office, an investigation by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica found. These are often attorneys, like Bash, with whom Paxton has personal or political ties.

In addition to Bash, one such contract went to Tony Buzbee, the trial lawyer who successfully defended Paxton during his 2023 impeachment trial on corruption charges. Three other contracts went to firms whose senior attorneys have donated to Paxton’s political campaigns. Despite these connections and what experts say are potential conflicts of interest, Paxton does not appear to have recused himself from the selection process. Although he is not required to by law, this raises a concern about appearing improper, experts who study attorneys general said.

Paxton appears to have also outsourced cases more frequently than his predecessors, available records show. And he’s inked the kind of contingent-fee contracts, in which firms receive a share of a settlement if they win, far more often than the attorneys general in other large states, including California, New York and Pennsylvania. Since 2015, the New York and California attorneys general have awarded zero contingent-fee contracts; Pennsylvania’s has signed one. During that period, Paxton’s office approved 13.

One of those was with Bash’s firm, Chicago-based Keller Postman, at the time known as Keller Lenkner, which she joined as partner in February 2021 after resigning from her job at the attorney general’s office. Paxton had signed a contract with the company two months earlier to investigate Google for deceptive business practices and violations of antitrust law. A little more than a year later, Bash’s firm won a state contract to work on the Meta litigation, alleging its facial recognition software violated Texans’ privacy. This time, Bash was the co-lead counsel.

Meta, which called the lawsuit meritless, settled the case for $1.4 billion in the summer of 2024. It was a windfall for Keller Postman. The firm billed $97 million, the largest fee charged by outside counsel under Paxton’s tenure. Bash’s work alone accounted for $3.6 million of that total.

Bash, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, said in a statement she is honored the attorney general’s office partnered with Keller Postman based on the firm’s “first-rate attorneys and extensive experience.”

“We have a record of taking on the most significant litigation in the country against the most powerful defendants in the world,” Bash said.

Keller Postman did not respond to a request for comment.

There is little to stop Paxton, or any other occupant of his office, from handing these contracts out. The attorney general can award them without seeking bids from other law firms or asking anyone’s permission.

Asked to provide competitive-bid documents for the contingent-fee contracts it has awarded, the attorney general’s office said it had none because state law “exempts the OAG from having to do all of the solicitation steps when hiring outside counsel.”

Given the high-profile nature of representing an attorney general and the potential for a big payday, many qualified firms would be eager to compete for this work, said Paul Nolette, a professor of political science at Marquette University who studies attorneys general.

“I’d be curious to know what the justification is for this not going on the open market,” Nolette said.

Paxton declined interview requests for this story. He has publicly defended the practice of hiring outside law firms, arguing that his office lacks the resources in-house to take on massive corporations like tech companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

“These parties have practically unlimited resources that would swamp most legal teams and delay effective enforcement,” Paxton told the Senate finance committee during a budget hearing in January.

A spokesperson for Paxton said in a statement that the outside lawyers hired by the office are some of the best in the nation. With the contingent-fee settlements to date, more than $2 billion, the state “could not have gotten a better return on its investment,” the statement said.

Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, questioned why so much extra help is needed. Outside counsel is appropriate for small states, he said, that “only have so many lawyers with so many levels of expertise.”

The Texas attorney general’s office, one of the largest in the country, has more than 700 attorneys.

“Large states typically don’t hire outside counsel,” Toth said. “They should have the people in-house that should be able to go toe-to-toe with the best attorneys that are out there.”

When a Texas attorney general previously made a practice of giving lucrative contracts to private counsel, it didn’t end well.

Dan Morales was the last Democrat to hold the office. He became embroiled in scandal after he used outside firms to help secure a $17 billion settlement in Big Tobacco litigation in 1998.

Republicans, including then-Gov. George W. Bush, blasted the $3.2 billion payout to the outside lawyers as exorbitant. Their attacks grew more intense when Morales sought to steer $500 million of that sum to a lawyer, a personal friend, who did very little work on the case. Morales pleaded guilty in 2003 to related federal corruption charges. He served 3 1/2 years behind bars.

John Cornyn, the Republican who succeeded Morales in 1999, criticized his predecessor’s handling of the tobacco case during his campaign for the office. In an interview for this story, Cornyn said he never hired outside counsel as attorney general because he focused on recruiting talented in-house lawyers that he felt could handle all the office’s cases.

Paxton is challenging Cornyn, now a four-term U.S. senator, in next year’s Republican primary.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican who led the office after Cornyn, appears to have rarely used private lawyers. The attorney general’s office was able to produce records for only part of Abbott’s 12-year term because state law allows the files to be deleted after so many years. The office signed nine outside counsel contracts between 2010 and 2014, all pro bono or for hourly rates rather than contingency. Abbott did not respond to an interview request.

Paxton also seldom outsourced cases during his first five years in office. Through 2019, he awarded only nine outside counsel contracts, all pro bono or hourly rate. The most expensive contract capped fees at $500,000 — far less than $143 million the state paid to the two firms, including Bash’s, that handled the Meta case.

He changed course in 2020.

That summer, the attorney general’s office was gearing up to file its first case against Google. It related to allegations that the company monopolized the online advertising market, raising costs for advertisers, who increased the price of their products for average consumers as a result. Paxton initially had no plans to hire outside counsel for the litigation, three former deputy attorneys general told the Tribune and ProPublica.

But before the case was filed, the attorney general’s office was thrown into upheaval. At the end of September, seven of Paxton’s senior advisers reported him to the FBI, concerned his relationship with an Austin real estate investor had crossed the line into bribery and corruption. State House members would later impeach Paxton on counts related to the accusations; state senators eventually acquitted him. The federal criminal investigation into Paxton did not result in any criminal charges.

Over fall 2020, each of the lawyers in his office who had accused Paxton of wrongdoing quit or was fired. That included Darren McCarty, the head of civil litigation who was supposed to lead the Google litigation before he reported his boss to the FBI. He resigned on Oct. 26.

Less than two months later, on Dec. 16, Paxton signed contracts with The Lanier Law Firm and Keller Postman to investigate Google. They filed the lawsuit against the tech giant in federal court the same day.

Paxton replaced the lawyers who complained to the authorities. The staffing of the antitrust and consumer protection divisions, which would have handled these cases, remained constant at more than 80 employees in the following years. Yet Paxton continued to outsource lawsuits against large corporations to private lawyers.

Under Keller Postman’s contract, the firm would be paid only if it secured a settlement or won at trial. These contingent-fee cases have the potential to be far more profitable for the outside firms than those in which they bill at a regular hourly rate. In a successful case, the contracts say that firms are paid either a percentage of a settlement or the sum of hours billed by the firm times four, whichever is less.

In the Meta case, Keller Postman was entitled to 11% of the state’s settlement, a share that totaled $154 million. But because the firm’s fees and expenses totaled $97 million, it billed that sum.

In multiple legislative sessions, Paxton has testified that outsourcing was the only way his office could stand toe-to-toe with corporate titans.

If Paxton has a shortage of qualified in-house attorneys, Cornyn told the newsrooms, that’s because of the damage the whistleblower scandal did to the reputation of the attorney general’s office as a home for ambitious young lawyers.

“He’s a victim of his own malfeasance and mismanagement because people did not want to work for him anymore,” Cornyn said. “And if you run off your best lawyers because you engage in questionable ethical conduct, then you’re left with very few options. But this shouldn’t be a way to reward bad behavior.”

Former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said he was surprised Paxton began hiring contingent-fee outside lawyers only after the scandal, since those contracts, with their potential for high profits, are tougher to ethically defend.

“I would have thought it would have been the other way around — that he got more careful after he got the whistle blown on him,” said Goddard, a Democrat. “But it looked like he got more reckless.”

Paxton’s style of procurement also benefited Buzbee, the man who successfully defended him during his impeachment trial, which stemmed from allegations the whistleblowers raised.

The attorney general chose to skip most of the proceedings, so for the 10 days of trial in the Texas Senate, his most vociferous advocate was the loquacious Buzbee. The pair sat side by side when the attorney general did attend.

A little more than a year later, Paxton hired The Buzbee Law Firm to pursue an antitrust suit against the investment firms BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard that accuses the companies of manipulating the coal market in a way that allegedly increased electricity prices for Texans. The firms deny wrongdoing.

Buzbee is a successful litigator and one of Houston’s most famous plaintiffs’ attorneys. Among other victories, he won settlements for victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and $73 million for Gulf of Mexico oil drillers in a 2001 antitrust case. But he’s known primarily for personal injury work, not antitrust litigation.

His firm, one of two hired for this latest attorney general’s office contingent-fee case, could collect 10% of any judgment or settlement. The case is in its early stages, though the Trump administration in May filed a brief in the case in support of Texas.

Buzbee downplayed the potential for a big payday in an email to the newsrooms and argued there is no buddy system at play, noting he believed other law firms also interviewed with Paxton’s office for the job. (The attorney general’s office did not confirm this.) He said his firm has to pay for significant expenses up front, without any guarantee of payment.

“The current arrangement may be a good deal for other lawyers, but in all candor, it’s not for me,” Buzbee said, adding that his normal hourly rate is $2,250. “Frankly, the only reason I’m even doing it is that I am proud to represent the state in such a landmark case.”

The connections between Paxton and the lawyers he has hired also extend to other firms. The attorney general’s office hired the firm Norton Rose Fulbright, one of the largest in the country with more than 3,000 lawyers on staff, to work on separate Google cases for the state, focusing on consumer protection allegations.

The attorney general’s office has awarded three contracts to the firm since 2022 for cases against the tech giant. Three times during that period, Joseph Graham, the firm’s lead counsel on the Google litigation, contributed $5,000 to Paxton’s campaign for attorney general. Twice, the donations came within 16 days of Graham signing one of the firm’s contracts with the attorney general.

The firm and its attorneys have contributed $39,500 to Paxton’s campaign since he took office. Neither Graham nor Norton Rose Fulbright responded to requests for comment.

Mark Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm, which the state hired to work on a separate Google case, is a large donor to Texas elected officials. He has contributed $31,000 to Paxton’s campaigns since 2015. The largest contribution, for $25,000, came six months after Lanier signed his firm’s Google contract.

The Lanier contract is slightly different from the others the attorney general’s office awarded, in that the firm’s payment is partially based on a basic hourly rate but it could also be paid more if it wins the case, as in the contingent-fee model. Lanier noted in an emailed statement to the newsrooms that he took a reduced fee on this case and maintained that the attorney general’s office needed the kind of firepower his team can bring against an opponent like Google.

“The Texas AG office and its lawyers are good, but specialists are needed in a war like this. And it is a war,” Lanier wrote. “It would be irresponsible to pursue Google on behalf of Texans without bring[ing] the fullest resources you can.”

A competitive, open process for awarding contracts can be a strong defense against accusations of favoritism, Goddard said.

Unlike some other states, Texas does not require these contracts be put out to competitive bid.

Florida, for example, has one of the most robust laws in the country for procuring outside counsel, requiring the attorney general to explain in writing why a contingent-fee contract is necessary. It also mandates most contracts be put out to competitive bid and caps contingent-fee payouts at $50 million.

Texas has no such cap.

It also has virtually no method for state lawmakers to truly supervise this kind of practice. State law mandates only that the attorney general notify the Legislature when his office awards a contingent-fee contract, and certify that no in-house lawyers or private attorneys at an hourly rate can handle the task. Paxton has done so in boilerplate two-page letters that all say outside attorneys are needed because of the “scope and enormity” of the cases.

If lawmakers are concerned about these contracts, there is no mechanism for them to challenge Paxton’s determination that private counsel is needed.

Having lawyers bid for work would eliminate the appearance of impropriety that hangs over Paxton’s hires, Goddard said.

“A couple look like paybacks, which is extraordinarily improper, in other words to award a contract to someone who’s a major contributor or has recently left your office,” he said. “All of those would not be allowed in our state.”

Officials in other states have said they can still secure big wins for their constituents without relying on private firms.

California, for example, reached a $93 million settlement with Google in 2023 over claims that the company was clandestinely tracking users’ locations. A year earlier, in a case with similar allegations, Oregon and Nebraska led a 40-state coalition that won a $392 million settlement against the company. Texas was not part of this suit.

The latter agreement required Google to make new privacy disclosures to consumers, restricted its ability to share users’ location information with advertisers and required the company to prepare an annual report detailing how it was complying with the settlement terms.

Doug Peterson, the Republican attorney general of Nebraska at the time, said negotiating the financial penalty — Nebraska’s share was $11.9 million — was a secondary goal of the settlement.

“The most important thing we’re trying to do is to stop the bad behavior,” Peterson said.

McCarty, one of the attorney general employees who blew the whistle on Paxton, said private lawyers can be talented, but they have an incentive to fixate on the financial portion of settlements — which is tied to their compensation — rather than enforcement provisions that may best protect a state’s residents.

“Government enforcers, especially in the antitrust context, can focus on more effective solutions,” McCarty said.

Norton Rose Fulbright has yet to send its final billing records to the attorney general’s office but is likely to be rewarded handsomely. The firm helped the state secure a $1.38 billion settlement with Google in May. Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the Texas settlement, which has not been finalized, will contain no new restrictions on the company’s practices.

Under the terms of its contracts, the firm’s fees could exceed $350 million.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune.

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On March 15, President Donald Trump’s administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Without providing evidence, Trump has called the men “some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth.”

Last week, the men were released as suddenly as they’d been taken away. Now, the truth of all their stories — one by one — will begin to be told.

Starting here.

We’ve compiled a first-of-its-kind, case-by-case accounting of 238 Venezuelan men who were held in El Salvador.

ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) spent the past four months reporting on the men’s lives and their backgrounds. We obtained government data that included whether they had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. or had pending charges. We found most were listed solely as having immigration violations. We also conducted interviews with relatives of more than 100 of the men; reviewed thousands of pages of court records from the U.S. and South America; and analyzed federal immigration court data.

Some of our findings:

• We obtained internal data showing that the Trump administration knew that at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. — and that only six had been convicted of violent offenses. We identified fewer than a dozen additional convictions, both for crimes committed in the U.S. and abroad, that were not reflected in the government data.

• Nearly half of the men, or 118, were whisked out of the country while in the middle of their immigration cases, which should have protected them from deportation. Some were only days away from a final hearing.

• At least 166 of the men have tattoos. Interviews with families, immigration documents and court records show the government relied heavily on tattoos to tie the men to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — even though law enforcement experts told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

• The men who were imprisoned range in age from 18 to 46. The impact of their monthslong incarceration extended beyond them. Their wives struggled to pay the rent. Relatives went without medical treatment. Their children wondered if they would see them again.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not respond to questions about the men in the database but said Trump “is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public.” She referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond.

Read the men’s stories in our database.

Reporting by: Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melisa Sánchez, ProPublica; Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Risquez, Alianza Rebelde; Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News; Adriana Núñez Moros, independent journalist; Carlos Centeno, independent journalist; Maryam Jameel, ProPublica; Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica; Cengiz Yar, ProPublica; Gabriel Pasquini, independent journalist; Kate Morrisey, independent journalist; Coral Murphy Marcos, independent journalist; Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Nicole Foy, ProPublica; Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria; Lisa Seville, ProPublica

Design and development by: Ruth Talbot, ProPublica

Additional design and development by: Zisiga Mukulu, ProPublica

Additional data reporting by: Agnel Philip, ProPublica

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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.

Louisiana passed a new police accountability law following allegations of civil rights violations against a sheriff’s deputy caught on video dragging a Black woman by her hair and slamming her head into the ground.

The woman, Shantel Arnold, sued the deputy and the sheriff, accusing the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office of conspiring to cover up the 2021 assault. The Sheriff’s Office agreed in March to pay Arnold $300,000 after three days of trial but before jury deliberations began, Arnold’s attorney said.

After the incident, ProPublica, in partnership with WRKF, WWNO and The Times-Picayune, published an investigation detailing the long history of excessive-force complaints against Jefferson Parish sheriff’s Deputy Julio Alvarado. Alvarado, a 20-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office, was employed by the department as of March.

Arnold’s attorney, state Sen. Gary Carter, D-New Orleans, said he introduced the legislation after it emerged that Alvarado had failed to write a report about his encounter with Arnold despite his department’s policy that officers document each time they use force. Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto said during his testimony in the March trial over Arnold’s lawsuit that Alvarado’s commanders instructed him against writing such a report after video of his actions spread across social media.

Arnold’s run-in with Alvarado, which was captured in a 14-second video, left the woman with bruises and scratches across her body, a busted lip and recurring headaches, according to her subsequent account to police investigators.

“Had it not been for a bystander capturing how this officer beat up Shantel Arnold, there would be no report, there would be no evidence of it, there would be no indication that it ever happened,” Carter said in a recent interview.

The new law, passed unanimously by state legislators and signed by Gov. Jeff Landry in June, will require all law enforcement agencies to report every time an officer’s use of force results in serious injury. It directs the Council on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which certifies police officers, to adopt a policy on mandatory use-of-force reporting by Jan. 1. Details of how the process will work have not been spelled out, nor has the penalty for failing to comply.

The bill was introduced as “Shantel Arnold’s Law,” but Carter said that name was removed because “Sheriff Lopinto got very upset about that, and that almost killed the bill.”

Neither the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office nor Alvarado’s attorney responded to requests for comment or an interview.

Alvarado came across Arnold in September 2021, when the officer responded to a 911 call about a fight among 25 people in Jefferson Parish. When the deputy pulled up in his patrol car, Alvarado saw Arnold, covered in dirt, walking down the street. Arnold told the deputy she was attacked by a group of boys who frequently bullied her. When Alvarado ordered her to stop, Arnold said she just wanted to go home and kept walking. That’s when the deputy jumped out of his vehicle, grabbed Arnold and slammed her into the sidewalk, according to several witnesses.

In a video taken by a bystander, Alvarado drags Arnold along the pavement, holds her by her braids and slams her repeatedly onto the pavement. Arnold was not charged with a crime and was later taken to a hospital. The Sheriff’s Office did not use body cameras at the time but has since begun using them.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office denied wrongdoing. A 2022 internal investigation by the Sheriff’s Office determined Alvarado’s actions against Arnold were “both reasonable and acceptable.” Alvarado received an “approximately” 40-hour suspension for failing to file a written report, Lopinto said in his March testimony.

Arnold alleged in her 2022 lawsuit that the Sheriff’s Office knew Alvarado had a propensity for violence against Black people and other minority groups yet continued to have him patrol such communities, putting the public in danger.

Lopinto attributed Alvarado’s history of complaints to his working a high-crime beat, according to a 2022 Times-Picayune interview. “It’s not like he’s getting a complaint every month,” Lopinto said. During that same interview, Lopinto dismissed Arnold’s account and accused her of “looking for a paycheck.”

Alvarado’s alleged misdeeds fit a broader pattern in the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, as the yearlong investigation into the Sheriff’s Office by ProPublica, WRKF and WWNO found. Between 2013 and 2021, deputies disproportionately discharged guns against Black people. Of the 40 people shot at by Jefferson Parish deputies during that time, 73% were Black, more than double their share of the population. Twelve of the 16 people who died after being shot or restrained by deputies during that time were Black.

Alvarado has been named in at least 10 federal civil rights lawsuits since 2007, all involving the use of excessive force; eight of the plaintiffs were members of minority groups.

The Sheriff’s Office settled three of those lawsuits. Arnold’s $300,000 payout is the third — and largest — settlement involving Alvarado. Five other lawsuits were closed in favor of the Sheriff’s Office, one was dismissed on a legal technicality and one was indefinitely delayed.

The Sheriff’s Office said in filings responding to the eight lawsuits that were not dismissed or delayed that officers’ actions were “reasonable under the circumstances” and characterized the claims as “frivolous.”

Prior to the 2021 incident involving Arnold, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office had settled a 2016 lawsuit accusing Alvarado of grabbing a 14-year-old Hispanic boy by the neck and slamming his head against the concrete as the child screamed, “Why are you doing this to me?” A woman had called the police complaining that the boy and a friend were wrestling in a parking lot. Alvarado then threatened to have the boy and his family deported, according to the suit. The Sheriff’s Office, which paid the boy’s family $15,000, said in court filings that Alvarado’s actions were “reasonable under the circumstances.”

In 2018, another lawsuit claimed Alvarado and three deputies beat Atdner Casco, a Honduran native, and stole more than $2,000 from him during a traffic stop the year before, then conspired to have him deported. Casco claimed Alvarado beat and choked him until he agreed to keep silent about being robbed. The Sheriff’s Office denied wrongdoing but settled that case in 2020 for $50,000.

Both incidents were cited in Arnold’s lawsuit as evidence that Alvarado has exhibited a pattern of behavior throughout his career that made him unfit for duty. Carter, Arnold’s attorney, raised yet another incident during the March trial in which sheriff detectives in December 2019 witnessed Alvarado patronizing a massage parlor that was being investigated for suspected prostitution. Alvarado denied he went there to “have a sexual act performed on him.” He was demoted from sergeant to deputy for “bringing the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in disrepute” and for patronizing an “illegitimate business while on duty and neglecting your responsibilities to detectives under your command,” Carter said during the trial, citing an internal police report.

Carter said in an interview that Lopinto’s continued defense and employment of Alvarado represented a permissive attitude toward questionable behavior.

“He stood by” Alvarado, who “shows no contrition, no remorse,” Carter said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Richard A. Webster, Verite News.

Leer en español.

The Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, and accused them of being members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang. For the past four months, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have been reporting on these men, their backgrounds and how they ended up in custody. We’ve written about how the administration knew before removing them that the vast majority had not been convicted of any crimes in the U.S., contradicting its claims that the men were “the worst of the worst,” and how, by and large, they were abiding by the immigration system and not absconding from authorities. Now that they’ve been returned to Venezuela, we’re continuing to report on who the men are and what they went through.

Do you have information about the men or about the operation in which they were deported that you can share? Fill out this form or contact us via Signal at 917-512-0201 or WhatsApp at 917-327-4868.

We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Perla Trevizo, Melissa Sanchez, Mica Rosenberg and Maryam Jameel.

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.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith grew up in a community that was deeply involved in the fight for Indigenous rights, protesting broken treaties and other mistreatment of Native American people. Members of the movement, she said, understood that law enforcement agencies were surveilling their activities.

“I’ve been warned my entire life, ‘The FBI’s watching us,’” said Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon.

Government records later confirmed wide-ranging FBI surveillance of the movement in the 1970s, and now the agency is focused on her and a new generation of Indigenous activists challenging development of a mine in northern Nevada. Farrell-Smith advises the group People of Red Mountain, which opposes a Canadian company’s efforts to tap what it says is one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

All told, about 10 agencies have monitored the mine’s opponents. In addition to the FBI, those agencies include the Bureau of Land Management, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nevada State Police Highway Patrol, Winnemucca Police Department and Nevada Threat Analysis Center, the records show.

Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law, called the scrutiny of Indigenous and environmental protesters as potential terrorists “chilling.”

“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” Ferguson said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Land Management, which coordinated much of the interagency response, declined to comment. Most of the law enforcement activity has focused on monitoring, and one person has been arrested to date as a result of the protests.

Mike Allen, who served as Humboldt County’s sheriff until January 2023, said his office’s role was simply to monitor the situation at Thacker Pass. “We would go up there and make periodic patrol activity,” he said.

Allen defended the joint terrorism task force, saying it was “where we would just all get together and discuss things.” (The FBI characterizes such task forces, which include various agencies working in an area, as the front line of defense against terrorism.)

Tim Crowley, Lithium Americas’ vice president of government and external affairs, said in a statement: “Protestors have vandalized property, blocked roads and dangerously climbed on Lithium Americas’ equipment. In all those cases, Lithium Americas avoided engagement with the protestors and coordinated with the local authorities when necessary for the protection of everyone involved.”

Crowley noted that Lithium Americas has worked with Indigenous communities near the mine to study cultural artifacts and is offering to build projects worth millions of dollars for the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, such as a community center and greenhouse.

But individuals and the community groups opposed to the mine don’t want money. They worry mining will pollute local sources of water in the nation’s driest state and harm culturally significant sites, including that of an 1865 massacre of Indigenous people.

“We understand how the land is sacred and how much culture and how much history is within the McDermitt Caldera,” Callao said of the basin where Thacker Pass is located. “We know how much it means to not only the next generation, but the next seven generations.”

Indigenous groups are increasingly at odds with mining companies as climate change brings economies around the globe to an inflection point. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are contributing to increasingly intense hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. The solution — powering the electrical grid, vehicles and factories with cleaner energy sources — brings tradeoffs.

Massive amounts of metals are required to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure. Demand for lithium will skyrocket 350% by 2040, largely to be used in electric vehicles’ rechargeable batteries, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. produces very little lithium — and China controls a majority of refining capacity worldwide — so development of Thacker Pass enjoys bipartisan support, receiving a key permit in President Donald Trump’s first administration and a $2.26 billion loan from President Joe Biden’s administration. (Development ran into issues in June, when a Nevada agency notified the company that it was using groundwater without the proper permit. Company representatives have said they are confident that they will resolve the matter.)

Many minerals needed to produce cleaner energy are found on Indigenous lands. For example, 85% of known global lithium reserves are on or near Indigenous people’s lands, according to a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, the University of the Free State in South Africa and elsewhere. The situation has put Indigenous communities at odds with mining industries as tribes are asked to sacrifice land and sovereignty to combat climate change.

Luke Danielson is a mining consultant and lawyer who for decades has researched how mining affects Indigenous lands. “What I fear would be we set loose a land rush where we’re trampling over all the Indigenous people and we’re taking all the public land and essentially privatizing it to mining companies,” he said.

If companies or governments attempt to force mining on such communities, it can slow development, noted Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, a professor emeritus of Australia’s Griffith University and author of “Indigenous Peoples and Mining.”

“If there are bulldozers coming down the road and they are going to destroy an area that is central to people’s identity and their existence, they are going to fight,” he said. “The solution is you actually put First Peoples in a position of equal power so that they can negotiate outcomes that allow for timely, and indeed speedy, development.”

Most of the documents tracing law enforcement’s involvement at Thacker Pass were obtained via public records requests by two advocacy groups focused on climate change and law enforcement, Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. They shared the records with ProPublica, which obtained additional documents through separate public records requests to law enforcement agencies.

Given the monitoring of mining’s opponents highlighted in the records, experts raised questions about authorities’ role: Is the government there to support industrial development, protect civil liberties or act as an unbiased arbiter? At Thacker Pass, the documents show, law enforcement has helped defend the mine.

Protests have at times escalated.

A small group of more radical environmentalists led by non-Indigenous activists propelled the early movement, setting up a campsite on public land near the proposed mine site in January 2021. In June 2022, a protester from France wrote on social media, “We’ll need all the AR15s We can get on the frontlines!” Tensions peaked in June 2023, when several protesters entered the worksite and blocked bulldozers, leading to one arrest.

That group — which calls itself Protect Thacker Pass — argued that its actions were justified. Will Falk, one of the group’s organizers, said that, in any confrontation, scrutiny unfairly falls on protesters instead of companies or the government. “As a culture, we’ve become so used to militarized police that we don’t understand that, out of the group of people gathered, the people who are actually violent are the ones with the guns,” he said.

Falk and another organizer were, as a result of their participation in protests, barred by court order from returning to Thacker Pass and disrupting construction, and the Bureau of Land Management fined them for alleged trespass on public lands during the protest. The agency charged them $49,877.71 for officers’ time and mileage to monitor them, according to agency records Falk shared with ProPublica. Falk said his group tried to work with the agency to obtain permits and is disputing the fine to a federal board of appeals.

“None of us are armed. We’re not there for an uprising,” said Gary McKinney, a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain, which parted ways with Falk’s group before the incident that led to an arrest.

McKinney, a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, leads annual prayer rides, journeying hundreds of miles across northern Nevada on horseback with other Native American activists to Thacker Pass. He described the rides, intended to raise awareness of mining’s impact on tribes and the environment, as a way to exercise rights under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects tribes’ ability to practice traditional spirituality. Still, the group feels watched. A trail camera once mysteriously appeared near their campsite along the path of the prayer ride. They also crossed paths with security personnel.

Beyond the trail rides, the FBI tracks McKinney’s activity, the records show. The agency informed other law enforcement when he promoted a Fourth of July powwow and rodeo on his reservation, and it flagged a speech he delivered at a conference for mining-affected communities.

“We’re being watched, we’re being followed, we’re under the microscope,” McKinney said.

The records show security personnel hired by Lithium Americas speaking as if an uprising could be imminent. “To date, there has been no violence or serious property destruction, however, the activities of these protest groups could change to a more aggressive actions and violent demeanor at any time,” Raymond Mey, who joined Lithium Americas’ security team for a time after a career with the FBI, wrote to law enforcement agencies in July 2022.

Mey also researched protesters’ activities, sharing his findings with law enforcement. In an April 2021 update, for example, he provided an aerial photograph of the protesters’ campsite. Law enforcement agencies worked with Mey, and he pushed to make that relationship closer, seeking “an integrated and coordinated law enforcement strategy to deal with the protestors at Thacker Pass.” The records indicate that the FBI was open to him attending its joint terrorism task force.

Mey is not licensed with the Nevada Private Investigators Licensing Board, which is required to perform such work in the state, according to agency records.

Mey said that he didn’t believe he needed a license because he wasn’t pursuing investigations. He said that his advice to the company was to avoid direct conflict with protesters and only call the police when necessary.

The battle over Thacker Pass reflects renewed strife between mining and drilling industries and Indigenous people. Two recent fights at the heart of this clash have intersected with Thacker Pass — one concerning an oil pipeline in the Great Plains and the other over a copper mine in the Southwest.

Beginning in 2016 and continuing for nearly a year, a large protest camp on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation sought to halt construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Members of the Indigenous-led movement contended that it threatened the region’s water. The protest turned violent, leading to hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement eventually cleared the camp and the pipeline was completed.

Law enforcement agencies feared similar opposition at Thacker Pass, the records show.

In April 2021, Allen, then the local sheriff, and his staff met with Mark Pfeifle, president and CEO of the communications firm Off the Record Strategies, to discuss “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Pfeifle, who helped the Bush administration build support for the second Gulf War, had more recently led a public relations blitz to discredit the Standing Rock protesters. This involved suggesting using a fake news crew and mocking up wanted posters for activists, according to emails obtained by news organizations. Pfeifle sent Allen presentations about the law enforcement response at Standing Rock, including one on “Examples of ‘Fake News’ and disinformation” from the protesters. “As always, we stand ready to help your office and your citizens,” he wrote to the sheriff.

The department appears not to have hired Pfeifle, although Allen directed his staff to also meet with Pfeifle’s colleague who worked on the Standing Rock response.

Around July 2021, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office held a meeting “to plan for the reality of a large-scale incident at Thacker Pass” similar to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Police referred to the ongoing protests on public land at Thacker Pass as an “occupation.”

Allen said he didn’t remember meeting with Pfeifle but said he wanted to be prepared for anything. “We didn’t know what to expect, but from what we understand, there were professional protestors up there and more were coming in,” he said.

Pfeifle didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Members of People of Red Mountain have also traveled to Arizona to object to the development of a controversial copper mine that’s planned in a national forest east of Phoenix. There, some members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe oppose the development because it would destroy an area they use for ceremonies. (In May, the Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing a land transfer, removing the final key obstacle to the mine.)

On these trips, Callao and others have frequently found a “notice of baggage inspection” from the Transportation Security Administration in their checked luggage. She provided ProPublica with photos of five such notices.

An agency spokesperson said that screening equipment does not know to whom the bag belongs when it triggers an alarm, and officers must search it.

To Callao, the surveillance, whether by luggage inspection, security camera or counterterrorism task force, adds to the weight placed on Indigenous communities amid the energy transition.

“We shouldn’t have to accept the burden of the climate crisis,” Callao said, “We should be able to protect our ancestral homelands.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Mark Olalde.

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Despite the Trump administration’s public pronouncements that it has hired enough wildland firefighters, documents obtained by ProPublica show a high vacancy rate, as well as internal concern among top officials as more than 1 million acres burn across 10 states.

Less than a month ago, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration had done a historically good job preparing the nation for the summer fire season. “We are on track to meet and potentially exceed our firefighting hiring goals,” said Rollins, during an address to Western governors. Rollins oversees the wildland firefighting workforce at the U.S. Forest Service, a subagency of the Department of Agriculture. Rollins had noted in her remarks that the administration had exempted firefighters from a federal hiring freeze, and she claimed that the administration was outdoing its predecessor: “We have reached 96% of our hiring goal, far outpacing the rate of hiring and onboarding over the past three years and in the previous administration.”

Since then, the Forest Service’s assertions have gotten even more optimistic: The agency now claims it has reached 99% of its firefighting hiring goal.

But according to internal data obtained by ProPublica, Rollins’ characterization is dangerously misleading. She omitted a wave of resignations from the agency this spring and that many senior management positions remain vacant. Layoffs by the Department of Government Efficiency, voluntary deferred resignations and early retirements have severely hampered the wildland firefighting force. According to the internal national data, which has not been previously reported, more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs — as many as 27% — remained vacant as of July 17. A Forest Service employee who is familiar with the data said it comes from administrators who input staffing information into a computer tool used to create organization charts. The employee said that while the data could contain inaccuracies in certain forests, it broadly reflects the agency’s desired staffing levels. The employee said the data showing “active” unfilled positions was “current and up-to-date for last week.”

The Department of Agriculture disputes that assessment, but the figures are supported by anecdotal accounts from wildland firefighters in New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, California and Wyoming. According to a recent survey by Forest Service fire managers in California, 26% of engine captain positions and 42% of engineer positions were vacant. A veteran Forest Service firefighter in California characterized the Trump administration’s current estimate of the size of its firefighting workforce as “grossly inaccurate.”

Last week, Tom Schultz, the chief of the Forest Service, circulated a letter to high-ranking officials in the agency that underscored the dire moment. “As expected, the 2025 Fire Year is proving to be extremely challenging,” wrote Schultz in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability.” Schultz at once directed staff to employ full suppression — stomping out fires as quickly as possible, instead of letting them burn for the sake of landscape management — and acknowledged that the resources necessary to pursue such an aggressive strategy were lacking. All options were on the table, he wrote, including directing human-resources employees to fight fires and asking recently departed employees with firefighting qualifications to return to work.

When asked about the discrepancy between Schultz’s memo and Rollins’ public statements on firefighting staffing at the Forest Service, an agency spokesperson said that Schultz was referring to employees who can be called on to bolster the agency’s response “as fire activity increases,” while Rollins was pointing only to full-time firefighters. “The Forest Service remains fully equipped and operationally ready to protect people and communities from wildfire,” the spokesperson said, noting that “many individuals that have separated from the Agency either through retirements or voluntary resignations still possess active wildland fire qualifications and are making themselves available to support fire response operations.”

The federal government employs thousands of wildland firefighters, but the precise number is opaque. Throughout the Department of the Interior, which is overseen by Secretary Doug Burgum, there are about 5,800 wildland firefighters in four agencies that have been impacted by cuts. An employee at a national park in Colorado that is threatened by wildfire said that they were “severely understaffed during the Biden administration on most fronts, and now it’s so much worse than it’s ever been.”

But the Forest Service is by far the largest employer of wildland firefighters, and it has long used gymnastic arithmetic to paint an optimistic picture of its staffing. Last summer, ProPublica reported that the Forest Service under President Joe Biden had overstated its capacity. Robert Kuhn, a former Forest Service official who between 2009 and 2011 co-authored an assessment of the agency’s personnel needs, recently said that the practice of selectively counting firefighters dates back years. “What the public needs to understand is, that is just a very small number of what is needed every summer,” he said. Riva Duncan, a retired Forest Service fire chief and the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a labor advocacy organization, said staffing is a constant frustration for managers on the ground. “We have engines that are completely unstaffed,” said Duncan, who remains active in wildland firefighting, having worked in temporary roles this summer. “We have vacant positions in management.”

That said, there is a difference this fire season from years past. Officials in the previous administration publicly acknowledged the danger presented by an exodus of experienced wildland firefighters. The Trump administration has taken a different approach — claiming to have solved the problem while simultaneously exacerbating it. When asked about the staffing cuts, Anna Kelly, a White House deputy press secretary, wrote, “President Trump is proud of all Secretary Rollins has accomplished to improve forest management, including by ending the 2001 Roadless Rule for stronger fire prevention, and Secretary Burgum’s great work protecting our nation’s treasured public lands.”

In March, Congress finally codified a permanent raise for federal wildland firefighters via the appropriations process, a change that advocates have sought for years. In her remarks in June, Rollins credited the president: “Out of gratitude for the selfless service of our Forest Service firefighters, President Trump permanently increased the pay for our federal wildland firefighters.”

But in February, the Trump administration laid off about 700 employees who support wildland fire operations, from human-resource managers to ecologists and trail-crew workers. Those employees possess what are known as red cards — certifications that allow them to work on fire crews. Many were subsequently rehired, but the administration then pushed Forest Service employees to accept deferred resignations and early retirements.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to combine their firefighting forces. For the moment, it’s unknown what form that restructuring will take, but many Forest Service firefighters are anticipating further staffing cuts. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior wrote, “We are taking steps to unify federal wildfire programs to streamline bureaucracy.”

Administration officials have maintained that employees primarily assigned to wildland fire were exempted from the resignation offers this spring. But according to another internal data set obtained by ProPublica, of the more than 4,000 Forest Service employees who accepted deferred resignations and early retirements, approximately 1,600 had red cards. (A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture wrote that the actual number was 1,400, adding that 85 of them “have decided to return for the season.”)

Even those figures don’t account for all the lost institutional knowledge. The departures included meteorologists who provided long-range forecasts, allowing fire managers to decide where to deploy crews. One of the meteorologists who left was Charles Maxwell, who had for more than 20 years interpreted weather models predicting summer monsoons at the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an interagency office. The thunderstorms can fuel wildfire, with lightning and wind, and extinguish them, with great rains. Lately, according to Maxwell, the monsoons have become less and less reliable, and understanding their nuances can be challenging. Maxwell said that he’d already been planning to retire next year. But he also said he “was concerned with the degree of chaos, the potential degradation of services and what would happen to my job.”

Maxwell noted that his work had been covered by knowledgeable fill-ins from out of state. But another firefighter who worked on blazes in New Mexico said that Maxwell’s understanding of the monsoon had been missed. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees the interagency office where Maxwell worked, wrote, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”

The monsoon season is now here and has brought deadly flash flooding along old burn scars in Ruidoso, New Mexico, while distributing sporadic rain in the state’s Gila National Forest.

It is shaping up to be a severe fire season. On Monday, federal firefighters reported 86 new fires across the West; by Tuesday, there were 105 more. And there’s already been some criticism of the federal response. Arizona’s governor and members of Congress have called for an investigation into the Park Service’s handling of a blaze this month that leveled a historic lodge on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Last month, Rollins acknowledged, “Fires don’t know Republican or Democrat, or which side of the aisle you are on.” This much, at least, is true.

Ellis Simani contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Abe Streep.

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The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought.

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites — known as spaceports — along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

The White House did not answer questions about the draft order.

“The Trump administration is committed to cementing America’s dominance in space without compromising public safety or national security,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “Unless announced by President Trump, however, discussion about any potential policy changes should be deemed speculation.”

The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.

The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.

The draft order comes as SpaceX is ramping up its ambitious project to build a reusable deep-space rocket to carry people to Earth’s orbit, the moon and eventually Mars. The rocket, called Starship, is the largest, most powerful ever built, standing 403 feet tall with its booster. The company has hit some milestones but has also been beset by problems, as three of the rockets launched from Texas this year have exploded — disrupting air traffic and raining debris on beaches and roads in the Caribbean and Gulf waters.

The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.

Derek Brockbank, executive director for the Coastal States Organization, said the proposed executive order could ultimately force state commissions to prioritize spaceport infrastructure over other land uses, such as renewable energy, waterfront development or coastal restoration, along the coastline. His nonprofit represents 34 coastal states and territories.

“It’s concerning that it could potentially undermine the rights of a state to determine how it wants its coast used, which was the very fundamental premise of the congressionally authorized Coastal Zone Management Act,” he said. “We shouldn’t see any president, no matter what their party is, coming in and saying, ‘This is what a state should prioritize or should do.’”

SpaceX is already suing the California Coastal Commission, accusing the agency of political bias and interference with the company’s efforts to increase the number of Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The reusable Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, ferrying satellites to orbit and astronauts to the International Space Station.

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the U.S. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the U.S. is racing with China to return to the moon — in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars — and could lose if regulations don’t allow U.S. companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

Cavossa said he sees “some sort of environmental review process” continuing to take place. “What we’re talking about doing is right-sizing it,” he said.

He added, “We can’t handle a yearlong delay for launch licenses.”

The former head of the FAA’s commercial space office said at a Congressional hearing last September that the office took an average of 151 days to issue a new license during the previous 11 years.

Commercial space launches have boomed in recent years — from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year. With more than 500 total launches, mostly from Texas, Florida and California, SpaceX has been responsible for the lion’s share, according to FAA data.

But the company has tangled with the FAA, which last year proposed fining it $633,000 for violations related to two of its launches. The FAA did not answer a question last week about the status of the proposed fine.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

In addition to seeking to cut short environmental reviews, the executive order would open the door for the federal government to rescind sections of the federal rule that seeks to keep the public safe during launches and reentries.

The rule, referred to as Part 450, was approved during Trump’s first term and aimed to streamline commercial space regulations and speed approvals of launches. But the rule soon fell out of favor with launch companies, which said the FAA didn’t provide enough guidance on how to comply and was taking too long to review applications.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” He called for the resignation of the head of the FAA, who stepped down as Trump took office.

Other operators have expressed similar frustration, and some members of Congress have signaled support for an overhaul. In February, Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., signed a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to review the process for approving commercial launches and reentries.

In their letter, Babin and Lofgren wrote they wanted to understand whether the rules are “effectively and efficiently accommodating United States commercial launch and reentry operations, especially as the cadence and technological diversity of such operations continues to increase.

The draft executive order directs the secretary of transportation to “reevaluate, amend, or rescind” sections of Part 450 to “enable a diversified set of operators to achieve an increase in commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by an order of magnitude by 2030.”

The order also directs the Department of Commerce to streamline regulation of novel space activity, which experts say could include things like mining or making repairs in space, that doesn’t fall under other regulations.

Brandon Roberts and Pratheek Rebala contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Heather Vogell and Topher Sanders.

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.

Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.

Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.

In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.

Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.

But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.

Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.

Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.

Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.

Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.

Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.

Over the years, legislators have declined to pass at least three bills that would create siren or alert systems, tools experts say can be especially helpful in rural communities that lack reliable internet and cell service. A 2019 state-commissioned report estimated flood prevention needs at over $30 billion. Since then, lawmakers have allocated just $1.4 billion. And they ignored the key recommendations from the state’s 2024 flood plan that are meant to help rural areas like Kerr County, which is dubbed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its geography.

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, did not answer questions about why the plan’s recommendations were overlooked but defended the Legislature’s investment in flood mitigation as significant. They pointed to millions more spent on other prevention efforts, including flood control dam construction and maintenance, regional flood projects, and increased floodplain disclosures and drainage requirements for border counties. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to questions.

This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”

But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.

“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we've continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”

One recommendation from the 2024 flood plan would have cost the state nothing to enact. It called for granting counties the authority to levy drainage fees, including in unincorporated areas, that could fund local flood projects. Only about 150 of 1,450 Texas cities and counties have dedicated drainage fees, according to a study cited in the state assessment.

Kerr, a conservative county of 53,000 people, has struggled to gain support for projects that would raise taxes. About a week after the flooding, some residents protested when county commissioners discussed a property tax increase to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

The inability to raise such fees is one of the biggest impediments for local governments seeking to fund flood mitigation projects, said Robert R. Puente, a Democrat and former state representative who once chaired the state committee responsible for water issues. Lawmakers’ resistance to such efforts is rooted in fiscal conservatism, said Puente, who now heads the San Antonio Water System.

“It’s mostly because of a philosophy that the leadership in Austin has right now, that under no circumstances are we going to raise taxes, and under most circumstances we’re not even going to allow local governments to have control over how they raise taxes or implement fees,” he said.

Another one of the flood plan’s recommendations called for lawmakers to allocate money for a technical assistance program to help underresourced and rural governments better manage flood prone areas, which requires implementing a slew of standards to ensure safe development in those hazardous zones. Doing this work requires local officials to collect accurate mapping that shows the risk of flooding. Passing this measure could have helped counties like Kerr with that kind of data collection, which the plan recognized is especially challenging for rural and economically disadvantaged communities.

Insufficient information impacts Texas’s ability to fully understand flood risks statewide. The water board’s plan, for example, includes roughly 600 infrastructure projects across Texas in need of completion. But its report acknowledged that antiquated or missing data meant another 3,100 assessments would be required to know whether additional projects are needed.

In the Guadalupe River region, which includes Kerr County, 65% of areas lacked adequate flood mapping. Kerrville, the county seat, was listed among the areas identified as having the “greatest known flood risks and mitigation needs.” Yet of the 19 flood needs specific to the city and county, only three were included in the state plan’s list of 600. They included requests to install backup generators in critical facilities and repair low-water crossings, which are shallow points in streets where rainwater can pool to dangerous levels.

At least 16 other priorities, including the county’s desire for an early warning flood system and potential dam or drainage system repairs, required a follow-up evaluation, according to the state plan. County officials tried to obtain grants for the early warning systems for years, to no avail.

Gonzales County, an agriculture-rich area of 20,000 people along the Guadalupe River, is among the rural communities struggling to obtain funding, said emergency management director Jimmy Harless, who is also the county’s fire marshal. The county is in desperate need of a siren system and additional gauges to measure the river’s potentially dangerous flood levels, Harless said, but doesn’t have the resources, personnel or expertise to apply for the “burdensome” state grant process.

“It is extremely frustrating for me to know that there’s money there and there’s people that care, but our state agency has become so bureaucratic that it’s just not feasible for us,” Harless said. “Our folks’ lives are more important than what some bureaucrat wants us to do.”

For years, Texas leaders have focused more on cleaning up after disasters than on preparing for them, said Jim Blackburn, a professor at Rice University specializing in environmental law and flooding issues.

“It’s no secret that the Guadalupe is prone to flash flooding. That’s been known for decades,” Blackburn said. “The state has been very negligent about kind of preparing us for, frankly, the worst storms of the future that we are seeing today because of climate change, and what’s changing is that the risks are just greater today and will be even greater tomorrow, because our storms are getting worse and worse.”

At a news conference this month, Abbott said state committees would investigate “ways to address this,” though he declined to offer specifics. When pressed by a reporter about where the blame for the lack of preparedness should fall, Abbott responded that it was “the word choice of losers.”

It shouldn’t have taken the Hill Country flooding for a special session addressing emergency systems and funding needs, said Usman Mahmood, a policy analyst at Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for flood protection measures.

“The worst part pretty much already happened, which is the flooding and the loss of life,” he said. “Now it’s a reaction to that.”

Misty Harris contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

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Microsoft says it has stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems after ProPublica revealed the practice in an investigation this week.

“In response to concerns raised earlier this week about US-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for US Government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services,” the company’s chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, announced on X Friday afternoon.

Microsoft’s announcement came hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said his agency would look into Microsoft’s use of foreign-based engineers to help maintain the highly sensitive cloud systems.

“Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X Friday.

In its investigation, ProPublica detailed how Microsoft uses engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking or spying from its leading cyber adversary. The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police the work of foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found.

Earlier Friday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, cited ProPublica in a letter to Hegseth asking for details about which DOD contractors use Chinese personnel to maintain the department’s information and computing systems.

China poses “one of the most aggressive and dangerous threats to the United States, as evidenced by its infiltrations of our critical infrastructure, telecommunications networks and supply chains,” Cotton wrote in the letter, which he posted on X. “DOD must guard against all potential threats within its supply chain, including those from subcontractors.”

Since 2011, cloud computing companies like Microsoft that wanted to sell their services to the U.S. government had to establish how they would ensure that personnel working with federal data would have the requisite “access authorizations” and background screenings. Additionally, the Defense Department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

This presented an issue for Microsoft, which relies on a vast global workforce with significant operations in India, China and the European Union.

So the tech giant enlisted staffing companies to hire U.S.-based digital escorts, who had security clearances that authorized them to access sensitive information, to take direction from the overseas experts. An engineer might briefly describe the job to be completed — for instance, updating a firewall, installing an update to fix a bug or reviewing logs to troubleshoot a problem. Then, with little review, an escort would copy and paste the engineer’s commands into the federal cloud.

“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” one escort told ProPublica.

In an earlier statement in response to ProPublica’s investigation, Microsoft said that its personnel and contractors operate in a manner “consistent with US Government requirements and processes.”

The company’s global workers “have no direct access to customer data or customer systems,” the statement said. Escorts “with the appropriate clearances and training provide direct support. These personnel are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data, preventing harm, and use of the specific commands/controls within the environment.”

In addition, Microsoft said it has an internal review process known as “Lockbox” to “make sure the request is deemed safe or has any cause for concern.”

Insight Global — a contractor that provides digital escorts to Microsoft — said it “evaluates the technical capabilities of each resource throughout the interview process to ensure they possess the technical skills required” for the job and provides training.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley.

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is preparing to shut down seven major investigations and cases concerning alleged housing discrimination and segregation, including some where the agency already found civil rights violations, according to HUD records obtained by ProPublica.

The high-profile cases involve allegations that state and local governments across the South and Midwest illegally discriminated against people of color by placing industrial plants or low-income housing in their neighborhoods, and by steering similar facilities away from white neighborhoods, among other allegations. HUD has been pursuing these cases — which range from instances where the agency has issued a formal charge of discrimination to newer investigations — for as many as seven years. In three of them, HUD officials had determined that the defendants had violated the Fair Housing Act or related civil rights laws. A HUD staffer familiar with the other four investigations believes civil rights violations occurred in each, the official told ProPublica. Under President Donald Trump, the agency now plans to abruptly end all of them, regardless of prior findings of wrongdoing.

Four HUD officials said they could recall no precedent for the plan, which they said signals an acceleration of the administration’s retreat from fair housing enforcement. “No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” one of the officials said. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.”

In the short term, closing the cases would allow the local governments in question to continue allegedly mistreating minority communities, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. In the long term, they said, it could embolden local politicians and developers elsewhere to take actions that entrench segregation, without fear of punishment from the federal government.

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett declined to answer questions, saying “HUD does not comment on active Fair Housing matters or individual personnel.”

Three of the cases involve accusations that local governments clustered polluting industrial facilities in minority neighborhoods.

One concerned a protracted dispute over a scrap metal shredding plant in Chicago. The facility had operated for years in the largely white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But residents complained ceaselessly of the fumes, debris, noise and, occasionally, smoke emanating from the plant. So the city allegedly pressured the recycling company to close the old facility and open a new one in a minority neighborhood in southeast Chicago. In 2022, HUD found that “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.” Chicago’s mayor called allegations of discrimination “preposterous,” then settled the case and agreed to reforms in 2023. (The new plant has not opened; its owner has sued the city.)

In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint. The township did not respond to a ProPublica inquiry about the case.

Still another case involved a plan pushed by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to build a water desalination plant in a historically Black neighborhood already fringed by oil refineries and other industrial facilities. (Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area are disproportionately high, and average life expectancy is 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city, researchers found.) The city denied the allegations. Construction of the plant is expected to conclude in 2028.

Three other cases involve allegations of discrimination in municipal land use decisions. In Memphis, Tennessee, the city and its utility allegedly coerced residents of a poor Black neighborhood to sell their homes so that it could build a new facility there. In Cincinnati, the city has allegedly concentrated low-income housing in poor Black neighborhoods and kept it out of white neighborhoods. And in Chicago, the city has given local politicians veto power over development proposals in their districts, resulting in little new affordable housing in white neighborhoods. (Memphis, its utility and Chicago have disputed the allegations; Cincinnati declined to comment on them.)

The last case involved a Texas state agency allegedly diverting $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and other communities of color hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and toward more rural, white communities less damaged by the storm. The agency has disputed the allegations.

All of the investigations and cases are now slated to be closed. HUD is also planning to stop enforcing the settlement it reached in the Chicago recycling case, the records show.

The move to drop the cases is being directed by Brian Hawkins, a recent Trump administration hire at HUD who serves as a senior adviser in the Fair Housing Office, two agency officials said. Hawkins has no law degree or prior experience in housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. But this month, he circulated a list within HUD of the seven cases that indicated the agency’s plans for them. In the cases that involve Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Flint and Houston, the agency would “find no cause on [the] merits,” the list reads. In the two Chicago cases and the one involving Memphis, HUD would rescind letters documenting the agency’s prior findings. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment.

The list does not offer a legal justification for dropping the cases. But Hawkins also circulated a memo that indicates the reasoning behind dropping one — the Chicago recycling case. The memo cites an executive order issued by Trump in April eliminating federal enforcement of “disparate-impact liability,” the doctrine that seemingly neutral policies or practices could have a discriminatory effect. Hawkins’ memo stated that “the Department will not interpret environmental impacts as violations of fair housing law absent a showing of intentional discrimination.” Four HUD officials said such a position would be a stark departure from prior department policy and relevant case law.

The reversal on the Chicago recycling case also follows behind-the-scenes pressure on HUD from Sen. Jim Banks. In June, Banks, a Republican from Indiana, wrote a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in which he criticized the administration of President Joe Biden’s handling of the case as “brazen overreach.” Noting that the Chicago plant would supply metal to Indiana steel mills, Banks asked the Trump appointees to “take any actions you deem necessary to remedy the situation.” Banks did not respond to a request for comment.

That case and others among the seven had also received scrutiny from other federal and state agencies, including the EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice. The EPA declined to say whether it was still pursuing any of the cases. The DOJ did not respond to the same inquiry.

The case closures at HUD would be the latest stage in a broad rollback of fair housing enforcement under the Trump administration, which ProPublica reported on previously. That rollback has continued in other ways as well. The agency recently initiated a plan to transfer more than half of its fair housing attorneys in the office of general counsel into unrelated roles, compounding prior staff losses since the beginning of the year, four HUD officials told ProPublica.

The officials fear long-lasting ramifications from the changes. “Fair housing laws shape our cities, shape where housing gets built, where pollution occurs, where disaster money goes,” one official said. “Without them, we have a different country.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

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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, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.

On Feb. 15, José Manuel Ramos Bastidas called his wife from inside a Texas immigration detention facility.

He asked her to record a message so there would be some lasting evidence of his story.

“They detained me simply because of my tattoos. I am not a criminal.”

The Trump administration had sent dozens of Venezuelan immigrants to Guantanamo. He was afraid the same would happen to him.

“Just in case something happens to me, so you can be aware.”

Uncertain about his fate, Ramos wanted to make sure there was a record of what happened to him.

A month later, he was gone.

Ramos never set foot in the U.S. — at least not as a free man. He left Venezuela in January 2024, hoping to earn enough money to pay for his newborn son’s medical needs. Born with a respiratory condition, the family’s “milagrito,” or “little miracle,” had severe asthma and repeatedly needed to be hospitalized. The cost of treatment had become impossible to manage on the meager wages Ramos made washing cars in Venezuela’s collapsed economy, so he trekked thousands of miles through a half dozen countries to reach the U.S. border.

When Ramos arrived, he didn’t sneak into the country. He followed the rules established by the Biden administration for immigrants seeking asylum. He signed up for an appointment through a government app and, when he was granted one, turned himself in to request protection. An immigration official and a judge determined he didn’t qualify, and Ramos didn’t fight the decision.

The government kept him in detention until he could be deported back to Venezuela.

In the months that followed, Donald Trump was elected president for a second term and began his mass deportation campaign. Among his first actions was to fly groups of Venezuelan immigrants whom he had labeled dangerous gang members to a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ramos, 30, panicked and called his wife to say he was worried that the same was going to happen to him. On a video call his wife recorded, he held up a document he said was proof that immigration authorities had agreed to deport him to Venezuela. But he worried that they would not honor that promise.

“I have a family,” he said, staring directly into the camera. “I am simply a hard-working Venezuelan. I haven’t committed any crimes. I don’t have a criminal record in my country nor anywhere else.”

A month later, a more upbeat Ramos called again. He seemed confident that U.S. officials would send him home. Ramos’ family started preparing for his return. They planned to bake him a cake, cook his favorite chicken dish and go to church together to thank God for bringing him home safely.

They never heard from him again.

On March 15, a day after that call, Ramos and more than 230 other Venezuelan men were sent to the CECOT maximum-security prison in El Salvador, one of the most notorious in the Western Hemisphere. Without publicly providing evidence, the administration accused each of them of being members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang it designated a terrorist organization.

In the months since the mass deportation — one of the most consequential in recent history — the Trump administration has released almost no details about the backgrounds of the people it deported, calling them “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” Several news organizations have reported that most of the men did not have criminal records. ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) went further, finding that the government’s own records showed that it knew the vast majority of the men had not been convicted of violent crimes in the U.S. We also searched records in South America and found that only a few had committed violent crimes abroad.

Now, a case-by-case examination of each of the deportees, along with interviews with their lawyers and family members, reveals another jarring reality: Most of the men were not hiding from federal authorities but were instead moving through the nation’s immigration system. They were either in the middle of their cases, which normally should have protected them from deportation, or they had already been ordered deported and should have first been given the option to be sent back to a country they chose.

Like Ramos, more than 50 of the men had used the government app called CBP One to make an appointment with border officials to try to enter the country. Others had crossed illegally and then surrendered to border agents, often the first step in seeking asylum in immigration court.

According to our analysis, almost half of the men were deported even though their cases hadn’t been decided yet. More than 60 of them had pending asylum claims, including several who were only days away from a hearing where a judge could have ruled on whether they would be allowed to stay. Judges or federal officials had issued deportation orders for about 100 of the men, and a handful had even agreed to pay their own way home. Others, like Ramos, had spent their entire time in the U.S. in detention. They had no opportunity to commit crimes in the U.S.

Meanwhile, many of those who were allowed into the country had been appearing at their court hearings and immigration check-ins. At least nine had been granted temporary protected status, which gives people from countries affected by disasters or other extraordinary conditions permission to live and work in the U.S.

By and large, these were men who had been playing by the rules of the country’s immigration system.

Then, the Trump administration changed the rules.

A day before the administration deported the men to El Salvador, Trump invoked an obscure 18th-century law called the Alien Enemies Act and declared that Tren de Aragua was invading the country. Administration officials argued that the declaration authorized them to take extraordinary measures to remove anyone it had determined was a member of the gang and to make sure they would not threaten the U.S. again.

Following the March 15 deportations, the Trump administration moved to shut down their pending immigration cases. Since then, more than 95 cases have been dismissed, terminated or otherwise closed by judges, according to our analysis. They disappear from the dockets, some marked as dismissed just hours before a scheduled hearing.

Michelle Brané, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the Biden administration, said it was “very un-American” to deport people who followed the immigration rules at the time. “You can’t retroactively say that those people were acting illegally and now punish them for that,” she added.

Lawyers for the Venezuelan men have filed several lawsuits against the administration, calling the summary removals from the country a gross violation of their clients’ rights. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled in June that the move deprived the men of their constitutional rights and called their plight Kafkaesque. He wrote that the men “never had any opportunity to challenge the Government’s say-so,” and that they “languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

The government has appealed the ruling.

Meanwhile, Ramos’ mother, Crisálida del Carmen Bastidas de Ramos, waits anxiously for any news about her oldest child. “What is my son thinking? Is my son eating well? Is my son sleeping? Is he cold?”

“Is he alive?”

Although the Trump administration routinely describes the men as criminals and terrorists, it has not provided evidence to support the claim. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at DHS, defended sending them to the Salvadoran prison. “They may not have criminal records in the U.S., beyond breaking our laws to enter the country illegally,” she said in a statement, “but many of these illegal aliens are far from innocent.”

For example, she said one of the TPS holders sent to El Salvador admitted he had previously been convicted of murder. We obtained Venezuelan court records confirming that the man had been convicted of murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. McLaughlin said his case proved that immigrants had been granted status in the U.S. under Biden without being thoroughly vetted. Three former DHS officials from the Biden administration said the vetting process has remained standard across administrations, including during the first Trump term, and that many governments do not share criminal background histories with U.S. officials.

Trump has moved to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of people.

Ramos, McLaughlin said, was a terrorist who was flagged as a Tren de Aragua member in a law enforcement database at his CBP One appointment. His family denies he has anything to do with the gang. His lawyers said in court records that U.S. authorities wrongly identified him as a gang member based on his tattoos and an “unsubstantiated” report from Panamanian officials. A spokesperson for the Panamanian security ministry said he could not locate any documents about Ramos.

At least 163 men who were deported had tattoos, we found. Law enforcement officials in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

Days before Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra was whisked away, he appeared in immigration court and tried to convince a judge that his tattoos did not mean he was part of the gang.

He had come to the U.S. with a brother in 2023, applied for asylum and settled in Chicago. He told his mother that it was difficult to find work, but that he’d gotten an electric razor, learned to cut hair and offered trims on the street. In January 2024, he was arrested at a Walmart in the Chicago suburbs for shoplifting about $1,000 worth of food, laundry detergent, shampoo and other items. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, served a two-day jail sentence and tried to move on.

Rodríguez Parra, 28, got a job working in concessions at Wrigley Field, moved in with his girlfriend and sent money home to his mother to buy a refrigerator and a stove. Then, in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents picked him up at his apartment. McLaughlin said he was in the country illegally and was a Tren de Aragua member. Rodríguez Parra continued his asylum case from immigration detention in Indiana.

He told his family he believed he would be released soon. But in early March, he was transferred to a jail in Missouri, then to one in Central Texas, then another in Laredo, in South Texas, each move bringing him closer to the border. Uncertainty began creeping into his calls home.

Despite the transfers, Rodríguez Parra’s attorney, Cruz Rodriguez, who works for a small immigration unit at the Cook County public defender’s office in Chicago, said he was confident in the merits of the asylum case. He felt optimistic when he logged into his client’s virtual bond hearing before Judge Eva Saltzman on March 10.

At the hearing, a government attorney asked Rodríguez Parra about a TikTok video he’d made of himself dancing to a popular audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you.” Close to 60,000 users on TikTok have shared the clip.

Rodríguez Parra scoffed at the notion that a real gang member would make such a video. “It would be like they were outing themselves,” he said in Spanish. The audio clip has been used by Venezuelans to ridicule the widespread suggestion that everyone from the country is a gangster.

The government attorney also asked Rodríguez Parra about the tattoos that covered his neck, arms and chest — a rose, a wolf, carnival masks and an angel holding a gun. “In my country, it’s very normal to have tattoos,” he responded. “Each one represents a story about my life.”

He was also questioned about a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member who had crossed the border at the same time as him. Rodríguez Parra said he did not know the man.

At the end of the hearing, he pleaded with the judge to free him on bond. “I’m a good person,” he told her. “If I was in a gang, I wouldn’t have applied for asylum. I came fleeing my country.”

Saltzman denied Rodríguez Parra’s request, citing his shoplifting conviction. But she offered him a sliver of hope, reminding him that his final hearing was just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be released and could continue his life in the U.S.

“You’re not facing a particularly lengthy detention without a bond,” she told him.

Five days later, he was gone. At what was supposed to be his final asylum hearing on March 20, Rodríguez Parra’s lawyer sounded despondent. He had barely slept. He didn’t know where the authorities had taken his client, but he’d seen a video posted online of shackled men being frog-marched into CECOT. The attorney had visited El Salvador and was aware of that country’s reputation for mistreating prisoners. He feared his client would face a similar fate.

He felt powerless. At the hearing, he turned to the government lawyer on the call. “For his family’s sake,” he told her, “would you happen to know what country he was sent to?”

The government’s lawyer had little to say.

“I’m operating under the same information as you,” she responded. “I have no further information to provide.”

Design and development by Anna Donlan and Allen Tan of ProPublica. Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data reporting. Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research. Adriana Núnez and Carlos Centeno contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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This article was adapted from David Epstein’s Substack newsletter, “Range Widely,” and references the story “The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene” that he wrote for ProPublica in 2016. That story also became an episode of “This American Life.”

Jill Dopf Viles — self-taught genetic detective, the central figure in the most interesting story I’ve ever reported and my friend — passed away last month in Gowrie, Iowa, at 50.

I’m heartbroken that Jill did not live to see the publication of her book — “Manufacturing My Miracle: One Woman’s Quest to Create Her Personalized Gene Therapy — which came out last week. I know how much she treasured the fact that she would soon be able to call herself “author.”

Here is a paragraph from her book:

“Every gain I’d made in learning more about my genetic disease had involved some type of deception — to do my family’s underground blood draw in 1996 required that phlebotomy supplies be lifted from a hospital and a nurse secretly visit our home; gaining journalist David Epstein’s interest began with a wild exaggeration in my email subject line: ‘Woman with muscular dystrophy, Olympic Medalist—same mutation’; and I’d adopted the lexicon of a research scientist to gain a client rate for Priscilla’s genetic testing (the cost for clients was half what was charged to individual patients).”

If I was deceived, I’m grateful for it. In that paragraph, Jill is describing just a bit of the effort that went into figuring out that she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and also an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from certain parts of the body. Jill had been told for years that she didn’t have either of these, never mind both.

After my first book, “The Sports Gene,” came out in 2013, I was on “Good Morning America” talking about genetics, and Jill happened to be within earshot of her TV. “I thought, oh, this is divine providence,” Jill later told me. So she sent me that email with the provocative subject line. She followed up by sending me a batch of family photos and a bound packet outlining her theory: that she and Canadian sprinter Priscilla Lopes-Schliep — bronze medalist in the 100-meter hurdles at the 2008 Olympics — shared a genetic mutation.

On the face of it, this seemed ridiculous. One could hardly find a picture of two more different women. Take a look at this page from the packet Jill sent me:

The packet outlined in granular detail why Jill thought, just from looking at pictures of Priscilla, that the two women shared a genetic mutation that caused the same fat wasting, but because Priscilla didn’t also have muscle wasting — quite the contrary — her body had found some way to “go around” muscular dystrophy.

If Jill was right, she thought, perhaps scientists could study both of them and figure out how to help people with muscles like Jill’s develop muscles a little closer to Priscilla’s end of the human physique spectrum. Jill was sharing all this with me because she wasn’t sure how best to contact Priscilla and hoped I would facilitate an introduction.

Jill’s hypothesis struck me as unlikely, to say the least. But her presentation in the packet was so interesting, and her knowledge of the underlying genetics and physiology so thorough, that I felt her idea deserved a hearing. I reached out to Priscilla; she agreed to meet Jill, and after comparing body parts in a hotel lobby, Jill convinced her to get a genetic test. Long story short, Jill turned out to be right. She and Priscilla had a mutation in the same gene, albeit at neighboring locations.

The discovery led Priscilla to get urgent care for a serious health condition that had previously been overlooked because of her obvious fitness. Jill and I shared this story in an episode of “This American Life” in 2016 — which was rerun last week in her honor.

After that story ran, Jill’s genome became the subject of research, exactly as she’d hoped. Today, in a lab in Iowa, there are fruit flies known as “Jill” flies, because they have been engineered to carry her same mutation. As expected, Jill flies have severely limited mobility. But just recently, a scientist conducted a genetic experiment in which she increased the production of a particular protein in the Jill flies. Suddenly, they began to move like normal fruit flies.

The breadth of life contained in Jill’s new book is incredible.

She was a child the first time she heard a doctor discussing her own death with her mother. The indignities of adolescence and young adulthood that she endured were legion, starting with spontaneous falls in school, followed by kids looping their fingers around her arms and legs and asking if her mother fed her.

Jill’s condition accelerated with puberty, so the bodily changes that are confusing for any teenager were absolutely harrowing for her. Almost overnight she lost the ability to do things she loved, like skate or ride a bike.

At one point in her early teen years, a doctor ordered pictures of Jill’s posture, which forced her into a strange and humiliating photo session that hadn’t been properly explained beforehand:

“I had seen these photos before — a stark, frozen moment of a patient’s greatest vulnerability, the body positioned in a way nature and the photographer dictate, all except for the eyes. The eyes cannot be manipulated or coaxed. It is often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Maybe that is why black bars are printed over the eyes of the patient. Perhaps this is done to protect the patient’s anonymity, but I wonder if it isn’t really done to shield the peering eyes of the medical community from the humanity before them.”

In college, when Jill rushed a sorority, she couldn’t keep up with fellow pledges as they walked across campus. When a man who had been following the group saw Jill lag behind, he crept up and exposed himself to her. “I had been targeted because I was weak,” Jill writes. “I had assumed the plight of the injured gazelle, the one separated from the herd with a lame leg. … Any normal eighteen-year-old would bolt for safety, but I remained glued in place, the shame of my predicament filling every cell of my being. I was trapped alongside a simple street curb, something I couldn’t climb, no matter my desperate need to get away.”

But even more powerful in “Manufacturing My Miracle” than the candid humiliations are the scenes of family, love and hope.

Jill’s wry humor comes through when she writes about dating. At one point she used a Match.com profile to come up with the estimate that at least 1% of men are open to dating a woman with a disability. In typical Jill fashion, rather than lamenting the other 99%, she was thrilled that this meant that if she got her profile in front of enough men, she could have a new date every week of the year.

Jill eventually met Jeremy, the man she would marry. She writes about aspects of their relationship with such tenderness that I frequently paused after a passage just to sit and think about her words for a few moments. “I recalled our first weeks of dating when Jeremy made a heartfelt observation,” Jill writes. “Previously, as a single man, he often went an entire weekend without saying even one word aloud. It was such a contrast to the way I lived my life. I was known to strike up a conversation with the caller of a misdialed number, banter with strangers in a bookstore, or chat freely with the checkout clerk at the grocery store.”

In their second month of dating, Jill and Jeremy attended the gigantic Iowa State Fair. Here’s how Jill remembered it:

“I lived ten years in a single night, clutching carnival booty tightly to my chest as Jeremy walked up and down the rows of carnival games, taking entirely too long to decide which to go for. ‘What’s taking you so long?’ I asked.

‘I’m trying to find one you can play,’ he said.

My eyes filled with tears.”

After our “This American Life” segment came out in 2016, Jill became a bit of a celebrity among people struggling to figure out their own mysterious illnesses.

She developed into a sort of clearinghouse for people with undiagnosed muscle conditions seeking help. She kept in constant touch with a man in rural Pakistan who sent her a video of his struggle to rise from his knees following daily prayers at a local mosque. She navigated immense cultural and logistical barriers to help him get a genetic test. “She was a worldwide person,” her mother, Mary, told me recently, “just out of her little office in Gowrie, Iowa.”

Jill became so fluent in genetics that she was perceived as a scientist when she called labs, lab supply companies or pharmaceutical companies. Toward the end of her life, that fluency allowed her to obtain an experimental gene therapy that isn’t actually available for nonresearch purposes. She knew the drug was both promising and potentially deadly, and with a loving husband and college student son in mind, she was hesitant. “I no longer had a fear of death,” Jill writes in her book, “but this did not imply that I wanted to die. My wish was the opposite, but without a life partner and a child, I wouldn’t need to consider anyone’s viewpoint but my own.”

As always, she did consider others, and at the time of her death she had not gone through with this final experiment.

In April, Jill and Jeremy drove to Chicago to attend a wedding. Mary shared photos with me, and it’s the same Jill I began talking to in 2013: dressed impeccably, every strand of blond hair in its right place. She took great care and pride in her appearance. Looking at the pictures, it is extremely hard to imagine that Jill was less than two months away from dying.

Her brother Aaron, afflicted with the same condition, had passed away in 2019. Four of the five siblings inherited the mutation, though the disease severity differed — likely moderated by other parts of the genome. In “Manufacturing My Miracle,” Jill writes of the difficult decision regarding whether or not to have a child, given the 50-50 chance of passing down her mutation. Her son, Martin, did not inherit the mutation.

Shortly before the “This American Life” episode ran, Jill got nervous and wondered if we should hit pause on it. She worried that listeners would only focus on her decision to have a child and criticize her for being selfish. We talked for hours about the potential outcomes. Jill and I had been in touch for three years by that time, and we were going to stick together as friends no matter what criticism came. She decided we should forge ahead. Fortunately, the response was the most overwhelmingly positive of any story I’ve ever been involved with.

Jill and I met up in Chicago after that so I could watch her give an invited lecture. We kept in touch over the years. Sometimes we went months without talking before a burst of calls back and forth.

By this spring, it had been an unusually long while since we last talked. We emailed, but no phone calls. Mary told me that Jill had recently bought a new dress that she planned to wear when giving talks about her book. At a visitation before the funeral, she’ll be wearing her book dress.

Mary added that, a few weeks before Jill passed, she caught pneumonia and never recovered. Mary told me her voice was weak. “I kept telling her to call you,” Mary said. “But she kept saying: ‘I want my voice to be stronger. I want my voice to be stronger before I call David.’”

I’m crestfallen that I didn’t hear from her again, but I think her voice was plenty strong.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by David Epstein.

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Off a two-lane stretch of U.S. Route 1 in rural Caribou, Maine, sits a white ranch-style house that’s been consumed by weeds and vines.

The house was once the fulfillment of a dream. The owner had purchased it in 2006 through a federal mortgage program designed specifically for people like her: impoverished, first-time homeowners who live in the most rural parts of the United States. The loan, which came directly from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, required no down payment.

But things started going wrong from the day she moved in. First, the basement flooded. Then the furnace stopped working. As major repair costs accumulated over the next six years, the woman’s health deteriorated until she was forced to leave her job as a manager at Kmart. Her disability check was not enough to cover medical expenses and the upkeep required for the house — let alone the $855 monthly mortgage.

So in 2012 she drove to a USDA office 20 miles away and tried to give the house back. She said staff there would not accept her keys, telling her instead to call a toll-free number for help, as agency protocol requires. She left a message and did not hear back. She stopped paying her mortgage and moved out.

Her dream home sat abandoned for more than a decade.

USDA guidance says the agency should act quickly when borrowers fall behind on payments “to minimize any potential loss to the Government and to the borrower.” A prompt sale keeps the government from having to pay the legal and administrative costs associated with foreclosure down the road and may protect the borrower from incurring a major blemish on their credit history.

But that did not happen. Rather, 13 years passed before a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door of the woman’s public housing apartment in May and served her with foreclosure papers on the now dilapidated ranch home that’s been overtaken by squatters. The government’s delay hurt the value of its investment and left the woman with a bill far greater than the cost of the loan she initially took out — with additional interest and other fees that had accumulated over those years.

The woman, now 68, declined to be interviewed, but her attorney, Tom Cox, said she allowed him to share her experience on the condition that she not be named to protect her privacy.

Since March, the USDA has filed 56 foreclosures in the federal court system against properties purchased with a rural development mortgage, also known as a Section 502 direct loan. All but one were in Maine. The borrowers have been in default for an average of nearly nine years.

As in the case of the Caribou homeowner, the USDA’s delays in those cases have resulted in borrowers racking up more debt because of the interest and fees that piled up in the intervening years, according to a Bangor Daily News and ProPublica examination of the foreclosure cases and interviews with former USDA officials and legal experts.

On average, borrowers in the 55 Maine cases owe $110,000 more than they would have had the agency moved to take possession of the properties when they first defaulted, the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica found. This includes what the USDA calls “preservation and inspection” fees, a broad category on the foreclosure filings that can include home repairs and yard maintenance, among other things.

Borrowers who can’t pay risk having the government garnish their wages or federal benefits such as Social Security. The Caribou woman had her disability checks garnished six times since 2015 to offset her debt before the USDA even foreclosed on her property, according to her lawyer. The best way to keep the government from garnishing federal benefits is to file for bankruptcy, attorneys said.

“It really undermines the concept of giving access to homeownership to a population who might not otherwise have been able to afford it,” said Rhiannon Hampson, former USDA rural development director for Maine who stepped down in January before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. “The irony, with all of these fees piled on, is that they can’t afford to get out of it.”

The recent wave of foreclosure filings in Maine underscores the government’s failure to monitor a mortgage program that since its founding in 1949 has poured tens of billions of tax dollars into giving the poorest Americans a shot at homeownership.

The USDA does not publicly report how often it files foreclosures. U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat and member of a House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the USDA’s direct loan program, has proposed language in the House agriculture appropriations report for the 2026 fiscal year calling on the agency to regularly report the number of foreclosures and abandoned properties related to the direct loan program. The bill awaits a vote before the full House of Representatives.

The USDA regularly filed foreclosures in Maine prior to the coronavirus pandemic but has rarely done so in recent years, according to Richard H. Broderick Jr., a Maine attorney with whom the agency had contracted to file foreclosures until 2022. Kevin Crosman, the Maine attorney now filing foreclosures on behalf of the USDA, would not comment on why the agency started doing so again.

Reporters visited 12 of the 55 homes in the Bangor Daily News’ core coverage area in May. At least five appeared to be abandoned and in disrepair — with windows boarded up or a sign affixed to the door saying it was being cared for by a New York company — raising doubts that the government will recoup its investments.

The USDA is supposed to take custody of properties purchased with a Section 502 direct loan and begin the foreclosure process when the homeowner becomes incapacitated, dies or has abandoned it, according to the agency’s handbook. Otherwise the properties may languish and lose value.

It really undermines the concept of giving access to homeownership to a population who might not otherwise have been able to afford it.

Agency guidelines do not specify how soon the government should step in after a loan falls into delinquency, but under federal law, lenders cannot foreclose on a property until borrowers have been in default for 120 days.

Nearly a fifth of the USDA’s 159,208 Section 502 direct loans in its active national portfolio — 30,496 — were delinquent as of March, according to internal agency data obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. That rate is double what a 1993 internal agency report said was acceptable. But neither the USDA nor the White House would say why the agency is focusing on foreclosures in Maine. Vermont is the only other state in which the USDA has filed a single foreclosure, according to federal court filings.

The foreclosures started just before Trump’s Justice Department sued the state of Maine in April over its inclusion of transgender athletes in girls’ sports, part of a larger spat between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills. The White House would not say whether the foreclosures are connected in any way to those ongoing conflicts.

The Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the 76-year-old rural homeownership program in the White House’s budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year. Some of his predecessors, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have also sought to cut back the $880 million direct mortgage program, which has bipartisan support in Congress.

A USDA spokesperson said the Trump administration is in the process of reviewing the loans to “understand the magnitude of the problems it has inherited.” The agency noted that in Maine alone, more than 800 properties are considered delinquent and nearly 400 homes are being tracked for foreclosure. The USDA did not respond to additional questions.

In 2013, months after the Caribou woman had abandoned her property, she received a letter at her new residence from the USDA informing her that she had to pay the government $22,000 in missed mortgage payments and late fees or she’d lose the Caribou home, said Cox, her lawyer. He said she did not pay because she did not want the house anymore. The USDA sent her nearly a dozen letters between 2014 and 2015 claiming foreclosure was imminent, but a decade passed before she was served with foreclosure papers this spring.

A sign on the front door says the property is being maintained by a New York City company, which did not return calls seeking comment. A green tarp stretches across missing sections of the roof. Inside, piles of garbage and feces litter the floor.

A real estate broker who inspected the home in June with Cox estimated the value of the house to be around $40,000, a steep depreciation from the 2006 purchase price of $144,000.

During the time since she abandoned the property, what the woman owes USDA continued to balloon, Cox said.

His client now owes the government $393,463, according to court documents — nearly 10 times what the home is worth. Nearly 60% of that comprises interest that accumulated after she defaulted, as well as $91,304 in “preservation and inspection” fees.

“If the USDA had dealt with this back in 2012, they might have gotten most or all of their money back by selling the home” before it deteriorated, Cox said. “They’re not going to collect it now. It’s a huge waste of government resources and money to let this happen.”

Other USDA borrowers simply continue living in their homes long after they default on their loans, accumulating more debt with each passing year that the government does not move to collect.

It’s a huge waste of government resources and money to let this happen.

Christine Ogden had stopped paying the $465-a-month mortgage for her blue saltbox home in the coastal Maine town of Searsport in 2013, according to court documents. She said she told the USDA at the time to take her home after the agency threatened her with foreclosure if she did not pay.

But it took the government until 2019 to attempt to foreclose upon her property. The case was dismissed in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. Five years later, in April, she received a summons to appear in federal court to start foreclosure proceedings again.

Ogden now owes $203,787 on what had been a $66,200 mortgage, according to court documents. Half of her debt comprises interest that accumulated after she defaulted, as well as other fees she would not have had to pay had the USDA addressed the delinquency sooner, an analysis by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica found.

Ogden, who has lived rent-free in the house for 12 years, says she is unable to pay the burgeoning debt and does not know what will happen. The foreclosure will hurt her credit, making it harder for her to get another loan or find rental housing, she said.

“I'm 59,” Ogden said. “I’ll be homeless, basically.”

The owners of another property, in Norridgewock in central Maine, also stopped paying their mortgage — and moved out of the house — years before the USDA foreclosed on the home this spring, court records show. The owners have not appeared to live at the property since at least 2014, according to property tax records, and defaulted on their loan in 2019 — but the government did not file for foreclosure until April.

The owners, it turned out, were violating USDA rules by renting out their home. The tenant, who answered the door when a reporter visited in May after the foreclosure was filed in federal court, would not share his name but estimated that he has paid $100,000 in rent to the owners during the 12 years he said he has lived there. USDA guidelines allow borrowers to rent their homes for up to three years, and only under very narrow circumstances.

Properties purchased under the 502 direct loan program are supposed to be the borrower’s permanent residence and not meant to generate income, according to USDA guidelines. Homeowners can rent out their properties only due to certain life events such as if their families outgrow their current home or if they are moving for a job. But the borrower must still pay the mortgage every month.

The USDA says the owners of the Norridgewock home owe the agency $276,191. The homeowners live in Tennessee, according to foreclosure summons and other court records filed this year by the USDA; they did not respond to calls made to phone numbers listed under their names.

USDA staff based in Maine who once were in close touch with borrowers when they ran into financial trouble now have little to no oversight of Section 502 loans. That’s because a major restructuring in the 1990s eliminated many of the county offices that had managed all aspects of the loans and centralized the servicing of these loans to an office in St. Louis, said Leslie Strauss, a senior policy analyst for the Housing Assistance Council, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on affordable rural housing.

These changes came on the heels of an internal study in 1991 concluding that centralizing the administration of these loans would result in better service and a lower delinquency rate of about 10%, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. More than three decades later, the delinquency rate for Section 502 direct loans has nearly doubled to 19%.

Hampson, Maine’s former USDA rural development official who now leads economic development for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, said she had been pushing the agency to allow local staff to regain oversight of borrowers’ financial situations “so that we can go out and monitor what’s going on, so that we aren’t caught by surprise.”

But her effort did not gain traction, Hampson said.

As the foreclosures accumulated in Maine in recent months, the USDA website published an advisory directing struggling Maine borrowers to call the St. Louis office for help. But fewer staff members are available to respond after Trump’s recent cuts to the federal workforce.

As of early May, 1,536 employees — nearly a third of the rural development office — had taken the buyout, according to USDA documents outlining the results of the Trump administration’s two financial incentive offers to quit. Of those, 197 worked in the St. Louis office.

“We can’t afford failure,” Hampson said of the long-delayed foreclosures leading to insurmountable debt. “The onus is on the government to make sure that we’re providing the right kind of safety nets to prevent this sort of thing from happening.”

Michael Shepherd, Sasha Ray and Paula Brewer of BDN contributed reporting. Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sawyer Loftus, Bangor Daily News.

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What Happened: Former New York Police Department Commissioner Thomas Donlon sued Mayor Eric Adams and other top police officials on Wednesday, accusing Adams of running the force as a “criminal enterprise” that the mayor used to “consolidate power, obstruct justice and punish dissent.”

In the 251-page complaint, Donlon said the mayor used the department’s Community Response Team for political gain. “CRT became the enforcement arm of Defendant Adams’ political strategy,” the complaint says, “a tool for projecting ‘tough on crime’ optics at the expense of civil rights and constitutional law.”

It also calls the CRT a “rogue” unit that answered “only to City Hall.”

The suit drew extensively from a recent ProPublica investigation, which detailed how the mayor championed the CRT despite concerns within the Police Department about the unit. Adams, former officials said, was so close to the unit he had access to a little-known livestream of the CRT’s body-worn camera footage, a detail that Donlon cited in his legal complaint.

What They Said: “The Community Response Team speaks to the culture under Adams of willfully violating the constitutional rights of civilians and officers,” John Scola, Donlon’s lawyer, told ProPublica. That culture is: “We’ll do whatever we want.”

Background: In 2023, a senior NYPD official wrote a scathing internal audit after finding that CRT officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document the incidents. Weeks later, Adams 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 official who wrote that audit was pushed out months later. He and other top former commanders recently sued Adams alleging favoritism and misconduct, charges the mayor denies.

Why It Matters: Donlon, a former FBI agent who held the job of police commissioner for only two months, from September to November 2024, lobbed his accusations against Adams as the mayor has been waging an uphill battle to keep his job. Adams was indicted last fall on federal charges of bribery, fraud and illegally taking campaign contributions from foreigners. He pleaded not guilty. He avoided trial by making a deal with President Donald Trump, who dropped the prosecution in exchange for Adams working with the administration on immigration enforcement. Still, he remains unpopular in the city and is running for reelection as an independent against a popular Democrat, Zohran Mamdani.

Response: In a statement, the mayor’s office dismissed Donlon’s claims.

“These are baseless accusations from a disgruntled former employee who — when given the opportunity to lead the greatest police department in the world — proved himself to be ineffective,” the statement said. “This suit is nothing more than an attempt to seek compensation at the taxpayer’s expense after Mr. Donlon was rightfully removed from the role of interim police commissioner.”

Previously, Adam has defended the CRT. Asked about the unit at a press conference this spring, the mayor said, “CRT is here.” He continued, “I support all my units.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment about the suit.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eric Umansky.

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Five months after taking over the federal agency responsible for the health of all Americans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to overhaul an obscure but vital program that underpins the nation’s childhood immunization system.

Depending on what he does, the results could be catastrophic.

In his crosshairs is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system designed to provide fair and quick payouts for people who suffer rare but serious side effects from shots — without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent. Congress created the program in the 1980s when lawsuits drove vaccine makers from the market. A special tax on immunizations funds the awards, and manufacturers benefit from legal protections that make it harder to win big-money verdicts against them in civil courts.

Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccination group and previously accused the pharmaceutical industry of inflicting “unnecessary and risky vaccines” on children for profits, has long argued that the program removes any incentive for the industry to make safe products.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy condemned what he called corruption in the program and said he had assigned a team to overhaul it and expand who could seek compensation. He didn’t detail his plans but did repeat the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and suggested, without citing any evidence, that shots could also be responsible for a litany of chronic ailments, from diabetes to narcolepsy.

There are a number of ways he could blow up the program and prompt vaccine makers to stop selling shots in the U.S., like they did in the 1980s. The trust fund that pays awards, for instance, could run out of money if the government made it easy for Kennedy’s laundry list of common health problems to qualify for payments from the fund.

Or he could pick away at the program one shot at a time. Right now, immunizations routinely recommended for children or pregnant women are covered by the program. Kennedy has the power to drop vaccines from the list, a move that would open up their manufacturers to the kinds of lawsuits that made them flee years ago.

Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, who served as New Jersey’s state epidemiologist and then spent a dozen years as a vaccine executive at Merck, is among those worried.

“If his unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it,” said Bresnitz, who retired from Merck and has consulted for vaccine manufacturers. “I still believe, having worked in the industry, that they care about protecting American health, but they are also for-profit companies with shareholders, and anything that detracts from the bottom line that can be avoided, they will avoid.”

A spokesperson for PhRMA, a U.S. trade group for pharmaceutical companies, told ProPublica in a written statement that upending the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program “would threaten continued patient access to FDA approved vaccines.”

The spokesperson, Andrew Powaleny, said the program “has compensated thousands of claims while helping ensure the continued availability of a safe and effective vaccine supply. It remains a vital safeguard for public health and importantly doesn’t shield manufacturers from liability.”

Since its inception, the compensation fund has paid about $4.8 billion in awards for harm from serious side effects, such as life-threatening allergic reactions and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition that can cause paralysis. The federal agency that oversees the program found that for every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed between 2006 and 2023, about one person was compensated for an injury.

Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has turned the staid world of immunizations on its ear. He reneged on the U.S. government’s pledge to fund vaccinations for the world’s poorest kids. He fired every member of the federal advisory group that recommends which shots Americans get, and his new slate vowed to scrutinize the U.S. childhood immunization schedule. Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease eliminated here in 2000, roared back and hit a grim record — more cases than the U.S. has seen in 33 years, including three deaths. When a U.S. senator asked Kennedy if he recommended measles shots, Kennedy answered, “Senator, if I advised you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?”

Fed up, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies sued Kennedy last week, accusing him of dismantling “the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans.” (The federal government has yet to respond to the suit.)

Just about all drugs have side effects. What’s unusual about vaccines is that they’re given to healthy people — even newborns on their first day of life. And many shots protect not just the individuals receiving them but also the broader community by making it harder for deadly scourges to spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that routine childhood immunizations have prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations among the generation of Americans born between 1994 and 2023.

To most people, the nation’s vaccine system feels like a solid, reliable fact of life, doling out shots to children like clockwork. But in reality it is surprisingly fragile.

There are only a handful of companies that make nearly all of the shots children receive. Only one manufacturer makes chickenpox vaccines. And just two or three make the shots that protect against more than a dozen diseases, including polio and measles. If any were to drop out, the country could find itself in the same crisis that led President Ronald Reagan to sign the law creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

Back then, pharmaceutical companies faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the vaccine protecting kids from whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus caused unrelenting seizures that led to severe disabilities. (Today’s version of this shot is different.) One vaccine maker after another left the U.S. market.

At one point, pediatricians could only buy whooping cough vaccines from a single company. Shortages were so bad that the CDC recommended doctors stop giving booster shots to preserve supplies for the most vulnerable babies.

While Congress debated what to do, public health clinics’ cost per dose jumped 5,000% in five years.

“We were really concerned that we would lose all vaccines, and we would get major resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases,” recalled Dr. Walter Orenstein, a vaccine expert who worked in the CDC’s immunization division at the time.

A Forbes headline captured the anxiety of parents, pediatricians and public health workers: “Scared Shotless.” So a bipartisan group in Congress hammered out the no-fault system.

Today, the program covers vaccines routinely recommended for children or pregnant women once Congress approves the special tax that funds awards. (COVID-19 shots are part of a separate, often-maligned system for handling claims of harm, though Kennedy has said he’s looking at ways to add them to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.)

Under program rules, people who say they are harmed by covered vaccines can’t head straight to civil court to sue manufacturers. First, they have to go through the no-fault system. The law established a table of injuries and the time frame for when those conditions must have appeared in order to be considered for quicker payouts. A tax on those vaccines — now 75 cents for every disease that a shot protects against — flows into a trust fund that pays those approved for awards. Win or lose, the program, for the most part, pays attorney fees and forbids lawyers from taking a cut of the money paid to the injured.

The law set up a dedicated vaccine court where government officials known as special masters, who operate like judges, rule on cases without juries. People can ask for compensation for health problems not listed on the injury table, and they don’t have to prove that the vaccine maker was negligent or failed to warn them about the medical condition they wound up with. At the same time, they can’t claim punitive damages, which drive up payouts in civil courts, and pain and suffering payments are capped at $250,000.

Plaintiffs who aren’t satisfied with the outcome or whose cases drag on too long can exit the program and file their cases in traditional civil courts. There they can pursue punitive damages, contingency-fee agreements with lawyers and the usual evidence gathering that plaintiffs use to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.

But a Supreme Court ruling, interpreting the law that created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, limited the kinds of claims that can prevail in civil court. So while the program isn’t a full liability shield for vaccine makers, its very existence significantly narrows the cases trial lawyers can file.

Kennedy has been involved in such civil litigation. In his federal disclosures, he revealed that he referred plaintiffs to a law firm filing cases against Merck over its HPV shot in exchange for a 10% cut of the fees if they win. After a heated exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation proceedings, Kennedy said his share of any money from those cases would instead go to one of his adult sons, who he later said is a lawyer in California. His son Conor works as an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm benefiting from his referrals. When ProPublica asked about this arrangement, Conor Kennedy wrote, “I don’t work on those cases and I’m not receiving any money from them.”

In March, a North Carolina federal judge overseeing hundreds of cases that alleged Merck failed to warn patients about serious side effects from its HPV vaccine ruled in favor of Merck; an appeal is pending.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program succeeded in stabilizing the business of childhood vaccines, with many more shots developed and approved in the decades since it was established. But even ardent supporters acknowledge there are problems. The program’s staff levels haven’t kept up with the caseload. The law capped the number of special masters at eight, and congressional bills to increase that have failed. An influx of adult claims swamped the system after adverse reactions to flu shots became eligible for compensation in 2005 and serious shoulder problems were added to the injury table in 2017.

The quick and smooth system of payouts originally envisioned has evolved into a more adversarial one with lawyers for the Department of Justice duking it out with plaintiffs’ attorneys, which Kennedy says runs counter to the program’s intent. Many cases drag on for years.

In his recent interview with Carlson, he described “the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the leaders of it” working on the cases as corrupt. “They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and we’re going to change all that,” he said. “And I’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that.”

The system is “supposed to be generous and fast and gives a tie to the runner,” he told Carlson. “In other words, if there’s doubts about, you know, whether somebody’s injury came from a vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it and compensate them.”

Kennedy didn’t identify who is on the team reviewing the program. At one point in the interview, he said, “We just brought a guy in this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”

The HHS employee directory now lists Andrew Downing as a counselor working in Kennedy’s office. Downing for many years has filed claims with the program and suits in civil courts on behalf of clients alleging harm from shots. Last month, HHS awarded a contract for “Vaccine Injury Compensation Program expertise” to Downing’s firm, as NOTUS has reported.

Downing did not respond to a voicemail left at his law office. HHS didn’t reply to a request to make him and Kennedy available for an interview and declined to answer detailed questions about its plans for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the past, an HHS spokesperson has said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety.”

While it’s not clear what changes Downing and Kennedy have in mind, Kennedy’s interview with Carlson offered some insights. Kennedy said he was working to expand the program’s three-year statute of limitations so that more people can be compensated. Downing has complained that patients who have certain autoimmune disorders don’t realize their ailments were caused by a vaccine until it’s too late to file. Congress would have to change the law to allow this, experts said.

A key issue is whether Kennedy will try to add new ailments to the list of injuries that qualify for quicker awards.

In the Carlson interview, Kennedy dismissed the many studies and scientific consensus that shots don’t cause autism as nothing more than statistical trickery. “We’re going to do real science,” Kennedy said.

The vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged autism was caused by the vaccine ingredient thimerosal and the shot that protects people from measles, mumps and rubella. Facing more than 5,000 claims, the court asked a committee of attorneys representing children with autism to pick test cases that represented themes common in the broader group. In the cases that went to trial, the special masters considered more than 900 medical articles and heard testimony from dozens of experts. In each of those cases, the special masters found that the shots didn’t cause autism.

In at least two subsequent cases, children with autism were granted compensation because they met the criteria listed in the program’s injury table, according to a vaccine court decision. That table, for instance, lists certain forms of encephalopathy — a type of brain dysfunction — as a rare side effect of shots that protect people from whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella. In a 2016 vaccine court ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. explained, “The compensation of these two cases, thus does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism.”

Hastings noted that when Congress set up the injury table, the lawmakers acknowledged that people would get compensated for “some injuries that were not, in fact, truly vaccine-caused.”

Many disabling neurological disorders in children become apparent around the time kids get their shots. Figuring out whether the timing was coincidental or an indication that the vaccines caused the problem has been a huge challenge.

Devastating seizures in young children were the impetus for the compensation program. But in the mid-1990s, after a yearslong review of the evidence, HHS removed seizure disorder from the injury table and narrowed the type of encephalopathy that would automatically qualify for compensation. Scientists subsequently have discovered genetic mutations that cause some of the most severe forms of epilepsy.

What’s different now, though, is that Kennedy, as HHS secretary, has the power to add autism or other disorders to that injury table. Experts say he’d have to go through the federal government’s cumbersome rulemaking process to do so. He could also lean on federal employees to green-light more claims.

In addition, Kennedy has made it clear he’s thinking about illnesses beyond autism. “We have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits,” he told Carlson. Kennedy mentioned diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, seizure disorders, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, peanut allergies and eczema.

President Donald Trump’s budget estimated that the value of the investments in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program trust fund could reach $4.8 billion this year. While that’s a lot of money, a life-care plan for a child with severe autism can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the CDC reported in April that 1 in 31 children is diagnosed with autism by their 8th birthday. The other illnesses Kennedy mentioned also affect a wide swath of the U.S. population.

Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed studies to justify adding autism and other common medical problems to the injury table, no matter how much they conflict with robust scientific research.

“You can do that, and you will bankrupt the program,” he said. “These are ways to end vaccine manufacturing in this country.”

If the trust fund were to run out of money, Congress would have to act, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at University of California Law San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress could increase the excise tax on vaccines, she said, or pass a law limiting what’s on the injury table. Or Congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would find themselves back in the situation they faced in the 1980s.

“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss said.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, last year proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would have allowed people to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court. His press release for the bill — written in September, before Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary — quoted Kennedy saying, “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”

The legislation never came up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said he expects to introduce it again “in the very near future.”

Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington University Law School’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people filing claims for injuries, said it’s hard to predict what Congress, faced with a doomsday scenario, would do.

“Normally Democrats are friends of plaintiffs’ lawyers,” she said. “But talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on a razor blade that’s on fire.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Patricia Callahan.

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U.S. inspectors have uncovered new and dangerous breakdowns in drugmaking at an Indian factory owned by Sun Pharma that produces generic medications for American consumers.

The latest problems come 2 1/2 years after the Food and Drug Administration gave the facility a special pass to continue sending certain drugs made there to the United States, even after the factory was officially banned from the U.S. market.

The factory failed to investigate the source of bacteria found in test vials or deal with damaged equipment that had caused drugs to be contaminated with metal particles, according to the June inspection report, which ProPublica obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Workers improperly handled vials and stoppers meant for sterile medications and, in some cases, failed to disinfect manufacturing areas and equipment, according to the report. One FDA inspector saw a worker put on a sterile gown and then brush up against a waste bin and use their hands to push down the overflowing trash. Investigators also saw liquid dripping through ceiling cracks and the growth of what appeared to be fungus and mold in a storage area for samples used for testing.

The FDA in late 2022 had banned the factory in the city of Halol from shipping drugs to the United States because of similar manufacturing failures.

ProPublica reported last month that a low-profile group inside the agency at the same time exempted some medications from that ban, ostensibly to prevent drug shortages. The FDA has granted similar exemptions for drugs made at more than 20 other foreign factories that violated critical standards in drugmaking and were barred from the U.S. market.

The FDA kept the practice largely hidden from the public. The agency did not regularly test drugs coming from the banned factories or proactively monitor reports about potential harm among consumers, ProPublica found.

In Sun’s case, more than a dozen drugs were initially excluded from the Halol import ban. The company is still allowed to send five to the United States, government records show, including vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, and the cancer drug doxorubicin. Also excluded are divalproex delayed release tablets, which treat seizures and other conditions; leuprolide injection, used by people with prostate cancer, endometriosis and other conditions; and temozolomide capsules, for brain cancer.

The inspection last month marked the first time the FDA had been back to the factory in the 2.5 years since it imposed the import ban and Sun started sending exempted drugs to the United States. Inspectors found that procedures designed to prevent microbiological contamination of sterile drugs were not established or followed and that equipment wasn’t maintained to prevent malfunctions that would “alter the safety, identity, strength, quality or purity of the drug product,” according to the report.

Some of the concerns focused on the exempted drugs still being sent to the United States, according to a person familiar with the situation who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The FDA blacked out the names of the drugs that were potentially compromised on its publicly released inspection report, including a medication made on a manufacturing line in which several batches had to be rejected because they were filled with black particles.

“It’s disappointing to see issues continue to come up at this site given the site’s role in potentially manufacturing critical drugs for U.S. consumers,” said the person familiar with the inspection findings.

Sun did not respond to questions about the latest inspection or its regulatory history with the FDA. In an email, the company said that adherence to quality standards “is a top priority for Sun, and we maintain a relentless focus on quality and compliance to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines to our customers and patients worldwide. We continue to work proactively with the US FDA and remain committed to achieve full resolution of any FDA regulatory issues at our facilities.”

The FDA said factories that receive exemptions from import bans are required to conduct extra testing on drugs with third-party oversight before they are sent to the United States, helping to ensure patient safety. Sun’s Halol plant, however, was cited in 2022 and again last month for failing to thoroughly investigate unexplained quality problems, including impurities, found during drug testing. The FDA did not respond to a request for comment about the latest Sun inspection.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan, who recently co-sponsored a bill to lower prescription drug costs, said in a statement to ProPublica that the FDA has a responsibility to ensure that drugs coming into the country are safe.

“We need full transparency about the extent to which exemptions enabled sub-par, unsafe, or ineffective drugs to be distributed to American patients,” she said.

Medill Investigative Lab student Katherine Dailey contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan Rose and Debbie Cenziper.

In late September 2000, longtime Kerr County, Texas, resident W. Thornton Secor Jr. sat down with an oral historian to tell his story. Like many of the residents recorded as part of a decadeslong effort by the Kerr County Historical Commission to document the community’s history, Secor had a lot to say about the area’s floods.

“It always seems to happen at night too,” Secor said of local floods he and his family had experienced. “Can’t see most of it.”

Secor, who died in 2022, was a third-generation manager of a lodge that still operates along the Guadalupe River. His oral history shares family memories of floods going back to 1932 — like the time a flood that year washed away most of the cabins his grandfather built.

Now, Secor’s daughter, Mandi Secor Lipscomb, is left considering the future of the lodge in the aftermath of another devastating flood, on July 4. Secor Lipscomb is the fourth-generation owner and operator of the same lodge, Waltonia on the River.

Often when I try to understand a place or process a big news event, I look for records kept by local historical societies and libraries. In archived documents, preserved photographs and oral history collections, one can start to see how a community understands itself. So, as news reports about the floods in the Central Texas Hill Country poured in throughout the week, I went looking for historical context. What local knowledge is held by people who live, or have lived, in what’s repeatedly described as “Flash Flood Alley”? How have people in Kerr County’s past contended with floods of their own time?

A trove of more than 70 oral histories recorded by the Kerr County Historical Commission begins to answer those questions. The recordings document memories of floods going back to 1900, but oral histories alone rarely tell a full or accurate story. Still, there’s at least one conclusion to draw: Everything has a history. The flood that killed more than 130 people in the Kerr County area this month is not the first time a flash flood on the Guadalupe River took lives of people, including children.

I keep this history in mind when I hear local and state officials say no one could have seen this coming. Take this exchange between a reporter and Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly:

Reporter: Why weren’t these camps evacuated?

Kelly: I can’t answer that. I don’t know.

Reporter: Well you’re the judge. I mean you’re the top official here in this county. Why can’t you answer that? There are kids missing. These camps were in harm’s way. We knew this flood was coming.

Kelly: We didn’t know this flood was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States. And we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.

My colleague Jennifer Berry Hawes wrote last week about the uncanny similarities between the Texas floods and Hurricane Helene, which struck North Carolina last year. In both disasters, weather forecasts predicted the potential devastation, yet people were left in harm’s way.

And as another colleague, ProPublica editor Abrahm Lustgarten, pointed out in a piece about how climate change is making disasters like the flood in Texas more common, “there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss” in the weeks to come.

“Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding?” Lustgarten wrote. “Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity?”

As we wait for answers — or as journalists dig for them — the oral histories show Kerr County residents have warned one another, as well as newcomers and out-of-towners, about flooding for a long time. In his 2000 oral history, Secor said he remembered a time in the spring of 1959 when his father tried to warn one new-to-town woman about building a house so close to the river.

“He took her out and showed her the watermarks on the trees in front of our house and all,” Secor said, likely referring to the watermarks from the flood of 1932, which a local newspaper described at the time as “the most disastrous flood that ever swept the upper Guadalupe Valley.” The flood killed at least seven people.

“‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that will never happen again,’” Secor recalled.

He said her body was found in a tree a few months later after a flood swept her and the roof she stood on away.

“It’s going to surprise newcomers when we get another flood like the ’32 flood,” Secor said in 2000.

“It’ll get us again someday.”

As the Guadalupe River rose over the July 4 weekend, the 16-cabin lodge his daughter owns was sold out and full of guests. All of them escaped the floods, said Secor Lipscomb. They ran, some barefoot in the mud, up a steep hill beyond the property’s retaining wall. They took shelter in a barn.

Later, Secor Lipscomb assessed the damage to her family property. What she saw left her in tears: Four cabins had water up to the ceiling. Another two had flooded about 5 feet. But among the wreckage was a crew of nearly 40 volunteers, ready to help with the cleanup.

By the time I reached out to her to ask her about her father’s oral history, six cabins and the main camp office were already demolished.

The cabin her great-grandfather and grandfather built together more than 100 years ago still stood. But it won’t for much longer. It is so damaged with water that it, too, will have to go.

“This is our family history, our family legacy,” Secor Lipscomb told me. “Of course we’re going to rebuild.”

When they do, their customers will be ready. Many of the families who survived the flood already told her they’ll be first in line to book for the next available July 4.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Logan Jaffe.

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Clayton Strong pulled up to a tiny hospital in Idaho, walked through the emergency room doors and told a clerk that his wife’s body was outside in their SUV.

A sheriff’s deputy was at the hospital talking to Strong by the time the coroner arrived. This was an “unattended” death: one where no doctor could attest to a medical reason for the person’s demise. That made it the coroner’s job to determine how and why she died.

Strong, a stocky man with white hair and bushy eyebrows, explained that he and his wife lived in an RV park on the edge of the woods nearby. He said his wife had been bedridden for years with Parkinson’s disease. That morning she’d woken up and asked for peanut butter and water, Strong told the deputy. He found her dead some time later.

The coroner looked over Betty Strong’s body. It was thin and frail. He didn’t see a reason to suspect anything other than a natural death for this 75-year-old woman. The sheriff’s deputy seemed to be satisfied with the explanation too. So, the coroner ruled that Betty Strong died around 8:40 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2016, from complications of Parkinson’s, and he signed off on allowing cremation of her body.

Less than five years later, Clayton Strong’s next wife turned up dead, too: shot in the chest in Texas.

It turns out that both marriages had a history of domestic unrest, with visits from police who documented threats to each woman’s safety.

It’s impossible to know whether a different approach to investigating Betty Strong’s death would have uncovered foul play. What is certain is that clues and evidence in the case were lost forever — and Idaho’s system for death investigation let it happen.

Family members of both women believe a more thorough investigation of the death in Idaho might have saved the life of Clayton Strong’s next wife in Texas.

“Someone shows up with a dead body and just says they died of natural causes,” said Amy Belanger, one of Betty Strong’s children. “I mean, really, do you just take their word for it?”

The answer is no, according to five of six national death investigation experts ProPublica consulted. They said the coroner should have obtained medical records to confirm Betty Strong was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, examined the trailer where her husband said she died, or both.

“You can think of all sorts of scenarios — criminal, accidental or natural — that could have occurred there,” said Jennifer Snippen, a death investigator, educator and consultant in Oregon. “But my argument is, if you don’t go to the scene and you don’t look at the medical records, you just don’t know.”

Most of the county coroners in Idaho are part-time elected officials with tiny budgets and no oversight or state funding to support their work. The national experts said that kind of system is more prone to cursory investigations like the one into Betty Strong’s death.

The failure to reform death investigations in Idaho has raised alarms for more than 70 years, according to current and former Idaho coroners and previous ProPublica reporting.

A national magazine called Idaho “the best place in the nation for a criminal to ‘get away with murder’ in the literal sense” because of the state’s “antiquated county coroner’s system,” the Idaho Statesman newspaper reported in 1951.

Asked whether murderers have escaped prosecution in Idaho’s coroner system, Rich Riffle, coroner for the county that includes Boise, said, “My humble opinion? Yes.”

That almost happened in 2019 when one inexperienced Idaho coroner decided to take the word of Chad Daybell that his wife, Tammy Daybell, had died in her sleep after chronic health problems, vomiting and a cough. Her body was later exhumed after his next wife’s children went missing. An autopsy by the Utah medical examiner’s office found what medical records would have shown, had the Idaho coroner requested them: Tammy Daybell was healthy. A jury convicted Chad Daybell of murdering her by asphyxiation and of killing his next wife’s two youngest children. The case is under appeal.

At trial, coroner Brenda Dye said she had regrets. Her voice shaking, Dye told the court she would have ordered an autopsy if she’d known better, but “at that time, with my limited training and being new, I did the best I could.” She declined ProPublica’s interview request, citing the case’s effect on her mental health.

Idaho isn’t the only place where death investigations fall short. Because there is no uniform federal system, the rigor with which your death is investigated depends on where you die. Other states lack enough forensic pathologists to do autopsies. And many local systems like Idaho County’s are squeezed for money.

But even among its short-staffed, underfunded peers, Idaho stands out. One measure is the state’s autopsy rate: third-lowest for autopsies in all deaths, last in the nation for autopsies in known cases of homicide.

Gov. Brad Little said in January that he would support more state resources to help Idaho’s coroners do their jobs. But he never got the chance; coroner-related bills passed by the Idaho Legislature this year contained no funding or other assistance for coroners and death investigations.

So for now, each of Idaho’s 44 coroners will bear costs that other states help cover: driving a body hundreds of miles to an autopsy; paying for some of those autopsies; or trying to recruit one more person to join Idaho’s statewide forensic pathology workforce of three.

“If you don’t care enough about how death investigations are done in your jurisdiction to invest in the people doing it, to provide them with the resources or to have high enough standards for the people that you hire to do this, you’re going to get what you get, what you accept,” said Snippen. “You’re going to get what you allow to happen.”

Betty Brock was a mother of seven who enjoyed singing and art, long bicycle rides, organizing family photos and researching her ancestry.

She was caring for her terminally ill husband in 2010 when Clayton Strong befriended her on the internet, according to Belanger, her daughter. Strong claimed to be “basically destitute and living in his car,” a backstory that appealed to a woman with a soft spot for taking in “wounded people” and trying to heal them with love, Belanger said.

Strong drove hundreds of miles from Southwest Florida and showed up at the Brocks’ property in the Florida panhandle. They agreed he could sleep in his car there as long as he helped with caregiving and housework. Soon he was sleeping in an outbuilding on the property, then in the house.

Betty’s children were puzzled as this newcomer became a fixture in their mother’s life. They wanted to give Strong a chance, but they soon grew suspicious.

Betty Brock’s husband died in August 2010. By January, she was Betty Strong.

After their courthouse marriage, Clayton Strong used their now-shared funds to buy a Ford truck and an Airstream trailer and took his bride on the road, Belanger said. The couple visited national parks that Betty had always wanted to see. They camped and hiked their way across the continent. They bought mining claims and panned for gold in the remote Idaho wilderness.

After that honeymoon, the walls around Betty Strong grew impenetrable, her children said. According to what two of her children told ProPublica and to statements two others made to police, Clayton became the gatekeeper of all communication with their mother, and he padlocked the doors of their Florida home and held the key.

The last time Betty Strong saw her primary care doctor in Florida was in May 2013, according to records her son obtained after the death. Before that, she hadn’t been in since 2010, the year Clayton Strong entered her life. The notes from the 2013 checkup show health issues common in older adults but no Parkinson’s diagnosis, and neither Parkinson’s nor other neurodegenerative diseases were listed in the family history section.

The children watched from afar as the marriage devolved over the next two years. Between January 2014 and February 2015, police went to the couple’s residence for welfare checks and domestic disturbances at least six times, according to police reports that Belanger provided to ProPublica.

Her children told police that Clayton Strong threatened to shoot them if they set foot on the property, threatened to hurt their mother if they didn’t back off, and prevented her from seeing a doctor.

In the first of those police visits, in January 2014, the records show that Belanger’s sister, who lived nearby, called the sheriff while standing outside the Strong residence, a brown house surrounded by oak trees and pines on a winding country road. A deputy arrived to find Belanger’s sister and Clayton Strong in a stalemate, then talked to everyone outside, according to a sheriff’s office report. The deputy then watched as Betty Strong turned to her husband to “ask him for permission” to hug her daughter, and Clayton Strong “removed a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the porch entrance gate so Betty could go in the yard” for the hug.

The report says the deputy made a referral to Florida Department of Children and Families, the agency that investigates possible abuse of vulnerable adults, and that the department opened a case.

A similar scene played out when one of Betty Strong’s sons went to the house to check on her in February 2015. For two years, Clayton Strong turned the son away when he tried to visit, and this time Strong “threatened to shoot him with a gun if he did not leave,” the son told a sheriff’s deputy. Clayton Strong denied that, the deputy’s report says.

The deputy found Betty Strong alone on a bed in an RV parked behind the home, the report says. She said she had Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t get around well. Clayton wasn’t holding her against her will, she told the deputy, but she couldn’t take care of herself without him.

She had a walkie-talkie. The deputy asked: Is Clayton using that radio and telling you what to say? Betty answered “no” while nodding her head “yes.” It was a chilly afternoon, and the deputy noticed Betty had a blanket but no heater.

“Betty’s demeanor, living conditions, and the controlling behavior by Clayton” warranted a referral to the Florida Department of Children and Families, the deputy wrote.

Asked for the outcome of that referral, a spokesperson told ProPublica the department investigates “all allegations of abuse, neglect, or exploitation” but that records of those investigations are confidential under state law.

Days after the referral in February 2015, police were again dispatched to the Florida home. This time, it wasn’t one of Betty Strong’s children who called; it was someone from adult protective services in need of police backup. According to the dispatch log, the worker said Clayton Strong “has threatened before to pull a gun on her and is very anti-law enforcement.”

The couple left town a month later. Betty Strong’s children never heard from her again.

By the time Betty Strong died in Idaho County in December 2016, she hadn’t been seen in Florida in 21 months.

Idaho County’s elected coroner, Cody Funke, had been in the job about as long.

He knew the county well. Its vast forests, mountains and meadows stretch across more land than Massachusetts. Rugged and remote, it attracts people who want to be left alone and who distrust both government and conventional medicine.

Funke, pronounced “funk,” was in his late 20s in 2014 when he learned his part-time job at a funeral home was being eliminated. His boss asked: Had he considered running for coroner? The coroner at the time was retiring and urged Funke to do it. So did Funke’s boss from his other part-time job, as an EMT. What sealed the deal for Funke: As coroner, he would get health insurance.

Funke started the job with a feeling of “good luck, godspeed, you’re gonna need it.” There was no apprenticeship or ride-along to watch seasoned pros, like he’d gotten when he trained to be an EMT. There was a training conference he attended in Las Vegas before taking office, and Funke received more than double the 24 hours of coroner education required by Idaho law. Even so, he isn’t sure it was enough to prepare him.

Funke learned on his first day that he wasn’t getting a vehicle to move bodies from a death scene. If the local funeral home’s vehicle was occupied, Funke had to use his family truck. A year after Betty Strong’s death, the county commission got the coroner a vehicle: a pickup truck the sheriff’s office didn’t need anymore.

The office he inherited also had no camera, and the county hadn’t budgeted to give him one. He’d have to use his phone to take pictures of bodies and death scenes.

There was no morgue.

The Idaho County coroner’s office didn’t even have an actual office.

Funke’s predecessors kept their files on paper, at home, he learned. The previous coroner’s house had flooded, so when Funke took over, all that remained fit in two manila folders.

The coroner’s entire budget this year is $85,651. By comparison, coroner’s offices serving small populations had an average budget of $280,000 in 2018, according to a national study.

Paid $13,000 a year, Funke is on call 24 hours a day and, last year, investigated and ruled on 71 deaths, about one every five days. Papers on an additional 102 deaths of people under a doctor’s care came through needing his signature for cremation.

Funke does the coroner work on top of a full-time job. When a call comes in during business hours, he dips out to go to a death scene. If someone dies at dinnertime, he might not see his family until morning.

He must decide with each death what the circumstances require: a simple phone call; an all-out investigation with autopsy, witness interviews, tissue samples and more; or something in the middle.

To examine a death scene, Funke might have to drive three hours or longer each way. Whenever he orders an autopsy, Funke or his deputies have to take the body to the nearest autopsy center, a trip that takes a full day and usually demands an overnight stay. His current budget can cover 10 autopsies a year.

In those first years as coroner, Funke often leaned on police.

Funke found it strange that Clayton Strong had loaded his wife’s body into their SUV and driven to the hospital. Most people call 911 to report a death and wait for help to arrive, Funke said. But Strong offered an explanation that seemed to satisfy the sheriff’s deputy: He didn’t know many people in town and wasn’t sure what to do.

Strong had said his wife hadn’t seen a doctor because she stuck to homeopathic remedies. That’s not unusual for Funke to hear.

The widower gave Funke the impression a coroner and sheriff’s deputy wouldn’t be welcome inside the trailer where she died. That’s not so outside the norm for Idaho County either, Funke said.

Betty Strong’s death looked like an easy call. So Funke helped move her body to a cot to be taken from the hospital to a local funeral home.

According to a later report from the sheriff’s office, Clayton Strong showed up at the funeral home that day, said he wanted her cremated and paid $2,310 in cash. The way Funke heard it from a funeral home employee a few days later, Strong paid in $100 bills out of a lunch box.

The detail struck Funke as peculiar. But he let it go.

The couple’s Airstream trailer showed up one day in January 2017, parked outside their house in Florida. A neighbor called Amy Belanger with the news, and she dispatched her brother, Daniel, who lived nearby. They’d spent almost two years fearing the worst.

The only person at the house was Clayton Strong.

The family’s matriarch had died a few weeks ago in Harpster, Idaho, Strong said. Then he told his son-in-law to get off the property.

Amy Belanger started making calls the next day. One of the first people she reached was Funke, the county coroner. She was perplexed, she said. Why hadn’t anyone called her or her siblings? Why didn’t he question whether Betty Strong had actually succumbed to a disease or if something else had killed her? Belanger told Funke about the history of police calls in Florida and concerns about their mother’s safety.

Funke thought back to what he’d heard from the funeral home. A lunch box of cash for a cremation? That image never sat quite right. Now he had solid ground for suspicion. Funke told Belanger he’d talk to the county prosecutor and see what could be done.

The prosecutor and the sheriff’s office initially told Belanger they had opened a homicide investigation, according to a detailed timeline she created at the time. But the death scene — the Strongs’ trailer — was long gone, the body cremated. The sheriff’s investigator and prosecutor ultimately didn’t seem to think there was enough evidence for a homicide investigation, Funke told ProPublica.

(The prosecutor and sheriff’s investigator did not return phone calls, emails or certified letters from ProPublica requesting comment on their decisions following Betty Strong’s death.)

Notes from Belanger’s timeline quote a Florida detective saying he was sorry the death had occurred outside his jurisdiction. He explained to her that “in Florida, deputies would have had the medical examiner’s office verify medical records and take a blood sample.”

The year Betty Strong died, 20% of natural deaths investigated by a medical examiner in the part of Florida where she had lived underwent autopsies before the examiner decided the cause of death was natural. About 65% of all deaths taken in by Florida’s medical examiner that year were autopsied. Both numbers dwarf Idaho’s coroner autopsy rates.

It’s not just Florida. Many states have more sophisticated systems for investigating deaths than Idaho’s. In much of the country, centralized state medical examiner offices oversee all death investigations or provide a backstop to elected coroners in each county.

Idaho’s rural neighbor Montana has a hybrid system of medical examiners and coroners, supported by a coroner liaison who works with death investigators to make the process more consistent statewide. And next door in Wyoming, a state board sets rules for coroners to follow. The rules spell out what each death investigation should include: scene investigation, toxicology sample, DNA sample, photographs, external examination of the body and an inventory of property, evidence and medications.

Jennifer Snippen, the death investigator in Oregon, was one of the experts who drafted the National Institute of Justice’s 2024 death-scene investigation guidebook.

She said death investigations are more likely to be thorough when states and counties give their investigators enough funding and education, “so that they have the motivation and the ability to get to as many scenes, and get as much information about every single death, as possible.”

Those who study the work of coroners and medical examiners in the U.S. have learned that the deaths of elderly people are especially likely to be written off as age-related, without considering whether the person may have also been a victim of abuse or neglect.

Snippen’s research in 2023 is one of the most recent studies to confirm that. She reviewed data from thousands of cases. The person least likely to get a scene investigation or autopsy? An elderly woman who dies at home.

Lauri McGivern, a nationally recognized expert in death investigations, said national standards would have Funke verify Betty Strong’s Parkinson’s diagnosis and ask more questions of Clayton Strong as the sole caregiver of a vulnerable adult. McGivern, who coordinates medicolegal death investigations in Vermont, reviewed the facts that Funke was given at the time of Betty Strong’s death and his subsequent report at ProPublica’s request.

To follow national standards, McGivern said, Funke also would have gone to the Airstream trailer or asked law enforcement to examine the death scene and report back to him.

But McGivern and other experts said they understand why Funke didn’t follow those national guidelines — because they’ve seen it happen so many times in places like rural Idaho.

“He’s doing what he was shown how to do,” McGivern said. “And probably doing the best he can, with no budget and no support and no education.”

Frustrated by how little Idaho officials knew and why they hadn’t dug further into her mother’s death, Amy Belanger channeled her grief into trying to find answers on her own.

She followed a trail of public records left by Clayton Strong. Had he harmed other women? Had he been in a relationship with anybody who went missing? “I was looking into his past to see if there was a pattern like that,” Belanger said. Something she could share with officials in Idaho.

Then she stumbled across a document: a recent marriage license.

Three months after depositing Betty Strong’s body at a hospital in Idaho, Clayton Strong wed a woman from Texas.

Belanger needed to warn her.

Shirley Weatherley had a lot in common with Betty Strong. She was a mother and grandmother. She’d been married before. She lived in a small, modest home on a large piece of land in a rural locale, where she’d been caring for a terminally ill former spouse when Strong contacted her on Facebook.

They’d known each other as teenagers in Lubbock. Their reconnection after he arrived at her house in Weatherford, a suburb of Fort Worth, eventually began to worry her children.

“He isolated her,” said Jamie Barrington, Weatherley’s son with a previous husband. “He wouldn’t let grandkids, my brother — anybody’d come over, he just kept them at arm’s length.”

Barrington said he and other members of Weatherley’s family had suspicions about Strong. Then they connected with Belanger and heard what happened in Florida and Idaho.

Belanger urged the family to tell their mother everything they’d heard. She “actually was pleading with us to watch out,” Barrington recalled.

Knowing another family was worried helped fuel Amy Belanger’s quest for the truth about her mother’s death. Her siblings chipped in to help Belanger rent a van and drive across the country in search of clues — anything that could shed light on her mother’s death.

Once she got to Idaho, Belanger spent more than a week investigating. She met with the coroner and sheriff. She went to the mining claims the Strongs had purchased. She stayed at the RV park where Betty Strong died and interviewed the people who’d owned it in 2016; they remembered talking to each other about how “hinky” the death and Clayton Strong’s reaction to it seemed.

Back in Texas, Weatherley’s family tried to warn her.

When they relayed the story about Betty Strong to her, Weatherley chalked it up to a grieving family trying to cope with loss by grasping for an explanation, Barrington said. After all, Strong had a death certificate that listed natural causes.

The details Barrington later learned from family members and police about his mother’s life with Strong were “pretty horrific,” he said. Weatherley had reported that Strong threatened to kill her, but no charges were filed. Then at one point, in the midst of an argument with Strong, Weatherley lobbed the accusations about Betty Strong’s death at him, Barrington said. Strong flew into a rage.

Weatherley called police in July 2021. She and Strong were splitting up, and he shoved her while moving his stuff out of the house, Weatherley told the officer. Strong had “hurt her” in the past, so she called police to make sure it didn’t happen again, the officer’s report says. The officer got Strong’s side of the story — she was “running him off,” but he didn’t push her — and stuck around until Strong agreed to leave.

Police would later document finding two items in the house. The first was a copy of Weatherley’s will that left everything to Strong, on which she’d written “VOID,” the second was a digital camera hidden in their bedroom. The camera contained selfies of injuries to her face and chest and a video of Strong putting his arm around her neck as she screamed for help.

Strong persuaded Weatherley to let him back into their home once more on Aug. 4, 2021, according to police records.

Four days later, Weatherley’s son and grandson found her body wrapped in a gray tarp near the front steps to her home. She’d been shot in the chest. Authorities matched shell casings at the scene to an AK-47-style rifle, which security footage showed Strong ditching in a shopping cart outside a Walmart.

Picked up later by police in Mexico, Strong died of cardiac arrest while awaiting extradition in Weatherley’s killing.

Jamie Barrington, Shirley Weatherley’s son, was reluctant at first to speak publicly about his mother’s death in Texas, even years later. He agreed to talk with ProPublica, he said, because he wants Idaho’s coroner system to improve. He said he never imagined that a death like Betty Strong’s could be ruled “natural” based on what a spouse told authorities.

“I truly believe that if there had been a proper investigation and not taking his word for it,” Barrington said, “that it probably would have made a big difference” in what happened to Shirley Weatherley.

Word of Weatherley’s murder eventually reached Funke, the coroner in Idaho. He said in hindsight, Strong’s actions in Idaho County seem more suspicious than they did at the time to his inexperienced eyes and ears.

Now, after 10 years as coroner, “I would have pushed a little bit harder” to have an officer or deputy follow up or go to the RV park with him. He would have asked police to use a national database — one he didn’t know about at the time — to find Betty Strong’s family members and learn more about her background. “I have trust issues after cases like this,” he said.

Funke said the story of Betty Strong’s death needs to be told, even if it shows that he and Idaho County made mistakes, because it can help lawmakers understand what is wrong with the state’s system.

Idaho’s coroners need more funding, he said, because right now they’re an afterthought in county budgets. Most counties set a coroner salary at what amounts to less than minimum wage, so it’s impossible for someone like Funke to be coroner without a second, full-time job.

“These offices should be fully staffed,” he said. “Maybe we have one or two people that are here full time to answer questions and respond to these calls, versus, ‘Hey, I’ve got to take time off work, boss.’”

And he believes new coroners who lack experience should be required to learn how to work a case from start to finish before they’re called out to a death like Betty Strong’s.

Daniel Belanger, one of Betty Strong’s children, came away from his interactions with Idaho County officials convinced that the only way deaths like his mother’s will be properly investigated is through legislation forcing coroners and law enforcement agencies to change their approaches.

“They completely dropped the ball,” he told ProPublica.

Amy Belanger said her family has reclaimed very few of her mother’s possessions from the Airstream trailer. Strong emptied the Florida house of family heirlooms after their mother’s death, Belanger said. Most of the family photo albums her mother toiled over are gone.

The brown house on the winding road in Florida is still there. Belanger’s memories of family cookouts and holiday gatherings linger in the house; they weren’t wiped away by the police visits and padlocked doors. But the family home isn’t the family’s anymore. Years later, it is stuck in legal limbo — the deed still in the name of Clayton Strong and Shirley Weatherley, the woman he married after the death of Betty Strong.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Audrey Dutton.

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For nearly a decade, Microsoft has used engineers in China to help maintain highly sensitive Defense Department computer systems. ProPublica’s investigation reveals how a model that relies on “digital escorts” to oversee foreign tech support could leave some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

Here are the key takeaways from that report:

Since 2011, cloud computing companies that wanted to sell their services to the U.S. government had to establish how they would ensure that personnel working with federal data would have the requisite “access authorizations” and background screenings. Additionally, the Defense Department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

This presented an issue for Microsoft, which relies on a vast global workforce with significant operations in India, China and the European Union.

Microsoft’s foreign workforce is not permitted to access sensitive cloud systems directly, so the tech giant hired U.S.-based “digital escorts,” who had security clearances that authorized them to access sensitive information, to take direction from the overseas experts. The engineers might briefly describe the job to be completed — for instance, updating a firewall, installing an update to fix a bug or reviewing logs to troubleshoot a problem. Then the escort copies and pastes the engineer’s commands into the federal cloud.

The problem, ProPublica found, is that digital escorts don’t necessarily have the advanced technical expertise needed to spot problems.

“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” said one current escort.

Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said.

Defense Department data in this category includes materials that directly support military operations.

Because the U.S.-based escorts are taking direction from foreign engineers, including those based in China, the nation’s greatest cyber adversary, it is possible that an escort could unwittingly insert malicious code into the Defense Department’s computer systems.

A former Microsoft engineer who worked on the system acknowledged this possibility. “If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious, then [escorts] would have no idea,” the engineer, Matthew Erickson, told ProPublica.

Pradeep Nair, a former Microsoft vice president who said he helped develop the concept from the start, said a variety of safeguards including audit logs, the digital trail of system activity, could alert Microsoft or the government to potential problems. “Because these controls are stringent, residual risk is minimal,” Nair said.

“If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access. We need to be very concerned about that,” said Harry Coker, who was a senior executive at the CIA and the National Security Agency. Coker, who also was national cyber director during the Biden administration, added that he and his former intelligence colleagues “would love to have had access like that.”

Chinese laws allow government officials there to collect data “as long as they’re doing something that they’ve deemed legitimate,” said Jeremy Daum, senior research fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. Microsoft’s China-based tech support for the U.S. government presents an opening for Chinese espionage, “whether it be putting someone who’s already an intelligence professional into one of those jobs, or going to the people who are in the jobs and pumping them for information,” Daum said. “It would be difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.”

In a statement, Microsoft said that its personnel and contractors operate in a manner “consistent with US Government requirements and processes.”

The company’s global workers “have no direct access to customer data or customer systems,” the statement said. Escorts “with the appropriate clearances and training provide direct support. These personnel are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data, preventing harm, and use of the specific commands/controls within the environment.”

Insight Global — a contractor that provides digital escorts to Microsoft — said it “evaluates the technical capabilities of each resource throughout the interview process to ensure they possess the technical skills required” for the job and provides training.

Microsoft told ProPublica that it described the escort model in documents submitted to the government as part of cloud vendor authorization processes. Former defense and intelligence officials said in interviews that they had never heard of digital escorts. Even the Defense Department’s IT agency didn’t know about it until reached for comment by ProPublica.

“I probably should have known about this,” said John Sherman, who was chief information officer for the Defense Department during the Biden administration. He said the system is a major security risk for the department and called for a “thorough review by [the Defense Information Systems Agency], Cyber Command and other stakeholders that are involved in this.”

DISA said, “Experts under escort supervision have no direct, hands-on access to government systems; but rather offer guidance and recommendations to authorized administrators who perform tasks.”

Multiple people raised concerns about the escort strategy over the years, including while it was still in development. A former Microsoft employee, who was involved in the company’s cybersecurity strategy, told an executive they opposed the concept, viewing it as too risky from a security perspective.

Around 2016, Microsoft engaged contacts from Lockheed Martin to hire escorts. The project manager says they told their counterpart at Microsoft they were concerned the escorts would not have the “right eyes” for the job given the relatively low pay.

Microsoft did not respond to questions about these points.

It’s unclear whether other major cloud service providers to the federal government also use digital escorts in tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by ProPublica.

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The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.

ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.

Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.

Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.

The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.

In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.

“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”

In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.

Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, said the privacy laws allowing federal investigators to obtain taxpayer data have never “been read to open the door to the sharing of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative.”

A spokesperson for the White House said the planned use of IRS data was legal and a means of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of “illegal criminal aliens.”

Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.

“If this program is implemented in its current form, it’s extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted,” said an IRS engineer who examined the blueprints and who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The dispute that ended in De Mello’s ouster was the culmination of months of pressure on the IRS to turn over massive amounts of data in ways that would redefine the relationship between the agency and law enforcement and reduce taxpayers’ privacy, records and interviews show.

In one meeting in late March between senior IRS and DHS officials, a top ICE official made a suggestion: Why doesn’t Homeland Security simply provide the name and state of its targets and have the IRS return the addresses of everyone who matches that criteria?

The IRS lawyers were stunned. They feared they could face criminal liability if they handed over the addresses of individuals who were not under a criminal investigation. The conversation and news of deeper collaboration with ICE so disturbed career staff that it led to a series of departures in late March and early April across the IRS’ legal, IT and privacy offices.

They were “pushing the boundaries of the law,” one official said. “Everyone at IRS felt the same way.”

The technical blueprint obtained by ProPublica shows that engineers at the agency are preparing to give DHS what it wants: a system that enables massive automated data sharing. The goal is to launch the new system before the end of July, two people familiar with the matter said.

The DHS effort to obtain IRS data comes as top immigration enforcement leaders face escalating White House pressure to deport some 3,000 people per day, according to reports.

One federal agent tasked with assisting ICE on deportations said recent operations have been hamstrung by outdated addresses. Better information could dramatically speed up arrests. “Some of the leads that they were giving us were old,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “They’re like from two administrations ago.”

In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block the plan, arguing that the memorandum of understanding between DHS and the IRS is illegal. But a judge in early May ruled against them, saying the broader agreement complied with Section 6103, the existing law regulating IRS data sharing. That opened the door for engineers to begin building the system.

The judge did not address the technical blueprint, which didn’t exist at the time of the ruling. But the case is pending, which means the new system could still come under legal review.

Until now, little was known about the push and pull between the two agencies or the exact technical mechanics behind the arrangement.

The plan has been shrouded in secrecy even within the IRS, with details of its development withheld from regular communications. Several IRS engineers and lawyers have avoided working on the project out of concerns about personal legal risk.

Asked about the new system, a spokesperson for IRS parent agency the Treasury Department said the memorandum of understanding, often called an MOU, “has been litigated and determined to be a lawful application of Section 6103, which provides for information sharing by the IRS in precise circumstances associated with law enforcement requests.”

At a time when Trump is making threats to deport not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens, the scope of information-sharing with the IRS could continue to grow, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and sources familiar with the matter: DHS has been looking for ways to expand the agreement that could allow Homeland Security officials to seek IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes.

Last month, an ICE attorney proposed updating the MOU to authorize new data requests on people “associated with criminal activities which may include United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” according to a document seen by ProPublica. The status of this proposal is unclear. De Mello, at the time, rejected it and called for senior Treasury Department leadership to personally sign off on such a significant change.

The White House described DHS’ work with the IRS as a good-faith effort to identify and deport those who are living in the country illegally.

“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.

She pointed to the April MOU as giving the government the authority to create the new system and added, “This isn’t a surveillance system. … It’s part of President Trump’s promise to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens — the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling.”

In a separate statement, a senior DHS official also cited the court’s approval of the MOU, saying that it “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”

The new system would represent a sea change, allowing law enforcement to request enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated, computerized process.

The system, according to the blueprint and interviews with IRS engineers, would work like this:

First, DHS would send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people it’s targeting. The request would include the date of a final removal order, a relevant criminal statute ICE is using to investigate the individual, and the tax period for which information is sought. If DHS fails to include any of this information, the system would reject the request.

The system then attempts to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary method by which the IRS identifies an individual in its databases.

If the system makes a match, it accesses the individual’s associated tax file and pulls the address listed during the most recent tax period. Then the system would produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS’ targets’ last known addresses. The spreadsheet would include a record of names rejected for lack of required information and names for which it could not make a match.

Tax and privacy experts say they worry about how such a powerful yet crude platform could make dangerous mistakes. Because the search starts with a name instead of a taxpayer identification number, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name as or a similar address to that of one of ICE’s targets. The proposed system assumes the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. In effect, the IRS has no way to independently check the bases of these requests, experts told ProPublica.

In addition, the blueprint does not limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS can request it. The system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on taxpayers, said technical experts and IRS engineers who reviewed the documents. By shifting a single parameter, the program could return more information than just a target’s address, said an engineer familiar with the plan, including employer and familial relationships.

Engineers based at IRS offices in Lanham, Maryland, and Dallas are developing the blueprint.

For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay taxes — regardless of immigration status — with an implicit promise that their information would be protected. Now that same data may be used to locate and deport noncitizens.

“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”

The push to share IRS data with DHS emerged while Elon Musk’s DOGE reshaped the engineering staff of the IRS. Sam Corcos, a Silicon Valley startup founder with no government experience, pushed out more than 50 IRS engineers and restructured the agency’s engineering priorities while he was the senior DOGE official at the agency. He later became chief information officer at Treasury. He has also led a separate IRS effort to create a master database using products from Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, enabling the government to link and search large swaths of data.

Corcos didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House said DOGE is not part of the DHS-IRS pact.

Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, told ProPublica the system being built was ripe for abuse. It “would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions,” he said.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the department’s internal watchdog, is already probing efforts by Trump and DOGE to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, ProPublica reported in April.

The Trump administration continues to add government agencies to its deportation drive.

DOGE and DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database, NPR reported last month. The database links information from the Social Security Administration and the DHS, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizenship.

And in May, a senior Treasury Department official directed 250 IRS criminal investigative agents to help deportation operations, a significant shift for two agencies that historically have had separate missions.

McKenzie Funk contributed reporting, and Kirsten Berg and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by William Turton, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro.

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Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.

“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” said one current escort who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, fearing professional repercussions.

The system has been in place for nearly a decade, though its existence is being reported publicly here for the first time.

Microsoft told ProPublica that it has disclosed details about the escort model to the federal government. But former government officials said in interviews that they had never heard of digital escorts. The program appears to be so low-profile that even the Defense Department’s IT agency had difficulty finding someone familiar with it. “Literally no one seems to know anything about this, so I don’t know where to go from here,” said Deven King, spokesperson for the Defense Information Systems Agency.

National security and cybersecurity experts contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an arrangement was in place, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital prowess as a top threat to the country.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has called China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.” One of the most prominent examples of that threat came in 2023, when Chinese hackers infiltrated the cloud-based mailboxes of senior U.S. government officials, stealing data and emails from the commerce secretary, the U.S. ambassador to China and others working on national security matters. The intruders downloaded about 60,000 emails from the State Department alone.

With President Donald Trump and his allies concerned about spying, the State Department announced plans in May to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” — a pledge that the president seems to have walked back. The administration is also trying to arrange the sale of the popular social media platform TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company that some lawmakers believe could hand over sensitive U.S. user data to Beijing and fuel misinformation with its content recommendations. But experts told ProPublica that digital escorting poses a far greater threat to national security than either of those issues and is a natural opportunity for spies.

“If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access. We need to be very concerned about that,” said Harry Coker, who was a senior executive at the CIA and the National Security Agency. Coker, who also was national cyber director during the Biden administration, added that he and his former intelligence community colleagues “would love to have had access like that.”

It is difficult to know whether engineers overseen by digital escorts have ever carried out a cyberattack against the U.S. government. But Coker wondered whether it “could be part of an explanation for a lot of the challenges we have faced over the years.”

Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.

John Sherman, who was chief information officer for the Department of Defense during the Biden administration, said he was surprised and concerned to learn of ProPublica’s findings. “I probably should have known about this,” he said. He told the news organization that the situation warrants a “thorough review by DISA, Cyber Command and other stakeholders that are involved in this.”

In an emailed statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said that cloud service providers “are required to establish and maintain controls for vetting and using qualified specialists,” but the agency did not respond to ProPublica’s questions regarding the digital escorts’ qualifications.

It’s unclear whether other cloud providers to the federal government use digital escorts as part of their tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.

Microsoft declined to make executives available for interviews for this article. In response to emailed questions, the company provided a statement saying its personnel and contractors operate in a manner “consistent with US Government requirements and processes.”

Global workers “have no direct access to customer data or customer systems,” the statement said. Escorts “with the appropriate clearances and training provide direct support. These personnel are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data, preventing harm, and use of the specific commands/controls within the environment.” In addition, Microsoft said it has an internal review process known as “Lockbox” to “make sure the request is deemed safe or has any cause for concern.” A company spokesperson declined to provide specifics about how it works but said it’s built into the system and involves review by a Microsoft employee in the U.S.

Over the years, various people involved in the work, including a Microsoft cybersecurity leader, warned the company that the arrangement is inherently risky, those people told ProPublica. Despite the presence of an escort, foreign engineers are privy to granular details about the federal cloud — the kind of information hackers could exploit. Moreover, the U.S. escorts overseeing these workers are ill equipped to spot suspicious activity, two of the people said.

Even those who helped develop the escort system acknowledge the people doing the work may not be able to detect problems.

“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” Matthew Erickson, a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica in an email. That said, he maintained that the “scope of systems they could disrupt” is limited.

The Defense Department requires anyone working with its most sensitive data to be a U.S. citizen, U.S. national or permanent resident. “No Foreign persons may have such access,” according to the department’s cloud security requirements. Microsoft, however, has a global workforce, so it created the digital escort system as a work-around. Here’s an example of how it works and the risk it poses:

Tech support is needed on a Microsoft cloud product.

A Microsoft engineer in China files an online “ticket” to take on the work.

A U.S.-based escort picks up the ticket.

The engineer and the escort meet on the Microsoft Teams conferencing platform.

The engineer sends computer commands to the U.S. escort, presenting an opportunity to insert malicious code.

The escort, who may not have advanced technical expertise, inputs the commands into the federal cloud system.

Illustrations for ProPublica

A Microsoft contractor called Insight Global posted an ad in January seeking an escort to bring engineers without security clearances “into the secured environment” of the federal government and to “protect confidential and secure information from spillage,” an industry term for a data leak. The pay started at $18 an hour.

While the ad said that specific technical skills were “highly preferred” and “nice to have,” the main prerequisite was possessing a valid “secret” level clearance issued by the Defense Department.

“People are getting these jobs because they are cleared, not because they’re software engineers,” said the escort who agreed to speak anonymously and who works for Insight Global.

Each month, the company’s roughly 50-person escort team fields hundreds of interactions with Microsoft’s China-based engineers and developers, inputting those workers’ commands into federal networks, the employee said.

In a statement to ProPublica, Insight Global said it “evaluates the technical capabilities of each resource throughout the interview process to ensure they possess the technical skills required” for the job, and provides training. The company noted that escorts also receive additional cyber and “insider threat awareness” training as part of the government security clearance process.

“While a security clearance may be required for the role, it is but one piece of the puzzle,” the company said.

Microsoft did not respond to questions about Insight Global.

When modern cloud technology emerged in the 2000s, offering on-demand computing power and data storage via the internet, it ushered in fundamental changes to federal government operations.

For decades, federal departments used computer servers owned and operated by the government itself to house data and power networks. Shifting to the cloud meant moving that work to massive off-site data centers managed by tech companies.

Federal officials believed that the cloud would provide greater power, efficiency and cost savings. But the transition also meant that the government would cede some control over who maintained and accessed its information to companies like Microsoft, whose employees would take over tasks previously handled by federal IT workers.

To address the risks of this revolution, the government started the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as FedRAMP, in 2011. Under the program, companies that wanted to sell their cloud services to the government had to establish how they would ensure that personnel working with sensitive federal data would have the requisite “access authorizations” and background screenings. On top of that, the Defense Department had its own cloud guidelines, requiring that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

This presented an issue for Microsoft, given its reliance on a vast global workforce, with significant operations in India, China and the European Union. So the company tapped a senior program manager named Indy Crowley to put federal officials at ease. Known for his familiarity with the rules and his ability to converse in the government’s acronym-heavy lingo, colleagues dubbed him the “FedRAMP whisperer.”

In an interview, Crowley told ProPublica that he appealed directly to FedRAMP leadership, arguing that the relative risk from Microsoft’s global workforce was minimal. To make his point, he said he once grilled a FedRAMP official on the provenance of code in products supplied by other government vendors such as IBM. The official couldn’t say with certainty that only U.S. citizens had worked on the product in question, he said. The cloud, Crowley argued, should not be treated any differently.

Crowley said he also met with prospective customers across the government and told ProPublica that the Defense Department was the “one making the most demands.” Concerned about the company’s global workforce, officials there asked him who from Microsoft would be “behind the curtain” working on the cloud. Given the department’s citizenship requirements, the officials raised the possibility of Microsoft “hiring a bunch of U.S. citizens to maintain the federal cloud” directly, Crowley told ProPublica. For Microsoft, the suggestion was a nonstarter, Crowley said, because the increased labor costs of implementing it broadly would make a cloud transition prohibitively expensive for the government.

“It’s always a balance between cost and level of effort and expertise,” he told ProPublica. “So you find what’s good enough.” Hiring virtual escorts to supervise Microsoft’s foreign workforce emerged as “the path of least resistance,” Crowley said.

Microsoft did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Crowley’s account.

When he brought the concept back to Microsoft, colleagues had mixed reactions. Tom Keane, then the corporate vice president for Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, embraced the idea, according to a former employee involved in the discussions, as it would allow the company to scale up. But that former employee, who was involved in cybersecurity strategy, told ProPublica they opposed the concept, viewing it as too risky from a security perspective. Both Keane and Crowley dismissed the concerns, said the former employee, who left the company before the escort concept was deployed.

“People who got in the way of scaling up did not stay,” the former employee told ProPublica.

Crowley said he did not recall the discussion. Keane did not respond to requests for comment.

On its march to becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies, Microsoft has repeatedly prioritized corporate profit over customer security, ProPublica has found. Last year, the news organization reported that the tech giant ignored one of its own engineers when he repeatedly warned that a product flaw left the U.S. government exposed; state-sponsored Russian hackers later exploited that weakness in one of the largest cyberattacks in history. Microsoft has defended its decision not to address the flaw, saying that it received “multiple reviews” and that the company weighs a variety of factors when making security decisions.

The idea of an escort wasn’t novel. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which serves as the federal government’s standards-setting body, had established recommendations on how IT maintenance should be performed on-site, such as in a restricted government office. “Maintenance personnel that lack appropriate security clearances or are not U.S. citizens” must be escorted and supervised by “approved organizational personnel who are fully cleared, have appropriate access authorizations, and are technically qualified,” the guidelines state.

The government at the time specified the intent of the recommendation: to deny “individuals who lack appropriate security clearances ... or who are not U.S. citizens, visual and electronic access to” sensitive government information.

But escorts in the cloud wouldn’t necessarily be able to meet that goal, given the gap in technical expertise between them and the Microsoft counterparts they would be taking direction from.

That imbalance, though, was baked into the escorting model.

Erickson, the former Microsoft engineer who worked on the model, told ProPublica that escorts are “somewhat technically proficient,” but mainly are “just there to make sure the employees don’t accidentally or intentionally view” passwords, customer data or personally identifiable information. “If there are problems with the underlying” cloud services, “then only the people who work on those services at Microsoft would have the requisite knowledge to fix it,” he said.

Advanced threats from foreign adversaries weren’t on the radar for Erickson, who said he didn’t “have any reason to suspect someone more just based on their country of origin.”

“I don’t think there is any extra threat from Microsoft employees based in other countries,” he said.

Pradeep Nair, a former Microsoft vice president who said he helped develop the concept from the start, said that the digital escort strategy allowed the company to “go to market faster,” positioning it to win major federal cloud contracts. He said that escorts “complete role-specific training before touching any production system” and that a variety of safeguards including audit logs, the digital trail of system activity, could alert Microsoft or the government to potential problems.

“Because these controls are stringent, residual risk is minimal,” Nair said.

But legal and cybersecurity experts say such assumptions ignored the massive cyber threat from China in particular. Around the time that Microsoft was developing its escort strategy, an attack attributed to Chinese state-sponsored hackers resulted in the largest breach of U.S. government data up to that point. The theft initially targeted a government contractor and eventually compromised the personal information of more than 22 million people, most of them applicants for federal security clearances.

Chinese laws allow government officials there to collect data “as long as they’re doing something that they’ve deemed legitimate,” said Jeremy Daum, senior research fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. Microsoft’s China-based tech support for the U.S. government presents an opening for espionage, “whether it be putting someone who’s already an intelligence professional into one of those jobs, or going to the people who are in the jobs and pumping them for information,” Daum said. “It would be difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.”

Erickson acknowledged that having an escort doesn’t prevent foreign developers “from doing ‘bad’ things. It just allows for there to be a recording and a witness.” He said if an escort suspects malicious activity, they will end the session and file an incident report to investigate further.

How much of this information federal officials understood is unclear.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company described the digital escort model in the documents submitted to the government as part of cloud vendor authorization processes. However, it declined to provide those records or to tell ProPublica the exact language it used in them to describe the escort arrangement, citing the potential security risk of publicly disclosing it.

In addition to a third-party auditor, Microsoft’s documentation theoretically would have been reviewed by multiple parties in the government, including FedRAMP and DISA. DISA said the materials are “not releasable to the public.” The General Services Administration, which houses FedRAMP, did not respond to requests for comment.

In June 2016, Microsoft announced that it had received FedRAMP authorization to work with some of the government’s most sensitive data. Matt Goodrich, then FedRAMP director, said at the time that the accreditation was “a testament to Microsoft’s ability to meet the government’s rigorous security requirements.”

Around the same time, Microsoft put the escort concept into practice, engaging contacts from defense giant Lockheed Martin to hire cloud escorts, two people involved in the contract told ProPublica.

A project manager, who asked for anonymity to describe confidential discussions, told ProPublica that they were skeptical of the escort arrangement from the start and voiced those feelings to their Microsoft counterpart. The manager was especially concerned that the new hires would not have the “right eyes” for the job given the relatively low pay set by Microsoft, but the system went ahead anyway.

Lockheed Martin referred questions to Leidos, a company that took over Lockheed’s IT business following a merger in 2016. Leidos declined to comment.

As Microsoft captured more of the government’s business, the company turned to additional subcontractors, typically staffing companies, to hire more digital escorts.

Analyzing profiles on LinkedIn, ProPublica identified at least two such firms: Insight Global and ASM Research, whose parent company is consulting giant Accenture. While the scope of each firm’s business with Microsoft is unclear, ProPublica found more workers identifying themselves as digital escorts at Insight Global, many of them former military personnel, than at ASM. ASM and Accenture did not respond to requests for comment

Some Insight Global workers recognized the same problem as the former Lockheed manager: a mismatch in skills between the U.S.-based escorts and the Microsoft engineers they are supervising. The engineers might briefly describe the job to be completed — for instance, updating a firewall, installing an update to fix a bug or reviewing logs to troubleshoot a problem. Then, with limited inspection, the escort copies and pastes the engineer’s commands into the federal cloud.

“They’re telling nontechnical people very technical directions,” the current Insight Global escort said, adding that the arrangement presents untold opportunities for hacking. As an example, they said the engineer could install an update allowing an outsider to access the network.

“Will that get caught? Absolutely,” the escort told ProPublica. “Will that get caught before damage is done? No idea.”

The escort was particularly concerned about the dozens of tickets a week filed by workers based in China. The attack targeting federal officials in 2023 — in which Chinese hackers stole 60,000 emails — underscored that fear.

The federal Cyber Safety Review Board, which investigated the attack, blamed Microsoft for security lapses that gave hackers their opening. Its published report did not mention digital escorts, either as playing a role in the attack or as a risk to be mitigated. Sherman, the former chief information officer for the Defense Department, and Coker, the former intelligence official, who both also served as members of the CSRB, told ProPublica that they did not recall the board ever discussing digital escorting, which they said they now consider a major threat. The Trump administration has since disbanded the CSRB.

In its statement, Microsoft said it expects escorts “to perform a variety of technical tasks,” which are outlined in its contracts with vendors. Insight Global said it evaluates prospective hires to ensure they have those skills and trains new employees on “all applicable security and compliance policies provided by Microsoft.”

But the Insight Global employee told ProPublica the training regimen doesn’t come close to bridging the knowledge gap. In addition, it is challenging for escorts to gain expertise on the job because the type of work they oversee varies widely. “It’s not possible to get as trained up as you need to be on the wide array of things you need to look at,” they said.

The escort said they repeatedly raised concerns about the knowledge gap to Microsoft, over several years and as recently as April, and to Insight Global’s own attorneys. They said the digital escorts’ relative inexperience — combined with Chinese laws that grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data — left U.S. government networks overly exposed. Microsoft repeatedly thanked the escort for raising the issues while Insight Global said it would take them under advisement, the escort said. It is unclear whether Microsoft or Insight Global took any steps to address them; neither company answered questions about the escort’s account.

In its statement, Microsoft said it meets regularly with its contractors “to discuss operations and surface questions or concerns.” The company also noted that it has additional layers of “security and monitoring controls” including “automated code reviews to quickly detect and prevent the introduction of vulnerabilities.”

“Microsoft assumes anyone that has access to production systems, regardless of location or role, can pose a risk to the system, whether intentionally or unintentionally,” the company said in its statement.

Last year, about three months after government investigators released their report on the 2023 hack into U.S. officials’ emails, a former Insight Global contractor named Tom Schiller contacted a Defense Department hotline and wrote to several federal lawmakers to warn them about digital escorting. He had become familiar with the system while briefly working for the company as a software developer. By last July, Schiller’s complaints wound their way to the Defense Information Systems Agency Office of the Inspector General. Schiller told ProPublica that the office conducted a sworn interview with him, and separately with three others connected to Insight Global. In August, the inspector general wrote to Schiller to say it had closed the case.

“We conducted a preliminary analysis into the complaint and determined this matter is not within the avenue of redress by DISA IG and is best addressed by the appropriate DISA management,” the assistant inspector general for investigations said in the letter. “We have referred the information you provided to management.”

A spokesperson for the inspector general — whose office is supposed to operate independently in order to investigate potential waste, fraud and abuse — told ProPublica they were not authorized to speak about the issue and directed questions to DISA public affairs.

“If the public information office contacts me and wants to collaborate to formulate a response through their office, I’ll be more than happy to do that,” the spokesperson said. “But I will not be responding to any kind of media request concerning OIG business without speaking with the public information office.”

DISA public affairs did not answer questions about the matter. After a spokesperson initially said that he couldn’t find anyone who had heard of the escort concept, the agency later acknowledged in a statement to ProPublica that escorts are used “in select unclassified environments” at the Defense Department for “advanced problem diagnosis and resolution from industry subject matter experts.” Echoing Microsoft’s statement, it continued, “Experts under escort supervision have no direct, hands-on access to government systems; but rather offer guidance and recommendations to authorized administrators who perform tasks.”

It is unclear what, if any, discussions have taken place among Microsoft, Insight Global and DISA, or any other government agency, regarding digital escorts.

But David Mihelcic, DISA’s former chief technology officer, said any visibility into the Defense Department’s network poses a “huge risk.”

“Here you have one person you really don’t trust because they’re probably in the Chinese intelligence service, and the other person is not really capable,” he said.

The risk may be getting more serious by the day, as U.S.-China relations worsen amid a simmering trade war — the type of conflict that experts say could result in Chinese cyber retaliation.

In testimony to a Senate committee in May, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company is continually “pushing Chinese out of agencies.” He did not elaborate on how they got in, and Microsoft did not respond to follow-up questions on the remark.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke.

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This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want to reveal months of communications with Elon Musk or representatives from the tech mogul’s companies, arguing in part that they are of a private nature, not of public interest and potentially embarrassing.

Musk had an eventful legislative session in Texas this year. In addition to his lobbyists successfully advocating for several new laws, Abbott cited the Tesla and SpaceX CEO as the inspiration for the state creating its own efficiency office and has praised him for moving the headquarters for many of his businesses to the state in recent years.

As part of an effort to track the billionaire’s influence in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom in April requested Abbott and his staff’s emails since last fall with Musk and other people who have an email address associated with some of his companies.

Initially, the governor’s office said it would take more than 13 hours to review the records. It provided a cost estimate of $244.64 for the work and required full payment up front. The Texas Newsroom agreed and cut a check.

After the check was cashed, the governor’s office told The Texas Newsroom it believed all of the records were confidential and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office referees disputes over public records, to allow the documents to be kept private.

Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, gave several reasons the records should not be released. He argued they include private exchanges with lawyers, details about policy-making decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Releasing them to the public, he wrote, “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

Taylor also argued that the communications are confidential under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consist of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public, including financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a governmental body.”

He did not provide further details about the exact content of the records.

The language Abbott’s office used appears to be fairly boilerplate. Paxton’s office, in an explanation of the common-law privacy exception on its website, mentions that “personal financial information” that doesn’t deal with government transactions “is generally highly intimate or embarrassing and must be withheld.”

But Bill Aleshire, a Texas-based attorney specializing in public records law, was appalled that the governor is claiming that months of emails between his office and one of the world’s richest people are all private.

“Right now, it appears they’ve charged you $244 for records they have no intention of giving you,” Aleshire said. “That is shocking.”

Aleshire said it’s not unusual for government agencies to tap the common-law privacy exception in an attempt to withhold records from the public. But he’s used to it being cited in cases that involve children, medical data or other highly personal information — not for emails between an elected official and a businessman.

“You’re boxing in the dark,” Aleshire said. “You can’t even see what the target is or what’s behind their claim.”

Aleshire added that due to a recent Texas Supreme Court ruling, there is effectively no way to enforce public records laws against Abbott and other top state officials. He called the decision an “ace card” for these politicians.

The case dealt with requests to release Abbott and Paxton’s communications in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. The high court ruled that it is the only body that can review whether these officials are in compliance with public records laws.

Kevin Bagnall, a lawyer representing Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, also wrote a letter to Paxton’s office arguing the emails should be kept secret. He cited one main reason: They contain “commercial information whose disclosure would cause SpaceX substantial competitive harm.”

Most of the rest of Bagnall’s letter, which further explained SpaceX’s argument, was redacted.

Musk and representatives for his companies did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Abbott’s spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the records, including whether The Texas Newsroom would be refunded if Paxton withholds them.

In a statement, he said, “The Office of the Governor rigorously complies with the Texas Public Information Act and will release any responsive information that is determined to not be confidential or excepted from disclosure.”

The office of the attorney general has 45 business days to determine whether to release Abbott’s records.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

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Nine months ago, Hurricane Helene barreled up from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the rugged mountains of western North Carolina, dumping a foot of rain onto an already saturated landscape. More than 100 people died, most by drowning in floodwaters or being crushed by water-fueled landslides.

“We had no idea it was going to do what it did,” said Jeff Howell, the now-retired emergency manager in Yancey County, North Carolina, a rural expanse that suffered the most deaths per capita.

A week ago, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry slipped up from the coast of Mexico, drawing moisture from the Gulf, then collided with another system and inundated rivers and creeks in hilly south central Texas. More than 100 people are confirmed dead, many of them children, with more missing.

“We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here — none whatsoever,” said County Judge Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, Texas, where most of the deaths occurred.

The similarities between North Carolina and Texas extend beyond the words of these two officials. In both disasters, there was a disconnect between accurate weather alerts and on-the-ground action that could have saved lives.

Officials in each of those places were warned. The National Weather Service sent urgent alerts about potentially life-threatening danger hours in advance of the flash floods, leaving time to notify and try to evacuate people in harm’s way.

In Texas, some local officials did just that. But others did not.

Similarly, a ProPublica investigation found that when Helene hit on Sept. 27, some local officials in North Carolina issued evacuation orders. At least five counties in Helene’s path, including Yancey, did not. Howell said the enormity of the storm was far worse than anyone alive had ever seen and that he notified residents as best he could.

The National Weather Service described Helene’s approach for days. It sent out increasingly dire alerts warning of dangerous flash flooding and landslides. Its staff spoke directly with local emergency managers and held webinar updates. A Facebook message the regional office posted around 1 p.m. the day before Helene hit warned of “significant to catastrophic, life-threatening flooding” in the mountains. “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era.”

Similarly, in Texas, the weather service warned of potential for flash flooding the day before. Also that day, the state emergency management agency’s regional director had “personally contacted” county judges, mayors and others “in that area and notified them all of potential flooding,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick later said at a press conference.

AccuWeather, a commercial weather forecasting service, issued the first flash flood warnings for the area at 12:44 a.m. on July 4, roughly three hours before the catastrophic flooding. A half-hour later, at 1:14 a.m., the National Weather Service sent a similar warning to two specific areas, including central Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River’s banks and hills are dotted with vacation homes, summer camps and campgrounds — many filled with July 4 vacationers slumbering in cabins and RVs.

“Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly,” the weather service alert said. Impacts could include “life threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams.”

A severity descriptor on that alert sent it to weather radios and the nation’s Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which blasts weather warnings to cellphones to blare an alarm.

AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist, Jonathan Porter, was dismayed to hear news later that all the children attending youth camps in Kerr County had not been ushered to higher ground despite those warnings.

At Camp Mystic, a beloved century-old Christian summer camp for girls, at least 27 campers and counselors were killed. Six still haven’t been found. Its director also died, while trying to rescue children. (People at the camp said they received little to no help from the authorities, according to The New York Times.)

“I was very concerned to see that campers were awoken not by someone coming to tell them to evacuate based on timely warnings issued but rather by rapidly rising water that was going up to the second level of their bunkbeds,” Porter said.

In the area, known as Flash Flood Alley, Porter called this “a tragedy of the worst sort” because it appeared camps and local officials could have mobilized sooner in response to the alerts.

“There was plenty of time to evacuate people to higher ground,” Porter said. “The question is, Why did that not happen?”

But Dalton Rice, city manager of Kerrville, the county seat, said at a press conference the next day that “there wasn’t a lot of time” to communicate the risk to camps because the floodwaters rose so rapidly.

Rice said that at 3:30 a.m. — more than two hours after the flash flood warnings began — he went jogging near the Guadalupe River to check it out but didn’t see anything concerning.

But 13 miles upriver from the park where he was jogging, the river began — at 3:10 a.m. — to rise 25 feet in just two hours.

At 4:03 a.m., the weather service upgraded the warning to an “emergency”— its most severe flash flood alert — with a tag of “catastrophic.” It singled out the Guadalupe River at Hunt in Kerr County: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”

The local sheriff said he wasn’t made aware of the flooding until 4 to 5 a.m. He has declined to say whether the local emergency manager, who is responsible for alerting the public to approaching storms, was awake when the flash flood warnings went out starting at 1 a.m. The Texas Tribune reported that Kerrville’s mayor said he wasn’t aware of the flooding until around 5:30 a.m., when the city manager called and woke him up.

Local officials have refused to provide more details, saying they are focused on finding the more than 100 people still missing and notifying loved ones of deaths.

One challenge as disasters approach is that weather alerts often don’t reach the people in harm’s way.

In rural areas across Texas and North Carolina alike, cellphone service can be spotty on the best of days, and some people turn off alert notifications. In North Carolina’s remote mountains, many people live at least somewhat off the grid. The cell service isn’t great everywhere, and many aren’t glued to phones or social media. In Texas, Kerr County residents posted on Facebook complaints that they didn’t receive the weather service’s alerts while others said their phones blared all night with warnings.

Many counties also use apps to send their own alerts, often tailored to their specific rivers and roads. But residents must opt in to receive them. Kerr County uses CodeRed, but it isn’t clear what alerts it sent out overnight.

Pete Jensen has spent a long career in emergency management, including responding to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. He served as an official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina and often ponders why more people don’t receive – and heed – weather alerts.

“There’s an awful lot of denial,” Jensen said. “Disasters happen to someone else. They don’t happen to me.” That can include local officials who “don’t always understand what their responsibilities are. They very often react like most humans do – in denial.”

There is one big difference between the disasters in Texas and North Carolina. In Texas, residents, journalists and others have demanded accountability from local officials. Gov. Greg Abbott has called the Legislature into special session starting July 21 to discuss flood warning systems, flood emergency communications and natural disaster preparation.

But that hasn’t happened in North Carolina. The state legislature has yet to discuss possible changes, such as expanding its Know Your Zone evacuation plan beyond the coast, or boost funding for local emergency managers. (Instead, lawmakers went home in late June without passing a full budget.) Many emergency managers, including in Yancey County, operate in rural areas with small tax bases and skeleton staffs.

“There still has not been an outcry here for, How do we do things differently?” said state Sen. Julie Mayfield, a Democrat from Asheville. “It still feels like we’re very much in recovery mode.”

North Carolina’s emergency management agency commissioned a review of its handling of the disaster. The report found the state agency severely understaffed, but it didn’t examine issues such as evacuations or local emergency managers’ actions before Helene hit.

Erika Andresen also lives in Asheville, a mountain city in the heart of Helene’s destruction, where she helps businesses prepare for disasters. A lawyer and former Army judge advocate, she also teaches emergency management. After Helene, she was among the few voices in North Carolina criticizing the lack of evacuations and other inactions ahead of the storm.

“I knew right away, both from my instinct and from my experience, that a lot of things went terribly wrong,” Andresen said. When she got pushback against criticizing local authorities in a time of crisis, she countered, “We need accountability.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

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When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.”

Compared with other campuses, where protesters had ransacked buildings and hunkered down in encampments, George Mason had been relatively quiet over the past year, he said. His administration had taken extensive steps to improve relations with the Jewish community, had enacted strict rules on protests and had communicated all of that to the OCR during a previous antisemitism investigation that remained open.

By the next day, though, there were signs that the new investigation was part of a coordinated campaign to oust him.

One piece of evidence: the speed with which conservative news outlets reported on the OCR’s action, which hadn’t been publicly announced. The OCR letter was embedded in a July 2 article published by a right-wing news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon. The next day, the City Journal, published by the influential and conservative Manhattan Institute, ran an opinion essay headlined “George Mason University’s Disastrous President.” The article accused Washington, the university’s first Black president and a first-generation college graduate, of backing “racially discriminatory DEI programs” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and failing to address campus antisemitism. It concluded that “Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.”

The similarities to recent events at another public university in Virginia were hard to ignore. The OCR’s George Mason investigation was opened just four days after the University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, announced that he was resigning to help settle a federal probe into the university’s DEI commitments.

That happened after a group of conservative University of Virginia alumni, the Jefferson Council, published blog entries and newspaper ads decrying the president — in part for focusing too heavily on diversity efforts — and demanding that he resign. The council’s connections to board members and Justice Department lawyers led many observers in higher education to conclude that Ryan’s forced resignation was the result of a coordinated assault.

Now, Washington is feeling the same heat coming from similar sources.

The temperature cranked up several degrees Thursday morning, when the Education Department notified George Mason that it’s opening a second investigation — this one alleging the university illegally considers race in hiring and promoting employees. The department said it was acting on complaints from “multiple professors” at GMU.

In a press statement Thursday, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, suggested that the agency has already reached sweeping conclusions about the university’s hiring practices. “Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination — packaged as ‘anti-racism’ — was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” he wrote.

The university rebutted those accusations in a statement saying it is complying with all federal and state mandates and does not discriminate. The university “received a new Department of Education letter of investigation this morning as it was simultaneously released to news outlets, which is unprecedented in our experience,” the statement said. “As always, we will work in good faith to give a full and prompt response.”

Meanwhile, dozens of Jewish faculty members at GMU have signed on to a statement condemning “an attack on our university community and our GMU President that is quickly intensifying under a false, racially divisive, and deeply cynical claim of combating antisemitism.”

Even before Thursday’s announcement, Washington said he had detected a pattern that’s been playing out at other universities targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration: Multiple investigations are filed in quick succession and word leaks to news organizations.

“It seems like this is orchestrated,” Washington said during an interview Wednesday. “The same people who are kind of aligned that got rid of Jim Ryan are aligned against me.”

He finds the timing of the attacks against him and his university troubling.

“Given that the Office for Civil Rights doesn’t publicly announce who is under investigation, we were wondering how these conservative outlets even got the information in the first place,” Washington said. The “almost hateful discussions of me” in the City Journal article looked like “a concerted effort to try to paint the institution in a negative light.”

Washington said the piece seemed to be urging the Trump administration to take the investigation to the next level, the Department of Justice, which could levy punishments against the university.

Many faculty members at George Mason agree. They worry that despite the OCR’s insistence in its letter to the university that its investigation will be unbiased, the Trump administration has already reached a verdict on the institution’s president and wants him out. As evidence, they point to a web of ties between right-wing news organizations and politicians — including Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin — as well as some George Mason board members.

“The same unfounded and coordinated attacks that pushed Ryan out of UVa are now being leveled at GMU President Greg Washington,” the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in an online post. “We think the DOJ, Governor Youngkin, and Youngkin’s appointees” to GMU’s governing board “are trying to force President Washington out so they can hire an ideological ally who will impose the Governor’s political ideologies on Mason’s governance and curriculum.”

Late Wednesday, Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, doubled down on those warnings, publishing an opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch saying that the Trump administration “appears to be eyeing its next target” with George Mason’s president.

“The accusations — which are pushed by bloggers with ties to ultra-conservative groups with histories of false claims about Mason and advocacy for the removal of university presidents — are eerily similar to those lodged against Ryan,” they wrote. “They include vague and politically charged accusations centered around ‘DEI’ and suggestions that the university’s administration has been insufficiently responsive to concerns raised by Jewish students about their safety on campus. That’s despite the fact that the university’s leaders have repeatedly and publicly condemned antisemitism and actually been praised by the local Jewish Relations Council and campus Hillel for their leadership and commitment to Jewish members of Mason’s community.”

The education department’s July 1 letter notified George Mason that it was investigating a complaint, filed in June, that Jewish students and faculty members faced a hostile environment at the Virginia university between October 2023 and the end of the 2024-2025 academic year. It gave the university until July 21 to turn over voluminous information about its response to antisemitism complaints.

It also assured the university it would take a neutral stance in evaluating the information.

Warner and Kaine are skeptical that the investigation will be fair and impartial: In their opinion piece, they said it’s more likely “to serve as yet another smokescreen to punish universities and leaders who don’t align with their ideological goals.”

Some George Mason faculty members share these concerns.

“When you start seeing these hit pieces come out one after another in a matter of days, you know it’s coordinated,” Bethany L. Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development, said in an interview.

Indeed, higher education leaders have accused the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which officially oversees investigations by several federal agencies, of ignoring procedures intended to provide due process, racing toward predetermined results, and then punishing universities by stripping them of billions of research dollars.

Washington’s critics have ties to right-wing advocates of eliminating diversity efforts and other examples of what they see as higher education’s “woke” policies. The author of the essay calling Washington a “disastrous” president, Ian Kingsbury, has co-published articles promoting conservative causes with Jay P. Greene, a senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation. Christopher F. Rufo, one of the nation’s most aggressive and influential opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, is among the contributing editors at City Journal.

Such critics are well represented in George Mason’s leadership as well.

Youngkin, the governor, appointed most of GMU’s governing board, known as the board of visitors. The university’s general counsel, Anne Gentry, is married to a longtime conservative activist and executive with the Koch Foundation, Letiecq pointed out. “At Mason, the foxes are in the henhouse,” she said. “It’s an inside job.”

Letiecq worries that Youngkin might exert the same kind of influence that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a fellow Republican, has in trying to reshape higher education to fit a conservative playbook. Neither Youngkin nor the board of visitors immediately responded to requests for comment.

“I have suspected that Youngkin, in his quest for political capital, has been following the DeSantis playbook and sees Mason as a potential New College that they can take over and take down,” she said. New College of Florida, once a progressive institution, underwent substantial changes to its curriculum and staff beginning in 2023 when DeSantis stacked its board with conservative members.

Neither Kingsbury, the author of the City Journal piece, nor the Department of Education responded to inquiries about the patterns Washington saw. Eliana Johnson, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, said in a statement that “our reporting speaks for itself.” City Journal did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington defended his record in a public statement on July 3. “As we prepare a response to the complaint, it is important that we all have an accurate understanding of how safe and welcoming the George Mason community is, particularly as we prepare to welcome tens of thousands of students to campus in just a few short weeks,” he wrote.

“George Mason has not been marred by the sort of violence that has rocked so many other campuses elsewhere in Virginia and around the nation following the Hamas attacks of 2023. It is a distinction we are proud of, and work hard each day to maintain.”

In 11 messages that were sent to the campus community detailing the university’s responses to the Hamas attacks and that were shared with The Chronicle of Higher Education, his office denounced “craven acts of terrorism as we have seen in Israel,” urged “civil discourse, understanding, and peaceable assembly” on campus and denounced the “disgusting behavior” of those who were attempting to distribute antisemitic leaflets. University leaders coordinated with law enforcement to respond to two violent antisemitic actions.

It’s been more than a year since the last campus demonstration related to Gaza, Washington said. That protest remained safe and legal and did not disrupt university business. “No encampments have ever formed at George Mason, and we will not permit them in the future,” Washington said. The university was one of the first to introduce a comprehensive safety and well-being plan, which remains in effect.

“Our data continues to show that our environment has dramatically improved since the horrific Hamas attacks of 2023, so we are perplexed to be receiving this investigation at this time. Nevertheless, we will respond in a forthright, direct, and timely manner to this and any inquiry.”

In the 2023-2024 academic year, the university received 31 bias-incident reports based on antisemitism, according to Rose Pascarell, vice president for university life. Last year, that number dropped to 12.

Plus, she said, the university “responded fully” to a previous OCR complaint related to antisemitism — but never heard back from the government.

Letiecq said that, in her view, Washington has overreacted, not underreacted, to complaints of antisemitism, instituting restrictions on protests and punishments for protesters that she considers “oppressive.”

“This is an insatiable campaign on the right and it seems there’s nothing you can do to satisfy them,” she said.

George Mason, with more than 40,000 students, is the most racially diverse public research university in the state, university officials say. To comply with Trump’s executive orders, the university has repurposed its DEI office to focus on compliance and community. It has cut six positions, eliminated diversity training and expanded a program in constructive dialogue. All of those changes are outlined in a lengthy report to the board. Washington insists, though, that the university won’t abandon its commitments to the underlying principles its diversity efforts support.

“When you are a diverse institution, you have to operate from that diverse framework,” Washington said. “I don’t run away from that. I run toward it.”

DEI expenditures represent 0.1% of the university’s budget, GMU officials say.

Asked why he agreed to speak out publicly when so many presidents have stayed silent to avoid angering the administration, Washington said the attacks were too personal to avoid.

“My philosophy is: Sunlight is disinfectant. We’re going to be transparent with the community throughout the process,” including the back-and-forth with OCR, he said.

Washington says if the university is asked to make significant changes without a standard investigation and discussion of the facts, it will deal with that as necessary. “We will work in good faith to move through this,” Washington said. “We will know if we’re given due process by how they manage our particular case.”

Katherine Mangan is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Katherine Mangan, special to ProPublica.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said this week that the city has hired a full roster of prosecutors and is no longer dropping criminal charges due to short staffing. The announcement comes nine months after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported the mass dismissals.

“Public safety begins with accountability — and we cannot hold people accountable if we don’t have prosecutors in court,” LaFrance said in a news release, announcing that Alaska’s largest city has filled all “frontline” prosecutor jobs for the first time since 2020. “This was about more than filling positions. It was about rebuilding the systems that keep Anchorage safe.”

An investigation by the newsrooms, published in October, found that city prosecutors dropped hundreds of misdemeanor cases because there weren’t enough attorneys on the payroll. Between May 1 and Oct. 2 of last year, the city dropped more than 250 domestic violence assault cases and more than 270 drunken driving cases due to an inability to meet the 120-day deadline Alaska sets for upholding a defendant’s right to a speedy trial.

Days after the investigation came out, the state of Alaska announced it would help prosecute city cases to avoid speedy-trial dismissals.

But those state prosecutors are no longer needed. According to the city, the municipal prosecutor’s office now has a full staff of 12 “frontline” prosecutors who take cases to trial, plus a supervisor and an attorney who files motions and appeals. The only vacancy, they said, is a supervisory role: deputy municipal prosecutor.

That amounts to a vacancy rate of about 7% in the prosecutor’s office. In contrast, more than 40% of city prosecutor positions were vacant as of mid-2024, according to a city spokesperson.

At a Wednesday “trial call” hearing at downtown Anchorage’s Boney Courthouse, Assistant Municipal Prosecutor Andy Garbe announced the city was ready to go to trial in case after case, including a drunken driving arrest, weapons charges and domestic violence assaults. It was a far different scene from September, when prosecutors were routinely forced to drop charges in cases nearing the speedy-trial deadline.

“We’re not in the position we were last fall,” Garbe said, referring to the forced dismissals. “That’s not happening anymore.”

City prosecutors said they are still dismissing cases for reasons other than speedy-trial deadlines. For example, on Wednesday, Garbe moved to dismiss two cases, including a domestic violence assault, citing factors such as the weakness of the case and unavailable witnesses. A defense attorney had warned the cases were nearing the 120-day speedy-trial deadline, but Garbe said the timing was not the reason for the dismissals.

In Anchorage, city prosecutors handle misdemeanor cases while state attorneys generally prosecute felonies.

With the most serious felonies, the state has long dealt with problems apart from Anchorage’s mass dismissals. The newsrooms reported in January that some of those cases are delayed as long as a decade before reaching trial. In March, the Alaska Supreme Court issued a series of orders aimed at reducing delays.

District Court Judge Brian Clark cited the Supreme Court orders on Wednesday when asking attorneys if they were ready to go to trial, noting the pending deadline.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News.

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Texas health officials are overhauling a program designed to steer people away from abortion following a ProPublica and CBS News investigation that found that the state had funneled tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into the effort while providing little oversight of the spending.

The money has been flowing to a network of nonprofit organizations that are part of Thriving Texas Families, a state program that supports parenting and adoption as alternatives to abortion and provides counseling, material assistance and other services. Most of the groups operate as crisis pregnancy centers, or pregnancy resource centers, which often resemble medical clinics but are frequently criticized for offering little or no actual health care and misleading women about their options.

In its 20 years of existence, the program’s funding has grown fortyfold — reaching $100 million a year starting Sept. 1 — making it the most heavily funded effort of its kind in the country.

Under new rules set to take effect then, the organizations in the program must now document all of their expenses, and they will be reimbursed only for costs tied to services approved by the state. And they cannot seek reimbursement when they redistribute donated items, an effort to prevent taxpayer money from going to organizations for goods they got for free.

Meanwhile, Texas is opening administration of the program to a competitive selection process instead of automatically renewing agreements with contractors, including one contractor that has overseen most of the program for nearly two decades.

The changes address failures uncovered a year ago by the ProPublica/CBS News investigation. As Thriving Texas Families currently operates, most providers are paid a flat rate for each service they claim to provide, regardless of the actual cost of that service. As a result, a single client visit can generate multiple stacked charges, significantly increasing the amount of public money being spent. In some cases, providers billed separately for each item or service given to a client — such as diapers, baby clothes, blankets, wipes, snacks and even educational pamphlets — according to records reviewed by ProPublica and CBS News.

That arrangement allowed organizations to bill the state for more than the services actually cost to provide — and keep the difference. One group, Sealy Pregnancy Resource Center, more than quintupled its assets in three years by banking some reimbursements. Its executive director, Patricia Penner, acknowledged the practice, saying her goal was “to make sure we have enough for this center to continue and to continue for the years to come.”

“There’s no guarantee the funds we receive is going to be sufficient to keep the center going,” Penner added, “and it’s my duty as a director to ensure we are taking whatever service funds we are receiving to ensure we can take care of these young ladies when they come in the door.”

Two others, McAllen Pregnancy Center and Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend in Corpus Christi, used reimbursements to finance real estate deals. The McAllen center, which receives nearly all its revenue from the state, bought a building that had previously housed an abortion clinic. The Coastal Bend center openly acknowledged using state funds to buy land for a new facility. The centers did not respond to questions.

In San Antonio, Thriving Texas Families cut off funding to a pregnancy center known as A New Life for a New Generation after a local news outlet reported it had spent taxpayer money on vacations, on a motorcycle and to fund a smoke shop business owned by its president and CEO. The center did not respond to a request for comment.

ProPublica and CBS News also found that state health officials had no visibility into what services were being delivered or whether they were reaching the people most in need. In many cases, the state reimbursed providers $14 each time they handed out donated goods or materials, regardless of their cost or how they got them.

That included distributing pamphlets on parenting, fetal development and adoption, which could trigger the same reimbursement as providing tangible aid like diapers or formula. The state could not say exactly how much it had spent on these materials because it did not track what was being distributed.

State-approved pamphlets and lessons reviewed by a reporter stated inaccuracies — such as that a fetal heartbeat starts 21 days after conception — and painted single motherhood as risky and lonely, with marriage or adoption as better options.

While flat-rate reimbursement is sometimes used in government contracting, nonprofit and accounting experts said applying it to the distribution of donated goods — without clear standards for quantity or value — was highly irregular.

Officials with the state Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees Thriving Texas Families, did not say what prompted the policy shift, only that it was following guidance from the state comptroller. That guidance recommends awarding state grants as reimbursements for actual expenses.

The state has long allowed its main contractor, Texas Pregnancy Care Network, to handle most of the program’s oversight. The network told the news organizations last year that once state funds were passed to subcontractors, “it is no longer taxpayer money” and those groups were free to spend it as they saw fit. HHSC pushed back against the network, saying it still considered the money to be taxpayer dollars and expected it to be used in line with state guidelines.

The shift to a cost-reimbursement model appears to bring the program more in line with how public money is typically distributed across state agencies in Texas.

Texas Pregnancy Care Network, which in recent years has received nearly 75% of the Thriving Texas Families funding and distributed it to dozens of crisis pregnancy centers, faith-based groups and other charities that serve as subcontractors, did not respond to questions about how it plans to approach the new contract or adapt to the stricter reimbursement rules.

State Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin and a vocal critic of the state’s support for anti-abortion programs, said in an interview that while she opposes taxpayer support for anti-abortion programs, she sees the new rules as a step in the right direction.

But with the new reimbursement requirements in place, Howard questioned whether many of the centers would even be able to make use of the funding. Unlike the previous flat-fee system, providers must now track costs, document services and submit receipts to justify their spending. “Who knows if they can actually use the funds now that they have to show receipts,” she said.

By requiring pregnancy centers to track clients’ income, education level and employment — and to provide clients with information about public benefits available to them — the state is moving away from a system that allowed nonprofits to collect funds without regard for who was receiving help.

Pregnancy resource centers and anti-abortion activists lobbied Republican lawmakers to block the policy change during the most recent legislative session, and some publicly denounced it.

On the social media platform X, Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from the northern Dallas suburbs, urged the agency to “not give veto power” over the program “to biased media reporters.” Leach did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview, Texas Right to Life President John Seago warned that the new reimbursement model would discourage participation. He said it was “not worth small providers getting into the program because of all the red tape.”

And in written testimony, Penner, from Sealy, implored legislators to preserve the current model, saying it allowed her team “to focus on serving our clients rather than staffing up in order to handle the paperwork” required for reimbursement.

Despite the pushback, lawmakers did not take action to block the new rules.

Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University, said switching to a cost-reimbursement system could help prevent waste by making sure organizations only get paid for what they actually spend.

But she warned that this model has its own risks. Since providers know they will be reimbursed, they might not be as careful about keeping costs down — or could even inflate their expenses to get more money. She pointed to Medicare, which used a similar system in the past but abandoned it after costs spiraled out of control.

To avoid the same problem, she said, the program will need strong public oversight to make sure organizations aren’t overspending just because they know the state will cover the bill.

One reproductive health policy specialist who has closely tracked Texas’ spending on crisis pregnancy centers cautioned that the reforms do little to address the broader gaps in the state’s social safety net.

“You can’t really make up for a lack of Medicaid health insurance for the very poor in Texas by giving people educational services, pamphlets and diapers,” said Laura Dixon, a researcher with Resound Research for Reproductive Health, based in Austin.

But at the very least, she said, “understanding where money is going is a really good first step for this program.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Cassandra Jaramillo and Jeremy Kohler.

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On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.

Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.

We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.

The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.

There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”

That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.

The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.

What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.

Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.

Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Abrahm Lustgarten.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main, a 2022-2023 LRN partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

In January, Katie Clark’s one-bedroom rental of more than 15 years, and nearly everything inside, was incinerated by Los Angeles County’s Eaton fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in California history. For her troubles, she received a one-time payment of $770 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she used to replace clothes, food and a crate for her dog. While it was only a fraction of what she needed, the money was at least available while she waited for other funding.

As an organizer with the Altadena Tenants Union who has been helping renters with their FEMA applications, Clark knows just how common her experience has been for fire survivors. She believes federal and local agencies severely underestimated the need and cost of housing for the 150,000 people displaced by the fires, leaving many still struggling to recover. A FEMA spokesperson denied the accusation, saying the agency’s “ongoing assessments indicate that the current Rental Assistance program is effectively meeting the housing needs of survivors eligible for FEMA assistance.”

The disaster response “has been so shockingly bad,” Clark said, but she recognizes that without FEMA’s help in responding to fires that killed at least 30 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, “it could have been so, so, so much worse.”

“We would have seen a whole lot more people left to their own devices. And what that would mean is homelessness. It would mean people just abandoned,” Clark said.

Even before President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom squared off over Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to quell immigration protests, before Newsom likened Trump to a dictator and Trump endorsed the idea of arresting the governor, the question of how much California could continue to rely on FEMA was front and center.

It’s a critical question in a state — with its earthquakes, wildfires, floods, drought and extreme heat — that frequently suffers some of the costliest disasters in the country.

Since Trump’s inauguration, his administration has floated sweeping proposals that would slash FEMA dollars and make disasters harder to declare. This has left both blue and red states wrestling with scenarios in which they must pay for what FEMA will not. States have long counted on FEMA to cover at least 75% of declared major disaster response and recovery costs.

In just the past few months, FEMA has denied federal assistance for devastating floods in West Virginia and a destructive windstorm in Washington. The agency approved such funding for deadly tornadoes in Arkansas after Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appealed an initial denial and personally begged the president for help.

Last month, ProPublica reported that FEMA missed a May deadline to open the application process for many grants, including funding that states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. The delay, which the agency has not explained, appears to have little precedent.

In California, Trump has cast doubt on whether he will approve the $40 billion Newsom has requested to help pay for recovery costs associated with the fires, including $16.8 billion from FEMA to rebuild property, infrastructure and remove debris. That’s on top of the almost $140 million the agency has already provided to individual survivors.

The president told reporters last month that states need to be weaned off FEMA and that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid after hurricane season ends in November.

The questions now are: How much will be approved? Will it be enough? And, if not, what then?

A FEMA spokesperson did not directly respond to questions from Capital & Main about anticipated funding cuts and potential impacts on state and local communities, but said the agency “asserts that disasters are best managed when they’re federally supported, state managed and locally executed.”

The uncertainty makes it “very hard” to plan, said Heather Gonzalez, principal fiscal and policy analyst for emergency services at California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. “The little bean-counters in the back are stressing out right now trying to figure out ‘what are we going to have to work with?’”

The recent “dust-ups” between Newsom and Trump, she said, have only underscored the unpredictability. For his part, Newsom said he prefers the “open hand” of cooperation over the “closed fist” of fighting when it comes to disaster response.

“Emergency preparedness and emergency planning, recovery and renewal — period, full stop — that should be nonpolitical,” he said on Monday, which marked six months since the fires.

Since at least the 1980s, California has endured a rapidly growing number of billion-dollar disasters, with 18 occurring between 2015 and 2024 alone.

As the frequency and severity of California’s disasters increase, so too does its reliance on federal assistance to respond. In the aftermath of January’s Eaton and Palisades fires — the second and third most destructive wildfires in California history, respectively — FEMA has already provided $139 million for everything from home repair costs to medical expenses, and the agency “has allocated billions of dollars for debris removal,” according to a FEMA spokesperson. Over 5,000 properties have already been cleared of ash and fire debris.

Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management Communications Director Emily Montanez said recovery efforts for the fires likely won’t be complete for many years and are heavily dependent on FEMA.

“After the Northridge earthquake in 1994, FEMA had field offices here for 28 years,” Montanez said. “We see this as being no different. This was way more devastation, way more impact. So this could be years, definitely decades.”

While Montanez acknowledged that potential “gaps” in disaster response efforts leave some survivors without sufficient resources, she said that the recent operations coordinated between FEMA and local agencies in Los Angeles have mostly been efficient and successful.

FEMA’s federal assistance supplements California’s own disaster response and mitigation resources like those allocated to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which was allotted $4.4 billion in the May revision of the state’s 2025-26 budget. When the office’s funding does not cover all disaster costs, California can also pull from a number of its reserves, including the Budget Stabilization Account and Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties.

Newsom told Capital & Main on Monday that the state has increased its discretionary reserves as a direct consequence of Trump’s ongoing threats to FEMA, though he admitted that even that increased investment wouldn’t make up for the potential loss in federal funding.

California “can’t backfill the elimination of FEMA,” Newsom said. “There’s no state in America [that can], even the most endowed state — $4.1 trillion a year economy — largest in the nation, fourth largest in the world.”

And California’s $12 billion budget deficit will make backfilling the office’s shortfall especially difficult the next time a major disaster strikes, according to Laurie Schoeman, senior adviser on climate resilience to former President Joe Biden.

That will be made even harder if the still-unfinalized proposals outlined in an internal FEMA memo are implemented, according to Schoeman. One of the reforms floated in the memo caps the proportion of recovery costs covered by the federal government at the current baseline of 75%. Under current rules, the president can increase FEMA’s cost share up to 100%, as Biden did for the Los Angeles fires less than two weeks before he left office.

Another proposal quadruples the amount of damage that needs to be suffered in a disaster before FEMA awards any public assistance grants for infrastructure repair and debris removal. That would hike California’s damage threshold from roughly $75 million to nearly $300 million per disaster.

Had just that second reform been in place between 2008 and 2024, California would have received 26% less in public assistance funding from FEMA, a loss of nearly $2 billion, according to a May analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Such reduced funding during future events would cause an “apocalyptic scenario” where California communities would struggle to afford the cost of running shelters and paying for emergency responders to rescue disaster victims, according to Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow in the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Yet already, significant damage has been done, Schoeman said.

In April, the Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, a FEMA initiative dedicated to funding disaster-preparedness projects. Over $880 million in federal funding was rescinded, including a $35 million grant in California’s Napa County largely dedicated to wildfire prevention work. The administration declined to respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment, referring questions to FEMA. An agency spokesperson said that its approach to disaster preparedness mirrors that of disaster response: FEMA will play a supporting role.

“All types of preparedness start with families, individuals and local and state officials ahead of any emergency and disaster,” a statement from the agency said.

The rescinded federal funding risks undermining communities’ abilities to protect against future disasters, Schoeman said, and undoes work accomplished under Trump’s first term.

“They’re just cutting these projects even though they have proven benefit cost analyses in place,” Schoeman said. “The BRIC program was started under the Trump administration … so it feels like the administration is going to cut their own leg off.”

Clark said she is already struggling to get help. She said her insurance provider has so far withheld over $25,000 due to disagreements over whether her transitional housing qualifies as temporary, and her applications for additional FEMA assistance have been denied due to her technically being insured. Some wealthier survivors had “the insulation and resiliency that economic resources give you,” while others had to depend on nonprofits or the kind of government assistance that is now at risk to afford transitional housing.

“If you don’t have those economic resources, your only option is to turn to either philanthropy or the state,” Clark said. “If neither of those are available, then tough luck.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Lindenfeld, Capital & Main.

ProPublica announced on Tuesday that Chris Alcantara has joined the graphics team as a graphics editor. In this role, Alcantara will develop, design and build charts, maps, data visualizations and visual stories.

Alcantara comes to ProPublica from The Washington Post, where he was a graphics reporter for almost 10 years and published ambitious data visualizations and interactives that covered a range of national and world news. He also built reporting tools and programs that helped collect and analyze data, as well as led production of data pipelines for the U.S. presidential and midterm elections and the Olympic Games.

Before the Post, Alcantara was an interactive news developer at the Miami Herald, where he created interactive stories and data-driven graphics, as part of a three-person visuals team, and contributed data reporting to the newspaper’s investigations team.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Chris to the graphics team,” said Lena Groeger, graphics director. “Chris brings over a decade of experience creating data visualizations that clarify complex topics and reveal important findings through visual storytelling. We can’t wait to get started.”

“ProPublica does valuable work,” Alcantara said, “and I’m grateful for the opportunity to join the team and eager to contribute visual storytelling to the newsroom’s investigations.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by ProPublica.

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On Monday, June 23, a crowd of about 2,000 people surrounded the Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet had come for a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association. “Not for sale!” the crowd boomed. “Not one acre!” There were ranchers and writers in attendance, as well as employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, all of whom use public land to hike, hunt and fish. Inside the hotel ballroom where the governors had gathered, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the New Mexico governor, apologized for the noise but not the message. “New Mexicans are really loud,” she said.

On the street, one sign read “Defend Public Lands,” with an image of an assault rifle. Others bore creative and bilingual profanities directed at Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees most of the country’s public acreage, and Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, who on June 11 had proposed a large-scale selloff of public lands. Lee, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was not in Santa Fe, so the crowd focused on Burgum, who earlier that afternoon had addressed the governors about energy dominance and artificial intelligence. “Show your face!” the crowd chanted. But he had already departed the hotel through a back door. That night, a hunting group projected an image of him on the exterior wall of the hotel. “Burgled by Burgum,” it read.

In the weeks before the meeting, the possibility of selling off large swaths of public lands had seemed as likely as at any time since the Reagan administration. On June 11, Lee had introduced an amendment to the megabill Congress was debating to reconcile the national budget. The amendment mandated the sale of up to 3 million acres of land controlled by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, with the vast majority of proceeds going to pay for tax cuts. Although Lee had framed his measure as a solution to the West’s acute lack of affordable housing, it would have allowed developers to select the land they most desired. Under the amendment’s original language, the ultimate power to nominate parcels for sale fell to Burgum and Brooke Rollins, head of the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service.

In the days after the Santa Fe protest, the outcry from hunting and outdoor recreation groups escalated across the West and the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s amendment violated the chamber’s rules. Republican lawmakers from Montana opposed the amendment; Burgum also distanced himself from it. (“It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill,” he told a reporter on June 26.)

By the time Burgum made his comments, Lee’s effort seemed doomed, and days later he announced that he was removing the amendment; public land advocates celebrated. “This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners,” wrote Patrick Berry, the president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. But the celebration may have been premature. In a social media post announcing his decision, Lee indicated that he would revisit the issue: “I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land,” he wrote. And powerful forces still support privatization. At the Santa Fe gathering, Rollins had been asked during a press conference about the effort to sell federal land. She told reporters she wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Lee’s amendment but supported his broader vision and suggested such efforts will continue regardless of the fate of the amendment. “Half of the land in the West is owned by the federal government,” said Rollins. “Is that really the right solution for the American people?”

The circumstances that led to Lee’s proposal continue to simmer. The American West has an acute lack of affordable and attainable housing. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Colorado, with a population of 6 million, is lacking 175,000 rental units for people who earn up to 50% of area median income. New Mexico, which has one-third of Colorado’s population, is lacking 52,000 such rentals; Utah, 61,000. But nowhere is the issue as acute as in Nevada, where Las Vegas and Reno are encircled by public land. The state of 3.27 million is estimated to lack 118,000 such rentals.

The lack of housing emerged as a lever for Lee, who has sought to challenge federal control of public lands since he was first elected to the Senate in 2010. A year after winning his seat, he introduced a bill to sell a limited amount of public land, saying, “There is no critical need for the federal government to hold onto it.” In 2013, he and others in his state’s delegation wrote a letter demanding the transfer of federal lands to Utah and angrily accusing the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres nationwide, of “obvious abuse.” And in a 2018 address at a think tank, he compared federal land managers — and people who recreate on public acreage — to feudal lords, ruling from far-off kingdoms on the coasts. He also denounced “elite publications” that advocated for the protection of public lands, and he used the language of political war to describe the conflict over federal land: “It will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” (Lee’s office did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.)

But this spring, Lee found support from unlikely places: the coastal elites he previously railed against seemed open to some of his ideas. The arguments in favor of privatization and development use a word of the season: abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book of the same name argues that burdensome regulatory processes have crushed the American housing market. While the authors focus on increasing supply in urban areas, in April, The New York Times ran an op-ed calling for building housing on public lands. That same week, the Times Magazine, in a piece titled “Why America Should Sprawl,” framed outward growth, including through the sale of public lands, as all but inevitable. The American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, has estimated that the nation could build 3 million homes by opening federal land. In December, AEI leaders advocated for federal land sales in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, promising that disposal could “usher in housing abundance and prosperity.”

When pitching his land-sale bill, Lee adopted a more moderate tone than in years past, focusing squarely on housing. On June 20, he posted on X, “This is to help American families afford a home.” On June 23: “Housing prices are crushing families.” The next day: “This land must go to American families.”

But it’s challenging to build affordable housing on public land for a host of reasons, among them the high cost of infrastructure such as water pipelines and the cumbersome bureaucratic processes involving land agencies. But a primary obstacle is the price of that land itself: When it’s sold at market rate, it’s extremely difficult for developers to create affordable homes. “High land costs alone can kill an otherwise great affordable housing project,” said Waldon Swenson, vice president of corporate affairs for Nevada HAND, which builds affordable rental housing.

In fact, past public land sales have created very little affordable housing. There’s just one prominent test case, in Nevada, where a 1998 law enables the sale of federal land at market rate in the Las Vegas Valley and at steeply discounted prices throughout the state if it’s to be used for affordable housing. Though municipalities can buy BLM land at $100 per acre to create affordable housing, the law has so far created just about 850 affordable units on 30 acres of land. By contrast, the law’s market-value mechanism has enabled the sale of more than 17,000 acres of land at an average of more than $200,000 per acre. In March, the BLM sold 42 acres for $16.6 million. Meanwhile, according to a recent analysis, rents in Clark and Washoe counties have respectively risen by 56% and 47% since 2018.

Lee’s amendment did little to address these issues and lacked any definition of affordable or attainable housing. Furthermore, it allowed private developers to nominate parcels for sale — at market rate only. “It would be an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado law school. John Leshy, a former solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration and an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that the bill was “not a well-designed scheme to get more acres out there built with affordable houses.” Leshy, the author of “Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands,” added, “I think it is just a ploy to get your toe in the door to start selling off lots of federal land.”

Congress’ stance toward public land shifted as settlers moved westward, violently displacing tribal nations. During the homesteading era, the General Land Office — a precursor to the BLM — was tasked with disposing of federal lands to states. But in the late 19th century, states began to request that Congress set aside lands for national forests. As a condition of its statehood, in 1896 Utah relinquished any claim to ownership of “unappropriated public lands” — an acknowledgment that appears in its state Constitution. As the conservation movement took off in the early 20th century, lawmakers and presidents set aside more public land. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which codified the BLM’s role in stewarding lands and declared that they would remain public unless their sale served “the national interest.”

Lee has lamented the impact of those historic changes on Utah, where 42% of the state is BLM land, saying in a 2018 speech, “Manifest destiny had left us behind, in some respects.”

A movement in the 1970s tried to reverse those historical currents when Western ranchers and lawmakers calling themselves “Sagebrush Rebels” sought to claim federal lands for states. They found sympathetic ears in Washington, D.C.: Ronald Reagan, during a 1980 campaign stop in Salt Lake City, said, “Count me in as a rebel.” Once elected, he nominated as secretary of the Interior James Watt, an attorney who favored transfer of public lands to the states. Reagan also came to rely on an economic adviser named Steve H. Hanke, who arrived at the White House from Johns Hopkins University. Hanke was more strident about getting rid of public lands than Watt; he has written that public lands “represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system.”

Hanke helped drive an ambitious effort to dispose of national forests and grazing lands, and in 1982 the Interior Department announced plans to sell millions of acres — as much as 5% of the public estate — in order to reduce the national debt. Hanke later joined The Heritage Foundation, entrenching the idea of privatizing lands at the conservative think tank and predicting that Americans would come around to his way of thinking. Since then, the foundation has regularly advocated for selling public lands. (The foundation did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica.)

Lee is deeply tied into The Heritage Foundation, which he has called “a guiding light for generations.” In 2016, The Heritage Foundation suggested that Trump nominate Lee to the Supreme Court. Among Utah’s leadership, his positions on federal land are widely held. Last year, the state attorney general filed suit to the United States Supreme Court, seeking to seize 18.5 million acres of federal public land. The court declined to hear the case.

Public lands are popular, especially among hunters, hikers and off-roaders, and periodic efforts to sell them have incurred wrath. In 2017, Jason Chaffetz, the former Utah representative, retracted a disposal bill after a backlash. Last December, a survey of 500 Utah voters commissioned by the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust found that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans supported preserving national monuments in the state. In its preelection policy recommendation known as Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation called for the privatization of everything from public education, using school-choice programs, to Medicare, by automatically enrolling patients in insurer-run plans. But it notably didn’t call for the privatization of the public estate.

Instead, Lee has recently focused the debate on affordable housing. In 2022 and 2023, Lee introduced legislation to sell Western lands called the HOUSES Act. The bill was more prescriptive than his reconciliation amendment: It only allowed states and municipalities to nominate lands for disposal, rather than developers, and it required that 85% of nominated parcels be developed as residential housing, at a minimum of four homes per acre, or as parks. But like his amendment to the reconciliation bill, Lee’s HOUSES Act lacked a definition of affordable housing, and critics suggested that it would lead to the building of mansions. In both 2022 and 2023, when Lee reintroduced the bill, it did not pass out of committee.

But it caught the attention of Kevin Corinth, then the staff director on the Joint Economic Committee, which advises Congress on financial matters. After leaving the Capitol, Corinth joined the American Enterprise Institute, which began focusing on building housing on federal lands. This March, AEI held an event with powerful developers to discuss its ideas, which it called “Homesteading 2.0.” Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive who helps oversee AEI’s housing research, said during the event that the proposal “grew out of an effort that Sen. Lee undertook with the HOUSES Act.”

AEI advocates for dense development of single-family homes, but its ultimate vision remains opaque: The group has spoken of creating unregulated “freedom cities” far from existing infrastructure, and its proposals for 3 million houses seem ambitious. Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit group in Montana, published an analysis finding that existing public land could support less than 700,000 new homes; Nicholas Irwin, the research director for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Lied Center for Real Estate, said he found Headwaters’ numbers more convincing.

When I asked Pinto for a real-world example that illustrates his hopes for the West, he pointed to Summerlin, a planned community in Las Vegas, and Teravalis, a forthcoming development in Buckeye, Arizona, a rapidly expanding city at Phoenix’s edge. Both are owned by Howard Hughes Holdings, a developer based in Texas.

Housing in Summerlin is not easily attainable — its median home price approaches $700,000. Teravalis, meanwhile, was first proposed more than 20 years ago and has been beset by delays, in part due to ongoing litigation with the state, which claims that the developer has not proven that it can obtain a sufficient water supply. A spokesperson for Howard Hughes Holdings, which bought the development in 2021, wrote that the company is “working with local stakeholders around long-term water policy to support the full build out of Teravalis for more than 300,000 residents over several decades.”

Earlier this year, Pershing Square Holdings, which is controlled by the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, purchased $900 million of stock in the company. (Ackman, a prominent supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the executive chairman of Hughes’ board of directors. Through a spokesperson, he declined to comment for this article.)

Teravalis’ first lots sold for a steep $777,000 per acre without homes on them, and Hughes’ plans are for 2.8 dwellings per acre — less than a quarter of the figure that Pinto cited as ideal for naturally affordable housing. Hughes is currently planning a grand opening for November. The company did not say how much homes would cost, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The need for new housing in the Phoenix West Valley is urgent, and Teravalis will help meet that demand.”

When given the option, developers often pursue the profit margins of high-end housing. In 1998, Congress passed a law, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, that allows any of the state’s municipalities to request the sale of federal lands for affordable housing. (SNPLMA relies on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define affordable housing, which it says are units within reach of those making up to 80% of the area’s median income.) Still, to date, only about 900 acres have been set aside for affordable housing projects under the law — and only 30 of those acres have been developed into homes where low-income residents can actually live.

It’s unclear why so few affordable housing projects have been built at a time when they are so desperately needed. Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick attributed it to bureaucratic delays: “It’s taken a long time to get through the process with the BLM.” According to Maurice Page, executive director of the Nevada Housing Coalition, the average time the BLM takes to review projects has recently dropped — from between three and five years to one. Only at that point can a developer close a deal. Tina Frias, CEO of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, said such delays can be crippling.

In 2023, the BLM began selling Nevada land for affordable housing for $100 per acre. (Previous SNPLMA affordable housing sales had averaged nearly $35,000 per acre.) Still, local authorities have not requested the transfer of many parcels in recent years. According to the BLM, only three new affordable housing projects are moving toward approval.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “BLM Nevada can only offer land after it has been nominated by an eligible entity and BLM has confirmed that there are no encumbrances or restrictions on the parcel. In many cases, the restrictions referenced by stakeholders originate with the nominating entities themselves.”

SNPLMA’s affordable housing mechanism is also poorly understood. Alexis Hill, the chair of Washoe County’s board of commissioners, which includes Reno, told me she didn’t know whether the affordable housing provision applied there. (It does.) When I asked Biden’s former BLM director, Tracy Stone-Manning, who now leads The Wilderness Society, whether the $100-per-acre provision was applicable statewide, she said she did not know. Squillace, the Colorado law professor, also admitted he wasn’t sure how widely the provision applied.

Steve Aichroth, the administrator of the Nevada Housing Division, acknowledged a disconnect between agencies. His office is hiring an official to work with municipalities and the BLM. “If you came back to us in about a year we’d have better answers,” he said.

In the meantime, both of the state’s Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, have proposed legislation that would open federal acreage for housing and transfer it to trust land for tribal nations — while protecting other territory for conservation. The governor, Joe Lombardo, a Republican, recently signed a bill to invest $183 million of state money in developing housing for lower- and middle-class residents. Elsewhere in the West, New Mexico is leasing state lands to develop apartments. In Utah, the state housing office is encouraging cities to change zoning requirements to increase density; it is also using public funds to finance private developments and looking to build on state lands. Before Lee pulled his amendment, I spoke with Steve Waldrip, who directs housing strategy for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. During our conversation, Waldrip expressed concern that the hyperpoliticized debate around a broad federal land sell-off was hampering focused efforts to alleviate the region’s housing crisis. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve the affordability crisis,” he said.

But some continue to believe a simple solution exists. After Lee’s amendment died, I spoke with Pinto, who directs AEI’s efforts to push for housing on federal lands. He struck a conciliatory tone, given the political climate. (The sweeping GOP bill passed Thursday without Lee’s amendment.) At the moment, Pinto said, there doesn’t appear to be an easy route to sell large swaths of public land for development. “The path forward is to have a much more targeted approach.”

In Nevada, such a thing is already happening. Last year Clark County bought 20 acres from the BLM for $2,000, and the county’s plan is to turn that land into single-family houses for first-time homebuyers. This spring, a new affordable housing development opened in Las Vegas — an apartment complex for people 55 and older with rent starting at $573. The project was built by a developer called Ovation on former public land that was transferred through SNPLMA. It had taken a while — the deal was first proposed in February 2020. But recently, the pace of transfers has picked up. Ovation says it’s also working on a similar project in the city of Henderson. It was nominated for BLM approval last February and, according to Jess Molasky, the company’s chief operating officer, “We hope to be in the ground in the first quarter of next year.”

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Abe Streep.

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Inspectors charged with safeguarding America’s drug supply say they are reeling from deep cuts at the Food and Drug Administration despite promises by the Trump administration to preserve the work of the agency’s investigative force.

Dozens of people who help coordinate travel for complex inspections of foreign drug-making factories have been let go, and though some have since been rehired, inspectors said the ongoing strain of policing an industry spread across more than 90 countries has exhausted staff and could compromise the safety of medications used by millions of people.

For years, inspectors have uncovered dirty equipment, contaminated supplies and fraudulent testing records in some overseas factories — serious safety and quality breaches that can sicken or kill consumers. Last month, ProPublica reportedthat a generic immunosuppression drug for transplant patients could dissolve too quickly when ingested, increasing the risk of kidney failure. The drug was made at an Indian factory with a history of quality violations that wasbanned from the U.S. market. The company previously told ProPublica it believes the medication is safe.

In April, more than 3,500 FDA employees were laid off under U.S. Department and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a roughly 15% reduction in force. “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said.

At the time, the agency said the reductions would not impact inspectors. Kennedy has since announced that HHS would reverse 20% of the cuts across the agency. Amid news reports describing the layoffs at the FDA, Kennedy did not specify how many people would be reinstated.

ProPublica spoke to 10 current and former FDA staff members and leaders in recent weeks, including inspectors who said that the loss of support staff has slowed critical investigations and that little relief has materialized. Most declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly or feared backlash within the industry as they search for new jobs.

One veteran drug inspector said nearly 70 people who helped arrange travel, budgets, translators and contingency plans for investigations were laid off. Only about one-third have been brought back, forcing a handful of busy managers to coordinate travel clearances and visas for inspections that can span weeks and include stops in multiple countries.

“It’s difficult to get inspections done,” the investigator said. “The pace has slowed down. You can’t inspect as many sites.”

In an email, an HHS spokesperson said inspections have not been affected by downsizing. The agency did not address questions about how many people have been let go or reinstated or whether additional help will be brought on.

“To be clear, FDA inspectors were not impacted, and this critical work continues,” the agency said.

Two former FDA commissioners and the agency’s longtime head of drug safety, however, said that the loss of support staff has undermined one of the FDA’s most essential missions at a time when Americans get most of their generic drugs from overseas manufacturers. That includes chemotherapy treatments, sedatives, antibiotics and medications on hospital crash carts.

“It’s like saying, ‘Oh we didn’t fire any of the doctors or nurses at the hospital, but we fired all the lab techs, all the orderlies, all the phlebotomists … oh, but the doctors and nurses are still left so it’s fine,’” said Janet Woodcock, who ran the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research for more than two decades and retired in 2004. “A lot of the connective tissue that deals with drug safety and similar things are going to be missing.”

Beyond the staff cuts, the departures of some longtime investigators and leaders in recent months have left less experienced people tasked with rooting out dangerous and sometimes deceptive manufacturing practices.

The investigative unit, which looks into potential safety issues with drugs, vaccines, medical devices and other products, has had a retention problem for years. Inspectors leave so often that even with hiring blitzes, the FDA has been unable to get ahead.

Between 2022 and 2024, the agency hired 105 inspectors but about the same number left, leaving the inspection pool with about 230 people, according to the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress.

About one-third did not have the experience to conduct independent foreign inspections, the GAO found.

Two FDA inspectors said the agency needs an additional 100 to 200 experienced investigators to do the work.

The job can be grueling. Some inspectors who travel to overseas drug-making factories can be away for as long as 15 weeks a year. Some have described threats of violence by company managers, days on planes and trains in oppressive heat and long nights preparing inspection reports before they head to the next stop.

The loss of experienced investigators and cuts to support staff have also hamstrung other inspectors.

“I am in utter shock that they don’t support and promote those of us who can do a decent inspection,” said one investigator who scrutinizes factories that produce vaccines, cell therapies and other biological products. “You’re adding to the chaos.”

Dozens of employees who handled technology support, facilities, supplies and equipment were dismissed as well, snarling some day-to-day operations at the agency. One current employee recalled how a colleague couldn’t find replacement batteries for a computer mouse and how another locked herself out of her office and couldn’t get back in because there was no one to open the door.

Even before the layoffs, the FDA’s investigative force struggled to monitor drug-making factories in countries that include India and China, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, raising alarms in Congress that serious manufacturing lapses may have gone unchecked. The FDA received more than 1 million reports from doctors, patients and others in 2023 about product quality issues or consumers who had adverse reactions to drugs, FDA data shows.

“Things will be missed,” former FDA inspector Patrick Stone said about the layoffs. “We are going to have a lot less safe drugs.”

The Trump administration has said little about the layoffs in recent weeks, though Kennedy told Congress late last month that more than 900 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health had been reinstated.

The FDA announced in May that it would expand the use of unannounced inspections at overseas factories, a move that some members of Congress have been pushing for years. And FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that a new AI tool known as Elsa would help identify inspection targets.

Current and former employees others say that won’t make up for the losses.

“You can’t just expect the inspector to take care of all the complexities of organizing their trips overseas,” said former FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who served under the Obama administration. “Even though it might be said we’ve kept the inspectors, that doesn’t mean that they’ve kept the infrastructure … that actually supports safe and meaningful inspections.”

Brandon Roberts contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies, which typically employ dozens of people to represent them. But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.

Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

His lobbyists, who represented Tesla, SpaceX and the social media giant X Corp., spent tens of thousands of dollars on things like gifts and meals for Texas elected officials and others during the session, according to an analysis of state ethics data. In most cases, Texas transparency laws do not require lobbyists to disclose which politicians they wined and dined or on behalf of which clients.

The Texas Newsroom reached out to all 12 of Musk’s lobbyists registered with the state this session. Only one, Carrie Simmons, a lobbyist who counts Tesla among her clients, responded, but she declined to be interviewed. She said only Musk’s companies could comment on their work this session.

Emails sent to Musk’s companies and to Musk himself were not returned.

The Texas Newsroom was able to find hints of some of their actions in records obtained from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa. Other documents detailing their deeper connections are hidden from disclosure by state laws.

Ethics experts said the responsibility to improve transparency lies with Texas lawmakers. State law provides a “base level of transparency” for the public on who lobbyists are and who they represent, said Andrew Cates, a former lobbyist who wrote a guide on state ethics rules.

“Beyond that, the Legislature simply has not prioritized enough transparency in how the dollars are actually being spent on legislators on a regular basis. But that’s not the lobby’s fault, it’s the Legislature’s,” Cates said.

Tom Forbes, president of the Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, a statewide lobbyist organization, said while lobbyists sometimes get a bad rap, they play a critical role for lawmakers trying to make decisions on complex policies. He told The Texas Newsroom that his group is “agnostic” about making reporting requirements more stringent but will follow any changes the state implements.

“Our association is going to comply with whatever law the Legislature passes,” Forbes said.

Eight of Musk’s lobbyists worked for SpaceX, according to filings with the Ethics Commission. Tesla had four, one of whom also worked for X.

Musk’s lobbyists include former advisers and staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott, among them Mike Toomey and Reed Clay. Another lobbyist, Will McAdams, once sat on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electric, telecommunications, and water and sewer utilities.

All but one lobbyist had other clients for whom they were also working, making it more difficult to track exactly how much spending went to further Musk’s agenda. Benjamin Lancaster, a former legislative staffer, was only on SpaceX’s payroll.

Lobbyists are not required to report their exact salaries, only a pay range. According to Ethics Commission data, Musk pledged to pay somewhere between about $400,000 to nearly $1 million in total to his lobbyists for their work this year. Half of them could rake in more than $110,000 each working for Musk’s companies.

Each month, lobbyists report their total spending. But state rules don’t require them to disclose who was on the receiving end unless the lobbyist shelled out more than $132.60 on one person in a single day. This includes food and beverages, transportation, lodging or entertainment. Taxes and tips are not counted. The disclosure threshold for gifts is $110.

Lobbyists also don’t need to disclose exactly who attended events to which all legislators were invited, like catered lunches for the entire Texas House of Representatives or happy hours hosted off-site.

In practice, these rules mean a lobbyist could buy the same elected official a steak dinner every night. As long as the daily cost stays under that amount, they don’t need to say who got the free meal.

Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.

Jim Clancy, the former chair of the Ethics Commission, said it’s common for multiple lobbyists to divide a single bill in order to stay below the reporting threshold.

“They have 15 different credit cards in the deal to make sure that it’s all below the limit,” Clancy told The Texas Newsroom. “The Legislature has to change it. And if they did, they wouldn’t get to eat for free.”

A slate of ethics bills, including several to require transparency into who funds mass text messages for political campaigns, failed to become law this year, according to The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, legislators approved a new law that will reduce the fine for former lawmakers who engage in illegal lobbying activity.

While lobbyists are not required to disclose which bills they discuss in private meetings with officials and their staff, they must note their position if they choose to testify on a piece of legislation. This is how The Texas Newsroom identified the 13 bills on which Musk’s lobbyists took a public stance.

The Texas Newsroom was able to glean some additional insight on lobbyist influence from records received through public information requests.

Calendars for Hinojosa, a newly elected South Texas Republican who authored multiple bills that would benefit SpaceX and other aerospace companies, showed he or his staff had meetings scheduled with lobbyists or representatives from Musk’s rocket company at least three times in two months. Emails showed Patrick penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting SpaceX’s ability to increase the number of launches at its South Texas rocket site.

Patrick was also invited to take a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Austin, these records showed, but it’s unclear if he went.

Neither Hinojosa nor Patrick responded to requests for an interview.

The Texas Senate declined to release other documents that could have shed light on how Musk’s companies interacted with elected officials. In denying their release, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said communications between state lawmakers and Texas residents are “confidential by law.”

The reason, she said, is “to ensure the right of citizens of the state to petition their state government without fear of harassment, retaliation or public ridicule.”

This could include emails with lobbyists.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

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 Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies, which typically employ dozens of people to represent them. But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.

Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

His lobbyists, who represented Tesla, SpaceX and the social media giant X Corp., spent tens of thousands of dollars on things like gifts and meals for Texas elected officials and others during the session, according to an analysis of state ethics data. In most cases, Texas transparency laws do not require lobbyists to disclose which politicians they wined and dined or on behalf of which clients.

The Texas Newsroom reached out to all 12 of Musk’s lobbyists registered with the state this session. Only one, Carrie Simmons, a lobbyist who counts Tesla among her clients, responded, but she declined to be interviewed. She said only Musk’s companies could comment on their work this session.

Emails sent to Musk’s companies and to Musk himself were not returned.

The Texas Newsroom was able to find hints of some of their actions in records obtained from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa. Other documents detailing their deeper connections are hidden from disclosure by state laws.

Ethics experts said the responsibility to improve transparency lies with Texas lawmakers. State law provides a “base level of transparency” for the public on who lobbyists are and who they represent, said Andrew Cates, a former lobbyist who wrote a guide on state ethics rules.

“Beyond that, the Legislature simply has not prioritized enough transparency in how the dollars are actually being spent on legislators on a regular basis. But that’s not the lobby’s fault, it’s the Legislature’s,” Cates said.

Tom Forbes, president of the Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, a statewide lobbyist organization, said while lobbyists sometimes get a bad rap, they play a critical role for lawmakers trying to make decisions on complex policies. He told The Texas Newsroom that his group is “agnostic” about making reporting requirements more stringent but will follow any changes the state implements.

“Our association is going to comply with whatever law the Legislature passes,” Forbes said.

Eight of Musk’s lobbyists worked for SpaceX, according to filings with the Ethics Commission. Tesla had four, one of whom also worked for X.

Musk’s lobbyists include former advisers and staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott, among them Mike Toomey and Reed Clay. Another lobbyist, Will McAdams, once sat on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electric, telecommunications, and water and sewer utilities.

All but one lobbyist had other clients for whom they were also working, making it more difficult to track exactly how much spending went to further Musk’s agenda. Benjamin Lancaster, a former legislative staffer, was only on SpaceX’s payroll.

Lobbyists are not required to report their exact salaries, only a pay range. According to Ethics Commission data, Musk pledged to pay somewhere between about $400,000 to nearly $1 million in total to his lobbyists for their work this year. Half of them could rake in more than $110,000 each working for Musk’s companies.

Each month, lobbyists report their total spending. But state rules don’t require them to disclose who was on the receiving end unless the lobbyist shelled out more than $132.60 on one person in a single day. This includes food and beverages, transportation, lodging or entertainment. Taxes and tips are not counted. The disclosure threshold for gifts is $110.

Lobbyists also don’t need to disclose exactly who attended events to which all legislators were invited, like catered lunches for the entire Texas House of Representatives or happy hours hosted off-site.

In practice, these rules mean a lobbyist could buy the same elected official a steak dinner every night. As long as the daily cost stays under that amount, they don’t need to say who got the free meal.

Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.

Jim Clancy, the former chair of the Ethics Commission, said it’s common for multiple lobbyists to divide a single bill in order to stay below the reporting threshold.

“They have 15 different credit cards in the deal to make sure that it’s all below the limit,” Clancy told The Texas Newsroom. “The Legislature has to change it. And if they did, they wouldn’t get to eat for free.”

A slate of ethics bills, including several to require transparency into who funds mass text messages for political campaigns, failed to become law this year, according to The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, legislators approved a new law that will reduce the fine for former lawmakers who engage in illegal lobbying activity.

While lobbyists are not required to disclose which bills they discuss in private meetings with officials and their staff, they must note their position if they choose to testify on a piece of legislation. This is how The Texas Newsroom identified the 13 bills on which Musk’s lobbyists took a public stance.

The Texas Newsroom was able to glean some additional insight on lobbyist influence from records received through public information requests.

Calendars for Hinojosa, a newly elected South Texas Republican who authored multiple bills that would benefit SpaceX and other aerospace companies, showed he or his staff had meetings scheduled with lobbyists or representatives from Musk’s rocket company at least three times in two months. Emails showed Patrick penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting SpaceX’s ability to increase the number of launches at its South Texas rocket site.

Patrick was also invited to take a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Austin, these records showed, but it’s unclear if he went.

Neither Hinojosa nor Patrick responded to requests for an interview.

The Texas Senate declined to release other documents that could have shed light on how Musk’s companies interacted with elected officials. In denying their release, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said communications between state lawmakers and Texas residents are “confidential by law.”

The reason, she said, is “to ensure the right of citizens of the state to petition their state government without fear of harassment, retaliation or public ridicule.”

This could include emails with lobbyists.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

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One summer day in 2017, a front-page story in the StarNews of Wilmington, North Carolina, shook up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The drinking water system, it said, was polluted with a contaminant commonly known as GenX, part of the family of “forever” PFAS chemicals.

It came from a Chemours plant in Fayetteville, near the winding Cape Fear River. Few knew about the contaminated water until the article described the discoveries of scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency and a state university. Given that certain types of PFAS have been linked to cancer, there was widespread anxiety over its potential danger.

In the onslaught of legal action and activism that followed, the EPA during President Donald Trump’s first term took an assertive stance, vowing to combat the spread of PFAS nationwide.

In its big-picture PFAS action plan from 2019, the agency said it would attack this complex problem on multiple fronts. It would, for example, consider limiting the presence of two of the best-known compounds — PFOA and PFOS — in drinking water. And, it said, it would find out more about the potential harm of GenX, which was virtually unregulated.

By the time Trump was sworn in for his second term, many of the plan’s suggestions had been put in place. After his first administration said PFOA and PFOS in drinking water should be regulated, standards were finalized under President Joe Biden. Four other types of PFAS, including GenX, were also tagged with limits.

But now, the second Trump administration is pulling back. The EPA said in May that it will delay enforcement on the drinking water limits for PFOA and PFOS until 2031, and it will rescind and reconsider the limits on the other four. Among those who challenged the standards in court is Chemours, which has argued that the EPA, under Biden, “used flawed science and didn’t follow proper rulemaking procedures” for GenX.

These EPA decisions under Trump are part of a slew of delays and course changes to PFAS policies that had been supported in his first term. Even though his earlier EPA pursued a measure that would help hold polluters accountable for cleaning up PFAS, the EPA of his second term has not yet committed to it. The agency also slowed down a process for finding out how industries have used the chemicals, a step prompted by a law signed by Trump in 2019.

At the same time, the EPA is hampering its ability to research pollutants — the kind of research that made it possible for its own scientists to investigate GenX. As the Trump administration seeks severe reductions in the EPA’s budget, the agency has terminated grants for PFAS studies and paralyzed its scientists with spending restrictions.

Pointing to earlier announcements on its approach to the chemicals, the EPA told ProPublica that it’s “committed to addressing PFAS in drinking water and ensuring that regulations issued under the Safe Drinking Water Act follow the law, follow the science, and can be implemented by water systems to strengthen public health protections.”

“If anything,” the agency added, “the Trump administration’s historic PFAS plan in 2019 laid the groundwork for the first steps to comprehensively address this contamination across media and we will continue to do so this term.”

In public appearances, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has pushed back on the suggestion that his agency weakened the drinking water limits on GenX and similar compounds. Future regulations imposed by his agency, he said, could be more or less stringent.

“What we want to do is follow the science, period,” he has said.

That sentiment perplexes scientists and environmental advocates, who say there is already persuasive evidence on the dangers of these chemicals that linger in the environment. The EPA reviewed GenX, for example, during both the first Trump and Biden administrations. In both 2018 and 2021, the agency pointed to animal studies linking it to cancer, as well as problems with kidneys, immune systems and, especially, livers. (Chemours has argued that certain animal studies have limited relevance to humans.)

Scientists and advocates also said it’s unclear what it means for the EPA to follow the science while diminishing its own ability to conduct research.

“I don’t understand why we would want to hamstring the agency that is designed to make sure we have clean air and clean water,” said Jamie DeWitt, a toxicologist in Oregon who worked with other scientists on Cape Fear River research. “I don’t understand it.”

Favored for their nonstick and liquid-resistant qualities, synthetic PFAS chemicals are widely used in products like raincoats, cookware and fast food wrappers. Manufacturers made the chemicals for decades without disclosing how certain types are toxic at extremely low levels, can accumulate in the body and will scarcely break down over time — hence the nickname “forever chemicals.”

The chemicals persist in soil and water too, making them complicated and costly to clean up, leading to a yearslong push to get such sites covered by the EPA’s Superfund program, which is designed to handle toxic swaths of land. During the first Trump administration, the EPA said it was taking steps toward designating the two legacy compounds, PFOA and PFOS, as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund program. Its liability provisions would help hold polluters responsible for the cost of cleaning up.

Moving forward with this designation process was a priority, according to the PFAS plan from Trump’s first term. Zeldin’s EPA describes that plan as “historic.” And, when he represented a Long Island district with PFAS problems in Congress, Zeldin voted for a bill that would have directed the EPA to take this step.

The designation became official under Biden. But business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and organizations representing the construction, recycling and chemical industries, sued. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the new administration, also questioned it.

Zeldin has said repeatedly that he wants to hold polluters accountable for PFAS, but his EPA requested three delays in the court case challenging the Superfund designation that helps make it possible.

The agency said in a recent motion it needed the latest pause because new leadership is still reviewing the issues and evaluating the designation in context of its “comprehensive strategy to address PFOA and PFOS.”

The EPA also delayed a rule requiring manufacturers and importers to report details about their PFAS use between 2011 and 2022. An annual bill that sets defense policy and spending, signed by Trump in his first term, had charged the EPA with developing such a process.

When Biden’s EPA finalized it, the agency said the rule would provide the largest-ever dataset of PFAS manufactured and used in the United States. It would help authorities understand their spread and determine what protections might be warranted.

Businesses were supposed to start reporting this month. But in a May 2 letter, a coalition of chemical companies petitioned the EPA to withdraw the deadline, reconsider the rule and issue a revised one with narrowed scope.

When the EPA delayed the rule less than two weeks later, it said it needed time to prepare for data collection and to consider changes to aspects of the rule.

In an email to ProPublica, the agency said it will address PFAS in many ways. Its approach, the agency said, is to give more time for compliance and to work with water systems to reduce PFAS exposure as quickly as feasible, “rather than issue violations and collect fees that don’t benefit public health.”

The court expects an update from the EPA in the Superfund designation case by Wednesday, and in the legal challenges to the drinking water standards by July 21. The EPA could continue defending the rules. It could ask the court for permission to reverse its position or to send the rules back to the agency for reconsideration. Or it could also ask for further pauses.

“It’s just a big unanswered question whether this administration and this EPA is going to be serious about enforcing anything,” said Robert Sussman, a former EPA official from the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As a lawyer, he now represents environmental groups that filed an amicus brief in PFAS cases.

Back in North Carolina, problems caused by the chemicals continue to play out.

A consent order between the state and Chemours required the manufacturer to drastically reduce the release of GenX and other PFAS into the environment. (The chemicals commonly called GenX refer to HFPO-DA and its ammonium salt, which are involved in the GenX processing aid technology owned by Chemours.)

Chemours told ProPublica that it invested more than $400 million to remediate and reduce PFAS emissions. It also noted that there are hundreds of PFAS users in North Carolina, “as evidenced by PFAS seen upstream and hundreds of miles away” from its Fayetteville plant “that cannot be traced back to the site.”

PFAS-riddled sea foam continues to wash up on the coastal beaches. Chemours and water utilities, meanwhile, are battling in court about who should cover the cost of upgrades to remove the chemicals from drinking water.

Community forums about PFAS draw triple-digit crowds, even when they’re held on a weeknight, said Emily Donovan, co-founder of the volunteer group Clean Cape Fear, which has intervened in federal litigation. In the fast-growing region, new residents are just learning about the chemicals, she said, and they’re angry.

“I feel like we’re walking backwards,” Donovan said. Pulling back from the drinking water standards, in particular, is “disrespectful to this community.”

“It’s one thing to say you’re going to focus on PFAS,” she added. “It’s another thing to never let it cross the finish line and become any meaningful regulation.”

The EPA of Trump’s first term didn’t just call for more regulation of PFAS, it also stressed the importance of better understanding the forever chemicals through research and testing.

In a 2020 update to its PFAS action plan, the EPA highlighted its support for North Carolina’s investigation of GenX in the Cape Fear River. And it described its efforts to develop the science on PFAS issues affecting rural economies with “first-of-its-kind funding for the agriculture sector.”

Zeldin, too, has boasted about advancing PFAS research in an April news release. “This is just a start of the work we will do on PFAS to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water,” he said.

At about the same time, though, the agency terminated a host of congressionally appropriated grants for PFAS research, including over $15 million for projects focused on food and farmlands in places like Utah, Texas and Illinois.

Scientists at Michigan State University, for example, were investigating how PFAS interacts with water, soil, crops, livestock and biosolids, which are used for fertilizer. They timed their latest study to this year’s growing season, hired staff and partnered with a farm. Then the EPA canceled two grants.

In virtually identical letters, the agency said that each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

The contrast between the agency’s words and actions raises questions about the process behind its decisions, said Cheryl Murphy, head of Michigan State’s Center for PFAS Research and co-lead of one of the projects.

“If you halt it right now,” she said, “what we’re doing is we’re undermining our ability to translate the science that we’re developing into some policy and guidance to help people minimize their exposure to PFAS.”

At least some of the researchers are appealing the terminations.

About a month after PFAS grants to research teams in Maine and Virginia were terminated for not being aligned with agency priorities, the agency reinstated them. The EPA told ProPublica that “there will be more updates on research-related grants in the future.”

Even if the Michigan State grants are reinstated, there could be lasting consequences, said Hui Li, the soil scientist who led both projects. “We will miss the season for this year,” he said in an email, “and could lose the livestock on the farm for the research.”

Federal researchers are also in limbo. Uncertainty, lost capacity and spending restrictions have stunted the work at an EPA lab in Duluth, Minnesota, that investigates PFAS and other potential hazards, according to several sources connected to it. As one source who works at the lab put it, “We don’t know how much longer we will be operating as is.”

The EPA told ProPublica that it’s “continuing to invest in research and labs, including Duluth, to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Meanwhile, the agency is asking Congress to eliminate more than half of its own budget. That includes massive staffing cuts, and it would slash nearly all the money for two major programs that help states fund water and wastewater infrastructure. One dates back to President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The other was spotlighted in a paper by Trump’s first-term EPA, which said communities could use these funds to protect public health from PFAS. It trumpeted examples from places like Michigan and New Jersey.

The EPA lost 727 employees in voluntary separations between Jan. 1 and late June, according to numbers the agency provided to ProPublica. It said it received more than 2,600 applications for the second round of deferred resignations and voluntary early retirements.

“These are really technical, difficult jobs,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. “And the EPA, by encouraging so many employees to leave, is also losing a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of technical expertise.”

The shake-up also worries DeWitt, who was one of the scientists who helped investigate the Cape Fear River contamination and who has served on an EPA science advisory board. Her voice shook as she reflected on the EPA’s workforce, “some of the finest scientists I know,” and what their loss means for public well-being.

“Taking away this talent from our federal sector,” she said, will have “profound effects on the agency’s ability to protect people in the United States from hazardous chemicals in air, in water, in soil and potentially in food.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Clark.

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This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk was pleading.

It was April 2013, and Musk stood at a podium in a small committee room in the basement of the Texas Capitol. The Tesla CEO asked the legislators gathered before him to change state law, allowing him to bypass the state’s powerful car dealership lobby and sell his electric vehicles directly to the public.

He painted a bleak picture of what could happen if they didn’t give him his way.

“We would, I’m afraid, we would fail,” Musk told the assembled representatives. “So for us, it’s a matter of life or death.”

Clad in a dark suit instead of his now ubiquitous black T-shirt and baseball hat, the younger Musk was unable to persuade lawmakers in Austin. That year, the bill he wanted to pass died.

More than a decade later, however, Musk’s fortunes inside the Texas Capitol have changed — dramatically.

Musk is now not only one of the richest people in the world, who, until recently, was a key member of President Donald Trump’s second administration, but he’s also become one of the most powerful business and political figures in the state.

During this year’s legislative session, Musk’s lobbyists and representatives publicly advocated for almost a dozen bills that would benefit his companies. The Texas Newsroom identified these priorities by searching legislative records for committee testimony and other evidence of his public stances.

Musk wanted legislators to pass new laws that would make it faster and easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, like the kind Tesla makes, on their properties. He wanted them to create new crimes so people who fly drones or interfere with operations at his rocket company SpaceX can be arrested. And he wanted to change who controlled the highway and public beach near SpaceX’s South Texas site so he can launch his rockets according to his timeline.

Musk got them all.

In a Capitol where the vast majority of bills fail to pass, all but three of Musk’s public priorities will become law. The two bills his lobbyists openly opposed are dead, including a measure that would have regulated autonomous vehicles.

Musk made gains even on bills he didn’t publicly endorse. Texas lawmakers followed the tech giant’s lead by rewriting the state’s corporate laws and creating a new office modeled after the Department of Government Efficiency, the controversial effort he led in the Trump administration to cut federal spending.

By all accounts, Musk’s influence was great enough that he did not have to formally address lawmakers in person this session to make the case for any of his priorities.

Critics said these new laws will hand Musk’s companies more cash, more power and more protection from scrutiny as his business footprint continues to expand across Texas.

“The real harm is the influence of a private company on the decisions made by government,” Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, told The Texas Newsroom. The Sierra Club is part of a group suing the state over SpaceX’s activities in South Texas.

Musk and his representatives did not respond to requests for an interview. He recently ended his run with DOGE, and his relationship with Trump has increasingly frayed.

Contrary to his slash-and-burn tactics in Washington, D.C., where he bulldozed his way onto the scene after Trump’s reelection, Musk has played the long game to amass power in Texas. He still hasn’t succeeded in changing Texas law to allow for Tesla direct sales, but that hasn’t stopped him from steadily investing his personal and professional capital in the state over more than a decade. Most of his businesses, including the tunneling firm The Boring Company, social media giant X and Tesla, are now headquartered here. While it’s still based in California, SpaceX operates production, testing and launch sites across Texas.

Musk has also moved his personal home to the state, reportedly securing properties in the Austin area and South Texas.

In the Texas Capitol, Musk’s power is subtle but undeniable.

Calendars and emails obtained by The Texas Newsroom through public information requests show his company’s representatives met regularly with lawmakers backing his priority bills and invited Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to tour SpaceX. Patrick, who leads the state Senate, also penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting the rocket company’s request to increase its launches in South Texas.

Texas politics, with its long history of outsize characters, has never seen the likes of Musk, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

“Even in the heyday of the [George W.] Bush era, you couldn’t find somebody who had such dramatic wealth as Musk, who also had the same level of access and business interests here in Texas,” Jones told The Texas Newsroom. “Today, Elon Musk is arguably the most powerful and influential private citizen in the country.”

When lawmakers convened their 2025 legislative session in January, one of Musk’s top priorities was quickly clear. He wanted more control over the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas.

Known as Starbase, the massive rocket testing and launch facility has come to dominate the small rural area between Brownsville, on the border, and the Gulf of Mexico. It is the launch site for Starship, the rocket meant to eventually take humans to Mars and the heart of Musk’s mission to make humans a multiplanetary species. The FAA recently gave SpaceX permission to increase Starship launches fivefold.

Although SpaceX owns most of the land around Starbase, county officials retained the authority over access to the adjacent public beach, called Boca Chica. The county worked closely with SpaceX to ensure the area was cleared ahead of launches, but the company’s leaders did not have ultimate control over the process.

That changed this year. First, Musk decided to incorporate the launch site as its own city. That happened on May 3, when the few residents who live in the area — most of whom The Texas Newsroom determined work for SpaceX — voted to create the new city of Starbase.

Musk then wanted state lawmakers to hand the new city the power to close Boca Chica Beach and the adjoining public highway during the week, a change the county officials opposed.

State Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a newly elected Republican who represents the area, authored the legislation to shift control to Starbase. Dozens of SpaceX employees got involved in the effort, submitting pages of identical comments to lawmakers in support.

Democrats succeeded in killing Hinojosa’s bill, prompting local activists to celebrate. Their victory was short-lived. Late in the session, lawmakers decided instead to shift some of this power to the Texas Space Commission, which facilitates the state’s space exploration agenda.

The new law states that the commission’s board can close highways and gulf beaches with the approval of a local municipality, which, in this case, is Starbase. SpaceX retains a connection to the commission itself: Kathy Lueders, who confirmed that she left her job as Starbase general manager last month, still sits on the Space Commission board. She directed additional questions to the commission.

The Space Commission declined to answer questions on SpaceX’s potential future involvement with these discussions.

“The way I view it is SpaceX wanted a certain amount of power,” said Reed, with the Sierra Club. “And at the end of the day, they didn’t quite get it, but they got something pretty close.”

The bill passed along largely partisan lines. Republican state Rep. Greg Bonnen, who authored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment about the role Starbase may play now that it will become law.

Lawmakers passed several more bills to benefit spaceports, the sites where spacecraft launch, like SpaceX.

While Texas is home to multiple spaceports, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, SpaceX dwarfs the rest in size and scope of influence across the state and country, boasting large federal government contracts and a growing satellite industry.

Hinojosa was an author or sponsor on most of these bills; he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story.

Other than the beach closure legislation, many passed with the support of Democrats.

At SpaceX’s urging, Texas lawmakers passed a measure to ban drones over spaceports. They also added spaceports to the state’s “critical infrastructure” facilities, which already include airports and military bases. The law will make it a felony to intentionally damage or interrupt the operation of any site where a spacecraft is tested or launched. Similar critical infrastructure laws have been used in other states to arrest people protesting oil and gas pipeline projects.

Bekah Hinojosa with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, a local activist group, told The Texas Newsroom the new critical infrastructure law will let Musk “militarize our Boca Chica Beach for his dangerous rocket testing endeavors."

The Sierra Club and other groups from South Texas, including a local Indigenous tribe, are suing the state, arguing that closing Boca Chica violates an amendment to the Texas Constitution that protects access to public beaches.

The General Land Office, the main defendant in that suit, declined to comment. In court filings, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argues the state can still regulate beach access for public safety reasons and that it cannot be sued in this case because it has immunity. The case is pending at the Texas Supreme Court.

Legislators also passed two more new laws that will shield companies like SpaceX from public scrutiny and legal challenges.

One will exempt certain military and aerospace issues from public meetings laws, allowing elected officials in some cases to discuss these topics behind closed doors. The proposal was so concerning to residents who live close to SpaceX’s facility near Waco, where locals say the company’s rocket testing has spooked livestock and damaged homes, that they submitted a dozen comments against it.

This law went into effect on May 15.

Another new law will make it harder for crew members and certain other employees to sue space flight companies. This, like most new legislation approved this session, will become law on Sept. 1.

SpaceX’s only significant public defeat during this year’s legislative session was the failure of a bill it supported to give spaceports a tax cut. The measure would have cost nearly $14.5 million over five years, according to an official estimate from the Legislative Budget Board.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, believes Texas is pandering to Musk.

“It’s all to help Elon,” said Jah, who added that his viewpoint is rooted in resisting policies that enable what he called “environmental plunder masked as ‘innovation.’” He has concerns that the state is investing in spaceports, most notably Musk’s, while carving out exceptions that prohibit public insight and input into what’s happening at those facilities.

“There’s this whole cloak of secrecy with whatever Elon is doing,” Jah said. “We will not and should not cease to launch satellites or explore space. But the way in which we do it matters a lot.”

This year, Tesla’s lobbyists publicly advocated against only two bills. Both died.

One was a GOP-authored proposal intended to create a buffer zone between homes and large-scale energy storage facilities like the kind Tesla sells.

The other bill would have imposed more regulations on the type of cars that Musk is rolling out as robotaxis in Texas, and would have required a public hearing if a collision involving an autonomous vehicle resulted in a fatality.

Bill author Rep. Terry Canales, an Edinburg Democrat, believes his legislation failed because it was not pro-industry enough.

“Tesla is the worst actor that I’ve ever dealt with in the Capitol. They’re subversive. They never come out of the shadows,” Canales told The Texas Newsroom. “Not only did I not hear from them, I didn’t expect to hear from them because that’s the way they operate.”

Lawmakers instead advanced a different bill, one with a lighter regulatory touch that was crafted with input from the autonomous vehicle industry.

It will require commercial operators, such as robotaxi and driverless big rig companies, to obtain authorization from the state. This approval can be revoked if the company’s vehicles endanger the public, including causing “serious bodily injury,” though it requires no public hearings in the case of a fatality, as Canales’ bill would have done. Autonomous vehicle companies will also have to develop plans for interacting with emergency responders.

Tesla took a neutral stance on the legislation. But the bill’s author, state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, told The Texas Newsroom that Tesla’s team participated in work groups and stakeholder conversations with industry groups, trial lawyers and others.

Texas has been at the forefront of testing this technology for years, rolling out its first regulations in 2017. But with more autonomous vehicles hitting the streets, Nichols said it was time to clarify the rules and called his bill “a real opportunity here to actually improve safety.”

Nichols’ legislation initially died in the Texas House. But with less than a week before lawmakers packed up to go home, a House member added the entirety of Nichols’ bill as an amendment to another transportation bill, which will become law Sept. 1.

Tray Gober, a personal injury lawyer who handles vehicle crash cases in Austin, said it’s smart to get new regulations for autonomous vehicles on the books. But he worries that Texas is rushing to give its blessing to a technology that has not been fully tested.

“We’re not talking about rockets crashing into the ocean. We’re talking about cars crashing into other people,” he said, comparing Tesla to SpaceX. “There’s going to be people that are hurt during this process of improving these systems, and that’s unfortunate. I think it’s viewed as collateral damage by these companies.”

When asked about concerns that there could be fatalities as the number of driverless cars grows in Texas, Nichols said, “There probably will be. Eventually there will be. I would not doubt that.” But he pointed to studies showing autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers.

“If you start looking at the breakdown of the fatalities on the roads and the crashes and the wrecks, what causes them? It’s not equipment failure. It’s driver distraction,” he told The Texas Newsroom.

Critics of these studies argue their scope is too narrow to make conclusions about the safety of self-driving technology. Citing safety concerns, some local lawmakers asked Tesla’s robotaxi rollout in Austin to be delayed. The company continued with the launch but with human monitors in the passenger seats.

Many Democrats opposed Nichols’ proposal. But at least three other bills affecting Tesla got bipartisan support.

At times, the Sierra Club was fighting against Musk’s SpaceX bills while working with his Tesla lobbyists on clean energy legislation, said Reed, the club’s conservation director. For example, Tesla and the Sierra Club both supported legislation to create new fire standards for battery energy storage facilities and address the environmental and financial challenges associated with decommissioning them.

Tesla also backed a bill that had bipartisan support to make it easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, such as the company’s Powerwall.

Reed said Musk’s shift to the right has created interesting bedfellows, sometimes making it easier for Republicans to back some of the energy policies more traditionally associated with progressives.

He remarked, “It’s an interesting time in our country, right?”

For all the bills Musk pushed to see pass, he also indirectly influenced the creation of new laws on which he did not take a public stance.

Texas lawmakers created the state’s own DOGE office housed under the governor, the name an homage to Musk’s controversial federal cost-slashing effort in Washington, D.C.

Musk himself took no public role in creating the new office. But at a signing ceremony for the bill, Gov. Greg Abbott explained he was the inspiration.

Texas legislators also rewrote the state’s corporate laws after Musk raised concerns about business codes in other states. Authored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the rewrite shields business leaders from lawsuits and establishes thresholds for the types of legal challenges shareholders can file.

Musk and his lobbyists never came out in support of the bill, but he has long complained that states needed to shore up protections for CEOs and other business leaders.

Musk began crusading on the issue after his $55 billion compensation package at Tesla was challenged in Delaware’s business courts. Musk moved many of his businesses elsewhere, including Texas, and publicly urged other companies to “get the hell out of Delaware.”

The legislation written in response was dubbed the “DExit” bill.

“Texas is much better than Delaware,” Musk posted on X in early April, just days after the bill passed the state Senate. “If Delaware doesn’t reform, it will lose all its corporate business.”

Last year, a Delaware judge ruled Musk’s pay package violated his fiduciary duties to the company’s stockholders. He won most of it back in a shareholder vote, but the judge again rejected his pay package in December.

In an interview, Hughes told The Texas Newsroom he heard input from different groups in crafting the Texas legislation and could not remember whether Musk’s companies were involved.

Abbott signed the DExit bill and a handful of other business bills into law on May 14. Standing behind him at a public ceremony marking the occasion were Hughes and a large group of business representatives.

Standing behind Hughes was a representative from Tesla.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New York Focus, an investigative news outlet reporting on New York. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week, and sign up for New York Focus’ newsletter here.

Hotels have long been considered a last resort for sheltering people who’ve lost their housing. But over the past few years, they’ve become New York’s predominant response to homelessness outside New York City, a recent investigation by New York Focus and ProPublica found.

Social services agencies across the state now place nearly half of all individuals and families seeking shelter in hotels. Yet those placed in hotels often go without services that they’re supposed to receive in shelters, such as meals, help finding housing and sometimes child care so they can look for work.

The growing reliance on hotels has been driven by soaring rent, shelter closures and a spike in evictions that followed a moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has known about the problem for years and even put rules to address the issue on its regulatory agenda. But the agency has failed to formally propose the rules or come up with a way to ensure people receive services they need.

Here are five charts to explain our investigation.

The number of families and individuals placed in hotels doubled in the two years following the end of New York’s eviction moratorium in 2022. As the population in hotels shot up, so did the bill. Over that period, spending on hotels outside of New York City more than tripled to $110 million.

OTDA oversees the state’s county-run social services districts. The agency’s commissioner, Barbara Guinn, said that it prefers that counties use shelters, but that there aren’t enough beds for everyone who needs one. She said that the agency hadn’t studied the growth in hotel use.

Despite the growth in spending, families placed in hotels aren’t promised the same services as people in shelters. New York requires family shelters to provide services like child care, assistance finding housing and three meals a day. But the regulations generally exempt hotels.

There’s an exception: A hotel is supposed to be considered a shelter if it “primarily” serves temporary housing recipients. OTDA spokesperson Anthony Farmer said that the agency interprets “primarily” to mean “exclusively, or almost exclusively,” and that no hotels currently meet that standard. An analysis of the agency’s data by New York Focus and ProPublica found that welfare recipients made up over half of the capacity for at least 16 hotels during fiscal year 2024.

Guinn said that social services offices have to work within the confines of what hotel owners will allow, and that counties try to provide services off-site.

Not only are more people being placed in the hotels, but they are staying for much longer periods. The number of families and individuals spending at least six months out of the year in hotels nearly tripled from 2022 to 2024.

The lack of services leads to people getting stuck in the system, creating a snowball effect, said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“It’s this expanding problem,” he said. “A good shelter should be housing-focused. If they don’t have a pretty substantial effort to move people quickly back into housing and provide the services that are necessary to do that, the shelters quickly fill up, and then they just need more shelters.”

Farmer said via email that a lack of affordable housing contributes to the longer stays, and that counties can use other funding to help people move back into permanent housing.

Nearly half of all payments to hotels were for more than twice the counties’ FMR.

Many hotels are charging rates higher than rent for permanent housing.

The news organizations found that the overwhelming majority of hotel payments exceeded fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the same county. (Fair market rent is defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as the 40th percentile of rent plus utilities in the local housing market.) The rates charged were often more than twice that.

“We’re forced to rent hotel rooms across the state, and the operators of these places understand that,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, a Democrat and chair of the chamber’s Social Services Committee. “The municipalities’ backs are against the wall. And so they must place the unhoused person or persons somewhere. And so that’s why you see the cost is skyrocketing, because people understand that it’s an easy way to make money off the government.”

New York Focus and ProPublica found numerous examples of families with children living in sordid and dangerous conditions. Roaches, mold, broken windows and filthy linens were common. Some hotels were subject to over a hundred emergency calls a year for assaults, robberies, mental health crises, overdoses and other incidents.

Hotels sheltering homeless families are supposed to be inspected every six months by their county’s social services office. Yet data obtained from OTDA shows that many wind up behind schedule. As of October, about 40% of hotels were either out of date on their inspection or didn’t have one listed.

Farmer, the OTDA spokesperson, said that nearly all hotels were inspected within a year, and that some had stopped accepting welfare recipients.

Guinn, the commissioner, said that OTDA will formally propose rules this year clarifying that people in hotels must receive the same services as they would receive in shelters. She also said her agency will increase oversight of how social services offices are delivering those services.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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In court, Dr. Nancy Harper comes across as professional and authoritative. Often she begins her testimony by explaining her subspeciality: child abuse pediatrics, which focuses on the diagnosis and documentation of signs of child abuse. Her role, she often reminds judges and juries, is solely medical. Whether or not to remove a child from their home, terminate the parent’s rights or, in the most serious cases, charge a caregiver criminally is not up to her.

According to Harper’s testimony, she and her team at the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children in Minneapolis handle about 700 cases of suspected abuse each year. She has testified that 10% to 20% of those wind up confirmed for physical abuse, although it is difficult to determine if these figures are accurate since child protection cases are not public.

When Harper, the center’s director, and her team diagnose abuse, parents and caregivers often struggle to challenge those opinions. By Harper’s own estimation, she’s never been wrong.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case where I thought it was abusive head trauma and the other specialist didn’t,” Harper testified in 2023, in the case of a day care provider charged with the death of a child in her care.

The defense attorney in the case pressed her: “Have you ever incorrectly diagnosed a child with abusive head trauma?”

“Not currently to my recollection,” she answered.

But in a handful of cases, judges and juries have found day care providers and parents not guilty of crimes after Harper has testified that abuse occurred, though a verdict cannot necessarily be interpreted as a repudiation of Harper or any other expert witness’ determinations or credibility.

Additionally, two federal lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis, shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma.

Harper did not respond to requests for comment. She has yet to respond to either lawsuit. In past court testimony, Harper has said that both shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma are considered scientifically valid diagnoses by the mainstream medical community. Any controversy, she has said, exists primarily in the legal world rather than the medical one.

Kathleen Pakes, a former prosecutor who now specializes in the forensics of child abuse cases for the Office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender, said Harper’s claim of never making an incorrect diagnosis strains credulity.

“There is no other specialty in medicine that has zero error rate. None,” she said.

Below are four cases in which Harper concluded there was abuse but courts or juries determined otherwise.

On July 12, 2017, an 11-month-old boy named Gabriel Cooper collapsed in his high chair at the day care that Sylwia Pawlak-Reynolds operated in South Minneapolis. Paramedics took him to Hennepin County Medical Center, where he was declared brain dead a day later.

Harper reviewed Cooper’s medical records and wrote that “in the absence of a well-documented consistent severe accidental injury, non-accidental trauma or abusive head trauma remains the primary diagnostic consideration.” The child, she wrote, was essentially shaken to death. Before any criminal charges were filed, Pawlak-Reynolds boarded a plane for her native Poland to care for her ailing father, according to her attorney. In February 2018, prosecutors charged Pawlak-Reynolds with two counts of second-degree murder, citing Harper’s diagnosis.

According to her husband, Will Reynolds, they did not realize Pawlak-Reynolds was pregnant when she boarded her flight to Poland. She remained there to give birth to their third child, who is now 6, while Reynolds remained in Minnesota with their two older children, who are now 13 and 16. Reynolds said he and his wife have no confidence that she will get a fair trial, and that she fears she will lose custody of their youngest child if she reenters the country. The family has now been separated for eight years.

Early in the case, Pawlak-Reynolds’ attorneys obtained the same copy of Cooper’s hospital records that had been provided to Minneapolis police, which included the paramedics’ report. The document had been printed out at a significantly reduced scale, shrinking the text to the point that some fields were illegible. Two years later, they obtained a second copy, printed at normal size, which revealed a possible alternate explanation for the injuries: “Mom recalls [patient] did fall 2 days ago, striking the back of his head.”

“That was the sort of proverbial silver-bullet evidence that we’re always looking for in every case and usually never find,” said Brock Hunter, Pawlak-Reynolds’ lawyer.

Polish courts, including an appeals court, have denied extradition requests from the U.S. three times, and the country’s minister of justice has affirmed the rulings. The denials are particularly critical of Harper’s assessment. Polish forensic experts evaluated the case records and took note of a finding by a neurology expert hired by Pawlak-Reynolds, who wrote that Cooper carried a gene tied to a blood clotting disorder.

The ambulance report, the Polish judges wrote, “was concealed from the defense.”

“Then, after the fact was made public, it did not affect the actions of the American authorities in any way,” a Polish district court judge wrote in 2022.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office certified Cooper’s manner of death as “undetermined” and the date and place of injury “unknown,” a tacit disagreement with Harper’s opinion that Cooper would have collapsed “shortly after infliction of the trauma.”

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office declined to comment.

Then in 2023, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty wrote to Pawlak-Reynolds’ attorneys after meeting with them: “We agree that to resolve the current impasse regarding Ms. Pawlak-Reynolds, the best course for all involved is to dismiss the pending charges without prejudice, and for her to return to the United States.”

But months later, Moriarty changed her mind.

In a statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office wrote that the office is completing a “final, thorough review” of the case that will include an evaluation of “concerns regarding the medical conclusions and the overall strength of the case.”

Gabriel’s parents, Joseph and Samantha Cooper, did not respond to requests for comment. In a television interview in June, they denied that Cooper struck the back of his head two days before his collapse. They said that they want justice for their son.

Pawlak-Reynolds declined to comment through her attorney. In late February, her husband filed a federal lawsuit against Harper that claims she “knowingly and intentionally falsified, modified and erased exculpatory information” from her evaluation of Cooper, and she diagnosed abusive head trauma to “promote her own personal, academic, reputational and financial needs.”

Harper has yet to respond to the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which operates Hennepin County Medical Center, declined to comment on the case or the lawsuit.

“There is no oversight,” Reynolds said. “It’s the thing they’re most resistant against and the thing that is most necessary to stop this legacy of brutality, that results in kids being taken away from innocent caregivers and innocent caregivers going to prison.”

In August 2017, Kathryn Campbell called 911 after a 4-month-old girl at her day care seemed lethargic and was “breathing wrong.” First responders did not take the baby to the hospital, but her mother eventually did. At the hospital, MRI scans showed fluid in the baby’s brain and doctors noted small bruises.

Dr. Barbara Knox, a child abuse pediatrician then with the University of Wisconsin, told police it was “obvious child abuse.” The Dane County district attorney charged Campbell with physical abuse of a child. Campbell pleaded not guilty.

But before the 2021 trial, Knox left the University of Wisconsin after she was placed on leave for “unprofessional acts that may constitute retaliation” and intimidation of her own staff. A Wisconsin Watch investigation cast doubt on Knox’s judgment in several cases of alleged abuse.

Knox did not respond to the Wisconsin Watch series or to ProPublica’s requests for comment. After two families in Alaska sued her in 2022, alleging she had wrongly concluded their children had been abused, Knox wrote in an affidavit that she has no control over whether police and child protection services workers take children away from parents, that she did not “conspire” with police or anyone else on custody issues, and that she did not personally evaluate one of the children. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024 after the families agreed to drop the matter.

Knox moved on to a job at the University of Florida. According to a spokesperson for the university, Knox resigned as a pediatrician with the Child Protective Team in late June, effective Aug. 15. He declined to comment on the circumstances.

At Campbell’s trial, Knox’s name was never mentioned. Instead, Harper stepped in as an expert witness. When Campbell heard Knox had been replaced, she was initially hopeful.

“I’m like, oh, great, new eyes,” Campbell said. “They’re going to look at it and go, ‘This is nuts, I don’t agree with this.’ And I definitely was wrong.”

Harper’s assessment affirmed Knox’s diagnosis of abuse. She told the jury that the bruises were likely caused by squeezing by an adult’s hand. A medical expert hired by Campbell’s defense argued that the child’s bleeding could not be precisely dated and that a preexisting medical condition could have caused it.

After just two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a not guilty verdict. Campbell said she is grateful to have the case concluded, though she said she is still haunted by the accusations against her.

“That was the hardest thing too, going home after this case was done, and being like, ‘Am I allowed to be alone with my children now?’” she said. “It’s all because of the quote-unquote experts not doing their due diligence and looking further into underlying issues that these kids could have.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne expressed confidence in both Harper and Knox, saying “their testimony had been consistent with many different medical professionals and experts in their own areas of practice.”

“It is important to note that a not guilty verdict by lay jurors hardly invalidates the widespread acceptance of abusive head trauma as a diagnosis in the medical community nor would it cause us to have concerns about Dr. Harper’s qualifications or knowledge in the field,” he added. “Jurors are not bound to accept any expert testimony as accurate.”

In the winter of 2022, a 4-month-old boy began breathing abnormally at his day care in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. His parents took him to a hospital, where he died days later. A police investigation determined that his day care provider, Joanna Ford, left him and several other children alone in her home for over an hour while she went to a tattoo and piercing parlor.

Prosecutors used Harper as an expert witness in the case. After evaluating the child’s medical records, she concluded that his injuries were “clinically diagnostic of abusive head trauma,” or, put another way, Ford shook the baby violently. She was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. Ford pleaded not guilty.

Ford’s defense lawyers successfully petitioned the judge in the case for a hearing to determine whether Harper’s expert witness testimony would be scientifically valid and admissible at trial. In response to questions, Harper explained why the child’s symptoms — brain swelling, blood under his skull, damage to his eyes — pointed to abuse, and why, despite the controversy surrounding it, the diagnosis of abusive head trauma was scientifically sound. She also explained that, because the baby was not walking or crawling, the fact that none of his caregivers could explain his injuries indicated abuse.

“People should know what happened,” she testified.

On cross examination by Ford’s lawyers, Harper said she couldn’t say for certain what time the abuse would have occurred, exactly how Ford had injured the baby and that there are no “great biomechanical models” for shaken baby syndrome.

A little over a month later, Judge Lisa McDougal delivered a highly critical ruling that barred Harper from telling the jury that the child died as the result of “abusive head trauma, non-accidental injury, child abuse or murder.” She also took issue with the idea that a lack of explanation for injuries is indicative of abuse, calling it a “leap in logic.”

“Offering a conclusive opinion as to how an injury may have occurred crosses a line and does not fit within the dictionary definition of what diagnosis is,” McDougal said. The judge also said that Harper views herself as an advocate, and that that casts doubt on her “fidelity to the scientific validation of abusive head trauma diagnoses, especially when it is a close call.”

The murder charge was dismissed. For leaving the children alone, Ford pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of neglect of a child where the consequence is death. She is serving a 10-year prison sentence. Ford, through her attorney, declined a request for an interview. The Iowa County district attorney also declined to comment.

On Feb. 4, 2022, Paul and Sarah Marshall hosted a dinner for her parents and a family friend at their home in Hudson, Wisconsin. Afterward, their 7-week-old son, Fox, became fussy. Paul Marshall carried him into the mother-in-law unit on the lower level of the house, which was cool and dark, to try to calm him. He emerged minutes later in a panic, yelling that the baby spit up and stopped breathing.

Paramedics rushed Fox to Children’s Minnesota, a hospital about 25 minutes across the state border in St. Paul. Doctors ran tests, and a scan showed Fox had a skull fracture with fluid pooling on both sides of his brain. He died days later.

Harper examined Fox, as well as his twin sister, Liana, and found “skull fractures, likely rib fractures, metaphyseal fractures.”

“This constellation of findings in a nonambulatory infant is clinically diagnostic of inflicted injury or child physical abuse likely occurring on more than one occasion,” she wrote.

But the Marshalls said that wasn’t true. They told Harper that Sarah Marshall had experienced a difficult pregnancy with gestational diabetes and severe anemia, and that Liana had a vacuum-assisted delivery. Both twins had been to their regular pediatrician over health concerns. While Liana’s health improved, Fox’s had not.

A spokesperson for Children’s Minnesota declined to comment on the case.

Because he was the last person alone with Fox before he stopped breathing, Paul Marshall was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. He was also charged with physical abuse of a child for hurting Liana. Sarah Marshall said there was no evidence that her soft-spoken husband had hurt their children.

“The state wanted to cast me as a naive idiot,” she said. “I chose not to believe it because of the logic and facts in my face. I had no reason to believe the accusation.”

At Paul Marshall’s 2023 trial, his defense lawyer, Aaron Nelson, cross-examined the other doctors who treated or evaluated Fox and Liana, and was able to highlight points of medical disagreement. A doctor who tested Liana for genetic disorders said she could not rule out rickets as a possible cause of her bone fractures. A neuropathologist did not agree with Harper that Fox had a trauma-induced blood clotting disorder. By Harper’s own admission on cross-examination, determining the age of the skull fractures in children Fox and Liana’s age was difficult. Nelson called six of his own medical experts to suggest that the difficult birth or a vitamin deficiency could explain the twins’ injuries.

“How many people have to be wrong for Dr. Harper to be right?” Nelson said in closing arguments.

After an 11-day trial, the jury found Marshall not guilty.

In a statement to ProPublica, St. Croix County District Attorney Karl Anderson pointed out that Harper was not the only treating physician who was concerned that Fox and Liana had been abused.

“A not guilty verdict does not mean that the jury concluded that the children were not abused,” Anderson said. “Rather, it means that they did not conclude that the State proved that Paul Marshall caused the death, beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Six weeks after the trial, the family moved three hours away into a century-old farmhouse that is far from the community that they felt wrongfully villainized by.

One of the cruelest impacts of the abuse diagnosis, they said, came after it was clear that Fox would die and the hospital staff began making preparations for his organs to be donated. Sarah Marshall said she had hoped to someday hear her son’s heart beating in another child’s chest. Instead, a court order put a halt to the procedure.

“They were already treating him as evidence,” she said.

The experience of going from a grieving parent to an accused murderer, her husband said, has given the couple post-traumatic stress. Paul Marshall said he is grateful to be with his wife and children, but what he calls a “broken system” has left them unsure whether or not to have another baby or even be left alone with one of their daughters.

“You get pregnant. You go to all of your appointments. You voice all of your concerns. You do everything you’re supposed to do as a parent and your child still dies. And the state tells you it’s your fault,” Sarah Marshall said. “I don’t understand why I live in a world like that.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Lussenhop, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

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Before states banned abortion, one of the gravest outcomes of early miscarriage could easily be avoided: Doctors could offer a dilation and curettage procedure, which quickly empties the uterus and allows it to close, protecting against a life-threatening hemorrhage.

But because the procedures, known as D&Cs, are also used to end pregnancies, they have gotten tangled up in state legislation that restricts abortion. Reports now abound of doctors hesitating to provide them and women who are bleeding heavily being discharged from emergency rooms without care, only to return in such dire condition that they need blood transfusions to survive. As ProPublica reported last year, one woman died of hemorrhage after 10 hours in a Houston hospital that didn’t perform the procedure.

Now, a new ProPublica data analysis adds empirical weight to the mounting evidence that abortion bans have made the common experience of miscarriage — which occurs in up to 30% of pregnancies — far more dangerous. It is based on hospital discharge data from Texas, the largest state to ban abortion, and captures emergency department visits from 2017 to 2023, the most recent year available.

After Texas made performing abortions a felony in August 2022, ProPublica found, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first-trimester miscarriage shot up by 54%.

The number of emergency room visits for early miscarriage also rose, by 25%, compared with the three years before the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that women who didn’t receive D&Cs initially may be returning to hospitals in worse condition, more than a dozen experts told ProPublica.

While that phenomenon can’t be confirmed by the discharge data, which tracks visits rather than individuals, doctors and researchers who reviewed ProPublica’s findings say these spikes, along with the stories patients have shared, paint a troubling picture of the harm that results from unnecessary delays in care.

“This is striking,” said Dr. Elliott Main, a hemorrhage expert and former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative. “The trend is very clear.”

After the state’s first abortion ban went into effect in September 2021, blood transfusions increased. After abortion became a felony in August 2022, they increased more.

The data mirrors a sharp rise in cases of sepsis — a life-threatening reaction to infection — ProPublica previously identified during second-trimester miscarriage in Texas.

Blood loss is expected during early miscarriage, which usually ends without complication. Some cases, however, can turn deadly very quickly. Main said ProPublica’s analysis suggested to him that “physicians are sitting on nonviable pregnancies longer and longer before they’re doing a D&C — until patients are really bleeding.”

That’s what happened to Sarah De Pablos Velez in Austin last summer. As she was miscarrying and bleeding profusely, she said physicians didn’t explain that she had options for care. Sent home from the emergency room without a D&C two times, she ultimately needed blood transfusions so that she wouldn’t die, according to medical records. “What happened to me was just so wrong,” she told ProPublica. "Doctors need to be providing care to pregnant women — that needs to be a baseline.”

After ProPublica exposed preventable deaths following delays in care, the Texas Legislature passed a bill this year to clarify that doctors can provide abortions when a patient is facing a life-threatening emergency, even if it is not imminent.

But many Texas doctors say the reform does not address the difficulty of treating women experiencing early miscarriages, which almost always involve blood loss; they say it’s hard to know when the expected bleeding might evolve into a life-threatening emergency — one that could have been prevented with a D&C. Women can bleed and remain stable for a long time, until they crash.

Texas forbids abortion at all stages of pregnancy — even before there is cardiac activity or a visible embryo. And while the law allows doctors to “remove a dead, unborn child,” it can be difficult to determine what that means during early miscarriage, when an array of factors can signal that a pregnancy is not progressing.

An embryo might fail to develop. Cardiac activity may not emerge when it should. Hormone levels might dip or bleeding might increase. Even if a doctor strongly suspects a miscarriage is underway, it can take weeks to conclusively document that a pregnancy has ended, and all the while, a patient might be losing blood.

Some OB-GYNs and emergency room physicians have long been advising patients to complete their miscarriage at home, especially at Catholic hospitals, even if that is not the standard of care. But now, physicians across the state are faced with a law that threatens up to 99 years in prison, and more are making a new calculus around whether to intervene or even tell patients they are likely miscarrying, said Dr. Anitra Beasley, an OB-GYN in Houston. “What ends up happening is patients have to present multiple times before a diagnosis can be made,” she added, and some of those patients wind up needing blood transfusions.

While they can be lifesaving, transfusions do not stop the bleeding, experts told ProPublica, and they can introduce complications, such as severe allergic reactions, autoimmune disorders or, in rare events, blood cancer. The dangers of hemorrhage are far greater, from organ failure to kidney damage to loss of sensation in the fingers and toes. “There’s a finite amount of blood,” said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington. “And when it all comes out, you’re dead.”

ProPublica’s findings about the rise in blood transfusions make clear that women who experience early miscarriages in abortion ban states are living in a more dangerous medical climate than many believe, said Amanda Nagle, a doctoral student investigating the same blood transfusion data for a forthcoming paper in the American Journal of Public Health.

“If people are seeking care at an emergency department,” Nagle said, “there are serious health risks to delaying that care.”

In some clinics and hospitals across Texas, the pressure to definitively diagnose a miscarriage has led to delays in offering D&Cs.

Considering the chance of criminal prosecution, some doctors now default to what many pregnancy loss experts view as an overly cautious method for diagnosing miscarriage: ultrasound images alone, using criteria from the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound. Relying only on images to diagnose — and discounting other factors, like lab results or clinical symptoms — can take days or even weeks.

Dr. Gabrielle Taper was a resident at a Catholic hospital in Austin when the ban was enacted, and a culture of fear took hold among her colleagues, she told ProPublica. “We started asking, ‘Are we certain that we can document that we’ve met the radiology guidelines?’ as opposed to just treating the patient in front of us,” she said.

If they couldn’t show that the likely miscarriage met the criteria, they often felt they had to discharge patients without offering a D&C. “People are already in distress, and you are giving them confusion, a false sense of hope,” she told ProPublica. “Having to send a patient home knowing they may bleed so much they would need a blood transfusion — when I know there are procedures I could do or medicine I could offer — is just excruciating.”

The hospital where she worked did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists does not recommend this approach, advising doctors instead to review the ultrasound as one piece of information among many and counsel patients on all their options.

The Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound said that the guidelines “are not meant to apply in the setting of a life-threatening situation, such as heavy bleeding,” but did not respond to a question about whether it agreed with ACOG that doctors should use a combination of ultrasound images and clinical judgment to assess a pregnancy loss.

Dr. Courtney A. Schreiber, an obstetrics and gynecology professor and expert in early pregnancy care, said that even if a patient wants to let a likely miscarriage complete at home, the medical team should still explain different management options, including medication to speed up the process or a D&C, should symptoms like bleeding get worse.

“It’s our obligation to share information, help manage expectations and keep women safe,” she said.

What happened to Porsha Ngumezi shows how dangerous it can be to delay care, according to more than a dozen doctors who previously reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica.

When the mother of two showed up bleeding at Houston Methodist Sugar Land in June 2023, at 11 weeks pregnant, her sonogram suggested an “ongoing miscarriage” was “likely,” her doctor noted. She had no previous ultrasounds to compare it with, and the radiologist did not locate an embryo or fetus — which Ngumezi said she thought she had passed in a toilet; her doctors did not make a definitive diagnosis, calling it a pregnancy of “unknown location.” After hours bleeding, passing “clots the size of grapefruit,” according to a nurse’s notes, she received two blood transfusions — a short-term remedy. But she did not get a procedure to empty her uterus, which medical experts agree is the most effective way to stop the bleeding. Hours later, she died of hemorrhage, leaving behind her husband and young sons.

Doctors and nurses involved in Ngumezi’s care did not respond to multiple requests for comment for ProPublica’s story last fall, and the hospital did not answer questions about her care when asked about it again for this story. A spokesperson from Methodist Hospital said its OB-GYNs follow ACOG’s miscarriage diagnosis guidelines, which recommend considering clinical factors in addition to ultrasounds.

Even in circumstances in which the abortion ban allows a doctor to intervene — to treat a life-threatening emergency, for example, or to “remove a dead, unborn baby” — there’s plenty of evidence, detailed in lawsuits and federal investigations, that doctors in Texas still aren’t offering procedures.

As soon as Sarah De Pablos Velez, a 30-year-old media director, learned she was pregnant last summer, she began attending regular checkups at St. David’s Women’s Care, in Austin. During her third appointment at about nine weeks, a resident, Dr. Carla Vilardo, and her supervisor, Dr. Cynthia Mingea, reviewed the ultrasound, according to medical records, which indicated her pregnancy wasn’t viable. Instead of being offered treatment for a miscarriage, De Pablos Velez says she was advised to hold out hope and come back for the next checkup.

Five maternal health experts and practicing OB-GYNs who reviewed the records for ProPublica said by that ultrasound visit, doctors would have had enough information to determine that the pregnancy wasn’t viable, even under the most conservative guidelines. If they wanted to be extra sure, they could have done blood work or one more ultrasound during that visit.

Instead, De Pablos Velez was told to come back in two weeks, according to medical records. During a visit when she should have been nearly 11 weeks pregnant, Mingea wrote in her chart she was “not optimistic” about the pregnancy's viability. Still, De Pablos Velez was advised to return in another week to be sure.

Within a few days, when the cramping got so bad she could barely walk, De Pablos Velez went to the emergency room at St. David’s Medical Center, unaware that a D&C could stop the pain and the bleeding. “I’ve never researched what it looks like for women who have a miscarriage,” she told ProPublica. “I always thought you go to the bathroom and have a little bit of blood.”

Over two visits to the emergency room, doctors told her that she could complete the miscarriage at home, even as she reported filling up three toilet bowls with blood and a nurse remarked that they needed a janitor to clean the floor, De Pablos Velez and her husband recalled. No obstetrician ever came to assess her condition, according to medical records, and while her hospital chart says “all management options have been discussed with the patient and her husband,” De Pablos Velez and her husband both told ProPublica no one offered her a D&C.

She was told to follow up with her OB at her next appointment in three days. Six hours after discharge, though, she was trying to ride out the pain at home when her husband heard her muttering “lightheaded” in the bathroom and ran to her in time to catch her as she collapsed. “She was pale as a ghost, sweating, convulsing,” said her husband, Sergio De Pablos Velez. “There was blood on the toilet, the trash can — like a scene out of a horror movie.”

An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where doctors realized she no longer had enough blood flowing to her organs. She received two blood transfusions. Without them, several doctors who reviewed her records told ProPublica, she would have soon lost her life.

Vilardo and the doctors who saw De Pablos Velez in the emergency room did not respond to requests to speak with ProPublica or declined to be interviewed. St. David’s Medical Center, which is owned by HCA, the largest for-profit hospital chain in America, said it could not discuss her case unless she signed privacy waivers. The hospital did not respond to ProPublica’s questions even after she submitted them. The De Pablos Velezes say that a hospital patient liaison told them after the ordeal that the hospital would conduct an internal investigation, educate the emergency department on best practices and share the results. It never shared anything. When ProPublica asked about the status of the investigation, neither the liaison nor the hospital responded.

Mingea, who supervised Vilardo’s care during checkups, reviewed the clinic’s records with ProPublica and agreed that De Pablos Velez should have been counseled about miscarriage management options at the clinic, weeks before she ended up in the ER. She said she did not know why she wasn’t but pointed ProPublica to the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound criteria, which is hanging on the clinic’s wall and is used to teach residents.

She was adamant that her clinic, which she described as “very pro-choice — about as much as we can be in Texas,” regularly provides D&Cs for miscarrying patients. “I feel badly that Sarah had this experience, I really do,” she said. “Everybody deserves to be counseled about all their options.”

Doctors had five opportunities to counsel De Pablos Velez about her options and offer her a D&C, said Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, who reviewed case records. If they had, the life-or-death risks could have been avoided.

De Pablos Velez “basically received the same care Porsha Ngumezi did, only Porsha died and she survived,” said Abbott. “She was lucky.”

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting, and Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Andrea Suozzo.

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Even though about a million women a year experience a miscarriage, there is little research on complications related to pregnancy loss in the first trimester, when most miscarriages happen. The need to explore this phase is urgent, experts told ProPublica, given the way state abortion bans have disrupted maternal health care.

Although most early miscarriages resolve without complications, patients with heavy bleeding can hemorrhage if they don’t get appropriate treatment — which includes a procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C, that is now tangled up in legislation that bans abortion. As women recounted being left to lose dangerous amounts of blood, and ProPublica told the story of a mother who died in a Houston hospital while seeking miscarriage care, reporters searched for a way to gain a broader understanding of what was happening in the state.

We consulted dozens of researchers and clinicians to develop our methodology and understand how to look at early miscarriage outcomes in the emergency department.

Our latest analysis, of hospital discharge data from Texas, found that after the state made performing abortions a felony in August 2022, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first-trimester miscarriage shot up by 54%.

The number of emergency room visits during first-trimester miscarriage also rose by 25%, a sign that women may be returning to hospitals in worse condition after being sent home, more than a dozen experts told ProPublica.

Experts say the spike is a troubling indicator of delays in care.

The most effective way to prevent severe blood loss during miscarriages, experts said, is a D&C, which uses suction to remove remaining tissue, allowing the uterus to close. The procedure is also used to terminate pregnancies.

Dr. Elliott Main, an expert on maternal hemorrhage and the former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, said the increase in transfusions suggested to him that doctors working under abortion bans are now delaying those interventions for miscarrying patients for longer — “until they’re really bleeding.”

These findings add to ProPublica’s growing body of reporting revealing that maternal outcomes have gotten worse after the state’s abortion bans. In February, we published an analysis of second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations, which found that the rate of sepsis climbed by more than 50% after the state banned abortion. That study focused only on inpatient stays in Texas hospitals. However, many of the clinicians and researchers we spoke with told us that that focus would limit what we could say about miscarriage care earlier in pregnancy; most people experiencing first-trimester pregnancy complications would likely be seen in a shorter emergency department visit, rather than an inpatient stay.

This methodology lays out the steps we took to examine early miscarriage outcomes in the emergency department, to help experts and interested readers understand our approach and its limitations.

We purchased seven years of discharge records for inpatient and outpatient encounters at hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers from the Texas Department of State Health Services. These records contain deidentified data for visits, with information about the encounter, including diagnoses recorded and procedures performed, as well as some patient demographic information and billing data.

We limited our analysis to visits with a diagnosed pregnancy loss across both the inpatient and outpatient datasets. We followed a methodology that maternal health researchers have used for many years to identify “abortive outcomes” — instances of pregnancy loss at less than 20 weeks, which includes diagnoses like ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage. Researchers have typically identified these cases in order to exclude them from metrics assessing complications in childbirth. In contrast, we focused our analysis only on those encounters with a pregnancy loss diagnosis. Medical experts suggested that it's possible more women are self-managing abortions at home; since a self-managed medication abortion would present like a spontaneous miscarriage, however, we can’t differentiate those patients in our data.

We also limited our analysis to either emergency department visits or inpatient stays that began in the emergency department. The state’s outpatient data also includes encounters for outpatient procedures and data for ambulatory surgery centers, which we excluded to focus on emergent hospital care. Ultimately, our analysis focused on 35,500 first-trimester visits per year that came into hospitals through the emergency department, excluding a small number (about 1,400 per year) of inpatient stays that did not begin in the emergency room.

To limit our analysis to pregnancy loss in the first trimester, we looked for a diagnosis code indicating gestational weeks. In cases where a long hospitalization had multiple gestational week codes recorded over the course of the stay, we took the latest one. We excluded any row that had a gestational week code of 13 weeks or more, which marks the start of the second trimester. The vast majority — 78% — of emergency department visits for pregnancy loss had a code indicating unknown gestational week or no gestational week diagnosis code at all. We included those visits in the first-trimester category. Clinicians told us that a pregnant patient coming to the emergency department in her first trimester is less likely to have had a doctor’s appointment establishing gestational age. Since pregnancy loss in the second or third trimester is more serious, and because it is easier to establish gestational age in a pregnancy that is further along, an emergency department doctor would likely be able to establish a gestational age over the course of treatment in those cases.

We then filtered our list of visits to ones where the patient was female and between the ages of 10 and 54, to exclude rows with potential errors. This removed 2,692 visits, or 1.1% of all visits we’d identified.

The number of emergency department first-trimester hospitalizations were relatively stable prior to COVID-19. In 2022, the first full year after the state passed its six-week abortion ban, the number of encounters jumped by 11%. And in 2023, the year after the state criminalized abortion, they rose again, increasing by 25% from pre-COVID levels.

While we could identify an increase in visits, we could not identify patients across visits, which means we can’t say how many of these visits represent the same person returning to the emergency department multiple times for the same pregnancy loss. Texas has seen an increase in live births since the state banned abortion — about 2.7% in 2022, compared with the pre-COVID average, and declining slightly in 2023. But this increase in births — and, by extension, pregnancies — does not explain the rate of change in emergency visits, which far surpasses it.

Clinicians also told us that the threshold for diagnosing pregnancy loss increased after the state banned abortion. To assess how many relevant visits our analysis might be leaving out, and whether we were missing more visits after hospital policy changes, we looked for visits without a pregnancy loss code but with a diagnosis of “threatened abortion” or “early pregnancy hemorrhage,” indicating uterine cramping or bleeding in early pregnancy. Since clinicians told us that these diagnoses might range from light spotting to significant bleeding, and since bleeding in pregnancy is common and does not always indicate a miscarriage in progress, we did not include these visits in our main analysis. However, we also identified a 23% increase in visits with those codes — from an annual average of 70,936 prior to COVID to 87,431 in 2023.

Next, we identified pregnancy loss visits with a transfusion, which typically indicates that there has been a dangerous loss of blood.

For our inpatient dataset, where procedures performed during a hospitalization were recorded as ICD-10-PCS codes, we identified visits with a blood transfusion using a list of codes defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The outpatient dataset, which uses Current Procedural Terminology codes, has just one code — 36430 — for blood transfusions.

Prior to COVID-19, there were 840 first-trimester pregnancy loss emergency department visits each year, on average, with a blood transfusion. In 2022, the first full year after the state passed its first abortion ban, transfusions climbed to 1,076 — an increase of 28% from pre-COVID years. By 2023, the first full year after abortion was criminalized, that number climbed to 1,290 — an increase of 54% compared to pre-COVID. That’s 450 more visits with a blood transfusion in 2023 than the pre-COVID average.

After the state’s first abortion ban went into effect in September 2021, blood transfusions increased. After abortion became a felony in August 2022, they increased more.

Even as the number of visits to the emergency department increased, the proportion of those visits with a transfusion also went up, from 2.5% in pre-COVID years to 2.8% in 2022 and 3% in 2023 — suggesting that the increase in transfusions may not be explained by an increase in encounters alone.

Experts who reviewed ProPublica’s data wondered if the increase in transfusions might be driven by more women experiencing complications of ectopic or molar pregnancies, rare nonviable pregnancies in which the likelihood of a blood transfusion is much higher than for a spontaneous miscarriage. The data did not bear this out. When we excluded visits with ectopic and molar pregnancy diagnoses, the increase in the number of pregnancy loss transfusions was even higher — it rose by 61% by 2023.

To understand whether there were increases in the numbers of transfusions in other maternal visits over the same time period, we also looked at blood transfusions in delivery events, using the federal methodology to identify birth complications. In hospital births, the number of transfusions increased by 6.7% in 2022 and 9.9% in 2023 compared with the pre-COVID average — an increase, but smaller in magnitude than the increase in first-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations.

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Andrea Suozzo, Kavitha Surana and Lizzie Presser.

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.

A Hartford woman never saw her car again after it was towed while she sat in housing court fighting an eviction.

A home care worker had her car towed while she hurried to assist a patient down the stairs.

A young man lost his car and slipped into financial instability after he mistakenly put his apartment’s parking sticker in the wrong spot.

Late last month, Connecticut lawmakers, following a series of stories by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica, passed sweeping reforms to the state’s towing laws that will address many of the issues drivers have complained about. The stories highlighted how towing companies can begin the process to sell people’s cars after 15 days, one of the shortest windows in the country.

Reporters heard from dozens of drivers across Connecticut who had to pay exorbitant fees or had their vehicles sold when they couldn’t afford the charges. Many told reporters about the severe consequences they experienced after their cars were towed or sold, including the loss of jobs, personal mementos and housing.

While some people’s cars might not have been towed under the new law, which takes effect Oct. 1, it doesn’t solve all the problems that vehicle owners raised.

Here are some of their stories, as well as whether the changes in the new law would have helped them.

Not fixed: The bill does not address this issue.

Home care worker Maria Jiménez circled the Hartford apartment complex for low-income seniors, looking for a place to park. Jiménez drives patients to and from errands like doctor’s appointments and grocery shopping. Her patient that day last November used a cane, and Jiménez planned to park close so that her patient wouldn’t have to walk too far.

Unsuccessful, Jiménez stopped in front of the building’s entrance.

“I turned on the hazard lights and left the car on, just long enough to let her know I had arrived, since I didn’t have her phone number,” she said. Jiménez said she told a few bystanders she would be right back and asked them to keep an eye on her car.

She said she went inside only briefly, and when she returned, the car was gone. Bystanders told Jiménez the car had been towed and that they’d pleaded with the truck’s driver, to no avail.

Tracy Wodatch, president and CEO at Connecticut Association for Healthcare at Home, said many of her members complain about getting ticketed or towed when they’re doing their jobs helping people.

When it happens frequently enough at a particular complex, she said, an agency might speak with the landlord to ask for a designated spot. But there isn’t a statewide mandate.

New Jersey passed a law in 2018 allowing home health care workers, visiting nurses and others to apply for a placard similar to an accessible parking tag to place in their cars.

“Maybe we can talk to the legislators off session to see if there’s anything we can do,” Wodatch said.

The company that towed Jiménez, MyHoopty.com, was in Watertown, and Jiménez was stranded over 30 miles away in Hartford. “How will I get there if I don’t have a car?” she recalled thinking.

MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said the vehicle was parked in the fire lane without its hazard lights on for 17 minutes before it was towed and that the apartment complex had hired MyHoopty to prevent such parking violations.

“This is a critical safety issue, particularly at an elderly housing complex where the emergency access can be a matter of life and death,” Festa said. (MyHoopty has appeared in other stories in our series.)

If you have information about health workers and caregivers being towed while on the job, email Dave Altimari at daltimari@ctmirror.org or Ginny Monk at gmonk@ctmirror.org, or call 203-626-4705.

The apartment complex owners didn’t respond to calls and emails for comment.

Jiménez said she makes about $290 a week. By the time she got to MyHoopty, the company told her the bill was more than $400.

Her husband footed the bill. But it wasn’t easy: “The only reason I could afford it is because I work mornings, I work nights,” he said.

Not fixed: The bill does not address this issue.

Marie Franklin paid the parking meter and dashed into Hartford housing court for a December 2023 hearing that would determine if she would get evicted from her apartment. She worried about the parking. People can wait for hours for the judge to call their cases, but the Hartford Parking Authority limits nearby meters to two hours.

So people facing eviction sometimes run the risk of getting a parking violation, getting their cars towed or missing their names being called for hearings, which can cause them to lose their housing in a default judgement for not showing up to court.

Joshua Michtom, a Hartford City Council member and an attorney who has represented children and parents in juvenile court, said although there’s a nearby parking garage, it’s more expensive and it fills up.

“You have to be there, but then you don’t know how long you’re going to have to wait,” Michtom said. “And the courts are not particularly forgiving if you’re not there the moment your case gets called.”

When Franklin’s name was finally called, a judge rejected her plea to stave off eviction. Dejected and stressed about losing her home, she walked out of court only to discover her 2015 Volvo was gone. Franklin had more than a dozen unpaid parking tickets, some of which were nearly 20 years old. She’d forgotten about some, and others were for vehicles she no longer owned. About half of the tickets were for exceeding the meter limit or parking over the line near the courthouse.

“I had paid for the parking meter and everything,” Franklin said. “They drive around, and they look for people’s cars.”

Jill Turlo, CEO of the Hartford Parking Authority, said the agency’s officers use license plate scanners to find people with outstanding tickets. Turlo said “high-traffic metered areas,” like the street the courthouse is on, are “regularly patrolled by parking enforcement.” Turlo said that the parking authority has not received any requests to extend the time for metered parking near the courthouses.

While towing cars for unpaid parking tickets is a common practice for cities, Minnesota passed a law last year barring such tows, seeing them as an unfair burden on low-income families. Several cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, have also stopped such tows after a California appeals court ruled that towing cars for unpaid parking tickets violated people’s rights against warrantless seizures, said Rebecca Miller, an attorney with the Western Center on Law & Poverty.

Hartford has one of the strictest policies in Connecticut. A city ordinance allows tows after two or more unpaid tickets that date back to September 2012. Other cities including Danbury and New Britain don’t tow for unpaid tickets. Norwalk and Waterbury will tow if there are four unpaid tickets; Stamford tows for three unpaid tickets or more than $250 owed, officials in those cities said. The limit in Bridgeport is $100, and New Haven’s is $200.

“We do have an ordinance where we can boot a car for unpaid tickets, but we haven’t used it in years,” said Deborah Pacific, director of the Danbury Parking Authority.

When Franklin went to eviction court, she had been trying to hold onto the place she and her daughter lived while she looked for a new job. Between unpaid fines, late fees, and towing and storage charges, it would have cost almost $3,000 to get her car back, she said.

If you have information about towing near courthouses, email Dave Altimari at daltimari@ctmirror.org or Ginny Monk at gmonk@ctmirror.org, or call 203-626-4705.

“I would have chose to pay whatever I owed to my housing. So my car, there was nothing I could do,” Franklin said.

The vehicle was towed by Metro Auto Body & Towing, which did not return calls and emails for comment. It was later sold by the lender.

After losing her car and housing, Franklin moved to Florida to stay with her son.

Fixed: Apartment residents now have 72 hours if caught without a parking permit or with an expired one.

It’s often little discrepancies that lead to big consequences. When Tishawn Tillman moved into his Hartford apartment in September, he got a parking sticker that allowed him to park in the building’s private lot. He said he wasn’t sure where to put it, so he stuck it on the driver’s side window.

But less than a month later, his car was towed by Cross Country Automotive in Hartford.

“There is absolutely no legal documentation in my lease that says that this has to be strictly on the windshield,” Tillman said.

Minor rule violations such as parking crooked or not backing into a space have caused people’s cars to be towed and then sold when they couldn’t afford the fees. Stories like Tillman’s drove legislators to act. Under the new law, the towing company would have had to warn Tillman, giving him 72 hours to get a new sticker and place it in the right spot. The law also says towers have to get permission from the apartment complex to tow a vehicle unless it’s blocking traffic or parked in a fire lane.

Tillman said he assumed his car had been stolen. But the police told him it had been towed.

Tillman contacted Cross Country: “I asked them, ‘Did you see my sticker?’ And they said, ‘We didn’t see the sticker.’” He said he called the apartment manager, but he wouldn’t help.

“When I realized that neither of the parties were going to budge on the matter, I told them that I wasn’t going to pay the fine, even if I had the money, which I didn’t at the time,” Tillman said.

Tillman said his bill was “$200 but growing every day.”

He filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office, which said it unsuccessfully tried to resolve the issue through its voluntary mediation program and recommended he complain to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Sal Sena, Cross Country’s owner, submitted a letter to the attorney general saying there are signs all over the parking lot explaining the rules. The apartment manager, Jack Matos, wrote to the attorney general that he talked with Sena about giving TIllman a discount on the towing fees.

“I reiterated Tishawn needs to make sure that it’s placed on the windshield,” Matos wrote.

Frustrated, Tillman eventually gave up trying to get his car back.

“I went from being a self-made young man with his own apartment and car to having to burn a hole in my pocket just to get to and from work on ride-share services like Uber and Lyft,” he said.

Fixed: The law allows vehicle owners to reclaim their cars with other documents besides DMV registration.

Shaleah Carr needed two more weeks until her DMV appointment in April to register the Chevrolet Malibu she had just bought from her mom. It was the earliest appointment she could get.

Her boyfriend had taken the car to his brother’s house to work on it when they decided to take it for a test drive. But the car broke down on U.S. Route 5 in South Windsor, and police called for a tow.

Her boyfriend told the tow truck driver that the car was registered to Carr’s mother and that Carr had the title and proof of insurance. But the towing company, Tolland Automotive, wouldn’t release the vehicle to Carr because she wasn’t the registered owner, said the company’s owner, George Fellows. The vehicle was towed on a Friday afternoon, and by the time Carr was able to get to the lot on Monday morning, she owed more than $300.

“I told them I’m on one income and I can’t afford it,” Carr said. “I just paid my rent for that month, and I even asked, ‘Do you guys do payments?’”

Since then, her Malibu has been sitting in the company’s lot.

Carr’s dilemma has happened to people whose cars have been towed across Connecticut — they’ve been unable to quickly register their cars and then blocked from reclaiming them because they’re not registered in their names yet. By the time they can register their cars, so much time has passed that the tow bill is too expensive or the company has sold their car.

The new law gives consumers time to register their car before it can be towed and requires towers to release vehicles if presented with the title or a bill of sale as proof of ownership. The law also requires towers to accept other forms of payment besides cash and demands towers have business hours on weekends so fees don’t accrue while they’re closed.

Fellows said police called them to the scene. “Then we found out that this guy didn’t own the car at all,” Fellows said. Without the owner there, “it had to come back to our shop.”

Carr called her mother. “I was like, ‘You’re going to have to come up here,’ but even if she does, she can’t really do much,” Carr said. “She didn’t have the money to get it back either.”

Carr said the last time she called Tolland Automotive, the bill was $800. Given that she paid her mother only $500 for the car, she said, it almost wasn’t worth trying to get it back anymore.

Fellows said Carr’s mother did come into the office earlier this month with proof of registration, and he is willing to release the vehicle if she pays what is owed.

“It’s all on them,” he said. “I mean they knew what the issue was back then. Why haven’t they come back?”

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Dave Altimari, Ginny Monk and Shahrzad Rasekh, The Connecticut Mirror.

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 February afternoon in 2022, Dr. Bazak Sharon logged into a remote video meeting from his home office in Minneapolis. He propped up his cellphone next to his laptop and hit record on a video app.

There were several people in the meeting with Sharon, who at the time was a pediatrician with the University of Minnesota. Two hospital leaders, Sharon’s boss and a lawyer were there, too. But the person Sharon was most wary of was in the lower-right corner of the grid of faces: Dr. Nancy Harper, the director of the child abuse team at University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis.

Sharon suspected that the discussion, about the care of a 3-month-old named Hank, was going to be contentious. He worried that someday, perhaps even in court, he might need evidence of his role caring for Hank. He was prepared to argue with Harper if she challenged his clinical judgment, but it was quickly apparent that the quality of the care he provided was not at issue.

Hank was born small and was not eating well or gaining enough weight; sometimes, according to his parents, he just seemed to be in pain. (ProPublica is using a nickname for the child at the parents’ request.) At an appointment in January, a doctor ordered an endoscopy, a procedure where a tiny camera is threaded through the body, and also suggested an MRI.

The scans of Hank’s brain showed fluid pooled under both sides of his skull. The blood was old, possibly months old, and Hank was admitted to the hospital. Sharon met him the next day.

A member of Harper’s team named Dr. Caroline George also evaluated Hank that day. In her opinion, according to court records, the bleeding was “consistent with abusive head trauma.” Sharon had suggested other possible causes, including an injury from birth, an infection or even spontaneous bleeding. Sharon wrote in the child’s medical record that it’s “likely we will never identify the exact mechanism that caused his injury.”

Three days after Hank was admitted, Sharon said he learned that a county child protection services worker was preparing to come to the hospital to take custody of the baby, as well as his 2-year-old brother, William.

Sharon said that he was stunned that no one had spoken to him since he was Hank’s primary doctor. So he did something that seemed to put him at odds with George, Harper and hospital leadership: He told Hank’s parents, CPS and police he didn’t think the bleeding alone was enough evidence to say this was abuse.

Sharon was also concerned that separating a sick infant from his parents based only on a suspicion of abuse would cause more harm to Hank. Working with the detective assigned to the case, he admitted William, though the older boy was not sick, so that the whole family could stay in the hospital under the supervision of a nursing assistant while doctors continued to treat and monitor Hank.

But four days later, according to Sharon, his supervisor told him that he was being removed from Hank’s care team, and that he should not communicate further with the parents. When Sharon asked why, he said he was told it was at Harper’s recommendation. “The care,” he said, “changed the second she got involved.”

In less than 48 hours, a judge determined that Hank and William were in need of child protection services and their parents were forced to leave the hospital without them. The same day, Sharon said, he was summoned to the first of two meetings with hospital leadership and Harper. When his supervisors scheduled the second meeting — titled “Review of CPS Patient” in the emailed invitation — less than a month later, Sharon came prepared to record it.

Before all this, Sharon had an appreciation for Harper’s formidability and for her influence in the world of child abuse pediatrics. She began her career as a pediatrician in the U.S. Navy before leading a child abuse team at a hospital in Texas. In 2014, she became the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Safe and Healthy Children.

A certified child abuse pediatrician for almost 16 years, the 56-year-old Harper consulted on suspected cases of abuse for several Twin Cities hospital systems, testified as an expert witness in child abuse trials across the U.S. and lectured on diagnosing signs of abuse. She was also the vice president of the Ray E. Helfer Society, a national nonprofit organization for physicians who work on the medical aspects of child abuse and neglect, and she became its president in 2023.

Sharon, now 53 years old, was also well-respected. Originally from Israel, he came to the U.S. in 2003 to continue his medical studies. He began as a fellow at the University of Minnesota in 2006 and had been on faculty for 12 years. Specializing in infectious diseases, he became medical director of the university’s pediatric COVID-19 clinic and was a contributing member of the state Health Department’s Long COVID Guiding Council. Sharon was also a hospitalist, meaning he directed the care for admitted patients like Hank, coordinating with other doctors and specialists.

As the online February meeting progressed, it became clear to Sharon that, in a face-off with Harper, his medical expertise and the fact that he considered many of the people on the call to be friends counted for little. The lawyer noted that differing medical opinions could open the hospital or the doctors themselves up to a lawsuit. George added that the differences in opinions had also “made things difficult for particularly law enforcement.”

“I’m not a child abuse expert,” said Dr. Sameer Gupta, the chief medical officer of the hospital, on the call. “But, you know, my experience is this: Try to be completely aligned. That’s one story that’s coming from the medical team as much as possible, to avoid the potential for, one, litigation, two, to let the experts really drive the ship.”

Sharon became increasingly agitated during the call, shaking his head. He was angry that the conversation had revolved around protocols and the hospital’s legal liabilities, rather than Hank’s care.

“I think I did the best any doctor can do at that point in making sure that my patient is getting the best care while I’m not trying to hide any potential abuse,” he said during the meeting, the video of which he shared with ProPublica. “I felt very uncomfortable that CPS are showing up unannounced and taking two children away from the parents without having a discussion with the doctors who take care of this patient. I hope no one expects me not to say something when that happens in front of me.”

But Harper seemed to suggest that Hank might have been seen by too many doctors, and that Sharon had interfered with her team’s ability to “frame” the case to CPS and law enforcement. She said she did not consider it her role to be concerned about what could happen to a family after a diagnosis.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “if I spent all of my time worrying about … what’s going to happen with child protection and foster care or the cost for the legal stuff afterwards, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.”

Sharon began to protest. He said he had been reading the scientific literature on abusive head trauma and found it unconvincing, a conclusion more and more doctors were coming to. Harper cut him off. “If I spent two weeks reading the literature on COVID, would you consider me as qualified as you are?” she asked. “I’ve been doing this for decades.”

Gupta abruptly shut down the conversation. He said that Sharon’s plan to keep the family in the hospital was the “wrong decision and will never, ever happen again,” and then he ended the call.

As the screen went blank, Sharon let out a long, deep sigh. Though disturbed and frustrated, he did not yet realize his actions on behalf of Hank and his family would affect his career. Over time, Sharon came to see Harper as the main driver of a campaign to get him to fall in line with the child abuse team.

“She’s very black and white, right and wrong, no gray area,” he said, “which is not the way to do medicine or pediatrics.”

Harper did not respond to requests for comment. She and a spokesperson for University of Minnesota Physicians, which is the clinical practice for the university’s medical school faculty, also did not respond to a detailed list of questions. But the spokesperson wrote that the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children, as it is now called and which is led by Harper, provides “trauma-informed medical care and psychosocial support while addressing research, prevention, advocacy, policy and education.”

“When healthcare providers and community organizations refer patients to CSCH, the team only makes decisions about diagnoses and subsequent medical care based on expert assessment of medical evidence (e.g., medical history, physical exam, lab and radiological findings, input from other medical specialists and information provided by caregivers),” the spokesperson added. “Further investigations and legal determinations are outside of our team’s scope.”

A spokesperson for Fairview Health Services, which owns Masonic Children’s Hospital, said in a statement that although Harper is an employee of University of Minnesota Physicians, “we obviously take these concerns seriously and are actively reviewing the matter.”

“Our highest priority is the safety, dignity, and wellbeing of our patients and families — especially in moments of crisis. We are aware of concerns being raised regarding the conduct of a University of Minnesota Physicians (UMP)-employed provider who practices in a UMP-led clinic within the M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital,” the spokesperson added. “We are in close communication with our academic partners and are evaluating any steps we may need to take to preserve the trust our patients and families place in us.”

Harper’s arrival in Minnesota coincided with the fallout of a high-profile tragedy: the 2013 death of 4-year-old Eric Dean.

Dean lived with his family in sparsely populated Pope County, in west-central Minnesota. According to an investigation by The Minnesota Star Tribune, teachers and caregivers reported signs that Dean was being abused to child protection workers at least 15 times before his stepmother threw him across a room, causing injuries that would kill him. She is in prison serving a life sentence.

In response, then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in 2014 creating the Governor’s Task Force on the Protection of Children. The next year, along with a slew of other reforms, the state Legislature created a $23.35 million grant to give counties money based partially on the number of open child protection investigations.

She’s very black and white, right and wrong, no gray area, which is not the way to do medicine or pediatrics.

The number of child abuse cases soared. For instance, in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, cases of physical abuse more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, before dropping over the next several years. Child abuse experts attributed the rise to what Joanna Woolman, a law professor who specializes in child abuse law, called “a moment of hyper-awareness around medical child abuse and child abuse in general.”

“We were convening a task force that was heavily made up of people with the view that we needed to do more, have more eyes on, be more aware,” added Woolman, who is also the executive director of the nonprofit Keeping Families Connected Minnesota, which provides free legal services to families going through child protection proceedings.

A subspecialty of pediatrics first recognized by the American Board of Pediatrics in 2006, child abuse pediatrics focuses on the diagnosis and documentation of signs of abuse. A diagnosis can help determine whether a parent loses custody of their child or faces criminal investigation. In cases where children die, it can mean murder charges. Harper was one of the first certified child abuse pediatricians in the country — the board counts over 350 subspeciality certifications nationwide — and is one of seven currently certified in Minnesota.

“Physicians with less training on child abuse and neglect both over- and under-identify injuries in children, whether they’re physical abuse injuries, sexual abuse injuries,” she testified in a 2019 trial. “A child with a missed injury could come back later with a more serious injury or even die. And so these are sort of issues where we realize that we needed expertise.”

Harper was hired as director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Children by the University of Minnesota the same year as Dayton’s executive order. According to testimony she gave in a 2019 criminal trial, the university recruited her to build up the center and create a regionwide child abuse consultation system.

“When I’m on call, I can be covering up to six different places where children can be seen,” Harper testified.

In 2016, the Otto Bremer Trust, a private charitable organization based in St. Paul, announced a $2.5 million grant to fund Harper’s ambitions to expand the center, which is based at Masonic. Harper is also program director for the university’s Child Abuse Pediatrics Fellowship, a three-year training program, giving her influence over the next generation of child abuse pediatricians. A spokesperson for the trust added that it does not have any “role in the day-to-day operations of the Center.”

Hennepin County has a contract with Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, to provide medical consultation, expert witness testimony and case consultation with county attorneys. According to testimony Harper has given in the past, she and her team handle about 700 cases of suspected abuse each year. She has testified that 10% to 20% of those wind up confirmed for physical abuse, although it is difficult to determine if these figures are accurate since child protection case records are not public. She has given different answers on the witness stand when asked if she has ever testified for the defense; in 2021, she said she’d testified for the defense in a “half dozen or a dozen” cases. In 2023, she said she’d done so twice.

In 2018, Harper’s center began cohosting an annual Child Abuse Summit with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. In 2022, she received an introduction during a panel discussion from Dan Allard, senior assistant Hennepin County attorney, that illustrated the close relationship between Harper and her team and county prosecutors.

“If you haven’t heard Dr. Harper testify, she does a wonderful job. She knows her stuff,” Allard, who is also the head of the county attorney’s child abuse team, said at the summit. “We just barely try to keep up understanding what she’s talking about. So we just kind of let her go.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, Daniel Borgertpoepping, a spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, wrote, “Since our office represents Hennepin County in CPS matters, we are unable to comment.”

Before Sharon’s encounter with Harper, he hadn’t given much thought to her team’s practices, which included evaluating and treating some of the worst cases of physical and sexual abuse of children. While he said he had referred a dozen or so cases of suspected neglect to her team, he viewed their work as a bleak side of pediatrics. He was happy to avoid it.

“I had a lot of respect for the child abuse doctors, like, ‘Thank you for doing that for us,’” he said.

But for roughly 15 years, the world of child abuse pediatrics has been roiled by criticism of the diagnosis once known as shaken baby syndrome and now categorized under the umbrella term abusive head trauma. A triad of symptoms — brain bleeding, brain swelling or injury, and blood in the retina — was once considered evidence that a child had been violently shaken, even if there were no other injuries or even bruising.

In court testimony, Harper has said that both shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma are considered scientifically valid diagnoses by “the mainstream medical community,” and that the controversy is more of a legal one than a medical one. She has acknowledged there are medical conditions that mimic possible signs of abuse, including bruises, bone fractures and head trauma symptoms, but she said that her assessments take all of that into account in concert with specialists like neurosurgeons and radiologists.

“We take a very detailed history from the family. We do a physical examination, look at past medical history, other medical conditions, the initial laboratory and X-ray reports,” she testified in 2023.

Sharon readily concedes that he wasn’t an expert in child abuse medicine. But as he and the other doctors tried to understand the bleeding in Hank’s brain as well as his lack of weight gain, he spent his evenings reading the scientific and legal literature about shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma, scribbling notes to himself. He read a key American Academy of Pediatrics statement reaffirming its belief in the diagnoses; he also read studies that challenged the science underlying them.

“It is wrong to fail to advise parents and courts when these are simply hypotheses, not proven medical or scientific facts,” Sharon wrote on a copy of one law review article.

He read about how the first neurosurgeon to posit the theory of shaken baby syndrome said in an interview years later that he was “disturbed that what I intended as a friendly suggestion for avoiding injury to children has become an excuse for imprisoning innocent parents.” According to the National Registry of Exonerations, over 40 people convicted in cases related to the diagnosis have been exonerated since the 1990s, often over increasing doubts that the three symptoms can be interpreted so definitively.

Sharon also learned that the subspecialty of child abuse pediatrics itself has also been under increasing scrutiny. Perhaps the most famous child abuse pediatrician case became the basis for the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya,” in which a 10-year-old girl’s pain syndrome was diagnosed by a child abuse pediatrician as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. A jury found the hospital liable for medical malpractice and awarded the family over $200 million; the hospital has appealed. Several families are suing a Pennsylvania hospital for what they say are false diagnoses of abuse by Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen, who led its child abuse team. A series of allegations of overzealous diagnoses of abuse have followed Dr. Barbara Knox from her job leading a child abuse team at the University of Wisconsin to similar positions in Alaska and at the University of Florida.

The child abuse pediatrician community is tightknit. After Knox left Wisconsin, Harper replaced her as an expert witness in some criminal cases. Esernio-Jenssen wrote Harper a nomination letter for a Ray E. Helfer Society award, calling her “an unstoppable force.”

Esernio-Jenssen and Knox, as well as the Helfer Society, did not respond to requests for comment. In a response to the lawsuit, attorneys for Esernio-Jenssen and her former hospital network wrote that they “are being attacked and demonized for protecting children from abuse and following the law,” and that the allegations of bad-faith abuse investigations are “obviously untrue.” The lawsuit is ongoing.

Knox was sued by two families in Alaska who accused her of leveling false accusations of abuse against them. In response, Knox said in an affidavit that she has no say over whether child protection takes children away from their parents, that she did not “conspire” with police or anyone else on custody issues or criminal prosecution, and that she did not personally evaluate one of the named children. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024 after the families agreed to drop the matter.

According to a spokesperson for the University of Florida, Knox resigned her job there as a pediatrician with the Child Protective Team, effective Aug. 15. He declined to comment on the circumstances.

From the start, Sharon thought what was happening to Hank — a child struggling with eating and weight gain, with abnormal results on his endoscopy and weeks-old, unexplained cranial bleeding without any other symptoms of abuse — fit into his wheelhouse treating complex and even mysterious cases more than it fit into Harper’s. After poring through the literature on abusive head trauma, he was even more convinced.

Sharon followed his supervisor’s instruction not to speak to Hank’s parents. But after the couple’s attorney approached him, he provided a five-page account of Hank’s medical treatment. He included several potential alternative diagnoses.

“It is clear to me that missing child abuse is as serious as missing bacterial meningitis and should be considered as malpractice,” he wrote. “But also, as a hospitalist, who frequently manage children without clear definitions of their diagnosis, I’m used to ambiguity.”

Dr. Matthias Zinn, Hank’s neurologist, agreed with Sharon that the fluid in Hank’s brain, what he called “subdural collections,” could not be definitively tied to abuse. He provided a letter to the couple’s attorney as well. Zinn, who said he’s consulted on hundreds of cases of suspected abuse, said Harper’s child abuse team was by far the most aggressive he’s worked with.

“It was just crazy,” he said. “I remember speaking to them and saying, ‘What evidence do you have, other than the subdural collections?’ And they made it clear that they did not respect my opinion.”

Zinn has since left the University of Minnesota for a position in Florida.

Both a CPS investigator and a police detective spoke to Sharon repeatedly, and according to Hank’s parents, they also relayed Zinn’s opinion and begged CPS to talk to him as well. But the CPS petition alleging Hank was a victim of abuse only cited George’s assessment. There’s no mention of Sharon or Zinn.

George did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Hennepin County declined to comment on individual cases or to respond to a detailed list of questions. But she provided a statement from Kwesi Booker, the director of Hennepin County Children and Family Services, which oversees child protection services. In that statement, Booker said “child protection social workers appropriately rely on the subject matter expertise of trained medical professionals in situations involving complex medical issues.”

Unable to let the matter go, Sharon wrote letters to the hospital’s leadership council about what he called “dangerous overreach” by Harper’s child abuse team. In response, Gupta said he referred the letter for review to the hospital’s Committee for Professional Enhancement. Citing privacy laws, hospital administrators would not tell Sharon the outcome of the committee’s review.

Separately, Gupta wrote Sharon a “peer review” letter informing him that, in several of his cases, there were concerns about his conduct, professionalism and a disregard for hospital protocol. Sharon said he was aware of his reputation for being strong-willed and, at times, dismissive or even rude to colleagues. The letter warned him against doing anything that could be seen as “retaliatory” toward other members of the staff. Gupta gave three examples related to Sharon’s purportedly improper procedures for prescribing medications for pediatric COVID-19 patients; he also referred to Sharon’s interaction with the child abuse team.

“Your documentation in the chart and communication with law enforcement was contrary to what was being stated by the child abuse team,” Gupta wrote in the peer review letter. “This created confusion with the community workers and with the family in a situation in which consistency is very important.”

Gupta did not respond to repeated requests for comment or to a list of questions.

Hank’s family had a limited view of what was going on behind the scenes at Masonic Children’s Hospital, even though Hank’s mother, Kay, worked in the neonatal intensive care unit there. She recognized Sharon and knew of George, though she hadn’t worked closely with either. Because Hank’s parents both work in the pediatric field and for the privacy of their children, they asked that ProPublica not use their full names.

The day after Hank’s admission, Kay and her husband, Ross, explained to George about the baby’s difficulty with breastfeeding, his inexplicable pain and his inability to tolerate formula. When George asked her about possible accidents or injuries, the only thing Kay could think of was a time when she was driving and slammed on the brakes with Hank in his car seat.

After she read the CPS petition alleging her children were victims of physical abuse, Kay said that she came to suspect that George had been trying to collect information to use against her and her husband, not to treat Hank.

“I think she was sitting there hoping that I was just going to confess or tell her that I thought my husband might have done it,” Kay said. “And I was just hoping that she was going to help me.”

While Hank and William were in foster care, police confiscated the couple’s cellphones, laptops and baby monitors, and interviewed various family members and friends. In April 2022, Hennepin County decided not to pursue criminal charges.

CPS found no additional evidence of abuse, and after nearly four months, a judge ordered both boys returned to the couple, though it was on the condition that a grandparent live in the home full time as well. In June, just before a trial to determine if Hank had been abused, CPS agreed to begin the process of dismissing the matter, though the agency still made a “finding of maltreatment” by an “unknown offender.”

In late July, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office signed off on the dismissal. It had been nearly seven months since Hank was first admitted to the hospital.

Around the same time, Kay and Ross took Hank for genetic testing, which showed he carried an abnormal gene duplication with unknown effects. He was also put on medication that resolved his stomach sensitivity issues and increased his appetite. One of Sharon’s theories was that the bleeding under his skull was due to poor feeding, dehydration or vitamin deficiency, though no one has been able to identify a definitive cause.

“He’s just been our little mystery baby, but he is a beautiful, healthy, thriving little 3-year-old,” Kay said.

William, she said, still has nightmares about being taken from his parents. At 5 years old, he insists on sleeping in their bed every night. Defending themselves, Kay said, plus the cost of additional caregivers amounted to roughly $100,000 for the family.

Kay never met Harper and only later came to understand the role she played. Because there was no trial, she never had the chance to confront Harper or George, or lay out any of the arguments that she and her husband had been falsely accused of abuse.

But just before the case closed, Kay saw an advertisement for the 2022 Child Abuse Summit, with Harper as a featured panelist. She bought a ticket to the event and sat right in front of Harper.

“They do these things and probably never have to see the people again, outside of places where they’re in charge,” she remembered thinking. “You’re going to have to see me.”

Sharon did not know it at the time, but he was far from the only person struggling in recent years to keep a family from losing their children after Harper’s involvement. In his job as an attorney for indigent parents at Hennepin County Adult Representation Services, Scotty Ducharme has dealt with horror stories and seen cases of extreme child abuse up close. But when allegations have arisen almost exclusively from a medical diagnosis from a child abuse pediatrician, which he calls a “CAP,” he has also seen signs that not all the doctors on the child’s treatment team are in lockstep.

“If you read the medical records written by the CAPs versus the regular doctors in the cases I’ve worked on, you can see the breadcrumbs by the regular doctors who don’t believe what the CAPs are saying,” he said. “I’ve only caught, on the record, doctors directly contradicting each other a few times.”

In the spring of 2023, Ducharme met María Alejandra Ramírez Rodríguez and her husband, Cristian Andrés Guzmán de la Ossa, a couple in their 20s. Recent arrivals from Colombia who spoke no English, they brought their 4-week-old son to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis after noticing bruises on his thighs, back, forehead and face. They had taken photos of previous bruises as well, which they shared with doctors. (ProPublica is not naming the child to protect his privacy.) The couple also brought him to the hospital when he was 12 days old because his umbilical stump wouldn’t stop bleeding.

Harper examined the baby and reviewed X-rays of his skeleton. The results were alarming; he had 14 healing rib fractures, as well as fractures in his arms and legs in various states of healing. Harper wrote that the baby was “at grave risk for further injury, morbidity and mortality,” and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed an expedited petition to permanently sever the parents’ rights. The baby was placed in foster care with a woman who worked as a nurse.

When Ducharme looked at the medical records, he saw that the baby had gone through a number of blood tests, including ones to check for clotting disorders. Several metrics were marked slightly outside of the normal range, including a reading for a protein tied to a genetic clotting disorder called von Willebrand disease. Ducharme zeroed in on a particular note, perhaps a “breadcrumb,” written by the pediatrician who saw the baby before Harper; he wrote that the baby would need more follow up from the hematology department “if more bruising develops.”

While in the care of the foster parent, the baby developed new bruises and Harper evaluated him again. A new abuse investigation was opened against the foster parent, and he was moved to a second foster family — in this case, a pediatrician and her husband. Once again, the baby developed new bruises, according to his visitation supervisor.

“This is medical, something weird is going on here,” Ducharme remembered thinking.

But according to notes from the CPS investigator, Harper declined to change her determination or to perform additional blood clotting disorder tests as the first doctor had advised: “Would not be any different now so they did not repeat those tests,” he wrote. He added that in Harper’s opinion, whoever bruised the baby in April was the most likely offender in subsequent incidents.

In her notes, Harper also questioned whether the marks noticed on the baby while he was living with his second foster family were true bruises. Instead, prosecutors posited a new theory in the case: that Ramírez and Guzmán were surreptitiously abusing their son during visits, even though the visits were supervised by a woman who works as an observer in CPS cases. To Ducharme, that strained credulity. He became concerned that Harper was too unwilling to change her diagnoses, and that prosecutors were reluctant to challenge her.

“She has this level of cachet with prosecutors, it’s like a trauma bond. I’m sure she’s right more than 90% of the time,” he said. “They’re unwilling to see her failures.”

But not everyone is. In several cases in recent years, judges and juries have found Harper’s diagnoses unconvincing. In 2024, a Wisconsin judge barred Harper from telling the jury that a child died as the result of “abusive head trauma, non-accidental injury, child abuse, or murder.”

“Dr. Harper sees herself as an advocate, at least in part, and this blurs her role as scientist and clinician with the role of advocate against child abuse, further calling into question her fidelity to the scientific validation of abusive head trauma diagnoses, especially when it is a close call,” the judge said.

In another Wisconsin case, Paul Marshall was found not guilty in 2023 of shaking his 7-week-old son, Fox, to death. Harper examined the boy at Children’s Minnesota, a hospital in St. Paul. A spokesperson for Children’s Minnesota declined to comment on the case.

“We were put through the grinder,” Marshall said. “We don’t get our son back, and we don’t get a lot of the closure that we should have had as a family. That was robbed from us.”

After Ducharme became convinced that there was a medical explanation for Ramírez’s baby’s injuries, he prepared a memo that pointed out a number of possible contributing factors, including that Ramírez had gone days without eating while she was pregnant and traveling across the U.S.-Mexico border from Colombia and had a difficult delivery in Minneapolis. Ramírez got her own medical records from Colombia which showed that, as a child, she’d also experienced unexplained bruising.

To challenge the prosecutors’ theory that the baby’s new bruises were from further abuse by the parents, Ducharme spoke to their visitation supervisor. She provided a sworn affidavit saying that she did not witness any abusive behavior from the parents, and that she’d become so stressed in part from the pressure to say she had witnessed abuse that she asked to be taken off the case. She also wrote that CPS workers were lying to and about the couple, claiming that the foster parents spoke Spanish, which they did not, and that Ramírez and Guzmán were unreliable about keeping visitation appointments.

“The parents attended every visit. They never cancelled,” the supervisor wrote. “Even when their tire popped on the way to their first supervised visitations, they got an Uber and were only about five minutes late.”

A judge ruled that there was “no evidence” that the parents were abusing their baby at visits and ordered a second medical opinion. But before that could happen, the county agreed to drop the termination of parental rights petition after Ramírez and Guzmán agreed to acknowledge that their son “sustained serious injury” while living with them, without admitting guilt. The case was converted to a regular child protection matter, which allowed the couple to have home visits. They eventually regained custody, and the case was closed in April 2024.

“There’s no accountability. There’s no finding of fact,” Ducharme said. “You think: ‘You get your baby back. None of the rest of it matters.’ But it matters.”

The couple found the entire experience bewildering and traumatic. Although they are now reunited, they missed six months of their newborn son’s life. Ramírez didn’t have the chance to breastfeed after the first foster parent began feeding her son formula instead of the breast milk she was pumping.

“We didn’t see him crawl. We didn’t see him turn over —” Guzmán said.

“We didn’t see him sit up,” Ramírez said.

Although they worry about doing anything that might draw attention from immigration authorities, in late May they filed a federal civil lawsuit against Harper and the institutions she works for. Ducharme, who left his job at Hennepin County and is now in private practice, is representing the couple in the lawsuit, which alleges that Harper acted in “bad faith,” and that because of her actions there was no “genuine investigation” into the baby’s medical condition.

According to a spokesperson for Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, they have not been served with the lawsuit yet and have not responded to the allegations.

“Why, after they didn’t find any physical abuse, did the hospital not keep doing exams to see if there was something medically wrong with him?” Guzmán asked. “They robbed us of our child without any real explanation.”

In late May 2023, a year and a half after Hank’s case, Sharon was on his way home from work when he got a phone call. A new case had come into the emergency room at Masonic Children’s Hospital that needed his consultation: a 3-month-old boy named Daniel. An MRI had shown fluid on his brain. CPS was already investigating whether this was abuse.

“Not again,” Sharon recalled thinking. He turned his car around.

At the hospital, he learned the unusual circumstances that had brought Daniel to the hospital: His mother, a pediatric nurse, had volunteered her son for an academic study that needed the MRIs of healthy children as a baseline. Someone on the research team noted fluid in Daniel’s brain, and a report was made to child protection services.

After meeting with the parents, examining Daniel and reviewing the MRI report, Sharon wrote up a one-page note. Among other things, he recommended that CPS continue assessing Daniel for possible abuse. But after what had happened with Hank’s case the year before, Sharon also put his views on the record.

“One should practice extreme caution attributing isolated intracranial fluid collection to abusive head trauma when no additional clinical signs or symptoms are found,” he wrote, “as the evidence to support this is controversial and has been questioned by many authorities (medical as well as legal).”

After a day in the hospital, Daniel and his parents, Grace and Paul, were allowed to go home together, although they said the CPS investigation remained open for a month. George, the same doctor involved in Hank’s case, asked Daniel’s parents to bring him back two weeks later, where Grace said he screamed as he was pinned down for additional X-rays and to check for bruises. According to medical records, George determined that Daniel had experienced an “accidental trauma” but did not attribute the cranial fluid to abuse.

Nevertheless, according to Sharon, his supervisor called to tell him that, once again, Harper was concerned about the legal liability created by his note, and that his opinion about the bleeding was “beyond the scope” of his practice. Struck by the similarities in Daniel’s and Hank’s cases, Sharon wrote another letter reiterating his concerns from the conference call in February 2022. He said that he’d spoken to many colleagues at the hospital who shared those concerns, and that he strongly believed “our organization must acknowledge and address these concerns in a transparent manner.”

In late June, University of Minnesota records show that three complaints were filed within days of one another against Sharon. Because the complaints were closed without discipline, they are protected personnel data under Minnesota law.

The first complaint was filed the same day he said he received an invite to a meeting with Dr. Joseph Neglia, head of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics, physician-in-chief at Masonic Children’s Hospital and one of the people included on the February 2022 call. The second complaint was filed a few days later, while the third came the day before the meeting took place.

According to Sharon, an attorney for University of Minnesota Physicians at the meeting told him he was “weaponizing” his notes. A week and a half after that, Sharon said, Neglia brought him in again and gave him a choice: resign or be terminated on the spot. Sharon was shocked. He ultimately resigned.

Under an agreement with University of Minnesota Physicians, Sharon stayed on the job for several months with strict guidelines, including that he was prohibited from working with the infectious disease division. Neglia warned Sharon in a letter to “maintain a high level of professionalism and decorum” and not to engage in “any behavior that could be perceived as retaliation,” echoing the language in Gupta’s peer review letter to Sharon.

“You will refrain and remove yourself from involvement in any cases of suspected child abuse or potential non-accidental trauma,” Neglia wrote. “This includes any interactions with or communication with parents or guardians of a patient in such a case.”

Neglia did not respond to requests for comment.

At the time of his departure, Sharon was one of only a small number of doctors in the country who treated a complicated immune disease with behavioral symptoms in children known by the acronym PANDAS or PANS. Parents of Sharon’s patients were so upset by news of his resignation that they went to the local newspaper.

The coverage prompted an investigator from the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office to reach out to Sharon, and Sharon said he took the opportunity to share his concerns about the child abuse protocols at his former workplace. He said he has yet to hear back. A spokesperson at the attorney general’s office declined comment.

On a recent April afternoon, Sharon arrived at a restaurant in a suburb of Minneapolis. Tucked in a back corner table was Daniel, now a blond-headed 2-year-old, Grace, Paul and Grace’s mother. Sharon had not seen them since that day in the emergency room two years ago, and the family wanted to thank him for what he’d done. (Because Grace is a pediatric nurse and because she wants to protect her son’s privacy, ProPublica agreed to withhold the families’ full names.)

Grace still feels traumatized by the 24 hours she spent at Masonic Children’s Hospital, not sure if she’d be allowed to take her son home. She remembers that the one person who seemed to be in her corner was Sharon and how it felt to read that single line in her son’s medical report that may have cost Sharon his job.

“That was the light in the darkness at that point,” she said.

Since the incident, Grace said, she has had to work with George on cases of suspected child abuse and said she has become more understanding of how parents are treated.

For his part, Sharon characterizes the entire experience as “surreal.” He commutes from Minnesota to Colorado and Wyoming for temporary hospitalist and clinical work, but he is still looking for a full-time job. He wants to get back to treating infectious diseases and thinking about pediatric immunology, and he worries that he could be hurting his own reputation by speaking out about how hospitals deal with cases of suspected child abuse.

At the same time, he said he feels that he has to push back against the attempt to get him, and other physicians like him who may disagree with a child abuse pediatrician, to “fall in line.”

After leaving his job, Sharon got a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm, a quote attributed to Albert Einstein he said reflects his thinking and his actions at Masonic Children’s Hospital: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Mariam Elba contributed research. Melissa Sanchez and Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Lussenhop, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

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In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There is nothing remarkable about a politician raising money for nonprofits and other groups that promote their campaigns or agendas. What’s unusual, experts said, is for a politician to keep some of the money for themselves.

“If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official’s political future but also literally providing them with their income, that’s new and disturbing,” said Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now leads the Brennan Center’s work on campaign finance.

ProPublica discovered details of the payment in the annual tax form of American Resolve Policy Fund, which is part of a network of political groups that promote Noem and her agenda. The nonprofit describes its mission as “fighting to preserve America for the next generation.” There’s little evidence in the public domain that the group has done much. In its first year, its main expenditures were paying Noem and covering the cost of some unspecified travel. It also maintains social media accounts devoted to promoting Noem. It has 100 followers on X.

In a statement, Noem’s lawyer, Trevor Stanley, said, “Then-Governor Noem fully complied with the letter and the spirit of the law” and that the Office of Government Ethics, which processes disclosure forms for federal officials, “analyzed and cleared her financial information in regards to this entity.” Stanley did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the ethics office was aware of the $80,000 payment.

Stanley also said that “Secretary Noem fully disclosed all of her income on public documents that are readily available.” Asked for evidence of that, given that Noem didn’t report the $80,000 payment on her federal financial disclosure form, Stanley did not respond.

Before being named Homeland Security secretary, overseeing immigration enforcement, Noem spent two decades in South Dakota’s government and the U.S. House of Representatives, drawing a public servant’s salary. Her husband, Bryon Noem, runs a small insurance brokerage with two offices in the state. Between his company and his real estate holdings, he has at least $2 million in assets, according to Noem’s filing.

While she is among the least wealthy members of Trump’s Cabinet, her personal spending habits have attracted notice. Noem was photographed wearing a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that costs nearly $50,000 as she toured the Salvadoran prison where her agency is sending immigrants. In April, after her purse was stolen at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, it emerged she was carrying $3,000 in cash, which an official said was for “dinner, activities, and Easter gifts.” She was criticized for using taxpayer money as governor to pay for expenses related to trips to Paris, to Canada for bear hunting and to Houston to have dental work done. At the time, Noem denied misusing public funds.

Noem’s personal company, an LLC called Ashwood Strategies, shares a name with one of her horses. It was registered in Delaware early in her second term as South Dakota governor, around 1 p.m. on June 22, 2023. Four minutes later, the nonprofit American Resolve Policy Fund was incorporated in Delaware too.

American Resolve raised $1.1 million in 2023, according to its tax filing. The group reported that it had zero employees, and what it did with that money is largely unclear.

In 2023, the nonprofit spent only about $220,000 of its war chest — with more than a third of that going to Noem’s LLC. The rest mostly went toward administrative expenses and a roughly $84,000 travel budget. It’s not clear whose travel the group paid for.

The nonprofit reported that it sent the $80,000 fundraising fee to Noem’s LLC as payment for bringing in $800,000, a 10% cut. A professional fundraiser who also raised money for the group was paid a lower rate of 7%.

In the intervening years, American Resolve has maintained a low public profile. In March, it purchased Facebook ads attacking a local news outlet in South Dakota, which had been reporting on Noem’s use of government credit cards. Noem’s lawyer did not answer questions about whether the group paid her more money after 2023, the most recent year for which its tax filing is available.

The nonprofit has an affiliated political committee, American Resolve PAC, that’s been more active, at least in public. Touting Noem’s conservative leadership under a picture of her staring off into the sky, its website said the PAC was created to put “Kristi and her team on the ground in key races across America.” Noem traveled the country last year attending events the PAC sponsored in support of Republican candidates.

American Resolve’s treasurer referred questions to Noem’s lawyer. In his statement, Noem’s lawyer said she “did not establish, finance, maintain, or control American Resolve Fund. She was simply a vender for a non-profit entity.”

While Noem failed to report the fundraising income Ashwood Strategies received on her federal financial disclosure, she did provide some other details. She described the LLC as involving “personal activities outside my official gubernatorial capacity” and noted that it received the $140,000 advance for her book “No Going Back.” The LLC also had a bank account with between $100,001 and $250,000 in it and at least $50,000 of “livestock and equipment,” she reported.

The fact that Ashwood Strategies is Noem’s company only emerged through the confirmation process for her Trump Cabinet post. South Dakota has minimal disclosure rules for elected officials, and Noem had not previously divulged that she created a side business while she was governor.

Noem’s outside income may have run afoul of South Dakota law, according to Lee Schoenbeck, a veteran Republican politician and attorney who was until recently the head of the state Senate. The law requires top officials, including the governor, to devote their full time to their official roles.

“There’s no way the governor is supposed to have a private side business that the public doesn’t know about,” Schoenbeck told ProPublica. “It would clearly not be appropriate.”

Noem’s lawyer said South Dakota law allowed her to receive income from the nonprofit.

Do you have any information we should know about Kristi Noem or other administration officials? 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.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski.

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Upheaval at the nation’s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers — and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

“There’s no transparency on why it’s not happening,” said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA’s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

FEMA’s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward. The clawback of money included hundreds of millions already pledged. FEMA also quietly withdrew a notice for states to apply for $600 million in flood mitigation grants.

On top of that, on June 11, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began requiring that she review all FEMA grants above $100,000. That could slow its vast multibillion grants apparatus to a crawl, current and former FEMA employees said.

FEMA did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the missed application deadline or the impact of funding cuts and delays, instead responding with a statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that Noem is focused on bringing accountability to FEMA’s spending by “rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and working to ensure only grants that really help Americans in time of need are approved.”

The memo announcing the change arrived the day after President Donald Trump said he wants to begin dismantling FEMA at the close of hurricane season this fall.

All of this has left states — some of which rely on the federal government for the vast majority of their emergency management funding — in a difficult position. While Trump has sharply criticized FEMA’s performance delivering aid after disasters strike, he has said almost nothing about the future of its grant programs.

“It’s a huge concern,” said Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, which houses emergency management. The state agency gets more than 90% of its operating budget from federal funds, especially FEMA grants. “The uncertainty makes it very difficult,” she said.

In North Carolina, a state hit hard by a recent natural disaster, federal grants make up 82% of its emergency management agency’s budget. North Carolina Emergency Management leaders are pressing state lawmakers to provide it with “funding that will sustain the agency and its core functions” and cut its reliance on federal grant funding, an agency spokesperson said.

A forced weaning off of federal dollars could have an outsize impact in North Carolina and the other states that pass on much of their FEMA grants to county and local agencies. Many rural counties have modest tax bases and are already stretched thin.

In May, ProPublica published a story detailing the horrors of Hurricane Helene’s impact on one of those counties, Yancey. Home to 19,000 people, it suffered the largest per capita loss of life and damage to property in the storm. Jeff Howell, its emergency manager, was operating with only a part-time employee and said that for years he had been asking the county commission for more help. It wasn’t until after the storm that county commissioners agreed with the need.

“They realized how big a job it is,” said Howell, who has since retired.

But even large metropolitan counties rely on the grants. The hold upin opening the grant applications concerns Robert Wike Graham, deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management, which serves an area of 1.2 million people and is home to a nuclear power plant. The training and preparation FEMA grants help the agency pay for are critical to keeping the community safe in the face of a nuclear catastrophe.

Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants — and the future of FEMA itself.

“We’re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What’s going on? Nobody knows,” Graham said.

Trump is on his second acting FEMA administrator in five months, and the director who coordinates national disaster response turned in his resignation letter June 11. More than a dozen senior leaders, including the agency’s chief counsel, have left or been fired, along with an unknown mass of its full-time workers.

“Every emergency manager I know is screaming, ‘You’re screwing the system up.’ We’ve all been calling for reform,” Graham said. “But it’s too much, too fast.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 to centralize federal disaster management, the agency began to dole out grants to help communities grappling with large-scale destruction. Over the years, its grants ballooned, especially after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when huge new programs helped states harden security against this alarming new threat.

Today, FEMA operates roughly a dozen preparedness grant programs. Among other things, the money serves as a financial carrot to ensure that even spending-averse and tax-strapped states and counties employ emergency managers who help communities prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Former FEMA leaders said states have been largely content to sit back and let the feds pay up. As a result, they said, the grants have created a system of dependence that leaves emergency managers vulnerable to ever-shifting national priorities and, at the moment, a president set on dismantling the agency.

Across the country, the percentage of state emergency management agencies’ budgets paid by federal funding ranges from zero to 99.4%, a 2024 National Emergency Management Association report says. A spokesperson declined to provide a state-by-state breakdown, so ProPublica canvassed a few.

Wyoming tops 90%. Texas’ agency gets about three-quarters of its operational budget from federal funding. Virginia gets roughly 70%. South Carolina comes in around 61% federal funding for day-to-day operations.

Most state emergency managers agree that their states need to depend less on the federal government for their funding, “but there’s got to be some glide path or timeline where we can all work toward the goal,” Budd said.

Some states would need upwards of a decade to prepare for such a seismic shift, especially those like Wyoming that budget every other year, she added. Its Legislature is in the middle of budget negotiations for fiscal year 2027-28.

ProPublica is continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. If you are an emergency manager who would like to tell us about your needs or share your experience with recovery efforts, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

If emergency managers instead are scrambling, “the effects that we’re going to see down the line is a lack of preparedness, a lack of coordination, training and partnerships being built,” Budd said. “We’re not going to be able to respond as well.”

A key reason states have become so dependent on FEMA grants despite the risk of national political upheaval is that state legislatures and local elected leaders haven’t always prioritized paying for emergency management themselves despite its critical role. With FEMA’s grants, they haven’t had to.

W. Craig Fugate has seen reluctance to wean off FEMA grants from all levels of government. He served as FEMA administrator under Obama and, before that, as head of Florida’s emergency management division under then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist.

“My experience tells me locals will not step up unless they are dealing with a catastrophe,” Fugate said.

Because most of the preparedness grants require no match from state or local governments, he said, it strips away any motivation for them to do so — especially with other pressing needs vying for those dollars.

“The real question is how much of this is actually critical and should be the responsibility of local governments to fund?” Fugate said. “Neither local governments nor states have been very forward in funding beyond the minimums to match federal dollars.”

After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Emergency Management agency commissioned a report that pointedly criticized the state’s “over-reliance on federal grants to fund basic operations.” Only about 16.5% of the state agency’s budget comes from state appropriations.

The report noted that this reliance had led to an inadequate investment by the state in its emergency management staffing and infrastructure. A staff shortage at the agency “severely compromised the state’s response to Hurricane Helene.” Among other things, a lack of staff hampered the State Emergency Response Team’s ability to maintain a 24-hour operation that was supposed to support local and county officials who were overwhelmed by the massive storm.

North Carolina state Rep. Mark Pless, the Republican co-chair of the House Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Committee, said the state’s conservative spending and $3.6 billion in reserves have “afforded us the ability to fund ourselves for preparedness” if FEMA suddenly yanks its grants.

But Democratic Rep. Robert Reives, the House minority leader, worried that any financial flexibility would dry up if planned and potential tax cuts in the years ahead create a budget shortfall, as some have predicted.

In mostly rural Washington County, along North Carolina’s hurricane-prone coast, Lance Swindell is a one-man emergency management office. His county, home to 11,000 people, lacks a big tax base.

Like other emergency managers across the state, Swindell said he supports cutting FEMA red tape and waste, but “grant funding is a major funding source just to keep the lights on.”

One of the grants in the FEMA program that blew past its deadline for opening applications pays half of his salary. That grant can fund core local operations such as staffing, training and equipment. It is critical to local emergency management offices: Almost 82% of counties across the country report tapping into it.

Cuts to this particular grant under the Biden administration already reduced what North Carolina gets — and therefore what gets passed down the governmental food chain to people like Swindell. North Carolina was allocated $8.5 million in fiscal year 2024, down from $10.6 million two years earlier.

Looking ahead, Swindell is still waiting for the applications to open while wondering if FEMA will more drastically slash the grants — and, if so, whether his county could find the money to continue paying his full-time salary.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

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Senators this week called for a federal investigation into the Trump administration’s killing of hundreds of contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Angus King, a Maine independent, wrote to the agency’s inspector general on Monday asking for an investigation into the administration’s cancellation of the contracts and the consequences for veterans.

The senators highlighted “damning reporting from ProPublica” on the cancellations, including how the Department of Government Efficiency used an artificial intelligence tool that marked contracts as “MUNCHABLE.”

The senators wrote that DOGE’s use of AI to scrutinize contracts “adds an entire new level of unease connected to the decision-making, security, governance, and quality control of the entire process.”

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts after DOGE’s review but have declined requests by lawmakers and ProPublica for details.

“Despite repeated requests in letters to the Secretary, questions at hearings, and dozens of emails to VA officials,” the senators wrote, “the Department has not provided a single briefing or a complete and accurate list of the contracts it has cancelled.”

Blumenthal and King wrote that the VA shared a list of contracts in May, but it was “riddled with errors and inaccuracies.”

Amid the administration’s “stonewalling,” Blumenthal said in a statement, “ProPublica’s reporting revealed these cancelled contracts were delivering essential services to veterans and exposed the cruel and dumb AI formulas DOGE bros used to cancel contracts.”

Blumenthal added, “Veterans and all Americans deserve transparency around decisions being made at VA.”

As ProPublica detailed, a DOGE staffer with no background in government or health care created the AI tool used to mark contracts as “munchable.” Among the contracts that were tagged and later killed was one to maintain a gene sequencing device for improving cancer treatment. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. And a third was to help measure and improve nursing care.

In another story, we reported how VA doctors and other staffers across the country have raised alarms about how the killing of contracts could threaten veterans’ care. In internal emails, hospital staffers warned about canceled contracts to maintain cancer registries, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked one such contract “for immediate termination.”

The VA is one of the nation’s largest health care providers, charged with the care of more than 9 million veterans. President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize former service members. “We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”

The administration has reiterated that stance even as the VA has been shedding employees and contracts. Amid the cutbacks, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, said earlier this year, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”

The VA has not responded to our request for comment about the senators’ letter. Previously, press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said that decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff.

He also said the VA has not canceled contracts that provide services to veterans or work that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Congressional Republicans, looking for ways to offset their proposed tax cuts, are seeking to mandate that millions of Americans work in order to receive federally subsidized health insurance. The GOP tax and budget bill passed the House in May, and Senate Republicans are working feverishly to advance their draft of federal spending cuts in the coming days.

Georgia, the only state with a Medicaid work mandate, started experimenting with the requirement on July 1, 2023. As the Medicaid program’s two-year anniversary approaches, Georgia has enrolled just a fraction of those eligible, a result health policy researchers largely attribute to bureaucratic hurdles in the state’s work verification system. As of May 2025, approximately 7,500 of the nearly 250,000 eligible Georgians were enrolled, even though state statistics show 64% of that group is working.

Gov. Brian Kemp has long advocated for Medicaid reform, arguing that the country should move away from government-run health care. His spokesperson also told The Current and ProPublica that the program, known as Georgia Pathways to Coverage, was never designed to maximize enrollment.

Health care analysts and former state Medicaid officials say Georgia’s experience shows that the congressional bill, if it becomes law, would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs as it is implemented while threatening health care for nearly 16 million people.

Here’s how proposed federal work requirements compare to Georgia’s — and how they may impact your state:

What Congress proposes:

The House bill, H.R. 1, and draft Senate proposal require all states to verify that Americans ages 19 through 64 who are receiving Medicaid-funded health coverage are spending 80 hours a month working, training for a job, studying or volunteering. These new verification systems would need to be in place by Dec. 31, 2026, and would have to check on enrolled residents’ work status twice a year. That means people who already receive coverage based on their income level would need to routinely prove their eligibility — or lose their insurance.

The federal work requirements would apply to more than 10 million low-income adults with Medicaid coverage as well as approximately 5 million residents of the 40 states that have accepted federal subsidies for people to purchase private health coverage through what’s commonly known as Obamacare.

The House bill exempts parents with children under 18 from the new requirements, while the Senate version exempts parents with children under 15. Neither bill exempts people who look after elderly relatives.

Georgia’s experience:

Georgia’s mandate applies to fewer categories of people than the proposed federal legislation would. Even so, officials failed to meet the state’s tough monthly verification requirement for Pathways enrollees due to technical glitches and difficulty confirming the employment of those who work in the informal economy such as house cleaners and landscapers because they may not have pay stubs or tax records. The challenges were steep enough that Georgia has decided to loosen its work verification protocols from monthly to once a year.

What this means for your state:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 1 would result in at least 10 million low-income Americans losing health insurance. Health care advocates say that’s not because they aren’t working, but because of the bureaucratic hoops they would need to jump through to prove employment. Research from KFF, a health policy think tank, shows that the vast majority of people who would be subject to the new law already work, are enrolled in school or are unpaid stay-at-home caregivers, duties that restrict their ability to earn a salary elsewhere.

Arkansas is the only state other than Georgia to have implemented work requirements. Republican state lawmakers later changed their minds after data showed that red tape associated with verifying eligibility resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage within the first few months of the policy. A federal judge halted the program in 2019, ruling that it increased the state’s uninsured rate without any evidence of increased employment.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, says Medicaid work requirements in H.R. 1 are “common sense.” He says the policy won’t result in health coverage losses for the Americans whom Medicaid was originally designed to help because the work requirements won’t apply to these groups: children, pregnant women and elderly people living in poverty. He points to the $344 billion in a decade’s worth of projected cost savings resulting from Medicaid work requirements as beneficial to the nation’s fiscal health. “You find dignity in work, and the people that are not doing that, we’re going to try to get their attention,” he said earlier this year.

What Congress proposes:

The House bill allocates $100 million to help states pay for verification systems that determine someone’s eligibility. The grants would be distributed in proportion to each state’s share of Medicaid enrollees subject to the new requirements — an amount health policy experts say will not be nearly enough. States, they say, will be on the hook for the difference.

Georgia’s experience:

In the two years since launching its experiment with work requirements, Georgia has spent nearly $100 million in mostly federal funds to implement Pathways. Of that, $55 million went toward building a digital system to verify participants’ eligibility — more than half the amount House Republicans allocated for the entire country to do the same thing.

Like other states, Georgia already had a work verification system in place for food stamp programs, but it contracted with Deloitte Consulting to handle its new Medicaid requirements. Georgia officials said the state has spent 30% more than they had expected to create its digital platform for Pathways due to rising consultant and IT costs. Deloitte previously declined to answer questions about its Pathways work.

What this means for your state:

All states already verify work requirements for food stamp recipients, but many existing systems would need upgrades to conform to proposed federal legislation, according to three former state Medicaid officials. In 2019, when states last considered work requirements, a survey by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office showed that Kentucky expected administrative costs to top $200 million — double what H.R. 1 has allocated for the country.

Rep. Buddy Carter, the Republican who represents coastal Georgia and chairs the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which had recommended Medicaid cuts in H.R. 1, said that upfront costs borne by states would be offset by longer-term savings promised in the House bill. Some congressional Republicans concede that the cost savings will come from fewer people enrolling in Medicaid due to the new requirements. Savings from work mandates amount to 43% of the $793 billion in proposed Medicaid cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

What Congress proposes:

Medicaid is a federal social safety net program that is administered differently in each state. Neither H.R. 1 nor the Senate legislative proposal provides a blueprint for how states should verify eligibility or how the costs of overseeing the new requirements will be paid.

Georgia’s experience:

Georgia’s experience shows that state caseworkers are key to managing applications and work requirement verifications for residents eligible for Medicaid. The agency that handles enrollment in federal benefits had a staff vacancy rate of approximately 20% when Georgia launched its work requirement policy in 2023. Georgia at the time had one of the longest wait times for approving federal benefits. As of March, the agency had a backlog of more than 5,000 Pathways applications. The agency has said it will need 300 more caseworkers and IT upgrades to better manage the backlog, according to a report submitted to state lawmakers in June.

What this means for your state:

Former state Medicaid officials and health policy experts say Georgia’s staffing struggles are not unique. In 2023, near the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, KFF surveyed states about staffing levels for caseworkers who verify eligibility for federal benefits, including Medicaid. Worker vacancy rates exceeded 10% in 16 of the 26 states that responded; rates exceeded 20% in seven of those states.

Adding caseworkers will mean higher costs for states. Currently, 41 states require a balanced budget, meaning that those state legislators would either need to increase taxes and revenues to verify Medicaid enrollees are working or lower enrollment to reduce costs, said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

In about half a dozen large states where county governments administer federal safety net programs, the costs of training caseworkers on the new verification protocols could trickle from states to counties.

“There are provisions in there that are very, very, very challenging, if not impossible, for us to implement,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told reporters in June of the costs facing her state to meet the House bill requirements.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Margaret Coker, The Current.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Tennessee Lookout . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

ProPublica and the Tennessee Lookout are continuing to investigate Harpeth Financial, which owns Flex Loan operator Advance Financial and online sportsbook Action 247. To tell us about the experience you had with either or both companies, call or text reporter Adam Friedman at 615-249-8509.

Jeanette Thomas had just made her first payment on a loan from payday lender Advance Financial when she said the company emailed her with “good news.” She could borrow $206 more.

The solicitation was a relief to Thomas, a 62-year-old grandmother who had already exhausted the $783 disability check she receives each month since her health conditions render her unable to work.

Over the next few months, Thomas made the required minimum payments on what started in 2019 as a $400 loan to buy Christmas presents. But each time she did so, the company invited her to borrow almost all of the payment back, she said, with emails or letters like “Access Your Cash Today” or “You’re Already Approved.”

“They kept trying to rope me in,” Thomas said.

In the months that followed, the company continued to expand her credit, allowing Thomas to borrow close to $1,600 in total. In the emails and letters that Thomas kept, Advance never stated how much it would cost if she continued to reborrow.

Thomas had read her original loan documents warning that the loan carried a high 279.5% interest rate and would be challenging to pay off. But as the loan balance grew, Thomas came to realize she was trapped. By the spring of 2021, Thomas had paid Advance almost $4,000, yet she still owed more than $1,000 and was paying more than $200 a month to cover the interest, depleting the disability checks that were her only source of income.

Until the Flex Loan, reborrowing or rolling over payday loans was against the law. Tennessee lawmakers first banned reborrowing when they passed the state’s payday lending law in 1997. They reaffirmed that protection in 2011 when they updated that law.

When Tennessee lawmakers passed a 2014 law allowing Flex Loans, they included no such provision.

Instead, the bill’s sponsor, current House Speaker Cameron Sexton, said the loans could be better for borrowers because it required them to make a monthly minimum payment that covered all fees, interest and 3% of the principal. This key provision would ensure that borrowers would always be paying down the principal on the loan.

Thomas and more than a dozen borrowers told the Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica that Advance has encouraged them through emails and notifications to borrow back the value of almost all of the payments they made, tearing a hole in the safety net the law tried to put in place.

All but one of the 14 borrowers who spoke to the newsrooms for this story reported having reborrowed at least once as part of their Advance loan. As with Thomas, Advance made them eligible to borrow more shortly after paying, even though they were often making the minimum payments and almost immediately borrowing the money back to cover the cost of the payment they just made. Advance went on to sue 12 of these borrowers once they stopped being able to afford the loan.

Andrea Heady, 45, was sued by Advance in Knoxville for over $7,300, despite having paid the company nearly double what she ultimately borrowed. She initially took out $750 through a Flex Loan after the hours at her university job were slashed in June 2020.

“I’ve always sent money home to my mom,” who was taking care of Heady’s sister, she said. “It was COVID. My aunt and uncle were very sick, then they passed away and I just needed money.”

Heady said Advance would send her notifications letting her know she could borrow more. One email appeared as a financial statement, but included in bold and large text was the amount she had available to borrow. The statement did not provide a payment schedule, a new loan amount, the total cost of the loan or how long it would take to pay off making minimum payments, information a lender would have been required to provide if she'd been borrowing on a credit card.

Heady reborrowed on her Flex Loan over a dozen times over the next 18 months as Advance increased her credit limit seven times. She stopped paying when her monthly payments of $650 equaled a quarter of her paycheck.

Heady hoped the company would forget about her, but it didn’t. In 2024 Advance sued and won a wage garnishment against her. Ultimately, Heady will end up paying Advance over $14,000 on the $3,850 she borrowed.

David Hill, a 36-year-old from Nashville, started by borrowing $175 from Advance in February 2020. Each month he would repay the full borrowed amount, including interest and fees, and reborrow the principal, often on the same or next day. Over 18 months, he reborrowed almost 80 times.

“COVID happened and I was going through financial trouble,” Hill said. “I would get a check and pay it off. But then I would have to borrow it back to have money.”

Via email, Advance kept increasing his credit limit and encouraging him to borrow more. “Dear David,” started two of the emails, which contained notes like “good news — you have $645 available.” Hill eventually reached a point where he couldn’t afford the minimum payment, totaling over $400 a month.

He stopped paying and the company sued him in 2023 for over $4,700.

The Lookout and ProPublica sent detailed questions to Cullen Earnest, the senior vice president of public policy at Advance Financial. Earnest repeated what he said in a previous statement, that the company has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. He added that the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions has received just 91 complaints about flexible credit lenders since 2020, representing less than 0.001% of all new flex loan agreements, and that this data reflects the satisfaction of the vast majority of Advance’s customers.

The Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica previously reported that the company has sued over 110,000 Tennesseeans since it began offering the Flex Loan in 2015, making it one of the largest single plaintiffs in the state. One of the subjects in that story reborrowed on her Flex Loan over a dozen times, turning $4,400 in borrowed cash into more than $12,500 in payments to Advance. The company sued her and won a judgment that led to the garnishment of her wages.

Christopher Peterson, a senior official with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2012 to 2016 and a contributor to multiple reports about payday loans, said the agency sought to limit reborrowing on payday and title loans because the desire to borrow again often indicated that borrowers couldn’t afford the loans and would be paying them off forever. That is especially true of the Flex Loan in Tennessee, he said.

“It’s a nasty loan,” he said.

The CFPB began targeting high-interest lenders in 2013, releasing a report on the dangers of payday loans and how reborrowing often led to debt traps.

With the threat of federal regulation looming, Advance Financial Chairman Michael Hodges started working with Tennessee lawmakers to create a new type of high-interest loan that would avoid federal oversight, he told the Nashville Business Journal.

In Tennessee’s state House, Advance and other high-interest lenders turned to Sexton to sponsor the legislation.

Sexton was then the majority whip, a position typically reserved for ambitious state House members hoping to travel up the party’s ranks. Sexton also knew banking. He worked at a local bank as a business development executive, a position he still holds today, along with having a seat on its board.

Starting in the spring of 2014, Sexton began guiding Flex Loan legislation through Tennessee’s state House committees. On the surface, the bill appeared to be a new type of loan with a 24% interest rate, which would be significantly cheaper than the triple-digit interest on payday and title loans. But the actual cost could be found in the bill’s details, which gave lenders the right to charge a 0.7% daily customary fee, which over a year adds another 255.5%.

Official video recordings from legislative committee hearings show that neither legislators nor Sexton discussed reborrowing or the loan’s interest rate.

When Sexton took to the Tennessee House floor in April 2014, his colleagues showed him deference because of his banking experience, said former Rep. Craig Fitzhugh, a rural West Tennessee Democrat and the minority leader at the time, who sponsored the original payday lending legislation in 1997.

During the hearing, Fitzhugh asked Sexton if he thought the soon-to-be-created Flex Loan was “a step up for consumers” compared to payday and title loans. Sexton said that was a “fair statement.”

When a lawmaker asked about the interest rate, Sexton said it was 190% to 210%, which is lower than the actual rate. But Sexton once again assured lawmakers that the minimum payment would reduce the cost of the loan for consumers.

“When you reduce the principal each and every month, obviously you’re decreasing the amount of interest,” Sexton said from the House floor.

The Flex Loan legislation passed the Tennessee House 83-6, with Fitzhugh abstaining from the vote. Fitzhugh said the high-interest lending landscape in Tennessee has only “gotten worse” over the past decade because of Flex Loans.

Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Knoxville Democrat, said she regrets voting for the Flex Loan legislation and feels like proponents of the legislation misled her.

“I definitely would not vote that way today, and would like to work to fix that massive mistake that’s hurt so many Tennesseans,” Johnson said.

A spokesperson for Sexton did not respond to questions from Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica.

Since passing the Flex Loans bill in 2014, Sexton has received over $105,000 in contributions to his campaign and political action committee from Advance Financial and its affiliated PACs, making them one of his largest contributors.

Over five years after the law passed, Jeanette Thomas walked into an Advance Financial store three weeks before Christmas 2019 and filled out an application.

Thomas said she listed her income, gave them her debit card number and permission to directly charge her bank account the required monthly minimum payment. A borrower isn’t required to put up any assets, like a car or future paycheck, to get a Flex Loan.

Unlike some other borrowers, Advance allowed Thomas to pay monthly, instead of biweekly, because that’s how she received her federal disability benefits. Thomas said she suffered physical abuse for decades that left her with a traumatic brain injury.

The company deposited $400 into her account the same day she walked into the store.

At the time of the loan, Thomas had been trying to build a better relationship with her two sons and three grandchildren. She used the money to purchase gift cards, art supplies and toys. She was happy to be able to give her family something for the holidays.

Thomas’ first minimum payment to Advance was due Dec. 31 and was a manageable $51.78. That December had been cold, and when Thomas’ heat bill came in $50 higher than normal, she started to worry.

Then, just two days after her loan payment, Thomas said an unsolicited email arrived from Advance telling her she was eligible to borrow $206 more. Thomas thought she could afford it. Why would Advance loan her money she couldn’t pay back, she said she thought.

What Thomas did not realize was her first bill had only been for a 13-day payment period, meaning she’d been charged less than two weeks of interest. By taking the additional loan for an entire month, her monthly payment would almost triple to $130 per month.

Over the next two months, the company offered her a lifeline, extending her credit limit enough that she could make her payments with the money she’d just borrowed.

Eventually, Advance stopped increasing her credit limit and her monthly payment had increased to $230 a month, almost a third of her disability check.

Thomas cut her spending to the bone, hoping that a few months of payments would get her out of debt. She turned to friends to help pay for food, and to a local church to cover her utility bill.

Thomas said Advance sent her mailers and emails multiple times a month, offering to let her borrow any of the principal she had paid off. She tried to resist, but inevitably, she would have an unexpected expense, like medical bills from a series of mini strokes.

Thomas found herself in the position the CFPB had warned about when it sought to restrict reborrowing. Former CFPB official Peterson, who’s now a law professor at the University of Utah, helped work on the agency’s 2017 payday regulations. At the time, the agency wrote that consumers who reborrowed would inevitably be forced to choose between making an unaffordable payment on the loan or paying for necessities like food or rent.

By May 2021, Thomas could no longer afford to pay. The company kept her loan open and unpaid for 90 days, allowing the interest and fees to accumulate, nearly doubling the amount due to $1,700. Advance then charged Thomas two times in one week, withdrawing $430, or half of her monthly budget.

“I can remember just lying in my bed, stomach hurting and doubled over in pain because I couldn’t get something to eat,” Thomas said.

Not knowing where to turn for help, Thomas filed a complaint with the Tennessee attorney general’s Division of Consumer Affairs. In her complaint, she wrote that Advance “needs to stop abusing their power.”

“Now I cannot pay my rent,” she said.

The state investigated the case and took no action. By October 2022, Advance noted on one of Thomas’s monthly bills that it had “written off” her loan and closed her account. Unlike the other 110,000 Tennesseans who fell behind in their payments, Advance hasn’t sued Thomas, whose federal benefits are protected from garnishment.

The company also agreed in a letter to the state to “cease all communications” with Thomas, but Advance continues to send bills requesting a minimum payment of $226.49.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Adam Friedman, Tennessee Lookout.

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 launched a major reorganization of the U.S. fight against drug traffickers and other transnational criminal groups, setting out a strategy that would give new authority to the Department of Homeland Security and deepen the influence of the White House.

The administration’s plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors’ control over investigations, shifting key decisions to a network of task forces jointly led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS.

Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project’s implementation.

Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations.

“To the administration’s credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,” said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. “But you won’t have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,” he added of the task force plan. “The White House will be able to decide.”

The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes.

The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government’s lead agency for narcotics enforcement.

Trump’s directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” which focused on immigration.

The new task forces will seek “to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,” the order states. They will also aim to “end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.”

Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said.

A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller’s role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. “While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,” she said, “the Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.”

The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president’s Homeland Security Council.

The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a “coordinated, whole-of-government approach” to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — which the Trump administration is shutting down.

Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced “oh-suh-def”), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams.

The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files.

While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking.

As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that OCDETF would play a central role in stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and street gangs. He even suggested that it investigate the governments of so-called sanctuary cities for obstructing immigration enforcement.

But just weeks after Blanche’s announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF’s “mission and resources” but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees.

“These were not broken programs,” said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration’s plans on condition of anonymity. “If you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.”

Officials also cited other concerns about the administration’s plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others.

Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF’s incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate.

“They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,” a Justice Department official said. “If you want to improve something, great, but they don’t even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.”

The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a “supremacy clause,” that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap.

The clause will require “that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives” targeting transnational criminal organizations “must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,” according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica.

“Further,” it adds, “the supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.”

Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny.

In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said.

One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration’s DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency’s cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo.”

Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos’ leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram’s approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.)

As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys’ offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others.

Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate.

Regional and national task forces will be overseen by “executive committees” that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said.

“The HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,” a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.”

During Trump’s first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration’s overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations.

The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force had arrested more than 1,000 “criminal illegal aliens” in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations.

On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were “tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.” Once again, however, no details were provided.

It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases.

In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.

“As the Department’s website notes, OCDETF ‘is the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,’” the senators wrote.

In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF’s operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system.

“A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,” said one former senior official. “But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.”

Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said.

“DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,” one former senior official said. “It is mind-boggling. They’re just getting orders saying, ‘This is what Stephen Miller wants and you’ve got to give it to us.’”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Tim Golden.

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Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.”

Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back.

None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he would later say.

It was only after Maloney went to Chase to investigate that he was able to piece together at least part of the explanation. It turned out that Chase had allowed an unknown individual, who applied online with no identification, to open an account under Middlesex’s name, according to information Chase provided to Maloney. The account was then used to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud victims, including the $133,565 from the man who was now trying to reclaim his funds.

Middlesex’s experience, as bizarre as it seems, is part of a global problem that plagues the banking industry. The account falsely opened in Middlesex’s name, and many others like it, are way stations in a sophisticated multistep money laundering process that transports cash from U.S. scam victims to crime syndicate bosses in Asia.

There’s been an explosion in international online fraud in recent years. Particularly widespread are “pig-butchering” schemes, as ProPublica reported in 2022. The macabre name derives from the process of methodically “fattening” victims by getting them to contribute more and more money to an investment scheme that seems to be succeeding, before eventually “butchering” them by taking all their deposits. Often operated by Chinese gangs out of prison-like compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, pig-butchering in that region has reached a staggering $44 billion per year, according to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, and it likely involves millions of victims worldwide. The report called the Southeast Asian scam syndicates the “most powerful criminal network of the modern era.”

A huge portion of such fraud is transacted in cryptocurrency. But given that the typical consumer doesn’t own crypto, many scams unfold with a victim tapping a traditional bank account to wire dollars to swindlers, who receive the funds in their own accounts, then convert them into crypto to move across borders. Later in the process, the scammers will typically transfer their crypto back into standard currency.

Bank accounts are so crucial to this process that a thriving international black market has developed to rent accounts for fraud. That, it seems, is how a Chase account in the name of Middlesex ended up as a repository for the proceeds of pig-butchering.

The huge demand for accounts used for misbehavior gives banks a crucial, and not always welcome, role as gatekeepers — a responsibility required by U.S. law — to prevent criminals from opening accounts or engaging in money laundering. Yet from the U.S. to Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong, banks have consistently failed at that responsibility, according to experts who have investigated money laundering, as well as reviews of fraudulent account details shared by victims and court cases reviewed by ProPublica. The list of financial institutions whose accounts pig-butchering scammers have made use of includes global behemoths like Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, HSBC and Wells Fargo and many other U.S. and foreign lenders.

The banks said in statements to ProPublica that they make extensive efforts to fight fraud by investing in systems to detect suspicious activity and to report it to authorities (read the banks’ statements here). The American Bankers Association, which represents the industry, acknowledged that “with more than 140 million bank accounts opened every year bad actors can sometimes get through despite determined and ongoing efforts to stop them.” But the group said other industries like telecommunications providers and social media platforms need to do more to fight fraud because there’s only so much that financial institutions can do.

Pig-butchering scams present some unique challenges for banks. Among other things, a customer in thrall to a fraudster will sometimes foil their own bank’s attempts to prevent them from sending money to a criminal. And foreign-based scammers have become adept at finding middlemen in the U.S. to exploit the banking system. “Cyber-enabled fraud operations in Southeast Asia have taken on industrial proportions,” according to an October report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. John Wojcik, one of the authors of the report, told ProPublica, “Banks have never been targeted at this scale, in these ways.”

It doesn’t help that there are “no real standards as to what a bank has to do for detecting fraud or money laundering,” said Lester Joseph, a financial compliance consultant who used to oversee money laundering cases at the Department of Justice and later worked at Wells Fargo. The main law governing U.S. compliance regimes, the Bank Secrecy Act, requires financial institutions to maintain programs to know their customers and to detect and report suspicious activity to the government. That might mean noticing, say, that a newly opened account is suddenly receiving and sending hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire payments each month.

But it is up to banks to design those programs. The regulations don’t even require that the programs be effective. That gives banks wide flexibility on how much due diligence and monitoring to do — or not do. More scrutiny upfront means slowing down business and adding costs. Many banks don’t ask questions until it’s too late.

If you’re a criminal looking to obtain a bank account with no pesky formalities, it’ll take you only minutes to find one on the messaging app Telegram. Chinese forums there feature ads for “cars” or “fleets” — bank accounts or other online payment platforms that can be used to collect stolen funds. (The vehicle metaphor stems from the fact that in Chinese slang, money laundering operations are known as “motorcades.”) One Telegram ad offered accounts at PNC, Chase, Citi and Bank of America and boasted of “firsthand” control of the accounts: “People can go to the bank to transfer money,” the ad said.

Another Telegram channel listed various flavors of pig-butchering scams for which it provided bank accounts. The group, named KG Pay, boasted of accepting wire transfers, making withdrawals from U.S. banks and converting deposits into crypto to transfer them to scammers. KG offered to handle deposits of up to $1 million in accounts that imitate “normal business transactions.” To avoid suspicion, KG said, it sliced big amounts into smaller batches. If banks grew suspicious and froze one of its accounts, KG said, it had agents ready to call customer service to persuade them to lift the freeze. For smaller transfers, a video tutorial inside the channel showed how easy it was to send cash using the Chase app. (Telegram deleted the KG Pay channel after ProPublica asked about it. In a statement, Telegram said it “expressly forbids money laundering, scams and fraud and such content is immediately removed whenever discovered. Every month, over 10 million accounts, groups and channels are removed for breaching Telegram’s terms of service — including rules that prohibit money laundering and fraud.”)

Demand for money laundering is huge in Sihanoukville, a seedy gambling hub in Cambodia notorious for hosting massive scam operations. In some hotels above casinos there, blocks of guest rooms have been converted into offices where workers help fraudsters find motorcades to move illicit funds, according to a 2024 report by a doctoral anthropology student.

Inside those offices, the tap of keyboards and buzz of Telegram notifications suggested a trading floor at a stock exchange. But the work of the people interviewed by Yanyu Chen, the doctoral student, was very different. The workers, all Chinese and speaking on the condition of anonymity, were candid. They said they were tasked with matching cyberscam gangs with providers who could supply them with bank accounts to collect and move proceeds from fraud victims. In Telegram chat groups, the workers could see bank account suppliers and swindlers in need of accounts and would match the two and keep track of trades and commissions.

The business has become so mainstream that even one of Cambodia’s most prominent financial services firms, Huione Group, runs an online marketplace that allegedly facilitates such transactions. Its Telegram channels, including the one that included the aforementioned ad offering “firsthand” control of U.S. bank accounts, have helped launder funds for pig-butchering scams as well as heists linked to North Korea, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. (Huione said in a statement that it is working to prevent abuse of its services and is “fully committed to collaborating with the U.S. Treasury Department to address expeditiously any and all concerns.”)

The workers interviewed by Chen were unperturbed about enabling fraud. One described the work as boring, little more than copying and pasting bank account info between scammers and motorcades. Another worker told her that he viewed himself as “solving a very old problem of getting into the banking system people who have long been shut out of it.”

The fraud that ensnared Middlesex Truck and Coach as a tangential victim covered thousands of miles via electronic byways. By all appearances, it emanated from Cambodia, then reached New Jersey, where a mark was persuaded to wire a total of $716,000 to accounts tied to purported businesses in Boston, New York, California, Hong Kong and elsewhere. All but a few appeared to have been incorporated by Chinese individuals, sometimes just days before their accounts started accepting large sums.

The fleecing of Kevin, who ProPublica agreed to identify by first name only, was a textbook example of pig butchering. Kevin had reached the stage in life when he wanted to ease his workload after a varied career as a financial planner, small-business owner and fitness instructor. Just before Christmas 2022, someone purporting to be a San Diego woman named Viktoria Zara friended Kevin on Facebook. She soon introduced him to a sleek crypto trading website called 3A on which she claimed to have made $700,000 on bitcoin futures. (Facebook deactivated Zara’s profile after ProPublica inquired about it, and a spokesperson said the social media company has “detected and disrupted over seven million accounts associated with scam centers” in Asia and the Middle East since the start of 2024.)

Kevin acknowledges he was seduced by the thrall of easy money. “Something came over me,” he said. Kevin accepted Zara’s offer to teach him how to trade and, within a few weeks, he was routinely wiring tens of thousands of dollars to various bank accounts to fund his trading.

The accounts were not registered to 3A. They were listed under a variety of companies he’d never heard of, such as Guangda Logistics and Danco Global.

Kevin found this odd. But Zara, his supposed friend, told him that was just how 3A operated, and Kevin felt safe wiring funds to accounts at Chase because of its size and reputation. Every time he did so, the sum showed up in his online 3A portal, making him think the transactions were real. Better yet, his investments had apparently soared; his account balance now read $1.4 million.

Like many a pig-butchering victim, Kevin realized something was off only when he went to withdraw his profits and 3A demanded that he first pay a “tax” of almost $134,000. Kevin knew from his financial planning days that wasn’t how things worked. But he set aside his doubts and went to his bank late one afternoon in April 2023 to wire the tax payment. He’d been given a fresh Chase account to send funds to and pressured to wire money within two hours.

This time, his money was addressed to Middlesex Truck and Coach. Kevin was so under the sway of his scammers at that point that he did not question the money’s destination. Nor did the teller at the TD Bank branch he went to. (TD declined to comment on Kevin’s case but said it trains employees to challenge customers when transactions seem suspicious and to warn them never to wire funds to people they do not know.)

As soon as Kevin got home, panic set in: 3A told him the Chase account to which he’d just wired $134,000 was frozen and that his tax payment would not go through. He would need to send another $134,000 to a different account. Confused, Kevin went back to TD first thing the next day and asked the teller to reverse the wire. Over the next two weeks, Kevin said, his bankers at TD called Chase three times but never got a response. (Chase did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Kevin’s efforts to recall his wire but said the wire recall process is challenging and rarely succeeds.)

It is possible to reverse a wire transfer if customers inform their banks quickly, before the transaction has been completed, according to lawyers and experts. But banks have no obligation to reverse a transfer even when a customer reports potential fraud. “It’s really up to the receiving institution if they release the funds and how they go after the customer on their end,” said Saskia Parnell, a banking industry veteran who now volunteers for an anti-scam group called Operation Shamrock.

As Kevin agonized, the 3A customer service reps dangled a solution: Just wire the funds again and unlock your $1.4 million. He feared TD wouldn’t let him send the wire again, so he switched to PNC Bank and sent a fresh $134,000 wire to another recipient at Cathay Bank in California. That yielded yet another tale about a purported government roadblock and the demand for yet another payment.

Kevin wasn’t thinking clearly. His son, who had struggled with substance abuse, had suddenly died of a fentanyl overdose. Kevin was overwhelmed with grief. He agreed to make another payment.

By June 2023, even a call from PNC’s fraud department declining his outgoing wire could not dissuade him. It was the only instance, out of the 11 times he attempted to wire money to scammers, that a bank stopped the transaction, according to Kevin, who did not have a history of making wire payments before. (PNC said in a statement that “we believe we took appropriate action.”)

It made no difference. Kevin’s mind was so clouded that he instead opened a new account at Wells Fargo. The switch illustrated another challenge: Even if one bank succeeds in preventing fraud, criminals can still win if another bank isn’t as diligent. (Wells Fargo said it invests hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fight scams).

After wiring $150,000 from Wells Fargo to two Chinese entities listed at a Singaporean bank, Kevin waited to receive his trading proceeds. But when all that resulted was another request that he wire money — $40,000 this time — Kevin finally grasped reality. He was now without a son, and his finances lay in ruins. “The whole world was coming to an end,” he recalled.

Kevin had preserved enough savings to hire a private investigator, John Powers of Hudson Intelligence, to follow the financial trail. Powers found a litany of red flags among the entities that had gotten bank accounts and received Kevin’s funds. Some of the businesses gave phony addresses, such as a vacant home. Another was registered to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles that was also listed as the headquarters of a dozen other businesses set up since 2022 by different Chinese individuals. Contact info was scarce; official emails for two companies included the temporary email domain “netsmail.us,” which doesn’t connect to a functioning website. All of these ersatz businesses had accounts at Chase, Cathay or Singapore’s DBS Bank.

Chase said that it has policies to identify and verify the identities of its customers, and that it continually evaluates and enhances them. Cathay said it also reviews its systems and policies to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. DBS did not respond to requests for comment.

Another clue indicated that the banks had been doing business with a larger criminal enterprise. Two of the companies Kevin sent funds to, Guangda Logistics (which lists no contact information) and Danco Global (which did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment), showed up on a list of more than six dozen shell entities that had been used to defraud Americans of nearly $60 million. The information was uncovered in an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service into KG Pay, one of the money laundering groups that was on Telegram.

The case of the man behind KG Pay sheds further light on how motorcades use U.S. banks. Daren Li, a Chinese national in his early 40s, went by the alias KG Perfect. Based in Cambodia, he directed the movement of large sums of pig-butchering proceeds from the U.S. to overseas. Li, who was arrested in April 2024 at the airport in Atlanta, pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit money laundering. He admitted that at least $73.6 million of victim funds were deposited into bank accounts he and his co-conspirators controlled. Li, who is in federal detention awaiting sentencing, could not be reached for comment through his lawyer. Seven other people have pleaded guilty to conspiring with Li.

KG exploited a weakness in the U.S. banking system: Banks are reluctant to share account information, even after they’ve identified suspicious activity. A law enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave banks a reprieve from secrecy rules if they alert one another to potential terrorism or money laundering activities. But the information sharing is voluntary and “banks are not communicating with each other,” according to Matt O’Neill, who led many money laundering investigations for the U.S. Secret Service during his 25 years there. “Fraudsters know it and fraudsters are clearly making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars off of this glaring gap in the system,” said O’Neill, who now runs 5OH Consulting.

One of the most prolific cogs in Li’s motorcade, according to civil and criminal cases, was a Chinese national named Hailong Zhu. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa around 2019 and then stayed, working odd jobs in construction and at a restaurant. In 2022, Zhu was recruited to help Li’s other operatives set up businesses and bank accounts near Los Angeles in exchange for $70,000.

Zhu turned the assignment into a full-time job, eventually juggling seven accounts at Bank of America, Chase, East West Bank and Wells Fargo tied to two entities set up in his name: Sea Dragon Trading and Sea Dragon Remodel. When Bank of America restricted Zhu’s Sea Dragon Trading account due to suspected fraud on Oct. 19, 2022, Zhu got another account at Bank of America the next day using Sea Dragon Remodel. By Nov. 1, 2022, he had secured four more accounts at Chase, Wells Fargo and East West Bank. Except for varying his address and email, investigators found that Zhu provided largely the same info when opening accounts for the two shell entities.

Zhu’s account opening spree happened just a few months after federal prosecutors blamed “the corruption of BofA bankers” for a scheme in which a handful of employees opened 754 accounts at Bank of America registered to 13 false addresses in the Los Angeles suburbs. In that case, shadowy middlemen dispensed bribes of $200 to $250 per account to Bank of America employees who overrode internal compliance systems to open accounts for overseas Chinese citizens who weren’t physically present at the branch to open the accounts, in violation of the bank’s rules. Even when the bankers registered 176 customers to one small home, the accounts were still opened. (Two of the bankers later pleaded guilty to making false entries in bank records; Bank of America said in a statement that it “uncovered illegal activity using its monitoring systems, terminated the employees, and cooperated with law enforcement, who successfully prosecuted those involved. This is how our anti-money laundering program is designed to work.”)

With banks always one step behind, Zhu’s accounts kept receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from victims across the U.S. Zhu would bundle the proceeds and transfer them abroad. During one week in November 2022, for example, he received six wires totaling almost $52,000 into one of his accounts and wired out one lump sum of $53,000. The destination was a bank account in the Bahamas controlled by Li and others, who converted the funds into cryptocurrency for their journey to scam centers located overseas, including in Sihanoukville. Investigators discovered a crypto wallet address they believed Li controlled. Data from cryptocurrency analytics firm Crystal Intelligence shows the wallet address sent and received about $341 million of crypto across 16,800 transactions between April 2021 and April 2024.

Zhu was arrested in March 2023 and charged with bank fraud. His lawyers acknowledged at trial that their client opened bank accounts and moved funds but said that Zhu did not know his bosses were using them for criminal purposes. Zhu was acquitted after the attorneys persuaded the trial judge that using false information to obtain a bank account does not constitute a scheme to defraud a bank. Only months after the acquittal, Zhu was charged again, this time with money laundering offenses, in an indictment filed in December 2023. Zhu, who couldn’t be reached for comment, did not enter a plea and was listed as a fugitive as of March 2025.

In January 2024, Kevin, desperate to get his money back, sued the 10 companies to which he had wired money at the scammers’ behest, including Middlesex Truck and Coach. None replied to his lawsuit — most were shell entities, after all — until January 2025, when Kevin’s lawyer got an email from Brian Maloney Jr.

Maloney confessed that his staff had ignored the lawsuit when it was initially served because it looked like a scam. He said he’d never banked with Chase and had no idea about any account that had been used to defraud Kevin. Maloney agreed to go to the local Chase branch to investigate and try to help Kevin get his money back.

“I went to the bank and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Maloney told ProPublica. After spending nearly two hours with the local Chase branch manager, Maloney realized that he, too, was a victim of the bank’s lax procedures: He said the branch manager told him that Chase had allowed someone to obtain an account online in his company’s name in March 2023 with nothing more than a digital signature and an employer identification number, but no personal identification. That account had then accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire transfers. And now Maloney’s family business — not Chase — was the defendant in a lawsuit. “How is this legal?” he wondered. (Colin Schmitt, a retired FBI agent, said Chase could have mitigated the fraud by at least pausing incoming wire transfers to the fake Middlesex account and asking its owner to justify the transactions. “If you’re just using an account just for wires, that’s a big red flag,” Schmitt said.)

Still, there was a silver lining: The funds remained in the account. Not only Kevin’s $134,000, but almost $100,000 more from several other victims sat frozen inside since spring 2023.

Kevin was glad the money was still there, but he wondered why it took a lawsuit to unearth the info. “It does not seem like the system is tailored to give any deference to the victim,” he said. “That’s what frustrates me.” His lawyers advised him to seek an order from a federal judge to get his funds back and filed such a petition in March. After ProPublica asked Chase about Kevin’s funds in April, the bank agreed to return the money to him without a court order.

The $134,000 landed back in Kevin’s bank account in mid-May. Finally, he felt a sense of relief. (He has now dropped the suit against Middlesex.) But Kevin also wondered what would happen to the other people whose money got siphoned up by the fake Middlesex account. Would Chase wait for them to file lawsuits too?

Banks are starting to face lawsuits by pig-butchering victims who allege laxness in opening accounts. In December, a California man who was defrauded of nearly $1 million sued DBS and two other banks for alleged failures to comply with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering laws. A college professor from Iowa who lost $700,000 filed a lawsuit in January against Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong for failing to do proper due diligence on the people who opened accounts used to defraud him. Hang Seng reached an agreement with the Iowa professor to dismiss the suit and declined to comment further. DBS did not reply to requests for comment on the California case, but the bank asserted that the lawsuit contains “fatal flaws,” according to a filing in the suit.

Such cases are long shots, according to Carla Sanchez-Adams, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. The suits typically fail because it’s hard to show that financial institutions knew or should have known about potential fraud.

Still, banks are well aware that fraud is on the rise. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans say they have been the victim of online fraud or cybercrime, according to a 2023 poll commissioned by Wells Fargo. “The scale of fraud taking place every day is a massive burden for our country and for the millions of hard-working women and men whose lives are affected by it,” Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association, said in an October speech.

Nichols contends that “consumers credit the banking industry with doing more than other industries to protect them from fraud and keep their information safe.” He cited an initiative by the ABA to create a database of fraud contacts to help banks figure out who to call when there’s a problem. And he urged the Trump administration to develop a national fraud prevention strategy.

Other countries are taking more aggressive steps. In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer. Australia recently enacted a law that will require banks to share suspect account info with one another. Thailand has gone even further, creating a Central Fraud Register intended to compel banks to identify and close accounts used for money laundering.

The U.S. lacks such rules. O’Neill, the former Secret Service agent, thinks that updating the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law meant to encourage banks to share intel, would be a good place to start. But Congress has not moved in that direction and the Trump administration has shown no sign that it plans to prioritize this issue. (Asked what steps the administration is taking, a spokesperson told ProPublica to Google the administration’s sanctions related to pig-butchering scams.)

For now, bank accounts remain easy for fraudsters to obtain. A sleek-looking brokerage akin to 3A has been online for months, soliciting deposits for what a researcher at the Global Anti-Scam Organization identified as a pig-butchering scheme. Anyone wishing to “invest,” the brokerage said, can wire money to a shifting array of banks, including Chase.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Cezary Podkul.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New York Focus, an investigative news outlet reporting on New York. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week, and sign up for New York Focus’ newsletter here.

Jasmine Stradford sat on her porch near Binghamton, New York, with toys, furniture, garbage bags full of clothing and other possessions piled up around her. She and her partner were being evicted after falling behind on rent.

So last June, they and their children — then ages 3, 12 and 15 — turned to New York’s emergency shelter system for help. It was built to provide homeless residents not only beds, but also food, help finding permanent housing and sometimes child care so parents can find work, attend school or look for apartments.

Stradford and her family received almost none of that. Instead of placing them in a shelter, the Broome County Department of Social Services cycled them through four roadside hotels over three months, where they mostly had to fend for themselves.

“I remember staring at my kids, thinking that I’d failed them,” Stradford said. “Then I remember going to DSS and being completely dehumanized.”

Stradford’s family was part of a growing trend: In the past few years, hotels have quietly become the state’s predominant response to homelessness outside New York City. New York Focus and ProPublica found that the state’s social services agencies placed just under half the 34,000 individuals and families receiving emergency shelter outside the city in fiscal year 2024 in hotels — up from 29% in 2018. The change was most pronounced in Broome County, where hotel cases more than quintupled.

Statewide spending on hotels more than tripled over that period to $110 million, according to an analysis of state temporary housing data by the news organizations. In total, hotels outside New York City were paid about $420 million to shelter unhoused people from April 2017 to September 2024.

It’s a makeshift arrangement that provides people a roof over their head but little else. State regulations exempt hotels from providing the same services that families are supposed to receive in the shelter system.

The hotels are “less supportive, less conducive for good health outcomes, good education outcomes,” said Adam Bosch, CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a policy research nonprofit. “If our ultimate goal is to get people moving back toward independence, sticking them in a hotel on a hillside away from services, away from schools, away from transportation networks is not a great strategy.”

Homelessness in New York City received intense media coverage as the migrant crisis became fodder in the presidential election. But far less attention has been paid to the homeless population throughout the rest of New York, which far surpasses most other states on its own.

Few of the migrants were relocated to hotels outside the city. Instead, the spike in hotel housing stems from a combination of soaring rent, dozens of shelter closures and what housing advocates and industry representatives said was a botched response to the end of the state’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium in 2022. After the moratorium ended, landlords began evicting tenants at rates exceeding previous years. With fewer shelters and more people in need, the number of individuals and families placed in hotels shot up.

Barbara Guinn, the commissioner of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said in an interview that her agency hadn’t studied the growth in hotel use for emergency shelter. The trend has been scarcely mentioned at legislative hearings in Albany.

But OTDA, which supervises the county social services offices, has long known about the problems the hotels present. In early 2020, state auditors warned the agency that it wasn’t adequately overseeing shelters, including hotels used as temporary housing. OTDA acknowledged that hotels present challenges because they don’t have on-site support services or the same level of supervision as shelters.

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Rules clarifying the requirement that temporary housing recipients in hotels receive shelter-like services have been on OTDA’s regulatory agenda for at least four years. But the agency, and lawmakers who oversee it, stood by as hotel housing increased. Guinn said she couldn’t “provide insight” on why the agency never formally proposed the rules, but she committed to advancing them this year. The Broome County Department of Social Services did not make its commissioner, Nancy Williams, available for an interview and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Reporting across the state, the news organizations found people living for months and sometimes years in hotels, doing what they can to get by. Families share beds while their belongings fill the corners of their rooms. Without kitchens and barred from using most appliances, they trek down shoulderless highways to grocery stores or scour food pantries for anything they can cook in a microwave. They squish cockroaches skittering in dressers. And hotels often force them to move out every few weeks, keeping stability out of reach.

The four hotels that Stradford’s family was placed in last summer collectively made about $10,000 sheltering it over three months — more than what the family owed in back rent. That works out to more than twice the monthly fair market rent for a four-bedroom apartment in Binghamton at the time.

Nearly half of all payments to hotels were for more than twice the counties’ FMR.

This isn’t unusual. County social services offices regularly pay the hotels rates that are worth many times fair market rent for permanent housing in their areas, according to the analysis of OTDA’s housing payment data. One motel in Rome, outside Utica, that was the scene of a shooting last fall charged the county $250 a night for a room at times, according to invoices submitted to the county’s Department of Social Services.

Over three months, Stradford’s family struggled to maintain some semblance of its old life while bouncing from hotel to hotel. The family would lose countless possessions. The kids’ educations would be disrupted, as the school bus failed to keep up with their moves. Their experiences would show the importance of the services they weren’t receiving and what happens to New York’s homeless families when they can’t access them.

Stradford and her partner, Tiberious Moses, had been evicted after she missed work at a children’s group home while recovering from surgery and Moses struggled to support the family with temporary jobs. At first, Stradford was relieved when the Department of Social Services informed her that it would place them in a hotel instead of a shelter.

“Going to the hotel, I originally thought, ‘OK, this gives a little bit more leeway, a little bit more comfort, hospitality, all of that,’ only to find out that it’s not that at all,” she said. “If you are a DSS recipient, you’re nothing. You are the bottom of the pit.”

Stradford’s family — two adults, three children and four dogs — was packed into a room with two beds at an Econo Lodge sandwiched between a gas station and another budget hotel. Stradford said she found cockroaches and had trouble getting the hotel to clean their room. She said she often saw drug use at the hotel and felt unsafe. Law enforcement and emergency services were called to the hotel 116 times in the first half of that year, dispatch logs show.

Despite those conditions, the Econo Lodge received more money to house temporary assistance recipients than any other known hotel outside New York City, according to the OTDA payments data for the 2024 fiscal year. The hotel, now called Hillside Inn & Suites, served more than 900 individuals and families placed by the Department of Social Services for at least 30,000 total nights, earning over $2.3 million.

“We’re forced to rent hotel rooms across the state, and the operators of these places understand that,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, chair of the chamber’s Social Services Committee. “The municipalities’ backs are against the wall. And so they must place the unhoused person or persons somewhere. And so that’s why you see the cost is skyrocketing, because people understand that it’s an easy way to make money off the government.”

OTDA’s regulations say hotels should be considered shelters and provide services if they are used “primarily” as temporary housing for homeless welfare recipients. At least 16 hotels appear to house mostly welfare recipients, the analysis showed.

OTDA spokesperson Anthony Farmer said the agency interprets “primarily” to mean hotels that “house recipients exclusively, or almost exclusively, throughout the year.” He said that hotels aren’t required to deliver services but that county social services agencies “are responsible for some level of service provision.” The state, however, doesn’t regularly collect information on how counties provide services. Guinn said OTDA plans to create a formal process for counties to submit it under new regulations.

The Econo Lodge’s contract with Broome County doesn’t call for the services offered by shelters, like food and assistance finding housing. It requires the hotel to provide little more than a room with housekeeping, linens and toiletries. The hotel’s CEO, Paresh Patel, declined to comment.

In contrast, traditional shelters often put a significant amount of their funding toward social services. Shelter budgets obtained from OTDA show that they frequently retain at least part-time employees to prepare food and help people find jobs and housing. Local social services offices try to offset the lack of on-site services by hiring caseworkers but have struggled to retain them.

Instead, hotel residents like Stradford’s family are caught in a web of conflicts between the way those services are provided, the strings attached to benefits and the rules and limitations of living in hotels. Social services departments might provide them food stamps to buy groceries, but hotel residents usually don’t have kitchens and are often not allowed to have appliances like hot plates. To keep their lodging, they’re generally required to seek housing and to work or look for jobs, but they often don’t receive child care. They have to regularly meet with caseworkers at social services offices but must rely on spotty public transportation.

“To me, it’s like malpractice as a homeless services provider to place people without support services” in hotels, said Deborah Padgett, a professor of social work at New York University. “It’s good in the sense that they get more privacy, but for them to get a life and not be dependent on the government, they need to be close to services and not be punished for making mistakes.”

Guinn said that her agency would prefer counties use regulated shelters in housing emergencies but that there aren’t enough beds to accommodate everyone. Social services offices must rely on hotels when shelters don’t have space or don’t exist in a particular county, Farmer said in an email.

After 26 nights, Broome County relocated Stradford’s family to the Quality Inn & Suites in Vestal, a Binghamton suburb down the Susquehanna River that’s home to Binghamton University. Stradford’s car had been repossessed, so they stuffed a suitcase and the kids’ book bags with as many clothes as they could and hopped on the bus.

At the Quality Inn, the family struggled to eat. They had applied for food stamps, but Stradford said she couldn’t get wage records from her former employer proving she was eligible. Instead, the county provided them a restaurant allowance worth about $15 a day to cover all five of them. To get by, they took the bus to food pantries like Catholic Charities, which had started creating “hotel bags” stuffed with canned food, oatmeal, crackers, macaroni and cheese and snacks for the kids — anything that could be eaten cold or prepared with a microwave.

While many shelters provide food on site, contracts between the hotels and Broome County forbid emergency housing recipients from eating the hotels’ food. Stradford said her family was threatened with removal from the Quality Inn after her 12-year-old daughter, Taylor, tried to eat the continental breakfast.

“When we first started taking families on, we did allow breakfast, and unfortunately there was too much being carried away, so we chose to change that,” the hotel’s general manager, Bernadine Morris, said. The Quality Inn has since closed and could not be reached for follow-up questions.

People can get kicked out of hotels and lose their housing assistance for repeatedly violating hotels’ policies, including by using their own cooking appliances. One woman who previously lived at the Motel 6 in Binghamton said she avoided sanctions by throwing an extension cord from the window of her second-story room to use a pressure cooker on the sidewalk.

Stradford’s nonstop juggling act left her on edge. She was grieving her mother’s death, feeding five people and four dogs, apartment-hunting and hustling to culinary classes and social services appointments. She said her children started feeling the stress too: Her 3-year-old, Samir, was wetting the bed frequently, and the older kids missed classes for their summer courses.

The family began butting heads with Quality Inn managers, who accused them of being disruptive and terminated their stay, according to Stradford’s social services case file.

“I’m not totally surprised that they run into problems with the hotel supervisors and the staff just because they’re trying to find some way to get their needs attended to, and it’s not really fair to expect the hotel to do what those people are not trained to do,” Padgett said.

Shelters are required to have enough qualified staff to meet residents’ needs. The staff members generally have at least some training in how to handle populations with complex needs, said Elizabeth Bowen, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work.

After Stradford and her family lost their room at the Quality Inn, the county sanctioned them and declined to find them a new place to stay. Moses, who had just gotten a job at Dave & Buster’s, paid out of his own pocket for a room at the Red Roof Inn in Johnson City. When they arrived, the woman at the front desk saw their belongings and dogs and told them the motel wouldn’t honor the reservation. They had used what little money was left on Ubers and the room deposit. The motel did not return requests for comment.

As it rained, Stradford got ahold of the Department of Social Services and pleaded their case. The county decided to continue housing her family until her sanction could be appealed. It booked them at the Knights Inn, another 10 minutes down the road in a town called Endwell.

Stradford’s family became skilled at sleeping on a single bed at the Knights Inn. Stradford, Moses, Samir and 15-year-old De’Vante would sleep side by side while Taylor slept horizontally at their feet.

The rest of the facility was in chaos, Stradford said. She saw hypodermic needles and other drug paraphernalia lying in the grass and underneath the stairwell and people slumped over while standing beside the dumpster. Over about six years that the county used it for temporary housing, law enforcement and emergency services were summoned to the motel for 789 incidents, including assaults, overdoses, robberies, domestic disputes and mental health crises.

The Knights Inn had a litany of issues that prevented it from passing Broome County Social Services’ inspections from 2018 to 2021. According to inspection reports, the rooms were dimly lit due to missing light bulbs and broken lamps. The walls were stained and punched through, and the wallpaper peeled off. Some rooms’ doors didn’t lock. Windows didn’t either or were broken. Carpets were torn, and inspectors found cockroaches in dressers.

Health and safety issues plague hotels used as emergency shelters across the state. A 2020 state comptroller audit found that 60% of the hotels they reviewed outside New York City were in “unsatisfactory” condition — about the same as the percentage of shelters.

One woman, who was living with her children in a motel south of Albany, showed paint flaking off their walls and mattresses covered in black mold. Two other parents placed in the motel said they felt that if the Department of Social Services caught them in private housing that resembled their living conditions, their kid could be taken away by Child Protective Services.

OTDA requires social services agencies to inspect hotels housing families every six months. But an analysis of OTDA compliance data showed that social services districts often fail to keep up with hotel inspections: About 40% of the 351 hotels used to house homeless people outside New York City were out of date on their social services inspections as of mid-October or didn’t have an inspection date listed.

Farmer, the OTDA spokesperson, said that most hotels had been inspected within a year and that some others had stopped housing people.

Even when social services agencies do inspections, records show they sometimes fail to take action. Hotels have to correct problems within 30 days, unless it’s a safety problem. If they don’t, counties are supposed to stop placing people there, according to a directive from OTDA.

Records show that the Knights Inn fixed some of the issues as it went but continued to get written up in every inspection for two and a half years. Despite this, Broome County placed hundreds of social services cases there, earning the motel over $750,000.

A Knights Inn manager, Aizaz Siddiqui, said that the motel moved people out of rooms that needed the most work until they were renovated.

In January 2021, the county said it would stop placing people at the Knights Inn until the violations were corrected. The motel received a clean inspection in July 2022. But Stradford said the Knights Inn wouldn’t give them toilet paper or fresh sheets, which are required in shelters. A bedsheet was used as a curtain for their rear window.

The family stayed for three weeks, but tensions with management boiled over when the family failed to get rid of their dogs by the deadline set by the motel. Eventually, the Knights Inn told them to leave. After giving them a few extra days to find other accommodations, Siddiqui called the police to remove them.

Siddiqui said the families placed at the inn by the Department of Social Services deserve sympathy, but he still has to maintain order. “It’s a tough situation to be in, and we try to work with them as much as we can,” he said. “But again, we do have to fulfill our policies, and we have to stand by them.” The motel declined to respond to additional questions about the conditions.

Stradford’s family didn’t have anywhere else to go. As the State Police arrived, she planted herself on a red cooler in front of their room and refused to leave until the county found them somewhere to stay.

Some community activists she met through local charity work showed up to support her and livestreamed the incident on Facebook.

After a three-hour standoff, management relented and allowed the family to stay two more nights. One of the activists arrived with a U-Haul and drove their stuff to the Motel 6, a 15-minute drive back up the river, past the Econo Lodge on the outskirts of Binghamton.

Things were initially calm at the Motel 6. But about three weeks into their stay, the Motel 6 complained to the county that Stradford had left the children alone, which they were told violated the motel’s guest policy. Stradford said she was doing charity work at the time but complained that she couldn’t attend school or meet the state’s requirements to look for housing if she had to constantly supervise her children.

The motel gave the family the weekend to leave. When they missed their checkout time, the Sheriff’s Office came to remove them.

Moses called Stradford, who was at school, to tell her what was happening. She headed to the Department of Social Services to plead their case.

“I got into protection mode,” Stradford said. “I wasn’t going to leave there and just put myself in a seriously homeless situation. So I told them I wasn’t leaving until I knew that we had a secure spot to go to.”

But her attempts failed. The agency said it would no longer help her family due to the complaints. The clerk used a special tool to unlock the room for the deputies.

Community members once again showed up to livestream the encounter and pressure the county. The Sheriff’s Office helped the family find a motel, where it stayed for two more nights.

In the end, it wasn’t New York’s social services system that found stable housing for Stradford’s family; it was a local landlord who heard about the case and offered an apartment at a rate the family could afford on Moses’ wages and temporary assistance from the county.

Stradford’s family was placed in hotels for 89 days, about the average for a social services case. Many stay far longer. More than 1,500 individuals and families spent six months or more in hotels, according to payment data from the 2024 fiscal year.

“Some of us really get into a hard time and we really do need the help. We don’t just rely on the system,” Stradford said. “I pay my hard-earned tax dollars. I worked multiple jobs. I’m the one that tried to keep afloat and stuff like that. But things happen in life.”

Between their six moves, the family lost most of its possessions: furniture, Social Security cards, birth certificates, tax documents, family photos, laptops, coats, a painting from someone Jasmine was taking care of, Samir’s toy box, Taylor’s art projects and a blanket covered in motivational quotes that Stradford’s mom had given her before she passed. They had to give up two of their dogs.

When they arrived at their new home, they had only a couple of suitcases and garbage bags full of clothes.

To track temporary housing recipients placed in hotels, New York Focus and ProPublica used data obtained from the New York Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance through an open records request. The data contains 1.1 million payments issued from April 2017 to September 2024 for emergency shelter stays outside New York City. OTDA repeatedly delayed releasing the data for 10 months but finally did so after ProPublica’s attorneys got involved in the appeals process.

The data classified payments by type of shelter, including family shelters, transitional housing and hotels. It also included an “emergency shelter” category for temporary housing assistance provided before a case is fully approved, which can flow to both hotels and shelters.

Our analysis includes only payments explicitly classified as hotel payments. We excluded some payments that were classified as hotel payments but where the recipients appeared to be nonprofits that operated homeless shelters.

The data also included unique IDs for each assistance case that received shelter, allowing us to determine how many people stayed in hotels and for about how long. Each case represents either an individual or a family.

To find hotels that housed mostly welfare recipients, New York Focus and ProPublica relied on each hotel’s total number of rooms reported to the New York State Department of Health and checked whether shelter payments covered at least half of the hotel’s total capacity from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024.

The data listed the start and end date for each payment, but it was not always clear whether the stay was inclusive or exclusive of the final date. As a result, we chose to exclude the final night whenever counting up dates to create the most conservative estimates possible, unless the payment covered a single night. When comparing the payments against fair market rent, we included the final night, which would decrease the daily rate.

Hotels used to house homeless families outside New York City must be inspected by counties once every six months. After that, the district has 30 days to submit the report to OTDA for review.

OTDA provided a database of inspections for hotels as of Oct. 15, 2024. To determine whether a hotel was past due on inspection, we checked whether the most recent inspection was completed and submitted to OTDA in the seven months leading up to that date. In some cases, the inspection may have been conducted but was not submitted to the state on time.

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

If you have been placed in a hotel or have information about the use of hotels as emergency housing in New York, contact New York Focus reporter Spencer Norris at 570-690-3469 or spencer@nysfocus.com.

Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Spencer Norris, New York Focus.

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In 2022, three Food and Drug Administration inspectors headed to India to investigate a massive Sun Pharma plant that produces dozens of generic drugs for Americans. Over two weeks, they found dangerous breakdowns in the way critical medications were made, and the FDA ultimately placed the factory on an import ban — prohibiting the company from shipping drugs to the United States.

The agency, however, quietly gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue sending more than a dozen drugs to Americans even though they were made at the same substandard factory that was officially banned from the U.S. market.

It wasn’t the first time. Here are the key takeaways from ProPublica’s 14-month investigation into the FDA’s oversight of foreign drugmakers:

• Over a dozen years, the agency entrusted to protect America’s drug supply gave similar exemptions to some of the most troubled foreign drugmakers in India, allowing factories banned from the U.S. market to continue shipping medications to an unsuspecting American public.

• A secretive group inside the FDA exempted the medications from import bans, ostensibly to prevent drug shortages. With each pass, the agency dismissed warnings from its own inspectors about dangerous breaches in drug quality on factory floors. All told, the FDA allowed into the United States at least 150 drugs or their ingredients from banned factories found to have mold, foul water, dirty labs or fraudulent testing protocols. Nearly all came from factories in India.

• The FDA did not regularly test the drugs exempted from import bans to see if they were safe or actively monitor reports about potential harm among patients. And as the drugs circulated in the United States, the agency kept the practice largely hidden from the public. The FDA said it put protective measures in place, such as requiring third-party oversight of factories to ensure the exempted drugs were safe.

• Some of the exempted drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about the exempted drugs at three factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after the medications were excluded from import bans. The reports cite about 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths.

• Janet Woodcock, who for more than two decades led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said she didn’t see a need to inform the public about the drugs from banned factories because the agency believed they were safe and that such information would create “some kind of frenzy” among consumers who might seek to change their prescriptions. “We had to kind of deal with the hand we were dealt,” she said, noting she supported the exemptions to deal with chronic drug shortages.

• Decisions made by the FDA decades ago gave rise to the use of exemptions. In the 2000s, as the cost of brand-name drugs soared, the FDA approved hundreds of generic drug applications for foreign manufacturers that had been in trouble before, companies well-known to the inspectors working to stamp out safety and quality breakdowns.

• The exempted drugs that have come to the United States include antibiotics, chemotherapy treatment, antidepressants, sedatives and epilepsy medication.

Sun Pharma did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When the FDA imposed the ban, the company said it would “undertake all necessary steps to resolve these issues and to ensure that the regulator is completely satisfied with the company’s remedial action. Sun Pharma remains committed to being … compliant and in supplying high-quality products to its customers and patients globally.”

Patricia Callahan and Vidya Krishnan contributed reporting. Alice Crites contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang.

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Joe DeMayo always knew his healthy years could end abruptly, bound to the lifespan of a transplanted kidney about the size of a small fist. But as the father of a toddler, he had hoped to have more time.

When he was 33, his wife had donated her kidney to him, a milestone that changed the course of DeMayo’s life. The relentless fatigue, nose bleeds and itchy skin brought on by his own poorly functioning kidneys vanished, and he felt good enough to leave home in Philadelphia for a new beginning in the foothills of northern California.

Over long afternoons, DeMayo would hike in the mountains with his wife and their black-and-white mutt, Fausto. When his son was born, he’d imagined himself coaching baseball games, clad in Phillies gear.

But his donated kidney started to fail in early 2023, much earlier than expected. The decline came as a surprise to DeMayo, who had been faithfully taking his medications, including tacrolimus, an essential immunosuppression drug that helps stave off organ rejection.

DeMayo didn’t know at the time that the capsules he swallowed twice a day precisely 12 hours apart could have left him vulnerable — or that one of the most formidable drug regulators in the world may have failed to protect him.

As he grew weaker, his kidney unable to cleanse his body of excess fluid and waste, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration headed to western India to inspect the factory that manufactured DeMayo’s tacrolimus and other generic drugs for American consumers.

It was at least the eighth time since 2015 that the FDA had been there, and each of those visits had uncovered problems in the way the drugs were made, government records show.

During the inspection in the spring of 2023, investigators discovered the Intas Pharmaceuticals factory had, among other things, manipulated drug-testing records to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

Unaware of the inspection, DeMayo continued taking his tacrolimus capsules. He fought exhaustion and struggled to hold onto his job behind a deli counter.

“Daddy needs a new kidney,” he recalled telling his 5-year-old son at the time.

That November, the FDA barred the Intas factory from exporting drugs to the United States. But under a long-standing practice uncovered by ProPublica, the agency excluded certain medications from the factory-wide ban, including tacrolimus, allowing the drugs to continue flowing to the U.S.

In a statement to ProPublica, Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said that the company could not comment on the cases of individual patients but that its tacrolimus is safe and effective. The company said it immediately responded to the FDA’s inspection findings, launching a program focused on quality and investing millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States but would not provide details.

“Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said.

ProPublica’s investigation found the FDA has allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients from banned factories into the country over the past dozen years, ostensibly to prevent drug shortages.

The agency did not routinely test the drugs or actively look for signs of sudden or unexplained reactions among patients. And the exemptions were largely kept hidden from Congress and the public, including patients like DeMayo, who counted on his medication to keep him alive.

DeMayo filled another prescription for tacrolimus only days before the FDA exempted it from the Intas import ban and continued taking the capsules until just before his second transplant surgery at Temple University Hospital in January 2024.

“I’m trying to do the right thing, take all my medicine,” said DeMayo, 45, who took Intas tacrolimus for two years. “If I’m doing all that, shouldn’t somebody be doing their due diligence?”

In a statement, the FDA said drugmakers that receive a pass from import bans are required to conduct additional safety and quality testing and hire third-party experts to assess the results before shipping medication to the United States. Current and former FDA officials said those measures are faulty. Many of the companies have been cited before for testing protocols that were ineffective or prone to fraud.

DeMayo, now recovered from his second transplant surgery, gave ProPublica two bottles of his unused Intas tacrolimus capsules. ProPublica had them tested at Valisure, an independent, accredited lab in Connecticut.

I. Preparation Valisure conducted three separate tests on DeMayo’s medication. For two of the analyses, technicians emptied the material inside the capsules onto a scale so precise that it protects samples from the movement of air. The material was then put into a solution for testing.

II. Assessment for Dosage For the first assessment, technicians used a machine to separate, identify and quantify compounds in the solution.

The liquid was poured into tiny vials and then assessed for physical and chemical properties. The analysis revealed how much of the medication’s key ingredient was present and whether it matched the dosage levels described on the label.

III. Testing for Contaminants Valisure also tested the drug for the presence of toxic elements, including lead, arsenic and mercury. The liquid was put into a machine that breaks down chemicals into atoms using plasma that is 18,000 degrees — hotter than the surface of the sun.

IV. Testing for Dissolution In the third assessment, a technician prepared a liquid that simulates stomach acid.

Then, the technician placed the pills into small metal cages and dropped them into the liquid.

The testing machine measured how fast the drug dissolved and whether the capsules provided the right amount of medication at the right time.

In their first test, the scientists at Valisure found that some of DeMayo’s pills contained an adequate amount of the key ingredient but others contained a lower amount than the minimum level set by U.S. regulation. Pharmacists, doctors and other experts said underdosing can leave patients vulnerable to organ rejection.

Valisure did not find any substantive contamination in DeMayo’s medication.

But the scientists found another potential problem. The capsules dissolved quickly — up to three times faster than the name brand. Rapid dissolution can introduce too much of the drug too quickly, experts said, potentially causing tremors, headaches and kidney failure.

ProPublica did not test tacrolimus made by any other manufacturer. In its statement, Intas said that the findings are “unrelated to the [FDA’s] inspections” and that the FDA had determined the drug was equivalent to the brand-name version when it was first approved for the U.S. market.

Valisure previously tested Intas’ tacrolimus for the Department of Defense, which is conducting safety and quality testing on more than three dozen drugs commonly used by U.S. service members and their families. Those tests, too, showed the capsules dissolved too quickly.

“This is an alarming signal of other quality issues that can be affecting patient care,” said retired Army Col. Vic Suarez, who helped launch the Defense Department effort and is assisting on the project.

The FDA conducted its own studies of Intas’ tacrolimus in recent years and reported a similar result on its website. The agency noted there was no apparent risk of organ rejection but said the Intas generic could create toxins in the body, which can cause kidney damage. The FDA said the capsules may not provide the same therapeutic effect as the brand-name version.

The findings were made public in September 2023. Weeks later, the agency went on to excuse the drug from the Intas import ban, allowing the company to continue shipping tacrolimus to the United States.

Janet Woodcock, who for years led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in an interview that the results of the testing are concerning and that the agency should quickly “try to sort them out.”

“This obviously was a quality problem,” she said.

Woodcock did not say why the FDA exempted the drug from the import ban imposed on the Intas factory. Though Woodcock approved exemptions for years, she had left the center and was serving as the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner when the exemptions for tacrolimus and other Intas drugs were made.

DeMayo said he’ll never know whether the medication contributed to the loss of his donated kidney. Organ rejection, which can happen quickly or over years, is among the most common causes of kidney failure in transplant patients, but kidneys can fail for other reasons, too, said Joseph Vassalotti, chief medical officer at the National Kidney Foundation.

In DeMayo’s case, he was hospitalized with a stomach virus and dehydration the same year his kidney function started to decline. Still, he questions the drug that was supposed to protect him and worries that other transplant patients who have taken Intas tacrolimus could be at risk.

One and a half years after the FDA banned the factory from shipping drugs to the United States, tacrolimus is still excluded. A customer service agent for the company said Intas recently stopped distributing the drug, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“The people who oversee the pills are failing and the people who are making the pills are failing,” DeMayo said. “How did it get so bad?”

Lucas Waldron contributed graphics and development.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose.

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 New York State Legislature this week passed a bill banning anonymous complaints to the state child abuse hotline. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the legislation, New Yorkers will now have to provide their name and contact information if they want to make an allegation that someone might be neglecting a child.

This dramatic change in the law comes a year and a half after a ProPublica investigation showed how the hotline had been weaponized by jealous exes, spiteful landlords and others who endlessly called in baseless allegations. Even if a caller didn’t leave their name or any details, and even if the same allegation had repeatedly been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated, it automatically triggered an invasive search of the accused’s home and often a strip search of the children.

We detailed the case of one Brooklyn mother whose apartment was searched dozens of times — by police officers and child protective services caseworkers who never had a warrant and often showed up at her door after midnight — all because an angry former acquaintance kept anonymously calling the hotline about her. She was never found to have mistreated her children in any way.

According to federal statistics, 96% of anonymous calls to child abuse hotlines are deemed baseless after an investigation. Among all allegations of child abuse or neglect, including non-anonymous calls, 83% are ultimately deemed unfounded.

In New York, more than 4,000 children every year had experienced child protective services investigations as a result of anonymous calls — until now.

The legislation passing is “a win-win for everybody,” said Democratic state Sen. Jabari Brisport, the bill’s sponsor. Not only will it protect victims of domestic violence who may have an abusive current or former partner who has used the anonymous reporting system to harass them or to influence a custody dispute, it will also help caseworkers themselves, Brisport said. “They are stretched so thin already,” he said. “By reducing the number of these false complaints, we can let them do their jobs better.”

“But the fact that false reports make such an effective method of harassment is a symptom of deeper issues in how CPS operates,” Brisport added, referring to how the home searches and investigations that result from these calls often turn families’ lives upside-down. Black parents especially are affected, he said, and they can feel helplessly unable to comfort their children through a terrifying and opaque process that can lead to their separation from their mom and dad.

A committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last year published a report that cited ProPublica’s journalism on these issues and called on New York to abolish anonymous reporting. ProPublica’s articles were also circulated among lawmakers and legislative staff in Albany both last year and this spring.

California and Texas, too, have passed legislation to curtail anonymous reporting. Several other states are considering similar bills.

New York’s new law will maintain the confidentiality of callers to the child abuse hotline, just not their anonymity. That means that if someone thinks that a family member, neighbor or colleague is harming a child, and they call it in, they can still be assured that the state will not reveal their identity to the alleged abuser or publicly in any way. The caller will just have to provide their name and contact information so that caseworkers can follow up, in part to make sure that they don’t have an ulterior motive for making a malicious accusation and so that caseworkers can gather more details from the caller to conduct a more informed investigation.

If they refuse to identify themselves, hotline staff will decline to pass along the tip to child protective services. But an amendment was added to the bill stating that if a caller doesn’t want to leave their name, they can still speak to a supervisor, who will then explain to them that if they provide their name it will remain confidential; that intentionally making a false report is illegal; and that issues involving children in need can also be addressed through housing, food and other services. Contact information for such services will be provided.

The new law will not affect mandated reporters of child abuse, such as teachers and police officers, who already were not anonymous.

Chris Gottlieb, director of the NYU School of Law Family Defense Clinic, helped to shepherd the legislation to its passage. She said that when she used to bring up this issue in Albany — and talk about how child protective services agents searching families’ homes without a warrant can be deeply traumatizing for both parents and children — she was often met with blank stares. But then ProPublica’s reporting “helped to change the conversation,” she said, and more importantly, parents themselves, many of them Black and Latino and led by the community organizer Joyce McMillan, started holding regular rallies on the steps of the Legislature and testifying at hearings.

In fact, parents have filed a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit challenging warrantless child protective services searches of their homes as unconstitutional. New York City is contesting the suit, but the city’s Administration for Children’s Services has said that it is committed to addressing child safety concerns while also respecting families’ rights.

In past statements to ProPublica, ACS has said that it is required by state law to investigate fully and to seek to conduct a home assessment whenever it receives a report of child maltreatment from the state, no matter the original source of that report. But a spokesperson said that the agency supports anonymous reporting reform with the perspective that protections for children who are in danger should also be preserved.

One of the plaintiffs in the class-action suit, Shavona Warmington, praised New York state lawmakers for abolishing anonymous reporting once and for all.

The Queens mother of six alleges that someone called in complaints about her every several months for a decade, knowing that the mere fact of a call would cause caseworkers to pound on her door; threaten that they would call the police if she didn’t let them in; search her refrigerator, cabinets, closets and bed while her kids watched; and then strip search and interrogate them. She said that the content of the reports to the hotline always sounded familiar, clearly from the same person, but that this never mattered.

In the suit, she contended that the person who made the complaints was likely the man who abused her. He could call every day and they would still send somebody out.

Her children have been traumatized by the sound of a knock on the door, she said.

“I have no contact with him otherwise, just through ACS,” Warmington said, referring to her abuser.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

ProPublica has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in federal court in New York, accusing the agency of withholding information about the safety and availability of generic drugs critical to millions of Americans.

For years, Congress, watchdog groups, doctors and others have questioned the quality of generic drugs made in factories overseas. To better understand how the FDA regulates the industry and protects consumers, ProPublica submitted four records requests last year under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FDA declined to quickly release the documents, including records that would identify drugs made at some of the most troubled factories in India. Inspection reports that describe unsafe manufacturing conditions are public, but the FDA redacts the names of the medications made in those factories.

“Americans (including pharmacists, doctors, hospital systems, policy makers) cannot see for themselves which drugs may have been made in unsafe facilities,” the lawsuit said.

ProPublica requested the records as part of an ongoing investigation into the safety of America’s generic drug supply. ProPublica has reported that the FDA allowed some manufacturers to continue shipping their drugs to Americans even after the factories that made them were found in violation of quality standards and banned from the U.S. market. More than 150 drugs or their ingredients were given these little-known exemptions over the past dozen years.

In its response to ProPublica’s initial records request, the FDA said the news organization had not demonstrated “a compelling need” to expedite the release of documents. Since the lawsuit was filed in November, the agency has begun to turn over some of the requested records. The case is still active in federal court in New York.

ProPublica has argued the records will help inform American consumers, who increasingly rely on generic drugs made overseas. Quality concerns have dogged the industry for years: In 2023, four people died after using tainted eye drops made in India, and others had to have their eyeballs surgically removed.

“Every single one of us relies on the FDA to ensure that the medicines we take and give our loved ones are safe,” said ProPublica’s outside counsel, Jack Browning, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. “With the increasing prevalence of offshore manufacturing, it is imperative for organizations like ProPublica to ensure that safety violations are not being swept under the rug.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing litigation.

This is the second time ProPublica has sued the FDA in recent years.

In 2023, the news outlet and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette filed a lawsuit against the agency for withholding records related to the massive recall of breathing machines made by Philips Respironics. The agency ultimately provided the documents.

Dailey and Nguyen are with Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab in Washington, D.C.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Katherine Dailey and Jessie Nguyen, Medill Investigative Lab.

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

ProPublica has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in federal court in New York, accusing the agency of withholding information about the safety and availability of generic drugs critical to millions of Americans.

For years, Congress, watchdog groups, doctors and others have questioned the quality of generic drugs made in factories overseas. To better understand how the FDA regulates the industry and protects consumers, ProPublica submitted four records requests last year under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FDA declined to quickly release the documents, including records that would identify drugs made at some of the most troubled factories in India. Inspection reports that describe unsafe manufacturing conditions are public, but the FDA redacts the names of the medications made in those factories.

“Americans (including pharmacists, doctors, hospital systems, policy makers) cannot see for themselves which drugs may have been made in unsafe facilities,” the lawsuit said.

ProPublica requested the records as part of an ongoing investigation into the safety of America’s generic drug supply. ProPublica has reported that the FDA allowed some manufacturers to continue shipping their drugs to Americans even after the factories that made them were found in violation of quality standards and banned from the U.S. market. More than 150 drugs or their ingredients were given these little-known exemptions over the past dozen years.

In its response to ProPublica’s initial records request, the FDA said the news organization had not demonstrated “a compelling need” to expedite the release of documents. Since the lawsuit was filed in November, the agency has begun to turn over some of the requested records. The case is still active in federal court in New York.

ProPublica has argued the records will help inform American consumers, who increasingly rely on generic drugs made overseas. Quality concerns have dogged the industry for years: In 2023, four people died after using tainted eye drops made in India, and others had to have their eyeballs surgically removed.

“Every single one of us relies on the FDA to ensure that the medicines we take and give our loved ones are safe,” said ProPublica’s outside counsel, Jack Browning, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. “With the increasing prevalence of offshore manufacturing, it is imperative for organizations like ProPublica to ensure that safety violations are not being swept under the rug.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing litigation.

This is the second time ProPublica has sued the FDA in recent years.

In 2023, the news outlet and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette filed a lawsuit against the agency for withholding records related to the massive recall of breathing machines made by Philips Respironics. The agency ultimately provided the documents.

Dailey and Nguyen are with Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab in Washington, D.C.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Katherine Dailey and Jessie Nguyen, Medill Investigative Lab.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

What Happened: A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s termination of hundreds of grants by the National Institutes of Health was “void and illegal,” ordering some of them to be reinstated, including many profiled by ProPublica in recent months.

District Judge William G. Young made the ruling in two lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s directives and cancellations: One case was brought by more than a dozen states’ attorneys general, and the other was led by the American Public Health Association alongside several other organizations and researchers.

In Monday’s ruling, the judge determined that the directives that led to the grant terminations were “arbitrary and capricious” and said they had “no force and effect.” The judge’s ruling ordered the funding of the grants to be restored. It only covers grants that have been identified by the plaintiffs in the cases.

What the Judge Said: After Young ruled that the agency directives and terminations were illegal, he noted that the government’s practices were discriminatory.

“This represents racial discrimination, and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out, and I do so.”

This year, the Trump administration banned the NIH from funding grants that had a connection to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” alleging that such research may be discriminatory. ProPublica previously found that caught up in mass terminations was research focused on why some populations — including women and sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — may be more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.

“I have never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during Monday’s hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years, and I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this, and I confine my remarks to this record, to health care.”

He also noted the administration’s targeting of LGBTQ+ research. “It is palpably clear these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop research that may bear on the health — we are talking about health here — the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s appalling.”

Background: In recent months, ProPublica has been covering the toll of the grant cancellations by the NIH. More than 150 researchers, scientists and investigators have reached out to ProPublica and shared their experiences, revealing how the terminations are dramatically reshaping the biomedical and scientific enterprise of the nation at large.

They described how years of federally funded research may never be published, how critical treatments may never be developed and how millions of patients could be harmed.

“Two and a half years into a three-year grant, and to all of a sudden stop and not fully be able to answer the original questions, it’s just a waste,” said Brown University associate professor Ethan Moitra, whose grant studying mental health treatment for LGBTQ+ people was terminated.

Response: White House spokesperson Kush Desai said it was “appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,” adding that “justice ceases to be administered when a judge clearly rules on the basis of his political ideologies.”

Desai also defended the administration’s policies targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion,” calling it a “flawed and racist logic.” He also said that the administration was committed to “restoring the Gold Standard of Science,” which he claimed involves a recognition of the “biological reality of the male and female sexes.” The NIH, he said, is shifting “research spending to address our chronic disease crisis instead, not to validate ideological activism.”

Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, told ProPublica that the agency “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people,” and that it was “exploring all legal options, including filing an appeal and moving to stay the order.”

Why It Matters: The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no historical precedent, experts told ProPublica, and marks an extraordinary departure from the agency’s established practices. ProPublica previously revealed that the Department of Government Efficiency — the administration’s cost-cutting initiative —— gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, raising questions about the provenance of the terminations.

The judge's ruling adds to a growing number of legal decisions halting or scaling back the administration’s actions. As of Monday, according to The New York Times, there have been more than 180 rulings that have “at least temporarily paused” the administration’s practices.

Whether the administration follows Monday’s ruling, however, remains an open question. As ProPublica reported, the NIH has previously terminated research grants even after a federal judge blocked such cuts, and the administration has disregarded several other rulings.

“If the vacation of these particular grant terminations, the vacation of these directives, taken as a whole, does not result in forthwith disbursement of funds,” Young said in Monday’s hearing, “the court has ample jurisdiction.”

Were you involved in a clinical trial, participating in research or receiving services that have ended, been paused or been delayed because of canceled federal funding? Our reporters want to hear from you. To share your experience, contact our reporting team at healthfunding@propublica.org.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Annie Waldman.

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

On a sweltering morning in western India in 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and demanded to be let inside.

For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers at the tablet presses, mixers and filling machines that produce dozens of generic drugs for Americans.

Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records that showed vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs.

Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States.

But the agency, worried about medication shortages, immediately undercut its mission to ensure the safety of America’s drug supply.

A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that otherwise would have been banned went to unsuspecting patients across the country, including those with cancer and epilepsy.

The FDA didn’t routinely test the medications for quality problems or use its vast repository of drug-related complaints to proactively track whether they were harming the people who relied on them.

And the agency kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and from Congress. Even others inside the FDA were unaware of the details.

In the hands of consumers, according to the FDA’s longtime head of drug safety, the information would have caused “some kind of frenzy.”

“We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing,” said Janet Woodcock, who spent nearly four decades at the agency.

The exemptions for Sun weren’t a one-time concession. A ProPublica investigation found that over a dozen years, the same small cadre at the FDA granted similar exemptions to more than 20 other factories that had violated critical standards in drugmaking, nearly all in India. All told, the group allowed into the United States at least 150 medications or their ingredients from factories with mold, foul water, dirty labs or fraudulent testing protocols.

Some of the drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems, government records show. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about exempted drugs at three of those factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after they were excluded from import bans in 2022 and 2023.

The “adverse event” reports about drugs from the Sun plant and two others run by Indian drugmaker Intas Pharmaceuticals described medication with an abnormal taste, odor or residue or patients who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems.

The reports cite about 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths. And those numbers are conservative. ProPublica limited its count to reports that linked problems to a single drug. However, the total number of complaints to the FDA that mention exempted drugs is in the thousands.

“Abdominal pain … stomach was acting very crazy,” one report said about a woman using a seizure drug from Sun Pharma. The FDA received the complaint in 2023, nine months after it excluded the medication from the import ban.

“Feeling really hot, breaking out with hives, hard to breathe, had confusion, glucose level was high, heart rate went up and head, arms and hands got numb,” noted another report about a patient taking a sedative from Intas. The complaint was sent to the FDA in June 2023, the same month the agency exempted the medication.

The outcomes described in the complaints may have no connection to the drug or could be unexpected side effects. In some cases, the FDA received complaints about the same drugs made by other manufacturers.

Still, the seriousness of the reports involving exempted drugs did not galvanize the agency to investigate, leaving the public and the government with no way of knowing whether people were being harmed and, if so, how many.

Those unknowns have done little to slow the exemptions. In 2022, FDA inspectors described a “cascade of failure” at one of the Intas plants, finding workers had destroyed testing records, in one case pouring acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag. At the second Intas factory, inspectors said in their report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

The FDA barred both plants in 2023 from shipping drugs to the U.S. Then the agency simultaneously granted more than 50 exemptions to those banned factories — the broadest use of exclusions in ProPublica’s analysis.

Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that the company has invested millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires and launched a companywide program focused on quality. Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States because the FDA found other suppliers. The company would not provide details.

“Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said.

Sun did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When the FDA imposed the ban, the company said it would “undertake all necessary steps to resolve these issues and to ensure that the regulator is completely satisfied with the company’s remedial action. Sun Pharma remains committed to being … compliant and in supplying high-quality products to its customers and patients globally.”

Both companies’ factories are still under import bans.

“We’re supposed to have the best medicine in the world,” said Joe DeMayo, a kidney transplant patient in Philadelphia who took an immunosuppression medication made by Intas until December 2023, unaware that a month earlier the FDA had excused the drug from an import ban. “Why are we buying from people who aren’t making it right?”

Watch video ➜

How the United States wound up here — playing a game of chance with risky drugs made thousands of miles away — is the story of an agency that has relentlessly pressed to keep the supply of low-cost generics flowing even as its own inspectors warned that some of those drugs posed a potentially lethal threat to the American public.

The vast majority of the prescriptions filled in the country are for generic drugs, from penicillin to blood thinners to emergency contraception, and many of those come from overseas, including India and China. For years, the FDA has vouched for the quality of generics, assuring the public in press releases, speeches and social media campaigns that they are just as safe and effective as brand-name drugs.

That guarantee came under serious question in 2019 when journalist Katherine Eban published a breakthrough book, “Bottle of Lies,” that exposed rampant fraud and manufacturing violations in Indian factories and the FDA’s reluctance to aggressively investigate.

ProPublica identified another alarming level of entrenched failure: Even when the agency did investigate and single out factories that were among the worst in India, it still gave them access to American consumers. All the while, patients took their medicine without question, trusting an agency that has long been considered the gold standard in drug regulation.

While specialized business publications have sometimes reported on exemptions when they happen, they’ve offered little context and few specifics.

The FDA in many ways put itself in this untenable position, forced to decide between not having enough drugs or accepting potentially dangerous ones, interviews and government records show.

For years, the agency gave companies with a history of manufacturing breakdowns approval to produce an increasingly larger share of generic drugs, allowing them to become a dominant force in American medicine with the power to disrupt lives if production lines were shuttered.

“It’s our own fault,” said former FDA inspector Peter Baker, who reported a litany of failures during inspections in India and China from 2012 to 2018. “We allowed all these players into the market who never should have been there in the first place. They grew to be monsters and now we can’t go back.”

The decisions to weaken penalties and allow banned factories to continue sending drugs to the United States were approved by Woodcock, one of the agency’s most powerful administrators. For more than two decades, she led the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the arm of the FDA that serves as the country’s gatekeeper for new and generic drugs.

In a series of interviews with ProPublica, Woodcock said she supported the use of exemptions “as a practical approach.”

“We had to kind of deal with the hand we were dealt,” she said.

Woodcock said she didn’t see a need to inform the public because the agency believed the drugs were safe. She said she mentioned the practice periodically in closed-door meetings with congressional staffers, but she did not provide specifics about those conversations.

After Woodcock left her post in 2020 to help lead the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exemptions — including those for Sun and Intas — continued under her successor, Patrizia Cavazzoni. Cavazzoni, who left the agency earlier this year and rejoined Pfizer, declined to comment.

Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, who led the agency when Sun and Intas received exemptions, told ProPublica that tough calls had to be made and the practice did not worry him.

The FDA did not respond to questions about who made those decisions or how the drugs were evaluated, and it declined requests for interviews with officials who currently oversee drug regulation. In an email, the agency said the exemptions are “thoroughly evaluated through a multi-disciplinary approach.”

Years after the FDA started granting exemptions, some current and former officials say they wrestle with a lingering fear that bad drugs are circulating in the United States.

“It’s not even a hypothetical,” said one senior FDA employee familiar with the exemptions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s not a question of if — it’s a question of how much.”

Although the FDA has been giving companies a way around import bans since at least 2013, the internal process was so secretive that many current and former FDA officials said they have no idea how many exemptions have been granted or for what drugs. In an email, the agency said it did not maintain a comprehensive list.

Even two high-level FDA staff members who worked on drug shortage challenges for the agency said in interviews they had never heard of the exemptions.

Congress required the FDA in 2012 to provide specific information every year about how and when the agency relaxed its rules for errant drugmakers to prevent shortages. But the FDA did not mention exemptions to import bans until 2024 — and only then in a single footnote of its 25-page report to Congress.

ProPublica uncovered the frequent use of exemptions by searching for the “import alert” list published on the FDA’s website that names factories banned from the U.S. marketplace. Because the agency publishes only a current list and doesn’t make the old ones public, the news organization used internet archives and FDA documents maintained by the data analytics company Redica Systems, ultimately compiling import alerts dating back more than a decade. The lists identify the drugs exempted from bans but provide few other details.

ProPublica reviewed scores of inspection reports and corporate documents for overseas factories and interviewed more than 200 people, including current and former officials of the FDA, to understand the little-known practice and the ongoing threat posed by the agency’s decisions.

The investigation revealed not only how many drugs received exemptions from import bans, but also how long the FDA allowed those exemptions to stay in place — in some cases for years.

The agency has removed exemptions when there is no longer a shortage concern. In those cases, the drugs are then banned along with the others at the factory. Both Sun and Intas have had drugs that lost their exemptions.

Two and a half years after the Sun factory was banned, five drugs are still exempted. Intas, whose factories were banned in 2023, currently has 24 drugs on the list. The bans themselves are removed only after companies fix the problems.

Earlier this month, the FDA went back to the Sun Pharma factory for a surprise inspection and found ongoing problems, according to a Sun filing with the Indian stock exchange and Indian media reports. The concerns focused on the way sterile drugs were made, including some of the exempted drugs still being sent to the United States, according to a person familiar with the situation who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The FDA said it put protections in place for exempted drugs: Manufacturers are required to conduct additional quality checks before they are sent to the United States. That has included extra drug-safety testing, in some cases at an independent lab, and bringing on third-party consultants to verify the results.

The agency did not provide ProPublica with the names of the third-party consultants hired by Sun and Intas. Intas declined to name its consultants.

“The odds of these drugs actually not being safe or effective is tiny because of the safeguards,” said one former FDA official involved in the exemptions who declined to be named because he still works in the industry and fears professional retribution. “Even though the facility sucks, it’s getting tested more often and it’s having independent eyes on it.”

But current and former FDA inspectors said those safety measures require trusting the vigilance of companies that were banned, at least in part, for providing unreliable or deceptive test results to the government or failing to investigate reports about drugs with contaminants or other quality concerns.

The FDA could have done its own routine testing of the exempted drugs but chose not to. The agency said in an email that it tests the drugs using a “risk-based approach” but would not provide ProPublica with any information about which drugs have been tested and what the results were.

Woodcock said testing was expensive and budgets were tight. She acknowledged that regularly assessing the exempted drugs for quality or safety concerns “would have enhanced our confidence … and made everyone more comfortable.”

The European Union, by contrast, requires drugs made in India and China to be checked for quality on EU soil. And the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting its own testing of more than three dozen generic medications and has already identified potency and other quality issues.

“If you don’t know about the quality of the product, why are you letting it in?” said Murray Lumpkin, the FDA’s former deputy commissioner for international programs, who left the agency in 2014 before most of the exemptions were granted.

Beyond the lack of testing, the FDA didn’t actively look for patterns of harm among the exempted drugs in its adverse event database, Woodcock and others said.

ProPublica’s analysis of that data found thousands of reports both before and after the factories were given a pass to sidestep import bans. The reports described unexpected cases of cardiac arrest, blurred vision, choking, vertigo and kidney injuries, among other issues — and in some instances identified specific concerns about how the drugs were made.

One person who took Intas’ clonazepam, a sedative and epilepsy drug, reported getting “brain zaps” and bright blue teeth from the coating of dye on the drug. The FDA received the complaint the same month the agency exempted the drug from the import ban.

Even before the FDA exempted Intas’ antidepressant bupropion, consumers reported that it made them sick, wasn’t always effective and had an abnormal odor, which pharmacists and others say can happen when an inactive ingredient breaks down.

“It was rotten eggs,” Nari Miller, a geologist in California who took the pills in 2022 and had severe stomach pain, told ProPublica. “I opened it and smelled it when I got home and it was awful.”

Intas said it could not respond to specific complaints and that all drugs have side effects. “Intas and Accord pay attention to each and every adverse event report,” the company said, adding, “Accord and Intas are committed to continuing to bring safe and effective medicines to patients.”

In its statement, the FDA said the database is monitored weekly for new reports in general. Woodcock, however, acknowledged the reports about exempted drugs, ideally, “would be under much more scrutiny.”

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Decisions made by the FDA decades ago gave rise to the use of exemptions and the risks that now confront the American public.

When new brand-name drugs come to market, they are protected by patents and exclusive sales rights that make them generally expensive. When patents expire, generic drug companies rush in to make their own versions, which are supposed to be equivalent to the brand. Generics are often far cheaper, and insurance companies typically insist that patients use them.

In the 2000s, as the cost of brand-name drugs soared, the FDA began to approve large numbers of generics. The agency, however, gave hundreds of those approvals to foreign manufacturers that had been in trouble before, companies well known to the inspectors working to stamp out safety and quality breakdowns at overseas factories, ProPublica found.

The FDA granted Sun Pharma alone more than 250 approvals for generic drugs since the late 2000s, when the company started amassing violations, records show. The agency’s decisions helped to transform the company from a local provider in India to one of the leading exporters of medications to the United States, with nearly $2 billion in annual U.S. sales.

The approvals kept coming as inspectors continued to raise concerns about manufacturing practices at the company’s factories in India, government records show.

More problems were found at a factory that Sun had acquired in Detroit, where the diabetes drug metformin was contaminated with metal scrapings. The violations were so significant that federal marshals in 2009 raided the plant and seized drugs. The company eventually shuttered the factory.

The rapid expansion of Sun and other foreign drugmakers set off new alarms among inspectors, their supervisors and advisers to Woodcock.

“In a rational system, you would have said, ‘This company is not producing properly, so let’s not approve any more of their drugs,” said William Hubbard, former FDA deputy commissioner for policy, planning and legislation. “The agency in a sense kind of let this happen.”

Ajaz Hussain, the former deputy director of an FDA office that oversaw pharmaceutical science, said that after leaving the agency and becoming a consultant, he made his concerns known in meetings with Woodcock and others.

“They can’t manufacture it. Why do you keep approving it?” Hussain recalled in an interview with ProPublica. “I said, ‘Wake up.’ … But they didn’t listen.”

Hussain in 2012 went to work for Wockhardt, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in India, but quit eight months later after he said he told his superiors about manufacturing failures in the company’s factories.

Although FDA inspectors had reported lapses after multiple visits to Wockhardt plants between 2004 and 2012, the agency cleared the way for the company to export sedatives, antibiotics, beta blockers, painkillers and other generics to the United States, records show. Wockhardt received exemptions from import bans in 2013. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but at the time, the company said it was going to quickly address the FDA’s concerns.

The FDA could have denied generic drug applications — nothing in the law prohibits the agency from saying no to companies with spotty track records. In an email, the FDA said it considers a company’s history and conducts inspections in some cases before issuing approvals.

Woodcock said the agency knew which factories were poor performers but feared being sued by companies blocked from introducing new drugs based on past behavior. Instead, she said that she tried to convince drugmakers to invest in equipment and practices that would turn out higher-quality drugs.

“We had many meetings about this, and we agonized about all these problems,” she said.

But little changed.

In 2008, dozens of Americans were killed by contaminated blood thinner from China. So when Margaret Hamburg was appointed commissioner of the FDA in the aftermath of the crisis, she pressed the agency to crack down on overseas drugmakers.

Her efforts ran headlong into what would become the worst drug shortage in modern history. By 2010, cancer drugs were scarce. So were the drugs on hospital crash carts. In all, more than 200 critical medications were in short supply.

Razor-thin profit margins had limited the number of companies that were willing to make generic drugs. And the FDA’s enforcement overseas had forced some manufacturing lines to temporarily shut down, which exacerbated the problem.

Congress lambasted the FDA for the shortages and started requiring the agency to prove every year how it was combatting the problem.

At the time, the FDA had a small team focused on shortages that operated on the edges of Woodcock’s 4,000-person Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. With the pressure on, Woodcock elevated the team in 2010 to report directly to her deputy, a move that gave those staff members a commanding voice at the highest levels of the agency, several former staffers told ProPublica.

After 16 years in top leadership roles, Woodcock was formidable enough to force a culture change. Standing 5’2” in FDA conference rooms where she had often been disregarded as the lone woman, Woodcock had fought for her status — sometimes, she said, pushed nearly to tears with frustration. The board-certified internist asserted her authority by wielding data, what she called “brute force” and the soft persuasion of an occasional gift of an orchid, picked from her garden in suburban Maryland.

By 2010, Woodcock had marshalled the center into a powerhouse with great independence — in many ways, outside the reach of the political whims of the commissioners who came and went. Those who worked with her over the years said despite her approachable manner, she fiercely guarded her territory.

In the conference room next to Woodcock’s office, the drug shortage staff began to weigh in whenever the FDA’s compliance team moved to penalize wayward drugmakers because of bad inspections, according to several former FDA officials involved in the deliberations.

Sometimes the small group would decide that a factory could no longer ship drugs to the United States and would try to get other manufacturers to make more. And other times, the group determined that exemptions from import bans were the only course.

Discussions could be tense and often lasted for weeks. A former employee on the compliance team told ProPublica that they repeatedly argued to impose a total import ban on a foreign factory because they feared the drugs couldn’t be trusted. They were left feeling uncomfortable about an exemption granted anyway — for a product that they would not use themselves.

Without exemptions, Woodcock told ProPublica, the FDA might have been forced to source the drugs from a “totally unknown manufacturer, say, from China or somewhere.”

Current and former FDA officials said the concessions became a yearslong practice rather than a stopgap measure and that the protections put in place by the agency were not sufficient. They question why Woodcock and her successor didn’t do more to raise alarms with Congress or the public about the decision to rely on inadequate factories for critical drugs.

Woodcock said she thought the exemptions were a symptom of larger issues involving the drug supply that the FDA had no control over — the agency, for example, can’t force companies concerned about slim profit margins to produce generic drugs.

Two former FDA commissioners told ProPublica they knew about the practice but were not included in the decision-making.

Hamburg, who spent six years at the agency under the Obama administration, said the extent of the practice surprised her. “Had I known that it was sort of an open-ended policy, I would have been disturbed,” she said.

One of her successors, Stephen Hahn, appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term, said more people should have been involved in the decisions.

“You’re talking about a drug of questionable quality being brought into the country,” he said.

Woodcock said she did not believe she needed their input. “I didn’t think in the individual circumstances it was necessary to elevate,” she said, “because what could they do?”

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In 2020, the billionaire founder of Sun Pharma joined a pivotal conference call with FDA compliance and investigative staff.

Dilip Shanghvi, whose father had run a wholesale drug business in Kolkata, India, started the company in the 1980s and ultimately turned Sun Pharma into one of the largest suppliers of generic drugs in the United States. On the call, Shanghvi spoke about improvements at Sun’s enormous plant in the Indian city of Halol, according to an FDA official who attended the meeting.

Among other drugs, the plant produced at least 16 sterile injectables for the U.S. market, according to a Sun email to the FDA obtained by ProPublica. Injectables are particularly dangerous if contaminated because the medication is injected directly into the body, unlike a pill that goes through the filtering of the digestive tract.

In 2018 and 2019, inspectors had reported a series of violations at the factory, and Sun had received more than 700 complaints about what appeared to be crystals or spider webs forming in one of its injectable medications, records show.

The company also had to recall more than 135,000 vials of vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, after reports that the medication contained glass particles. Sun said the defect could cause life-threatening blood clots.

On the call with the FDA, according to the agency official, Shanghvi assured the government that the Halol plant was turning out high-quality products.

Yet, when the three investigators went back to the factory that scorching morning in 2022 for the surprise inspection, it was clear within days that the FDA would have to take swift action.

Splitting up to check different parts of the plant, the inspectors quizzed workers about cleaning procedures and looked at disassembled equipment to see if it was contaminated with residue from old drugs. At one point, they spotted water leaking near areas where sterile drugs were made, an alarming observation because water can introduce contaminants capable of causing infections or even death.

Digging through company records and test results, they found more evidence of quality problems, including how managers hadn’t properly investigated a series of complaints about foreign material, specks, spots and stains in tablets.

Several FDA employees familiar with the inspection report — 23 pages of detailed violations — said they had no idea why the agency went on to exclude so many of Sun’s drugs from the subsequent import ban.

“We know what was found,” said the FDA official who attended the meeting with Shanghvi. “How could you trust [those] drugs?”

Sun did not respond to questions about the recalls or its regulatory history with the FDA. In its 2023-24 annual report, the company said, “We have a relentless focus on 24x7 compliance to ensure continuity of supplies to our customers and patients worldwide.”

The specific findings of the FDA’s latest inspection of the Sun plant conducted this month have not yet been made public, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

To some current and former FDA officials and other experts, plugging a supply shortage with drugs that may be contaminated or ineffective is no solution at all.

“That might be helping a shortage but might be creating a new problem,” said Lumpkin, the former deputy commissioner.

Last summer, a pair of FDA investigators arrived at another manufacturing plant in India that had a bustling production line. After more than a week at the Viatris factory, they left with a familiar list of safety and quality violations.

The inspectors found that equipment wasn’t clean and managers failed to thoroughly investigate unexplained discrepancies in test results.

In a statement to ProPublica, Viatris said it immediately worked to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “Patient safety remains our primary and unwavering focus,” the company said.

Just before Christmas, the FDA banned the facility from exporting drugs.

Then the agency gave the factory a pass, and four of its drugs are still bound for the United States.

Patricia Callahan and Vidya Krishnan contributed reporting, and Alice Crites contributed research.

Medill Investigative Lab students Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Kate McQuarrie and Katherine Dailey contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang.

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

On a sweltering morning in western India in 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and demanded to be let inside.

For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers at the tablet presses, mixers and filling machines that produce dozens of generic drugs for Americans.

Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records that showed vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs.

Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States.

But the agency, worried about medication shortages, immediately undercut its mission to ensure the safety of America’s drug supply.

A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that otherwise would have been banned went to unsuspecting patients across the country, including those with cancer and epilepsy.

The FDA didn’t routinely test the medications for quality problems or use its vast repository of drug-related complaints to proactively track whether they were harming the people who relied on them.

And the agency kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and from Congress. Even others inside the FDA were unaware of the details.

In the hands of consumers, according to the FDA’s longtime head of drug safety, the information would have caused “some kind of frenzy.”

“We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing,” said Janet Woodcock, who spent nearly four decades at the agency.

The exemptions for Sun weren’t a one-time concession. A ProPublica investigation found that over a dozen years, the same small cadre at the FDA granted similar exemptions to more than 20 other factories that had violated critical standards in drugmaking, nearly all in India. All told, the group allowed into the United States at least 150 medications or their ingredients from factories with mold, foul water, dirty labs or fraudulent testing protocols.

Some of the drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems, government records show. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about exempted drugs at three of those factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after they were excluded from import bans in 2022 and 2023.

The “adverse event” reports about drugs from the Sun plant and two others run by Indian drugmaker Intas Pharmaceuticals described medication with an abnormal taste, odor or residue or patients who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems.

The reports cite about 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths. And those numbers are conservative. ProPublica limited its count to reports that linked problems to a single drug. However, the total number of complaints to the FDA that mention exempted drugs is in the thousands.

“Abdominal pain … stomach was acting very crazy,” one report said about a woman using a seizure drug from Sun Pharma. The FDA received the complaint in 2023, nine months after it excluded the medication from the import ban.

“Feeling really hot, breaking out with hives, hard to breathe, had confusion, glucose level was high, heart rate went up and head, arms and hands got numb,” noted another report about a patient taking a sedative from Intas. The complaint was sent to the FDA in June 2023, the same month the agency exempted the medication.

The outcomes described in the complaints may have no connection to the drug or could be unexpected side effects. In some cases, the FDA received complaints about the same drugs made by other manufacturers.

Still, the seriousness of the reports involving exempted drugs did not galvanize the agency to investigate, leaving the public and the government with no way of knowing whether people were being harmed and, if so, how many.

Those unknowns have done little to slow the exemptions. In 2022, FDA inspectors described a “cascade of failure” at one of the Intas plants, finding workers had destroyed testing records, in one case pouring acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag. At the second Intas factory, inspectors said in their report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

The FDA barred both plants in 2023 from shipping drugs to the U.S. Then the agency simultaneously granted more than 50 exemptions to those banned factories — the broadest use of exclusions in ProPublica’s analysis.

Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that the company has invested millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires and launched a companywide program focused on quality. Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States because the FDA found other suppliers. The company would not provide details.

“Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said.

Sun did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When the FDA imposed the ban, the company said it would “undertake all necessary steps to resolve these issues and to ensure that the regulator is completely satisfied with the company’s remedial action. Sun Pharma remains committed to being … compliant and in supplying high-quality products to its customers and patients globally.”

Both companies’ factories are still under import bans.

“We’re supposed to have the best medicine in the world,” said Joe DeMayo, a kidney transplant patient in Philadelphia who took an immunosuppression medication made by Intas until December 2023, unaware that a month earlier the FDA had excused the drug from an import ban. “Why are we buying from people who aren’t making it right?”

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How the United States wound up here — playing a game of chance with risky drugs made thousands of miles away — is the story of an agency that has relentlessly pressed to keep the supply of low-cost generics flowing even as its own inspectors warned that some of those drugs posed a potentially lethal threat to the American public.

The vast majority of the prescriptions filled in the country are for generic drugs, from penicillin to blood thinners to emergency contraception, and many of those come from overseas, including India and China. For years, the FDA has vouched for the quality of generics, assuring the public in press releases, speeches and social media campaigns that they are just as safe and effective as brand-name drugs.

That guarantee came under serious question in 2019 when journalist Katherine Eban published a breakthrough book, “Bottle of Lies,” that exposed rampant fraud and manufacturing violations in Indian factories and the FDA’s reluctance to aggressively investigate.

ProPublica identified another alarming level of entrenched failure: Even when the agency did investigate and single out factories that were among the worst in India, it still gave them access to American consumers. All the while, patients took their medicine without question, trusting an agency that has long been considered the gold standard in drug regulation.

While specialized business publications have sometimes reported on exemptions when they happen, they’ve offered little context and few specifics.

The FDA in many ways put itself in this untenable position, forced to decide between not having enough drugs or accepting potentially dangerous ones, interviews and government records show.

For years, the agency gave companies with a history of manufacturing breakdowns approval to produce an increasingly larger share of generic drugs, allowing them to become a dominant force in American medicine with the power to disrupt lives if production lines were shuttered.

“It’s our own fault,” said former FDA inspector Peter Baker, who reported a litany of failures during inspections in India and China from 2012 to 2018. “We allowed all these players into the market who never should have been there in the first place. They grew to be monsters and now we can’t go back.”

The decisions to weaken penalties and allow banned factories to continue sending drugs to the United States were approved by Woodcock, one of the agency’s most powerful administrators. For more than two decades, she led the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the arm of the FDA that serves as the country’s gatekeeper for new and generic drugs.

In a series of interviews with ProPublica, Woodcock said she supported the use of exemptions “as a practical approach.”

“We had to kind of deal with the hand we were dealt,” she said.

Woodcock said she didn’t see a need to inform the public because the agency believed the drugs were safe. She said she mentioned the practice periodically in closed-door meetings with congressional staffers, but she did not provide specifics about those conversations.

After Woodcock left her post in 2020 to help lead the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exemptions — including those for Sun and Intas — continued under her successor, Patrizia Cavazzoni. Cavazzoni, who left the agency earlier this year and rejoined Pfizer, declined to comment.

Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, who led the agency when Sun and Intas received exemptions, told ProPublica that tough calls had to be made and the practice did not worry him.

The FDA did not respond to questions about who made those decisions or how the drugs were evaluated, and it declined requests for interviews with officials who currently oversee drug regulation. In an email, the agency said the exemptions are “thoroughly evaluated through a multi-disciplinary approach.”

Years after the FDA started granting exemptions, some current and former officials say they wrestle with a lingering fear that bad drugs are circulating in the United States.

“It’s not even a hypothetical,” said one senior FDA employee familiar with the exemptions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s not a question of if — it’s a question of how much.”

Although the FDA has been giving companies a way around import bans since at least 2013, the internal process was so secretive that many current and former FDA officials said they have no idea how many exemptions have been granted or for what drugs. In an email, the agency said it did not maintain a comprehensive list.

Even two high-level FDA staff members who worked on drug shortage challenges for the agency said in interviews they had never heard of the exemptions.

Congress required the FDA in 2012 to provide specific information every year about how and when the agency relaxed its rules for errant drugmakers to prevent shortages. But the FDA did not mention exemptions to import bans until 2024 — and only then in a single footnote of its 25-page report to Congress.

ProPublica uncovered the frequent use of exemptions by searching for the “import alert” list published on the FDA’s website that names factories banned from the U.S. marketplace. Because the agency publishes only a current list and doesn’t make the old ones public, the news organization used internet archives and FDA documents maintained by the data analytics company Redica Systems, ultimately compiling import alerts dating back more than a decade. The lists identify the drugs exempted from bans but provide few other details.

ProPublica reviewed scores of inspection reports and corporate documents for overseas factories and interviewed more than 200 people, including current and former officials of the FDA, to understand the little-known practice and the ongoing threat posed by the agency’s decisions.

The investigation revealed not only how many drugs received exemptions from import bans, but also how long the FDA allowed those exemptions to stay in place — in some cases for years.

The agency has removed exemptions when there is no longer a shortage concern. In those cases, the drugs are then banned along with the others at the factory. Both Sun and Intas have had drugs that lost their exemptions.

Two and a half years after the Sun factory was banned, five drugs are still exempted. Intas, whose factories were banned in 2023, currently has 24 drugs on the list. The bans themselves are removed only after companies fix the problems.

Earlier this month, the FDA went back to the Sun Pharma factory for a surprise inspection and found ongoing problems, according to a Sun filing with the Indian stock exchange and Indian media reports. The concerns focused on the way sterile drugs were made, including some of the exempted drugs still being sent to the United States, according to a person familiar with the situation who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The FDA said it put protections in place for exempted drugs: Manufacturers are required to conduct additional quality checks before they are sent to the United States. That has included extra drug-safety testing, in some cases at an independent lab, and bringing on third-party consultants to verify the results.

The agency did not provide ProPublica with the names of the third-party consultants hired by Sun and Intas. Intas declined to name its consultants.

“The odds of these drugs actually not being safe or effective is tiny because of the safeguards,” said one former FDA official involved in the exemptions who declined to be named because he still works in the industry and fears professional retribution. “Even though the facility sucks, it’s getting tested more often and it’s having independent eyes on it.”

But current and former FDA inspectors said those safety measures require trusting the vigilance of companies that were banned, at least in part, for providing unreliable or deceptive test results to the government or failing to investigate reports about drugs with contaminants or other quality concerns.

The FDA could have done its own routine testing of the exempted drugs but chose not to. The agency said in an email that it tests the drugs using a “risk-based approach” but would not provide ProPublica with any information about which drugs have been tested and what the results were.

Woodcock said testing was expensive and budgets were tight. She acknowledged that regularly assessing the exempted drugs for quality or safety concerns “would have enhanced our confidence … and made everyone more comfortable.”

The European Union, by contrast, requires drugs made in India and China to be checked for quality on EU soil. And the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting its own testing of more than three dozen generic medications and has already identified potency and other quality issues.

“If you don’t know about the quality of the product, why are you letting it in?” said Murray Lumpkin, the FDA’s former deputy commissioner for international programs, who left the agency in 2014 before most of the exemptions were granted.

Beyond the lack of testing, the FDA didn’t actively look for patterns of harm among the exempted drugs in its adverse event database, Woodcock and others said.

ProPublica’s analysis of that data found thousands of reports both before and after the factories were given a pass to sidestep import bans. The reports described unexpected cases of cardiac arrest, blurred vision, choking, vertigo and kidney injuries, among other issues — and in some instances identified specific concerns about how the drugs were made.

One person who took Intas’ clonazepam, a sedative and epilepsy drug, reported getting “brain zaps” and bright blue teeth from the coating of dye on the drug. The FDA received the complaint the same month the agency exempted the drug from the import ban.

Even before the FDA exempted Intas’ antidepressant bupropion, consumers reported that it made them sick, wasn’t always effective and had an abnormal odor, which pharmacists and others say can happen when an inactive ingredient breaks down.

“It was rotten eggs,” Nari Miller, a geologist in California who took the pills in 2022 and had severe stomach pain, told ProPublica. “I opened it and smelled it when I got home and it was awful.”

Intas said it could not respond to specific complaints and that all drugs have side effects. “Intas and Accord pay attention to each and every adverse event report,” the company said, adding, “Accord and Intas are committed to continuing to bring safe and effective medicines to patients.”

In its statement, the FDA said the database is monitored weekly for new reports in general. Woodcock, however, acknowledged the reports about exempted drugs, ideally, “would be under much more scrutiny.”

Watch video ➜

Decisions made by the FDA decades ago gave rise to the use of exemptions and the risks that now confront the American public.

When new brand-name drugs come to market, they are protected by patents and exclusive sales rights that make them generally expensive. When patents expire, generic drug companies rush in to make their own versions, which are supposed to be equivalent to the brand. Generics are often far cheaper, and insurance companies typically insist that patients use them.

In the 2000s, as the cost of brand-name drugs soared, the FDA began to approve large numbers of generics. The agency, however, gave hundreds of those approvals to foreign manufacturers that had been in trouble before, companies well known to the inspectors working to stamp out safety and quality breakdowns at overseas factories, ProPublica found.

The FDA granted Sun Pharma alone more than 250 approvals for generic drugs since the late 2000s, when the company started amassing violations, records show. The agency’s decisions helped to transform the company from a local provider in India to one of the leading exporters of medications to the United States, with nearly $2 billion in annual U.S. sales.

The approvals kept coming as inspectors continued to raise concerns about manufacturing practices at the company’s factories in India, government records show.

More problems were found at a factory that Sun had acquired in Detroit, where the diabetes drug metformin was contaminated with metal scrapings. The violations were so significant that federal marshals in 2009 raided the plant and seized drugs. The company eventually shuttered the factory.

The rapid expansion of Sun and other foreign drugmakers set off new alarms among inspectors, their supervisors and advisers to Woodcock.

“In a rational system, you would have said, ‘This company is not producing properly, so let’s not approve any more of their drugs,” said William Hubbard, former FDA deputy commissioner for policy, planning and legislation. “The agency in a sense kind of let this happen.”

Ajaz Hussain, the former deputy director of an FDA office that oversaw pharmaceutical science, said that after leaving the agency and becoming a consultant, he made his concerns known in meetings with Woodcock and others.

“They can’t manufacture it. Why do you keep approving it?” Hussain recalled in an interview with ProPublica. “I said, ‘Wake up.’ … But they didn’t listen.”

Hussain in 2012 went to work for Wockhardt, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in India, but quit eight months later after he said he told his superiors about manufacturing failures in the company’s factories.

Although FDA inspectors had reported lapses after multiple visits to Wockhardt plants between 2004 and 2012, the agency cleared the way for the company to export sedatives, antibiotics, beta blockers, painkillers and other generics to the United States, records show. Wockhardt received exemptions from import bans in 2013. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but at the time, the company said it was going to quickly address the FDA’s concerns.

The FDA could have denied generic drug applications — nothing in the law prohibits the agency from saying no to companies with spotty track records. In an email, the FDA said it considers a company’s history and conducts inspections in some cases before issuing approvals.

Woodcock said the agency knew which factories were poor performers but feared being sued by companies blocked from introducing new drugs based on past behavior. Instead, she said that she tried to convince drugmakers to invest in equipment and practices that would turn out higher-quality drugs.

“We had many meetings about this, and we agonized about all these problems,” she said.

But little changed.

In 2008, dozens of Americans were killed by contaminated blood thinner from China. So when Margaret Hamburg was appointed commissioner of the FDA in the aftermath of the crisis, she pressed the agency to crack down on overseas drugmakers.

Her efforts ran headlong into what would become the worst drug shortage in modern history. By 2010, cancer drugs were scarce. So were the drugs on hospital crash carts. In all, more than 200 critical medications were in short supply.

Razor-thin profit margins had limited the number of companies that were willing to make generic drugs. And the FDA’s enforcement overseas had forced some manufacturing lines to temporarily shut down, which exacerbated the problem.

Congress lambasted the FDA for the shortages and started requiring the agency to prove every year how it was combatting the problem.

At the time, the FDA had a small team focused on shortages that operated on the edges of Woodcock’s 4,000-person Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. With the pressure on, Woodcock elevated the team in 2010 to report directly to her deputy, a move that gave those staff members a commanding voice at the highest levels of the agency, several former staffers told ProPublica.

After 16 years in top leadership roles, Woodcock was formidable enough to force a culture change. Standing 5’2” in FDA conference rooms where she had often been disregarded as the lone woman, Woodcock had fought for her status — sometimes, she said, pushed nearly to tears with frustration. The board-certified internist asserted her authority by wielding data, what she called “brute force” and the soft persuasion of an occasional gift of an orchid, picked from her garden in suburban Maryland.

By 2010, Woodcock had marshalled the center into a powerhouse with great independence — in many ways, outside the reach of the political whims of the commissioners who came and went. Those who worked with her over the years said despite her approachable manner, she fiercely guarded her territory.

In the conference room next to Woodcock’s office, the drug shortage staff began to weigh in whenever the FDA’s compliance team moved to penalize wayward drugmakers because of bad inspections, according to several former FDA officials involved in the deliberations.

Sometimes the small group would decide that a factory could no longer ship drugs to the United States and would try to get other manufacturers to make more. And other times, the group determined that exemptions from import bans were the only course.

Discussions could be tense and often lasted for weeks. A former employee on the compliance team told ProPublica that they repeatedly argued to impose a total import ban on a foreign factory because they feared the drugs couldn’t be trusted. They were left feeling uncomfortable about an exemption granted anyway — for a product that they would not use themselves.

Without exemptions, Woodcock told ProPublica, the FDA might have been forced to source the drugs from a “totally unknown manufacturer, say, from China or somewhere.”

Current and former FDA officials said the concessions became a yearslong practice rather than a stopgap measure and that the protections put in place by the agency were not sufficient. They question why Woodcock and her successor didn’t do more to raise alarms with Congress or the public about the decision to rely on inadequate factories for critical drugs.

Woodcock said she thought the exemptions were a symptom of larger issues involving the drug supply that the FDA had no control over — the agency, for example, can’t force companies concerned about slim profit margins to produce generic drugs.

Two former FDA commissioners told ProPublica they knew about the practice but were not included in the decision-making.

Hamburg, who spent six years at the agency under the Obama administration, said the extent of the practice surprised her. “Had I known that it was sort of an open-ended policy, I would have been disturbed,” she said.

One of her successors, Stephen Hahn, appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term, said more people should have been involved in the decisions.

“You’re talking about a drug of questionable quality being brought into the country,” he said.

Woodcock said she did not believe she needed their input. “I didn’t think in the individual circumstances it was necessary to elevate,” she said, “because what could they do?”

Watch video ➜

In 2020, the billionaire founder of Sun Pharma joined a pivotal conference call with FDA compliance and investigative staff.

Dilip Shanghvi, whose father had run a wholesale drug business in Kolkata, India, started the company in the 1980s and ultimately turned Sun Pharma into one of the largest suppliers of generic drugs in the United States. On the call, Shanghvi spoke about improvements at Sun’s enormous plant in the Indian city of Halol, according to an FDA official who attended the meeting.

Among other drugs, the plant produced at least 16 sterile injectables for the U.S. market, according to a Sun email to the FDA obtained by ProPublica. Injectables are particularly dangerous if contaminated because the medication is injected directly into the body, unlike a pill that goes through the filtering of the digestive tract.

In 2018 and 2019, inspectors had reported a series of violations at the factory, and Sun had received more than 700 complaints about what appeared to be crystals or spider webs forming in one of its injectable medications, records show.

The company also had to recall more than 135,000 vials of vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, after reports that the medication contained glass particles. Sun said the defect could cause life-threatening blood clots.

On the call with the FDA, according to the agency official, Shanghvi assured the government that the Halol plant was turning out high-quality products.

Yet, when the three investigators went back to the factory that scorching morning in 2022 for the surprise inspection, it was clear within days that the FDA would have to take swift action.

Splitting up to check different parts of the plant, the inspectors quizzed workers about cleaning procedures and looked at disassembled equipment to see if it was contaminated with residue from old drugs. At one point, they spotted water leaking near areas where sterile drugs were made, an alarming observation because water can introduce contaminants capable of causing infections or even death.

Digging through company records and test results, they found more evidence of quality problems, including how managers hadn’t properly investigated a series of complaints about foreign material, specks, spots and stains in tablets.

Several FDA employees familiar with the inspection report — 23 pages of detailed violations — said they had no idea why the agency went on to exclude so many of Sun’s drugs from the subsequent import ban.

“We know what was found,” said the FDA official who attended the meeting with Shanghvi. “How could you trust [those] drugs?”

Sun did not respond to questions about the recalls or its regulatory history with the FDA. In its 2023-24 annual report, the company said, “We have a relentless focus on 24x7 compliance to ensure continuity of supplies to our customers and patients worldwide.”

The specific findings of the FDA’s latest inspection of the Sun plant conducted this month have not yet been made public, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

To some current and former FDA officials and other experts, plugging a supply shortage with drugs that may be contaminated or ineffective is no solution at all.

“That might be helping a shortage but might be creating a new problem,” said Lumpkin, the former deputy commissioner.

Last summer, a pair of FDA investigators arrived at another manufacturing plant in India that had a bustling production line. After more than a week at the Viatris factory, they left with a familiar list of safety and quality violations.

The inspectors found that equipment wasn’t clean and managers failed to thoroughly investigate unexplained discrepancies in test results.

In a statement to ProPublica, Viatris said it immediately worked to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “Patient safety remains our primary and unwavering focus,” the company said.

Just before Christmas, the FDA banned the facility from exporting drugs.

Then the agency gave the factory a pass, and four of its drugs are still bound for the United States.

Patricia Callahan and Vidya Krishnan contributed reporting, and Alice Crites contributed research.

Medill Investigative Lab students Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Kate McQuarrie and Katherine Dailey contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang.

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

It’s been 17 years since tainted blood thinner from China injured or killed hundreds of people in the United States, and since then, contaminants and other defects have appeared in a cross section of America’s generic drugs.

To understand how risky drugs could end up in our medicine cabinets, ProPublica spent more than a year investigating the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of foreign factories accused of violating critical quality standards. Reporters focused largely on factories in India, a key supplier of the world’s generic drugs.

The investigation exposed how the FDA, without warning the public, allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients into the United States over the past dozen years even though they were made at factories banned from shipping products here. The agency did not routinely test the drugs as they were circulating in the United States or actively track whether consumers had been harmed.

The FDA and several former agency officials told ProPublica they believed the medications that were exempted from import bans were safe. They said the agency required generic drugmakers to conduct additional quality checks before the drugs were sent to the United States, including extra drug-safety testing and bringing on third-party consultants to verify the results.

To conduct its analysis, Propublica used Redica Systems, a quality and regulatory intelligence company with a vast collection of agency documents, as well as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to find hundreds of “import alert” lists published by the FDA over more than 15 years. The lists identified factories barred from shipping drugs to the United States because the FDA found manufacturing violations.

In examining those lists, reporters discovered references to drugs or raw ingredients that the FDA had excluded from the bans. The exemptions were mentioned with almost no explanation, scattered throughout the often lengthy alerts.

Because the FDA does not keep a comprehensive list of drugs that have been exempted from bans over the years, ProPublica had to build one. Reporters employed two distinct methods to do this. First, ProPublica wrote code that used keyword search and pattern matching to pull drug names and manufacturing locations from the FDA alerts. Second, ProPublica used artificial intelligence to extract the same information. Results from each analysis were cross-checked, and reporters verified each of the results.

In finalizing its analysis, ProPublica counted all drugs that were exempted from each banned factory. Sometimes, the same drug was exempted from multiple factories and was added to each factory’s total. In a handful of cases, the FDA exempted different formulations of the same drug, such as a tablet, capsule or injectable. ProPublica counted those different forms as distinct drugs.

ProPublica’s list of drugs exempted from import bans could be an undercount; there is no way to know for sure without a full accounting from the FDA.

The reporting team interviewed more than 200 people, including former FDA inspectors who repeatedly reported breakdowns in drugmaking overseas and top administrators directly involved in drug safety. ProPublica also obtained troves of government and corporate documents in the United States and India and filed suit against the FDA in November after the agency said it would take as long as two years to turn over public records related to drug safety. The FDA has since begun to provide some of the requested records; the case is active in federal court in New York.

ProPublica paid Redica for access to FDA inspection records and ultimately reviewed reports spanning more than two decades.

To gauge what the FDA knew about the drugs before and after they were exempted from import bans, ProPublica drew on reports from the agency’s Adverse Event Reporting System. The reports are submitted to the FDA by consumers, health care professionals, drug companies and others and used by the agency to detect safety concerns and potential patterns of harm. Each contains information about conditions or reactions linked to drugs and, in some cases, complaints about product quality.

ProPublica identified more than 8,000 reports about the drugs excused from factorywide import bans both before and after the bans were put in place. ProPublica’s analysis included reports from 2010 to early 2025.

The FDA has cautioned that information in the reports is not verified and there may be no “causal relationship” between the drug and the adverse event. Multiple drugs are sometimes listed in a single adverse event report. ProPublica limited its analysis to cases that listed only one primary suspect drug.

Some reports don’t list specific concerns but instead reference academic studies; ProPublica excluded those reports.

To examine the FDA’s role in the growth of foreign drugmakers, ProPublica used the agency’s Orange Book, a register of drugs considered safe and effective by the FDA. The list includes approvals for both brand name and generic drugs, the dates the drugs were approved and the names of the companies that submitted the applications. ProPublica’s analysis showed that companies with troubled regulatory histories received scores of approvals to introduce generic drugs in the United States — and some went on to receive exemptions from import bans.

Journalists have been uncovering problems with generic drugs for years. Katherine Eban’s bestselling 2019 book, “Bottle of Lies,” exposed how Indian drugmakers failed to follow basic quality and safety standards and often knowingly sent shoddy drugs abroad. In 2023, a Bloomberg investigation revealed, among other things, how poisoned cough syrup made in India spread around the world. And the independent watchdog The People’s Pharmacy has raised repeated concerns about the quality of some generic drugs.

ProPublica collaborated with journalism students from Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab in Washington, D.C. Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Kate McQuarrie and Katherine Dailey contributed to this report.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Brandon Roberts, Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose and Irena Hwang.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

What Happened: A monitor appointed by a federal court has found that a New York City Police Department unit has been unjustly stopping and searching New Yorkers, almost all of them Black and Hispanic men. The report on the NYPD’s Community Response Team echoes a recent ProPublica investigation that found the unit, championed by Mayor Eric Adams, has been ridden with abuses.

The federal monitor found that while the CRT was initially created in the early days of the Adams’ administration to focus on so-called quality-of-life issues such as illegal motorbikes, its officers have more recently been “stopping, frisking, and searching unconstitutionally.”

What They Said: In a sample of body-worn camera footage, the monitor found that 41% of stops, searches, and frisks by CRT officers were unlawful, a far higher percentage than with other NYPD units. What’s more, while officers are required to document such stops, which the department then releases as public data, the report found that officers often failed to do so, and even when they did there was a “lack of meaningful review” by supervisors.

As ProPublica previously reported, that behavior goes back to at least 2023, when an NYPD audit found officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to log the incidents. Soon after the audit, the mayor took to Instagram. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing the CRT’s signature khaki pants.

The federal monitor had other striking findings. For instance, it found that “97% of the individuals stopped, frisked, and searched were Black or Hispanic men.”

It also found, as ProPublica previously reported, that the NYPD had not been straightforward about the CRT with the monitor itself. Department officials had initially told the monitor that the CRT was just a “pilot program” that already ended, only for the monitor to later learn the team was here to stay and actually expanding.

Background: Our March investigation detailed a wide range of troubling behavior by CRT officers that alarmed NYPD leaders. In the fall of 2022, department lawyers and others warned that highlight videos of the CRT that the team posted on social media showed problematic conduct. Other incidents included a CRT commander who punched a driver, another commander who shoved a pedestrian into a car window and a third officer who drove into a motorbiker, ultimately killing him.

Over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints alleging improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records. Another NYPD team with a similar size and mandate has had about half as many complaints.

Adams’ connection to CRT has been so close, former officials said, that the mayor was given private access to a live feed of the unit’s body-worn cameras. This year, he chose one of the team’s leaders, Kaz Daughtry, to be deputy mayor of public safety.

Why It Matters: The federal monitor for the NYPD was created a dozen years ago after a court found that the department had been engaging in widespread unconstitutional stop-and-frisks, a practice overwhelmingly focused on Black and Hispanic men. The seminal ruling imposed court oversight — the creation of the monitor’s office — of the country’s largest police department. The monitor in turn files regular progress reports.

The monitor’s latest report was filed with Judge Analisa Torres, who oversees the case and has the power to impose fixes. But whatever Torres does, the monitor’s findings make clear that the problems identified by the court all those years ago still persist.

Former NYPD Chief Matthew Pontillo, who wrote the 2023 audit of the CRT, said that the conduct of the team may actually be worse than what’s described in the monitor’s report, noting that the recent investigation relied on body-worn camera footage to examine officers’ conduct. In his own review, Pontillo had found that CRT officers were often not turning on their cameras to fully capture incidents.

Lawmakers and civil rights advocates have called for the CRT to be disbanded.

Response: The mayor’s office declined to answer ProPublica’s questions and instead suggested contacting the NYPD. The department has not replied to our questions.

Adams has previously defended the CRT. Asked about the unit at a mayoral press conference this spring, Adams said: “CRT is here. I support all my units. And if they don’t all stand up and do the job the way they’re supposed to do, those who don’t will be held accountable.”

The NYPD has also defended the CRT’s work and touted the unit’s confiscation of illegal motorbikes and ATVs.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eric Umansky.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.

It was a remarkable step following repeated failures by the government to uphold the tribal fishing rights it swore in treaties to preserve.

The agreement is now just another of those broken promises.

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday pulling the federal government out of the deal. Trump’s decision halted a government-wide initiative to restore abundant salmon runs in the Columbia and Snake rivers and signaled an end to the government’s willingness to consider removing dams that blocked their free flow.

Thursday’s move drew immediate condemnation from tribes and from environmental groups that have fought to protect salmon.

“The Administration’s decision to terminate these commitments echoes the federal government’s historic pattern of broken promises to tribes,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chair Gerald Lewis said in a statement. “This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

The government’s commitment to tribes, however, had been unraveling since almost when the deal was inked.

Key provisions were already languishing under Biden. After Trump won the presidency, his administration spiked most of the studies called for in the agreement, held up millions of dollars in funding and cut most of the staff working to implement salmon recovery. Biden’s promise to seriously consider the removal of dams gained little traction before it was replaced by what Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, called “passionate support” for keeping them in place.

The chair of the White House task force to implement the agreement quit in April because of what he saw as Trump’s efforts to eliminate nearly everything he was working on.

“Federal agencies who were on the hook to do the work were being destroyed through untargeted, inefficient and costly purges of federal employees,” Nik Blosser, the former Columbia River Task Force chair, told ProPublica and OPB. “When I left, most things were on hold or paused — even signed contracts were on hold, which is a disgrace.”

Trump’s White House announcement called the Biden administration’s commitments “onerous” and said the president “continues to deliver on his promise to end the previous administration’s misplaced priorities and protect the livelihoods of the American people.”

“President Trump is committed to unleashing American energy dominance, reversing all executive actions that impose undue burdens on energy production and use,” the announcement read.

But the decision could also have some unintended consequences, experts say.

Trump signed an executive order in April to “restore American seafood competitiveness” but in revoking the Columbia River agreement has canceled millions of dollars to support the programs that seed the ocean with fish to catch. He signed a separate executive order on his first day in office to “unleash American energy dominance” but has now reversed a commitment, made under the Biden salmon deal, to build new sources of domestic energy. This week’s action has sent federal agencies back to court, where judges have repeatedly shackled power production at hydroelectric dams because of its impact on the endangered fish.

“It’s tempting to comment at length on the absurdity of the President’s order, including the fact that what he says he wants — stability for power generation — is in fact put more at risk by this action,” Blosser wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Instead, I’ll look for inspiration to the mighty salmon, who don’t stop swimming upstream when they get to a waterfall.”

Before they began negotiating the Columbia River Basin agreement in 2021, federal agencies had been losing in court over the hydropower system for more than 20 years. Judge after judge ordered the federal government to use less water for making electricity and instead let more of the river spill through the dams’ floodgates so that fish could more safely ride the current past them.

The accord with states and tribes guaranteed up to a decade without those lawsuits. Trump canceled that.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which sells the hydroelectricity from federal dams, had more at stake than the rest of the agencies in the deal. When the government signed it, Bonneville Administrator John Hairston said it provided “operational certainty and reliability while avoiding costly, unpredictable litigation in support of our mission to provide a reliable, affordable power supply to the Pacific Northwest.”

In its most recent annual report, Bonneville credited the agreement for giving it the flexibility to increase hydropower production during times of high electricity demand, which helped stem the losses in an otherwise difficult financial year.

A major component of the agreement was the acknowledgment of the region’s dependence on hydropower and the need to build new sources of energy before removing the dams. It offered no guarantee of dam removal.

The Biden White House had pledged to help tribes develop enough renewable energy sources to replace the output of four dams on the Snake River, which salmon advocates have long wanted to remove. The administration also planned an analysis of how to meet the region’s energy needs without sacrificing salmon.

The Biden administration never followed through. Even tribally backed energy projects that were already in progress ran into bureaucratic quagmires. When Trump took office and slashed thousands of jobs from the Department of Energy, the commitment for new energy sources died too.

Proponents of Columbia River dams, including the publicly owned utilities that buy federal hydroelectricity, criticized the Biden administration for leaving them out of the negotiations that led to the agreement.

“I want to thank the President (Trump) for his decisive action to protect our dams,” Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Central Washington, said in a statement on Thursday. He said the Biden administration and “extreme environmental activists” would have threatened the reliability of the power grid and raised energy prices with dam removal.

Even critics of the Biden deal, however, acknowledge they do not want the issue to return to court, where judges’ orders have driven up electricity rates. When Bonneville can’t generate as much hydropower to sell, but still has to pay for hatcheries and habitat fixes for salmon, it has to charge utilities more for its electricity.

“I’m hoping that we avoid dam operations by injunction, because that doesn’t help anybody in the region,” said Scott Simms, executive director of the Public Power Council, a nonprofit representing utilities that purchase federal hydropower.

Earthjustice attorney Amanda Goodin, who represents the environmental advocates who signed the agreement, said the Trump administration’s actions would force a return to courts.

“The agreement formed the basis for the stay of litigation,” Goodin said, “so without the agreement there is no longer any basis for a stay.”

The White House said that Trump’s revoking of the Columbia River deal shows that he “continues to prioritize our Nation’s energy infrastructure and use of natural resources to lower the cost of living for all Americans over speculative climate change concerns.”

Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce Tribe, said the damage on the Columbia River is anything but speculative.

“This action tries to hide from the truth,” Wheeler said in a statement. “The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now.”

Wild salmon populations on the Columbia and its largest tributary, the Snake River, have been so sparse for decades that commercial, recreational and tribal subsistence fishing are only possible because of fish hatcheries, which raise millions of baby salmon in pens and release them into the wild when they’re old enough to swim to the ocean.

In some years, an estimated half of all the Chinook salmon commercial fishermen catch in Southeast Alaska are from Columbia River hatcheries, making them critical for “restoring American seafood competitiveness” as Trump aimed to do.

But some Columbia River hatcheries are nearly a century old. Others have been so badly underfunded that equipment failures have killed thousands of baby fish.

As ProPublica and OPB previously reported, the number of hatchery salmon surviving to adulthood is now so low that hatcheries have struggled to collect enough fish for breeding, putting future fishing seasons in jeopardy.

The Biden administration promised roughly $500 million to improve hatcheries across the Northwest. His administration never delivered it, and Trump halted all the funds before eventually canceling them with this week’s order.

Mary Lou Soscia, former Columbia River coordinator at the Environmental Protection Agency, said the administration’s dismantling of salmon recovery programs amounts to “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“We’re losing decades of accomplishments,” said Soscia, who spent more than 30 years at the agency.

“When the fish managers aren’t there to make real time river decisions, more fish will die,” she said. “Or the watershed restoration work will take a lot longer to happen because you won’t have funding and more fish will die.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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. To keep up with the latest education news, sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter.

More than 4,000 students once crowded DuSable High School, then an all-Black academic powerhouse on Chicago’s South Side. Its three-story Art Deco building drew students with a full lineup of honors classes, a nationally known music program and standout sports teams.

Nat King Cole played the piano in his classroom as a DuSable student. Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, studied there. On Friday nights, teenagers zipped through its hallways on roller skates and danced in the gymnasium.

But at the turn of the millennium, enrollment plunged as Chicago closed a massive public housing complex nearby and a growing number of Black families left the city. Amid a national infatuation with smaller high schools 20 years ago, Chicago Public Schools conducted a grant-funded experiment to chop DuSable into three separate schools sharing a campus. What remains today, after that grant money ran out, is an enormous building and, inside, two tiny schools clinging to life.

One has about 115 students and claims the north corridors. The other, with only 70 students, takes the south wings. The inoperable pool is off-limits.

Hundreds of unneeded hallway lockers hide behind decorative paper and student posters of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and former first lady Michelle Obama, whose father attended in the 1950s.

The two little high schools in Bronzeville share the same entrance and sports teams, but other things are doubled: two main offices, two principals, two assistant principals, two school counselors. Even though there’s a teacher for roughly every five students, the course offerings are limited.

Chicago Public Schools operates more than 500 schools and spends about $18,700 per student to run buildings that it considers well-utilized. At the DuSable schools, the cost is closer to $50,000 a student.

The DuSable schools are emblematic of an unyielding predicament facing the district. Enrollment has shrunk. Three of every 10 of its schools sit at least half-empty, and they are costly to run.

More critically, there are 47 schools, including those inside DuSable, operating at less than one-third capacity, by the district’s measure. That’s almost twice as many severely underenrolled buildings as Chicago had in 2013, when it carried out the largest mass school closings in the country’s history, Chalkbeat and ProPublica found. The most extreme example is Frederick Douglass Academy High School, which has 28 students this year and a per-student cost of $93,000.

Many of those schools are in historic buildings that need millions of dollars in repairs.

The costs are not only financial. Students in the city’s smallest schools have fewer courses to choose from and often miss out on clubs, extracurricular activities and sports. Chicago’s underenrolled high schools are more likely to have lower graduation and college enrollment rates. They tend to struggle with chronic truancy and higher dropout rates, a ProPublica and Chalkbeat analysis found.

But officials in Chicago have chosen not to confront the problem of the city’s tiny schools. The teachers union and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who used to be an organizer and legislative liaison for the union, are quick to shut down discussion of downsizing. Widespread anger over the 2013 closures helped fuel the union’s rise to political power over the past decade; the union has also wielded the radioactive closure issue to undermine opponents, notably outgoing district CEO Pedro Martinez.

Union leaders, many community activists and some researchers say closures disrupt displaced students’ learning and harm the city’s predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, which were disproportionately affected by that earlier wave of closures. They argue the district needs to do much more to try revitalizing these campuses before it considers shuttering or merging them.

Helping to delay a reckoning: Since 2013, the district has operated under a series of moratoriums on closing schools, including one state lawmakers enacted with strong support from the teachers union. And a statewide school finance overhaul under former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner increases or at least holds funding steady for districts even if enrollment declines.

Chicago has too many schools for the number of students it serves today, Martinez said in an interview with ProPublica and Chalkbeat. The district is spending too much on aging buildings, and it’s not providing a rich experience for students in many of its tiny schools, he said, adding: “They’re not having joy in that environment.”

But he said he inherited a closure moratorium and worked with school boards that had no appetite for closing or merging schools. “Our footprint is too large,” said Martinez, who leaves the district this month. “Every time somebody wants to address this issue, you see at all levels of politics, nobody wants to do it.”

He said he hopes a fully elected school board that will take over in 2027 will tackle the issue head-on, working closely with the communities it serves.

In a statement, the district noted its building utilization formula is “just one measure,” and it could overestimate available space.

The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

With public school enrollment declining across the country, a growing number of cities — Milwaukee; Denver; Flint, Michigan; Boston; San Francisco; Philadelphia — are grappling with the issue of underenrollment. Some plan to close schools.

But Chicago, the country’s fourth-largest district, operates on a larger scale: It has more students and more buildings than most other cities. The city’s school-age population, meanwhile, is on a downward trajectory, federal COVID-19 aid ran out this year and the district faces a budget deficit of more than $500 million.

And yet, Chicago “doesn’t seem to be having an honest conversation about the challenges it’s facing,” said Carrie Hahnel, a school finance researcher with the nonprofit Bellwether.

The 2013 closings of 49 Chicago elementary schools and one small high school were more than controversial. Families there felt that their communities were being torn apart as the city moved to shutter schools with long and rich histories. After protests and angry meetings, students were displaced to schools that were farther away from home. Neighborhood hubs were mothballed.

Deep distrust of Chicago Public Schools after the mass closures lingers, especially in Black neighborhoods like DuSable’s Bronzeville. University of Chicago research showed those closures set students back academically, though a small number who moved to high-performing campuses fared better. Some community groups and the teachers union in Chicago see schools as a public good; shuttering them is another mark of disinvestment.

That was the backdrop when a group of DuSable High School alumni grew concerned about dwindling enrollment at their beloved school and worried the district might target the building for closure. They approached CPS just before the pandemic with an alternative idea: Consolidate the two tiny schools at DuSable and focus classes on STEM careers.

The Bronzeville Scholastic Institute and the Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory School of Medicine would unite and revert to the name DuSable.

The alumni had no illusions that they could fully restore DuSable to what it once was. Compared to the school’s heyday, a much smaller number of school-age children live in Bronzeville today. But the alumni wanted more for the school.

The group met repeatedly with school and district leaders in DuSable’s wood-paneled social room, where trophies mark decades of athletic and musical excellence.

Officials told the group to get more input from current families at both schools — a daunting task given that the district would not provide their names or contact information. The plan fizzled out.

Hal Woods, now a policy director with the parent advocacy nonprofit Kids First Chicago, worked as the district’s school development director at the time and sat in on those meetings. He said the bottom line was that the plan smacked too much of a closure.

“We didn’t want to be seen with our fingerprints on this,” he said.

Former school board President Jianan Shi, a Johnson appointee who served from 2023 to 2024, said rebuilding trust and planning for schools’ future with local communities at the helm takes time; it must begin now.

But, he said, “There’s a lack of political courage to have this conversation, and yet it’s often weaponized.”

Amid the uproar over the 2013 closings, Chicago’s then-mayor, Rahm Emanuel, vowed that his appointed school board would not close schools for five years. The state legislature then imposed a 2021 moratorium on closing Chicago schools until January of this year, part of a bill that changed the Chicago Board of Education to an elected, rather than mayor-appointed, body.

Today, Chicago has 634 schools, including 119 charter and contract schools run by outside entities, and a teachers union ally holds the mayor’s office. Last September, amid a power struggle between Johnson and Martinez, the Chicago Teachers Union publicized a facilities analysis that the district had done in late 2023, which included hypothetical scenarios for consolidating 75 schools, including Williams and Bronzeville. The union argued that even entertaining that idea was cause to fire Martinez immediately.

As the CTU pounced, Martinez pushed back, saying the district had concluded that no school would be closed while he was in charge — which he now says was really the school board’s decision. At the next school board meeting, he presented a new resolution that got unanimous support: CPS would not close any schools until 2027.

But the city’s demographic realities are not on hold. About 325,000 students enrolled this year, a drop of more than 70,000 from a decade ago. District officials project that three school years from now, there could be as few as 300,000 or, in a best-case scenario, as many as 334,000 students. Those estimates are based in part on the city’s sharply falling birth rates. Citywide, from 2011 to 2021, the number of births dropped by more than 43%.

Still, CTU leaders insist that the city is actually poised for a population turnaround. During President Donald Trump’s second administration, Chicago under Johnson can bill itself as a progressive refuge — a place that protects immigrants, abortion care, LGBTQ+ rights and access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth and adults, said Jackson Potter, vice president of the CTU.

“We are going to need to be a citadel of protection,” he said, adding that the last thing the city wants is to shutter some of its schools, then see families arriving in these neighborhoods en masse only to find limited classroom seats.

The union’s real issue with school closures, Potter said, is that Chicago has done them without enough educator and community input and has rushed them, destabilizing other nearby schools.

An influx of immigrant families allowed CPS to stabilize its enrollment and the city to notch modest population increases in the past two years after a lengthy decline. But some demographers think the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown might mean these gains are short-lived.

Jim Lewis, a senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute, a research hub at the University of Illinois Chicago, is skeptical about the possibility of an influx of school-age children in areas with shrinking schools. Some gentrifying Chicago neighborhoods have drawn new residents, but they tend to be higher earners who generally have fewer kids.

Lewis cautions that people tend to overestimate the power of schools to attract residents. Studies have shown that crumbling schools can deter families, he said. But research also suggests new programs and attractive campuses can only do so much to draw them — unless those schools come with a complete package of job opportunities, safe neighborhoods, affordable housing and more.

“I’m all for beautiful new schools,” Lewis said. “Do I think by itself it changes the demography of a place? I don’t think so.”

What to do about underenrolled schools and Chicago’s diminished school-age population is a decision for Chicago’s school board. Currently, 10 members are elected and 11 are appointed by the mayor. Next year, all will be up for election.

Some members, who said they could only speak candidly if they aren’t named, said the board must discuss solutions for tiny schools, including consolidation. But being branded “school closers” is a concern ahead of elections. Others said they’re open to discussing alternatives to school closings, including bringing health clinics or other family services into vacant parts of underenrolled schools.

“I think we have to talk about small schools as a result of historic racism, underfunding, neglect and inequity,” said member Debby Pope, a former CTU employee. A conversation is going to be essential, she said, but with a moratorium on closings in place and the possibility that the board could extend it, “I don’t think this is the moment for that conversation.”

About 5 miles southeast of DuSable is Hirsch High School, which was one of the district’s largest school building projects when it opened in the 1920s and once dealt with severe overcrowding. It’s gotten so small now that M’Kya Craig had taken all the electives the school offered by her junior year.

She was one of roughly 100 students at Hirsch, which could enroll 1,000. She browsed the school’s limited courses and decided to take yearbook for a second time. She was bracing to take the course a third time her senior year, but Hirsch added an African American literature class.

Craig appreciated that staff at the small school got to know her well, including a counselor who helped her get into Chicago State University. But she often felt frustrated by the school’s slim course offerings and scarce extracurriculars over the years.

“We lost a lot over the years due to being a small school,” she said.

Most of the district’s underenrolled schools serve students who do not participate in Chicago’s expansive system of school choice, where high-performing students test into selective schools ranked the best in the state, and other students find their way to magnets, charters or strong neighborhood schools, often in wealthier parts of Chicago.

Many of the district’s small schools serve Chicago’s highest-needs students.

At the Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory School of Medicine, one of the schools inside DuSable, junior Georgia Deaye was drawn to the school’s medical career program and loves the close-knit feel.

“The connection with teachers is way deeper than if I was at another school,” she said.

She participated in a summer internship program that Williams accesses through one of the larger district high schools and recently got her CPR certification. The most recent graduation rate at Williams was 93%, among the highest in the district. The graduating class was 14 students. There are a total of 70 students enrolled there, at a cost of $54,000 per student.

“Small schools are not always painted in a positive light,” said Williams Principal Leonetta Sanders, but the smaller environment is ideal for some students. In part because of its size, the campus hasn’t had to deal with gang problems or violence, she said.

“Safety,” she said, “is always money well spent.”

Some research has suggested that students tend to do better in smaller schools, notes Bruce Fuller, an expert at the University of California, Berkeley. But those findings apply to small-by-design campuses with healthy enrollments, not schools that have shrunk dramatically as families have moved away.

Fuller doesn’t think that student outcomes at those underenrolled schools have been studied rigorously because it would be too hard to control for factors such as the high needs of the students they tend to serve. “There’s consistent evidence that smaller can be better,” Fuller said. “But small in this lifecycle of decline is a totally different story.”

In Chicago’s tiny schools, the limitations, even at a high per-student cost, are substantial. Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, the other school inside DuSable, used to be able to teach Spanish and French but now offers Spanish only. The school once offered Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses but realized it could not continue to offer both; it kept the IB program.

The schools have tried to make up for the limited course offerings by encouraging students to take online courses and dual-enrollment classes that local community colleges offer to high school students.

“You’ve got 12 kids in a class. The board is not going to pay for a calculus teacher,” Grace Dawson, who leads DuSable’s robust alumni group, said of the school district. Students are being “robbed” of opportunity, said Dawson, a former Chicago school principal.

Flush with federal COVID aid, the district added more than 7,500 new positions over the past four years even as enrollment kept declining. It also recently started guaranteeing a certain number of staff, including 10 teachers, at each school regardless of enrollment. Williams and Bronzeville, which used to share an assistant principal and a gym teacher, each hired their own. Douglass High School on the city’s West Side now has 27 employees for 28 students.

That includes six regular education teachers, six special education teachers, a school counselor, a college and career coach, a conflict resolution specialist, a restorative justice coordinator, and an assistant principal and principal. The cost to run the school is $93,000 per student.

“Is a Douglass student getting a $93,000-a-year experience? No,” said Woods of Kids First Chicago. “We can confidently say that. CPS pumps extra dollars into these schools so they can offer the bare minimum."

The district, which handles requests for comment about individual schools, did not dispute the high per-pupil price tag at Douglass. It has said its new budgeting approach gives all schools a fiscal boost regardless of size.

David Narain, who was principal at Hirsch until 2023, said the school’s smaller size allowed his staff to focus intensely on a highly mobile student body, where many students came in reading at the third or fourth grade level. But it was challenging to build a school culture on a campus with so few students.

“You try to have a homecoming, but there’s no football team,” he said. “There’s nothing to come home to.”

And Narain understands the financial tension the district faces. “The writing is on the wall,” he said. “You can’t continue to run these schools and give them all of these resources.”

In a district with a $10 billion budget, the overall spending on staff and programs at small schools can seem negligible. But keeping aging campuses running is costly no matter how many students are there. The average Chicago school building is 85 years old; dozens of them were built before 1900.

Analysis of capital spending data by ProPublica and Chalkbeat found that since 2017, the district’s 47 severely underenrolled schools — ones that sit more than two-thirds empty — have cost more than $213 million to maintain and renovate.

The emptiest buildings account for $400 million of the district’s estimated $3.1 billion in needed critical repairs. The DuSable building alone needs $21 million in urgent repairs.

Adding to the financial uncertainty at CPS is the Trump administration’s threat to withhold federal funding from districts such as Chicago that have maintained their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Education policy researcher Chad Aldeman, the former policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said some closures or consolidations seem inevitable on the heels of Chicago’s massive enrollment losses. If the district doesn’t make a plan now — with community input and help to ease the transition for students — it could find itself scrambling later to reorganize in crisis mode.

“A lot of places that are closing schools are in financial distress,” Aldeman said. “They are trying to save money rather than thinking holistically.”

Closing schools can also carry steep costs. In 2013, the district spent big to add staff at schools that took in students, spruce up those schools and move furniture out of the closed buildings.

Then there’s what to do with vacant buildings. The district is still trying to sell 20 vacant schools from the 2013 closures, which it pays to maintain.

CTU leaders, who pushed to add thousands of new school staff positions in recent contract talks, have long advocated spending more to breathe new life into underenrolled schools — an invest-and-they’ll-come theory.

Potter, the CTU vice president, holds up Dyett High School — which the district closed but later reopened after a CTU-supported hunger strike in protest — as an example of a “phoenix rising from the ashes.” Its basketball team won a state title this year. Though the school is still at 58% capacity, enrollment has stabilized at roughly 500 students, a benchmark CPS has used to weigh whether a high school is big enough.

“Why would you start with a question about consolidations when you can start with a question about support?” he said.

But recent years have tested the power of added investments to boost enrollment.

In 2018, the district and teachers union jointly launched an initiative to target 20 high-poverty campuses, including Dyett, with an additional $500,000 a year. They’ve used the money to partner with a local nonprofit to offer more services for students and families.

Some of these schools have since reported parent and student engagement gains. But with a few exceptions, they have steadily lost enrollment since then, in some cases dramatically.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat, and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica.

ProPublica announced on Thursday that Adriana Pera has been hired as an engagement and tips coordinator, where she’ll work to ensure that the tips that flow into our newsroom remain secure and are routed to the appropriate reporters.

Pera was most recently an engagement producer at KPCC/LAist, where she worked on projects related to civics, democracy and education.

“Reader tips are the lifeblood of our newsroom, and we’re fortunate to have a journalist as seasoned and thoughtful as Adriana at the helm,” said Tyson Evans, chief product and brand officer.

“I’m a firm believer that journalism is better when we hear from sources and community members with direct knowledge of what’s happening,” Pera said. “I am beyond ecstatic to join ProPublica’s impressive engagement team and to uphold the accessibility, security and impact of their tips line.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by ProPublica.

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The National Institutes of Health is responsible for more than 80% of the world’s grant investment in biomedical research. Its funding has sparked countless medical breakthroughs — on cancer, diabetes, strokes — and plays a fundamental role in the development of pharmaceutical drugs.

Scientists compete vigorously for a slice of the more than $30 billion that the agency doles out annually; they can spend years assembling grant applications that stretch thousands of pages in hopes of convincing peer reviewers of the promise of their projects. Only 1 in 5 gets chosen.

The NIH has rarely revoked funding once it has been awarded. Out of the tens of thousands of grants overseen by the institution since 2012, it terminated fewer than five for violations of the agency’s terms and conditions.

Then Donald Trump was reelected.

Since his January inauguration, his administration has terminated more than 1,450 grants, withholding more than $750 million in funds; officials have said they are curbing wasteful spending and “unscientific” research. The Department of Government Efficiency gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, ProPublica has previously found, bypassing the NIH’s established review process.

“The decision to terminate certain grants is part of a deliberate effort to ensure taxpayer dollars prioritize high-impact, urgent science,” said Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services. He did not respond to questions about the terminated grants or how patients may be impacted, but he said, “Many discontinued projects were duplicative or misaligned with NIH’s core mission. NIH remains focused on supporting rigorous biomedical research that delivers real results — not radical ideology.”

Targeted projects, however, were seeking cures for future pandemics, examining the causes of dementia and trying to prevent HIV transmission.

The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no precedent, former and current NIH officials told ProPublica. It threatens the stability of the institution and the scientific enterprise of the nation at large. Hundreds of current and former NIH staffers published a declaration this week — cosigned by thousands of scientists across the world, including more than 20 Nobel laureates — decrying the politicization of science at the agency and urging its director to reinstate the canceled grants. Many researchers have appealed the terminations, and several lawsuits are underway challenging the cuts.

It has been difficult for scientists and journalists to convey the enormity of what has happened these past few months and what it portends for the years and decades to come. News organizations have chronicled cuts to individual projects and sought to quantify the effects of lost spending on broad fields of study. To gain a deeper understanding of the toll, ProPublica reached out to more than 500 researchers, scientists and investigators whose grants were terminated.

More than 150 responded to share their experiences, which reveal consequences that experts say run counter to scientific logic and even common sense.

They spoke of the tremendous waste generated by an effort intended to save money — years of government-funded research that may never be published, blood samples in danger of spoiling before they can be analyzed.

Work to address disparities in health, once considered so critical to medical advancement that it was mandated by Congress, is now being cut if the administration determines it has any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or “gender ideology.” Caught in this culling were projects to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage.

Researchers catalogued many fears — about the questions they won’t get to answer, the cures they will fail to find and the colleagues they will lose to more supportive countries. But most of all, they said they worried about the people who, because of these cuts, will die.

The NIH often awards funding in multiyear grants, giving scientists the time and intellectual freedom to pursue their work uninterrupted. They plan experiments, hire staff and make equipment purchases on long timelines.

Now, studies can’t be completed. Papers can’t be published. Years of research may be lost and millions of dollars wasted.

Grants Terminated:

A project to improve recruitment of participants in Alzheimer’s clinical trials.

A study to increase vaccine uptake in underserved populations.

A study investigating in-utero exposure to contaminants in public drinking water.

An examination of the consequences of abortion restrictions.

After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, demographer Diana Greene Foster set out to study the outcomes of pregnant patients who showed up in emergency departments. She wanted to know whether state restrictions were causing delays in care.

“This needs to be answered for courts to consider the evidence,” said Foster, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “Every day that goes by, people are potentially at risk.”

Less than one year into a five-year NIH grant, she had arrived at some early findings: “Abortion bans don’t stop very many people from getting abortions,” she said. “Bans actually cause people to have their abortions later in pregnancy.” For those who live in states with bans, she found, second-trimester abortions increased from 8% of procedures to 17%, requiring more complex interventions to end their pregnancies and increasing their risk of complications.

But before the data could be published, the NIH informed her on March 21 that the grant was terminated. It was no longer in line with agency priorities, a letter stated, specifying that studies on “gender identity” “ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.”

The termination left Foster confused. “They are wrong that studying gender minority populations is not important,” she said. “But my study is not about gender identity. It is relevant to anyone who is pregnant, regardless of how they identify.”

Foster had to pause her research while she searched for other funding. “This was clearly a politically motivated cut,” she said.

ProPublica heard from more than 70 researchers who said that they were unable to continue their projects due to the terminations.

“Two and a half years into a three-year grant, and to all of a sudden stop and not fully be able to answer the original questions, it’s just a waste.” —Ethan Moitra, associate professor at Brown University, who was researching whether brief therapy can improve mental health for LGBTQ+ people

“We are now scrambling to figure out if there are parts we can continue or salvage.” —Julia Marcus, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who was researching whether HIV prevention medicine can be made available over the counter

“To build trust between health care providers, health researchers in communities takes decades of work, and scientists have already done the work. Now this is going to be depleted.” —Jesus Ramirez-Valles, professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was examining how HIV impacts the physical and mental health of gay men as they age

Thousands of studies supported by the NIH involve human subjects. Some include clinical trials, in which researchers recruit participants, often with grave conditions from cancer to HIV, to test the value of novel treatments and protocols.

In addition to jeopardizing data, terminating a grant in the middle of an active study may worsen participants’ conditions and put them at higher risk of death.

Grants Terminated:

A study to prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics.

A study to increase access to kidney transplant evaluations.

A clinical trial to understand the effectiveness of flu and COVID-19 vaccine text message reminders.

A study to test a protocol to prevent HIV transmission.

A single daily pill can nearly eliminate the risk of contracting HIV — but only when taken as prescribed. Black and Latino men who have sex with men have more than a 1-in-4 chance of contracting HIV but sometimes struggle to get or stay in care.

Working with community clinics across Mississippi, Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island, Brown University professors Amy Nunn and Dr. Philip Chan set out to examine what happens when people are provided wraparound clinical services before they contract the disease. “This is about preventing people from getting HIV,” Nunn said.

The study provides aggressive case management to help patients navigate the health care system and stay on the treatment, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, which is available in both oral and injectable forms. Workers provide patients with reminders, help them get coverage and even pick up their medicine.

In 2023, the researchers received about $3.7 million in NIH funding for five years of work. Their team was just starting to gather data that showed the program’s efficacy when the grant was terminated. “This is science that had really great chances of having a huge impact, and all of a sudden, it’s cut off at the knee,” Nunn said.

Chan told ProPublica that he worries that the patients in their study could be harmed by the cut. “There’s no doubt that some of them are going to not stay on PrEP,” said Chan, “and that some of them are going to get HIV.”

At least 30 researchers told ProPublica that the termination of their grant forced them to end clinical research or a trial abruptly, leaving participants in limbo.

“We cannot assay the blood samples that we have collected and paid participants for. A total waste of the money and resources that went into collecting the data.” —Sarah Whitton, professor at the University of Cincinnati, who was identifying risk factors for mental illness and suicidality for young LGBTQ+ women

“We have also had to quickly scramble to keep the study going unfunded to avoid having to stop the treatment and clinical trial for those already enrolled.” —Tiffany Brown, assistant professor at Auburn University, who was developing an eating disorder treatment for LGBTQ+ patients

“With a clinical trial, if you can’t follow participants to the end, you have no information, because the whole point is to see whether there’s change from beginning to end.” —Katie Biello, professor and chair of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health, who was trying to improve adherence to medication protocols for adolescents with HIV in Brazil

The Trump administration has banned the NIH from funding grants with a perceived connection to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” alleging that such projects may be discriminatory.

Caught up in the wave of terminations is work seeking to understand why some populations — including women and sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — may be more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.

Grants Terminated:

A study investigating how discrimination affects the mental health of Latino youth.

Research examining maternal behavioral health conditions of Black women.

An examination of the effects of structural racism on people at risk of kidney disease.

A study investigating why women of color disproportionately die from cervical cancer.

Despite preventative vaccines and improved screening, more than 4,000 women die every year from cervical cancer. Black and Hispanic women are more likely than their white peers to be diagnosed, and often at later stages.

After more than a decade of studying cancer care disparities, epidemiologist Adana Llanos found that the ZIP code in which a woman received care often plays a pivotal role in how she fares. And in 2023, Llanos and her colleagues were awarded a multiyear NIH grant to further examine inequities, specifically in cervical cancer care and who survives it.

Even though their work targets the women most at risk, Llanos said their research, like most health equity research, will increase our understanding of cervical cancer more broadly. “This work has the potential to improve cancer outcomes for everyone, no matter what you identify as, no matter what your characteristics are,” she said.

Last year, her team began to recruit a cohort of 960 women who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer to track their patterns of care and outcomes. But in March, after the researchers had enrolled about 200 participants, the NIH terminated the funding. Llanos paused enrollment.

The cancellation felt like a betrayal of her study’s participants, she said. Llanos had spent years developing relationships with community groups and cancer patients, gaining their trust so they would feel comfortable sharing their treatment experiences.

“We’ve made commitments to them,” she said.

More than 550 of the terminated grants were focused on health disparities or inequities, attempting to understand why some groups have different health outcomes.

“If you cannot identify groups that are higher risk, it seems like just really bad science. That’s sort of the basics of how you try to conquer a disease.” —Carl Latkin, professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was analyzing the comorbidities of people who have HIV and those at risk for getting it

“Health disparities are just going to get larger, and real folks are going to die.” —Marguerita Lightfoot, professor at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health, who was studying the value of guaranteed income and financial mentoring to Black youth

“It’s a major principle of epidemiology to target work towards the people who are being disproportionately affected. Now we’re being told that we cannot mention them in our research.” —Dr. Matthew Spinelli, assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was working to prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics

One of Trump’s first executive orders was a directive banning federal funds from being used to support or promote so-called “gender ideology.” Hundreds of grants focused on the health of LGBTQ+ populations have been terminated, including many studies focused on young people and those at risk of contracting HIV.

In response to a lawsuit, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the administration from fully enforcing the orders. It canceled the grants anyway, citing agency policy and scientific priorities.

Grants Terminated:

A study to improve the delivery of behavioral health care to LGBTQ+ youth.

Research to address substance use in young men who are at risk for or living with HIV.

An evaluation of disparities in mpox vaccination rates among men who have sex with men.

An investigation of why LGBTQ+ adults are dying by suicide.

Gay, lesbian and bisexual adults are over three times more likely to consider suicide than their heterosexual peers. Few studies have aimed to figure out how to prevent this.

Last year, Lauren Forrest, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, received a multiyear grant to do so, focusing on LGBTQ+ people who live in rural areas where access to specialized care may be more limited.

She was planning to recruit dozens of participants. But on March 21, she received a notification from the NIH that her grant was terminated because it did not “effectuate” the agency’s priorities, citing its connection to “gender identity.”

“The way they’re going about deciding which grants will or won’t be terminated, it’s not about scientific rigor,” she said. “It’s about literally actively discriminating against health-disparity populations.”

Forrest has been forced to reduce the hours of her research staff, and she now risks losing key lab personnel who may have to seek other employment due to the cuts. “There is no way to recover the lost time, research continuity or training value once disrupted,” she said.

She worries most about the deaths that could have been prevented. “People are going to be harmed because of this,” she said.

More than 300 of the grants terminated by the NIH were focused on LGBTQ+ health care. About 40 of those grants were researching ways to prevent suicide in adults and youth.

“We have a paper that’s ready to go out that shows lesbian women are almost 3 times as likely to have a stillbirth compared to their heterosexual peers. That’s such an avoidable, horrible outcome to happen, and that paper may never be published.” —Brittany Charlton, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who was quantifying obstetrical outcomes for lesbian, gay and bisexual women

“It is devastating to have state-sanctioned dehumanization and exclusion. I am afraid for what these messages will do to the mental health of youth who are told they don’t matter or, for some, that they don’t even exist by parts of society.” —Dr. Sarah Goff, professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was studying how to improve the delivery of mental health care to LGBTQ+ youth

“I honestly burst into tears. The evidence we would have gained from this work will not exist.” —Kirsty Clark, assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who was finding best practices for preventing suicide in LGBTQ+ preteens

The grant terminations and subsequent instability have created a lost generation of scientists, dozens of researchers told ProPublica — cutting off an established pipeline at all stages of researchers’ careers.

Universities are trimming the number of openings in postdoctoral and graduate programs.

Young researchers are struggling to find funding to initiate studies or open new laboratories.

And some scientists are opting to pursue opportunities abroad.

Grants Terminated:

A grant to train researchers and public health professionals on HIV science.

A program to support the development of early-career scientists and researchers.

A grant to support Ph.D. students from historically underrepresented groups.

A program to train the next generation of pediatric research scientists.

Dr. Lauren Harasymiw was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit when an infant took a turn for the worse. Born at only 23 weeks gestation — the edge of viability — the baby girl experienced a hemorrhage within the ventricles of her brain.

“What does this mean for her?” Harasymiw recalls asking her attending physician. The supervisor didn’t know. “The field of neonatology has made incredible strides over the last decades in helping our babies survive,” Harasymiw said. “But we’ve made less progress in protecting their neurodevelopmental outcomes.”

If doctors could better assess infants’ outcomes after a brain injury, they could target interventions sooner and provide families with better resources. To advance this area of medicine, Harasymiw pursued NIH-funded training to become a pediatric scientist.

But in March, the NIH terminated funding for the Pediatric Scientist Development Program, which funded Harasymiw’s salary and research, claiming that the program was connected to “DEI.”

“This is just ripping out the foundation of my career,” Harasymiw said.

In a statement about the grant terminations, Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, said that the NIH “continues to invest robustly in training and career development opportunities that produce measurable contributions to biomedical science and patient care.” However, he added that “while fostering the next generation of scientists is essential, effective leadership requires clear focus: prioritizing research that is impactful and results-driven over duplicative or low-yield programs.”

Dr. Sallie Permar, who runs the program and is chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, was perplexed by the cut; the program seemed to be in line with the administration’s focus on combating chronic disease in children.

“That’s exactly what we’re training these scholars to do,” she said.

More than 50 researchers told ProPublica that the funding cuts would harm the next generation of scholars, discouraging them from practicing in the United States.

“We have a generation of researchers that were planning to focus on these questions that are now either scared or don’t have funding to continue their training, or both.” —Mandi Pratt-Chapman, associate center director for community outreach, engagement and equity at the George Washington Cancer Center, who was identifying best practices for collecting data about LGBTQ+ people at small and rural cancer centers

“Admissions for graduate school have been downsized to a point where prospective students are giving up on pursuing a Ph.D.” —Tigist Tamir, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who received a career development grant and was studying how oxidative stress is regulated in breast cancer and obesity

“I already know several researchers on the job search who ended up taking faculty positions in Canada instead of the U.S.” —Dr. Benjamin Solomon, instructor of immunology and allergy in the department of pediatrics at Stanford Medical School, who received a career development grant and was examining rare genetic immune diseases in children

Shortly after the public became aware of the termination of hundreds of grants at the National Institutes of Health, ProPublica published a call for tips in March, requesting that researchers with canceled grants share their experiences. ProPublica heard from more than 150 researchers and scientists and interviewed more than 70 about how the grant terminations were affecting their projects, their careers and the field of biomedical science at large. The story relies on the personal opinions of the researchers and does not reflect the views of their institutions. To understand the universe of NIH grant terminations, ProPublica relied on two main data sources: spreadsheets of terminated health grants released by the federal government to comply with Trump’s “Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending” order, and data from Grant Watch, a private initiative tracking the terminations, led by researchers Noam Ross, Scott Delaney, Anthony Barente and Emma Mairson. They have used crowdsourcing and federal sources to create their dataset.

Were you involved in a clinical trial, participating in research or receiving services that have ended, been paused or been delayed because of canceled federal funding? Our reporters want to hear from you.

To share your experience, contact our reporting team at healthfunding@propublica.org.

Melody Kramer and Agnel Philip contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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In mid-April, President Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to celebrate a new partnership. They had recently negotiated an extraordinary deal in which El Salvador agreed to incarcerate in a maximum security prison hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants that the Trump administration had labeled as violent criminals, though few had been convicted of such crimes. The U.S. also sent back accused members of the notorious Salvadoran gang MS-13 — which both the U.S. and El Salvador have designated as a terrorist organization.

Bukele’s presidency has been defined by his successful crackdown against MS-13. He has jailed tens of thousands of alleged gang members, transforming one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous nations into one of its safest. Although human rights groups have criticized his tactics, Bukele remains extremely popular in El Salvador.

During their meeting at the White House, Trump praised his guest as “one hell of a president.” He shook Bukele’s hand, saying, “We appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime and so do we.”

A long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 has uncovered evidence at odds with Bukele’s reputation as a crime fighter. The inquiry, which began as an effort to dismantle the gang’s leadership, expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with MS-13 in the early years of his presidency.

New reporting on that investigation by ProPublica shows that senior officials in Bukele’s government repeatedly impeded the work of a U.S. task force as it pursued evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Salvadoran president and his inner circle.

Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.

In a previously unreported development, federal agents came to suspect that Bukele and members of his inner circle had diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review U.S. bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of U.S. funds. The list of names assembled by the agents included Bukele, senior officials and their relatives, according to documents viewed by ProPublica.

“Information obtained through investigation has revealed that the individuals contained within this submission are heavily engaged with MS-13 and are laundering funds from illicit business where MS-13 are involved,” the agents wrote. The people on the list “are also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns and MS-13 have received political funds.”

The outcome of the request is not known, but its existence shows that the U.S. investigation had widened to examine suspected corruption at high levels of the Bukele government.

The investigation was led by Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency law enforcement team created at Trump’s request in 2019. Agents found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced U.S. charges that include ordering the murders of U.S. citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.

In addition, U.S. officials helped at least eight of their counterparts in Salvadoran law enforcement flee the country and resettle in the United States or elsewhere because they feared retaliation by their own government, current and former U.S. officials said.

It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.

Veterans of the Vulcan team are “concerned that all their work, the millions of dollars that were spent, going all over the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, that it will be weakened for political reasons,” said a U.S. official familiar with the investigation.

The task force worked closely with the Salvadoran attorney general’s office, whose prosecutors shared evidence from their own investigation of the gang negotiations and suspected graft in the Bukele government, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

“There was good information on corruption between the gang and the Bukele administration,” Christopher Musto, a former senior official at Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, who worked on Vulcan, said about the Salvadoran investigation. “It was a great case.”

In May 2021, Bukele’s legislative majority in Congress ousted the attorney general and justices of the Supreme Court, which oversees extradition requests. Within seven months, newly installed justices reversed or halted six requests for senior gang leaders wanted in the U.S., according to interviews and documents.

“Bukele’s people were coming to the Supreme Court and saying under no circumstances are we extraditing the MS-13 leaders,” said the U.S. official familiar with the investigation. “‘Delay, interfere, undermine, do what you have to do.’”

Senior Bukele officials helped an MS-13 leader with a pending extradition order escape from prison, according to court records, U.S. officials and Salvadoran news reports. At least three other top gang leaders were released from Salvadoran custody after the U.S. filed extradition requests for them, according to Justice Department documents.

Published accounts in the United States and El Salvador have reported allegations that Bukele also pushed for the return of MS-13 leaders to prevent them from testifying in U.S. courts about the pact. Despite his government’s refusal to extradite gang bosses to the United States, the Trump administration in March deported one MS-13 leader accused of terrorism. The Justice Department is now seeking to dismiss charges against a second leader, which would allow him to be sent back to El Salvador, according to recent court filings.

The Justice Department declined to comment in response to questions sent by ProPublica. The State Department referred questions to the Justice Department.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions.

“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminals and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “We are grateful for President Bukele’s partnership.”

Bukele, the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Salvadoran Supreme Court did not respond to lists of questions. Bukele has repeatedly denied making any agreement with MS-13. The Trump administration’s deportation of MS-13 members to El Salvador, he said in a post on X, will enable security forces to dismantle the gang.

“This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors,” the post said.

Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in February 2019, promising to fight the country’s ingrained political corruption and pervasive gang violence, which he called “one of the greatest challenges” facing the nation.

During his first term, Trump also made MS-13 a high-profile foe, calling it “probably the meanest, worst gang in the world.” In August 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr created the Vulcan task force, teaming federal prosecutors with agents of the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies. The goal: Eradicate MS-13.

For decades, MS-13 has bedeviled law enforcement in the Americas with its vast reach, extreme violence and complex culture. The initials stand for “Mara Salvatrucha.” “Mara” means a swarm, while “salvatrucha” has been said to refer to a clever Salvadoran, according to interviews and an academic study. The number represents the 13th letter of the alphabet, M, in homage to the Mexican Mafia, the powerful Southern California prison gang.

MS-13 emerged in the 1980s in Los Angeles among Salvadoran youths whose families had fled a bloody civil war. The gang expanded throughout the diaspora and, as the U.S. deported planeloads of ex-convicts starting in the 1990s, took root in El Salvador. Although most of the leaders were serving sentences in El Salvador, a jailhouse council of 14 bosses, known as the “Ranfla,” used cellphones to micromanage criminal activities in U.S. cities thousands of miles away.

The gang developed a reputation for torturing, brutalizing and dismembering its victims. Barr has called it “a death cult” in which violence is more important than riches.

“It was like a very violent mom-and-pop operation where the cousins and second cousins all want to be a part of it,” said Carlos Ortiz, who served as the HSI attaché in El Salvador from 2018 to 2024. “Minimal money, compared to others. Even though it’s an organization, a lot of it is just fear. Fear of the high-ranking bosses among the rest of the gang, that’s what drives it.”

Trained with military weapons, MS-13 warred with security forces in El Salvador, took over neighborhoods and generated one of the world’s worst homicide rates, driving an exodus of immigrants reminiscent of the 1980s. The Salvadoran Supreme Court designated the gang as a terrorist organization in 2015.

The Vulcan task force had about 30 members, including prosecutors, agents and analysts. Its director, John J. Durham, was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York who had spent a decade pursuing MS-13 cliques on Long Island. Members of the task force worked from bases around the country and traveled to Mexico and Central America.

One of the founding investigators, Newark FBI agent Daniel Brunner, spoke fluent Spanish and had worked gangs for seven years. He became a roving specialist providing expertise, communications intelligence and court transcripts, sometimes in person and sometimes from a distance.

“Our idea was that Vulcan was like a SEAL Team 6, going in to help the different districts build cases,” Brunner, who is now retired, said in an interview.

Vulcan built on the longtime U.S. presence and extensive influence in El Salvador, where the embassy has long funded and trained law enforcement agencies. FBI agents and others were embedded as advisers in police anti-gang and homicide units and worked with prosecution teams led by Attorney General Raúl Melara.

The U.S. task force modeled its strategy on the ones used against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerrillas: Break the power of the MS-13 bosses by extraditing them to face trial and prison in the United States.

On Jan. 14, 2021, six days before the end of the Trump administration, Durham and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray joined acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen when he announced “the highest-reaching and most sweeping indictment targeting MS-13 and its command and control structure in U.S. history.”

Prosecutors charged the 14 members of the leadership council with major crimes including conspiracy to support and finance narcoterrorism. For more than two decades, the Ranfla ran a criminal network in the United States, Mexico and Central America that sanctioned the murders of Americans and trafficked drugs and arms, the indictment alleged.

The indictment contained a stunning charge: MS-13 bosses had taken the extraordinary step of giving an order, or “green light,” to assassinate an FBI agent working with local investigators in El Salvador. Embassy officials learned of the threat and evacuated the agent, according to interviews.

It is highly unusual for Latin American criminal groups to target a U.S. agent — they have learned that it invites an overwhelming law enforcement response. The assassination plot was a sign that the U.S. crackdown had rattled the gang chiefs, current and former officials said.

In conversations with American officials as president-elect, Bukele promised cooperation and welcomed their support against gangs and graft, even in his own Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former U.S. officials.

At a press event about the Vulcan task force in 2020, Trump asserted that in the past El Salvador “did not cooperate with the United States at all,” but now it had become a strong law enforcement partner.

Already, though, there had been news accounts alleging that Bukele had cut deals with gangs when he was mayor of San Salvador. Vulcan investigators quickly found evidence that top aides to the new president were negotiating a new pact with gang chiefs, according to interviews.

For more than a decade, MS-13’s control of the streets had made it a political force. It could deliver votes, ignite mayhem or impose order. A series of politicians had held talks with gang leaders to seek electoral support and reductions in violence in return for improved prison conditions and perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions.

The Bukele government adopted a more sophisticated bargaining strategy, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials. During secret meetings in prisons and other sites, the president’s emissaries offered MS-13 leaders political power and financial incentives if they lowered the homicide rate and marshaled support for the Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials and court documents.

The chief negotiator was Carlos Marroquín, a former rap artist and confidant of the president. Bukele had appointed him the director of a new Justice Ministry program known as “Reconstruction of the Social Fabric” that operated in impoverished communities.

Marroquín promised the Ranfla a central role in developing the program, control of neighborhood youth centers, power over urban turf and other financial and political benefits, according to current and former U.S. officials, court documents and Treasury Department sanctions. Informants and communications intercepts indicated that some of the resources going to MS-13 came from U.S. government aid, a violation of U.S. law, according to interviews and documents.

“Money was going from us, from USAID, through to this social fabric group,” a former federal law enforcement official said. “They’re supposed to be building things and getting skills and learning. It was funding the gangs.”

Vulcan also gained information from two highly placed Salvadoran officials involved in the talks with MS-13. The officials provided inside information to U.S. agents about the negotiations, which they said Bukele directed, according to interviews.

The accumulating evidence about the gang pact and the suspected misuse of U.S. funds spurred the task force to broaden its initial focus and target alleged corruption in the Bukele government, current and former U.S. officials said.

In April 2021, federal agents prepared a list of powerful Salvadorans for a financial review by the U.S. Treasury Department. Bukele was one of the 15 names. So were Marroquín; Osiris Luna, the director of the national prison system and another alleged organizer of the gang talks; Martha Carolina Recinos, the president’s chief of staff; and other political figures and their relatives. The request asked the Treasury Department to search for possible illicit transactions in any bank accounts held in the United States by those on the list, according to documents seen by ProPublica.

The Vulcan task force was seeking evidence in U.S. banks of money laundering tied to the diversion of USAID funding through the gang pact, the documents showed. Agents explained that the task force had “uncovered information that MS-13 members are in close contact with politically exposed persons in El Salvador,” referring to prominent government figures.

“The USAID funding is believed to have been laundered by the individuals submitted in this request,” who were suspected of “facilitating, supporting and promoting MS-13 through their official positions,” said the request, which was viewed by ProPublica.

Made under section 314A of the USA Patriot Act, the request for a canvass of U.S. banks requires that investigators show reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, which is a higher standard. The outcome of the request is unknown. The Treasury Department declined to comment. U.S. prosecutors have not publicly accused Bukele and the others of crimes related to USAID funds.

As U.S. investigators advanced in this political direction, they gained valuable information from the Salvadoran prosecutors who were pressing their own investigation of the gangs and the Bukele administration.

Known in English as Operation Cathedral, their probe was as ambitious and sensitive as the U.S. one. Investigators had documented the secret jailhouse deals with MS-13 and the official attempts to cover them up. They also pursued leads that revealed alleged widespread corruption involving the country’s COVID-19 relief programs, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials and documents. Political tensions increased as the Salvadoran prosecutors targeted the president’s inner circle and raided government offices, clashing with police who tried to stop them from searching the Health Ministry in one incident.

April 2021 was also when a delegation led by Attorney General Melara came to Washington to meet with leaders of Vulcan and other senior U.S. officials. The prosecutors laid out their case against prominent figures in the Bukele government. The “impressive” presentation, a former U.S. federal law enforcement official said, cited videos, phone intercepts and other evidence showing that Marroquín, prisons director Luna and others had clandestinely arranged for government negotiators and gang leaders to enter and leave prisons, smuggled in phones and destroyed logs of prison visits.

“Melara was very nervous because of the very high level of the people he was investigating,” a former U.S. federal law enforcement official said.

Melara declined to comment, saying he does not discuss his work as attorney general.

On May 1, 2021 — soon after Melara and his team met with U.S. investigators — the Salvadoran Legislature, controlled by Bukele, voted to expel the attorney general and five justices on the Supreme Court.

The purge was a decisive step by Bukele to centralize power. It drew international condemnation. In El Salvador, critics denounced the president’s actions as a “self-coup.” On his Twitter page, Bukele began calling himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”

For Vulcan, the expulsions marked a dramatic shift in its investigation. The Supreme Court justices had signaled their willingness to sign off on some extraditions. Melara had been a helpful ally who reportedly pledged to do “everything necessary” to extradite the Ranfla members, many of whom were in custody in El Salvador. But it soon became clear that the government was no longer interested in handing over senior gang leaders.

“The next prosecutors were not willing to work with us,” said Musto, the former HSI official. “We were not closed out, but all these things that we had in place that we were moving to getting people back here slowed down to a snail’s pace.”

The first clash came over Armando Melgar Diaz, an alleged MS-13 leader who acted as a middleman between gangs in the United States and senior leaders in El Salvador. Melgar, known as “Blue,” had ordered the kidnapping of a family in Oklahoma that owed the gangs $145,000, collected money from a drug ring operating out of restaurants in Maryland and Virginia and was involved with killings in the U.S., according to an indictment and interviews with U.S. officials. He was the first MS-13 member to be accused under terrorism laws.

The newly constituted Supreme Court voted to approve Melgar’s extradition but then reversed its decision, announcing that the matter needed further study. Later, Bukele’s new attorney general asked for a halt to the extradition. The reason: The United States had failed to guarantee that it would not seek the death penalty or life in prison, sentences not allowed under Salvadoran law.

The rationale made no sense to Vulcan prosecutors. The Justice Department had already promised that it would not pursue such punishments against Melgar, according to records and interviews. U.S. and Salvadoran officials attributed the sudden reversal to fear that Melgar could link Bukele and his government to the pact with MS-13.

“Melgar Diaz was going to be the test case,” Musto said. “It was going to be an easy win for Vulcan.”

Information obtained by U.S. agents included allegations that Bukele’s judicial adviser, Conan Castro-Ramírez, had called one of the new Supreme Court justices and told him to find ways to stop the extradition of Melgar, according to interviews. When the justice objected, saying that the extradition had already been approved, Castro allegedly ordered him to reverse it. “That’s why we put you there,” he said, according to the interviews.

The State Department sanctioned Castro for his role in assisting in the “inappropriate removal” of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. Castro did not respond to attempts to contact him.

A Salvadoran court sentenced Melgar to 39 years in prison for conspiracy to commit homicide, among other crimes. He was the first MS-13 leader whose extradition was blocked. Soon after, the U.S. extradition requests for other gang chiefs ran into opposition.

“Bukele and his government are using the entire state apparatus to prevent these people from being extradited,” a person with knowledge of the Salvadoran judicial system said in a recent interview.

Miguel Ángel Flores Durel, a newly appointed Supreme Court justice who reportedly had served as a lawyer for a top MS-13 leader, made sure that the requests were never granted, according to the person with knowledge of El Salvador’s judicial system. Flores instructed colleagues “do not work on extraditions at all,” the person said.

In July 2022, El Salvador agreed to extradite two lower-ranking MS-13 members charged with the murders of Salvadoran immigrants in Long Island in 2016 and 2017 in which victims were butchered with axes and machetes. The Supreme Court also approved the return of Salvadorans not affiliated with the gang who were accused in the U.S. of crimes such as murder.

This was a deliberate strategy, the person said. Flores said that El Salvador needed to continue some extraditions in order to “calm” U.S. officials, who were complaining about the lack of cooperation with Vulcan, the person said. (Flores died in 2023.)

It didn’t work. The extradition of other criminals by the Bukele-aligned Supreme Court only emphasized the lack of cooperation on requests for the senior MS-13 leaders.

“We were never told officially that it wouldn’t happen, but it became impossible,” said Brunner, the former FBI agent.

In October 2022, Bukele’s new attorney general announced that criminals would first have to serve their sentence in El Salvador before being sent to the U.S. — an interpretation of the country’s extradition treaty that differed from the previous Supreme Court.

“We aren’t going to be sending Salvadorans without them first paying for the crimes they have committed” in El Salvador, Rodolfo Delgado said.

The Bukele government’s interference with the U.S. investigation went beyond blocking extraditions, U.S. officials said.

Senior Bukele allies also waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the Salvadoran officials who had investigated corruption and assisted the Vulcan task force, according to interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

The government threatened officials with arrest and sent police patrols to their homes, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials. At least eight senior Salvadoran law enforcement and judicial officials fled El Salvador for the United States and elsewhere. Vulcan provided them with travel money, language classes, housing and help gaining legal immigration status and finding jobs. In one instance, a U.S. Embassy official escorted a Salvadoran prosecutor out of the country because American officials believed his life was in danger, according to an official familiar with the incident.

The Salvadoran government also weakened special “vetted units” of the police that had worked with the FBI and other U.S. agencies, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Bukele’s allies didn’t stop there. They allegedly helped the escape or release from prison of at least four members of the MS-13 leadership council sought by Vulcan for alleged crimes in the U.S., according to interviews, court documents and press reports.

Elmer Canales-Rivera, alias “Crook de Hollywood,” was one of the most wanted of the Ranfla members. He had been imprisoned for several murders in El Salvador, including a case in which he reportedly helped suffocate and drown in insecticide a gang member who violated orders. In the United States, prosecutors had accused him of orchestrating murders and kidnapping across the nation for more than 20 years.

In November 2021, Canales escaped from prison. El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, and other Salvadoran media published stories that detailed how Marroquín had escorted Canales from the prison. The articles featured taped calls between gang members and a person identified as Marroquín discussing his role in the escape, along with photos of officials apparently attempting to remove jail logs to conceal their presence at the prison.

Canales was caught in Mexico and turned over to U.S. authorities. Currently in prison awaiting trial, he has pleaded not guilty.

Over the next several months, three other MS-13 leaders disappeared from Salvadoran prisons, causing Durham, the head of the task force, to express his concern in a letter to the judge in New York overseeing the cases. At the time the Bukele administration had received extradition requests and Interpol notices, he wrote, the leaders had been in custody. Salvadoran media later reported that the country’s Supreme Court had formally denied the extradition requests for the three men.

The purge of the Supreme Court and prosecutors, the blocked extraditions and the disappearance of the MS-13 gang members marked a significant deterioration in relations between Bukele and the administration of President Joe Biden. Agencies across the government began looking for ways to push El Salvador to cooperate.

Acting U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes announced a “pause” in relations with El Salvador and left the country. A veteran diplomat who had previously served in El Salvador, Manes had pressured Bukele in public and private, criticizing the extradition delays and his increasingly authoritarian rule, according to State Department officials.

“What are we seeing now? It is a decline in democracy,” Manes said shortly before her departure.

In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against Bukele aides Luna, Marroquín and Recinos, blocking them from conducting financial transactions in the United States because of alleged corruption. None of them responded to questions sent to a Bukele spokesperson.

Nonetheless, former members of the task force said they felt that the Biden administration treated Vulcan as a lower priority and cut its resources. They said Biden officials saw the task force as a Trump initiative and wanted to focus on other law enforcement targets, such as human trafficking.

“As soon as the Biden administration came in, we were slowed down,” Brunner said. “There was a lot more red tape we had to go through.” Former Biden officials denied this was the case.

Whatever truce had existed between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 collapsed in March 2022. The country descended into chaos. Over one three-day period, some 80 people were killed in gang-related violence.

Bukele reacted forcefully. He declared a nationwide “state of exception” that suspended constitutional protections. Police began rounding up thousands of accused gang members and others. He announced the construction of the megaprison known as CECOT.

The policies proved tremendously popular. Murder rates dropped dramatically, though human rights advocates criticized the loss of civil liberties. Bukele dismissed their complaints.

“Some say we have put thousands in prison, but the reality is that we have set millions free,” he has said, an assertion he repeated to Trump in the Oval Office.

Despite the harsh treatment of gang members — an estimated 14,500 people are now held in CECOT — one thing did not change: The Bukele government continued to refuse to extradite senior MS-13 leaders to the United States.

The reasons for Bukele’s alleged protection of the gang leadership versus his relentless pursuit of the rank and file are the subject of speculation in both the United States and El Salvador. One possible explanation, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials: Bukele is aware that Vulcan was gathering evidence that could lead to criminal charges and political damage. The imprisoned leaders are potential witnesses to his alleged deal with MS-13, while El Salvador’s street-level gangsters are not.

In February 2023, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment for another group of leaders, most of whom operated a tier below the Ranfla, relaying its directives to gangsters on the streets. The 13 defendants were accused of terrorism and drug smuggling, among other charges.

The U.S. announced it would “explore options for their extradition with the government of El Salvador.” The Justice Department declined to say whether any such requests had been made.

In filing the charges, prosecutors made their strongest public accusations yet about deals between the Bukele government and the gangs. Without naming the president or his allies, prosecutors alleged that MS-13 leaders agreed to use their vast political influence to turn out votes for candidates belonging to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party in legislative elections in 2021.

The gang bosses also “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefited the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate,” the indictment said.

As part of the arrangement, the senior MS-13 leaders demanded that the Bukele government refuse to extradite them, the indictment said. The alleged condition appears to be in effect. To date, none of the extradition requests for more than a dozen high-ranking gang members has been approved.

In the face of obstacles, Vulcan relied increasingly on the Mexican government for help. During the past four years, Mexican authorities have captured nine of the 27 MS-13 leaders named in the indictments and deported them to the United States, where they were arrested. This year, prosecutors obtained guilty pleas to terrorism charges from two lower-ranking bosses, including one who prosecutors said had helped implement the deal between the Bukele administration and the gang. Sentencing for the men is pending.

Since Trump took office this year, his administration has redirected Vulcan’s mission to also target Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has put in the spotlight.

There has been a remarkable recent development related to MS-13, however. After more than five years leading the Vulcan task force, Durham wrote letters asking the judge overseeing the cases to dismiss charges against two gang leaders in U.S. custody, allowing them to be deported to El Salvador. The letters were dated March 11 and April 1, weeks after the Trump administration began negotiating the mass deportation deal with Bukele’s government.

César Humberto López Larios, a member of the Ranfla known as “Greñas,” had his charges dismissed and was returned to El Salvador with more than 250 Venezuelans and Salvadorans sent to CECOT as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants on March 15. López, identified in media reports, is featured in a slickly produced video posted by Bukele on X, kneeling in the prison, his head shaved. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Then, in April, Durham asked for the dismissal of terrorism charges against a lower-ranking MS-13 prisoner, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, alias “Vampiro,” according to recently unsealed court records. His defense lawyers are seeking to stall the request to give them time to fight his deportation to El Salvador. He has pleaded not guilty.

Durham acknowledged in his letters to the judge that the evidence against the two men is “strong.” After millions spent on an operation involving investigators and prosecutors from the U.S., El Salvador and other countries, Vulcan had amassed a trove of evidence aimed at incarcerating the MS-13 leaders who had overseen the killings, rapes and beatings of Americans. Prosecutors told defense attorneys they had more than 92,903 pages of discovery, including 600 pages of transcribed phone intercepts, 21 boxes of documents from prosecutors in El Salvador and 11 gigabytes of audio files.

Durham said prosecutors were dropping their pursuit of the cases “due to geopolitical and national security concerns.”

It was like a reverse extradition. Trump was giving Bukele the kind of high-level criminals that the United States had never received from El Salvador.

During the negotiations over the use of El Salvador’s prison, Trump officials agreed to pay some $6 million to house the deported men and acceded to an additional demand.

Bukele had one specific request, according to Milena Mayorga, his ambassador to the United States.

“I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States,” she quoted Bukele as telling U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

For Bukele, she said in a broadcast interview, it was “a matter of honor.”

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by T. Christian Miller and Sebastian Rotella.

ProPublica announced on Wednesday a new call for proposals to select the next five partners in its Local Reporting Network. These newsrooms will be chosen to be part of the organization’s 50 State Initiative, a commitment to partnering with one newsroom from each state by 2029. The deadline for applications is July 21 at 5 p.m. Eastern. Reporters selected for the one-year program will begin work on Oct. 1, 2025.

Through this partnership, ProPublica will reimburse news organizations for the salary of the selected reporter (up to $75,000 plus a benefits stipend) so they can spend a year working full time on an accountability journalism project of importance to their communities. Additionally, ProPublica provides editing support, along with our data, research, visual storytelling, graphics, design, audience and engagement expertise.

More information about how to apply and the application for prospective newsrooms have just been posted. Newsrooms from 35 states are eligible to apply for this round. Please see our eligibility map for details.

As part of the 50 State Initiative, ProPublica is currently working with newsrooms from the first 10 states; another five newsrooms will start in July. Reporting with The Connecticut Mirror on car towing in the state sparked legislative reforms to overhaul century-old towing laws that favored tow companies at the expense of drivers. In Georgia, we have documented how the state’s Medicaid work requirement, which is being heralded as a model for the rest of the country, has fallen short and cost millions. And in Tennessee, we’ve shown how one company has vastly expanded the use of a unique high-interest loan — and then gone on to sue more than 100,000 borrowers.

“It’s thrilling to see ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network reach newsrooms in all regions of the country,” said Sarah Blustain, an assistant managing editor at ProPublica. “With each additional state, we are able to bring urgent local issues to readers nationwide.”

The 50 State Initiative expands the scope of ProPublica’s work at the local and regional level, which includes a growing team of journalists reporting from communities across the country and groundbreaking partnerships with local news organizations through the LRN program.

The initiative broadens our support for local journalism, which now includes the LRN alongside dedicated reporting hubs in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, as well as an investigative unit in Texas in partnership with The Texas Tribune. ProPublica has more than 25 staff reporters and more than 20 reporting partnerships around the country contributing to regional and local accountability reporting, ensuring people can benefit from world-class journalism that can drive measurable change in their communities.

The LRN began in January 2018 in an effort to help remedy the lack of investigative reporting at the local level. It has since led to partnerships with some 80 news organizations across the country.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by ProPublica.

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What Happened: A trio of lawmakers demanded transparency from the Department of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday, saying the Trump administration continues to “stonewall” requests for details on the agency’s recent cancellation of hundreds of service contracts.

The group, which included Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Angus King, as well as Rep. Mark Takano, said that despite repeated requests, the agency has disclosed incomplete and inaccurate lists that failed to specify exactly which contracts have been canceled. Blumenthal and Takano are Democrats, and King is an independent. They made their comments at a special forum in Washington.

A review by the Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs identified 655 contracts canceled by the VA, where previous lists disclosed by the agency included dozens less and contained significant errors.

The lawmakers cited a recent ProPublica investigation into the agency’s use of a flawed artificial intelligence tool to assess VA contracts. That analysis was conducted by a staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency with no health care or government experience. The VA uses contractors for a range of services, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.

What They Said: Lists of contracts previously disclosed to the committee are “gobbledygook” and filled with errors, the lawmakers said. “This hearing shouldn’t even be necessary,” said King, who sits on the VA oversight committee. “The simplest thing is to send us a list.”

Senators highlighted the harm caused by canceling the contracts, including one that resolved glitches between VA systems preventing veterans from receiving benefits. Without this contract, said Benjamin Ambrose, whose job it was to resolve these errors, there is nobody left at VA to do this work. “In this case veterans are being locked out forever,” he said.

Scott Amey, general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight, said: “There’s a lot of fallout. There’s a lot of dominoes that go with canceling just one contract.”

Amey expressed doubt that the necessary work was done to ensure canceled contracts were duplicative or wasteful. “From the stonewalling that we’ve heard from the VA, you can’t have any confidence that that work was done,” he said.

The lawmakers also questioned the VA’s use of AI to assess contracts for possible cancellation, referring to ProPublica’s investigation. Blumenthal said AI holds promise, but it “has to be used thoughtfully.”

Background: ProPublica reported on Friday that the VA used an error-prone AI tool to identify contracts for possible cancellation. The tool, written by former DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia, used outdated AI models to “munch” contracts based on conflicting instructions and produced glaring mistakes, a ProPublica analysis found.

Experts in AI and government procurement agreed that the DOGE analysis of VA contracts was flawed, with one calling it “deeply problematic.” Lavingia acknowledged that there were problems. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

ProPublica identified at least two dozen contracts on DOGE’s list that have been canceled so far. Among them is a service agreement to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was with Columbia University for blood sample analysis to support a VA research project. Others still were related to addressing nursing issues, including one to develop social media tools to recruit nursing staff and another to help assess and improve the care they provide.

Democrats in Congress have been seeking more information from the VA on the canceled contracts in an attempt to assess whether the cuts have put veterans’ well-being in jeopardy.

Response: VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz has defended DOGE’s work on reviewing contracts, saying that the vetting sets a “commonsense precedent.” He and Lavingia have said that VA staffers reviewed everything on the DOGE “munchable” list before deciding which contracts to cut.

In a statement on Tuesday, Kasperowicz said that the agency’s contract review has been a careful process aimed at benefiting veterans and using taxpayer money efficiently. “Decisions to keep, cut or descope contracts are based on careful and methodical multilevel reviews by VA employees, including career subject-matter experts who are responsible for the contracts, as well as VA senior leaders and contracting officials,” he said.

He disputed any suggestion from legislators that the contract review might diminish essential services. “Terminating or not renewing these contracts will not negatively affect veteran care, benefits or services,” he said. “In fact, these decisions will allow VA to redirect billions of dollars back toward health care, benefits and services for VA beneficiaries.”

Why It Matters: Over 9 million veterans across the U.S. rely on the VA for health care through its network of 170 hospitals and 1,200 clinics. One of the nation’s largest health care providers, it is a training ground for doctors and nurses and an engine for medical research. Since returning to office in January, the Trump administration has set about a massive overhaul of the agency, seeking an increase in its overall budget while announcing layoffs that could claim the jobs of around 80,000 employees.

The VA is examining all of its estimated 76,000 contracts as part of that overhaul and in accordance with the Trump administration’s push towards tech. ProPublica’s analysis identified over 2,000 contracts flagged by AI for termination. It’s unclear how many more from that list are on track for cancellation. The Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Brandon Roberts and Vernal Coleman.