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by Talia Buford

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We are pleased to announce the journalists chosen as the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.

The program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country and help better reflect the nation as a whole. Nine journalists from across the country will join four ProPublica staffers for this year’s program.

This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.

Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers.

“By providing investigative editing tools to journalists across the country, we aim to ensure that there will be more accountability reporting in more newsrooms across the country,” said Ginger Thompson, a managing editor at ProPublica. “It’s an effort we have long considered one of our highest priorities.”

Introducing the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program:

Alejandra Cancino is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom investigating the Cook County court system. Her award-winning investigations focus on the intersection of government and business, combining data with personal stories to expose systemic failures. Most recently, she co-authored a five-part narrative series that exposed how the judicial system favors landlords’ property rights over their tenants’ rights. The project was recognized with an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. In 2022, Cancino spent a year editing and training emerging journalists at City Bureau, a nonprofit organization focused on Chicago’s marginalized communities. Previously, she covered manufacturing, economic development and labor as a business reporter at the Chicago Tribune. She is a 2025 recipient of Chicago’s Studs Terkel Award, which honors a journalist’s body of work. Cancino serves on the Investigative Reporters and Editors board and is a former president and board member of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Chicago Headline Club.

Daarel Burnette II is a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Before joining the Chronicle in 2022, he served as an assistant managing editor and reporter for Education Week and the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Tennessee, a news organization based in Memphis. He has worked as an education reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Louisville Courier Journal. He also worked as a general-assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He received his undergraduate degree in print journalism from Hampton University and a master’s degree in politics and journalism from Columbia University.

Daphne Chen is the investigations editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a former investigative data reporter for the news organization. In 2022, Chen was part of a reporting team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a project that uncovered how electrical fires disproportionately endanger poor Black renters. Previously, she was a data reporter for USA Today, where she revealed that state officials repeatedly sent children to live with foster parents accused of abuse. She also spent a year as a reporting fellow in Cambodia.

Nic Garcia is The Texas Tribune’s regions editor, leading a team of reporters who live across the state and tell the story of Texas policy and politics from the ground up. In 2022, his team produced a series on Texas’ failing water infrastructure — especially in rural communities — that propelled a statewide investment in water. Garcia joined the Tribune after a year as politics editor at The Des Moines Register in Iowa. He also was a senior writer at The Dallas Morning News, where he was named journalist of the year and won a second place Headliner award for his COVID-19 coverage. A Colorado native, Garcia covered the Colorado legislature for The Denver Post. His analysis of lobbying records inspired changes to the state’s lobbying laws.

Nicole Lewis is the engagement editor for The Marshall Project, leading the organization’s strategic efforts to deepen reporting that reaches communities most affected by the criminal legal system. She previously served as a senior editor at Slate, where she led a team of writers covering the array of legal issues before the Supreme Court for the publication’s jurisprudence section. In 2020, she was the lead reporter on a first-of-its kind political survey of the incarcerated, which received an honorable mention for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Award for the project’s pioneering use of social science research methods. Prior to The Marshall Project, Nicole reported for The Washington Post’s America desk and the Fact Checker. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea Lopez-Villafaña is the managing editor at Voice of San Diego. She is also a co-host on the VOSD Podcast, the most popular local public affairs podcast in San Diego, and writes a weekly newsletter, Cup of Chisme. She previously worked as a reporter at The San Diego-Union Tribune, where she covered the city’s neighborhoods.

Jennifer Palmer is an investigative reporter at Oklahoma Watch. She has more than two decades of news reporting experience and her work has been recognized with awards in public service reporting and investigative reporting. She started her career covering police and courts at the Rio Grande Sun, a scrappy weekly in northern New Mexico, where her reporting led to the ouster of a prominent judge. Before joining Oklahoma Watch, she previously worked as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and The Oklahoman. She is a native of Norman, Oklahoma, and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma.

Chastity Pratt is the national education editor at The Washington Post. Prior to joining the Post in 2024, she was the education bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and covered education at the Detroit Free Press, Newsday and The Oregonian. Over the years, she has helped train students and journalists for Harvard College, the Education Writers Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Milton Valencia is The Boston Globe’s criminal justice editor in metro, overseeing coverage of crime, policing and public safety. He was previously deputy editor of the Globe’s inaugural Money, Power, Inequality team, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap across the region. Milton started as a reporter at the Globe in 2007. In that role, he reported from the Globe’s City Hall bureau, helping lead coverage of Boston’s historic 2021 race for mayor. In 2020, he was part of a Globe police accountability team that exposed corruption and mismanagement in the Boston Police Department. He also spent several years covering the federal justice system, including the death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He was part of the staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the bombings. Milton began his career at local newspapers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He holds a degree in philosophy and public policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and lives south of Boston with his wife and their two children.

Additionally, four ProPublica staffers will join this year’s cohort. They are:

Peter DiCampo is a visuals editor at ProPublica, where he primarily works with local partner newsrooms across the country through the Local Reporting Network. His visual editing and art direction have been awarded by the National Press Photographers Association, the Society for News Design, The Society of Publication Designers and the Online Journalism Awards. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was NPR’s international visual editor. Before turning to editing, he worked for more than a decade as a freelance photojournalist, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. He co-founded Everyday Africa, a collective of photographers using social media to broaden coverage of Africa beyond the headlines, and The Everyday Projects, a global community of photographers and a visual literacy nonprofit. He was a 2019 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and he is the recipient of grants and awards from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Code for Africa, the Magnum Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, Pictures of the Year International and the Pulitzer Center, among others.

Duaa Eldeib is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. She has examined failures that have led to a stillbirth crisis in the U.S., the ways in which insurance companies interfere with mental health treatment and the fatal consequences of delaying care during the pandemic. She was a reporter and producer on the documentary “Before a Breath.” Her reporting has sparked legislative hearings, spurred government reform and led to the exoneration of a mother who was wrongly convicted of murder, as well as the release of young men who were incarcerated as juveniles and later sent to adult prison for minor offenses. Before joining ProPublica, she worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she and two colleagues were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting twice — first in 2023 for her series on stillbirths and again in 2025 as part of the team covering access to mental health care.

Hannah Fresques is the deputy data editor at ProPublica. She has edited data-driven investigations on the aftermath of Texas’ abortion ban, high-interest tribal lending and a salmonella outbreak. She joined the organization in 2016, and her work as a reporter and editor has earned recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Journalism Awards, as well as the Online News Association and Sigma Delta Chi Journalism awards. Before working in journalism, Fresques conducted evaluations of education policy for a nonprofit research organization. She holds a master’s degree in quantitative methods for social sciences from Columbia University.

Andrea Wise is the visual strategy editor at ProPublica, where she edits photography, illustration and other forms of visual journalism. She is also the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a nonprofit organization amplifying the voices of visual creatives from underrepresented groups in the global visual media landscape. She commissioned and led a yearlong photo essay that was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of ProPublica’s reporting on the harmful consequences of state abortion bans and was also Pictures of the Year International’s Online Storytelling Project of the Year. That body of work was also recognized with a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, George Polk Award for Medical Reporting, Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, and Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism, among other honors. Her photo editing and art direction have also been recognized by Pictures of the Year, the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Publication Designers, and the Society for News Design. She holds a bachelor’s with honors in studio arts from Trinity College and a master’s in photography from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

by Mark Olalde

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Days after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency sent an email to the entire workforce with details about the agency’s plans to close diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and included a plea for help.

“Employees are requested to please notify” the EPA or the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, “of any other agency office, sub-unit, personnel position description, contract, or program focusing exclusively on DEI,” the email from then-acting Administrator James Payne said.

No employees in the agency, then more than 15,000 people strong, responded to that plea, ProPublica learned via a public records request.

Trump has made ending diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs a hallmark effort of his second term. Many federal employees, however, are declining to assist the administration with this goal. He signed an executive order on his first day back in office that labeled DEI initiatives — which broadly aim to promote greater diversity, largely within the workplace — as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and ordered them halted. His pressure campaign to end DEI efforts has also extended to companies and organizations outside the government, with billions of dollars in federal funding for universities frozen as part of the fight.

Corbin Darling retired from the EPA this year after more than three decades with the agency, including managing environmental justice programs in a number of Western states.

“I’m not surprised that nobody turned in their colleagues or other programs in response to that request,” he said, adding that his former co-workers understood that addressing pollution that disproportionately impacted communities of color was important to the agency’s work. “That’s part of the mission — it has been for decades,” Darling said.

Payne’s note to agency employees listed two email addresses — one belonging to the EPA and one to the Office of Personnel Management — where EPA employees could send details about DEI efforts. ProPublica submitted public records requests to both agencies for the contents of the inboxes from the start of the administration through April 1.

The Office of Personnel Management didn’t respond to the request, although the Freedom of Information Act requires that it do so within 20 business days. The agency also did not answer questions about whether it received any reports to its anti-DEI inbox.

The EPA, meanwhile, checked its inbox and confirmed that zero employees had filed reports. “Some emails received in that inbox did come from EPA addresses but none of them called out colleagues who were still working on DEI matters,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement in May.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“The optimist in me would like to believe that maybe it is because, as an agency, we are generally dedicated to our mission and understand that DEIA is intrinsic in that,” a current EPA employee who requested anonymity said. “On the flip side, they’ve done such a good job immediately dismantling DEIA in the agency that folks who are up in arms might have just been assuaged.”

Although DEI programs are often internal to a workplace, the administration also put a target on environmental justice initiatives, which acknowledge the fact that public health and environmental harm disproportionately fall on poorer areas and communities of color. Environmental justice has been part of the EPA’s mandate for years but greatly expanded under the Biden administration.

Research has shown, for example, that municipalities have planted fewer trees and maintained less green space in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of people of color, leading to more intense heat. And heavy industry has often been zoned or sited near Latino, Black and Native American communities.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who was confirmed in late January, has boasted about cutting more than $22 billion in environmental justice and DEI grants and contracts. “Many American communities are suffering with serious unresolved environmental issues, but under the ‘environmental justice’ banner, the previous administration’s EPA showered billions on ideological allies, instead of directing those resources into solving environmental problems and making meaningful change,” he wrote in an April opinion piece in the New York Post.

The EPA spokesperson said employees with more than 50% of their duties dedicated to either environmental justice work or DEI were targeted for layoffs. The agency “is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency,” the spokesperson said.

EPA environmental justice offices worked on a range of initiatives, such as meeting with historically underserved communities to help them participate in agency decision-making and dispersing grants to fund mitigation of the carcinogenic gas radon or removal of lead pipes, Darling explained.

“A sea change isn’t the right word because it’s more of a draining of the sea,” Darling said. “It has devastated the program.”

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Texas lawmakers are pushing to impose steep penalties on local governments that don’t post campaign finance reports online, after an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found some school districts weren’t doing so.

The initial posting requirements, designed to make election spending more transparent, went into effect nearly two years ago. Most of the school district leaders said they had no idea they were out of compliance until the newsrooms contacted them. Even after many districts uploaded whatever documentation they had on file for their trustee elections, reports were still missing because candidates hadn’t turned them in or the schools lost them.

“I was surprised and disappointed,” said Republican state Rep. Carl Tepper, who authored the online posting requirement. “I did realize that we didn’t really put any teeth into the bill.”

Tepper is aiming to correct that with a new bill this legislative session. He cited the newsrooms’ findings in a written explanation of why the state needs to implement greater enforcement.

The measure would require the Texas Ethics Commission, the agency that enforces the state’s election laws, to monitor thousands of local governments’ websites across the state and to notify them if any campaign finance reports are missing. If those government agencies do not upload the records that candidates have turned in within 30 days of the state’s notice, the commission can fine them up to $2,500 every day until they comply.

The proposed measure also recommends the state allot funding for the ethics commission to hire two additional staff members, whose job would be to monitor all local government entities that hold public elections in the state’s 254 counties and roughly 1,200 cities and towns. The newsrooms previously found the agency did not have any staff dedicated to enforcing compliance in local elections and, instead, investigated missing or late reports only when it received a tip.

The bill has cleared the Texas House but still needs approval from the Senate by May 28 if it has a chance of becoming law.

The superintendent of Galveston Independent School District, which was among those that ProPublica and the Tribune found hadn’t posted any campaign finance reports online last year, said the measure would help schools like his.

“I do like the suggestion of a 30-day period to achieve compliance after an issue is reported,” Matthew Neighbors said of the new proposal in an emailed statement. “Our district, for example, had no objections to posting the necessary campaign information once our new employees were aware of the requirements.”

Kelly Rasti, the associate executive director of governmental relations for the Texas Association of School Boards, said districts do not flout the law intentionally. Rasti said the employees tasked with handling school board election documentation are not always well versed in the state’s regulations but that the association plans to provide additional resources later this year.

District employees are accustomed to handling a plethora of education-related paperwork and reporting requirements imposed by the state. But “elections are just different, and they seem to have ever-evolving laws and rules associated with them,” Rasti said.

Notably, Tepper’s bill would not directly require the ethics commission to penalize or follow up with candidates who fail to turn in their reports. He initially included a provision in his bill that would make candidates ineligible to run for office if they didn’t file those records, even if they won an election. He told the newsrooms that he cut the penalty after realizing the logistical challenges it might present.

That means the ethics commission must still decide whether to investigate and fine any of the candidates and officeholders for the state’s estimated 22,000 local elected positions should they miss a filing. By contrast, candidates who run for statewide office are automatically fined by the commission if they don’t make a deadline.

Tepper’s ultimate goal is to create a unified system in which the ethics commission compiles campaign finance records for state and local candidates in one central database, rather than leaving local filings scattered across thousands of city, county and school district government websites. The Republican lawmaker withdrew his proposal to create such a system in 2023 after the commission estimated it would cost $20 million, but he told the newsrooms that he hopes to gain enough support to make that investment next session, in 2027.

For now, he sees his proposal as a necessary advance.

“I’m a big believer in incrementalism,” said Tepper. “This is another step toward better enforcement.”

by Doug Bock Clark

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.

Last week, North Carolina Democrats scored a victory when Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, who’d lost a tight race for the state’s Supreme Court, finally conceded defeat after a six-month legal battle to throw out ballots that he contended were illegitimate.

But that same morning, the party suffered a setback that may be more consequential: losing control of the state board that sets voting rules and adjudicates election disputes.

The board oversees virtually every aspect of state elections, large and small, from setting rules dictating what makes ballots valid or invalid to monitoring compliance with campaign finance laws. In the Supreme Court race, it consistently worked to block Griffin’s challenges.

The conservative takeover comes after the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law stripping the power to appoint board members from North Carolina’s Democratic governor and gave it to the Republican state auditor.

Although a board spokesperson said its chair was traveling and unavailable to answer questions about how the new Republican majority would reshape North Carolina elections, experts said it will likely make it easier for challenges like Griffin’s to succeed and reduce expansive access to early voting.

It will “tilt the playing field to the advantage of the GOP,” said Gene Nichol, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies democracy in the state.

The party that controls the board holds significant power over who votes, how those votes are counted and who ultimately wins races.

Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a liberal voting advocacy organization, called the shift “very consequential” and said she was worried the new board would seek to remove voters whose registrations have missing information from the state’s rolls and tighten requirements for people seeking to register or have provisional ballots count.

Conservatives called Democrats’ concerns overblown, particularly after years of Democratic control. Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a conservative North Carolina think tank, conceded the board’s new majority might alter early voting locations or voter ID rules, over which the parties are divided. But he pointed out that many board decisions are made unanimously, not split along party lines.

“There is some sense that in the age of Trump there is some grand scheme to throw out election results and let the GOP win despite how people voted,” Kokai said. “I don’t think you’re seeing the stage being set for anything like that.”

Historically, the board’s five members have been appointed by North Carolina’s governor, with three of them coming from the governor’s party. Since 2016, the governor has been a Democrat.

When Josh Stein won a four-year term last fall, a Republican supermajority in the state legislature passed a law, then overrode his predecessor’s veto, to transfer this power to the state auditor. It was an unusual step. No other state has elections overseen by the state auditor.

Stein sued to block the law and, initially, a lower court sided with him. But in April, the state’s Court of Appeals, which has a Republican majority, issued a three-sentence decision overturning the lower court’s ruling without hearing oral arguments.

The next day, the state auditor named two new Republican members to the elections board, flipping control of it to conservatives. One is a former legislator who led efforts to redraw the state’s congressional districts in conservatives’ favor. The other was the longtime head of a conservative think tank with a history of advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud claims.

After swearing in the new members last week, the board’s first move was to fire its executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, replacing her with the general counsel to the speaker of the North Carolina House, a Republican. The board denied Bell’s request to address her staff during the meeting, but she subsequently released a statement that a spokesperson provided to ProPublica in response to a request for comment.

“We have done this work under incredibly difficult circumstances and in a toxic political environment that has targeted election professionals with harassment and threats,” she said of the board’s employees. “I hope we return to a time when those who lose elections concede defeat rather than trying to tear down the entire election system and erode voter confidence.”

Experts say the just-concluded battle over the Supreme Court seat provides a window into how changes at the elections board could affect future races, especially close ones with contested results. North Carolina is a swing state, and there have been several such cases in recent years. After the 2018 election, the board ordered a new election for a U.S. House of Representatives seat when a Republican victory was found to be tainted by an illegal absentee ballot scheme.

Before the 2024 election, right-wing activists discussed ways to overturn close election losses using a plan similar to the one Griffin put into action, according to a recording of a call obtained by ProPublica.

In the month after suffering a 734-vote loss to incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs, Griffin asked the elections board to toss out tens of thousands of ballots, mostly because information about the voters who cast them was missing from the state’s election database. The board, then majority Democrat, dismissed his challenges, concluding that voters had followed the rules in place at the time and that much of the missing information reflected administrative or clerical errors. Then Griffin sued.

Gerry Cohen, a former counsel for the legislature who is now a Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections, said it was “a real possibility” that a Republican-controlled state board “would have approved some of Griffin’s challenges” to throw out ballots. If that had happened, Riggs could have fought the board’s decision in the courts and won, but she would have then been litigating against the board rather than on the same side as it.

The law that gave the state auditor the power to appoint members of the state election board also gives him similar authority over North Carolina’s county election boards, which will mean each of them will be controlled by Republican majorities by the end of next month.

County boards approve locations and times for early voting, which is when the vast majority of North Carolinians vote. Experts predicted this could lead some boards to reduce the number of polling sites in areas that have more Democrats, like college campuses, or to close polls when Democratic voters are more likely to use them, such as Sundays when Black churches conduct “souls to the polls” voter drives.

Kokai contends that such changes aren’t necessarily meant to suppress the vote, if they even happen, and doubts they’d have much of an effect on Democratic turnout.

“If you really do care about voting, you do it,” he said. “If you go a mile off campus to do other things, you can do it to vote, too.”

Liberals, however, expect the revamped board to work hand-in-hand with the Republican-controlled legislature to transform elections in other ways.

“Things are going to look very different,” Webb said, in the 2026 midterm elections.

by Heather Vogell

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Update, May 15, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect the FAA’s announcement late Thursday that it had approved Starship 9 launch, which came after publication.

British officials told the U.S. they are concerned about the safety of SpaceX’s plans to fly its next Starship rocket over British territories in the Caribbean, where debris fell earlier this year after two of the company’s rockets exploded, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The worries from the U.K. government, detailed in a letter to a top American diplomat on Wednesday, follow the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision last week to grant SpaceX’s request for a fivefold increase in the number of Starship launches allowed this year, from five to 25. Growing the number of launches of the most powerful rocket ever built is a priority for SpaceX head Elon Musk, who is also one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers.

Of particular concern to British officials is the public’s safety in the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands — all of which could face debris risk from Starship 9.

After the explosion in January, residents of the Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the rocket on beaches and roads. A car was also damaged in the Starship 7 accident. Seven weeks later, after receiving the FAA’s blessing to proceed, SpaceX launched Starship 8 from Boca Chica, Texas, but it too exploded after liftoff. Air traffic in the region was diverted, and burning streaks from the falling rocket were visible in the sky from the Bahamas and Florida’s coast.

The British letter to a U.S. State Department official, Ambassador Lisa Kenna, asks the U.S. to consider changing the launch site or trajectory of Starship 9. If that isn’t possible, the request — from Stephen Doughty, the United Kingdom’s minister of state for Europe, North America and U.K. Overseas Territories — asks that agencies like the FAA consider altering the launch’s timing to minimize safety risks and the economic impact for the British territories.

The letter also requests that the U.S. government provide the United Kingdom more information on increased safety measures that will be put in place before Starship 9 launches, and that British territories be given enough warning to communicate with the public about those measures.

“We have been working closely with US Government partners regarding Starship Flight 9 to protect the safety of the UK Overseas Territories and to ensure appropriate measures are in place,” a  UK government spokesperson said Thursday in response to ProPublica’s questions about the letter.

The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

On Thursday afternoon, the FAA said it was “in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom and the Turks and Caicos Islands, as well as other regional partners, as we continue to evaluate SpaceX’s license modification request for its proposed Starship Flight 9 launch.”

Hours later, though, after this story originally published, the agency announced it had approved Starship 9’s launch, pending the completion of an investigation into the previous explosion.

The agency also said it was expanding the "Aircraft Hazard Area" for the mission, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean, potentially affecting 175 flights. That hazard area nearly encompasses the Turks and Caicos Islands in their entirety, according to the FAA’s environmental assessment. The agency said the changes were due to the prior Starship’s problems and because SpaceX plans to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster rocket — something it will be doing for the first time.

Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport will need to close during the duration of the launch window, the assessment said. Airspace over a portion of The Bahamas will be closed, too.

The FAA said the launch has been scheduled outside peak transit times to minimize disruptions.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. But the company has said it learns from its mistakes. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability,” the company said after the Starship 8 accident. “We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk — who sees the uptick in launches as critical to the development of technology that could help land astronauts on the moon and ultimately Mars — has been less diplomatic.

He downplayed the January explosion as “barely a bump in the road” and seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”

SpaceX has not announced the date of the Starship 9 launch, but news reports have said it could happen as soon as May 21.

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which licenses launches and reentries, is undergoing a leadership shakeup. Three top executives, including the head of the office, announced in April that they were accepting voluntary separation offers.

Musk has been leading efforts to shrink the federal government through the departures of thousands of federal workers. Critics say he has an inherent conflict of interest because his businesses are regulated by agencies such as the FAA and rely on their approvals.

Musk said in a February interview that “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Thursday that “All administration officials will comply with conflict of interest requirements.”

Last year, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines against SpaceX for violations related to two previous launches. Musk, in turn, accused the FAA of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” The administrative case remains open.

The number of rocket launches has increased dramatically in recent years, leading pilots and academics to warn about a growing danger in the air for flights that have only minutes to get out of harm’s way when a mishap — as explosions and other failures are called in industry parlance — occurs.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia found in a study published in January that the risk space objects pose to aircraft is rising. They said that the chance of an “uncontrolled reentry” from a rocket over a year is as high as 26% for some large, busy areas of airspace, such as those found in the northeastern U.S., in northern Europe or near major cities in the Asia-Pacific region.

A large union for airplane pilots told FAA officials in January that the Starship 7 breakup “raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights,” according to a letter sent the day after the rocket exploded.

“The ability of the FAA Air Traffic Control to respond in a timely fashion to an unanticipated rocket anomaly needs to be further evaluated,” said the letter from the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 79,000 pilots at 42 U.S. and Canadian airlines. It asked that flight crews receive more information about high-risk areas before a launch so they can “make an informed and timely decision about their need to potentially reject flight plans that route their aircraft underneath space vehicle trajectories.”

In a response, the FAA said it would review its processes to see whether more can be done to prepare flight crews before a launch.

Capt. Jason Ambrosi, the union’s president, said in a statement emailed to ProPublica that changes are necessary. “Any safety risk posed to commercial airline operations is unacceptable.”

by Tim Golden

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In what could be a significant escalation of U.S. pressure on Mexico, the Trump administration has begun to impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on prominent Mexican politicians whom it believes are linked to drug corruption, U.S. officials said.

So far, two Mexican political figures have acknowledged being banned from traveling to the United States. But U.S. officials said they expect more Mexicans to be targeted as the administration works through a list of several dozen political figures who have been identified by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as having ties to the drug trade.

The list includes leaders of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s governing party, several state governors and political figures close to her predecessor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the U.S. officials said. They insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive policy plans.

The governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, confirmed that she and her husband, a former congressman, were told their U.S. visas were revoked because of “a situation” involving her husband. “The fact that the State Department has cancelled my visa does not mean that I have committed something bad,” she said at a news conference on Monday.

Sheinbaum said her government had asked U.S. officials to explain why Ávila was stripped of her visa but had been told that such matters are private and no further information was given.

The visa actions represent the latest political challenge for the new Mexican leader and her leftist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena. Despite the country’s historic sensitivity to any hint of U.S. meddling, Sheinbaum has thus far bolstered her support at home by asserting Mexico’s sovereignty in discussions with President Donald Trump while also moving to meet his demands for action against the biggest traffickers.

Mexican journalists reported that U.S. immigration officials also pulled the visa of another border-state governor, Américo Villarreal of Tamaulipas, an assertion that the governor’s spokesperson dismissed as “unconfirmed.” (Villarreal has been frequently accused of having ties to drug trafficking, which he has denied.) Last month, the mayor of that state’s second-largest city, Matamoros, was stopped from crossing the border into Brownsville, Texas, but he, too, insisted he had not been formally stripped of his visa.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that visa records are confidential under U.S. law.

Three U.S. officials said the visa actions will likely in some cases be accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions that block individuals from conducting business with U.S. companies and freeze financial assets they have in the United States. Ávila said that she did not have any U.S. bank accounts and faced no such sanction.

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the sanctions plan.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (Tom Brenner/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

When the administration imposed tariffs on Mexico in early March, it asserted that the country’s government had granted “safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.”

As part of what it has described as an all-out fight against fentanyl and other illegal drugs, the administration has designated some of the biggest Mexican trafficking gangs as terrorist organizations and explored the possibility of unilateral U.S. military actions against them, officials said.

The review of Mexican drug corruption was initiated by a small White House team that requested information from law enforcement agencies and the U.S. intelligence community about Mexican political, government and military figures with criminal ties.

Officials said the group has been shaping the administration’s security policy with Mexico under the leadership of a deputy White House homeland security adviser, Anthony Salisbury. It is overseen by the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment in response to questions about the group’s role in initiating the travel sanctions.

One official familiar with the team’s list said it overlaps with a file of about 35 Mexican officials that was compiled by Drug Enforcement Administration investigators in 2019, after López Obrador began shutting down Mexico’s cooperation with the United States in counterdrug programs.

That earlier effort sought to identify Mexican government figures who could be criminally prosecuted for aiding drug traffickers. It led to the 2019 indictment in the U.S. of the country’s former security chief, Genaro García Luna, and his conviction on drug charges three years later in a New York federal court.

The two former DEA officials in Mexico City who oversaw the compilation of the 2019 list, Terrance Cole and Matthew Donahue, also proposed that the State Department cancel the U.S. visas of some of the Mexican political figures named on it. Senior U.S. diplomats rejected that proposal.

Cole is now awaiting Senate confirmation as the Trump administration’s new DEA administrator.

Some current and former U.S. officials expressed concerns about the latest White House-led plan. They noted that the standard of proof required for both visa cancellations and Treasury sanctions is well below that of a criminal trial, which could encourage proponents of the measures to act on what might be less-than-solid information.

Officials said the visa actions were being taken under Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which stipulates that noncitizens can be found ineligible for entry to the United States if the government “knows or has reason to believe” that the foreigner “is or has been a knowing aider, abettor, assister, conspirator or colluder with others in the illicit trafficking” of illegal drugs. The law also allows the State Department to cancel the visas of relatives of a sanctioned official who may have benefited from their illicit gains.

One U.S. official said that while the visa withdrawals might send a powerful signal of the United States’ new willingness to challenge Mexican corruption, they could also stir new conflict between the two governments.

“We should be using all the resources of the government to go after these people,” the official said, referring to corrupt Mexican officials. “But the bigger question is: Does this work with President Sheinbaum? Are you going to lose an opportunity now with a Mexican government that has been very compliant on the drug front?”

A former Mexican ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhaan, said further visa actions against prominent figures in Sheinbaum’s party would make it hard for her to continue claiming a “good” relationship with the United States despite Trump’s often openly confrontational tone.

“But at the same time,” Sarukhaan added, “it gives her — a nationalistic president with a very chauvinistic party behind her — a perfect excuse to say that everything bad that’s happening in Mexico with the economy and everything else is because of U.S. imperialism.”

López Obrador, who came to power in 2018, had promised to fight corruption as never before. Instead, he presided over an administration that denied having any corruption problem in its own ranks even as journalists produced report after report that officials close to the president and even his own sons were engaged in profiteering and graft.

Sheinbaum has struck a different tone. In a message to a Morena party congress on May 4, she warned the faithful about the dangers of cronyism, nepotism and corruption.

“All members of Morena should conduct themselves with honesty, humility and simplicity,” she said. “There cannot be any collusion with crime — whether organized or white collar.”

by Jesse Coburn

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Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

Staten’s complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal government’s decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued. Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate.

These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination.

“It’ll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, that’s just not happening right now. It’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”

Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: “HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. (Alyssa Schukar for ProPublica)

For many victims of housing discrimination, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments.

When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriff’s department said they had engaged in criminal activity — regardless of whether they were convicted — it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)

Such victories may be rare in the next four years.

“We are being gutted right now,” said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And it feels like it’s not even the beginning.”

The Fair Housing Office’s staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administration’s federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.

Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.

“For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.”

Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)

Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty — although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).

When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues “charges of discrimination,” akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.

It’s not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agency’s Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours — allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.

Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that “the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act.” She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.

Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trump’s “defending women” executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the country’s official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.

Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: “The number you reached is no longer in use.”

Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.

The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Office’s work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource — the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUD’s annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.

Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.

The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. “CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them,” Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstone’s CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)

The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUD’s budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.

Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUD’s retreat continues. “In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections,” said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. “It’s a terrifying situation.”

Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. “With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again,” he said when signing the legislation. “It proclaims that fair housing for all — all human beings who live in this country — is now a part of the American way of life. “

But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. “The fair housing laws were never fully implemented,” said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places.” And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket.

In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.

Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.

HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option.

Even if today’s policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. “Housing cycles are long,” one HUD official said. “This decimation will set us back for another several decades.”

April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to “uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership.” He added: “A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trump’s golden age of America.”

Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Office’s old website. The URL now redirects to HUD’s homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.

“God blessed us with this great nation,” it reads. “Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.”

by Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.

Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.

Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.

In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.

In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambia’s president with an “important request.” That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and “facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired.

Lamin Jabbi, first image, head of Gambia’s communications ministry, and Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia (Via the Facebook pages of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, and the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, Gambia)

The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.

As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.

In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlink’s license was approved despite concerns it wasn’t abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Department’s mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.

Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. “I honestly didn’t think we were capable of doing this,” one official told ProPublica. “That is bad on every level.” Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.”

The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.

ProPublica’s reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambia’s ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink — a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musk’s position — ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. “Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity,” a spokesperson wrote. “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.

During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agency’s approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trump’s return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.

Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.

At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that “we won’t let him get near” conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying “I’ll recuse myself” if conflicts arise. “My companies are suffering because I’m in the government,” Musk said.

In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. “For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.

Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”

The headquarters of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, a Cabinet agency headed by Lamin Jabbi (Brett Murphy/ProPublica)

Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide — more than the current population of the U.S.

Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musk’s fortune. His stake in Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth.

Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China aren’t far behind either.

“They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online,” said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst.

In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musk’s company a “first-mover advantage.”

Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth.

A technician mounts a Starlink satellite dish on a house in Niamey, Niger. (Boureima Hama/AFP/Getty Images)

As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africa’s 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musk’s company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa — where Starlink has so far failed to get a license — Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.

Now Musk’s campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa.

The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.

An 8-year-old democracy, Gambia’s 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.

In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the country’s tax revenue. Ads for the country’s multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works — parks, police booths, schools.

It’s unclear why Starlink’s efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense.

Banjul, the capital of Gambia, during New Year’s celebrations (Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP/Getty Images)

Cromer’s efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then “pressured” the regulator to remove “this unnecessary barrier to entry,” the ambassador wrote.

Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. “The ripple effects could be extraordinary,” Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education.

Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambia’s few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices — in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees — authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators’ ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: “They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said in 2021.

The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that don’t want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally.

Jallow, Jabbi’s top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change.

After Trump’s inauguration, Jabbi’s position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.

The stance surprised some of Cromer’s peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.

In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the company’s expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Department’s headquarters.

The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nation’s progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. “We want our license now,” Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. “Why are you delaying it?”

The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. government’s campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because “there was no more need,” Jallow said.

The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambia’s capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.

That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambia’s equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By day’s end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nation’s president.

“I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia,” the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbi’s agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbi’s predecessor.

“I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia,” Cromer concluded. “I look forward to your favorable response.”

In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. government’s efforts have continued. In late April, Gambia’s attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue.

Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt America’s image overseas. “This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator — this is a democracy, a natural ally,” said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is “a prime partner of the West” in United Nations votes. “You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.”

Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musk’s business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)

The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trump’s agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with America’s shifting foreign policy: “They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can.”

In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musk’s firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow.

In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with “Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlink’s case “early and often” with local officials, partnered with Starlink to “build an educational strategy” for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nation’s head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassy’s work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.

Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlink’s request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musk’s company had sought for years.

Do you have information about Elon Musk’s businesses or the Trump administration? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Brett Murphy can be reached at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Gary Hudson excitedly planned a fishing trip with his 4-year-old son and purchased a kids fishing pole in late 2019. He tossed it in the trunk of his Ford Taurus and parked on the street outside his Hartford, Connecticut, home.

Within hours, his car was hauled away by a tow truck. Hudson couldn’t afford to pay the more than $300 in towing and storage fees and asked if he could at least get into the car to collect his belongings — the fishing pole and the safety vest and handcuffs he needed to work nights as a security guard.

He said he offered to pay $20 but that Whitey’s, a Hartford towing company, told him he had to pay the full amount. “They would not budge, period,” Hudson said. “So I can’t get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you?” When Hudson couldn’t afford to retrieve the car, he said, Whitey’s sold it, and he lost his belongings. Whitey’s has since closed, and its owner has died.

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica have heard repeatedly from people with similar stories. Inside their vehicles, they had work equipment, child car seats or personal mementos, and towing companies refused to give them back.

Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles regulations say that vehicle owners can retrieve “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.” But that gives towing companies wide latitude in how they interpret the rule, and several people whose cars were towed said the companies used their belongings as leverage to get them to pay towing and storage fees.

Past reporting by CT Mirror and ProPublica showed how Connecticut’s laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of vehicle owners. Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country between when a car is towed and when tow companies can consider it abandoned and start the process of selling it — companies have to wait just 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500. People with low incomes have been particularly impacted by these laws, the news organizations found.

Some nearby states, like Rhode Island, have no law on the books about getting possessions from towed cars. But in those that do, the list of items owners must be allowed to retrieve is often broader than Connecticut’s. Maine allows people to retrieve clothing, car seats, medications and mail. In New York, people can retrieve anything from the vehicle. A bill in the Massachusetts legislature would let its drivers do the same.

In an interview last year, Michelle Givens, the Connecticut DMV’s assistant legal director, said she couldn’t say whether work equipment qualified as essential to health or welfare.

“It’s broad,” Givens said. “I can’t answer that and sit here and say, ‘Yes, that will qualify.’”

So I can’t get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you?

—Gary Hudson, a security guard who was not allowed to get his belongings out of his towed car

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera said he thought car owners should file a complaint with the agency if they weren’t able to get their belongings out. The complaint process can take weeks, however, which is often longer than the period before a towing company is allowed to sell a car.

Timothy Vibert, president of the industry association Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said people can generally retrieve medicine or tools, but he said that part of the law shouldn’t apply if people wait months to get them. He added that when people don’t pay the towing fees, it makes towers reluctant to return their belongings.

“If somebody owed you $800 and they called up and said they wanted to get something out of their car,” he asked, “it’s OK for them to waltz down here and take their things and then leave you with an $800 bill?”

Other towers say they are more lenient. Sal Sena, owner of Sena Brothers and Cross Country Automotive in Hartford, said if someone has keys to the vehicle or can prove it’s theirs, he lets them get stuff out of it regardless if they pay the fees.

“I don’t care if you take stuff out, but I just want to make sure you’re not putting my ass in a situation where I’m gonna get in trouble,” Sena said. “You got the key? Then take what you want out of the car because then I can justify it.”

Connecticut lawmakers are looking to change the state’s towing laws. House Bill 7162, which was voted out of committee in March, would overhaul the law and allow owners to retrieve “any personal property” from a towed motor vehicle.

The bill “makes a strong effort to identify and correct abusive practices in the towing industry that have had a serious and detrimental effect on motor vehicle owners,” legal aid attorney Rafie Podolsky said in public testimony.

Tow company employees and owners have objected to the bill, saying it would make it harder for them to tow vehicles that are parked illegally or unsafely and that towers didn’t have enough involvement in crafting the legislation.

Transportation Committee co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, said during a March meeting that the importance of the issue hit home for her because of “the number of folks” who have told her they got towed and weren’t allowed to retrieve belongings from their vehicles.

“The people should certainly be made aware of their rights with respect to towed vehicles,” she said.

Hudson, who had planned the fishing trip, had to save up to replace his holster, mace and safety equipment for the security job, which he estimated cost him about $1,000. He canceled the fishing trip and said he failed his son “by breaking a promise.”

“It really, really hurt,” Hudson said.

Hudson is one of several people who told the news organizations they lost things they needed for work — tools, chef’s knives, even the draft of a movie script.

Paul Boudreau, a carpenter and mechanic in Hamden, said he lost his entire carpentry tool set worth more than $1,500 when his Chevrolet Blazer was towed from his apartment complex in April 2021.

The vehicle wasn’t registered because it couldn’t pass an emissions test, and his mechanic was waiting on a part that was hard to get during the supply chain crisis following the COVID-19 lockdown. The apartment complex’s management gave him more time to get it registered, he said, so he was surprised when he looked out his window and saw a tow truck hooking up his vehicle.

He said MyHoopty.com, a towing company in Watertown, told him it would cost more than $300 to get it back. With his wife recovering from cancer, his carpentry work scarce because of the pandemic and “not a penny in cash,” Boudreau realized he couldn’t afford to retrieve his car.

Still, he asked multiple times to retrieve his tools and was denied, he told the DMV in a complaint, which included an itemized list of tools. But MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said in an interview, “At no point did anyone contact us or attempt to come down and retrieve any personal belongings that may have been in the vehicle.”

The Connecticut DMV found that MyHoopty committed no violations related to the tow but did not address the items Boudreau said were in the vehicle.

“Anybody we talked to was like, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” Boudreau said in an interview.

After 18 days, MyHoopty submitted a form to sell the Blazer.

The tows at his apartment complex led Boudreau to become a tenant union organizer. He said state legislators always tell him that when it comes to landlords, their “property is sacred.”

Paul Boudreau, center, speaks at a Connecticut Tenants Union rally at the state Capitol last year. His experience having his car towed led him to become a tenant organizer. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

“Why isn’t our property sacred? Why isn’t our car sacred?” Boudreau asked about tenants. “Wealthy people’s property is always sacred, but poor people’s property doesn’t mean a thing.”

Other drivers lost belongings that held sentimental value — photographs, a sewing project, a prayer card from their father’s funeral.

When Brandon Joyner’s Nissan Maxima was towed from the front of his Bridgeport home in 2017, he lost photos of his mother and aunt that had never been digitized, which he’d traveled with since he got his license as a teenager. He also had shoes, clothing and a car seat for his nieces and nephews in the vehicle, he said.

The car was towed because Joyner owed motor vehicle taxes on it. After a couple of weeks of saving, he paid the taxes. But when he asked for his car, he said he was told it had been sold.

“Everything was just gone,” he said.

It took him months to afford a new vehicle, in part because he was still paying down the old loan from the bank. When he told them he no longer had the vehicle and didn’t want to pay on it, it damaged his credit score, making it harder to get a loan for a new car, he said.

“It was hurtful, because there’s nothing you can really do,” Joyner said. “No matter how many people you talk to, you lose things, and it’s nobody’s fault, nobody cares.”

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Robert Faturechi and Brandon Roberts

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.

Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, fell 13% in the following days, before rebounding.

Trump’s “Liberation Day” press conference from the White House Rose Garden unveiling the tariffs came after the market closed on April 2. Bondi’s disclosure forms showing her Trump Media sales say the transactions were made on April 2 but do not disclose whether they occurred before or after the market closed.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through work could violate the law. But cases against government officials are legally challenging, and in recent years judges have largely narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.

It’s unclear from the public record whether Bondi as attorney general would have known in advance any nonpublic details about the tariffs Trump was announcing that day. Trump, of course, publicly announced his plans to institute dramatic tariffs during the election campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, the market seemed to assume his campaign promises were bluster.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions about the trades.

The disclosure forms do not include the specific amount of stocks sold or their worth but instead provide a rough range. The documents do not say exactly what time she sold the shares or at what price. The company’s stock price closed on April 2 at $18.76 and opened the next morning, after the press conference, at $17.92 before falling more in the days ahead. In addition to selling between $1 million and $5 million worth of Trump Media shares, Bondi’s disclosure form shows she also sold between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of warrants in Trump Media, which typically give a holder the right to purchase the shares.

Bondi’s ownership of Trump Media shares has previously been disclosed. Before she became attorney general, Bondi was a consultant for Digital World Acquisition Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media to take the president’s social media company public.

As part of her ethics agreement, Bondi had pledged to sell her stake of Trump Media within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have allowed her until early May to sell the shares.

On April 1, Trump Media filed a disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission with details about holdings of various top shareholders, including Trump and Bondi. The purpose of the filing is unclear, as is whether it relates to Bondi’s sales the next day. It appeared to reregister for sale shares held by several of the company’s top shareholders.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Jake Pearson

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica.

Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’

Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.

Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the consumer agency’s operations and fire most of its staff in early February.

Young’s arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB — which regulates companies that provide financial services — has jurisdiction over Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments.

The world’s richest man has in turn made no secret of his desire to do away with the bureau, posting just weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

“Musk clearly has a conflict of interest and should recuse,” said Claire Finkelstein, who directs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “And therefore an employee of his, who is answerable to him on the personal side, outside of government, and who stands to keep his job only if he supports Musk’s personal interests, should not be working for DOGE.”

Young, a 36-year-old Republican consultant, has been active in political circles for years, most recently serving as the campaign treasurer of Musk’s political action committee, helping the tech titan spend more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump.

Before joining Musk’s payroll, he worked as a vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade association representing the pharmaceutical industry’s interests, his disclosure shows. He also worked as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee and for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the New York Times reported.

Young was appointed a special governmental employee in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 30 and dispatched to work in the CFPB in early February, according to court records and his disclosure form. Someone with his position could be making as much as $190,000 a year in government salary, documents obtained by Bloomberg show. At the same time, Young collects a salary as an employee of Musk’s Texas-based Europa 100 LLC, where, according to his disclosure report, his duties are to “advise political and public policy.”

Beyond that description, it’s not clear what, exactly, Young does at Europa 100 or what the company’s activities are.

It was created in July 2020 by Jared Birchall, a former banker who runs Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, according to state records. The company has been used to pay nannies to at least some of Musk’s children, according to a 2023 tabloid report, and, along with two other Musk entities, to facilitate tens of millions of dollars in campaign transactions, campaign finance reports show.

As a special government employee, Young can maintain outside employment while serving for a limited amount of time. But such government workers are still required to abide by laws and rules governing conflicts of interest and personal and business relationships.

Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the administration to produce a range of public records documenting DOGE’s activities, said that Young’s government work appears to benefit his private sector employer.

“Which hat are you wearing while you’re serving the American people? Are you doing it for the interests of your outside job?” she asked.

In addition to his role at Europa 100, Young reported other ties to Musk’s private businesses. He affirmed in his disclosure form that he will “continue to participate” in a “defined contribution plan” sponsored by Excession, the Musk home office, and that he has served since February as a “vice president” of United States of America Inc., another Musk entity organized by Birchall, where he also advises on “political and public policy,” the records show. While he lists the latter among “sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year,” the exact figure is not disclosed.

Young did not return a call and emails seeking comment. The CFPB, DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk didn’t respond to an email seeking comment, and Birchall didn’t return a call left at a number he lists in public formation records. A lawyer who helped form United States of America Inc. hung up when reached for comment and hasn’t responded to a subsequent message. Asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, Musk said in a February interview that, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”

The revelation of Young’s apparent violation of federal standards of conduct follows a series of ProPublica stories documenting how another DOGE aide helped carry out the administration’s attempts to implement mass layoffs at the CFPB while holding as much as $715,000 in stock that bureau employees are prohibited from owning — actions one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute. The White House has defended the aide, saying he “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson also said the aide had until May 8 to divest, though it isn’t clear whether he did and the White House hasn’t answered questions about that. “These allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission,” the White House said. Following ProPublica’s reporting, the aide’s work at the CFPB ended.

On Monday, a group of 10 good government and consumer advocacy groups, citing ProPublica’s coverage, sent a letter to the acting inspector general of the CFPB, asking him to “swiftly investigate these clear conflicts of interest violations of Trump Administration officials acting in their own personal financial interest.”

ProPublica has identified nearly 90 officials assigned to DOGE, though it’s unclear how many, if any, have potential conflicts. Government agencies have been slow to release financial disclosure forms. But Finkelstein said the cases reported by ProPublica call into question the motivation behind DOGE’s efforts to undo the consumer watchdog agency.

“It matters because it means that the officials who work for the government, who are supposed to be dedicated to the interests of the American people, are not necessarily focused on the good of the country but instead may be focused on the good of themselves, self enrichment, or trying to please their boss by focusing on enriching their bosses and growing their portfolios,” she said.

Unionized CFPB workers have sued the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop his attempts to drastically scale down the bureau’s staff and its operations. Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice attempted to fire nearly all of the agency’s employees, tried canceling nearly all of its contracts and instituted stop-work mandates that have stifled virtually all agency work, including investigations into companies, ProPublica previously reported.

The parties will appear before an appeals court this Friday for oral arguments in a case that will determine just how deeply Vought can cut the agency while still ensuring that it carries out dozens of mandates Congress tasked it with when lawmakers established the bureau in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The court records produced in the litigation offer a window into the role Young played in gutting the CFPB during the administration’s first attempt to unwind the bureau beginning in early February.

He was dispatched to the CFPB’s headquarters on Feb. 6, just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, then the agency’s acting director, told the staff and contractors to stop working. The following day, Young and other DOGE aides were given access to nonclassified CFPB systems, court records show. That same day, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” with a gravestone emoji.

On Feb. 11 and 12, Young was included on emails with top agency officials. One of those messages discussed the cancellation of more than 100 contracts, an act that a contracting officer described in a sworn affidavit as including “all contracts related to enforcement, supervision, external affairs, and consumer response.” Another message involved how to transfer to the Treasury Department some of the more than $3 billion in civil penalties that the bureau has collected from companies to settle consumer protection cases, a move that could deny harmed consumers compensation. A third discussed the terms of an agreement that would allow for the mass layoff of staffers, court records show.

In his financial disclosure form, which he signed on Feb. 15, Young listed his employment by Musk’s Europa 100 as active, beginning in August 2024 through the “present.”

Then, in early March, as the legal fight over the administration’s cuts played out before a federal judge, Young sent the CFPB’s chief operating officer a message about forthcoming firings, known as a “reduction in force,” or RIF, in government parlance. In the email, he asked whether officials were “prepared to implement the RIF” if the judge lifted a temporary stay, according to a March district court opinion that has for the moment stopped most of the administration’s proposed cuts.

In addition to his employment, Young’s disclosure presents another potential conflict.

He also lists owning as much as $15,000 in Amazon stock, a company that is on the bureau’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Agency employees are forbidden from having such investments, and ethics experts have said that participating in an agency action that could boost the stock’s value — such as stripping the CFPB of its staff — constitutes a violation of the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Young hasn’t responded to questions about that either.

Al Shaw contributed reporting and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica

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.

It started with a call. A man identifying himself as a federal immigration agent contacted a Venezuelan father in San Antonio, interrogating him about his teenage son. The agent said officials planned to visit the family’s apartment to assess the boy’s living conditions.

Later that day, federal agents descended on his complex and covered the door’s peephole with black tape, the father recalled. Agents repeatedly yelled the father’s and son’s names, demanded they open the door and waited hours before leaving, according to the family. Terrified, the father, 37, texted an immigration attorney, who warned that the visit could be a pretext for deportation. The agents returned the next two days, causing the father such alarm that he skipped work at a mechanic shop. His son stayed home from school.

Department of Homeland Security agents have carried out dozens of such visits across the country in recent months as part of a systematic search for children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, and the sponsors who care for them while they pursue their immigration cases. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the children’s care and for screening their sponsors, has assisted in the checks.

The agency’s welfare mission appears to be undergoing a stark transformation as President Donald Trump seeks to ramp up deportation numbers in his second term, a dozen current and former government officials told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. They say that one of the clearest indications of that shift is the scale of the checks that immigration agents are conducting using information provided by the resettlement agency to target sponsors and children for deportation.

Trump officials maintain that the administration is ensuring children are not abused or trafficked. But current and former agency employees, immigration lawyers and child advocates say the resettlement agency is drifting from its humanitarian mandate. Just last week, the Trump administration fired the agency’s ombudsman, who had been hired by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to act as its first watchdog.

“Congress set up a system to protect migrant children, in part by giving them to an agency that isn’t part of immigration enforcement,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and later under Biden. The Trump administration, Shuchart said, is “trying to use that protective arrangement as a bludgeon to hurt the kids and the adults who are willing to step forward to take care of them.”

Republicans have called out ORR in the past, pointing to instances of children working in dangerous jobs as examples of the agency’s lax oversight. Lawyers, advocates and agency officials say cases of abuse are rare and should be rooted out. They argue that the administration’s recent changes are immigration enforcement tools that could make children and their sponsors more susceptible to harmful living and working conditions because they fear deportation.

Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint to reshape the federal government, called for moving the resettlement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, arguing that keeping the agencies separate has led to more unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally. Although Trump publicly distanced himself from the overall plan during his reelection campaign, many of his actions have aligned with its proposals.

During Trump’s first term, he required ORR to share some information about the children and their sponsors, who are usually relatives. That led to the arrests of at least 170 sponsors in the country illegally and spurred pushback from lawmakers and advocates who said the agency shouldn’t be used to aid deportation. Immediately after starting his second term in January, Trump issued an executive order calling for more information sharing between the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the resettlement agency, and Homeland Security. Now, current and former employees of the resettlement agency say that some immigration enforcement officials have been given unfettered access to its databases, which contain sensitive and detailed case information.

Data sharing for “the sole purpose of immigration enforcement imperils the privacy and security” of children and their sponsors, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, wrote in a February letter to the Trump administration. In a March response to Wyden, Andrew Gradison, an acting assistant secretary at HHS, said the resettlement agency is complying with the president’s executive order and sharing information with other federal agencies to ensure immigrant children are safe. Wyden told the news organizations that he plans to continue pressing for answers. On Tuesday, he sent another letter to the administration, stating that he is “increasingly concerned” that ORR is sharing private information “beyond the scope” of what is allowed and “exposing already vulnerable children to further risks.”

Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit last week in Washington, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully reversed key provisions of a 2024 Biden rule. Those provisions had barred ORR from using immigration status to deny sponsors the ability to care for children. They also had previously prohibited the agency from sharing sponsor information for the purpose of immigration enforcement. Undoing the provisions has led to the prolonged detention of children because sponsors are afraid or can’t claim them because they are unable to meet requirements, the lawsuit alleges. The government has not responded to the lawsuit in court.

In conjunction with those changes, Trump tapped an ICE official to lead ORR for the first time. That official was fired two months into her job because she failed to implement the administration’s changes “fast enough,” her successor for the position, Angie Salazar, an ICE veteran, said in a March 6 recording obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

“Some of these policy changes took too long. Three weeks is too long,” Salazar told staff without providing specifics. Salazar said that she would ramp up an effort to check on immigrant children and strengthen screenings of their sponsors.

She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant.

“Those are my marching orders,” Salazar told staffers. “While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.”

Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare.

Boxes packed with clothing and household goods in the Venezuelan family’s San Antonio home. The family started keeping many of their belongings boxed up and ready to ship out of fear of deportation. (Chris Lee for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.)

ORR said in a statement that it could not respond to ongoing litigation and did not answer detailed questions about Salazar’s comments or about the reasoning for some of the new requirements. Its policies are intended to ensure safe placement of unaccompanied minors, and the agency is “not a law enforcement or immigration enforcement entity,” the statement read.

Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, also declined to comment on pending lawsuits. But he criticized how the agency within his department was run under Biden, saying it failed to protect unaccompanied children after they were released to sponsors while turning “a blind eye to serious risks.” Jen Smyers, a former ORR deputy director, disputed those claims, saying the Biden administration made strides to address longstanding concerns that included creating a unit to combat sponsor fraud and improving data systems to better track kids.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, did not respond to detailed questions but said in a statement that her agency shares the goal of ensuring that unaccompanied minors are safe. She did not answer questions about the Venezuelan family in San Antonio. She also declined to provide the number of homes the agents have visited across the country or say whether they found cases of abuse or detained anyone for the purpose of deportation.

An April email obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune shows for the first time the scale of the operation in the Houston area alone, which over the past decade has resettled the largest number of unaccompanied immigrant children in the country. In the email, an ICE official informed the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that the agency planned to visit more than 3,600 addresses associated with such minors. The sheriff’s office did not assist in the checks, a spokesperson said.

An internal ICE memo obtained last month through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Immigration Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, instructed agents to find unaccompanied children and their sponsors. The document laid out a series of factors that federal agents should prioritize when seeking out children, including those who have not attended court hearings, may have gang ties or have pending deportation orders. The memo detailed crimes, such as smuggling, for which sponsors could be charged.

In the case of the San Antonio family, the father has temporary protected status, a U.S. permit for certain people facing danger at home that allows him to live and work here legally. The news organizations could not find a criminal record for him in the U.S. His son is still awaiting an immigration court hearing since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone a year ago. The father stated in his U.S. asylum application that he left Venezuela after receiving death threats for protesting against President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The father, who declined to be identified because he fears ICE enforcement, said in an interview that his son later fled for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the avenues for families, like that of the Venezuelan man and his son, to raise concerns about ORR’s conduct are shrinking. The Trump administration reduced staff at the agency’s ombudsman’s office. Mary Giovagnoli, who led the office, was terminated last week. An HHS official said the agency does not comment on personnel matters, but in a letter to Giovagnoli, the agency stated that her employment “does not advance the public interest.” Giovagnoli said the cuts curtail the office’s ability to act as a watchdog to ensure the resettlement agency is meeting its congressionally established mission.

“There’s no effective oversight,” she said. “There is this encroachment on ORR’s independence, and I think this close relationship with ICE makes everyone afraid that there’s going to come a point in time where you don’t know where one agency stops and the next begins.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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.

Last summer, as political debate swirled over the future of Georgia’s experiment with Medicaid work requirements, Gov. Brian Kemp held a press conference to unveil a three-minute testimonial video featuring a mechanic who works on classic cars.

Luke Seaborn, a 54-year-old from rural Jefferson, became the de facto face of Georgia Pathways to Coverage, Kemp’s insurance program for impoverished Georgians. In a soft Southern drawl, Seaborn explained how having insurance had improved his life in the year that he had been enrolled: “Pathways is a great program that offers health insurance to low-income professionals like myself.”

Kemp lauds Pathways as an innovative way to decrease the state’s high rate of uninsured adults while reining in government spending, holding the program up as an example to other Republican-led states eager to institute Medicaid work requirements.

But in the nine months since Seaborn’s video testimonial was released, his opinion of Pathways has plummeted. His benefits have been canceled — twice, he said, due to bureaucratic red tape.

“I used to think of Pathways as a blessing,” Seaborn recently told The Current and ProPublica. “Now, I’m done with it.”

Rather than an enduring symbol of success, Seaborn’s experience illustrates why the program struggles to gain traction even as the state spends millions of dollars to burnish Pathways’ brand. The Current and ProPublica previously reported that many of the approximately 250,000 low-income adults potentially eligible for the health insurance program struggle to enroll or maintain coverage.

The politics of Pathways were not on Seaborn’s mind when he received a phone call last summer from an insurance executive who handles Pathways clients. One of the first Georgians to enroll in the program in 2023, Seaborn had written a letter thanking his insurance provider for covering a procedure for his back pain. The executive from Amerigroup Community Care wanted to know: Would he take part in a promotional video for Pathways?

Seaborn, a supporter of the governor, said yes without hesitation. Soon afterward, Kemp’s press secretary, Garrison Douglas, arrived at his auto repair shop, located a few miles from the governor’s hometown, and spent hours filming in the garage filled with vintage Ford and Chevy trucks and handpainted gas station signs.

A trained chemical engineer, Seaborn had quit his corporate job to embrace his dream of repairing classic cars. But the realities of being a small business owner made that path difficult, Seaborn said, especially when it came to shouldering the cost of health insurance for himself and his son. Pathways eased the way, he said.

Seaborn said he was surprised when the governor called him out by name weeks later at the press conference during which his testimonial video was released. He wasn’t expecting to be the singular face of Pathways.

By November, though, Seaborn encountered some of the problems that other Georgians say have soured their opinion on Pathways. Seaborn said he had logged his work hours into the online system once a month as required. But his benefits were canceled after he failed to complete a new form that he said the state had added without adequate warning. Seaborn said the form asked for the same information he had been submitting every month, just in a different format. The state’s Medicaid agency did not respond to questions about Seaborn’s experience or the new form.

He said he called the same insurance executive who had asked him to take part in the testimonial. She told him she would be lunching with one of Kemp’s aides that day and promised to help, he recalled. Within 24 hours, Seaborn said, his benefits were restored, and a representative from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, which administers federal benefits programs, called to apologize.

Douglas said the governor’s office “had no involvement in Mr. Seaborn’s case.” The insurance company did not respond to requests for comment.

Pathways enrollees must submit paperwork every month proving they had completed the requirements necessary for coverage: 80 hours of work, study or volunteering. But the state says it is not verifying the information on a monthly basis — only during enrollment and upon annual renewal.

Seaborn said that after his coverage was restored, his insurance company told him he would no longer have to file his work hours monthly; the next time he would need to submit such documentation would be during his annual reenrollment. Nevertheless, Seaborn said he signed up for text and email notifications from the Pathways program so that he wouldn’t be caught off guard if requirements changed again.

Even so, technical glitches and more red tape caused him to lose his coverage once more, he said. He stopped receiving texts from the Pathways program in February. When he logged in to the digital platform in early March to make sure everything was in order, a notice informed him that his benefits would be terminated on April 1. The reason: he had missed filing an annual income statement. He said the surprise requirement had popped up on the digital platform even though his coverage was not up for renewal.

“My head exploded,” he said. “I didn’t get a text or an email. I did what I was supposed to, but that wasn’t good enough.”

Seaborn said he went ahead and filed the information, although it was late. He tried to call his insurance provider again for an explanation — and help. He reached out to the Division of Family and Children Services as well. This time, however, he said no one called him back.

In April, Seaborn paid out of pocket for his and his son’s prescription medications, an extra $40 that he said is difficult for him to afford.

Ellen Brown, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, would not say why Seaborn’s benefits were terminated.

“We are sorry to hear this happened and are looking into how we can better serve our customers and resolve communication gaps in the future,” Brown said in a written statement Friday. “Every Georgian that seeks our services is important, and we take these matters very seriously.”

Meanwhile, Seaborn received a phone call that day from the same Division of Family and Children Services representative who had apologized to him after he was kicked off Pathways last fall. He said she told him she would make sure he got his coverage back. The representative did not respond to a request for comment from The Current and ProPublica.

On Monday evening, Seaborn received a text message to alert him to a notification in the Pathways digital platform. He logged on: A notice confirmed that he had been reenrolled, a change of fortune that he credited to The Current and ProPublica’s questions to state officials about his predicament because he had already given up on contacting people for help.

“I am so frustrated with this whole journey,” Seaborn said. “I’m grateful for coverage. But what I don’t understand is them leaving me like a mushroom in the dark and feeding me nothing, no information, for more than a month.”

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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.

When the state of Georgia handed Deloitte Consulting a $10.7 million marketing contract last July to promote the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program, the initiative was in need of serious PR.

At the time, a year after the program’s rollout, less than 2% of those eligible for Georgia Pathways to Coverage had enrolled, well short of state targets.

To get the word out, the state turned again to the firm that it had relied on to build and manage the program. About 60% of the marketing contract went toward creating and placing ads about Pathways on television and radio, including during NFL games and morning talk shows.

Much of the remainder of the seven-month contract would go toward two efforts: $250,000 per month for Deloitte-trained teams to hand out brochures and Pathways-branded merchandise at community events and $300,000 a month for Deloitte to produce reports about its own performance.

When Deloitte’s publicity campaign ended in February, enrollment in Pathways remained less than 3% of the approximately 250,000 Georgians who are potentially eligible.

The marketing contract is part of a larger suite of services that Georgia has commissioned from Deloitte for its Medicaid experiment. Deloitte has made at least $51 million as of Dec. 31 to manage Pathways, including creating and maintaining its problematic software platform, as The Current and ProPublica previously reported. It is also earning at least $3 million more to oversee the state’s relationship with federal regulators, including its application to extend the experiment beyond its expiration this fall.

Deloitte’s outsize — and unusual — role in promoting the program it has built has allowed the firm to keep pulling in payments despite Pathways’ struggles. And there is virtually no public accounting of how well it is increasing enrollment, a key goal of the policy experiment.

An excerpt of Deloitte’s marketing contract shows its $300,000 per month expenditure on reports on its own performance, $250,000 per month for community outreach and $10.7 million total budget. (Obtained by The Current and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The marketing contract, obtained through a public records request, allows Deloitte to charge the state nearly half a million dollars for a final report on its publicity campaign, which was due to be submitted in February. When The Current and ProPublica requested the monthly and final performance reports, the state said they needed to be “reviewed” first and demanded $900 for that work. The news outlets did not pay because previous responses to public records requests for Deloitte’s Pathways contracts were heavily redacted, with the general counsel’s office at the Department of Community Health citing “confidential/trade secret.” The agency did not charge for those records.

The state recently approved another $10 million to Deloitte, Fiona Roberts, spokesperson for the Department of Community Health, Georgia’s Medicaid agency that oversees Pathways, said in response to questions about the effectiveness of Deloitte’s marketing efforts. The new marketing contract, which runs until November, includes more community meetings and a text message campaign by Salesforce Marketing Cloud rolling out in May to potentially eligible Georgians, Roberts said.

“In 20 years of researching these kinds of programs, I can’t think of another instance like this” in which a state has selected a for-profit company to both manage and market a federal benefit program, said Joan Alker, executive director for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families, where researchers have concluded that Medicaid work requirements prevent people from accessing health insurance.

Deloitte has designed and managed Medicaid and other benefit programs for many states, including Georgia, making the firm one of the nation’s experts in government health policy. But Alker said that when states want to educate and enroll residents in federal safety net programs, they typically select local nonprofits that have established relationships with low-income communities. Georgia’s arrangement with Deloitte raises questions, she said, about “whether the state is more committed to spending money on consultants or poor people.”

Deloitte, which has been in charge of the Pathways communications strategy for the past three years, declined to answer questions about its Georgia Pathways work, referring requests for information to the Department of Community Health. A contract signed in 2023 worth approximately $7 million stipulates that Deloitte would “develop first draft of response to media inquiries” on behalf of the Department of Community Health, but that responses “will be submitted by DCH and not Deloitte.” Deloitte’s duties also include drafting talking points for media interviews, including for the governor.

Roberts declined repeated requests for an interview with agency officials. When asked about Deloitte’s marketing and outreach work and whether the firm has met the state’s goals, she described the effort as a “robust, comprehensive awareness and outreach campaign throughout the state” that has generated 1.6 million visitors to the Pathways website since the campaign’s August 2024 launch.

“The state has invested heavily in marketing and outreach to reach Georgians potentially eligible for Pathways,” Roberts said in a written statement.

In 20 years of researching these kinds of programs, I can’t think of another instance like this.

—Joan Alker, executive director for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families

Gov. Brian Kemp has described Pathways as an innovative alternative to expanding Medicaid, something 40 other states have done. By contrast, Georgia’s program covers only the poorest individuals who can prove they are working, studying or volunteering at least 80 hours a month. Congressional Republicans are pointing to similar work requirements as a model in their budget negotiations.

In early 2024, less than a year after Pathways’ launch, however, Georgia legislators — including some of Kemp’s Republican allies — considered ending the experiment and instead expanding Medicaid without any work requirements. Georgia’s uninsured rate was 11.4%, or 1.2 million people, compared to the national average of 8% in 2023, the latest data available, according to KFF, a nonprofit focused on national health issues. State data showed that Pathways enrollment was well under the first-year target of 25,000 published in Georgia’s agreement with the federal government. As of April 25, approximately 7,400 Georgians were enrolled, according to the Department of Community Health.

An independent evaluation team commissioned by the state recommended ways to boost enrollment in a December 2024 report. The evaluators, Public Consulting Group, highlighted North Carolina’s strategy of allowing residents from rural communities and communities of color to help create outreach campaigns for its expanded Medicaid program in 2023. North Carolina Medicaid officials told The Current and ProPublica that they designed their outreach efforts to maximize participation in the new program, with a two-year target of enrolling 600,000 people. They achieved that goal within one year.

Georgia and Deloitte, however, took a different tack. The $10.7 million marketing contract does not lay out specific enrollment goals as a way of measuring the success of Deloitte’s efforts. The purpose of Pathways “is not and has never been to enroll as many Georgians as possible,” according to the state’s application to the federal government to continue the experiment.

The contract budgeted $247,000 to create up to four testimonial videos featuring satisfied Pathways clients; only one can be found on the state Medicaid agency’s YouTube channel, where it has received approximately 350 views since it was posted in January. The state did not respond when asked how many testimonials Deloitte produced.

Few people stopped by the Georgia Pathways booth at the Washington County Health Fair in Sandersville, Georgia, in March. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

Meanwhile, another part of Deloitte’s marketing strategy has also failed to catch wind: Deloitte had sent public relations teams to dozens of community events including farmers markets, a school Christmas pageant and a catfish festival to plug Pathways and encourage applications.

In March, one such team drove two hours from Atlanta to a health fair in Central Georgia’s rural Washington County. At the Pathways booth, the Deloitte team barely looked up from their phones for three hours. Residents largely bypassed the team to chat with locals staffing other kiosks where they could receive diapers, information on subsidized in-home nursing care and blood pressure screenings. Of those who stopped at the Pathways booth, only a handful asked about enrollment.

Other public events were tied to the state’s pursuit of federal permission to extend the Pathways program beyond September, when its original five-year mandate expires. Georgia is once again paying Deloitte to ensure that happens.

The monthslong process, managed by Deloitte, requires opportunities for public comment. A summary of these comments must be submitted with the application, which Deloitte is drafting. Health advocacy organizations say public outreach for this effort, especially to Black Georgians, has been superficial at best.

The only notice for two virtual public meetings appeared on a Department of Community Health web page that was not linked from the agency’s homepage. During both virtual events, health care advocates criticized the program’s inequitable access, but state officials did not engage with the speakers.

A third event — an in-person meeting in the rural 10,000-person town of Cordele — was added later and posted on the same website just one week before it was scheduled to occur. Only about a dozen people, some traveling for more than 80 miles, showed up to the noon meeting on St. Patrick’s Day.

Georgians traveled up to 80 miles to speak at a public meeting about Pathways held by the Georgia Department of Community Health in Cordele in March. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica) The town of Cordele has a population of around 10,000 people. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

The low attendance reflected the meeting’s out-of-the-way location and holiday timing, not a lack of public interest, said attendee Sherrell Byrd, executive director of Sowega Rising, a community advocacy group based in the majority Black town of Albany.

Inside the one-story cinder block building, three state health officials sat along a table at the front of the largely vacant room. One by one, attendees rose to the microphone to complain of technical glitches in the Pathways enrollment process, the lack of customer service and the generational health care inequalities faced by Black Georgians.

Tanisha Corporal, who lives approximately 140 miles away in Atlanta, was the only person to participate virtually. She told the Department of Community Health officials that she had submitted a Pathways application three times over the Deloitte-built digital portal only to have her file disappear. The licensed clinical social worker whose nonprofit job ended in January 2024 said state agencies offered her little enrollment support.

Grant Thomas, deputy commissioner for the Georgia Department of Community Health, sits in the back of the room during a public meeting on the Georgia Pathways program in Cordele. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

The state health officials did not respond to any of the speakers during the meeting. Grant Thomas, Kemp’s former health policy advisor and deputy director of the state Medicaid agency, sat in the back of the room and did not interact with the attendees. Thomas declined to speak on the record.

“There is a lot of disdain for real-life problems of Georgians who look like us,” Byrd said.

Robin Kemp of The Current contributed reporting.

by Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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.

Electric companies in Oregon and Washington are hurtling toward deadlines to stop using power generated by coal, gas and other fuels that contribute to global warming. Yet the states are nowhere near achieving their goals, and the dramatic consequences are already being felt.

During a winter storm in January 2024, for example, the Northwest barely had enough power to meet demand as homeowners cranked up electric heaters and energy prices surged to more than $1,000 per megawatt-hour, or 18 times higher than the usual price. Power lines were so congested that owners of the transmission network made an extra $100 million selling access to the highest bidder.

Multiple utilities were operating in states of emergency during the storm, preparing for rotating power outages.

The storm “highlighted a tipping point and demonstrated how close the region is to a resource adequacy crisis,” the Western Power Pool, a regionwide organization of utilities, wrote in its assessment of the event.

Price spikes like this are one reason customers of major utilities in Oregon are paying 50% more on their power bills than they were in 2019. The number of utility customers disconnected last year for failure to pay soared to 70,000, the highest number on record.

Forecasters predict periods of extreme weather in the Northwest will only bring more trouble in the future: the threat of rolling blackouts within the decade if the region’s current energy trends continue.

Wind, solar and other renewables are the only forms of power that can be added to solve the problem, thanks to Oregon’s and Washington’s green energy mandates. Yet better transmission lines are needed to carry new energy sources in the windy and sunny eastern parts of the region to big cities west of the Cascade Mountain Range.

Experts say adding transmission lines in corridors that currently lack them would also enable utilities to keep power flowing when ice storms or wildfires threaten other parts of the grid.

The biggest owner of these transmission lines, the federal Bonneville Power Administration, has been slow to spend on upgrades — and slow to approve new green projects until upgrades are made.

Bonneville’s parent agency, the Energy Department, declined to make officials available for an interview, but Bonneville answered written questions.

“The potential for blackouts in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly low,” the agency said. “Grid planners and operators will continue to ensure reliability.”

Washington and Oregon lawmakers failed to address the Bonneville bottleneck when they approved clean energy mandates in 2019 and 2021, as ProPublica and OPB reported recently.

Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Portland-area Democrat who was a sponsor of the 2021 legislation, said the failure to prioritize transmission lines wasn’t the only flaw with the legislation. He said the bill failed to provide accountability, having no penalties for when a utility did not reach certain deadlines for acquiring either solar or wind energy. Helm said now, House Bill 2021 is “dead letter law.”

“Senators and representatives like me, we cannot continue to believe our own PR, that we have been successful in promoting a renewable electricity future,” said Helm, a member of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment. “We are not heading in that direction, and we’re going to have to take action to change that or nothing will happen.”

Some lawmakers tried to play catch-up this year. Legislators in each state drew up plans for state transmission authorities that could finance improvements independent of utilities and Bonneville. Those efforts failed.

“Oregon desperately needs to take some leadership here,” said Nicole Hughes, executive director of the group Renewable Northwest, which advocates for weaning the region off of fossil fuels.

The Northwest’s situation is only expected to get worse. The region’s electrical demand is forecast to double over the next 20 years, in large part because data centers, rewarded with tax breaks in both Oregon and Washington, are driving an increase in power use the region hasn’t experienced since the early 1980s.

Abandoning Oregon’s and Washington’s renewable energy laws wouldn’t help, Oregon’s Citizens’ Utility Board says, because new fossil fuel power plants would cost ratepayers more than wind or solar. Those plants would still have to contend with transmission lines that have no room for their power.

The region’s utilities, meanwhile, say they’d like to add 29,000 megawatts of generating capacity over the next 10 years — an unprecedented addition that would be roughly equivalent to all the electricity that the Northwest currently consumes at any given time. The projects on their to-do list are powered entirely by renewable energy.

Yet the utilities added only a little over half the power to their systems that they planned for last year. In fact, of the 469 projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid in the past decade, the only one to win the agency’s approval was in 2022. Growth in green energy in 2024 came from projects that began seeking a connection to Bonneville’s grid prior to 2015 or that connected to smaller transmission networks owned by private utilities.

If the utilities continue to fall as short of their goals as they did in 2024, then projections from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council suggest residents will spend the equivalent of nearly a month annually under the threat of brownouts — the inability to power all the circuits in a household — or blackouts.

“In the next few years, we may start having to make some tough choices about the availability of electricity,” Hughes said.

Hughes has spent 20 years in the renewables industry.

For now, she said, her family decided to buy a gas generator for times when their house loses power.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Time and again, the U.S. Department of Education has been the last resort for parents who say the state of Idaho has failed to educate their children. The federal agency in 2023 ordered Idaho to stop blocking some students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, from special education. That same year, it flagged that the state’s own reviews of districts and charters obscured the fact that just 20% were fully complying with the federal disability law. Last year, it told the state it must end long delays in services for infants and toddlers with disabilities, which could include speech or physical therapy.

Now President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the department.

Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction Debbie Critchfield has celebrated the proposal. She insisted that the move would not change the requirement that states provide special education to students who need it. That would take an act of Congress.

But parents and advocates for students with disabilities say they are worried that no one will effectively ensure schools follow special education law.

“Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families,” said Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs, who retired last year after decades at the department.

Former federal Education Department employees who worked on special education monitoring said oversight measures would likely be hampered by the layoffs, which included attorneys who worked with the special education office to provide state monitoring reports.

Gregg Corr, a former division director with that office, said that without the group of attorneys who were focused on enforcing special education law, it will be “really difficult for staff to finalize and issue these reports to states.” He added there may also be a reluctance to take on more complicated issues without running them by attorneys.

“What might have been, you know, inconsistent with the legal requirements six months ago may be fine now — it just depends on how it’s interpreted,” Wexler said.

Before Federal Law, Millions Denied Services

For parents who have been fighting for services for years, the federal oversight has been critical.

After Ashley Brittain, an attorney and mom to children with dyslexia, moved to Idaho in 2021, she realized a key problem: Idaho’s criteria for qualifying students with specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dysgraphia was so narrow it disqualified some eligible students from receiving services, she said.

Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families.

—Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs

Together with Robin Zikmund, the founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho who has a son with dyslexia and dysgraphia, Brittain has spent years trying to get the state to acknowledge the disability and provide services to dozens of kids who needed help.

“We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students,” Zikmund previously told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “And it was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Brittain called state officials and told them they were breaking the law. State officials disagreed. No one took action, she said. In 2022, she wrote to the Office of Special Education Programs. In the letter she sent to the federal department, she said the Idaho Department of Education, under former superintendent Sherri Ybarra, was “refusing to entertain any conversations” about changing the way it determined which students were eligible for special education. Ybarra could not be reached for comment.

Before Congress passed what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and created the U.S. Department of Education as an agency under the Cabinet about five years later, Brittain would have been on her own.

At the time, nearly 1.8 million students with disabilities weren’t being served by the public schools, according to estimates. Some states had laws prohibiting students with certain disabilities from attending public schools, according to the federal government’s own history.

The law granted students with disabilities access to a “free appropriate public education” — fitting the individual needs of the student — and gave money to states to fulfill the promise. Now, the law also guarantees infants and toddlers with disabilities access to early interventions, such as physical or speech therapy.

The U.S. Department of Education has since been responsible for making sure states follow the law, providing reviews of state performance, distributing money and offering technical assistance to help states improve learning outcomes for students in special education.

The department conducts an annual review of each state, and a more intensive one that’s supposed to be completed roughly every five years. The annual reviews look at discipline numbers, graduation rates and test scores to identify problems and help states to fix them. A five-year review includes a visit to the state and a look at state policies, student data and annual reports. When states need to take corrective action, the federal special education office monitors that they are making the changes.

Idaho is one of about a dozen states currently being monitored, according to the most recent updates on the federal agency’s website.

We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students. And it was like, ‘What is going on?’

—Robin Zikmund, founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho

Parent complaints can also trigger a review, as was the case with Brittain in Idaho. After Brittain alleged that the state was wrongfully keeping kids with dyslexia and other disabilities from special education, she waited over a year before she got an answer from the Office of Special Education Programs: She was right. Idaho, it turned out, accepted a lower percentage of students with specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, into special education compared to other states — about half the national average, according to the most recent data reported to the U.S. Department of Education from the 2022-2023 school year.

By then, Idaho had a new state superintendent of public instruction, Critchfield, for whom Brittain campaigned. The Office of Special Education Programs told Critchfield in 2023 that the state needed to demonstrate its policies complied with federal law or update them.

In response, the Idaho Department of Education has updated its special education manual, which has since been approved by the Legislature. It has also directed school districts to review every student found ineligible for special education since 2023 to determine if they needed to be reevaluated.

Parents in Idaho celebrated the victory, which could make it easier for some kids to qualify in a state that has one of the lowest percentages of students who receive special education. But they acknowledged the fix wasn’t perfect and left out students who may have been found ineligible for special education before the federal office identified the problem. The state isn’t tracking the number of students who have since qualified due to the change.

Nicole Fuller, a policy manager at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said a case like this, in which some students are being missed, “truly underscores the need for federal oversight, and, of course, holding states accountable for accurately identifying disabilities.”

Federal oversight isn’t perfect. By the time Idaho addressed Brittain’s complaint, the state had been out of compliance since at least 2015. States that fall out of compliance can be at risk of losing federal funding, although that penalty does not appear to have been used in decades.

The federal government has never fulfilled its promise to fund 40% of each state’s special education costs, but Idaho relied on federal funding for about 18% — around $60 million — of its special education budget during the 2022-2023 school year, state officials said. The rest is made up by the state or by local school districts through referendums. A recent report by an independent Idaho state office estimated special education was underfunded by more than $80 million in 2023.

But U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, appointed by Trump in March, has said that closing the department wouldn’t mean “cutting off funds from those who depend on them” but would eliminate the “bureaucracy” and regulations associated with them.

Critchfield, Idaho’s superintendent, said on Idaho-based The Ranch Podcast that teachers involved in special education spend a lot of time filling out paperwork instead of “focusing on how to help that child be successful.” The changes are about “removing the bureaucracy.”

But Critchfield acknowledged that cuts at the federal level could pose challenges if states have to take on more of an oversight role.

“As much as I am a champion of states doing that, the reality is there would be implications for Idaho and our department,” she said in a statement to the Statesman and ProPublica. The state is looking at what it can do to prepare and “where gaps would exist” should more responsibilities fall to the states.

Zikmund, the advocate who praised Critchfield for being responsive to parents and having an “open-door policy,” said that parents could be better off after the changes with good leadership at the state level, but without it, they could face a “train wreck.”

One test will come in June, when the Office of Special Education Programs is expected to release reports telling states how they performed in their annual reviews. The layoffs and restructuring under Trump are making some advocates question if the federal government will truly hold states to account.

by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

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Ronald Carver was skeptical when his investment adviser first tried to sell him on an “ugly houses” investment opportunity eight years ago. But once the Texas retiree heard the details, it seemed like a no-lose situation.

Carver would lend money to Charles Carrier, owner of Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, a high-producing franchise in the HomeVestors of America house-flipping chain known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” advertisements. The business would then use the dollars to purchase properties in which Carver would receive an ownership stake securing his investment and an annual return of 9%, paid in monthly installments.

“Worst case, I would end up with a property worth more than what the loan was,” Carver said of the pitch.

Carver started with a $115,000 loan in 2017. And sure enough, the interest payments arrived each month.

He had worked three decades at a nuclear power plant, and retired without a pension and before he could collect Social Security. He and his wife lived off the investment income.

The deal seemed so good, Carver talked his elderly father into investing, starting with $50,000. As the monthly checks arrived as promised, both men increased their investments. By 2024, Carver estimates they had about $700,000 invested with Carrier.

Then, last fall, the checks stopped. The money Carver and his father had invested was gone.

Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.

As early as 2020, Carrier had begun taking out multiple loans on individual properties — some of which he never owned. In cases reviewed by ProPublica, as many as five notes were recorded against a single property, far exceeding the property’s value. Carrier also failed to properly record many deeds that were supposed to secure the loans, accumulating more debt than he could ever repay while investors remained unaware they had no collateral for their investments.

“It’s incalculable the amount of damage this guy did,” said one investor who lost about $1 million and asked not to be named to avoid embarrassment and not to interfere with a criminal investigation into Carrier’s scheme. “He’s ruined some lives.”

Carrier, who declined an interview request, said in a brief phone conversation that he’s not trying to avoid responsibility for the harm he caused. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,’” he said. “This is a mess created by me.”

Investors also blame HomeVestors. For nearly two decades, Carrier used the company’s carefully cultivated brand as the “largest homebuyer in the United States” to gain investors’ trust. They accuse HomeVestors of failing to provide oversight that could have prevented the fraud, despite claiming to hold its franchises accountable for best business practices. In its answers to their lawsuits, HomeVestors has denied responsibility for Carrier’s actions, claiming its franchises are independently operated, despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from Carrier’s business.

HomeVestors revoked Carrier’s franchise on Oct. 24, about the time interest payments stopped arriving in investors’ accounts. The company said it had received a tip on its ethics hotline — created in 2023, after ProPublica detailed predatory buying practices by multiple franchises. When confronted by HomeVestors, Carrier admitted that “he and his business had entered into debts that they could not pay,” a HomeVestors spokesperson said. The company reported him to the FBI. In May, HomeVestors filed suit against Carrier for trademark infringement and for not indemnifying it against these lawsuits.

“We take all allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously as demonstrated by our decisive action,” the spokesperson said. “It is truly disheartening for us that anyone who lent Mr. Carrier money was misled or harmed by his alleged fraudulent activity.”

Now, Carrier is under investigation by the Department of Justice, according to a recording of an April call between the lead prosecutor and potential victims. (The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.) A judge in one of the many lawsuits against Carrier has deemed allegations of fraudulent loans to be true because Carrier never answered the complaint. And the investors are in a race with one another to recoup even a small amount of what they lost, by either waiting for the DOJ to pay restitution, suing Carrier or trying to foreclose on properties still left in his portfolio.

Just months after learning they had lost all of their investments, and before any restitution could be paid, Carver’s father died.

Five notes for a property on Glen Forest Lane in Dallas given to investors between 2019 and 2023. Two of the notes were not recorded until 2024. (Obtained, collaged and highlighted by ProPublica) A Top-Performing Franchise

In 2005, Carrier opened a HomeVestors franchise in Dallas, where HomeVestors is headquartered. In the early days, records show, he relied on a handful of institutional lenders to finance his house purchases. Soon, the Wharton School of Business MBA who had come to house-flipping following a career at Pepsi and a food service equipment company, started cultivating his wealthy friends for loans.

Carrier didn’t fit any stereotype of a glad-handing huckster with a bad loan to sell. Those who knew him describe him as a serious person, “cordial but very direct.” He always had files in front of him, constantly focusing on his business. It made him seem trustworthy, one investor said.

At HomeVestors, he was held up as a model franchise operator. C&C Residential Properties routinely made the top volume and top closer lists and was even named franchise of the year. Carrier led training sessions at company conferences and described his business as “the largest and most successful HomeVestors franchise in the United States” — a claim that remained on the website for Carrier’s business through early May.

“Chas Carrier, for maybe 15 years, was one of the golden boys at HomeVestors,” said Ben Ahern, who over two decades worked for a HomeVestors franchise and later owned one before leaving the company in 2021. “Internally, it was like, ‘Do whatever Chas Carrier’s doing.’”

It isn’t unusual for HomeVestors franchises to rely on private investors to finance their house-flipping. Banks aren’t typically interested in house-flipping loans, which are often short-term and riskier than a standard mortgage. Because of that risk, investors who lend to house-flippers earn a substantially higher return.

To further minimize their risk and ensure they had a legitimate ownership stake in the house, savvy investors would verify the transaction with an independent title company to research whether there were other liens against the property and then record the deed with the county recorder. But many of Carrier’s investors, after years of consistent payments led them to trust him, let Carrier handle recording the deeds and did not confirm that he’d done so.

As Carrier grew his business, he began relying more on individual investors. ProPublica identified through public records at least 124 people who have lent money to Carrier since 2009. Not all of them have lost money.

Carrier’s search for new investors was aided by Robert Welborn, an investment adviser in Granbury, Texas, southwest of Dallas. Welborn had built a network of clients in Granbury, a city of about 12,000 people on the Brazos River, through church, friendships and referrals. Many of his clients were older and had modest nest eggs, which Welborn said were “well diversified.” He said he built a relationship with Carrier in 2012, after researching his background for about two months. That Carrier was a successful franchisee lent him credibility, Welborn said.

“I never imagined the No. 1 franchisee with a fast-growing franchise company, HomeVestors,” would defraud investors, he said.

At the time, Welborn also solicited new investors with invitations to steak dinners where they would hear his pitch. An investment in Carrier’s business, according to Welborn’s sales material, which also featured the HomeVestors caveman mascot, Ug, was both lucrative and secure. “Your investment is protected,” the sales material assured potential clients.

For loans he sent Carrier’s way, Welborn earned a 2% commission, he said. Welborn had at least two dozen clients who invested with Carrier, most of whom had multiple loans to him, according to a public records search. He would not comment on how many of his clients invested with Carrier.

Many investors were happy for years — in some cases, more than a decade. The interest payments came in like clockwork. A lot of Welborns’ clients relied on the payments for retirement income.

“I was real tickled with it,” said Tom Walls, 85, who said he lost $50,000 of his retirement savings by investing with Carrier.

Some investors noticed small problems — a payment that arrived a few days late or an error on the paperwork to secure the loan. But Carrier always fixed the problems promptly, investors said.

“When you have this 10-year continuous, pleasant and mutually beneficial relationship, you build up a great deal of trust,” said John Moses, who estimates he lost more than $1 million to Carrier.

Looking back, the investors who spoke with ProPublica said they wished they had taken those warning signs more seriously.

(Max Erwin for ProPublica) “He Just Pencil Whipped Those Deeds”

By fall 2024, Carrier’s payments to his lenders stopped. That’s when the house of cards fell.

Carrier had spent that summer scrambling for money. Not only did Carrier have to make loan payments to scores of investors, but he also needed to keep up with the HomeVestors franchise fees and advertising payments. The company requires its franchises to make regular reports on sales and to open their books for audits, to provide financial statements when requested, and to report all assets and liabilities. Any of those reports could have called into question Carrier’s ability to stay solvent. But, according to former franchise owners and employees, HomeVestors’ audits of its franchises are mostly geared toward ensuring they’re paying all their franchise fees, which are based on sales.

Before Carrier’s tangle of fraudulent loans collapsed and was exposed in court, there were signs of trouble.

In 2016, Carrier was fined by the Texas Real Estate Commission for managing properties without a license. The HomeVestors franchise agreement requires owners to follow all laws and regulations, particularly real estate regulations. In 2020, two title insurance companies issued special alerts on Carrier’s business, advising their title officers not to enter into transactions with him without further legal and underwriting review. Carrier hasn’t paid taxes on some of his properties since early 2023, according to court and public records, another violation of his franchise agreement. Despite the apparent violations, HomeVestors didn’t terminate Carrier’s franchise agreement.

“I don’t really think they do have much in place to prevent something like this,” Ahern, the former HomeVestors franchise owner, said of the company. “HomeVestors at the time didn’t seem to have an internal system policing how franchises finance buying properties.”

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company focuses on its franchise customers’ experiences selling their homes and does not “dictate” how franchises raise capital. “The more than 950 franchises of HomeVestors are independent businesses with a wide variety of finance options available to them,” the spokesperson said.

Last spring, Carrier began borrowing against his future receipts in exchange for cash advances with exorbitant fees and annualized interest rates that he later claimed ranged as high as 600%. Between May and October, he did this at least seven times, racking up more than $1.2 million in debt beyond what he owed his investors, exhibits included with court filings show. By fall, he owed more than $75,000 in payments a week, according to the original terms. Seven companies filed suit over the cash-advance agreements, accusing him of default. Carrier has denied the allegations of default and has countersued four of the companies, claiming he was charged unreasonably high interest rates.

The lending scheme appears to have fallen in a gray area for state and federal securities regulations. It’s unclear whether the promissory notes Carrier issued to investors meet the definition of a security, two experts told ProPublica.

In October, Carrier’s investors began to confront him about the missing payments, including Jeff Daly and Steve Needham, two of Carrier’s largest investors who had been lending him money for years. Carrier came clean to Daly, admitting he had been running a lending scheme for “several” years, according to a lawsuit Daly and Needham filed. He told Needham he had taken out multiple loans on individual properties without disclosing them to the investors, according to the lawsuit. The two men claimed in their lawsuit, which resulted in default judgments against Carrier, that combined they had lost $13.5 million to Carrier.

The investor who spoke to ProPublica and asked not to be named said in an interview that Carrier broke down in tears when confronted about losing more than $1 million of the investor’s money. Carrier admitted the loans paid for his operating expenses, not for buying and refurbishing houses, the investor said.

“He just pencil whipped those deeds at the end,” the investor said, explaining that Carrier drew up documents but didn’t record them. Because the deeds were never recorded, the investor had no lien on the properties and therefore no collateral. Some deeds were for houses that Carrier didn’t own or never bought, the investor said. “It was a complete fabrication.”

Welborn’s clients, who typically invested much smaller amounts with Carrier, also learned of the house-flipper’s collapse in the fall, when their payments stopped. Carver said that Welborn called him a couple of days after the October payment was due and said, “Hey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Chas has called me and admitted to fraud.”

Carver said he got in the car and drove to Welborn’s office, where he learned the nightmarish truth that all the money Carrier had taken was gone.

“A Life-Changing Hit”

Investors are deploying a variety of strategies to get their money back — some of which pit bigger investors against smaller ones and early investors against more recent ones. Those who acted quickly are recovering some money through foreclosures and lawsuit settlements. Although Carrier is denying allegations in lawsuits brought by the cash-advance companies, he’s not fighting individual investors who are suing him. Three of their lawsuits have resulted in judgments against Carrier, and he has so far not defended himself against the others.

Welborn said he’s doing his best to help his clients recover their money by providing the necessary paperwork, connecting them with buyers for the houses used as collateral and researching lien histories on the homes. When he first learned of the scheme, Welborn tried to convince his clients to sign on with his lawyer to sue Carrier. The lawyer, Anthony Cuesta, hoped a court would seize Carrier’s assets to help recover the investors’ lost funds. But he quickly learned there were too many investors and not enough equity in the properties to fund the litigation. Now, many of Welborn’s clients are waiting for the FBI and DOJ to act, while wealthier investors are foreclosing on properties and making them ineligible to be used for restitution. Welborn said some of his clients have been paid restitution through a DOJ-appointed real estate agent’s sale of Carrier’s properties, but he declined to provide details.

Carver isn’t optimistic: “We are not going to get a dime.”

At least one investor went after Welborn individually. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, the claim was settled for $130,000. In his response to the SEC disclosure, Welborn denied breaching fiduciary duty to the client and said he “resolved the claim to avoid controversy.” Welborn told ProPublica that $120,000 of the settlement came from the sale of the house used as collateral for the family’s loan and he paid $10,000 for their attorney fees.

Welborn said he’s “devastated” by the loss of his clients’ money. “But every day I drag myself to work with God’s help and spend most of my day helping lenders with their own personal restitution battles,” he said.

Some investors said they will have to go back to work after having retired or are scrambling to find some way to replace their lost income.

Carver wishes he had paid more attention to red flags, like paperwork errors. But the monthly checks were so reliable, he didn’t listen to his gut. Or his wife.

“Every time I added money, my wife would say, ‘Don’t do it,’” Carver said. “My mother, too. She would push on my dad not to add any more. But he liked getting the monthly check.”

Carver’s dad, Larry, believed it was the best performing investment he had ever made. When the money disappeared, Carver went to work trying to recoup some of it. Maybe he could write it off on his taxes, he thought. He wanted to get at least something back for his dad. But Larry was in ill health, and in February, he died.

“My dad passed thinking he lost all of his money to this guy,” Carver said, adding he hopes Carrier “goes to jail for a very long time.”

The investor who asked not to be named said the loss was “a life-changing hit.” He had retired at 53, after sticking it out in a job he hated until his stock options vested. When he finally quit, he put the money into Carrier’s business and lived off of the monthly payments. He may have to go back to work.

“He was an arrogant son of a bitch,” the investor said. “It was gone before he told anyone there was a problem. That’s the unforgivable piece. He squandered it all away. And he had to get backed into a corner before he admitted it was all gone.”

Byard Duncan contributed reporting.

by Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

On Feb. 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive state’s efforts to combat climate change.

As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy.

Oregon, Kotek said, had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades.

“It’s going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis,” the governor said, “and we are not turning back.”

But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power.

What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that.

Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places.

Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.

The agency decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid since 2015, only one has reached approval. Those are longer odds than in any other region of the country, the news organizations found. No major grid operator is as stingy as Bonneville in its approach to financing new transmission lines and substations needed to grow the power supply, according to industry groups that represent power producers.

Efforts to bypass Bonneville didn’t start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the region’s high-voltage network.

Both bills died.

Washington and Oregon Trail the Nation in Renewable Growth

Changes in states’ average annual production of power from wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal between the decades of 2005-2014 and 2015-2024

(Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)

The grid’s severe constraints are hindering the Northwest at a time when it desperately needs more electricity. Oregon and Washington lawmakers lured power-guzzling data centers with tax breaks in recent years, and the industry has helped drive electricity demand sky high.

Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys electricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outages — not to mention dashing the Northwest’s hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change.

“The people who, technically speaking, are in charge of our transmission system are dropping the ball,” said Oregon state Rep. Mark Gamba, a Democrat who sponsored this year’s failed legislation aimed at creating a state grid improvement authority. “We are absolutely looking at rolling blackouts, and we are absolutely looking at not hitting any of our climate targets when it comes to energy production.”

Kotek declined an interview request. Kotek spokesperson Anca Matica said in a statement that the governor is “open to innovative ideas to increase transmission capacity” and labeled it key to achieving the state’s energy goals. She offered no direct response to questions about Oregon’s lack of progress in boosting renewables.

While Washington and Oregon generate a lot of hydro power, their numbers have trended down over the last decade …

Hydroelectric generation by state

… and they’ve added new sources of renewables, such as wind and solar, much more slowly than other states.

Renewable energy net generation by state, excluding hydro

(Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)

Reuven Carlyle, the former state senator who crafted Washington’s 2019 decarbonization bill, said he was “deeply cognizant” of the region’s transmission challenges at the time but that plans to address the problem “simply slipped.”

“It’s certainly nothing to be proud of that it didn’t get resolved,” said Carlyle, who founded a consulting firm for climate-focused investments after leaving the Legislature. “And it’s embarrassing that Oregon and Washington, which are such good-looking states, simply can’t practically build anything in terms of energy.”

In the final months of the Biden administration, Bonneville announced a plan to do some grid upgrades, and agency Administrator John Hairston has said the self-funded federal agency is investing in transmission as much as it can without taking on too much debt.

Bonneville responded to written questions from OPB and ProPublica by citing recent improvements to its process for connecting energy projects and noting that it’s not the only player responsible for growing the grid. The agency added that it “remains committed to its critical mission of supporting the region with affordable, reliable and secure power.”

But Bonneville’s latest plans for the grid are in jeopardy. In addition to suspending all new federal wind permits, the Trump White House has added Bonneville to the long list of agencies cutting federal jobs. Three Bonneville employees, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution, said the cuts will make building out the transmission system even harder.

With four years of Joe Biden’s climate activism in the rearview mirror, the Pacific Northwest appears to have blown its best chance to realize its ambitions for renewable power.

Projects in Limbo

David Brown is a case study in the long and agonizing path to breaking ground on a Northwest solar farm.

The Portland energy developer has been in the renewables business since 2003, and his firm, Obsidian Renewables, has a plan to put a vast array of solar panels on a piece of southern Oregon high desert that’s the size of 3,000 football fields. Brown said it’s expected to produce enough energy for about 110,000 homes.

Obsidian will handle everything from acquiring the land to getting permits approved, then look to sell the solar farm to an investor or utility once it’s ready for construction.

But any power plant, whether fueled by coal, wind or sunshine, has to be wired into the electrical grid: a system of transmission lines and transformers that pools electricity and channels it to customers. While power lines crisscross the nation, power mainly gets used within the region that generates it.

As in most parts of the Northwest, the nearest transmission lines Brown could plug into belong to Bonneville. He asked the agency for permission to connect his solar farm to its system in 2020. He doesn’t expect approval until at least 2028.

“I don’t know a single place in Oregon or Washington where I can connect a new solar project and get transmission. Not one,” he said.

One part of the holdup is that Bonneville needs to finish studying what kind of substation it will need to safely let a big new power source into the grid.

Brown’s 400-megawatt solar farm has been through three such “interconnection” studies so far. The first time, Bonneville estimated Brown’s business would need to pay $23 million to build a substation, which Bonneville would own. The second study bumped the price to $70 million. By the third, Brown said, it was $212 million. He said the agency blamed supply chain and labor issues, in part, for the near-tripling in cost over four years.

David Brown’s company, Obsidian Renewables, has proposed to build one of the state’s largest solar farms but has been waiting for five years for Bonneville Power Administration’s approval. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

There are hundreds of projects like Brown’s: more than 200,000 megawatts worth of renewable energy awaiting Bonneville’s signoff, or enough to power the Northwest nearly 10 times over. One proposed wind farm has been in Bonneville’s queue for more than 16 years.

Among projects 20 megawatts or bigger that were proposed in the past decade, the only one that made it through Bonneville’s waitlist was an add-on to an existing Portland General Electric wind farm that didn’t require any major transmission upgrades. It won approval in 2022.

The Northwest is not the only region with a backlog of projects waiting to plug in. Grid operators across the country have navigated a deluge of new wind, solar and mass-storage battery requests in recent years. Many applicants proved to be merely testing the waters, with nearly 3 in 4 ultimately pulling their plans, according to Joseph Rand, an energy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

But other regions managed to sort out problems better than the Northwest, OPB and ProPublica found.

The news organizations used data from Bonneville and from a national database compiled by researchers at the Berkeley Lab to analyze how many large renewable energy projects waiting for grid connections made it to the finish line.

The data showed that for large projects proposed since 2015, Bonneville’s one approval translates to a success rate of 0.2%, the lowest rate of any region. By contrast, about 10% of new applications for major projects in the Midwest and 28% in Texas made it through.

Bonneville has said one reason for the slow progress is that its waitlist is jammed up with too many “speculative” projects — more dream than financial reality. (There’s no evidence that Bonneville has it worse, though; data shows that the share of developers who back out after seeking Bonneville’s approval, 76%, is close to the national average.)

Renewable advocates and energy developers say Bonneville struggles to hire and retain people to process connection requests because the agency pays less than the private sector. In January, Washington U.S. Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, and Dan Newhouse, a Republican, introduced a bill to make Bonneville’s compensation more competitive, but it hasn’t moved since.

To speed things up, Bonneville has halted new requests for grid connections and changed its approach to reviewing applications. Where specialists used to review proposals one at a time, in the order received, they now plan to prioritize projects that are closest to ready. The agency said the new approach will increase the number of projects that get connected while cutting processing time in half, from an expected 15 years.

Bonneville said in a statement that it is “confident the interconnection reforms we adopted” will prove “sufficient to meet our customers’ needs.”

The changes have not yet helped Brown, who has been awaiting Bonneville’s approval to start work in southern Oregon since 2020. For now, the planned solar project remains in limbo.

“It’s gonna take me years and a couple million dollars to get land use approval,” Brown said, “and why do I want to get land use approval if I don’t know whether or not I have transmission?”

“There’s No Room for Your Project”

The predicament Brown and dozens of other wind and solar developers face is a product of the Northwest’s unusual history with electric power.

Oregon and Washington were blessed with powerful rivers fed by abundant snow and rainfall. Beginning in the New Deal era, the federal government built dozens of hydroelectric dams and a sprawling transmission system to electrify the rural West. The region’s energy supply was cheaper and emitted less carbon than the rest of the nation’s. Bonneville was at the helm.

Even today, hydropower supplies almost 35% of Oregon’s electricity and more than 50% of Washington’s, according to the most recent data available.

But hydroelectric dams are a finite and increasingly shaky power source. Output from existing dams dips whenever droughts sap water from the Columbia River basin. New dams are a nonstarter because dams have decimated the region’s salmon populations.

That leaves wind, solar and battery storage as the most promising places for the Northwest to turn as it approaches self-imposed deadlines to fully wean utilities off electricity that comes from oil, coal or gas.

Bonneville has now become a barrier to accommodating the new power sources, six green energy developers told OPB and ProPublica.

An agency that erected more than 4,800 miles of high-voltage transmission lines from 1960 to 1990 built fewer than 500 miles from 1990 to 2020. In the past five years, it built 1.

Bonneville has the ability to borrow money, at low interest rates, for projects that would enable the grid to carry more power. Congress pushed the agency to do so in 2021, more than doubling Bonneville’s debt limit specifically to finance transmission upgrades.

The chairs of the Oregon and Washington public utility commissions, in a joint 2022 letter, urged Bonneville to spend the money: “The region needs BPA to be a leader in delivering a transmission system that serves the entire region.”

Bonneville, however, has been reluctant to take on debt. It is still paying off billions of dollars in bonds from failed nuclear plants in the 1970s. As recently as 2019, the agency’s finances were so poor that some economists expected it to become insolvent.

Bonneville’s transmission planners, for their part, have told OPB and ProPublica in previous interviews that they want to avoid building expensive transmission lines that no one ends up using.

“We can’t speculate and build a transmission line to nowhere,” Jeff Cook, the agency’s vice president for transmission planning, said in May 2024.

First image: Contractors repair a transformer box in Portland, Oregon. Second image: Solar panels on the Wheatridge farm, the only project Bonneville approved out of the hundreds that applied for a grid connection in the past decade. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

When Bonneville announced in the fall it would tap some of its expanded debt limit to help pay for $5 billion in transmission upgrades over a decade, renewable energy advocates characterized the work as long overdue maintenance that wouldn’t provide the expansion the grid needs.

Most of the work Bonneville announced was “the equivalent of fixing potholes, installing some new round-abouts, doing some repaving,” Spencer Gray, executive director of the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition, said in an email.

A further frustration for wind and solar developers that is unique to Bonneville: The grid operator makes them absorb an outsize share of the cost for projects that help the transmission network accommodate their electricity — and it requires a big deposit up front. That’s true even if the new power lines benefit a wide network and will be around for many generations of customers.

“Lately, the answer to these individual developers has been, ‘There’s no room for your project. If you want to put this project on our system, it’s going to cost you this many millions of dollars to help us upgrade the system,’” said Sarah Edmonds, president of a coalition of utilities known as the Western Power Pool.

The approach, Edmonds said, has had “a chilling effect on the ability of developers to get their projects online.”

Michelle Manary, Bonneville’s vice president of transmission marketing and sales, said requiring up-front deposits keeps existing ratepayers from getting stuck with the tab if a developer backs out and that Bonneville has begun work on a transmission upgrade. She said other regions have more control over who pays these costs because their entire distribution networks are under one operator. Bonneville’s transmission lines are more like highways, from which electric utilities serve as exit ramps that deliver power the last mile to Northwest neighborhoods.

Manary denied that Bonneville’s current way of allocating costs has stifled green energy projects. But she acknowledged the agency needs to reevaluate its policy amid the flood of applications for new projects, and she said that process is underway.

“Texas Is Kicking Our Ass”

The rest of the nation has taken a different approach to bringing green power online — with better outcomes.

In most parts of the country, each grid has a central, independent operator, known as a regional transmission organization, typically run by a board that represents customers, electric utilities and other groups. Bonneville recently rejected joining a California-based energy market that advocates described as the Northwest’s best bet at accelerating the adoption of renewables.

In Texas, which runs its own grid, large renewable projects applying to connect in the past decade took a median of 19 months to get the green light, or nearly two years less than the one project Bonneville approved in that time frame. California and the Midwest were also faster than Bonneville.

Texas doesn’t require project-by-project grid upgrades the way other grid operators do. It essentially tells developers it will connect their project, and then it figures out how to balance the added electricity after the fact.

Texas and other regional grid operators spend billions more than Bonneville on transmission upgrades annually, and they spread the costs across a wider swath of customers than Bonneville does. (Bonneville says the federal agency differs so much from regional operators that they’re not a fair comparison group.)

Texas brought more energy online in the past two years than any other power region. That’s helped the oil and gas powerhouse become the country’s biggest producer of wind and solar energy. Last year alone it added more than enough renewable energy to power the entire Northwest.

“Texas is kicking our ass,” said Gamba, the Oregon state representative.

Oil well pumps and wind turbines in Lamesa, Texas, in February (Julio Cortez/AP)

Northwest lawmakers were told that they’d need to find effective ways of confronting their region’s aging transmission system if they wished to phase out coal and natural gas.

As Washington lawmakers debated a mandate for renewable power in 2019, Nicholas Garcia of the Washington Public Utility Districts Association testified that replacing coal plants with wind and solar would require “more transmission, significantly more transmission.”

In 2021, when Oregon lawmakers debated their own mandate for carbon-free energy, Republicans also raised concerns that the state’s transmission lines were maxed out. It became one more GOP argument against the bill, in addition to saying more should be done to ensure green energy projects were built in Oregon.

Numerous reports — from the Oregon and U.S. departments of energy, for example — supported the assertion that heftier transmission lines were needed.

Bonneville would be key to meeting that need, with one utilities lobbyist calling Bonneville’s grid “the backbone for decarbonization” in testimony to Oregon lawmakers.

But Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, who led the 2021 effort, said in a recent interview she was focused on getting utilities to cut their carbon emissions and that green energy advocates weren’t demanding transmission improvements at the time.

“I was not thinking personally about the role that Bonneville might play in this,” said Marsh, a Democrat representing southern Oregon.

Washington’s Legislature took some action on the need for better transmission: It required the state to study the issue. The resulting 2022 report concluded that the grid was indeed inadequate but led to little in the way of solutions. Instead, lawmakers decided to require utilities to plan out transmission needs 20 years ahead rather than 10, and they created a statewide environmental review in hopes of streamlining the state’s approval process for transmission. It did nothing about impediments posed by Bonneville.

The Legislature was “a little complacent” about relying on Bonneville to upgrade the grid, said Sen. Sharon Shewmake, a freshman lawmaker in 2019 when Washington enacted its energy mandate.

Shewmake and Gamba both introduced legislation this year following states like Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming in creating independent authorities to finance transmission infrastructure. Gamba said he led an 80-person group of interested parties through 18 months of drafting. Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson labeled Shewmake’s bill a priority.

The legislation didn’t make it through either state’s Democrat-controlled legislatures, however.

Brown, the energy developer who’s been awaiting Bonneville’s solar approval since 2020, said the future of the Northwest’s energy dreams looks dim.

“We don’t have a prayer of meeting our heralded, flag-waving renewable energy goals,” he said. “The dialogue will be to blame Trump; it won’t be to blame ourselves for poor planning and extremely low expectations.”

Ellis Simani assisted with data analysis.

by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into whether the General Services Administration has given preferential treatment to a technology startup competing for a lucrative government contract. The startup is backed by some of President Donald Trump’s most influential Silicon Valley allies.

The committee’s action follows reporting by ProPublica last month that revealed the GSA was eyeing New York-based payments company Ramp to remake a massive, $700 billion federal credit card program known as SmartPay. Our reporting showed that senior GSA officials met with Ramp executives at least four times before publicly opening up a SmartPay contract opportunity.

Ethics experts flagged the early meetings as unusual and potentially problematic. Insiders at the GSA told ProPublica that, internally, Ramp was seen as the clear favorite for an initial $25 million pilot contract, which could act as an introduction to larger SmartPay work. The contract for the pilot program hasn’t been awarded yet.

A letter sent Friday to the GSA by Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and reviewed by ProPublica says Democrats on the committee want information about the GSA’s dealings with “Ramp, a company with zero federal contracting experience that is backed by prominent Trump supporters, Trump family connections, and allies of Elon Musk.”

Connolly’s letter demands an array of GSA documents, including “all communications between any GSA official, contractor or subcontractor and any representative of Ramp.”

Ramp did not respond to a request for comment about the investigation.

The GSA did not respond to questions Friday. Asked about Ramp for a previous article, a GSA spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices” and that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”

SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas. The cards typically are used for purchases up to $10,000.

Sources within the GSA say Trump appointees at the agency, including acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian and Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum, the nation’s top procurement officer, came into their roles saying SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste.

Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts call this view inaccurate, saying SmartPay has implemented effective safeguards and monitoring tools.

SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank. The GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend SmartPay with the current contract or to remake the program more fundamentally.

Ramp’s investors include some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures, such as Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who provided crucial early support to Trump and spent millions on Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Other major backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, who sits on Ramp’s board; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk and Trump allies.

In late April, as the GSA received a flurry of business pitches on the SmartPay pilot program, Ramp’s CEO, Eric Glyman, and Rabois appeared at a high-profile conference in Washington that brings together tech entrepreneurs, lawmakers and other senior government officials.

During a livestreamed panel titled “First Principles for a Smarter, Leaner Government,” the pair touted Ramp as a transformational solution for government payments. Later, during an interview, Rabois pointed to the fact that SmartPay issues more charge cards than there are total government employees as evidence of fraud.

But SmartPay experts say this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the program works. Employees are issued separate cards for different types of purchases and often hold multiple cards at once.

Rabois did not respond to questions from ProPublica on Friday. In his response for an earlier story, Rabois said he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.”

In the oversight committee’s letter to the GSA, Connolly writes that “the Trump Administration’s false claims about the SmartPay program may be an attempt to discredit the program to provide a new, Trump-affiliated contractor with a lucrative contract.”

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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.

Two years ago, Texas lawmakers quietly cut millions of dollars in funding for kits intended to help track down missing kids, after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed there was no evidence they had aided law enforcement in finding lost children.

The company that made the kits had used outdated and exaggerated statistics on missing children to bolster their sales and charged for the materials when similar products were available for less or for free.

Now, some Texas legislators are again pushing to spend millions more in taxpayer dollars to purchase such kits, slipping the funding into a 1,000-page budget proposal.

Although the proposal does not designate which company would supply them, a 2021 bill introduced by Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell all but guarantees Texas will contract with the same vendor, the National Child Identification Program. Back then, Campbell made clear that her intent was to enshrine into law a long-standing partnership between the state and NCIDP that goes back more than two decades. Her legislation, signed into law that June, also specified that whenever the state allocated funding for such materials, the Texas Education Agency must purchase identification kits that are “inkless,” a technology that NCIDP has patented.

The Waco-based company is led by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire, who ProPublica and the Tribune found had a history of failed businesses and financial troubles, including millions of dollars in federal tax liens and a ban from conducting certain finance-related business in Connecticut due to his role in an alleged scheme to defraud investors.

Hansmire cultivated relationships with powerful Texas legislators who went on to support his initiatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, championed Campbell’s legislation funding the kits and later told the news organizations that the state should prioritize anything that can speed up the return of a missing child. Campbell told lawmakers in a hearing that the bipartisan measure, which was brought to her by Hansmire and Patrick, was important to “protect our children.”

Patrick, Campbell and Hansmire did not respond to interview requests for this story. Hansmire previously told the newsrooms that his debts and other financial issues had been resolved. He also defended his company’s kits, saying they have helped find multiple missing children, and instructed reporters to ask “any policeman” about the kits’ usefulness. However, none of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that the news organizations reached — including three that Hansmire specifically named — could recall any examples.

Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant and former Louisiana State Police sergeant who oversaw that state’s Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said she has never seen any cases demonstrating that these kits work, including in the last two years since lawmakers discontinued the funding.

“I don’t understand why we’re going back to this,” said Pearson, who spoke with the newsrooms recently and for their previous investigation. “It wasn’t a good idea in 2023 and it’s not a good idea now.”

Despite the lack of evidence, Pearson said companies like NCIDP are able to profit off the kits by marketing them as part of a larger child safety program, a strategy that makes opposing lawmakers look as if they are against protecting children. Texas allocated nearly $6 million for the kits between 2021 and 2023.

Lawmakers did not explain their reasoning when they decided to stop paying for the kits in 2023. Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, who chairs the high chamber’s Finance Committee, told the newsrooms at the time that both the House and the Senate had agreed to remove the funding “after review and consideration.”

During this year’s budgeting process, Democratic state Rep. Armando Martinez proposed adding $2 million to the House’s budget to provide kits to families with children in kindergarten through second grade.

Martinez did not respond to an interview request.

State Rep. Greg Bonnen, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

Bonnen was among the 33 lawmakers who voted against Campbell’s bill that established the child identification kit funding four years ago. The newsrooms attempted to reach a handful of those legislators, but none responded.

Huffman and the Senate have so far chosen not to restore the program’s funding. Huffman declined the newsrooms’ interview requests.

“The entire budget process is ongoing,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “No final decisions have been made on most issues.”

Legislators from the two chambers will continue hashing out the differences between their budget proposals in a joint committee that operates behind closed doors. There’s no guarantee that the funding will make it into the final budget, which lawmakers must pass before the legislative session ends in early June.

Pearson cautioned legislators to question whether the kits are the best use of state funding, given the absence of documented success.

“My advice would be for lawmakers to ask themselves, ‘If this was your personal money and not the taxpayers’, would you spend it on this program?’” Pearson said. “And the answer is going to be no.”