ProPublica

by Doug Bock Clark

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As a member of the Army National Guard in 2019 and 2020, Jefferson Griffin voted in North Carolina elections using military absentee ballots.

Now, as he seeks to overturn the results of a state Supreme Court election that went against him, Griffin is asking that same court to disqualify the votes of around 5,500 people who voted in the same manner as he had.

Since Democrat Allison Riggs won reelection to the state’s highest court last year by 734 votes, Griffin, now a Republican judge on the state’s Court of Appeals, has repeatedly tried to nullify her victory. Last week, the Republican majority on the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked the certification of Riggs’ win after Griffin filed a legal petition arguing that the election should be awarded to him.

In a briefing, Griffin’s lawyers argued that ballots cast by overseas and military voters should not be counted if they did not also provide photo identification, such as a photocopy of a driver’s license. His position contradicts that of the state election board, which had issued a rule before the election stating that such voters did not have to provide an ID.

Griffin’s use of these military ballots, which ProPublica confirmed using publicly available voting data and documents obtained via an open records request, has not been previously reported.

Two of Griffin’s absentee ballot requests came while he was deployed as a captain and a judge advocate general in the North Carolina Army National Guard. They were covered by a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, more commonly known as UOCAVA.

In August 2019, for a municipal election, Griffin requested an absentee ballot, checking a box attesting that he was a “Member of the Uniformed Services or Merchant Marine on active duty and currently absent from county of residence.” Griffin listed his address as Fort Bliss, Texas, and the North Carolina Army National Guard’s 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team.

In January 2020, Griffin made a similar absentee ballot request for the March 2020 primary election, again checking a box that he was “on active duty in the Uniformed Services.”

At that time, North Carolina did not have a law in force requiring photo ID to be provided for in-person or absentee voters. (Though passed in 2018, the law did not take effect until late 2023.)

ProPublica sent Griffin a list of detailed questions, to which he replied: “I am not allowed to comment on pending litigation. It would be a violation of our NC Code of Judicial Conduct for me to do so.”

Embry Owen, the campaign manager for Riggs, criticized Griffin’s stance in the litigation. “Active-duty members of the military who are serving our country overseas count on their rights under UOCAVA to vote and make their voice heard. The same is true for members of the foreign service and missionaries in the field,” Owen said. “Any attempt to silence these voters is a shame on North Carolina’s democracy.”

As part of his legal fight, Griffin is challenging several categories of ballots, including over 60,000 that are missing driver’s license or Social Security data. But his theory that such information is necessary to legally vote has been repeatedly dismissed by the state election board, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump and even a right-wing activist who originally pushed it. In a virtual meeting, the activist called it “voter suppression” and said he was “100%” certain it would fail in court, as ProPublica has reported.

However, the issue of the 5,500 UOCAVA ballots has become increasingly important because Griffin has prioritized them in his latest legal briefing, asking the state Supreme Court to consider them first and, if nullifying those votes proves determinative, hand the election to him.

“In the Supreme Court contest, 5,509 such ballots were unlawfully cast,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote in their brief. “Judge Griffin anticipates that, if these unlawful ballots are excluded, he will win the election.”

Griffin is only trying to disqualify UOCAVA ballots in heavily Democratic counties, ignoring ballots from Republican areas, a ProPublica review of the contested ballots found. A data analysis by independent journalist Bryan Anderson found that Democratic ballots were disproportionately targeted, with Democrats being almost five times as likely as Republicans to have their ballots questioned by Griffin, though there are roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans in North Carolina.

“Judge Griffin’s targeting of military and overseas voters from four heavily Democratic counties lays plain his goal: toss votes to retroactively win an election he already lost,” Owen said.

Griffin’s lawyers have argued to the state Supreme Court that since North Carolina law requires in-person voters to show a photo ID, UOCAVA voters should have to as well, such as by providing a picture of their driver’s license.

However, the state board of elections has repeatedly ruled that UOCAVA voters are not required to do so. When striking down Griffin’s challenges to the election results in December, the bipartisan panel unanimously rejected Griffin’s assertion that UOCAVA ballots submitted without photo IDs were unlawful, though it split along partisan lines for other challenges he made.

“We are not at liberty to change the election rules as they are established,” said Stacy Eggers IV, a Republican member of the board, when voting to reject Griffin’s challenges. “We have previously adopted a rule that says military and overseas voters are not required to show a voter ID” and “unless a court says otherwise, I’d find that we’re bound by that rule.”

Griffin has gone to extraordinary lengths to have this matter heard by the state Supreme Court, which has a Republican majority, filing his petition directly to the high court instead of working through lower courts first, as is the standard process laid out in state law. ProPublica has reported that the court’s Republican chief justice, Paul Newby, has been described by Griffin as a “good friend and mentor,” and most of the spouses of the Republican justices have donated to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns.

UOCAVA ballots are the primary method of voting for American service members stationed away from home and for other Americans living overseas. Voters request an absentee ballot by submitting the Federal Post Card Application to their election office, after which it checks their eligibility and provides them the ballot, which the voter then mails in either electronically or physically. Around 2.8 million Americans eligible to vote live overseas, and tens of thousands of them vote using this method, including thousands of North Carolinians.

Whether these ballots will count in the Griffin-Riggs race is currently being considered in parallel legal proceedings at the North Carolina Supreme Court and 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The state board and Riggs’ campaign have argued that the matter should be decided in federal court, as the issue pertains to federal law. Briefings and oral arguments are scheduled in both through the remainder of the month. Until the election is decided in court, Riggs will continue to hold her seat. It is the last unresolved election in the nation from 2024.

Claude Murray, a member of Common Defense, a veterans group that has had the ballots of some of its North Carolina members challenged, criticized Griffin’s actions. “The right to vote is something Americans often take for granted, but as veterans we know how precious it truly is. Judge Griffin knows this too and is choosing a different path,” Murray said. “It is shameful that he is now seeking to invalidate thousands of votes — including military members and their families — simply because he lost an election.”

A voting rights advocate has compiled a list of challenged ballots in this race; you can check whether your vote is among them here. If it is, reporter Doug Bock Clark is interested in hearing your story. Email him at doug.clark@propublica.org and briefly describe your experience and why you believe you were challenged. Also, please reach out if you have any information about the North Carolina Supreme Court or state court system that you think we should know. Clark can be reached securely via phone or on Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns often remain largely divided by race, especially those with larger Black communities. You’ll often hear people describe railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks, Black people on the other. That’s true. But I’ve often seen a different dividing line, a more impenetrable one. This one runs between schools: private and public ones.

While reporting in many of these small towns, I saw that Black children typically attend the local public schools while white kids head to private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregation academies” because they opened for white children while the federal courts were forcing districts across the South to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies still operate, and they continue to divide their communities.

When children don’t go to school together, they don’t interact much with peers of another race. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop or at PTA meetings or on the sidelines of football games. Communities can remain almost as divided as they were before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional — 70 years ago.

I spent much of 2024 digging into “segregation academies” with my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon. Early on, we set out to compile a master list of segregation academies that are still operating, which we planned to use as a foundation for our reporting.

It’s difficult, impossible even, to identify these academies or even to understand local school segregation more broadly without knowing the racial makeup of each private school’s enrollment over time. And private schools aren’t always willing to hand over that information. Nor do they have to. But while putting together our list of segregation academies, we came across something incredibly useful — a 30-year trove of data kept by the U.S. Department of Education that lays out the story of racial segregation, school by school, across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of most private schools’ enrollments every other year since the early 1990s.

Outside of a handful of education researchers, the average person doesn’t know this data exists. Nor is most of it kept in an accessible format. Parents would need a high level of data literacy to use it to better understand education trends or to make their own school decisions.

ProPublica decided to create a Private School Demographics database, which we launched this week, that anyone, anywhere can use to look up a school and view the years of data we were relying on for our reporting.

The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregation academies still operate — and where. We wanted to focus only on those that continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not the ones whose student bodies had come to reflect their local areas.

We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has demographic data about the students at most private schools in the country on its website. (Schools voluntarily reported their information to the center.) This was helpful, but it provided the racial breakdown of kids at each school only from the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available.

We wanted to go back in time to see how the demographics of these schools have — or have not — changed over the years.

It turned out that this NCES data comes from something called the Private School Universe Survey, the dataset we came to rely on. It was practically hiding in plain sight.

While the most recent survey results are easily available on the NCES website, the rest are in formats that require experts to clean and organize into something usable. Luckily, we have those experts on our staff. Our colleagues Sergio Hernández and Nat Lash began digging into the older datasets, turning them into a searchable format. Then they compared each private school’s demographics to those of the public school district in which it is located.

This pointed us to illuminating stories about the effects of segregation academies in communities that weren’t on anyone’s radar, certainly not mine. In fact, the data could tell stories about myriad places all over the country where private schools educate millions of the nation’s children.

I used the database to point me to the segregation academies having the most dividing effects on their local communities. That led me first to a county in the rural shadow of Selma, Alabama, one of the most pivotal points on the Civil Rights movement’s map.

That community was 45 minutes to the south in Wilcox County, where I found people starkly divided by race, as they had been since the days when plantation operators hauled enslaved workers to the region to grow cotton. While Wilcox Academy was 98% white, the local county public schools were 98% Black. Local residents were dividing their scarce resources to operate two shrinking school systems, one private and one public — to the detriment of pretty much everyone there.

Wilcox Academy’s demographic breakdown as shown through ProPublica’s Private School Demographics database

The story of Wilcox County formed the backbone of the first story in our segregation academy series.

Our database also steered me toward the last story in our series, this one based in Mississippi’s Amite County, where we found segregation academies that had some of the most profoundly dividing effects yet. One of them had never reported enrolling more than a single Black student at a time. The other had just hit an all-time high — 3.5% Black enrollment in a county where almost 40% of residents are Black.

Perhaps the most telling detail didn’t come from the data or our master list. I found it at a Friday night football game. One night while I was in Amite, the public high school played a home game — and so did the nearby academy. While the public high school played, its stands full of Black families, I interviewed a Black man who had graduated from the public high school and coached its football team.

As halftime neared, he and I decided to head over to the private school, a segregation academy just over the tree line. Over all his years living and working in this community, he had never stepped foot on the campus. Almost everyone there — people from this very small community — was white. But he recognized only a few of them.

As we walked toward the stands, he described feeling a million eyes on him. Nobody was unfriendly. But this threshold felt far more impenetrable than any railroad tracks I had ever encountered.

by Renee Dudley

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On Thursday, in his final week in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order intended to strengthen the nation’s cyber defenses, in part by requiring software providers like Microsoft to provide proof that they meet certain security standards before they can sell their products to the federal government.

The action follows an onslaught of cyberattacks in recent years in which hackers linked to Russia, China and other adversaries have exploited software vulnerabilities to steal sensitive documents from federal agencies.

In demanding more accountability from software makers, Biden pointed to instances in which contractors “commit to following cybersecurity practices, yet do not fix well-known exploitable vulnerabilities in their software, which puts the Government at risk of compromise.”

In June, ProPublica reported on such a case involving Microsoft, the largest IT vendor to the federal government. In the so-called SolarWinds attack, which was discovered shortly before Biden took office, Russian state-sponsored hackers exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and other agencies. ProPublica found that, for years, Microsoft leaders ignored warnings about the flaw from one of their own engineers because they feared that publicly acknowledging it would alienate the federal government and cause the company to lose ground to competitors.

That profit-over-security culture was driven in large part by the rush to gain ground in the multibillion-dollar cloud computing market, the news organization reported. One former Microsoft supervisor described the attitude as, “Do whatever it frickin’ takes to win because you have to win.”

Microsoft has defended its decision not to address the flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the company’s assessment at the time involved “multiple reviews” and that it considers several factors when making security decisions, including “potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations.” But in the months and years following the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft’s security lapses contributed to other attacks on the government, including one in 2023 in which hackers connected to the Chinese government gained access to top U.S. officials’ emails. The federal Cyber Safety Review Board later found that the company had deprioritized security investments and risk management, resulting in a “cascade of … avoidable errors.”

Microsoft has pledged to put security “above all else.”

To be sure, Microsoft is not the only company whose products have provided hackers entree to government networks. Russian hackers in the SolarWinds attack gained access to victim networks through tainted software updates provided by the Texas-based SolarWinds company before exploiting the flawed Microsoft product.

To help prevent future hacks, the government wants IT companies to provide proof that they use “secure software development practices to reduce the number and severity of vulnerabilities” in their products, according to the order. In addition, the government “needs to adopt more rigorous third-party risk management practices” to verify the use of such practices, Biden said. He asked for changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the rules for government contracting, to implement his recommendations. If fully enacted, violators of the new requirements could be referred to the attorney general for legal action.

Biden also said that strengthening the security of federal “identity management systems” was “especially critical” to improving the nation’s cybersecurity. Indeed, the Microsoft product that was the focus of ProPublica’s June article was a so-called “identity” product that allowed users to access nearly every program used at work with a single logon. By exploiting the weakness in the identity product during the SolarWinds attack, the Russian hackers were able to swiftly vacuum up emails from victim networks.

In November, ProPublica reported that Microsoft capitalized on SolarWinds in the wake of the attack, offering federal agencies free trials of its cybersecurity products. The move effectively locked those agencies in to more expensive software licenses and vastly expanded Microsoft’s footprint across the federal government. The company told ProPublica that its offer was a direct response to “an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies.” In his executive order, Biden addressed the fallout of that 2021 request, directing the federal government to mitigate the risks presented by the “concentration of IT vendors and services,” a veiled reference to Washington’s increased dependence on Microsoft, which some lawmakers have referred to as a “cybersecurity monoculture.”

Though the order marks a firmer stance with the technology companies supplying the government, enforcement will fall to the Trump administration. It’s unclear whether the incoming president will see the changes in the executive order through. President-elect Donald Trump has emphasized deregulation even as he has indicated that his administration will take a tough stance on China, one of the nation’s top cyber adversaries.

Neither Microsoft nor the Trump transition team responded to requests for comment on the order.

Thursday’s executive order was the latest in a series of regulatory efforts impacting Microsoft in the waning days of the Biden administration. Last month, ProPublica reported that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company in a probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws. FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors, and one key area of interest is how the company packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services.

This so-called bundling was the subject of ProPublica’s November investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to box competitors out of lucrative federal contracts. The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told ProPublica.

Microsoft has declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation but told the news organization last month that the FTC’s recent demand for information is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.”

The commission’s new leadership, chosen by Trump, will decide the future of that investigation.

by Ziva Branstetter and Cassandra Jaramillo

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In advance of this year’s state legislative sessions, lawmakers are filing more than a dozen bills to expand abortion access in at least seven states, and a separate bill introduced in Texas seeks to examine the impact that the state’s abortion ban has had on maternal outcomes.

Some were filed in direct response to ProPublica’s reporting on the fatal consequences of such laws. Others were submitted for a second or third year in a row, but with new optimism that they will gain traction this time.

The difference now is the unavoidable reality: Multiple women, in multiple states with abortion bans, have died after they couldn’t get lifesaving care.

They all needed a procedure used to empty the uterus, either dilation and curettage or its second-trimester equivalent. Both are used for abortions, but they are also standard medical care for miscarriages, helping patients avoid complications like hemorrhage and sepsis. But ProPublica found that doctors, facing prison time if they violate state abortion restrictions, are hesitating to provide the procedures.

Three miscarrying Texas women, mourning the loss of their pregnancies, died without getting a procedure; one was a teenager. Two women in Georgia suffered complications after at-home abortions; one was afraid to seek care and the other died of sepsis after doctors did not provide a D&C for 20 hours.

Florida state Sen. Tina Polsky said the bill she filed Thursday was “100%” inspired by ProPublica’s reporting. It expands exceptions to the state’s abortion ban to make it easier for doctors and hospitals to treat patients having complications. “We’ve had lives lost in Texas and Georgia, and we don’t need to follow suit,” the Democrat said. “It’s a matter of time before it happens in Florida.”

Texas state Rep. Donna Howard, who is pushing to expand the list of medical conditions that would fall under her state’s exceptions, said she’s had encouraging conversations with her Republican colleagues about her bill. The revelations that women died after they did not receive critical care has "moved the needle here in Texas," Howard said, leading to more bipartisan support for change.

Republican lawmakers in other states told ProPublica they are similarly motivated.

Among them is Kentucky state Rep. Jim Gooch Jr., a Baptist great-grandfather who is trying for the second time to expand circumstances in which doctors can perform abortions, including for incomplete miscarriages and fatal fetal anomalies. He thinks the bill might get a better reception now that his colleagues know that women have lost their lives. “We don’t want that in Kentucky,” he said. “I would hope that my colleagues would agree.”

He said doctors need more clearly defined exceptions to allow them to do their jobs without fear. “They need to have some clarity and not be worried about being charged with some type of crime or malpractice.”

After a judge in North Dakota overturned the state’s total abortion ban, Republican state Rep. Eric James Murphy acted quickly to stave off any similar bans, drafting a bill that would allow abortions for any reason up to the 16th week and then up through about 26 weeks if doctors deem them medically necessary.

“We need other states to understand that there’s an approach that doesn’t have to be so controversial,” said Murphy, who is also an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “What if we get the discussion going and we get people to know that there are rational Republicans out there? Maybe others will come along.”

Under state rules, North Dakota lawmakers are required to give his bill a full hearing, he said, and he plans to introduce ProPublica’s stories as evidence. “Will it make it easier? I sure hope so,” he said. “The Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, I sure hope so.”

So far, efforts to expand abortion access in more than a dozen states where bans were in effect have faced stiff opposition, and lawmakers introducing the bills said they don’t expect that to change. And some lawmakers, advocates and medical experts argue that even if exceptions are in place, doctors and hospitals will remain skittish about intervening.

As ProPublica reported, women died even in states whose bans allowed abortions to save the “life of the mother.” Doctors told ProPublica that because the laws’ language is often vague and not rooted in real-life medical scenarios, their colleagues are hesitating to act until patients are on the brink of death.

Experts also say it is essential to examine maternal deaths in states with bans to understand exactly how the laws are interfering with critical care. Yet Texas law forbids its state maternal mortality review committee from looking into the deaths of patients who received an abortive procedure or medication, even in cases of miscarriage. Under these restrictions, the circumstances surrounding two of the Texas deaths ProPublica documented will never be reviewed.

“I think that creates a problem for us if we don’t know what the hell is happening,” said Texas state Sen. José Menéndez.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting, the Democrat filed a bill that lifts the restrictions and directs the state committee to study deaths related to abortion access, including miscarriages. “Some of my colleagues have said that the only reason these women died was because of poor practice of medicine or medical malpractice,” he said. “Then what’s the harm in doing the research … into what actually happened?”

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett agreed. The Texas Democrat and three other members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on Dec. 19 sent a letter to Texas state officials demanding a briefing on the decision not to review deaths that occurred in 2022 and 2023.

Crockett said the state has not responded to the letter, sent to Texas Public Health Commissioner Jennifer Shuford.

“If you feel that your policies are right on the money, then show us the money, show us the goods,” she said. “This should be a wakeup call to Texans, and Texans should demand more. If you believe that these policies are good, then you should want to see the numbers too.”

Doctors are starting to hear about heightened concerns in conversations at their hospitals.

Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas OB-GYN, said her hospital recently convened a meeting with lawyers, administrators and various specialists that focused on “how to keep our pregnant patients safe in our hospital system and how to keep our doctors safe.” They discussed creating additional guidance for doctors.

Dennard, who noted she is speaking on her own behalf, said she is getting more in-depth questions from her patients. “We used to talk about vitamins and certain medications to get off of and vaccines to get,” she said. “Now we do all that and there’s a whole additional conversation about pregnancy in Texas, and we just talk about, ‘What’s the safest way we can do this?’”

In addition to being a doctor, Dennard was one of 20 women who joined a lawsuit against the state after they were denied abortions for miscarriages and high-risk pregnancy complications. When she learned her fetus had anencephaly — a condition in which the brain and skull do not fully develop — she had to travel out of state for an abortion. (The lawsuit asked state courts to clarify the law’s exceptions, but the state Supreme Court refused.)

Dennard said stories like ProPublica’s have crystallized a new level of awareness for patients there: “If you have the capacity to be pregnant, then you could easily be one of these women.”

Mariam Elba contributed research and Kavitha Surana contributed reporting.

by Vianna Davila, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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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.

When President Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom last spring to face a slew of criminal charges, he was joined by a rotating cadre of lawyers, campaign aides, his family — and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton had traveled to be with Trump for what he described on social media as a “sham of a trial” and a “travesty of justice.” Trump was facing 34 counts of falsifying records in the case, which focused on hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from disclosing their sexual relationship.

“It’s just sad that we’re at this place in our country where the left uses the court system not to promote justice, not to enforce the rule of law, but to try to take out political opponents, and that’s exactly what they’re doing to him,” Paxton said on a conservative podcast at the time.

“They’ve done it to me.”

A year earlier, the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Paxton over allegations, made by senior officials in his office, that he had misused his position to help a political donor. Trump was not physically by Paxton’s side but weighed in repeatedly on social media, calling the process unfair and warning lawmakers that they would have to contend with him if they persisted.

When the Texas Senate in September 2023 acquitted Paxton of the impeachment charges against him, Trump claimed credit. “Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down at the hands of Democrats and some Republicans …” Trump posted on the social media platform he founded.

The acquittal, however, did not wholly absolve Paxton of the allegations brought by his former employees. The FBI has been investigating the same accusations since at least November 2020. And come Monday, when Trump is inaugurated for his second term, that investigation will be in the hands of his Department of Justice.

Paxton and Trump have forged a friendship over the years, one that has been cemented in their shared political and legal struggles and their willingness to come to each other’s aid at times of upheaval. Both have been the subjects of federal investigations, have been impeached by lawmakers and have faced lawsuits related to questions about their conduct.

“If there’s one thing both guys share in common, people have been after them for a while in a big way. They’ve been under the gun. They’ve shared duress in a political setting,” said Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist and Paxton friend. “They’ve both been through the wringer, if you will. And I think there’s a kinship there.”

Neither Trump nor Paxton responded to requests for comment or to written questions. Both men have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that they have been the targets of witch hunts by their political enemies, including fellow Republicans.

Their relationship is so cozy that Trump said he’d consider naming Paxton as his U.S. attorney general pick. He ultimately chose another political ally, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Although Trump did not select Paxton, the two men will get yet another opportunity to have each other’s backs now that he has returned to office, both when it comes to the federal investigation into Paxton and pushing forward the president’s agenda.

Before and during Trump’s first term, Paxton filed multiple lawsuits challenging policies passed under former President Barack Obama. He then aggressively pursued cases against President Joe Biden’s administration after Trump lost reelection. Such lawsuits included efforts to stop vaccine mandates, to expedite the deportation of migrants and to block federal protections for transgender workers.

Trump has supported Paxton over and over, not only as the Texas politician sought reelection but also as he faced various political and legal scandals. The president-elect’s promises to exert more control over the Justice Department, which has traditionally operated with greater independence from the White House, could mark an end to the long-running investigation into Paxton, several attorneys said.

Justice Department and FBI officials declined to comment on the story and the status of the investigation, but as recently as August, a former attorney general staffer testified before a grand jury about the case, Bloomberg Law reported. Paxton also referenced the FBI’s four-year investigation of him during a speech in late December without mentioning any resolution on the case. The fact that Paxton hasn’t been indicted could signal that investigators don’t have a smoking gun, one political science professor told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, but a former federal prosecutor said cases can take years and still result in charges being filed.

“As far as I’m aware, this is pretty unprecedented, this level of alliance and association between those two figures,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Paxton walks onstage at a rally in Robstown, Texas, on Oct. 22, 2022. (Go Nakamura/REUTERS) “Don’t Count Me Out”

In 2020, when then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr found no evidence to support Trump’s claims that voter fraud turned the election results in his opponent’s favor, Paxton emerged to take up the argument.

He became the first state attorney general to challenge Biden’s win in court, claiming in a December 2020 lawsuit that the increased use of mail ballots in four battleground states had resulted in voter fraud and cost Trump the election.

Trump eagerly supported the move on social media, writing, “We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, ruling that Texas had no legal interest in how other states conduct their elections. Trump, however, didn’t forget Paxton’s loyalty.

He offered Paxton his full-throated endorsement during the 2022 primary race for attorney general against then-Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. His decision to back Paxton, who was under federal criminal investigation at the time and had been indicted on state securities fraud charges, was a major blow to Bush, the grandson and nephew of two former Republican presidents. Bush had endorsed Trump for president even though Trump defeated his father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in the Republican primary and repeatedly disparaged his family.

Trump properties in Florida and New Jersey served as locations for at least two Paxton campaign fundraisers over the course of that campaign. And at a rally in Robstown in South Texas, Trump repeated debunked claims that the election was stolen and said he wished Paxton had been with him at the White House at the time. “He would’ve figured out that voter fraud in two minutes,” Trump said.

While Paxton pursued reelection, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an investigation into how his administration handled thousands of government documents, many of them classified. Paxton led 10 other Republican state attorneys general in intervening in court on Trump’s behalf, arguing in a legal filing that the Biden administration could not be trusted to act properly in the case.

Paxton won another term in office in November 2022, but the celebration was short-lived. Six months later, the Texas House of Representatives considered impeaching him over misconduct allegations including bribery, abuse of office and obstruction related to his dealings with Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor. Paxton has denied any wrongdoing.

Hours before the House voted on whether to impeach Paxton, Trump weighed in on social media.

“I love Texas, won it twice in landslides, and watched as many other friends, including Ken Paxton, came along with me,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Hopefully Republicans in the Texas House will agree that this is a very unfair process that should not be allowed to happen or proceed — I will fight you if it does. It is the Radical Left Democrats, RINOS, and Criminals that never stop. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Free Ken Paxton, let them wait for the next election!”

Despite Trump’s threat, the House voted 121-23 in May 2023 to impeach Paxton. The Senate then held a trial that September to determine Paxton’s fate. “Who would replace Paxton, one of the TOUGHEST & BEST Attorney Generals in the Country?” Trump posted before the Senate acquitted Paxton.

Trump is among the few people who understand what it’s like to be under the kind of scrutiny Paxton has faced and how to survive it, Miller said.

“There is that quality [they share] of, ‘Don’t count me out,’” he said. “‘If you’re counting me out, you’re making a mistake.’”

On Monday, Trump will become the first president also to be a convicted felon. A jury found Trump guilty on all counts of falsifying records in the hush money case. A judge, however, ruled that he will not serve jail time in light of his election to the nation’s highest office.

Trump has repeatedly decried the case, as well as the Justice Department’s investigations that resulted in him being charged in June 2023 with withholding classified documents and later with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election by knowingly pushing lies that the race was stolen. Jack Smith, the special counsel who led the DOJ investigations, dropped both cases after Trump’s reelection. A Justice Department policy forbids prosecutions against sitting presidents, but in a DOJ report about the 2020 election released days before the inauguration, Smith asserted that his investigators had enough evidence to convict Trump had the case gone to trial.

Not only have Paxton and Trump supported each other through turmoil that could have affected their political ambitions, they have taken similar tacks against those who have crossed them.

After surviving his impeachment trial in 2023, Paxton promised revenge against Republicans who did not stand by him. He had help from Trump, who last year endorsed a challenger to Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, calling Paxton’s impeachment “fraudulent” and an “absolute embarrassment.” Phelan, who has defended the House’s decision to impeach Paxton, won reelection but resigned from his speaker post.

For his part, Trump has tried a legal strategy that Paxton has employed many times, using consumer protection laws to go after perceived political adversaries. In October, Trump sued CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying the news organization’s edits “misled” the public. Instead of accusing CBS of defamation, which is harder to prove, his lawsuit argues that the media company violated Texas’ consumer protection act, which is supposed to protect people from fraud. The case is ongoing. In moving to dismiss the case, CBS’ attorneys have said the Texas law was designed to safeguard people from deceptive business practices, “not to police editorial decisions made by news organizations with which one disagrees.” (Marc Fuller, one of the CBS attorneys, is representing ProPublica and the Tribune in an unrelated business disparagement case.)

The move indicates a broader, more aggressive approach that the Justice Department may pursue under the Trump administration, said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University, who researches attorneys general.

“It’s a signal to me that, yes, the federal DOJ is going to follow the path of Paxton, and perhaps some other like-minded Republican AGs who have been using their office to also go after perceived enemies,” Nolette said.

Paxton speaks during the AmericaFest 2024 conference, hosted by conservative group Turning Point, in Phoenix on Dec. 21. (Cheney Orr/REUTERS) Cleaning House

On Dec. 21, six weeks after Trump won reelection, Paxton stepped onstage in a Phoenix convention center at the AmericaFest conference, hosted by the conservative organization Turning Point USA.

The event followed Trump’s comeback win. It also represented a triumphant moment for Paxton: He’d not only survived impeachment, but prosecutors agreed earlier in the year to drop long-standing state securities fraud charges against him if he paid about $270,000 in restitution and performed community service.

But Paxton spent much of his 15-minute speech ticking off the grievances about what he claimed had been attacks on him throughout his career, including impeachment by “supposed Republicans” and the FBI case.

He praised Trump’s selection of Bondi to run the DOJ. It was time to clean house in a federal agency that had become focused on “political witch hunts and taking out people that they disagree with,” Paxton said.

Before taking office, Trump threatened to fire and punish those within the Justice Department who were involved in investigations that targeted him. FBI director Christopher Wray, a Republican whom Trump appointed during his first term in office, announced in December that he would resign after the president-elect signaled that he planned to fire him. After facing similar threats, Smith, the special prosecutor who led the DOJ investigations, stepped down this month.

In his speech, Paxton made no mention of the agency’s investigations into Trump, nor did he connect the DOJ to his own case. But a Justice Department that Trump oversees with a heavy-handed approach could benefit the embattled attorney general, several attorneys told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Trump could choose to pardon Paxton before the case is officially concluded. He used pardons during his first presidency, including issuing one to his longtime strategist Steve Bannon and to Charles Kushner, his son-in-law’s father. He’s been vocal about his plans to pardon many of the Jan. 6 rioters on his first day in office.

More concerning, however, is if Trump takes the unusual approach of personally intervening in the federal investigation, something presidents have historically avoided because it is not a political branch of government, said Mike Golden, who directs the Advocacy Program at the University of Texas School of Law.

Any Trump involvement would be more problematic because it would happen behind closed doors, while a pardon is public, Golden said.

“If the president pressures the Department of Justice to drop an investigation, a meritorious investigation against a political ally, that weakens the overall strength of the system of justice in the way a one-off pardon really doesn’t,” Golden said.

Michael McCrum, a former federal prosecutor in Texas who did not work on the Paxton case, said “we’d be fools to think that Mr. Paxton’s relationship with the Trump folks and Mr. Trump personally wouldn’t play some factor in it.”

“I think that the case is going to die on the vine,” McCrum said.

Miller, Paxton’s friend, agreed.

“I would expect his troubles are behind him.”

by Sharon Lerner, photography by Annie Flanagan for ProPublica

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Cynthia Robertson could be forgiven for feeling that the banner was aimed at her. Its white-on-black lettering — “FUCK BIDEN AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM” — hung from the wooden house right across the street from her own.

Hostility toward the outgoing Democratic president is no surprise in Sulphur, Louisiana, a red town in a red state in a country that has handed the White House and Congress to Republicans. Yet the message felt like a poke in the eye at a time when Robertson was seeking funding through Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization could repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area — including her neighbor’s. Not even a fraying tarp, a tar patch or the piece of corrugated metal tacked on the roof could keep the rain from pouring inside.

Donald Trump has vowed to overturn the law that would provide the funding, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has referred to as the “new green scam.”

If he follows through once he assumes office, Trump would be rolling back a law that has disproportionately benefited red areas like Sulphur that make up his base.

Though not a single Republican legislator voted for the law, an outsized portion of its historic $1 trillion in climate and energy provisions has benefited red congressional districts and states that voted for Trump, according to a report by E2, a group tracking the effects of the law. Red districts had the biggest growth in green jobs, the report said. Red states, including Nevada, Wyoming, Kentucky and Georgia, have seen the biggest jumps in clean energy investments, according to an August report from the Clean Investment Monitor, which tracks public and private investments in climate technology. Texas has received $69 billion in clean investments since the law passed, second only to California.

Not all of the money has been spent yet. And several provisions are vulnerable to rollbacks, among them tax credits for home energy improvements and certain alternative fueling sites. Billions hang in the balance, including, to Robertson’s chagrin, more than $100 million for disadvantaged communities, like Sulphur, to combat pollution and better weather the effects of climate change.

An ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church, Robertson, 66, wears her wavy white hair short, cusses freely and greets by name the homeless of Sulphur, a city of some 20,000 people. Miss Cindy, as she’s known in her neighborhood, named her nonprofit organization, Micah 6:8 Mission, after an old testament verse about caring for the poor.

Cynthia Robertson and her neighbor, Nate, at home with her goats in Portie Town. Robertson is seeking funding through President Joe Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization can repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area.

Last summer, she and other community leaders worked around the clock to submit the grant proposal seven weeks in advance of a fall deadline. Among her partners is Build Change, which specializes in creating housing that can withstand natural disasters in the developing world. The organizations have sought more than $19 million for their local improvement plan, which includes shoring up roofs, remediating mold and mildew, providing homes with solar-powered air conditioning and building a community center where residents can find refuge during emergencies.

But in mid-December, an email from the Environmental Protection Agency explained it didn’t have enough time to make a decision on her application before the inauguration.

It will be up to the Trump EPA to determine whether Sulphur and some 2,000 other communities get the grants they applied for.

Now, Robertson said, all she can do is pray that Republicans will see that the investment is in everyone’s best interest, including their own.

As her small staff gathered for a weekly meeting in December, she bowed her head. “Dear Lord,” she said, “if it’s your will, may we get this damn grant, please.”

Average life expectancy in Portie Town is 69, nine years short of the national average. A Storm-Battered Community

Sulphur is near the beating heart of the extremely profitable petrochemical industry. Huge multinational corporations — including Westlake Chemicals, Citgo Petroleum, LyondellBasell and ConocoPhillips — have plants just a few miles from Robertson’s home and the office of her environmental nonprofit. But Portie Town, the crisscross of streets lined with low-slung homes on the north side of Sulphur where she lives, seems to have gained little for its proximity to these engines of wealth.

Named for a widow who moved to the area with her eight children in the early 1900s, Portie Town (pronounced Por-shay) remains a place of struggle. Median annual income is around $40,000 and life expectancy is 69, nine years short of the national average. Climate change has added another layer of challenge. The hurricane risk in Calcasieu, the parish where it is located, is in the top 3% in the country, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which rates the expected annual loss from storms in the area as high and the resiliency as low.

With its shore on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana has always been vulnerable to storms, but the threat has unquestionably worsened in recent years. Climate change has raised temperatures, causing the air and water to warm. Storms intensify as they travel across the warmed oceans, pulling in more water vapor and heat, which makes hurricanes stronger and more intense.

When Hurricane Laura hit in August 2020 — its eye passing directly over Sulphur — it was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the state’s history, killing at least 30 people and knocking out the power in Portie Town for weeks. Many residents couldn’t afford generators or the fuel to run them and went without air conditioners and refrigerators even as the temperature soared above 90 degrees. Shortly after the power was restored, it was knocked out again by Hurricane Delta, which was followed by a deep freeze caused by Winter Storm Uri. The next year, Hurricane Ida tied Laura’s record for the strongest winds measured in Louisiana.

“The storms have been getting closer and closer together, more and more active,” said Jessica McGee, who lives with her adult son in a small, cream-colored house a few blocks from Robertson in Portie Town. The McGees haven’t had gas since Hurricane Laura; they have used electric space heaters and cooked their meals in a microwave oven for the past three years. Boards nailed over their windows before the 2020 storm remain there.

Jessica McGee hasn’t been able to repair damage to her home from Hurricane Laura in 2020.

McGee, who lives on disability benefits, said she has neither the strength nor the money to repair the hurricane damage. “It’s my water, it’s the pipes, it’s the floor…,” she said. “The next one, our roof is going to be gone.”

If Robertson’s nonprofit is awarded the grant it is seeking, McGee’s house may also benefit. She brightens at the thought that government funding could bring her home back from the brink of inhabitability, but remains skeptical of politics.

“I don’t vote,” McGee said, shrugging. “It’s not for me.”

A Political Lightning Rod

The sprawling Inflation Reduction Act had many goals, including funding the Internal Revenue Service and lowering health care costs, but its main aim was to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change through tax credits, customer incentives and grants. Despite its purpose, its authors conspicuously omitted the word “climate” from its name in an effort to get bipartisan support for it.

The benefits of the law were felt widely, spurring clean energy projects in almost 40% of the country’s congressional districts; 19 of the 20 that got the most funding were led by Republicans.

In August, as he was standing on a corn and bean farm next to the deputy administrator of the Biden EPA, Jim Pillen enthused about his state’s grant. Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, called the agency’s $307 million IRA grant “a once-in-a-lifetime, extraordinary opportunity.” In Pocatello, Idaho — a town in a red county that is still recovering from the 2012 Charlotte Fire — “folks are pretty excited” about the planned greenway path that will decrease wildfire risks and allow residents to bike by the river, Hannah Sanger, the city’s science and environment administrator, told me. And in Alaska, where Trump also won handily, the recipients of a grant of more than $47 million to electrify two ports described themselves as “ecstatic” about the money.

Still the law remains a political lightning rod. Republicans in Congress have tried to repeal parts of it dozens of times, and Trump railed against it on the campaign trail. “My plan will terminate the Green New Deal,” Trump told a group assembled at the Economic Club of New York in September. “It actually sets us back, as opposed to moves us forward. And [I will] rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”

Robertson passes the Westlake Chemical plant in Sulphur.

Clay Higgins, the Republican who represents Sulphur in Congress, voted against the IRA, which he attacked as a “monstrosity of a bill” that “wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on Green New Deal subsidies.” Higgins, who receives campaign funds from the oil and gas industry, notes on his website that “fossil fuels are the lifeblood of our modern society.” He did not respond to questions about Robertson’s hope to use IRA money to shore up the houses in his district.

In November, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report that attacked the EPA’s IRA grants as a “green group giveaway” and characterized some of the recipients as “extremist organizations.” The lawmakers criticized funding groups that educate the public about climate change, or “environmental activist organizations that work to influence public and elected officials to adopt their often-extreme views, such as completely eliminating the use of fossil fuels.”

Despite the fiery rhetoric, a full repeal of the law seems unlikely, in part because it would require a majority of the House and Senate to agree on it. In August, 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to preserve the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are already funding projects. And it will be extremely difficult for the new administration to claw back grant money that has already been awarded.

Even if he fails to get the congressional support necessary to repeal the law, Trump could reverse the executive order that grants the authority to implement it. He could also cut short its longer term provisions, some of which were supposed to extend through 2029 and beyond. He can interfere with the funding that now flows through more than 12 federal agencies. And he can put a halt to the two dozen proposed rules that would carry out the law’s goals, according to the Brookings Institution. Congress could also severely undermine the law by targeting the rules that have been issued since Aug. 1 — and can thus be overturned through the Congressional Review Act.

A Looming Decision

Soon after the IRA was signed into law in 2022, Robertson began looking for ways it could benefit Portie Town.

Robertson at home before heading to church. Her charity and several other organizations together received $407,000 in Inflation Reduction Act funds in 2023.

Her charity had already been distributing food, clothing and “hurricane buckets” filled with mosquito repellant, canned ham, batteries and other supplies to locals when it and several other organizations together received $407,000 in IRA funds in 2023. The grant pays for the groups to distribute “evidence-based materials” about pollution, climate change and public health, according to its application. It also paid for two air monitors, which regularly document dangerously elevated levels of particulate matter in the air, pollution that is associated with premature death and breathing problems.

The IRA’s Community Change Grants, designed to provide approximately $2 billion for climate-related projects in disadvantaged communities, offered more direct help.

Robertson despaired on the December day when she learned that the Trump administration, not Biden’s, would be deciding whether Portie Town will get the grant.

“This community needs this so badly,” she said through tears. “Damn it.”

Just that morning, she had visited with Janet Broussard, 82, who lives by herself a few blocks away. The two had stood outside Broussard’s trailer imagining how the grant might improve it. Broussard’s roof had come off more than four years ago during Hurricane Delta. It was replaced, but, within two years, the new one was damaged by a tornado. She had no insurance that would pay to repair the damage and catches the rain in a bucket that she empties after storms.

Broussard has not been able to repair the roof of her trailer that was damaged during a tornado.

But Robertson said that if the grant came through, Micah 6:8 Mission would be able to help fix the roof. “We’ll also be able to take the siding off, insulate, put new siding on, take the windows out, put in double-paned insulating windows,” Robertson had said.

Zealan Hoover, a senior adviser to the EPA administrator who oversaw the IRA grant program, said the agency made a herculean effort and managed to distribute more than 95% of the money. But agency officials didn’t have time to give the proposals that were submitted in the final weeks of the application period the careful reads they deserved, he said, and so they decided to reserve some funds so the next administration can finish the process. “We are going to give those 2,000 applicants who came in at the very end, you know, some hope and chance of being selected,” said Hoover, who pointed out that, under any administration, “the agency’s mission is to protect human health and the environment.”

What it decides will matter to Tony Rodriguez, who hung the “FUCK BIDEN” banner outside his home in the fall. A slight man with a graying beard who goes by Burnout, Rodriguez said he hung the banner to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. He had heard on the news — he can’t remember the exact source — that the president was to blame for children being sex trafficked, repeating a false conspiracy theory, and had sold out our country.

Tony Rodriguez said he hung this banner outside his home to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. (Courtesy of Cynthia Robertson)

Still, he said he would be grateful if Miss Cindy would use some of the money she is hoping to get from the law championed by the outgoing president to stop the rain from coming into his bedroom.

“At least then he’d have done something good,” he said.

by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Ken Schwencke

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

Join us Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. Eastern for a live demonstration of this database’s features.

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.

While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.

In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.

Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.

Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.

How to Use the App

Searching: You can search for private schools or public school districts by name and drill down on results using several filter options.

For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.

For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.

Looking up a private school: On each private school’s page, you’ll find basic information about the school (its name; location; the type of school and its religious affiliation, if any; and what grades it teaches), and we’ve also included a summary and visualization of how the school’s demographics compare to the public school district’s.

There’s also a compilation of the demographic data the school provided to the survey, which you can download for your own analysis:

Exploring a district or state: On district and state pages, you’ll find more general information about private schools in those areas. (Search for districts here, and see links for each state here.)

You can find areas where private schools aren’t out of step demographically with their nearby public schools. In Osceola County, Florida, south of Orlando, both the local public school district and the private schools are mostly Hispanic or Latino.

Both state and district pages include breakdowns of private schools by religious orientation and school type, and a list of all private schools in the state or district. State pages also show a list of all school districts in the state.

District pages include some additional features, such as:

• A searchable map of private schools in the district’s boundaries, color coded by the predominant race of each school’s student body. (Use the lookup tool next to the map to search for schools by name, or click on the “Use Your Current Location” button to zoom in on schools near you. Clicking on a school’s address will fly the map to its location, and clicking on a school’s name will take you to that school’s page.)

• An interactive line chart that shows how public and private school enrollment have changed over time for each race category. Use the dropdown to change race categories and explore trends for different groups.

If you find something notable, we’d love to hear about it. We’d also like to hear your ideas for improving the app, including new features or data you’d like to see. And if you spot something you believe is an error, each page has a button you can use to report that to us.

by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Brandon Roberts

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter, less Black and less Hispanic or Latino than public schools.

With our new Private School Demographics database, we’re enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public schools.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever.

🔎 Look up private schools near you.

by Tony Schick, 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.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it could make hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River safe for endangered salmon by building gigantic mechanical traps and hauling baby fish downstream in tanker trucks. The Corps started pressing forward over objections from fish advocates and power users who said the plan was costly and untested.

That was until this month, when President Joe Biden signed legislation ordering the Corps to put its plans on hold and consider a simpler solution: Stop using the dams for electricity.

The new law, finalized on Jan. 4, follows reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica in 2023 that underscored risks and costs associated with the Corps’ plan. The agency is projected to lose $700 million over 30 years generating hydropower, and a scientific review found that the type of fixes the Corps is proposing would not stop the extinction of threatened salmon.

The mandate says the Corps needs to shelve designs for its fish collectors — essentially massive floating vacuums expected to cost $170 million to $450 million each — until it finishes studying what the river system would look like without hydropower. The Corps must then include that scenario in its long-term designs for the river.

The new direction from Congress has the potential to transform the river that sustains Oregon’s famously lush Willamette Valley. It is a step toward draining the reservoirs behind the dams and bringing water levels closer to those of an undammed river.

“There’s a very real, very viable solution, and we need to proceed with that as soon as possible,” said Kathleen George, a council member for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, which have fished the Willamette for thousands of years. They’ve urged the Corps to return the river closer to its natural flow.

George credited OPB and ProPublica’s reporting, and said she believes that without additional public pressure, the Corps would have continued to stall on already overdue studies.

“Our salmon heritage is literally on the line,” she said.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers biologist Doug Garletts carries an anesthetized Chinook salmon to a loading chute where it will slide into a holding tank before being drained into a tanker and trucked upstream to the other side of Oregon’s Cougar Dam. It’s one of many methods the Corps has tried to keep threatened fish from dying because of hydroelectric dams on the Willamette River system. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

Asked about how the Corps planned to respond to Congress, spokesperson Kerry Solan said in a statement that the agency was still reviewing the bill’s language.

The 13 dams on the Willamette and its tributaries were built for the main purpose of holding back floodwaters in Oregon’s most heavily populated valley, which includes the city of Portland. With high concrete walls, they have no dedicated pathways for migrating salmon.

Emptying the reservoirs to the river channel would let salmon pass much as they did before the dams. It would leave less water for recreational boating and irrigation during periods of normal rain and snow, but it would open up more capacity to hold back water when a large flood comes. And the power industry says that running hydropower turbines on the Willamette dams, unlike the moneymaking hydroelectric dams on the larger Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest, doesn’t make financial sense.

The dams generate less than 1% of the Northwest’s power, enough for about 100,000 homes. But lighting a home with electricity from Willamette dams costs about five times as much as dams on the Northwest’s larger rivers.

Congress asked the Corps in 2020 and 2022 to study the possibility of shutting down its hydroelectric turbines on the Willamette. The agency missed its deadlines for those studies while it proceeded with a 30-year plan for river operations that included hydropower.

Oregon Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat whose district includes much of the Willamette River Valley, said in an emailed statement it was “unacceptable” for the Corps to move ahead without first producing the thorough look at ending hydropower that lawmakers asked for.

“Congress must have the necessary information on-hand to decide the future of hydropower in the Willamette,” Hoyle said.

The bill also requires the Corps to study how it can lessen problems that draining reservoirs might cause downstream.

Because of a 2021 court order to protect endangered salmon, the Corps has tried making the river more free-flowing by draining reservoirs behind two dams each fall. The first time the reservoirs dropped, in 2023, they unleashed masses of mud that had been trapped behind the dams. Rivers turned brown and small cities’ drinking water plants worked around the clock to purify the supply.

Congress wants the Corps to study how to avoid causing those problems downstream. That could include engineering new drinking water systems for cities below the dams.

The Corps has the authority to engineer infrastructure for local communities and cover 75% of the cost for such improvements, but it has never used this provision in Oregon.

A week before Biden signed the new bill, biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published their own 673-page report saying the Corps’ preferred solution for the Willamette — the one involving fish traps — would jeopardize threatened salmon and steelhead.

NOAA proposed more than two dozen changes for the Corps, ranging from better monitoring of the species to altering the river flow to better accommodate migrating salmon. Solan said the agency is still reviewing NOAA’s opinion and deciding what action to take.

George, who has served on the council of the Grand Ronde tribes since 2016, said she was encouraged that the latest developments on the Willamette pointed to a future where salmon and people could coexist.

“In those darkest days of our families living here on the Grand Ronde reservation, it was truly returning to the Willamette to get salmon that helped keep our people alive,” George said. “It is our time and our role to speak up for our relatives and to say that a future with people and Willamette salmon is essential.”

by Brett Murphy

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

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

President Joe Biden Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in the White House last July. By then, Biden’s administration had issued multiple public warnings to the Israeli but did not follow through. During his visit, Netanyahu gave a fiery defense of Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. (Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

There were numerous civilian casualties during the Israeli military’s attack on the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The Biden administration had said invading the city would cross a “red line.” (Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu/Getty Images)

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Humanitarian aid trucks wait on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip last year. (Ali Moustafa/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Palestinians rush out of their home after Jewish settlers set it on fire in the town of Turmusaya in the West Bank last June. About 400 Jewish settlers launched an attack on the town and burned homes, cars and property. Officials within the State Department said it was difficult to get permission to publicly condemn instances of settlers destroying Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank. (Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department's conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

Israeli security forces beat protesters and pallbearers at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed during an Israeli raid in the West Bank in 2022. Neither her killing, nor the clashes at her funeral, resulted in discipline from the State Department under the Leahy Law, despite the recommendations from an internal panel of experts. (Muammar Awad/Xinhua/Getty Images)

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Omar Assad, who died while in custody of the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion. The State Department was set to disqualify the unit from future military assistance but ultimately decided not to after Israeli leaders pressured the secretary of state to change course. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images)

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

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Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Jake Pearson

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New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating about a half dozen guardianship organizations and how they manage the health and financial affairs of hundreds of elderly and infirm New Yorkers deemed incapable of looking after themselves, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, which is being conducted by lawyers in the office’s charities bureau, follows a yearlong series by ProPublica that revealed how some guardians neglected the vulnerable clients entrusted to their care, while others used their court-appointed positions to enrich themselves at their wards’ expense.

Judges often rely on guardianship companies to care for the so-called unbefriended, people who don’t have friends or family able to look after them. Oversight of these guardians, however, is scant, with officials rarely visiting wards to check on their care. Meanwhile, the courts that appoint the guardians rely largely on financial paperwork to determine a person’s well-being. That dynamic, the news organization found, has resulted in fraud, abuse and neglect of the state’s most vulnerable.

Among the groups investigators are scrutinizing is New York Guardianship Services, which was featured in ProPublica’s work, said one of the people familiar with the state probe, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement action.

ProPublica found NYGS had failed to meet the needs of more than a dozen people entrusted to its care, including an elderly woman whom the company placed in a dilapidated home with rats, bedbugs and a lack of heat. NYGS collected $450 a month in compensation from the woman’s limited income while stating in reports to the court that her living situation was “appropriate” — even as internal company records and her own emails showed that she’d repeatedly complained about the conditions.

After ProPublica’s first story was published, a judge ordered NYGS to pay back that ward $5,400, representing about a year’s worth of fees, writing that the company had provided “minimal services, if any” during that time.

In another instance, ProPublica reported that the company collected monthly fees from an elderly man even after he’d left the country — and also after he died.

Company executives have declined to answer questions about specific clients but previously told ProPublica that NYGS was accountable to the court and that its work was scrutinized by examiners, who are empowered to raise any issues.

But ProPublica’s investigation found that there are too few examiners in the system to provide timely and thorough oversight. There are just 157 examiners responsible for reviewing the reports of 17,411 New York City wards, according to the court’s most recent data. And there are roughly a dozen judges to check their work. As a result, ProPublica found that annual assessments detailing wards’ finances and care can take years to complete, depriving judges of critical information about people’s welfare.

The courts have similarly taken a light touch to vetting guardianship providers. ProPublica found that though NYGS presented itself as a nonprofit, it hadn’t registered as such with state and federal authorities.

The attorney general’s investigation is not the office’s first foray into the guardianship world. A decade ago, the same unit investigated a nonprofit guardian called Integral Guardianship Services, ultimately finding the group had improperly loaned its top officials hundreds of thousands of dollars while its wards unnecessarily sat in nursing homes, according to court records. To settle the case, Integral agreed to various reforms, paid back the loans and brought on a management consultant, the Harvard Business School Club of New York, to review its systems, operations and finances.

Even so, Integral shut down just a few years later, stranding hundreds of wards whose cases were absorbed by other nonprofit groups and private lawyers. Among them was NYGS, which was founded, in part, by Integral’s former director of judicial compliance, Sam Blau, who wasn’t named in the attorney general’s lawsuit. Other Integral employees also remained in the guardianship business, starting their own groups or working as court-appointed fiduciaries, court and tax records show.

Some of those successor businesses are now among the entities state investigators are examining, the people familiar with the attorney general’s investigation said.

NYGS executives Sam and David Blau did not respond to an email seeking comment. Neither did the attorney general’s office.

News of the attorney general’s investigation comes as court administrators and Albany legislators face increased pressure to fix the guardianship system. Court officials have said they need more money to address the problems and announced last fall that they were appointing a dedicated special counsel, as well as a statewide coordinating judge, to oversee reforms.

Advocacy groups have mounted their own lobbying campaign, pressing Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders to commit $15 million annually to support a statewide network of nonprofits experienced in handling government contracts to serve the unbefriended. Another proposal, put forth by an advisory committee to the state court system, has advocated for the creation of a $72 million independent statewide agency to serve as a public guardian.

It’s not clear what Hochul, a Democrat, foresees for guardianship ahead of the upcoming legislative session. She’ll present the executive budget later this month. Last year’s $229 billion spending plan included just $1 million to fund a statewide guardianship hotline. A spokesperson for her office did not respond to questions about her funding plans or for comment on the AG’s probe.

Guillermo Kiuhan, an attorney for the former NYGS ward who has since died, said he was encouraged to hear the company may have to answer for what he said was outright theft. He has been trying to get NYGS to reimburse the ward’s heirs for the thousands of dollars the company took as compensation while his family provided for his care in Colombia. So far, the efforts have been unsuccessful. The Blaus didn’t respond to questions about Kiuhan’s claims.

“We are very frustrated,” he said in an interview. “Hopefully this is an opportunity to get the authorities involved … and not have more people with the same problem.”

by Joel Jacobs and Megan O’Matz

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A decade ago, strange billboards started showing up, including in New York’s Times Square. They weren’t advertising a product. They were vilifying Connecticut’s then-governor, Dannel Malloy.

And they could be traced to that state’s unusual effort to stop an Oklahoma tribe from offering Connecticut residents short-term consumer loans at exorbitant interest rates.

“Gov. Malloy, Don’t take away my daddy’s job,” read one of the billboards, alongside a picture of a Native American child with braids and traditional garb.

But Malloy was not dissuaded by what he called a “scare tactic.” He said he felt the state’s banking regulations were on his side. The Oklahoma tribe was claiming sovereign immunity as it flouted Connecticut law — charging over 400% interest annually, though the state capped rates on such loans at 12%.

“We knew we could win,” Malloy said. “We knew they were harming people in Connecticut.”

He said he came to believe that the sums Native American tribes were making were paltry compared with the money flowing to the outside investment organizations that had linked themselves to the tribes because of the protections that can come with sovereign status.

Connecticut officials spent years fighting in court, but their eventual victory on behalf of the state’s citizens proved a crucial point about regulation at the local level.

Even as federal authorities have struggled to make an impact on this controversial form of lending, a handful of states have upended the notion that tribes’ sovereign immunity must keep state regulators on the sidelines. The lesson: a little pushback can go a long way.

In addition to Connecticut, five other states — Arkansas, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — have been remarkably effective at eliminating most tribal loans, which are made online. A ProPublica review of the fine print on more than 80 tribal lending websites shows that the vast majority of tribal lenders now don’t lend in those states.

And a sample of cases filed in federal bankruptcy court bolsters the findings, with few filers in those states listing tribal lenders as creditors. Complaints, too, funneled to the Federal Trade Commission were minuscule in number in these states in recent years.

The six states tend to have strong consumer protection laws overall. Arkansas’ Constitution, for example, limits consumer loans to 17% interest annually. But, more significantly, the states have had aggressive attorneys, working for public agencies or private law firms, who have stepped in to protect consumers from high rates.

“They’d rather stay out than offer a product at a lower rate,” Connecticut Sen. Matt Lesser said of tribal lenders.

“They saw that Connecticut was aggressive in enforcing the law,” said the senator, who helped pass a bill to make such high-interest loans uncollectable in the state.

Minnesota is the latest state to confront tribal lenders.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Minnesota’s attorney general filed a consent agreement in federal court in which the president of Wisconsin’s Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians promised that their tribal businesses would never again lend to Minnesotans at rates that violate the state’s usury — or lending — laws, which caps many consumer loans at 36% interest annually. The attorney general found LDF companies lending at annual rates between 200% and 800%.

The LDF tribe, which is a leading player in the industry, has said its lending business helps people without access to credit, while the profits provide critical funding for tribal government services. It also has defended a common industry practice of partnering with nontribal entities that conduct many of the day-to-day operations, likening it to outsourcing.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison succeeded in bringing two enforcement actions in 2024 against tribal lenders catering to Minnesota borrowers. Ellison is one of a handful of state officials bringing cases against usurious lenders. (Charles Krupa/AP Photo)

It was the second enforcement action Minnesota had secured against tribal loan executives in 2024. Earlier in the year, a Montana tribal lending operation agreed to the state’s demands to stop making loans in Minnesota.

Loans from tribal lenders can carry astronomical rates because the operations claim that the tribes’ sovereign immunity allows them to be governed by federal but not state laws. There is no federal interest rate limit, aside from a 36% cap on loans to active-duty military members and their families.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office had watched case law develop around tribal lending to the point where the state felt assured that it could enforce its interest rate caps against a sovereign entity offering loans to Minnesota residents.

In a March interview with ProPublica, Ellison said his office would share its knowledge with other states looking to crack down on tribal lending. “If people want to talk, we would love to see more enforcement action around the country,” he said.

Yet there are limits to what states can accomplish. Courts have ruled that states can only obtain injunctions to stop collections and prevent future harm, but they cannot collect fines or claw back money already lost by consumers. Their enforcement actions do not prevent tribes from making loans in other states. And they are only able to sue tribal leaders, not the tribes themselves.

Tribal Lending Has Largely Ceased in Six States Note: States are categorized as “all or nearly all” if 85% or more of tribal lending websites indicated that they do not lend in that state as of October. “Most” is defined as 51-84% who do not lend there, “some” is 15-50% and “few or none” is less than 15%. Source: ProPublica review of 81 tribal lending websites that listed states they do not do business in. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

And these legal battles can be lengthy and contentious, as exemplified by what happened in Connecticut.

In October 2014, Connecticut’s banking regulator ordered websites associated with the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma to stop providing loans to Connecticut residents, citing the state’s cap on interest rates and deeming the loans illegal.

The following spring, the Institute for Liberty, a pro-business organization in Washington, D.C., announced a campaign against Malloy. In social media posts, ads and mailings, the institute alleged that Connecticut’s actions were an affront to tribal sovereignty.

It further argued that the enforcement effort against the Oklahoma-based tribe would deprive Native American families of income for health care, education and employment.

But leaders of two Connecticut tribes uninvolved in lending joined state leaders in a press conference to reject the institute’s claims and to call on tribal lenders to stop taking advantage of the state’s consumers. Only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes have engaged in online lending.

The Institute for Liberty posted appeals like these on Facebook as part of its campaign against Connecticut’s then-Gov. Dannel Malloy. “What Connecticut is trying to do is to ignore hundreds of years of legal precedent and threatening the basic human rights of tribal people — rights guaranteed by our Constitution,” the institute’s president said in a 2015 press release.

As a political entity organized as a nonprofit, the institute did not have to publicly disclose its donors and so was considered a dark-money group. IRS records available online show its tax-exempt status has lapsed. Andrew Langer, the institute’s president, declined ProPublica’s request for an interview. “I have absolutely no comment,” he said in a phone call.

John Shotton, chair of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians, said in an email to ProPublica: “We did not financially support the campaign, the Institute for Liberty, or their executive director in any way. We had no knowledge of the campaign before learning about it from media sources.”

The Oklahoma tribe stopped lending in Connecticut but initiated a long court battle. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the tribe’s chair could not face civil penalties but could be subject to an injunction preventing future lending. The state also issued cease and desist orders to three other tribally affiliated lenders, which exited the state as well.

Forceful actions by state officials in New York and Pennsylvania targeting short-term lending also pushed out tribal operations.

In 2013, the New York Department of Financial Services sent cease and desist letters to dozens of online payday lenders, including some tribal lenders, and warned banks to cut off access to lenders operating in violation of state law. Two tribes sued the state to stop the crackdown, but were unsuccessful.

In 2014, Pennsylvania’s attorney general brought an ambitious case against Think Finance Inc., a hedge-fund-backed financial technology firm that was allied with three tribes. The state alleged that the arrangement was designed to enable Think Finance to profit from abusive loans by evading state lending laws. In court papers, Think Finance denied wrongdoing and said that it was not the actual lender on the tribal loans, arguing that it was providing “perfectly lawful services” to the tribes.

The litigation spurred additional private lawsuits, ultimately leading Think Finance to declare bankruptcy and resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements with borrowers.

“This is a model of how aggressive enforcement by one state can lend itself to nationwide relief for consumers,” Gov. Josh Shapiro, then attorney general, said in a press release.

In a 2019 deposition in a consumer lawsuit, an attorney previously involved in the tribal lending industry provided insight into tribal lenders’ avoidance of states where they may draw attention. Asked why a tribe might be advised not to lend in certain states, he replied “to avoid the headache of having to deal with an AG that was being aggressive.”

The attorney, Daniel Gravel, noted that the companies in the case believed that they were “engaging in perfectly legal activities” but “it wasn’t worth the time and effort of having to deal with state regulators who disagreed with us.”

In certain states, it’s not attorneys general or banking officials who are forcing out tribal lenders. The feat has largely been accomplished by private attorneys bringing consumer lawsuits, including sweeping class-action claims.

Most settlements remain confidential, but ProPublica tallied at least $2.9 billion in canceled loans and more than $360 million in restitution from class-action suits since 2019. The major settlements were all filed in federal courts in Virginia and were largely driven by consumer attorneys there.

The class-action cases are highly complex because of the difficulty in unraveling the layers of entities and people involved, which is why the circle of private lawyers challenging the tribal lending industry is small. In addition, private attorneys can be stymied by arbitration clauses in loan agreements, which aim to prevent consumers from going to court.

“This is rocket science. This is among the most complicated litigation you can do,” said Margot Saunders, a senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center who has served as an expert witness in cases.

Tribal lenders now largely steer clear of making loans in Virginia.

They also largely avoid neighboring West Virginia, ProPublica found. That state has strong consumer protection statutes, and private attorneys and a previous attorney general have used them effectively in lawsuits against tribally affiliated lenders.

Bren Pomponio, a West Virginia attorney for Mountain State Justice Inc., a nonprofit legal services firm that brought a lawsuit against a tribal lender and its business partners in 2020, said that the past decade of litigation has cut through the “myth” that sovereign immunity enables tribal lenders to charge excessive interest rates.

“They thought they had a model to avoid state law, but they don’t really,” he said.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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Lifesaving HIV treatments. Cures for hepatitis C. New tuberculosis regimens and a vaccine for RSV.

These and other major medical breakthroughs exist in large part thanks to a major division of the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet.

For decades, researchers with funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have labored quietly in red and blue states across the country, conducting experiments, developing treatments and running clinical trials. With its $6.5 billion budget, NIAID has played a vital role in discoveries that have kept the nation at the forefront of infectious disease research and saved millions of lives.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

NIAID helped lead the federal response, and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, drew fire amid school closures nationwide and recommendations to wear face masks. Lawmakers were outraged to learn that the agency had funded an institute in China that had engaged in controversial research bioengineering viruses, and questioned whether there was sufficient oversight. Republicans in Congress have led numerous hearings and investigations into NIAID’s work, flattened NIH’s budget and proposed a total overhaul of the agency.

More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has said he wants to fire and replace 600 of the agency’s 20,000 employees and shift research away from infectious diseases and vaccines, which are at the core of NIAID’s mission to understand, treat and prevent infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases. He has said that half of NIH’s budget should focus on “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” He has a particular interest in improving diets.

Even the most staunch defenders of NIH agree the agency could benefit from reforms. Some would like to see fewer institutes, while others believe there should be term limits for directors. There are important debates over whether to fund and how to oversee controversial research methods, and concerns about the way the agency has handled transparency. Scientists inside and outside of the institute agree that work needs to be done to restore public trust in the agency.

But experts and patient advocates worry that an overhaul or dismantling of NIAID without a clear understanding of the critical work performed there could imperil not only the development of future lifesaving treatments but also the nation’s place at the helm of biomedical innovation.

“The importance of NIAID cannot be overstated,” said Greg Millett, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. “The amount of expertise, the research, the breakthroughs that have come out of NIAID — It’s just incredible.”

To understand how NIAID works and what’s at stake with the new administration, ProPublica spoke with people who have worked for NIAID, received funding from it, or served on boards or panels that advise the institute.

Decisions, Decisions

The director of NIAID is appointed by the head of the NIH, who must be approved by the Senate. Directors have broad discretion to determine what research to fund and where to award grants, although traditionally those decisions are informed by recommendations from panels of outside experts.

Fauci led NIAID for nearly 40 years. He’d navigated controversy in the past, particularly in the early years of the HIV epidemic when community activists criticized him for initially excluding them from the research agenda. But in general until the pandemic, he enjoyed relatively solid bipartisan support for his work, which included a strong focus on vaccine research and development. After he retired in 2022, he was replaced by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, an HIV researcher who was formerly the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has spent much of her time in the halls of Congress working to restore bipartisan support for the institution.

NIH directors typically span presidential administrations. But Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, and current director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli told staff this week that she would resign on Jan. 17. A Stanford professor, Bhattacharya has spent his career studying health policy issues like the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the efficacy of U.S. funding for HIV treatments internationally. He also researched the NIH, concluding that while the agency funds a lot of innovative or novel research, it should do even more.

In March 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the death toll from the pandemic would likely be far lower than predicted and called for lockdown policies to be reevaluated. That October, he helped write a declaration that recommended lifting COVID-19 restrictions for those “at minimal risk of death” until herd immunity could be reached. In an interview with the libertarian magazine Reason in June, he said he believes the COVID-19 epidemic most likely originated from a lab accident in China and that he can’t see Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed, as a total success because it was part of the same research agenda.

Bhattacharya declined an interview request from ProPublica about his priorities for the agency. A recent Wall Street Journal article said he is considering how to link “academic freedom” on college campuses to NIH grants, though it’s not clear how he would measure that or implement such a change. He’s also raised the idea of term limits for directors and said the pandemic “was just a disaster for American science and public health policy,” which is now in desperate need of reform.

Where the Money Goes

Grants from NIAID flow to nearly every state and more than half of the congressional districts across the country, supporting thousands of jobs nationwide. Last year, nearly $5 billion of NIAID’s $6.5 billion budget went to U.S. organizations outside the institute, according to a ProPublica analysis of NIH’s RePORT, an online database of its expenditures.

In 2024, Duke University in North Carolina and Washington University in Missouri were NIAID’s largest grantees, receiving more than $190 and $173 million, respectively, to study, among other things, HIV, West Nile vaccines and biodefense.

Over the past five years, $10.6 billion, or about 40% of NIAID’s budget to external U.S. institutions, went to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the analysis found. Research suggests that every dollar spent by NIH generates from $2.50 to $8 in economic activity.

That money is key to advancing medicine as well as careers in science. Most students and postdoctoral researchers rely on the funding and prestige of NIH grants to launch into the profession.

New Drugs and Global Influence

The NIH pays for most of the basic research globally into new drugs. The private sector relies on this public funding; researchers at Bentley University found that NIH money was behind every new pharmaceutical approved from 2010 through 2019.

That includes therapies for kids with RSV, COVID-19 vaccines and Ebola treatments, all of which have key patents based on NIAID-funded research.

Research from NIAID has also improved treatment for chronic diseases. New understandings of inflammation from NIAID-funded research has led to cutting-edge research into cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and a growing body of evidence shows how viruses can have long-term impacts, from multiple sclerosis to long COVID. When private companies turn that research into blockbuster drugs, the public benefits from new treatments, as well as jobs and economic growth.

The weight of NIAID’s funding also allows it to play quieter roles that have been essential to advancing science and the United States’ role in biomedicine, several people said.

The institute brings together scientists who are normally competitors to share findings and tackle big research questions. Having that neutral space is essential to pushing knowledge forward and ultimately spurring breakthroughs, said Matthew Rose of the Human Rights Campaign, who has served on multiple NIH advisory boards. “Academic bodies are very competitive with one another. Having NIH pull the grantees together is helpful to make sure they talk to one another and share research.”

NIAID also funds researchers internationally, ensuring the U.S. continues to have an influential voice in global conversations about biosecurity.

NIH has also been working to improve representation in clinical trials. Straight, white men are still overrepresented in clinical research, which has led to missed diagnoses for women and all people of color, as well as those in the LGBTQ+ community. Rose pointed to a long history of missing signs of heart conditions in women as an example. “These are the type of things commercial companies don’t care about,” he said, noting that NIH helps to set the agenda on these issues.

Nancy Sullivan, a former senior investigator at NIAID, said that NIAID’s power is its ability to invest in a broad understanding of human health. “It’s the basic research that allows us to develop treatments,” she said. “You never know which part of fundamental research is going to be the lynchpin for curing a disease or defining a disease so you know how to treat it,” she said.

Sullivan should know: It was her work at NIAID that led four years ago to the first approved treatment for Ebola.

by Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror and originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In the summer of 2022, a source called me with a tip about towing. “The details of how this works,” he said, “your head’s gonna spin.”

It turns out Connecticut has a more than 100-year-old law that allows tow truck companies to sell someone’s car 15 days after they haul it away, if they can convince the Department of Motor Vehicles that the vehicle is worth $1,500 or less.

The time frame, we learned by calling every state, is one of the shortest in the country.

So I set out to answer what I thought was a simple question: How many cars have towing companies sold?

I submitted a request to the DMV under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.

Two-and-a-half years later, it seems the DMV doesn’t even know the answer — and we’re still waiting for thousands of records.

In the fall of 2022, the DMV told me it would cost us $47,000 to get the documents. Not only did it sound like the sticker price for a new car, but I realized we were in for a long fight. (The DMV now says the estimate was an error.)

The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles’ initial estimate for the cost of obtaining documents (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

We had sought one-page forms called H-100s that tow truck companies must submit to the DMV to get permission to sell someone’s car. Those forms could help us find out a lot of information — which companies are trying to sell cars quickly and what the DMV does with those requests.

Getting the documents was key to learning about towing practices in Connecticut and the real impact they have on people’s lives.

After asking the DMV to produce an itemized accounting of the $47,000 bill, we asked our attorney to appeal to the Freedom of Information Commission. Our attorney negotiated a compromise in April 2023. We agreed to pay $1,900 to cover the agency’s costs of redacting thousands of documents our request entailed.

The next month, we got our first group of forms, and it finally felt like we were on our way, until I opened the first batch and saw this:

(Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

In addition to being heavily redacted, many forms were handwritten, and the DMV didn’t seem to have a database or a system for keeping track of them. Agency officials initially told us there were 11,700 documents. Then they told us there were more than 7,000 for 2022 alone. Now they say there are about 4,100 for that year. The DMV hasn’t been able to explain the discrepancies. Officials also said the request has taken time because they have to manually redact thousands of documents.

The DMV’s slow drip of providing the forms made us have to look for other ways to find people whose cars were towed and then sold without their consent.

My colleague Ginny Monk, who covers housing, had heard complaints from renters about tow truck companies that had contracts with their apartment complexes. People were getting towed for not backing into their parking spaces or failing to properly display their parking stickers. Many people couldn’t get to the tow lot, which was at least a half-hour away, and others just didn’t have the money to pay the fees.

Under the law, towing companies must notify the local police within two hours of removing a car. So we submitted public records requests to several police departments for their call logs.

We also requested incident reports from the police department where one tow lot was located and found dozens of complaints, most from people who said they either couldn’t get their cars back or were being overcharged.

The police records also referenced DMV investigations into some of the same incidents. So we submitted a FOIA request to the DMV in February for investigations into several towing companies. That took four months but gave us more insight into the problem.

“It may be just a car to some,” Melissa Anderson of Hamden, Connecticut, wrote in her complaint, “but for my family it was sanity, peace of mind stolen from us.”

As we got closer to publishing our story last fall, the DMV began to send us more forms. We now have roughly 4,200. But the agency’s lawyer has told us there are still thousands more it has yet to turn over.

Just days after our story was published, at least two bills were introduced in the state legislature to address some of the issues raised in our reporting. The DMV said it would undertake a “comprehensive review” of towing practices, and the speaker of the House promised that fixing the towing laws will be a “priority” this legislative session.

We hope the interest generated by our story will induce the DMV to release the remaining records soon. Meanwhile, if you’ve had your car towed in Connecticut, we hope you’ll take some time to fill out this questionnaire.

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

Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror, contributed reporting.

by Tim Golden

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In the last years before the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, the great civic debate in my hometown was over the meaning of a shopping mall.

Some residents feared that the Palisades Village, a 3-acre archipelago of posh boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, was driving a gleaming stake through the heart of the place where we grew up. That “Old Palisades” was a mythologized, upper-middle-class community where people knew one another, raised happy families and tempered even the old, analog status-seeking of Malibu and Beverly Hills.

The Village, with its Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and its nouveau-McMansion architectural style, marked our final conquest by overly tanned, overly toned immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would stroll into the Erewhon grocery and tap down $20 for a Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie?

But plenty of people did. They liked the “bespoke, walkable village,” as the developers advertised it, seeing it as an overdue upgrade from Mort’s Deli and the family-run stores that the developer (and later mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso bulldozed away. They seemed happy to pay $27 for a seat in the Bay Theatre, a luxury multiplex that pirated its name and iconic facade from the long-closed movie house on Sunset Boulevard where my friends and I snuck into films like “Billy Jack” and “Big Wednesday.”

On either side of the mall debate, people rarely paused to note that these were rich people’s problems.

Unlike neighboring Santa Monica, an incorporated city with a spirited government, the Palisades didn’t raise its own taxes or run its own services. We call it a town, but it’s really a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles. Still, there is a community council and a couple of local newspapers, and none of them worried more than occasionally about the threat that catastrophic wildfires might sweep down on us as they had on so many other California towns.

We had been lucky, and we knew it.

Wildfire ravaged a building on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

On New Year’s Day, a handful of my old friends from Paul Revere Junior High were texting to that effect. “We have it so good,” my lawyer friend Eric wrote. He was looking out at the Pacific from the deck of his new home, having moved triumphantly back to the Palisades after years away.

It went without saying that our blessings included having grown up in a place where we could spend blissful days at the beach, attend very good public schools, learn how to work at miserable after-school jobs and get into trouble with minimal consequences.

Homes in that bygone Palisades could still be had for less than $100,000. We didn’t want to be Malibu or Brentwood. There were many wealthy Palisadians even then, but our baroque teenage hierarchies had little to do with who had money and who had less. There were Reagan Republicans and liberal Democrats, but the prevailing political vibe was tolerant and democratic.

The Palisades was still very white. There were separate beach clubs for WASPs and Jews; for years, some did not admit Blacks. But about a third of our classmates at Palisades High were bused from heavily African American neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. Whatever its failings, that integration shared what was arguably the city’s best public high school with thousands of less-privileged students. It also taught the white kids something about living in a more diverse society.

An impressive proportion of my classmates from those varied backgrounds went on to build meaningful lives. There are professors and social workers and doctors and film people. A star defensive tackle on the football team, who also sang in the chorus, became the actor and director Forest Whitaker. The businesspeople include a couple of zillionaires. For some, the ultimate marker of success was to afford a home in the neighborhood and send their kids to our old schools.

The Palisades changed a lot after I left for college. Despite the dangers, wealthier people built bigger, fancier homes, pushing out over the canyons and higher into the hills. We had long understood that we were living our nice lives in defiance of some powerful forces. I can still see the terror on my mom’s face one afternoon in the fall of 1978, as a wildfire swept toward us from Mandeville Canyon and we frantically packed the car with the most precious possessions we could gather up.

Even as they leveled quaint, old bungalows to build lot-to-lot monstrosities, many of the Hollywood people who flocked to the Palisades came for the sort of things that had always brought us together — the 10K runs and the Fourth of July parade; the beaches and parks and schools; the great hiking trails that wove into the Santa Monica Mountains from almost every hillside in town.

On New Year’s Day, my friend Eric closed our text conversation with a photograph of the evening’s spectacular sunset. The next images in the chat came a week later, in a video shot from the other side of his deck. A wall of gray-black smoke was billowing behind the ridge, not far from the home where my family lived for almost 50 years.

Less than an hour after he took the picture, Eric, his wife and their son fled down Chautauqua Boulevard, named for the high-minded Methodist educational movement that established the Palisades in the 1920s. Their home, along with the one my parents built and those of many friends, soon burned to the ground.

In photographs, the remains of the Palisades now evoke the streets of Aleppo or Homs, in Syria. Unlike most of my hometown friends, I’ve seen streets like those before. In Mexico City and San Salvador after devastating earthquakes in the 1980s. In Gaza. In the wastelands of Kabul, where American largesse never quite bandaged the scars of the Soviet war.

The ruins of buildings on Sunset Boulevard are reflected in the window of a Saint Laurent store that is part of the largely undamaged Palisades Village mall. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Imagery might be the only valid comparison between our tragedy and those in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Many Palisades residents displaced by the fire have enviable resources; they are reported to be filling four- and five-star hotels from Montecito to Laguna Beach. Compared with Syrians or Gazans or refugees from the Ukraine, the Palisadians have a far better shot at rebuilding their lives.

But the trauma remains overwhelming. To have our past so violently erased makes me wonder what we can really rebuild. Big developers are likely to snap up the burned-out lots of people who were uninsured or underinsured. What takes their place will inevitably be bigger and more generic construction, much of it in the nouveaux-McMansion style.

Even my friends in their early 60s have been weighing whether they will have the time and fortitude to rebuild their homes. And whose Palisades, they wonder, will be rebuilt around them? For now, the only section of the town center that stands somewhat unscathed is the Palisades Village mall, where Caruso called in private firefighters and water trucks to protect his investment.

As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, a city that had been leveled by an earthquake in 1972. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua was destitute; there was no money for street signs. But the Nicaraguans had a powerful collective memory, and I came to understand it as one of their great strengths.

In those days, a typical Managua address might be, “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago,” or, “From the old tree, three blocks toward the lake.” The old tree hadn’t existed for years. But everyone remembered.

by Alec MacGillis

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This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until March 14.

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

In the early 1990s, Ohio’s Catholic bishops faced a problem. For more than a century, religious education had been deeply entrenched in the state; in Cleveland, the parochial system was one of the largest in the country. For decades, though, the Church’s urban schools had been losing students to suburban flight. To keep up enrollment, many were admitting more Black students, often from non-­Catholic families. But these families typically could not afford to pay much, which put a strain on church budgets.

Catholic leaders elsewhere faced the same challenge, but Ohio’s bishops had an advantage. The new Republican governor, George Voinovich, was a devout Catholic who went to Mass multiple times a week, an expression of a faith that was inherited from his Slovenian American mother and deepened by the loss of his 9-year-old daughter, who was struck by a van that ran a red light. An unpretentious Midwesterner who loved fishing in Lake Erie, Voinovich had worked his way up from state legislator to mayor of Cleveland before becoming governor in 1991.

“If we could reconstitute the family and get everyone into Church,” the late Ohio Gov. George Voinovich told the bishop of Columbus in a private letter years ago, “60% of the problems we are confronted with would go away.” (Najlah Feanny/Corbis/Getty Images)

In office, Voinovich corresponded frequently with the state’s most prominent bishops, in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. Their letters, which are collected in Voinovich’s papers at Ohio University, show a close and collaborative relationship. The bishops wrote to thank Voinovich for the regular donations that he and his wife made to the church, which ranged as high as $2,000. They traded get-well wishes and condolence notes. “The last two times I’ve seen you you looked a little tired,” Voinovich once wrote to Anthony Pilla, the bishop of Cleveland. “Please take care of yourself.”

Most of all, they strategized about increasing state funding for Catholic schools. As a legislator, Voinovich had worked to launch a set of programs that helped private schools pay for administration, special education, transportation and other services. His support for these expenditures, which by the early ’90s amounted to more than $100 million, stood in contrast with his aggressive efforts to cut the rest of the budget. At one point, he banned peanuts and other snacks from official state flights. Legislators passed around a story about seeing him pluck a penny out of a urinal.

But Voinovich saw spending on parochial schools as fundamentally different, driven by his belief in the value of a Catholic upbringing. “If we could reconstitute the family and get everyone into Church, about 60% of the problems we are confronted with would go away,” he wrote to James Griffin, the bishop of Columbus. “I can assure you that the money you spend to deal with all the problems confronting the community is much better spent than the way government would spend it.”

Soon after Voinovich became governor, he and the bishops began discussing another way to fund Catholic schools: vouchers. The notion of publicly funded subsidies for private schools wasn’t totally new. After courts ordered school integration in the South, in the 1950s, some municipalities helped finance “segregation academies” for white students. At around the same time, the economist Milton Friedman argued that education should be subject to market forces, in part by paying parents to send their children to a school of their choosing. But no city or state had funded a true voucher initiative.

For the state government, there was an obvious risk to funding Catholic schools; the Ohio Constitution says that “no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society.” Voinovich and his aides worried not only about political repercussions but also about the potential for legal challenges from groups like the ACLU. In April 1991, Voinovich intimated to Pilla that he was recruiting proxies who could obscure their alliance. “We are quietly lining up ‘heavy hitters’ in the business community and are trying to identify someone in the legislature who would be willing to become our advocate,” he wrote.

Voinovich had an ideal partner in David Brennan, a well-connected local businessman. A towering presence at 6-feet-5 (not counting his customary cowboy hat), Brennan had attended Catholic school in Akron before earning degrees in accounting and law, and made a fortune forming corporations for doctors seeking tax benefits. When Voinovich ran for governor, Brennan was a major fundraiser for the campaign. Now he started cultivating allies, donating heavily to a Republican from the Cincinnati suburbs who was a promising sponsor of voucher legislation, as reported by the Akron Beacon Journal, which covered the early voucher push.

In May 1991, Voinovich and Brennan met to discuss creating a commission on school choice, which Brennan would chair. Soon afterward, the bishops provided 18 suggestions for possible members. Six of them ended up on the commission — with no mention of the fact that they had been selected by the church.

As word of the commission spread, it raised concerns. The following spring, an executive at Procter & Gamble, one of the state’s largest employers, urged Voinovich to couch “this sensitive issue” in a broader effort at school reform. “Vouchers on their own could lead to unnecessary divisiveness,” he wrote. The head of the Ohio teachers’ union warned that unilateral action “could explode any chance at building a statewide consensus.” Voinovich responded that he was prepared for discord: “I am confident that whatever recommendations they come back with, it will be difficult for the Ohio Federation of Teachers to support.”

The commission was moving fast. Brennan “is doing an outstanding job,” Voinovich wrote to Pilla. “He is on a mission from God.” Voinovich and Brennan took care to disarm political objections. One briefing document argued that any plan the commission produced “must be substantially tilted in favor of low income ­parents and children” and must require private schools to administer the same ­proficiency tests as public schools. By year’s end, the commission produced its recommendation: Ohio should create a voucher pilot program.

Representative C.J. Prentiss monitored the commission’s work with foreboding. Elected to the Ohio House in 1991, Prentiss had distinguished herself as a leading defender of public education and was steeped in the struggle for school integration. Her father had belonged to the Congress of Racial Equality, and after Prentiss graduated from Cleveland’s Marshall High School — where she was one of six Black students — she attended the 1963 March on Washington. Later, she joined local battles against school segregation, during which she met Michael Charney, a white teacher and union activist who became her third husband. She taught for a while in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights and served on the State Board of Education. In 1993, she and other Black officials in Cleveland condemned Voinovich’s plan. “It is difficult to see how subsidizing private schools will improve public education,” she said. “Private schools have selective entrance requirements, serve only private purposes, and are not accountable to the public.”

Brennan deflected the criticism, noting that the plan was still provisional: “We believe when the education choice bill reaches the final stages, these fine legislators will feel differently than they do today.” In fact, he and Voinovich knew that it would be tough to secure backing for a stand-alone voucher bill; school board members, teachers and administrators were already sending letters to legislators to object. In May 1994, Voinovich contacted Brennan to strategize about how to slip a voucher pilot into the next state budget. “We are going to have to crawl before we walk,” he wrote. “I believe if we can really get it underway in one or two districts during my second term, we will have accomplished more than what [has] been accomplished thus far.”

A few weeks later, Voinovich’s assistant for education policy, Tom Needles, sent him a strategy brief on a forthcoming lunch with the bishops. “The Catholic Conference will continue to maintain a low profile in terms of its formal position on voucher legislation,” Needles wrote. “At the same time, the Conference recognizes that parent organizations in each diocese will play a very active role in lobbying for its passage.” On the last day of January 1995, voucher proponents paid for six buses to carry some 300 children and parents from Cleveland to the Capitol in order to lobby legislators. As parents walked from office to office in the Statehouse, one declared, “The public schools are preparing Black children for prison, the welfare office or the graveyard. As a Black parent, that’s unacceptable.”

Prentiss and a state senator from Cleve­land decided to address the throng. With the parents visibly angry, she knew better than to dismiss concerns about their children’s schooling. “There is a crisis,” she acknowledged. “The question before us is, how do we improve the public schools?”

The bishops, though, were far more organized, with efforts unfolding parish by parish across the state; a list in Voinovich’s papers records hundreds of phone calls and letters to legislators, making the case for vouchers and inviting them to visit local parish schools. Voinovich urged them to do still more. “I really need your help and would appreciate being kept informed as to what is being done so I can convey that to the leadership in both the House and Senate,” he wrote to Daniel Pilarczyk, the archbishop of Cincinnati, in February 1995. The next month, Pilarczyk responded with another list of the church’s actions, including some 20,000 letters sent to ­legislators.

Two weeks later, Voinovich let Pilarczyk know that the House had not only increased funding for Catholic schools but also authorized a “limited scholarship program in the City of Cleveland.” The program would start small, with several thousand vouchers worth about $2,200 apiece. Yet Voinovich recognized that it was a “significant pilot project.” At the time, the only other city that allowed private ­school vouchers was Milwaukee, and the initiative there had initially barred religious schools from participating. Cleveland’s program, in contrast, had been designed from the start to benefit Catholic schools.

In June, the budget won final approval. Six bishops wrote Voinovich to express their gratitude. “Everything we asked you to do was included in your budget,” they told him. “Without your leadership and gentle nudging of legislative leaders, none of this would have been possible.”

Prentiss and Charney quickly grasped the pilot’s import. “This is the beginning of the end for public education,” he told her, only half joking. Prentiss resolved to monitor the program to make sure that the money was spent as intended. After one voucher recipient, an Islamic school, was found to have housed students in unsafe buildings, she successfully sponsored a bill requiring schools that received vouchers to meet the same minimum standards as public schools.

Meanwhile, Prentiss kept pushing for public school reforms: all-day kindergarten, smaller classes, mentorships for at-risk boys. She and Charney were encouraged by test results showing that kids in public schools were performing at least as well as those with vouchers at Catholic schools.

“There is a crisis,” the late Ohio state legislator C.J. Prentiss, a key opponent of vouchers, acknowledged in 1995. “The question before us is, how do we improve the public schools?” (Gus Chan/AP Images)

In 1998, Voinovich was elected to the United States Senate; Needles, his aide, went to work as a lobbyist for Brennan. And the push for vouchers entered a new phase, as an aggressive generation of proponents took up a battle in the courts.

In both Ohio and Wisconsin, opponents, led by teachers’ unions, were challenging the programs on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld vouchers; a federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against them.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up a First Amendment challenge to vouchers, based on one of the Ohio cases, in February 2002. Robert Chanin, a lawyer for the National Education Association, told the court, “Under the Cleveland voucher program, millions of dollars in unrestricted public funds are transferred each year from the state treasury into the general coffers of sectarian private schools, and the money is used by those schools to provide an educational program in which the sectarian and the secular are interwoven.” Chanin noted that ­virtually all the students in the voucher program were attending religious schools, rather than secular private schools.

But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the likely swing vote in the case, interrupted to pick up on a point made by a state attorney who’d defended the vouchers. In evaluating Cleveland’s choice program, shouldn’t the court consider not only private schools but also other options available to students, such as public magnet schools and charter schools?

The question caught Chanin off guard. The issue was the constitutionality of private school vouchers, yet O’Connor was evoking public school options. The state pressed its advantage, with its lawyer stressing the limited scope of the pilot: “It didn’t take too much money away from the public schools, but gave enough for a limited program that is targeted to the most needy, to the poorest of the poor.”

On June 27, 2002, the Court announced that it had ruled, 5-4, in favor of the Ohio program, arguing that it was “part of a broader undertaking by the State to enhance the educational options of Cleveland’s school children.” Clint Bolick, a leading lawyer on the pro-voucher side, declared on the Supreme Court plaza, “This was the Super Bowl of school choice, and the children won.” Later, he and others gathered at the office of the Institute for Justice, a conservative organization, and toasted with Dom ­Pérignon.

Protesters gathered in February 2002 when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about the constitutionality of Ohio’s voucher program. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Prentiss was on vacation with Charney in Washington state when she got word of the ruling. “PBS NewsHour” invited her to come to a studio in Vancouver and record a response, but she was too upset to think about what she would say on camera. “I’m not going to be the one,” she told Charney. “Let them get a lawyer.”

After the Supreme Court ruling, the momentum in seeking alternatives to traditional public schools shifted to charter schools — publicly funded institutions that are administered separately from school districts. Many Democrats had championed charters in the ’90s as a more palatable way to offer school choice, and Republicans had adopted the idea, too; Brennan, the chairman of Voinovich’s school choice commission, launched a for-profit charter ­school venture.

In 2005, with charters threatening to cut into parochial school enrollment, Ohio’s Catholic bishops secured a crucial expansion of vouchers beyond Cleveland: a new statewide program called EdChoice, which offered vouchers to students assigned to schools that were judged to be failing, many of them in Columbus and Cincinnati.

Prentiss stayed in the legislature until 2006, becoming the second Black woman to serve as Senate minority leader. Up until the end, she led the resistance to vouchers. As she left the legislature, though, an impassioned advocate for vouchers came in: a Republican representative named Matt Huffman.

Huffman was a lawyer from Lima, a small industrial city in western Ohio. Like Prentiss, he had grown up among activists, but with different political aims. His father, a lawyer and a county prosecutor, took a case against a local cinema that was showing “obscene” movies all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; his mother co-founded one of the state’s first pregnancy ­crisis centers after abortion was legalized.

Huffman was the fifth of nine children, all of whom went to Catholic schools. This was possible, he said later, because the parish schools were so affordable in those days. But, as tuition climbed (partly to cover the salaries of lay teachers who replaced nuns), the student body skewed wealthier. “The middle class was pretty much shut out of alternatives in education,” he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2022.

One of Huffman’s brothers became the principal of a Catholic elementary school. Huffman, after following his ­father into law, served as a fundraiser for Lima Central Catholic High. He also got involved in local politics, rising to president of the City Council. In 2000, he endorsed a young former Ohio State wrestling coach named Jim Jordan as he ran for the state Senate. Jordan, who is now one of the most stridently conservative members of the U.S. House of ­Representatives, later returned the favor by backing Huffman’s campaign for the state legislature.

By this point, school choice was becoming Huffman’s overriding priority. In Lima, he participated in a standing gin rummy game with the Rev. David Ross, a local Catholic priest, and Leo Hawk, the owner of a metal-forming company, who, in Ross’ recollection, repeatedly pressed Huffman on the issue. “Leo Hawk was very influential in terms of trying to inculcate him with ‘Let the parents decide where to spend their tax dollars,’” Ross told me. “Leo was very forceful in those gatherings.” (Hawk could not be reached for comment.)

During Huffman’s first four years in the legislature, the governor was a Democrat, and the focus was on protecting existing vouchers. But after the Republican John Kasich took office, in 2011, Huffman proposed a significant expansion: making vouchers available to middle-­class Ohio families, too, regardless of whether they were in a failing district. “This is starting down the path of looking at funding education in a fundamentally different way,” he said.

The proposal met with impassioned resistance. Opponents pointed to a ­report in the Plain Dealer that showed voucher students had performed worse than students at the public schools that they would have attended. Among the critics were public school administrators in Lima, where hundreds of students were already receiving vouchers because a few local schools were rated as failing. The exodus of students resulted in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in state revenue. As Lima’s school superintendent at the time, Karel Oxley, explained to me: Even if a class lost students, the school still had to pay for their classroom and teacher. To complicate matters, the students who left tended to be motivated kids from stable families, while special-needs students stayed. This made it harder for public schools to improve their poor test scores. “You have to have your A-team to help the school be as good as possible, but the A-team moves over to the other school,” Oxley, who also served as president of the state superintendents’ association, said. “It’s almost impossible to catch up.”

Oxley is herself Catholic, and consults for a Catholic school in retirement, but she testified against vouchers at a committee hearing around this time. She recalled that Huffman was adamant. “There was nothing I could have said that would have allowed him to see that he might be stripping resources from the greater community,” she told me. “He said, ‘You pay taxes, I pay taxes. Why can’t my taxes go toward my children’s school?’ I said, ‘Because you chose that private school.’ He said, ‘That doesn’t make sense, Karel. My taxes should pay for my child’s education.’” (Huffman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Huffman settled for a partial victory: In 2013, the state allowed EdChoice vouchers for families with incomes up to twice the poverty line in any district. It was a step forward, but Huffman wanted the program to be available to wealthier families, and it would take another ally to help him realize his full ambition.

Phil Burress was always candid about what had brought him to Citizens for Community Values: He was a former pornography addict. Burress had fought the addiction from the age of 14, until he finally swore it off, at 38. “I became a Christian that day,” he told me. From then on, he said, he was a “better father and husband” and “started speaking out about things that are wrong.” His background gave him insight into the enemy. “You have to look at your communities through the eyes of a pornographer and stay ahead of them,” he once told reporters.

Burress, a former organizer with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks, joined Citizens for Community Values in 1983. By then, the organization, which started as a Cincinnati prayer group, had devoted itself to fighting pornography and strip clubs, including various enterprises belonging to Larry Flynt, who launched his Hustler brand in Ohio. In 1990, it gained national prominence by leading the opposition to an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center. Not long afterward, Burress took over as president. “We are not some radical, right-wing, fundamental bunch of Bible-­thumping nuts out there yelling and screaming,” Burress said at the time. “We do our homework.”

The group grew under Burress — by 1997, it claimed to have 25,000 supporters — and started taking on nationwide causes, such as pressuring hotels to stop offering pay-per-view porn. In 2004, it led a successful petition drive for an amendment banning same-sex marriage in Ohio, a factor in George W. Bush’s narrow win over John Kerry there. “I was thinking, No way we can get that many signatures,” Lori Viars, a conservative activist in the Cincinnati exurbs, told me. “But we ended up doing it.”

The victory attracted more funding, which the group used to hire full-time lobbyists in Columbus. Its top issues were abortion, same-sex marriage, gay rights and, increasingly, school choice. Though the members were mostly evangelical, not Catholic, they shared the conviction that the public should pay for kids to attend religious schools. Still, Burress told me, the group struggled to persuade legislators to expand voucher access. “We could not get any traction whatsoever,” he said. What changed matters was “electing the right people to office.”

“You have to look at your communities through the eyes of a pornographer and stay ahead of them,” said Phil Burress, a former leader of the Center for Christian Virtue, which has become a leading advocate for vouchers. (Al Behrman/AP Images)

In 2017, Matt Huffman arrived in the state Senate. He had served the maximum eight years in the House and, like many other Ohio legislators, simply ran for the other chamber. In the Senate, school choice remained his primary cause. That year, he sponsored a bill to expand eligibility for vouchers to families that made as much as four times the poverty level. Catholic leaders were thrilled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a legislator who did more for school choice,” a former employee of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, the church’s public policy arm, said. “He’s just been a rock.”

Huffman still faced resistance from public school officials, but he now had influential assistance from Citizens for Community Values. In 2016, Burress was succeeded by a new director, Aaron Baer, who signaled a more expansive mission. Baer was a 29-year-old graduate of Ohio University, a hip-hop enthusiast raised by a single parent. “This is a Christian conservative movement for the next generation,” he told the Dispatch. “We talk about poverty, human ­trafficking, opioids, while still talking about ­marriage.” The organization moved its headquarters to Columbus and gave itself a forthright new name: the Center for Christian Virtue. Burress welcomed the change. “I was glad to see them admit that without God we’re nothing,” he told me.

Baer and Huffman were unlikely ­allies. Huffman liked to do impersonations and had a profane streak; he was once forced to apologize for making an ­off-color joke at an office party. But on vouchers they were effective partners, with Baer far more willing to advocate in public than the bishops were. In the next couple of years, Baer fought to get the state to define “failing” schools as broadly as possible, and called out suburban districts, many of which opposed vouchers, when they resisted accepting students from struggling city schools.

By early 2020, Huffman was still trying to make the case for a major voucher expansion. That January, he met with a few dozen public school officials in western Ohio. Craig Kupferberg, the superintendent for Allen County, which includes Lima, told me that he’d raised his hand and asked Huffman, “Have you put anything in the bill to stop the David Dukes of the world from starting up their own private schools and having our tax dollars fund their hateful ideology?” Kupferberg recalled that Huffman had looked at him “like I was from outer space” and said, “What stops homeschooling parents from doing any of that?” (Never mind that vouchers weren’t going to home­schooling families.) Then Huffman embarked on a lengthy complaint about how many people viewed Catholicism as a cult.

“You pay taxes, I pay taxes,” Matt Huffman, now the speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives, told the president of the state superintendents’ association. “Why can’t my taxes go toward my children’s school?” (Carolyn Kaster/AP Images)

Huffman’s proposal stalled again that term. But, two months later, the pandemic arrived and schools closed. After nearly a year, about a third of Ohio’s 609 districts still hadn’t returned to full in-person instruction. The holdouts included many of the largest districts, Cleveland and Columbus among them.

The state’s parochial schools, in contrast, had mostly reopened after a few months. The Catholic Conference of Ohio highlighted students’ educational gains in the legislature. “A lot of legislators appreciated what we did for children, because a lot of legislators were frustrated, too,” the former conference employee said. “We were sort of a beacon in the COVID era.” It helped proponents that many legislators had their own children in Catholic schools. Although Catholics account for only about 17% of the state’s population, they constitute more than half of the Senate and a third of the House.

As the pandemic wore on, school closures inspired similar outrage in other states. They “sparked a parent revolution, because families saw that school systems didn’t care about them all that much,” Corey DeAngelis, a leading voucher proponent, said on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” last May. “This is the silver lining of the pandemic.”

Many parents were alarmed by virtual instruction. It was not just that lessons conducted by Zoom seemed frustratingly inadequate; they also offered a glimpse of what their children were being taught, which in some families caused consternation over a perceived progressive agenda. Viars, the Cincinnati-area activist, noticed a surge of interest in Christian schools. “The books being pushed on these little kids were so objectionable,” she said. “It was really sexually explicit material for little kids. We heard that a lot: ‘No, these kids should not be seeing any of this.’”

In May 2021, two Republican representatives in Ohio introduced a “backpack bill,” which would give every ­family voucher money to spend as they saw fit: $7,500 for each high school student and $5,500 for each younger one. At a press conference announcing the bill, Baer stood beside its sponsors. “In the pandemic, we saw the need to have innovative and different learning environments,” he said. “You had some families who, because their local public schools decided not to open for in-person education, they were forced into an online environment that wasn’t ideal for them.”

The bill went a step further than Huffman had before; whereas he had pushed for vouchers for all but the wealthiest families, the backpack bill included everyone. It was a bold move, but proponents had a new advantage: earlier that year, Huffman’s Republican colleagues had elected him president of the Senate. In that role, not only was he able to push for vouchers — he could also block efforts to reform Ohio’s redistricting system, which had produced maps heavily slanted toward the GOP. By 2022, the Senate had 25 Republicans and eight Democrats; the House was split 64 to 35. “We can kind of do what we want,” Huffman told the Dispatch.

Yet Huffman and his allies decided not to advance the backpack bill through regular legislative channels, which would require stand-alone votes in both chambers. Opposition lingered, even within their own party: Some rural Republicans were conscious that there were few private schools in their districts, and so their constituents’ tax dollars would go toward vouchers used mostly by wealthy suburbanites. And, if more private schools did open in rural areas, that would drain enrollment from public schools that often served as centers of the community.

Instead, Huffman and his counterparts used a maneuver that would have been familiar to George Voinovich: they slipped an expansion of vouchers into the budget, a 1,200-page document that they sent to Gov. Mike De­Wine just before the deadline. Families with incomes of up to 450% of the poverty level would qualify for full payments: $8,407 for high school students and $6,165 for younger ones. These sums came close to covering tuition at many Catholic schools, and far exceeded what many public districts received in per-capita funds from the state. Even families making more than that income threshold, which was $135,000 for a family of four, would qualify for some funding. “Every student in Ohio will be eligible for a scholarship worth at least 10% of the maximum scholarship, regardless of income,” Huffman’s office said.

More than 30 years after Voinovich and the bishops proposed vouchers as a solution for underprivileged children in a single city, public subsidies for private ­school tuition were now universal in Ohio, covering tens of thousands of families. “We’re going to have the money to pay for it,” Huffman said afterward. “I hope more people take advantage of that if they want to.”

C.J. Prentiss died last April at 82. She had spent her retirement with Charney in a cottage on Lake Erie, in Ashtabula County. In her final years, declining health kept her from engaging much in the battle over public education. But she did have a confrontation with Huffman when she returned to Columbus for a Senate reunion in 2022. Several speakers had been chosen for the event, and when Prentiss saw that they were all white she asked Huffman about it. According to Charney, Huffman responded that he didn’t have enough time to line up others. “Don’t lie to me,” Prentiss said, and walked away.

That same year, a coalition of school districts, now numbering more than 200, filed suit against the voucher expansion. The suit alleged that the program exacerbated racial segregation, by essentially allowing private schools to select their own students; 90% of the new voucher recipients are white, in a state where only about two-thirds of students are. The suit also alleged that the vouchers violated two principles of the state constitution: a bar against religious control of public school funds and a promise of an adequate education for all. A judge denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case; a trial is expected in the coming months.

Among the districts that joined the suit is the one in Lima, Huffman’s home town. Virtually all the students enrolled in Catholic schools there now receive vouchers. Enrollment at these and other parochial schools has not increased dramatically; as is true across the state, they have limited capacity, so they accept only those students they prefer. This undermines the narrative that vouchers allow families to escape their public school. But public schools still suffer. Kupferberg, the superintendent, estimates that in his county the voucher expansion is costing schools millions of dollars a year. Federal pandemic relief aid has helped mitigate the damage, but that is coming to an end. “We’re starting to feel the impact,” Kupferberg said.

Meanwhile, some private schools are raising tuition, knowing that vouchers allow families to pay more. In Centerville, south of Columbus, the principal of Incarnation Catholic School told parents last year that it would no longer offer a discount for families that had multiple students enrolled there. “Our parishioner tuition rate is nowhere near the true cost to educate,” she wrote. “This increased revenue will allow us to increase teacher and staff salaries, address deferred maintenance, and hire additional staff.”

Huffman and his allies are pushing for more. Huffman (who has now moved back to the House, and was recently elected speaker) inserted funding for new construction at private schools into the last state budget, with an eye toward creating private school options in rural areas. Also on the table is legislation to create education-savings accounts for families with children in unregulated private schools that now can’t receive vouchers.

For these coming fights, the Center for Christian Virtue is stronger than ever. The organization has assembled a network of dozens of religious schools, which pay the center $5 per enrolled student, up to $3,000 per school, to lobby on their behalf. In effect, the state’s religious schools can now use some of the public money they receive to advocate for the flow of funding to increase.

Between 2020 and 2022, the center’s revenue more than tripled, to $4.2 million. It used some of the money to purchase two buildings opposite the statehouse — one previously owned by the Dispatch — for a total of $2.35 million, giving it space to accommodate a staff that has grown to 20. (The Center for Christian Virtue did not respond to a request for comment.)

In early October, the center held a policy conference, called the Essential Summit, at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. A main topic of discussion was Christian education, with sessions led by the executive director of the Center for Biblical Integration at Liberty University, the college founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. One session would address the question “How should we plan for teaching knowing that humans are inherently corrupt?” Another asked, “Why do Christian educators have the most dignifying approach to all humans?”

Huffman was slated to join a discussion with the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in ­Michigan that has become a powerful incubator of conservatism. Also in attendance was Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration. The plan, called Project 2025, includes a strong endorsement of vouchers, and Roberts’ presence was an affirmation of Ohio’s role as a model for the school choice movement. In Florida, the number of voucher recipients approached half a million this school year, up 74%. (The state distributes the same voucher — about $8,000 — regardless of income.) In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott helped to defeat nearly a dozen anti-­voucher Republicans in state legislative primaries last year. He had $10 million in campaign funding from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania hedge fund billionaire who has made expanding vouchers his central policy goal.

At the convention center, conference staff turned me away, even though I had paid to register. I hung around as attendees emerged from the morning session, their tote bags filled with brochures for Christian schools, investing advice and health coverage. Many of the event’s discussions were aimed at religious schools that were now supported with public funds. But, as I was about to approach Roberts, security guards blocked the path and told me to leave.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

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.

Two families have sued an East Tennessee school district in federal court, arguing that school officials violated students’ rights when they called the police under a Tennessee law that seeks to severely punish threats of mass violence.

One 11-year-old was arrested at a restaurant even though he denied making a threat. A 13-year-old with disabilities was handcuffed for saying his backpack would blow up, even though only a stuffed animal was inside.

ProPublica and WPLN News wrote about both cases last year as part of a larger investigation into how new state laws result in children being kicked out of school and arrested on felony charges, sometimes because of rumors and misunderstandings. Our reporting in Hamilton County found that police were arresting, handcuffing and detaining kids, even though school officials labeled most of the incidents as “low level” with “no evidence of motive.” The students arrested were disproportionately Black and had disabilities, compared to those groups’ overall share of the district’s population.

The lawsuits against Hamilton County’s school district, filed this month in federal court in Chattanooga, are two of several brought against school officials in Tennessee in response to the threats of mass violence law. Advocates hope to push for changes to the law in the legislative session that begins this month. But the law’s Republican sponsor, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, told ProPublica and WPLN News that he is “not looking to make any changes to the law.”

“The zero-tolerance policy for even uttering the words ‘shoot’ or ‘gun’ is an unconstitutional kneejerk reaction by the legislature, and has led school administrators to make rash decisions concerning student discipline,” states one of the lawsuits, filed Thursday on behalf of the 11-year-old autistic student arrested at the restaurant.

When asked by another student last September if he was going to shoot up the school, the 11-year-old said, “Yeah,” according to the lawsuit. The school reported the comment to the police, who tracked him down and arrested him.

The other federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 3, involves the 13-year-old student with “serious intellectual impairments,” who told his teacher last fall that the school would “blow up” if she looked inside his backpack. The teacher found just a stuffed animal in the backpack, but school officials reported the incident to police anyway.

“Despite the clear absence of any true threat, and in the context of a student with Doe’s intellectual and emotional impairments, Doe was isolated, handcuffed by the [student resource officer], and transported to juvenile detention,” the lawsuit reads. (Both suits refer to the children involved as John Doe to keep them anonymous.) The school later determined that the student’s behavior was a manifestation of his autism, according to documentation included in the lawsuit.

Both lawsuits allege that district officials violated state law by allowing students receiving special education services to be physically restrained and by failing to follow proper procedure before facilitating the students’ arrests. The school district “infringed on Doe’s First Amendment rights and did so with deliberate indifference,” both lawsuits read.

The juvenile court cases against both students have been dismissed.

The Hamilton County Schools superintendent referred a request for comment to the school board’s attorney, citing pending litigation. The attorney did not immediately respond to a subsequent request for comment. The district has not yet filed a response to either lawsuit.

Disability rights advocates fought for a broader exception in the law that would have prevented police from charging kids who might, as a result of their disability, say or do something that could be construed as a threat.

“What we’re seeing coming out with all of these lawsuits, it’s sort of exactly what we were trying to educate about last year,” said Zoe Jamail, the policy coordinator for Disability Rights Tennessee.

Instead, lawmakers only excluded people with “intellectual disabilities,” failing to address students with other disabilities that affect their communication or behavior. The law does not state how police should determine whether a child has an intellectual disability before charging them. In fact, our reporting found that police arrested the 13-year-old in the lawsuit although school records showed he did have an intellectual disability.

Disability Rights Tennessee and other organizations plan to push for an amendment to the law this legislative session to protect more students with disabilities, especially when the threat is not credible. “The question should really be how can we better support those young people in the school environment, and how can we handle these cases with compassion and reason, rather than reacting and interpreting the law in a way that is not really reasonable,” Jamail said.

A federal judge allowed a lawsuit against a suburban Nashville school board to move forward in November. Two parents had sued Williamson County’s school board on behalf of their children, claiming they were wrongfully suspended and arrested after being accused of making threats of mass violence at school.

The families, Judge Aleta Trauger ruled, had a “plausible claim” that the school board violated the students’ due process rights by suspending them.

Part of the lawsuit involved a middle school student referred to as “H.M.” Teased by friends in a group chat about “looking Mexican,” she jokingly texted her friends, “On Thursday we kill all the Mexicos.” The school board argued in a legal filing that state law required officials to suspend the student and call the police, regardless of whether the threat was serious. In response to a request from ProPublica and WPLN, a school board official declined to comment further.

Trauger questioned Williamson County school board’s analysis of the law, which she said “leads to absurdity.”

“The implausibility of an action — here, a middle school student killing all Mexicans — ought to affect the threat analysis,” she wrote. “What if, for example, H.M. had threatened to cast a magical killing spell on a large group of people? What if H.M. had threatened to fly to the moon and shoot at people using a space laser?”

She denied the Williamson County school board’s motion to completely dismiss the lawsuit. The suit is pending.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, and Julia Rendleman for ProPublica, photography by Julia Rendleman for ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. _A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Heather and Stephen Casner sat across from the loan officer in the fall of 2022, a stack of papers between them. The building they were trying to buy — a 21-room, one-story motel in rural Anna, Illinois — was overflowing with trash and would need a complete overhaul before they could reopen it as a child care center in a region where there were almost no such facilities. But after a long search, it was the best option they could find.

The Casners were about to sign the papers for a $600,000 loan, using their house as collateral and setting aside $200,000 from Stephen’s retirement to cover what the loan wouldn’t. It was a staggering sum in a southern Illinois town where the per capita income is about $25,000 — 40% below the national level. “I’ve never even seen that much money,” Heather said. “I wasn’t raised that way.”

But Heather, who grew up on a farm just up the road, channeled her late father’s philosophy: “My daddy always used to say he was going to just keep farming until the money runs out.”

With a firm handshake, they were the new owners of a 1950s relic, the Plaza Motel.

The clock on the project was already ticking: In order to survive financially, they’d need to start enrolling children within six months. They knew it would be tough, but they soon would be shocked by the magnitude of the challenges ahead.

The motel the Casners bought as it looked in 2022, before it was remodeled (first image), and in December 2024, after they turned it into a child care center (second image).

Over the past decade, Illinois has lost nearly 4,300 licensed child care providers, a 33% decline. As a result, it has also lost nearly 38,000 licensed child care slots for kids, outpacing the rate at which the child population is shrinking.

In 2019, at the end of his first year in office, Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledged that child care providers in rural Illinois were closing at an “alarming rate” and promised to make Illinois the “best state in the nation for families raising young children.” In response, the state increased its payments to providers. But that funding had been slashed in previous years amid a state budget crisis, and the extra boost was too little, too late. When COVID-19 hit, those that were already fragile folded.

With increased state and federal funding, the closures have now slowed slightly, but Illinois has still lost roughly 1,300 providers since Pritzker took office.

Over several months, Capitol News Illinois spoke with more than 50 parents, employers and child care experts to understand how the child care crisis has reshaped their lives.

Driven to the Limit

Jala Wilson, 25, works with adults with developmental disabilities and attends nursing school. She has struggled to find care for two children. Her older son has behavioral challenges and his public school can’t accommodate him full time. And for her younger son, she couldn’t find child care nearby: Before the Casners opened the Our World of Learning Child Development Center, she was driving 100 miles round trip each day for child care. She spent more than a year getting up at 5 a.m. to drop off her younger son before heading to her nursing classes in the opposite direction. At night, she did it all in reverse. “That was insane,” she said. “I’d pick them up by 5 p.m., cook dinner, get them in the bathtub and do homework after they go to bed. So I probably would stay up until about midnight.” Gas alone cost her $600 a month. “If OWL closed, honestly, I’d probably drop out of school.”

Wilson picks up her younger son, Royce Lingle, from OWL.

People who have sought to open new facilities say they’ve faced monumental difficulties, especially in rural areas where properties are scarce and often require costly repairs. Launching a child care center, even in rural areas, can cost upwards of $1 million, experts say. “We typically think about the cost of care as being much less in our rural communities, and I think that’s a false narrative,” said Ariel Ford, a senior vice president with Child Care Aware of America, a national advocacy organization.

Adding to the difficulties in Illinois, prospective providers say they struggle to navigate a maze of complex requirements largely on their own, leading to delays in opening. They also point to regulations that are contradictory or outdated. One directs providers to place a blanket in every crib, even though the state prohibits using blankets to reduce the risk of SIDS. The state also directs providers to carry coins on walks so they can use a pay phone in an emergency, a relic Heather Casner called “ridiculous.”

Providers also say their applications can get stuck in limbo for weeks or months, with little explanation for the delays or news about when they’ll be licensed. The state’s own data supports this claim: For more than a third of applicants, the state misses its 90-day timeline to approve applications.

Part of the challenge is that the Illinois offices that oversee child care centers are severely short staffed, with a roughly 20% vacancy rate. On average, each state licensing representative is responsible for about 120 facilities, while the National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a caseload of 50. “Is a rep with 150 cases going to take 30 minutes to explain, step by step, how to fill out a form for somebody? It’s possible,” said Janet O’Connell, a 30-year veteran of the Department of Children and Family Services who recently started a consulting business, Licensing Navigators, to help providers find their way through the system. “But when you’ve got 149 other day care providers tugging at your coat, it’s really hard.”

“The application timeline and the timeline to actually open would shock you,” said Jill Andrews, a longtime child care provider and president of the Southern Illinois Early Childhood Action Team, a nonprofit child care advocacy organization. Centers must hire staff before opening, but without a clear timeline for when they will be allowed to open, she said, they often end up paying staff for weeks or months while waiting for clearance. “Most get into so much unnecessary additional debt due to the long process.”

Child care is urgently needed throughout the country, but particularly so outside urban areas. In one of the few nationwide studies of child care access, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, found that about 60% of rural Americans live in a child care desert — a region with too few licensed child care spots for the children who live there. In rural Illinois, it’s nearly 70%.

The sun sets over Anna, a town of about 4,000 people in southern Illinois.

Parents in southern Illinois said they have been forced to rely on a patchwork of family and neighbors, drive long distances — sometimes over 100 miles — or bring children to work. Some have left the workforce, unable to find affordable care.

Alex Gough, a spokesperson for Pritzker, said that since the governor took office in 2019, the state has expanded access to subsidized child care, sought to stabilize the industry with cash infusions during the pandemic, and started the Smart Start grant program to raise worker wages and provide ongoing support as federal pandemic assistance runs dry — one of only 11 states to do so.

Pritzker has also promised to streamline the state’s red tape with a new Department of Early Childhood. But most changes won’t begin until mid-2026, and what impact they will have on providers is not yet clear. Additionally, Illinois’ child care system relies heavily on federal funding, and there could be significant changes under the new Trump administration. But what he’ll do is unclear: In his first term, President Donald Trump both sought deep cuts to child care subsidies and touted historic increases.

Heather Casner said that throughout the licensing process, she felt “alone in the middle of an ocean, just bobbing and looking for land.” Opening a child care center had long been her dream. After graduating with a degree in early childhood education, she faced a job market that couldn’t pay the bills. Instead, she took a job working with troubled teens. “I loved them,” she said, but their struggles reminded her of her true calling: “I’m like, man, if I had known you earlier, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have thought you were worth nothing.”

The Casners intended to serve families across four rural Illinois counties, among the poorest regions in the state. According to the plan they developed with a business expert at a local university, they would need 48 children enrolled for a full year to break even.

“And this looked good, on paper,” Stephen said.

“On paper,” Heather echoed.

Heather Casner “Somebody Has to Care”

People talk about the Illinois divide: Chicagoland and the rest of the state. But in far southern Illinois, the economic chasm widens and becomes more visible near Anna, where the Casners bought their motel. The back roads wind past struggling towns, crumbling buildings and boarded-up storefronts, toward the state’s southernmost tip, which The Wall Street Journal called the fastest-shrinking place in America.

Here, infrastructure and vital services are vanishing at an alarming pace. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has demolished four public housing complexes, displacing hundreds of people, while flooding forced others out. Grocery stores disappeared too, creating a food desert until Rise Community Market opened in Cairo in 2023. That facility is now temporarily closed, but the founders are planning a reopening.

For parents of young children, life here can be especially daunting. And that has been true for a long time: Heather faced the same shortages 30 years ago when she returned to work when her daughter was 9 months old.

What finally made her plan possible was Stephen. The couple had been dating off and on for 10 years when Stephen learned in 2014, at 40, that he had early-onset Parkinson’s disease. Not long after, Stephen popped the question. He was also determined to get her business off the ground.

“I had a little bit of extra money,” he said. He could have spent it on himself, but he remembers thinking, “Somebody has to care about the families around here.”

Stephen Casner watches children on the playground at OWL. Stephen Casner, center, was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease, and Heather is his primary caregiver. The couple and Stephen’s father, Fred Casner, spend time in a motel room they converted into a break room where Stephen can be near Heather during the day.

The first challenge they encountered was finding a building. The region hasn’t seen much new construction for decades, and in each place they found, their licensing representative from the Department of Children and Family Services pointed out problems that would cost more to fix than they could afford.

Searches like the Casners’ for an affordable building in decent condition are “incredibly common, especially in rural communities,” said Brittany Walsh, senior associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that has focused on the rural child care crisis. The largest source of child care funding in America comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. But most of it goes to offset payments for low-income parents; only a few exceptions allow spending federal funds on the buildings themselves.

A proposed expansion of loans and grants from the Department of Agriculture that rural child care providers could use to offset steep startup costs is pending in Congress, Walsh said. But it’s tied up in the long-delayed new farm bill.

Illinois has sought to help but has barely made a dent. The multiyear Rebuild Illinois infrastructure program, launched in 2019, included $100 million for early childhood facilities. But in the first round of funding, 238 applicants vied for grants with only eight programs receiving $55 million between them in January 2023. Most of those were in Chicago and its suburbs, and no grants went to any providers in the bottom half of the state. A second, $45 million funding round is forthcoming, though no timeline has been given, according to the Capital Development Board.

Stephen was the first to spot the listing for the old Plaza Motel, built by community leaders decades ago during a boom era for this Midwestern factory-and-farm town.

When they went to visit, the place smelled musty, with soiled carpeting and midcentury wood paneling. The broken furniture, old clothing, drug paraphernalia and stacks of lottery tickets inside would eventually become 22 truckloads of trash. A decrepit shack where squatters had lived sat where the Casners envisioned the playground.

But it did have some things going for it, including its manageable size and flat playground area. Heather invited their Department of Children and Family Services representative to walk through it with her again.

“I talked to the DCFS person, and she’s like, ‘Oh, I love it. I can see it. This works,’” Heather recalled with a chuckle. “And I’m like, Really, all those other places for two years didn’t work, but an old run-down motel, you’re like, ‘Yes, this is where the kids need to be’?”

Mary Pender, a teacher at OWL, pushes snow off an awning. The Money Pit

Heather is drawn to things that sparkle and shine, like bedazzled clothing and glittery nail polish, and she has a contagious laugh that can fill a room. In September 2022, in her typical upbeat fashion — her short bob of curly hair dancing in the breeze — Heather took to Facebook Live to share her vision: “In this great building behind us, we are going to be able to have students from 6 weeks old to 6 years old in hopefully a matter of three months!”

Things didn’t go as planned. It turned out that years-old fire damage had left hidden destruction in the interior walls. Then they paid the water bill and turned the water on for the first time: “The building started crying,” Stephen recalled. For a time, the prior owners had not heated the building but had left the water on, causing the pipes to burst. The entire plumbing system had to be replaced.

Each day brought new costs: $47,000 for an HVAC system; $170,000 to the general contractor; $130,000 to stock the playground and furnish the building.

They tapped into part of the $200,000 taken from Stephen’s retirement account and borrowed additional money from Stephen’s dad. They quickly blew through their budget and their timeline — and then some.

They also pored over rules, highlighters in hand. They needed articles of organization, operating agreements, budgets, staffing plans, job descriptions and the details of every teacher’s and aide’s educational background. Then there were lesson plans, radon measurements, lead tests, plumbing and fire safety checks, and blueprints, each done according to very specific requirements where any mistakes would set them back months more.

“Everybody jokes that all of our rules have been written by some 85-year-old man who never dealt with kids a day in his life because that’s how it reads,” Heather said. The back-and-forth with their DCFS licensing representative felt endless, correcting paperwork, resubmitting forms that got lost in the shuffle, hoping each submission would be the last one.

In December 2022, Heather wrote to her licensing representative: “I am hoping for a March opening. Eventually I need some money coming in on this deal instead of just flying out.”

In February, Heather started interviewing staff and preparing to open. It was admittedly a leap of faith, but the system is also a catch-22 for providers: They can’t predict when their license will be approved, yet they need to complete background checks and hire staffers for each classroom before that can happen. This can take weeks to months because of teacher shortages and the often-lengthy process for background checks.

March came and went.

First image: Bryce Clemons and Harper Watkins play with bubbles as Heather cleans toys. Second image: Heather comforts Raydyan Taylor, 2. First image: Heather Casner walks Royce Lingle to his mother’s car. Second image: Heather rests in the break room at the end of the day.

In April, she informed DCFS of their plan for a grand opening of the Our World of Learning Child Development Center, which the Casners called OWL for short, on May 22, hoping that would encourage DCFS to complete her paperwork. But that day, too, came and went without a license approval.

DCFS’ licensing division, chronically understaffed for years, currently faces a 20% vacancy rate. There’s a 45% vacancy rate for supervisors, who must review and approve all license applications. A DCFS spokesperson said the agency is working to fill vacancies in its licensing division, but said delays are not due to staff shortages but rather are the result of a range of issues including missing paperwork from applicants.

Providers frequently post on a Facebook page, Illinois Child Care in Crisis, about frustrating delays. One woman told Capitol News Illinois she has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into expanding her Chicago-based child care business into suburban Oswego only to be stuck in limbo for months awaiting approval of her licence while paying a full staff.

“I’m paying people to sit around and do nothing,” Doyin Ajilore said in late November. She has been paying a center director since August and several teachers since September. She received her license on Dec. 13. But Ajilore said the delays still forced her to borrow additional funding. Heather, however, couldn’t afford to pay her staff until children enrolled. And she couldn’t enroll children without DCFS’ final approval. When Stephen’s patience ran out, he made an angry phone call, demanding the licensing representative finalize the paperwork. Heather still shudders when she remembers that call. But by the following week, DCFS signed off on their license.

It was late July by this point, and by then most of their staff had lined up other jobs. They scrambled to rehire staff.

Few Kids, Small Subsidies

OWL’s doors finally opened on July 31, 2023, the place filled with pint-sized tables and chairs, shelves stocked with brightly colored toys and books for playing and learning. They’d transformed the old motel into an inviting space decorated with owls, their license now proudly on display near the entrance.

But the problems didn’t end. A few months before opening, Heather had asked parents on Facebook to add their names to a form if they were interested in care. The response seemed promising: Nearly 100 parents put their names down. When the Casners opened OWL, there were only two other centers serving children in an area with about 2,600 kids under 6. But filling classrooms still took months, a common issue in rural areas, experts said, because parents may live far away, be unaware of a new facility or need time to secure a job if they’re returning to the workforce.

The Casners’ business plan had little margin for error, especially given the subsidy payments they were relying on.

Illinois has long faced issues with its subsidies, which the state pays to child care providers on behalf of low-income families who qualify. The federal Administration for Children and Families recommends that states pay providers 75% of the market rate for care, but Illinois pays less than 45% for child care centers, according to federal data from April 2023, the latest available. That was one of the largest gaps in the nation, and it violated the equal access provision of the federal government’s block grant funding program, according to a news release from the federal agency. State officials noted that the data lags behind recent subsidy increases and said Illinois is now compliant in all but one category.

Providers could charge parents who receive these subsidies additional fees to help make up the difference, but most — including the Casners — don’t, knowing that many parents simply can’t afford it.

Today, a year and a half after opening, OWL is at just over half capacity, serving about 45 children. The vast majority of their care is paid for by government subsidies, and the center would need to maintain that population for a full year to break even.

Several OWL parents have no backup plan if Heather’s center doesn’t survive. Before the center opened, Jala Wilson of Carbondale had spent over a year driving 100 miles a day to drop her son at child care, head to her nursing classes in the opposite direction, and then do it again in reverse at pickup time. She spent $600 a month on gas alone. “That was insane, but it’s what I had to do,” she said.

Rachel Clover, another OWL mom, is effusive. Her daughter’s father died by suicide last summer, and Heather treated her and her daughter, 3-year-old Aizlyn, kindly. “They’ve been there for me emotionally,” she said, adding that having child care has allowed her to work full-time as an aide for the elderly and disabled. “It’s given me a chance to be more than just a welfare mom,” she said.

A Lifeline at a Hard Time

When Rachel Clover, 36, talks about OWL, she breaks down in tears. She’s been on her own with two girls, ages 8 and 3, since her fiancé died by suicide last summer, and child care had already been a battle for years — Clover said she had to pull her older daughter out of another facility after she was left sitting in the same diaper all day. Clover tried working nights while family and friends watched the kids, but it left her frazzled and sleep deprived, and she ultimately switched jobs. When OWL opened just a few miles from her public housing in Jonesboro, it felt like a godsend. “Heather never said anything if I was late for pickup because I just needed a moment to breathe,” she said. “I don’t want to get all choked up, but it’s true. Without having somewhere safe for my daughter to be, I won’t be able to work, I won’t be able to survive.”

Rachel Clover picks up her younger daughter, Aizlyn, from OWL. Access to nearby child care allows Clover to work.

Heather feels this pressure profoundly. Originally she had planned to pay herself a salary of $40,000, but since opening in July, she has yet to take a full paycheck. Every two weeks, she prays that there’s enough for payroll, and her staff has never missed a check. In early October, she was $1,000 short. To pay her staff, Heather had to transfer funds from an account that barely covered her $4,000 mortgage. Paying back Stephen’s retirement account seems out of reach. “Steve and I are broke by now,” Heather said. “And all of our future money is gone.”

Heather blinks a lot when she’s stressed, and there’s been a lot more blinking lately. “I can’t give up,” she said. She plans to keep the center open until the money runs dry, just as her father did with his farm.

“Sure,” Stephen added, “until she drops dead just trying to make a go.”

“Yep,” she concurred, “Just to make it go one more day.”

by Anna 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.

The door is closing on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s chance to fulfill many of her campaign promises after Democrats couldn’t coalesce around a legislative agenda in the final days of 2024.

Michigan Democrats led all branches of government for the past two years, for the first time in about four decades, and they started with a multibillion-dollar budget surplus to boot. But the trifecta was lost after Republicans won back the state House in the fall. And, during the chaotic final session of the year, Democrats accomplished little on what Whitmer once presented as the most significant issues facing the state.

Among the bills not acted upon: ones to bring more transparency to the governor’s office and Legislature, which are now exempt from public record requests. Also dead were efforts to repeal Michigan’s controversial emergency manager law and to charge royalties to bottled water companies for extracting groundwater and invest it in infrastructure and other programs, an idea similar to what Whitmer herself once suggested. The Legislature also took no substantive action to “fix the damn roads,” as Whitmer’s famous 2018 campaign slogan put it.

“Governor Whitmer thanks our colleagues in the legislature for their efforts on behalf of their fellow Michiganders and looks forward to working alongside the incoming House,” Stacey LaRouche, Whitmer’s press secretary, said in a statement. “She will continue to work with anyone who is serious about getting things done.”

Overall, Michigan Democrats followed an active first year in leadership with a markedly more stunted one, tempered by internal conflicts and moderate policies that seemed tailored to shoring up electoral prospects. (The governor has consistently demurred when asked about her interest in running for president.)

“I’m across-the-board mad,” said Lisa McGraw, public affairs manager of the Michigan Press Association, which has lobbied for years to expand the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

There is a continuing cost to secrecy in state government, McGraw said, pointing to how a lack of transparency contributes to corruption and the potential misuse of power. To those who oppose opening up the governor’s office and Legislature to FOIA, she asks, “What do they have to hide?”

Bills that would have made long-unaddressed fixes to Michigan’s Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act also never made it to the governor’s desk. A ProPublica investigation last year showed how WICA provides support for wrongfully convicted people as they rebuild their lives, but many of their compensation claims are challenged by the state. Some get nothing at all. Two Supreme Court justices, a state commission, the attorney general’s office and advocates have implored legislators to address gaps in the law.

But bills that aimed to do so expired at the end of the year.

“More people will be harmed in the near future because of the failure of our Legislature,” said Kenneth Nixon, president and co-founder of the Organization of Exonerees.

Now, he said, “everything starts over” with the WICA reform effort. The split government makes it unlikely that a new bill will advance over the next two years, he said, but it’s important to educate legislators on why the changes are needed.

“People have had their lives destroyed through no fault of their own, and they should be made whole,” Nixon said.

A Senate bill to ensure that health plans cover a new generation of cancer therapies also failed to reach the finish line. ProPublica previously reported on how a Michigan man died after an insurer denied the only therapy that could have saved his life.

Road funding wasn’t publicly addressed until the last moment. In mid-December, Whitmer reportedly warned her fellow Democrats that they shouldn’t expect her to sign any further bills if they didn’t move on road funding or economic development. But in the end, nothing got done on the issue that had once been Whitmer’s flagship.

Short-term funding sources that paid for some improvements in recent years are running out. Without further action, according to one estimate by civil engineers, the proportion of paved roads in poor condition will increase in the years to come.

“The governor has run on roads funding, but has she actually fixed it?” asked Rachel Hood, a Democrat whose term in the House ended in December. If Whitmer does run for higher office, she said, voters “will see that the job didn’t get done.”

Sam Inglot, executive director of the left-leaning nonprofit Progress Michigan, said that one of the lessons of the last session is that, even with a trifecta advantage, there’s a need for strong leadership. “You need to have somebody who’s going to set the vision and the priorities of what these folks are going to do,” he said.

Michigan lawmakers did pass a slew of consequential laws in 2023, the first year of full Democratic power. They repealed the state’s “right-to-work” law that allowed workers in unionized jobs to opt out of union dues and fees, codified reproductive rights, expanded the earned income tax credit, and provided free breakfast and lunch to all public schoolchildren.

And, in the last weeks of the trifecta, they passed bills that strengthened hate crime protections, modified the state’s gun buyback program and made changes intended to increase access to birth control.

State Sen. Jeff Irwin, a Democrat who sponsored the cancer treatment bill, said that many of the year’s accomplishments were overlooked because they didn’t sync with issues spotlighted in the presidential election. As an example of one such success, he pointed to reforms in how reading skills are taught in Michigan. (ProPublica has reported on how 1 in 5 American adults struggles to read at a basic level.)

Nonetheless, “2024 will be chronicled as one of the least productive legislative sessions in history,” said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan policy organization.

Momentum slowed in the first part of the year, as the Democrats’ slim House majority slipped to a tie until after special elections were held for two seats. Election-year campaigning ate up the summer and fall. And an ordinarily crowded late-term agenda was even more so because House Speaker Joe Tate instructed members to wait until after the election to introduce many bills, according to Hood. (Tate’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Then House Republicans and one Democratic representative refused to show up unless their policy priorities were addressed. Unable to muster a quorum, Tate adjourned the House early, on Dec. 19. “No one did their job in the House,” McGraw said. “They didn’t show up.”

The Senate continued working, powering through an all-night session before concluding business on the afternoon of Dec. 20. But it was effectively limited to bills needing no further action from the House.

That was a problem for the wrongful-compensation bill. Although the House passed it in December, the bill inadvertently left off an amendment, so it wasn’t possible for the Senate to vote on a complete version of the bill, said Sen. Stephanie Chang, the Democratic sponsor.

Despite her reported warning about legislative inaction on roads, Whitmer did sign many bills, including policies addressing housing discrimination and human trafficking.

And this week, on the first day of the new legislative session, the senators who have long fought to expand FOIA introduced the bipartisan proposals yet again. “The Senate has made this a priority,” said McGraw. “I hope the House Republicans feel the same way.”

If passed, the bills would likely not take effect until 2027 — after Whitmer concludes her second and final term in office.

LaRouche said in a statement that the governor believes that state government must be open, transparent and accountable to taxpayers. “She is the first governor in state history to voluntarily disclose personal financial information, and income tax returns,” LaRouche said.

Whitmer previously said that if legislative efforts to increase transparency stall, she would unilaterally open up the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices to public record requests.

“Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on,” she vowed in her 2018 Sunshine Plan.

Six years later, she has yet to do so.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News; Graphics by Lucas Waldron and Zisiga Mukulu, ProPublica

This story describes an alleged sexual assault and serious injuries resulting from it.

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

This story works best on ProPublica’s website. View the interactive story here.

The sexual assault case was one of the most horrendous that two Alaska Superior Court judges said they had encountered in their long careers on the bench. The victim suffered internal injuries that required surgery and the use of a bag for her digestive system.

“Even somebody like me, who does nothing but this work for so long, still has their sensibility shocked,” Judge Philip Volland said at an early bail hearing, warning that he worried the suspect might try to threaten the woman. “The facts of this case tell me there is a very, very real risk of intimidation of the victim. If she wasn’t afraid then, she should be afraid now.”

Detectives had interviewed the alleged victim, executed search warrants and, two weeks after the reported incident, arrested a suspect: then-38-year-old Lafi “Beago” Faualo, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree sexual assault.

That was a decade ago. The case has still not gone to trial.

Over the years, the state assigned the case to four different judges, including Volland, who between them agreed to delay the trial more than 70 times — usually at the request of the defense attorney. Such delays and judges’ acquiescence have become routine in Alaska, robbing victims of timely justice and sometimes eroding the prosecution’s ability to mount an effective case using eyewitness testimony.

A spokesperson for the court system said the state is taking steps to reduce the length of time it takes to resolve Alaska criminal cases, including providing new training for judges and issuing orders to limit delays.

In the neverending case of sexual assault against Faualo, it all began with an alleged attack on July 16, 2014, in a van parked outside an Anchorage church. According to the charges, Faualo was in the back seat with the victim during the incident. Prosecutors additionally accused a second man, who was in the driver’s seat, of sexual assault in the case but later dropped the charges when the man pleaded guilty to coercion.

According to a charging document, Faualo denied sexually assaulting the woman but told Anchorage police he might have “accidentally” put his hand in her anus. The report quotes Faualo saying he might have used a bottle, but then saying it was definitely his hand. Faualo’s defense attorney has since said that Faualo’s co-defendant — who has since died — was the one who committed the assault and not Faualo.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained audio recordings and logs from each hearing or listened to it live. Nearly every time the defense attorney asked to delay the trial, a judge agreed. Not once did anyone in the courtroom ask what the victim wanted.

Faualo did not respond to an interview request and did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions.

Here’s how an Alaska sexual assault defendant has been able to prevent his case from going to trial since 2014. Prosecutors typically raised no objection to the delays. Unless noted, the judge granted the defense request for a delay in every instance.

• Sept. 25, 2014: Faualo has hired a private attorney, Rex Butler, who asks to delay the hearing.
• Oct. 7, 2014: Judge Philip Volland agrees to a delay because the defense attorney says he is still new to the case.
• Nov. 4, 2014: The judge grants the defense a three-week delay.
• Nov. 25, 2014: The judge delays the case as Faualo’s co-defendant considers a plea deal.
• Dec. 9, 2014: The defense attorney has a scheduling conflict, delaying the case.
• Jan. 13, 2015: Faualo files a motion to suppress evidence, delaying the case for months.

By 2015, the case has stretched past the state’s 120-day speedy-trial deadline. With no trial date in sight, Faualo asks to be released on bail, but the prosecutor claims he is a flight risk and a threat to the victim. The judge denies the bail request. The stakes are high. If convicted, Faualo faces a minimum of 25 years in prison for one count of sexual assault that resulted in serious injury, plus additional time for each of three additional counts of sexual assault.

• April 7, 2015: The defense asks for another delay.
• July 7, 2015: The judge grants a two-week delay, no questions asked.
• Aug. 18, 2015: Judge Michael Wolverton has been assigned to the case. He approves another delay.
• Aug. 26, 2015: The judge delays the trial to November 2015.
• Oct. 14, 2015: The judge agrees to another delay.
• Nov. 18, 2015: The judge delays the case another 35 days.
• Dec. 9, 2015: The first motion to suppress evidence fails, and the judge agrees to another delay.
• Jan. 20, 2016: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
• Feb. 17, 2016: The state has offered a plea deal. The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
• Mar. 16, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on the plea deal and asks for another monthlong delay.
• April 20, 2016: The defense files another motion and asks for a 30-day delay.
• May 18, 2016: The judge agrees to delay the case for another month.
• June 15, 2016: With a new prosecutor assigned to the case, the defense again asks for a 30-day delay.
• July 13, 2016: The defendant is considering a plea deal that has been offered; the prosecutor asks for a two-week delay.
• July 27, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on whether to take the deal. The judge delays the trial by six weeks.

By now, the delays in the case mostly revolve around motions filed by the defense to throw out evidence collected by detectives early in the investigation. For example, Faualo’s lawyer says police served a search warrant too late at night — despite the warrant saying it could be served at any time. Meanwhile, Faualo’s co-defendant has agreed to a plea deal and is expected to testify against him at trial.

• Oct. 12, 2016: The defense asks for a one-month delay to continue negotiating a deal.
• Nov. 16, 2016: The judge agrees to the defendant’s request for another one-month delay.
• Dec. 14, 2016: The judge delays the case a month to make time for an evidentiary hearing.
• Feb. 8, 2017: The judge denies the defense’s motions to suppress evidence, and the defense asks for another three-week delay.
• Mar. 8, 2017: Faualo’s lawyer tells the judge he will “try to get” the case resolved soon but asks to delay the trial two months.
• May 17, 2017: The defense asks to delay the trial by one month to negotiate a deal.
• July 5, 2017: The defense asks for another one-month delay to continue negotiating.
• Aug. 2, 2017: The defense says they’re “very close” to making a plea deal and just need to delay proceedings by another two weeks.
• Aug. 16, 2017: Still negotiating, the defense says, asking for another two-week delay.
• Aug. 30, 2017: The defense says it needs a three-week delay to continue negotiating.
• Sept. 27, 2017: “Give us two more weeks,” the defense attorney asks. The judge OKs the delay.
• Oct. 11, 2017: The defense is “pretty close” to a plea deal but needs a two-week delay.
• Nov. 1, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay — long enough “so we don’t come back in two weeks and not have an answer.”
• Dec. 6, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay. The judge agrees without asking questions.
• Jan. 10, 2018: The defense says the two sides are “close to resolving” negotiations but need a two-week delay.
• Jan. 24, 2018: The judge delays the trial to allow more negotiations.
• Feb. 14, 2018: The defense asks for a new three-week delay without explanation. The judge agrees.
• Mar. 7, 2018: A new prosecutor takes over the case; the defense attorney asks for a two-week delay.
• Mar. 21, 2018: The defense asks for a one-week delay to negotiate.
• Mar. 28, 2018: The defense asks for two more weeks to negotiate.
• May 2, 2018: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial until October.

Prosecutors often say that trial delays make it harder to win a conviction because witnesses’ and police officers’ memories fade over time.

“Without question, the delay that occurs in cases going to trial makes it more difficult to keep track of where victims and witnesses are,” said Alaska Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore. “Police officers retire, move out of state. Lab analysts leave.”

“All of our cases depend upon us being able to present the evidence, and it’s just a fact of life that as time progresses, life moves on,” he said.

• Sept. 5, 2018: The defense asks for a one-month delay.
• Oct. 3, 2018: The defense asks for a two-week delay.
• Oct. 17, 2018: The judge agrees to delay the trial for two weeks for “attorney negotiations.”
• Nov. 28, 2018: Faualo has a new public defender, who asks to delay a week to prepare.
• Dec. 12, 2018: The public defender asks to delay again.
• Feb. 6, 2019: Butler, the private defense attorney, returns. He requests a delay until September.

Nothing happens in the case for seven months because Faualo’s attorney says he doesn’t have time for the trial. Faualo has now been in jail for five years, but the case appears to finally be destined for trial when a judge sets a new date for November 2019.

• Oct. 28, 2019: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial one month.

The 2019 trial date comes and goes, and Wolverton has now retired. At a spring hearing held before Judge Catherine Easter, the defense attorney says he’s once again considering a plea deal rather than a trial. The judge chuckles when she reads the case number, which shows it has been awaiting trial since 2014. When the defense asks for a delay, the prosecution objects.

Because of the age of the case, the judge sets a trial date. But soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic pauses jury trials across Alaska.

• May 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
• June, 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
• Oct. 27, 2020: COVID-related delay.
• Jan. 12, 2021: COVID-related delay.
• Mar. 9, 2021: COVID-related delay.
• June 17, 2021: COVID-related delay.
• Aug. 16, 2021: The defense asks for a delay to negotiate a deal. Judge Erin Marston, the latest judge assigned to the case, agrees.
• Oct. 26, 2021: A new prosecutor is assigned to the case and asks for a delay.
• Nov. 24, 2021: The defense requests a delay.
• Jan. 5, 2022: Jury trials have resumed across Alaska, but both sides in this case ask for a delay.
• May 9, 2022: The prosecutor says she’s ready for trial. The defense wants a delay.
• June 10, 2022: The defense asks for a 30-day delay to continue negotiations.
• July 14, 2022: The judge delays a hearing a week. The prosecutor doesn’t show up to the new hearing, so the judge delays again.
• July 26, 2022: The defense asks for a delay due to a scheduling conflict.
• Sept. 9, 2022: The prosecutor asks the judge to delay the case for “one last status hearing.”

The only witness to the alleged assault, other than the victim, has now died, the defense attorney says. Faualo has been in jail for eight years, and the judge agrees to release him on bail. His daughters will be asked to watch him and report to police if he violates conditions of his release.

• Nov. 28, 2022: “I know it’s an old case,” the defense attorney acknowledges while asking that the trial be delayed several more months.
• Feb. 1, 2023: The defense asks for a delay of 45 days.
• Mar. 15, 2023: The defense requests a delay. A new judge assigned to the case, Judge Andrew Peterson, agrees.
• April 26, 2023: The defense asks to delay a trial until 2024.

The talk of trial dates pauses for a few months as Faualo’s lawyer works, successfully, to loosen bail restrictions. At a bail hearing, a judge confuses Faualo with the codefendant who pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Misunderstanding the severity of the charges against Faualo, the judge agrees to ease up on his bail conditions. Faualo is now allowed to leave his house during the day.

• Nov. 15, 2023: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
• Dec. 13, 2023: The prosecutor wants time to negotiate. She asks for a 30-60 day delay.

It’s now been nearly 10 years since the alleged sexual assault. Having failed to reach a plea agreement, the two sides say the earliest they can appear at trial is October 2024.

• Aug. 30, 2024: With the trial set for October, the defense asks for a 15-day delay.
• Sept. 25, 2024: The defense requests a 30-day delay.
• Oct. 30, 2024: The prosecutor is ready. But the trial is delayed again because Faualo’s lawyer had double-booked himself for two trials at the same time.
• Nov. 27, 2024: The prosecutor and defense are supposed to select a trial date, but the defense isn’t ready. The judge delays the case again.

The most recent hearing in this case was held on Dec. 16, 2024, when Judge Andrew Peterson set a trial date for June 2025, 10 years and 11 months after the alleged sexual assault took place.