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by William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing and Andy Kroll

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A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show.

The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.

The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies that is typically highly restricted.

The review appears to be in its early stages — one document describes staffers as “beginning preplanning” — but the email directs the IRS to turn over specific documents by Thursday, April 24. It’s not clear if that happened.

The inspector general is seeking, for instance, “All requests for taxpayer or other protected information from the President or Executive Office of the President, OMB, or DOGE. Include any information on how the requestor plans to use the information requested, the IRS’s response to the request, and the legal basis for the IRS’s response,” the email says.

The inquiry also asks for information about requests for access to IRS systems from any agency in the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and DOGE.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration office, known as TIGTA, is led by acting Inspector General Heather M. Hill. When Trump fired 17 inspectors general across a range of federal agencies in January, those working for the Treasury Department were not among the ones axed.

The White House, DOGE, OMB and Musk did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Previously, the administration has said, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

A TIGTA spokesperson, Becky D’Ambrosio, said the agency “does not disclose specific details of ongoing work or timelines.” She said the office has received multiple requests from Congress. “When possible, we are incorporating these requests into our ongoing work providing independent oversight of IRS activities.”

The April 15 request follows concerns expressed by some within the IRS that DOGE employees under Musk’s direction have improperly accessed taxpayer information or shared it with other government agencies, said multiple people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Earlier this month, a group of Democratic senators urged the Treasury inspector general to investigate whether the Trump administration was “violating strict taxpayer privacy laws” by giving DOGE personnel wide access inside the agency.

“Taxpayer data held by the IRS is, by design, subject to some of the strongest privacy protections under federal law, the violation of which can trigger civil and criminal sanctions,” the lawmakers wrote in their request.

In March, three senators said they were troubled by reports the IRS had entered into a sharing agreement to help the Department of Homeland Security “locate suspected undocumented immigrants.” Trump has promised deportations on a massive scale.

A spokesperson for Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the signees of both requests, declined to comment. DHS referred a request for comment from ProPublica to the Treasury Department, which did not respond.

The inspector general examination comes amid major upheaval at the Treasury Department and the IRS, as the administration moves to fire thousands of agency workers and DOGE digs deeper into IRS databases. Melanie Krause resigned as the acting commissioner of the IRS after the agency reached an agreement to share taxpayer data with the DHS.

A former senior official at TIGTA told ProPublica the review could lead to a criminal investigation if reviewers find evidence of lawbreaking. The same official said it’s possible those leading the review could face political repercussions, as have scores of prosecutors, FBI agents, law firms and others who have questioned Trump’s actions.

Emails from the inspector general to IRS employees earlier this month asked them to provide copies of any written agreements to share taxpayer data with entities including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, DOGE, the Office of Personnel Management or other agencies.

It also seeks a full list of non-IRS employees who are part of DOGE or its affiliates. This year, ProPublica has been profiling the figures working for DOGE.

Danielle Citron, a leading privacy legal scholar at the University of Virginia, said the email suggests that the inspector general may be probing for violations of the Privacy Act, which requires agencies to safeguard citizens’ information and only share it across the government in specific cases. The kind of blanket data-sharing agreement the Trump administration is seeking with the IRS, she said, is “exactly what the Privacy Act is designed to avoid.”

CNN and Wired have reported that DOGE is attempting to build a master database that combines information from the IRS, DHS, Social Security Administration and other agencies. The database would be used for immigration enforcement, the outlets reported.

This is not the first time Trump administration decisions at the IRS have prompted an inspector general inquiry.

As ProPublica reported, a senior IRS lawyer warned the agency’s leaders in late February that its plan to terminate nearly 7,000 probationary employees based on poor performance was untrue and a “fraud.” The IRS proceeded with the firings, which have since been challenged in federal court.

After the firings, the IRS inspector general began scrutinizing the mass terminations, said a person familiar with the effort who wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters. The status of the probe is not known.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

A Louisiana judge this week set aside the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence of Jimmie Chris Duncan, whose 1998 conviction for killing his girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter was based in part on bite mark evidence that experts now say is junk science.

The decision comes after a Verite News and ProPublica investigation in March examined the questions surrounding Duncan’s conviction as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause.

Judge Alvin Sharp, of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish, pointed to new testimony during a September appeals hearing that such bite mark analysis presented by a once-heralded forensics team is “no longer valid” and “not scientifically defensible.”

The original analysis came from forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, whose longtime partnership as state experts fell under legal scrutiny after questions emerged about the validity of their techniques.

Over the past 27 years, nine prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row.

Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work, which Sharp said in his ruling appeared “questionable at best.”

Other expert witnesses said that Hayne’s autopsy and his findings were “sloppy in practice” and “inadequate overall.”

“It is worth noting that the qualifications of Dr. Hayne were lacking in certain ways to an extent that called into serious question” the pathologist’s “expert designation,” Sharp wrote in his ruling.

Sharp also stated in his ruling that he found “very compelling” the September testimony of an expert medical witness who said that the child’s death was not the result of a homicide but of an accidental drowning.

It remains unclear when — or if — Duncan will walk free.

Robert S. Tew, district attorney for the 4th Judicial District, can choose to appeal the decision, retry Duncan on the murder charge or a lesser offense or accept the court’s ruling and set him free. Tew did not respond to requests for comment. Duncan’s legal team declined to comment.

Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

Duncan, 56, has maintained his innocence for more than three decades, while prosecutors continued to insist that Duncan committed the murder and should be executed without delay.

Duncan was babysitting Haley Oliveaux, his girlfriend’s daughter, at the house they shared in West Monroe, Louisiana, on Dec. 18, 1993. He said he had left her alone in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, he said he heard a loud noise from the bathroom. When he went to check on Haley, he found her floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

While Duncan claimed it was a tragic accident, authorities charged him with first-degree murder after Hayne and West examined the girl’s body and determined there was evidence she was sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. After about two weeks of testimony in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.

Years later, Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys uncovered evidence that was not presented at trial that, they said, proves his innocence. This includes a jailhouse informant who wrote to prosecutors offering to share Duncan’s confession to the crime in what the defense claims was an exchange for leniency (the informant later recanted his trial testimony); past head injuries Haley suffered that might explain her death; and a video in which West can be seen grinding a cast of Duncan’s teeth into Haley’s body. West later claimed those bite marks, which the defense says the forensic dentist manufactured, were a match for Duncan’s teeth.

Dr. Lowell Levine, a defense expert, testified in a September hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal over the death of his girlfriend’s daughter. He is quoted in a brief summarizing Duncan’s case following his appeal hearing. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Hayne died in 2020. West did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.

West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.

West said he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition in a different post-conviction appeal, saying, “I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court” and admitted to making mistakes in previous cases. But he told The New Republic in a 2023 interview that his methods are valid because other people have used them.

In this week’s ruling, Sharp also noted the September testimony of Detective Chris Sasser, who investigated Haley’s death. Sasser said there was “no blood, no signs of struggle, no cleaning rags and no cleaning agents” in the bathroom or house where the alleged crime occurred. This undermined the state’s assertion that there was “massive blood loss,” the ruling said.

In addition, Sharp found that Duncan’s trial attorney, Louis Scott, provided ineffective counsel. Sharp pointed to a witness who testified that Scott failed to “investigate or present evidence that was available at the time of the trial,” that he did not “develop a coherent theory of defense,” and that he failed to disclose a conflict of interest.

Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he has suffered significant health problems including memory and speech impairment and declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

Duncan is among 55 people on death row in Louisiana, though until very recently he and the others were not in imminent danger of being executed as the state hadn’t put anyone to death since 2010 due to the unavailability of execution drugs. That changed with Landry’s 2023 election.

Landry has made clear his intention to carry out these death sentences as soon as possible, having recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.

This cleared the way for the state’s first execution in more than 15 years, as Jessie Hoffman was put to death on March 18 using nitrogen gas.

by Rob Davis, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

They are lines in the payroll ledger of a Cambodian baby clothing factory, invisible lives near the bottom of the global economy.

There is Phan Oem, 53, who says she clocked up to 76 hours a week producing clothing for Nike and other American brands, sometimes forced to work seven days a week. She says she feared being fired if she didn’t work through lunch breaks, on holidays and occasionally overnight. After 12 years spent packaging clothes, her base pay was the minimum wage: $204 a month.

There is Vat Vannak, 40, who at six months pregnant traveled by bus to join hundreds of workers who protested in the streets last year after Nike pulled out and the factory went bankrupt, leaving them unpaid. The authoritarian Cambodian government warned them to stop.

And there is the medical worker who said she saw one or two factory employees a month being sent to the hospital after falling unconscious. She said they were among eight to 10 workers a month who became too weak to work. Three other former employees said they sometimes saw two to three people go to the clinic for these issues in a single day. The reason, the medical worker said, was that they didn’t sleep much, didn’t eat enough and worked long hours.

Nike’s manufacturing apparatus in Southeast Asia has been shaken in recent weeks by news about President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Cambodia and Vietnam, mainstays of Nike’s supply chain, have faced import taxes of 49% and 46%, among the highest of any nation. Nike shares have been hammered.

The stories of workers at Cambodia’s Y&W Garment illuminate the longer-term legacy of Nike’s push into the region more than two decades ago, when labor abuses led co-founder Phil Knight to acknowledge that Nike products had become synonymous with “slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” The former employees’ recent experiences cast doubt on the company’s commitment to reform.

Unless tariffs force Nike to return manufacturing to the United States, labor advocates say, the company will have to offset the higher import taxes either by raising prices on its apparel or by pressuring its foreign factories for greater productivity, squeezing workers and their wages.

Vat Vannak, mother of 7-month-old Bun Kakada, said that the $250 a month she earned at Y&W Garment, including overtime, left her no money for savings. Phan Oem, 53, cuts mangos to prepare a dish for her mother. Phan said she struggled to find work after Y&W Garment closed because she was considered too old.

Nike has prided itself on the story of its reinvention since the 1990s sweatshop scandal. “We’ve gone from a target of reformers to a dominant player in the factory reform movement,” Knight wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Shoe Dog.”

The company has worked to convince consumers that it is improving the lives of its factory workers, not exploiting them. It became the first major apparel brand to disclose the names and locations of its suppliers. It established a written code that requires its suppliers to create a safe, healthy workplace, prohibit forced overtime and honor workers’ right to form unions. The company reports annually about its progress. In Nike’s marketing materials, contract factory workers are often smiling.

A key tentpole of Nike’s claims is that its suppliers pay competitive wages. Nike says contract factory workers for whom it has data now earn an average of 1.9 times their local minimum wage, without counting overtime.

Scrutinizing that claim is extraordinarily difficult. Nike acknowledges that the analysis omits more than a third of the 1.1 million people who make its sneakers and apparel worldwide. Nike says its focus in collecting wage data has been on its biggest suppliers. It hasn’t said which of its 37 producing countries are included.

ProPublica obtained a rare view of wages paid to the factory workers who produce Nike clothing: a highly detailed payroll list for 3,720 employees at Cambodia’s Y&W Garment. Covering earnings from longtime managers down to freshly hired 18-year-old sewing machine operators, the spreadsheet shows the workforce falling far short of the amount Nike says its factory workers typically earn.

While Nike says contract factory workers for which it has data earn 1.9 times their local minimum wage, a Y&W Garment factory payroll ledger shows many workers earning a base pay of $204 a month, Cambodia’s minimum wage last year. Even including bonuses and incentives, more than three-quarters of the factory’s employees earned close to the minimum wage. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights and redactions by ProPublica.)

Just 41 people, or 1% of the Y&W workforce, earned 1.9 times the local minimum wage of about $1 per hour — even when counting bonuses and incentives. These higher-paid employees included accountants, supervisors and a human resources manager.

Nike didn’t answer specific questions about ProPublica’s findings, including whether it dropped Y&W as a supplier because of any violations of its code of conduct.

In a statement, Nike said its code sets clear expectations for suppliers and that it “is committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing.”

“We build long-term relationships with our contract manufacturing suppliers,” the statement said, “because we know having trust and mutual respect supports our ability to create product more responsibly, accelerate innovation and better serve consumers.”

Nike added that it expects its suppliers “to continue making progress on fair compensation for a regular work week.”

Representatives of Y&W Garment and its Hong-Kong-based parent, Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to emails, text messages or phone calls seeking comment, and Wing Luen’s website is defunct. New York-based Haddad Brands, which Y&W workers said was an intermediary for Nike at the factory, did not respond to emailed questions about conditions at the factory and hung up on a reporter who called. Its website says it makes children’s clothing for Nike and that it enforces Nike’s code of conduct.

ProPublica interviewed 13 former Y&W workers in the Cambodian capital and surrounding villages, plus another one by phone, during two weeks in January.

In spare concrete homes and earthen courtyards that smelled of burbling fish sauce, they described workplace abuses that Nike promised to eradicate long ago. In addition to low wages, fainting workers and forced overtime, they spoke of bosses who mocked them if they underperformed and a life of debts that kept piling up.

They told ProPublica that what they made in Cambodia’s standard 48-hour, six-day week wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Some feared being fired or angering their supervisors if they refused extra hours. Others said they needed to work overtime simply to keep up. Still, many said they wished the factory hadn’t shut down.

Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, a Cambodian legal aid group also known as CENTRAL, said his country’s garment workers — including those at Y&W — do what circumstances require.

“When you ask them, ‘Do you want to have the weekend off with your family, your kids?’ yes, they do,” he said. “But how can they afford that? They’re stuck. There’s no choice.”

Khun Tharo, program manager for a Cambodian legal aid group, says workers feel compelled to work long hours to get by.

Nike’s arrival inside the corrugated metal walls at Y&W Garment was a big deal.

It was December 2021, workers said, when the company began trial production runs inside the expansive factory complex in southern Phnom Penh, about two miles from one of the notorious killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s 1970s genocide.

Supervisors told ProPublica that the owner, a man they called “thaw kae” — the big boss — gave them a message to deliver to line workers: Nike was coming. Money and benefits would follow. And they wouldn’t have to work extra hours.

Workers were happy. Earning more would let them save, pay off debts and stop borrowing from friends to make it to the next month. They said they felt secure knowing that it was Nike, a company they had heard respected labor laws.

But the promise of the big American brand was never realized, according to the workers who spoke to ProPublica. “After Nike came, nothing has changed,” one worker said.

A former Y&W Garment worker who asked not to be identified provided this photo taken inside the factory that produced baby clothing for Nike and other brands.

The former Y&W employees said neither their working conditions nor their pay improved while Nike goods were made at the factory. They instead described problems that would violate Nike’s code of conduct, which prohibits forced overtime and verbal abuse.

Three workers said they faced intense pressure to meet production targets. Two said workers were blamed if they missed their goals. Managers would yell at team leaders when that happened, one of them said; “If you can’t do it, just go back home,” the former worker recalled employees being told. If workers hit their targets, he said, managers set higher ones. If employees refused to work the extra hours needed to get there, two workers said, then managers would tell them their contracts wouldn’t be renewed or that they should resign.

Y&W’s payroll sheet covers March 2024, when the factory’s total employment was down from a previous high of about 4,500 people. The spreadsheet shows that even with bonuses and incentives, more than three-quarters of workers made close to Cambodia’s minimum wage — at most, 15% above it.

Workers with seniority earned only a little more. Of the 183 workers who’d been at Y&W a decade or longer, more than three-quarters had base pay, bonuses and incentives that put them, at most, 25% ahead of minimum wage.

It’s hard to know if wages at Y&W are an outlier or emblematic of Nike’s Southeast Asia supply chain; comprehensive pay records aren’t readily available for other factories. But 18 paystubs ProPublica collected at three of Nike’s other 25 Cambodian suppliers also show workers at or slightly above the minimum wage. Separately, a 2023 survey by labor advocates found similar results at two factories that supplied Nike.

The average pay at Y&W, without overtime but with bonuses and incentives included, is slightly below the $250 to $260 a month that Ken Loo, secretary general of the Textile, Apparel, Footwear and Travel Goods Association in Cambodia, estimated is standard for the industry.

Loo said wage increases must be balanced against productivity “because it will impact our competitiveness” with other garment-producing countries.

In December 2023, two years after Nike arrived at Y&W, workers said Nike pulled out. They said they were told to destroy any remaining Nike labels, a standard demand to prevent counterfeit or unauthorized products from being created. Hundreds of workers were let go.

In early 2024, around the time of the Lunar New Year, workers said, the factory owner left Phnom Penh for what many thought was a new year’s trip home to China. He didn’t return. Factory suppliers began calling in their debts, hauling away hundreds of rented sewing machines. The factory fell silent.

Workers slept in front of the factory’s locked gates to prevent the buildings from being cleared out. Hundreds marched in the streets, hoping to get the attention of the government and the brands for whom they’d produced.

Nike, in its statement, did not explain why it left Y&W. It said its suppliers have an obligation to pay severance, social security or other separation benefits. “In the event of any closure or divest, Nike works closely with the supplier to conduct a responsible exit,” the statement said.

A section of the former Y&W Garment factory now bears a for-rent sign.

A California-based brand that shipping records show also did business with Y&W before its closure, True Classic, did not respond to written questions.

Workers said they never heard from the brands. They said they did hear from the government, which was unhappy about their protests. Labor ministry officials called and told them to stop inciting their co-workers, threatening arrest. In March 2024, Cambodian news reports said the government seized the factory’s assets and distributed the proceeds to workers. But workers told ProPublica they received far less than they were owed.

The garment workers said they took what they could get.

It might be hard to understand how far a dollar stretches in Cambodia’s economy. The country’s current $208 monthly minimum wage — a $4 increase from last year — doesn’t sound like much to Americans. ProPublica heard from workers about why it isn’t enough for Cambodians, either.

Two women who worked at Y&W Garment and recently gave birth said they each spend $120 a month on powdered infant formula — four cans a month at $30 apiece.

Sar Kunthea, 34, who packaged clothing at Y&W, pays $282.70 a month on $12,000 she borrowed to make drainage improvements that would keep out floodwaters, which rose halfway up her home’s doors during the rainy season.

Sar Kunthea said she commonly worked two Sundays a month but still had to borrow money from friends a few times a year to stay afloat.Sar pulls leftovers out of her refrigerator for dinner. She buys the family’s groceries daily, she says, because she doesn’t have enough money to keep the refrigerator full. Sar pulls leftovers out of her refrigerator for dinner. She buys the family’s groceries daily, she says, because she doesn’t have enough money to keep the refrigerator full.

Vat Vannak, who added metal buttons to clothing, said she typically earned about $250 a month by tacking on two hours at the end of her regular, six-day-a-week 7 a.m.-to-4 p.m. shifts. The overtime pushed her workweek close to 60 hours. Her husband also brings home a paycheck from construction. But their monthly household costs included $109 for a motorbike, $50 for a room near the factory, $60 for food and about $40 for school expenses. She said she’d saved nothing.

Labor advocates have long pushed brands like Nike to pay what’s known as a living wage, calling it a basic human right. Although methods for estimating it vary, a living wage usually includes enough for food, water, housing, education, transportation, health care, energy, clothing, a phone and unforeseen expenses.

Vat puts her nephew's hair in a ponytail (first image) and hangs laundry to dry. Vat and her husband, Bun Sokha, dry off their son after a bath.

Nike does not explicitly require its factories to pay a living wage, but it says that every worker “has a right to compensation for a regular work week that is sufficient to meet workers’ basic needs and provide some discretionary income.” Nike reports that two-thirds of its key suppliers for which it was able to collect data paid above living wage benchmarks for their countries.

Estimates from the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, which represents labor unions based in Asia, put that benchmark for Cambodia at $659 a month. The WageIndicator Foundation, an independent Dutch nonprofit, puts it at $276 to $360 a month.

But Nike’s preferred estimate is just $232, based on research by the Anker Research Institute, which is part of the Global Living Wage Coalition. Nike has sponsored the institute’s work.

In a statement, the institute’s founders and one member of the wage coalition told ProPublica: “Our estimates are always fully independent. Companies have no influence over the methodology or estimates.”

Regardless of what researchers say, Ngin Nearadei says what she earned at Y&W was not enough.

Ngin feeds her son rice porridge.

Ngin, 26, worked in quality control and found herself with hefty debt payments because, like other workers, recent flooding required her to raise the floor of her house. How much would she need to earn monthly to forgo overtime? About $400, she said, maybe $500. That’s up to 30% more than what Nike says its contract workforce earns, on average, compared to the minimum wage.

Speaking in her home, Ngin disappeared for a moment and returned with two creased paystubs. One, covering roughly two weeks, showed just how much she had to work to get close to what she said she needs.

She was scheduled to work 104 hours as part of a regular schedule that runs eight hours a day, Monday through Saturday. On top of that, she added 64 hours of overtime, including eight hours on Sunday, the paystub shows.

Her total work time for the period was 168 hours, an average of roughly 11 to 12 hours a day if she worked every day. (Paychecks came twice a month; the exact pay period covered was not printed on Ngin’s document.)

When combined with her other paycheck for the month, she earned $341.65.

One of Ngin’s paystubs shows she worked 56 overtime hours and 8 additional hours on Sunday in a roughly two-week period. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica.)

The workers who make Nike’s products have helped Knight, the cofounder, become one of the richest people on earth. Nike’s market capitalization was $13 billion in 1998, when Knight delivered his mea culpa about “slave wages.” Although its stock has been trading far below its 2021 peak, Nike was still worth about $80 billion as of April 21, 2025.

The company has been a cash machine. In just its last two fiscal years, Nike has returned $13.9 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.

According to Dennis Arnold, an associate professor of human geography at the University of Amsterdam who’s studied the Cambodian garment industry, unless Nike and others choose lower profit margins for the sake of higher pay, little is likely to change for factory workers.

Governments like Cambodia’s fear that raising the minimum wage dramatically will drive away manufacturing, he said, because companies that benefit from Cambodia’s low wages must also wait longer and pay more to get garments to Western markets due to shipping costs and the country’s poor infrastructure.

“All said, it’s not the most appealing place in the world, and the government is not taking much initiative to try to change the situation for the better,” Arnold said.

So far, no brand has guaranteed its factory workers a living wage, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign, a Dutch advocacy group. H&M, the Swedish retailer, was quoted by numerous news outlets in 2013 promising that its top suppliers would pay a “fair living wage” by 2018. An analysis by the Clean Clothes Campaign in 2019 concluded that the promise was not fulfilled. (H&M did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

Recently, H&M and 11 other brands made a smaller commitment in an agreement with a global labor union, IndustriALL: to guarantee production volumes when Cambodian unions sign bargaining agreements that include higher wages, and to pay for the resulting higher labor costs.

Nike is not a signatory.

European and U.S. regulators could take measures to increase accountability for wages. Jason Judd, executive director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University, said they could require publicly traded companies like Nike to consistently disclose what factory workers earn when producing their goods.

H&M currently reports what its foreign suppliers pay workers on a country-by-country basis, for example. Puma did too, until stopping this year. Nike did it once — in 2001.

“Companies have enormous leeway in what they report,” Judd said. “It’s enormously difficult to compare within firms across years. Between firms, impossible. Companies are able to pick and choose how they tell their story.”

Knight, who did not respond to requests for comment, wrote in his 2016 memoir that the question of wages for Nike’s factory workers would always remain.

“The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand,” wrote Knight, whose net worth Forbes put at $28.5 billion as of April 21. “Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can’t simply pay whatever we wish to pay.”

Knight recounted a story, one that’s hard to verify. When Nike tried to raise wages in an unnamed country, “we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.”

At Y&W Garment, payroll data shows, line workers were nowhere close to making that much.

On average, they earned $236.25 a month with incentives.

The factory doctor made $581.

About the Numbers

The Y&W Garment payroll ledger that ProPublica obtained was for March 2024, around the time the factory shut down. The data shows workers’ monthly base pay and how much they earned from bonuses and incentives, which are also paid on a monthly basis. More than a dozen former workers verified details about their own pay shown in the spreadsheet. To estimate total earnings for each worker, we included base salary, incentives and bonuses for transportation, seniority and attendance, but we excluded overtime pay — as Nike does in its calculations of average wages — and a meal incentive related to overtime. We assumed every worker got a $10 attendance bonus that Cambodian law requires. Although the spreadsheet did not indicate that $10 transportation bonuses were universal, we assigned this amount to every worker.

by McKenzie Funk

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

Connecticut’s attorney general has sent his second warning in a month to the low-cost carrier Avelo Airlines, telling the startup it has jeopardized tax breaks and other local support by agreeing to conduct deportation flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Democrats in the Connecticut legislature, meanwhile, are working to expand the state’s sanctuary law to penalize companies like Avelo for working with federal immigration authorities.

The backlash comes after Texas-based Avelo signed an agreement early this month to dedicate three of its 20 planes to carrying out deportation flights as part of the charter network known as ICE Air. It also follows a report by ProPublica, which Connecticut Attorney General William Tong cited in an April 8 letter to Avelo, revealing flight attendants’ unease over the treatment and safety of detainees on such flights. The concerns airline staffers raised included how difficult it could be to evacuate people wearing wrist and ankle shackles.

“Can Avelo confirm that it will never operate flights while non-violent passengers are in shackles, handcuffs, waist chains and/or leg irons?” Tong’s April 8 letter asks. “Can Avelo confirm that it will never operate a flight without a safe and timely evacuation strategy for all passengers?”

Tong then issued a public statement on April 15 reiterating his concerns.

In 2022, before its current ICE Air contract, Avelo flew a series of charters for the immigration agency. A flight attendant captured photos of detainees in wrist and ankle shackles. (Obtained by ProPublica)

In an April 3 email to Avelo employees obtained by ProPublica and other publications, CEO Andrew Levy called the deportation contract “too valuable not to pursue” at a time when his startup was losing money and consumer confidence was declining, leading Americans to take fewer trips. Avelo would close one of its bases, in Sonoma County, California, and move certain flight routes to off-peak days as resources shifted to ICE Air. Deportation flights would be based out of Mesa, Arizona, and would begin in May.

Avelo has a major hub in New Haven, Connecticut, and it recently expanded to Bradley International Airport near Hartford. In 2023, the airline won a two-year fuel-tax moratorium from state lawmakers after extensive lobbying.

Last Thursday, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal was among the nearly 300 attendees at a rally outside the New Haven airport. “Avelo has to change its course,” he said. “To the president of Avelo: You really stepped in it.”

Members of the public are raising objections as well. An online petition calling for a boycott of Avelo unless it drops its new ICE contract has collected almost 35,000 signatures since April 6. And protests are spreading from Connecticut to cities the airline serves across the country, including Eugene, Oregon; Rochester, New York; Burbank, California; and Wilmington, Delaware.

Tong’s letter to Avelo demanded that the airline produce a copy of its ICE Air contract. The attorney general also asked if Avelo would deport people in defiance of court orders, pointing to March flights to El Salvador carried out by another charter airline, GlobalX, after a federal judge ordered that the planes be turned back. Neither ICE nor GlobalX responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Levy answered Tong with a one-page letter. In it, Levy suggested that if Connecticut wanted more information about Avelo’s ICE Air contract, it should file a public records request. (Federal statistics show that such requests to ICE typically take months or years to be answered.)

If the attorney general wanted to know more about the use of shackles on deportation flights, Levy continued, he should ask the Department of Homeland Security. If Tong wanted to know more about evacuation requirements, he should address questions to the Federal Aviation Administration. For Avelo’s part, Levy assured Tong, the airline “remains committed to public safety and the rule of law.”

“Regardless of the administration or party affiliation,” an Avelo spokesperson told ProPublica in an emailed statement, “when our country calls our practice is to say yes. We follow all protocols from DHS and FAA.”

A Democrat-sponsored bill to expand Connecticut’s sanctuary law has now cleared its House Judiciary Committee in a 29-12, party-line vote, over the strong objections of Republicans, and awaits a full vote on the floor. If it passes, any companies — including airlines — proposing to do business with the state must pledge not to “cooperate or contract with any federal immigration authority for purposes of the detention, holding or transportation of an individual.”

Meanwhile, Avelo’s fuel-tax moratorium expires on June 30. So far, no legislation has been introduced to extend it, and activists are urging Connecticut lawmakers to let the tax break die.

by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mica Rosenberg and Avi Asher-Schapiro

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

In an unusual move, the administration of President Donald Trump has canceled a $3.8 billion contract to build an immigrant detention camp in Fort Bliss, Texas, just days after issuing it.

That doesn’t mean the job won’t go forward. Sources told ProPublica the administration still intends to move ahead with the plan to build a tent detention camp at Fort Bliss. A site visit for interested contractors took place on Wednesday.

The job promises to be highly sought after as Trump officials plan to pour billions of dollars into building detention facilities as part of the president’s push to deport more immigrants.

Why the contract was posted and then canceled is unclear.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded the contract on April 10 to Deployed Resources, a privately held company, according to data posted on a federal procurement website.

ProPublica published a profile of the company on April 11, describing its ascension from running facilities at music festivals into a government contracting juggernaut that, like other vendors, is pursuing billions of dollars in detention contracts planned under Trump. Company executives, ProPublica found, had hired more than a dozen former government insiders as it built its business over the years. Recent hires included some high-ranking former officials from ICE, the agency that would be tasked with carrying out Trump’s promises of mass deportation.

Then, on April 13, the administration reversed course and terminated the contract with Deployed Resources “for convenience,” according to data posted to the federal contracting site.

An ICE spokesperson confirmed that the award was made and then canceled, and that “a revised procurement action for Fort Bliss is currently active and ongoing.” The agency did not answer questions about why it reversed course.

Deployed Resources has not responded to requests for comment. On its website, the company says it is “dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere.”

The awarding and cancellation of such a large contract to a company in such a short time is extremely unusual, according to a ProPublica review of contracting data going back a decade.

In solicitation documents, the government said it needs a facility with the capacity to hold thousands of immigrants before they are deported.

It’s possible, but not yet clear, that Deployed Resources could win the contract following a subsequent round of bidding. It likely is not the only bidder interested in the job, which could be broken up into two pieces.

Since mid-March ICE has housed detainees at a tent facility in El Paso, Texas, operated by Deployed Resources, that was previously used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Department of Defense awarded Deployed Resources a contract to run the site for ICE, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica.

Current and former agency officials said holding ICE detainees in tent facilities — which in the past have generally held people for shorter periods of time — raises significant concerns about potential health and safety risks. An ICE official at a recent border security conference said Deployed Resources was adding more rigid structures within its tents, which could address such concerns.

Trump, upon returning to office in January, signed a series of executive orders declaring an emergency at the border and enlisting the military to help with immigration enforcement. In early April, the administration issued a request for bids on new detention facilities across the country that could be worth up to $45 billion.

The rush of immigration contracts comes as the Trump administration guts federal programs and fires thousands of workers in other wings of the government.

Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has taken steps to eliminate regulations addressing climate change, pull back funding for climate programs and cancel methods used to evaluate how climate change is affecting American society and its economy. Now it is directly undermining the science and research of climate change itself, in ways that some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists say will have dangerous consequences.

Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAA’s work extends deep into the heart of the American economy — businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity — and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the country’s safety, competitiveness and national security.

The gutting of NOAA was outlined earlier this month in a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget that detailed steep reductions at the Department of Commerce, which houses the science agency. The memo, which was viewed by ProPublica, has been previously reported. But the full implications of those cuts for the nation’s ability to accurately interpret dynamic changes in the planet’s weather and to predict long-term warming scenarios through its modeling arm in Princeton have not.

According to the document, NOAA’s overall funding would be slashed by 27%, eliminating “functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people” including almost all of those related to the study of climate change. The proposal would break up and significantly defund the agency across programs, curtailing everything from ocean research to coastal management while shifting one of NOAA’s robust satellite programs out of the agency and putting another up for commercial bidding. But its most significant target is the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research ⎯ a nerve center of global climate science, data collection and modeling, including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ⎯ which would be cut by 74%. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the memo stated.

The total loss of OAR and its crown jewel in Princeton represents a setback for climate preparedness that experts warn the nation may never recover from.

“If we don’t understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, you can’t be adapting, you can’t be resilient. You’re just going to suffer,” Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist who sits on NOAA’s scientific advisory board, told ProPublica. “We’re going to see huge impacts on infrastructure and lives lost in the U.S.”

There are other national climate models, but they also appear to be in jeopardy of losing funding. The National Science Foundation supports the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but the foundation announced it was freezing all research grants on April 18. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a model, but the institute could see cuts of up to 47%. And the Department of Energy, home to a fourth climate modeling system, is also under budget pressure.

Without the models, and all the sensor networks and supporting NOAA research programs that feed them, “We’ll go back to the technical and proficiency levels we had in the 1950s,” said Craig McLean, a 40-year veteran of NOAA who, until 2022, was the agency’s top administrator for research and its acting chief scientist. “We won’t have the tools we have today because we can’t populate them by people or by data.”

Neither the Department of Commerce nor NOAA responded to lists of emailed questions, including whether the agencies had appealed the OMB’s proposal before the April 12 deadline to do so or whether NOAA has prepared a plan to implement the changes, which is due by April 24. OMB also did not respond to a request for comment.

Princeton and NOAA together built America’s global supremacy in weather and climate science over generations. After World War II, the United States refocused its scientific superiority ⎯ and its early computing capabilities ⎯ on understanding how the weather and the planet works. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory was established in 1955 and moved to Princeton in 1968. Under NOAA, which was established by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the lab advanced early forecasting, using sensors in the oceans and the sky. It developed theories for how fluids and gases interact and came to understand that the oceans and the atmosphere drive weather ⎯ what today has become known as climate science.

The GFDL’s models, including the first hurricane model, became the basis for both short-term weather outlooks and longer-range forecasts, or climate prediction, which soon became one and the same. Those models now form the underlying modeling architecture of many of NOAA’s other departments, including the forecasts from the National Weather Service. The GFDL has trained many of the world’s best climate scientists, who are leading the most prestigious research in Japan, the U.K. and Germany, and in 2021 an alumnus of its staff won the Nobel Prize in physics. The U.S. agencies periodically run their models in competition, and last time they did, the GFDL’s models came out ahead. The lab is “the best that there is,” McLean said. “It’s really a stunningly impressive and accomplished place. It is a gem. It is the gem.”

Today the GFDL works in partnership with Princeton researchers to produce a series of models that have proven extraordinarily accurate in forecasting how the planet is changing when their past predictions are tested against past events. The GFDL models formed the basis of NOAA’s Hurricane Weather Research Forecast model that almost exactly foretold the extraordinary and unprecedented rainfall near Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 — the model predicted 45 inches of rain, the final total was 48 inches. The GFDL models are working to incorporate once-elusive factors, like large-scale methane emissions from melting permafrost, and are increasingly understanding the role of changing currents and warming ocean temperatures in driving rapid storm intensification of hurricanes like Milton and Helene. Every May the lab delivers an updated model to the National Hurricane Center, which uses it to produce the center’s annual forecast for the following season of storms.

It is not yet clear what the potential loss of the GFDL and the databases and sensors that support it might mean. Funding cuts could merely hobble the lab’s staff and prevent the model from ever being advanced, or its operations could be shut down entirely, the responsibility perhaps passed on to another agency’s models. What is clear, McLean and others point out, is that even the degradation of American climate prediction capabilities poses significant risks to the U.S. economy, to national security and to the country’s leverage in the world.

NOAA makes its data ⎯ from ocean buoy and satellite readings to the outputs from the GFDL models ⎯ free to the public, where it constitutes a certified base layer of information that is picked up not only by American policymakers, regulators and planners but also by scientists around the world and by industries, which use it to gain a competitive advantage. A 2024 study by the American Meteorological Society found that NOAA’s weather forecasts alone ⎯ which use parts of the GFDL models and represent just a tiny fraction of the agency’s data production ⎯ generate more than $73 in savings for every dollar invested in them.

The data that drives those forecasts informs the calculations for an untold number of property insurance policies in the country, helping to channel billions of dollars in aid to home and business owners in the aftermath of natural disasters. All three of the major U.S. insurance catastrophe modelers build their assessments at least in part using NOAA data. Munich Re, the global reinsurance giant backing many American property insurers, depends on it, and Swiss Re, a second reinsurance powerhouse, also routinely cites NOAA in its reports.

The shipping industry charts its courses, plans its fuel use and avoids disaster using NOAA climate and weather forecasts, while NOAA data on water levels and currents is relied on to manage the channels and ports used by those ships, which carry a sizeable portion of global trade, generating trillions of dollars in economic activity each year. The trucking industry, too, saves upward of $3 billion in fuel costs based on idling guidelines that apply NOAA temperature data. It is equally important for farmers and large agricultural corporations, which rely on NOAA’s seasonal and long-range precipitation forecasts to make strategic planting decisions. NOAA’s chief economists estimate that the agency’s El Nino outlooks alone boost the U.S. agricultural economy by $300 million a year, and that corn growers save as much as $4 billion in fertilizer and cleanup costs based on optimizing to NOAA forecasts.

Developers and homebuilders rely on NOAA data to determine coastal flooding risk and to schedule work. The Federal Aviation Administration is using new NOAA models to develop its next-generation air traffic management system. And the banks and financial corporations that depend on the healthy functioning of these other industries know this. Morgan Stanley uses NOAA climate data to assess risk to the economy across multiple sectors. As does J.P. Morgan, whose top science adviser is a former NOAA scientist who once worked directly with the climate modeling program at the GFDL.

The secretary of commerce himself, Howard Lutnick, endorsed the importance of climate science when he was the CEO and chair of the global Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which characterized climate change as “the defining issue of our time.” In the same report, the company wrote that “Scientific evidence indicates that if left unchecked, climate change will be disastrous and life threatening.” The report went on to state that those changes could offer “a unique investment opportunity” but also “presents a challenge to our investments.”

A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald did not respond to a question about whether the firm’s assessment was based on NOAA data, but McLean asserts that it likely was because NOAA and the GFDL’s data represents “the roots of every climate model in the world.”

Perhaps this is why Lutnick, when asked by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., during his confirmation hearing in January whether he believed in keeping NOAA and its core scientific responsibilities together, declared that he did. “I have no interest in separating it. That is not on my agenda,” Lutnick told her. When asked again, 30 minutes later, by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, whether he agreed with the Project 2025 goal that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” Lutnick was again explicit: “No”

Yet after the NOAA budget documents were leaked and the threats to GFDL became clear, Lutnick’s office targeted even more climate-related programs, announcing the suspension of $4 million in grants to a separate but related program at Princeton that includes its Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a research effort run in conjunction with the GFDL, and that provides some of the core staffing and research for the lab. “This cooperative agreement promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as climate anxiety,” his office wrote in an April 8 press release from the Department of Commerce. “Its focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion.”

Princeton University did not respond to emailed questions.

The potential loss of the world’s greatest climate forecasting tool has other ramifications for long-term safety and security. NOAA’s climate modeling systems ⎯ in combination with other national climate models at the National Science Foundation, NASA and elsewhere ⎯ help the Defense Department to run its operations and to anticipate and prepare for emerging threats.

NOAA models and data generate the actionable weather forecasts for operational planning in conflict theaters like the Middle East. Its measurements of ocean salinity and temperatures inform Navy operations, according to the Council on Strategic Risks, a nonpartisan security policy institute in Washington. It contributes to the forecast data for Air Force strike planning and Army troop movement. Its long-range climate forecasts are core to the Defense Department’s five-year planning for each of its global Geographic Combatant Commands that divide jurisdiction for U.S. forces around the world, according to a Rand report.

Without this information, warned Rod Schoonover, a former State Department analyst and director of environment and natural resources within the office of the director of national intelligence, the U.S. surrenders its superiority in projecting all kinds of security concerns, including not only threats to its own facilities and operations but also cascading power failures or extreme heatwaves and sudden food price spikes that can lead to destabilization and conflict around the world. “This is a foundational degradation in our intelligence capabilities,” said Schoonover, the founder and CEO of the Ecological Futures Group. “There is a profoundly changed and heightened threat if the U.S. can no longer rely on its own premier, ‘homegrown’ climate forecasts for strategic and operational decisions.

“Why would any U.S. administration choose to forfeit this vital strategic edge?”

by Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll

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The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”

Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).

At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.

In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin’s career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group’s board fired Martin. Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization.

After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider.

Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin.

ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more “organic.”

Ed Martin exchanged emails with Priscilla Gray, who had worked in various roles for Phyllis Schlafly, about how to attack Judge John Barberis. (Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica)

“That is not justice but a rigged system,” he urged her to write. “Shame on you and this broken legal system.”

“Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,” Martin continued.

Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. “Go slow and steady,” he advised. “Make it organic.”

Gray appeared to take Martin’s advice. “Private messaging him that sweet line,” she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture.

Gray told Martin she would direct message Barberis after she was blocked from commenting on his Facebook page. (Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica)

Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin’s conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin’s behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney.

Martin appeared to be “deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. “That’s not OK.”

Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Martin’s legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all.

His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his “willful disregard” of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori.

Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged.

Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves.

Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer’s career. Not so for Martin.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms.

As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor.

A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes.

Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases.

Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government "discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”

Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,” says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.

Already, Martin has been the subject of at least four disciplinary complaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump’s pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin’s actions so far “threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.” If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public.

Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin’s confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump’s most controversial nominees.

Ed Martin pats his son, Edward, at an election watch party in St. Louis for his failed congressional bid in 2010. (J. B. Forbes/AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city’s top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper’s leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews.

Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired.

“He was attacking her,” said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. “He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn’t get traction, it was more like ‘this isn’t a story.’ It wasn’t that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.”

Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed “Memogate” that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt’s staff, the governor’s office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes.

An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt’s office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails.

Mike Meiners, director of news administration, center, and Teak Phillips, metro photo editor, right, wheel 22 boxes of emails from Gov. Matt Blunt’s staff into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch office on Nov. 14, 2008. (Emily Rasinski/Post-Dispatch/Polaris)

In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley’s lawsuit as a “desperate attempt” to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley’s own testimony that not all emails are public records.

The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin’s efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. “His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,” she told ProPublica. “I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.”

When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. “He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,” she said.

Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit.

As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a “conscientious and dedicated professional.”

But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed “not having to do anything” and “wasn’t interested in changing.” The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had.

Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his “obstinacy.”

Phyllis Schlafly, center, is escorted onstage by Martin, right, during a March 2016 campaign rally in St. Louis for Donald Trump. (David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Polaris)

Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly’s right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him “Ed Martin Schlafly.”

As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cori described Trump at the time as an “egomaniacal dictator.” (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side.

A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum’s board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as “deplorable.” Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly’s “hand-picked successor” and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover.

“Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,” he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016.

Cori and the board’s lawsuit sought to enforce Martin’s removal and demand an accounting of the forum’s assets. That’s the case that wound up before Barberis.

On top of his efforts to direct Gray’s posts on Barberis’ Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis’ ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president “judicial activism at its worst” that “shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.”

Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from “Bruce Schlafly, M.D.” — the name of one of Schlafly’s sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a “declaration of war” and urged the Schlaflys to “put something like this out to our biggest list.” (It’s unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment.

In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori’s lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis’ Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings.

First image: Anne Schlafly Cori won a defamation claim against Martin in 2022. Second image: Eagle Forum’s office in Alton, Illinois. (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said “no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy” and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she “speaks for herself” and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin’s style — then and now — to Trump’s. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles.

“What would Trump do in that position?” Andy Schlafly said of Martin’s current role in Washington. “I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed’s doing. Elections do have consequences.”

Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit.

When Cori’s lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for “an underhanded scheme” to “attack the integrity and authority” of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records.

Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear if Martin appealed.

Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint.

In 2022, when part of Cori’s lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother’s death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member.

Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn’t write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else.

In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it’s not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn’t prove it.

But while he’s wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he’s taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration.

For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a “dick” and urged Democrats to “bring weapons” to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation.

Martin, center, speaks at a rally outside the Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill on Nov. 5, 2020. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

With the start of Trump’s first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president’s most prolific and unfiltered surrogates.

CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and described some of his CNN co-panelists as “rabid feminists” and “Black racists.”

Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the “Russia hoax,” criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion by saying the U.S. was “wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.” The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents.

Martin’s flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled “America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.” He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going “soft” on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was “an op” orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to “damage Trump and Trumpism.”

During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “weaponized” Congress’ response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. “Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,” he said.

As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held “long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,” wore a “Hitler mustache” and allegedly told his co-workers that “Hitler should have finished the job.” (In court, Hale’s attorney said his client “makes no excuses for his derogatory language,” but the government’s description of him was “simply misleading.”)

After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was “to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he’s extraordinary.”

Martin speaks during a 2023 hearing on the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters. (Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He’s vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith’s lawyers to “[s]ave your receipts.” And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk’s deputy, Martin wrote that “if people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”

More often than not, Martin’s threats have gone nowhere.

A month into the job, he announced “Operation Whirlwind,” an initiative to “hold accountable those who threaten” public officials, whether they’re DOGE workers or judges. One of the “most abhorrent examples” of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer’s 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price” if they weakened abortion rights.

Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer’s nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin’s bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer’s remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct.

In another instance, when one of Martin’s top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy’s resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin’s was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica.

Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of “such extraordinary sensitivity” that the office’s leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena “out of concern that it wasn’t legally or ethically appropriate.”

And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration’s actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” Chutkan said. “There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.”

Martin’s tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin’s nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin’s case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin “a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.”

Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements.

“I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote.

Sharon Lerner contributed reporting.

by Mark Olalde

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.

A top official in the Department of Labor this week informed all staff members that they could face criminal charges if they speak to journalists, former employees or others about agency business.

A memo sent Monday by Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff, Jihun Han, and obtained by ProPublica, states that “individuals who disclose confidential information or engage in unauthorized communications with the media may face serious legal consequences.”

Among the ramifications, the memo states, are “potential criminal penalties, depending on the nature of the information and the applicable laws,” and “immediate disciplinary actions, up to and including termination.”

The guidance document went on to say that “any unauthorized communication with the media,” regardless of what information is shared or how it is shared, “will be treated as a serious offense.”

The memo listed laws, regulations and a departmental guide to explain its legal position. Among them was a regulation concerning civil servants’ ethical obligations and a law, the Freedom of Information Act, guaranteeing the public the right to inspect certain public records.

“This message will serve as your only warning,” the memo stated.

The warning comes as current and former Labor Department employees have spoken to the news media about harms they see resulting from the dismantling of portions of their agency, which enforces laws guaranteeing rights to a safe workplace, fair pay and protections against discrimination.

“It’s very chilling,” a Labor Department employee who requested anonymity for fear of retribution told ProPublica. “It’s never a good look when you’re telling people to never talk about what you’re doing.”

Labor Department spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“These types of missives can chill the free flow of information to the press and the public,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “That’s a concern.”

Civil servants do not sacrifice their First Amendment rights by accepting a job with the federal government, but there do exist higher restrictions on what information they can disclose publicly. Government agencies that handle classified information have on rare occasions launched criminal investigations against leakers, but those are typically invoked only when leaks involve classified national security intelligence or protected financial information, Rottman said.

“But normally, disclosures to the press or others would be a matter of employee discipline as opposed to carrying criminal sanctions,” he said.

While the memo raising the possibility of criminal penalties was sent to Labor Department employees, it reflects a common approach by the administration of President Donald Trump to guard against federal government employees speaking to reporters.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, for example, has publicly announced an aggressive pursuit of leakers. Elon Musk, who launched the Department of Government Efficiency, which is at the heart of the shake-up of the federal government, has bragged about his tactics in rooting out leaks at his companies. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has blamed alleged leaks by former Pentagon staffers for reigniting controversy over his use of the Signal messaging app to discuss military operations.

Federal employees at various agencies told ProPublica that an air of suspicion has descended on their workplace during Trump’s second term, with rumors flying of surveillance of rank-and-file government workers. In the Department of Agriculture, for example, a banner temporarily appeared on government computers when employees logged in, telling them that “unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in disciplinary action, as well as civil and criminal penalties.”

Agriculture Department spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Labor Department employee told ProPublica that Monday’s memo felt like the latest attack on a workforce already weathering layoffs, spending freezes and reorganizations.

“It’s been horrible. It’s been a deeply exhausting roller coaster,” the employee said. “It’s very difficult to work when you’re in a constant state of being terrorized by your employer.”

by Sebastian Rotella

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

China’s vast security apparatus shrouds itself in shadows, but the outside world has caught periodic glimpses of it behind the faded gray walls of Shijiazhuang prison in the northern province of Hebei.

Chinese media reports have shown inmates hunched over sewing machines in a garment workshop in the sprawling facility. Business leaders and Chinese Communist Party dignitaries have praised the penitentiary for exemplifying President Xi Jinping’s views on the rule of law.

But the prison has an alarming secret, U.S. congressional investigators disclosed last year. They revealed evidence showing that it is a Chinese government outpost in the trafficking pipeline that inundates the United States with fentanyl.

For at least eight years, the prison owned a chemical company called Yafeng, the hub of a group of Chinese firms and websites that sold fentanyl products to Americans, according to the U.S. congressional investigation, as well as Chinese government and corporate records obtained by ProPublica. The company’s English-language websites brazenly offered U.S. customers dangerous drugs that are illegal in both nations. Promising to smuggle illicit chemicals past U.S. and Mexican border defenses, Yafeng boasted to American clients that “100% of our shipments will clear customs.”

Although China tightly restricts the domestic manufacturing, sale and use of fentanyl products, the nation has been the world’s leading producer of fentanyl that enters the United States and remains the leading producer of chemical precursors with which Mexican cartels make the drug. Overdoses on synthetic opioid drugs, most of them fentanyl related, have killed over 450,000 Americans during the past decade — more than the U.S. deaths in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

The involvement of a state-run prison is just one sign of the Chinese government’s role in fomenting the U.S. fentanyl crisis, U.S. investigators say. Chinese leaders have insistently denied such allegations. But U.S. national security officials said the Yafeng case shows how China allows its chemical industry to engage openly in sales to overseas customers while blocking online domestic access and enforcing stern laws against drug dealing inside the country. Beijing also encourages the manufacture and export of fentanyl products, including drugs outlawed in China, with generous financial incentives, according to a bipartisan inquiry last year by the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

“So the Chinese government pays you to send drugs to America but executes you for selling them in China,” Matt Cronin, a former federal prosecutor who led the House inquiry, said in an interview. “It’s impossible that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t know what’s going on and can’t do anything about it.”

China’s antidrug cooperation has been persistently poor, U.S. officials said. In 2019, Xi imposed controls that cut the export of fentanyl, but Chinese sellers shifted to shipping precursors to Mexico, where the cartels expanded their production.

“We couldn’t get the Chinese on the phone to talk about fighting child pornography, let alone fentanyl,” said Jacob Braun, who served as a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration. “There was zero cooperation.”

China also remains the base of global organized crime groups that launder billions for fentanyl traffickers in the U.S, Mexico and Canada. ProPublica has previously reported that this underground banking system depends on the Chinese elite, who move fortunes abroad by acquiring drug cash from Chinese criminal brokers for Mexican cartels. Chinese banks and businesses also help hide the origin of illicit proceeds. The regime in Beijing therefore has considerable control over key nodes in the fentanyl chain: raw materials, production, sales and money laundering.

U.S. leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, have accused China of using fentanyl to weaken the United States. Some veteran agents agree.

Ray Donovan, who retired in 2023 as the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief of operations, said he believes that a “deliberate strategy” by the Chinese state has caused the trafficking onslaught “to grow in size and scope.”

“They have said for years that they are cracking down,” Donovan said in an interview. “But we haven’t seen meaningful action.”

Still, current and former U.S. officials told ProPublica that the national security community has not found conclusive evidence of a planned, high-level campaign against Americans by the Chinese government. That is partly because for years the U.S. treated fentanyl as a law enforcement matter rather than a national security threat, making it hard to gather intelligence about the extent and nature of the regime’s role.

“If this was Chinese intelligence doing something, we have a focus on that as counterintelligence,” said Alan Kohler, who retired from the FBI in 2023 after serving as director of the counterintelligence division. “If it was drug cartels, we have a criminal focus on that. But this area of crime and state converging falls between the seams in and among agencies.”

Nonetheless, the current and former officials said rampant fentanyl trafficking could not continue without at least the passive complicity of the world’s most powerful police state.

“I haven’t seen smoking-gun evidence that it’s a policy or strategy of the government at a high level,” Kohler said. “You could argue that their decision not to do anything about it, even after the results are clear, is tacit support.”

In a written statement, the spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington described as “totally groundless” any allegation that the regime has fomented the crisis.

“The fentanyl issue is the U.S.’s own problem,” said the spokesperson, Liu Pengyu. “China has given support to the U.S.’s response to the fentanyl issue in the spirit of humanity.” At the United States’ request, he said, China in 2019 restricted “fentanyl-related substances as a class,” becoming the first country to do so, and has cooperated with the U.S. on counternarcotics.

“The remarkable progress is there for all to see.”

The Trump administration has made the fight against fentanyl a priority and in February imposed a 25% tariff on Chinese imports to pressure Beijing for results. The approach could put a dent in the drug trade, but it’s too early to tell, officials said.

“The Chinese system responds to a negative incentive,” said former FBI agent Holden Triplett, who served as legal attache in Beijing and director of counterintelligence on the National Security Council. “China may be willing to endure more pain than we can give. But it is our only chance.”

To respond effectively, the U.S. needs a clearer picture of the Chinese fentanyl underworld, Triplett and others say. The activities of the Shijiazhuang prison are a compelling case study, but not the only one.

To examine the role of the Chinese state in the drug trade, ProPublica interviewed more than three dozen current and former national security officials for the U.S. and other countries, some of whom provided exclusive inside accounts. The reporting also drew on last year’s House investigation, digging into significant findings that have received little public attention, plus court files, government documents, academic studies, private inquiries and public records in the U.S., China and Mexico.

(Collage by Mike McQuade for ProPublica. Source images: Google Maps and screenshots from ads found by a U.S. congressional inquiry.) Prison Business

In 2010, the Hebei Prison Administration Bureau combined three detention facilities to create a high-security prison in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province. The region is a base of China’s chemical industry, which is the largest in the world. It is also weakly regulated and freewheeling, according to U.S. national security officials, private studies and other sources. A shifting array of companies peddle everything from innocuous fertilizers to deadly opioids.

Liu Jianhua, a veteran Chinese Communist Party official with a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Illinois Chicago, became director of the prison in 2014. By then, fentanyl was cutting a swath across America. Overdose deaths soared due to the ease with which U.S. users and dealers could acquire fentanyl products by mail from China.

China’s high-tech surveillance apparatus aggressively polices the online activities of its citizens. Yet sales of fentanyl to foreigners have thrived on popular, easily accessible websites, said Frank Montoya Jr., a former FBI agent with years of China-related experience who served as a top U.S. counterintelligence official.

“You don’t have to go on the dark web,” Montoya said. “It is out in the open.”

Yafeng Biological Technology Co. Ltd., also known as Hebei Shijiazhuang Yafeng Chemical Plant, became a typical player on this frontier, the congressional inquiry found. (As part of its reporting, ProPublica mapped links between the prison, the company and the U.S. drug market with the help of two entities that specialize in China open-source research: Sayari, a company that provides risk management and supply-chain analysis and that supported the House inquiry, and C4ADS, a nonprofit that investigates illicit global networks.)

Yafeng’s websites and Chinese corporate records describe the firm as a chemical manufacturer. It has ties through other websites, phone numbers and email addresses to at least nine companies that advertised illicit drugs, causing investigators to conclude that Yafeng was a network hub, according to the report and interviews. It’s common for interconnected Chinese fentanyl producers and brokers to obscure details about their enterprises and change names and platforms to elude detection, U.S. officials said.

In some ways, Yafeng presented itself to foreign buyers as a respectable company. The English-language websites featured peppy phrases like “team spirit” and “promoting the well-being of community.” The China-based sales representatives gave themselves Western names: Diana, Monica, Jessica. A map of markets showed shipping routes from China to the United States, Mexico, Canada and other countries.

A map on Yafeng’s website showed its distribution and a list of available drugs to purchase. (U.S. government)

Yet the sales pitches left little doubt that the firm knew its activities were illegal. Yafeng websites utilized familiar terms assuring U.S. and Mexican drug users and traffickers of the company’s skill at smuggling illegal narcotics overseas, according to the House report and U.S. investigators. The company touted its use of “hidden food bags,” a method in which drugs are concealed in shipments labeled as food products. Ads promised “strong safety delivery to Mexico, USA” with “packaging made to measure” to “guarantee” that illicit chemicals would elude border inspections, documents show.

Advertisements on a Chinese website (U.S. government)

Chinese traffickers often discuss lawbreaking in such brazen terms with foreign customers, seemingly unconcerned about China’s omnipresent surveillance system, court files and interviews show. Another firm, Hubei Amarvel Biotech, explicitly explained to U.S. and Mexican clients online — complete with photos — its methods for “100% stealth shipping” of drugs disguised as nuts, dog food and motor oil, court documents say. After undercover DEA agents lured two Amarvel executives to Fiji and arrested them, a New York jury convicted them in February on charges of importation of fentanyl precursors and money laundering. (One defendant, Yiyi Chen, has filed a motion requesting an acquittal or retrial.)

At the time of the arrests, the Chinese government issued a statement condemning the U.S. prosecution as “a typical example of arbitrary detention and unilateral sanctions.”

Similarly, Yafeng websites displayed photos of narcotics in plastic baggies to peddle a long list of chemicals, including fentanyl precursors and U-47700, a powerful fentanyl analogue outlawed in both the U.S. and China that has no medical use, the House report says.

One victim of U-47700 was Garrett Holman of Lynchburg, Virginia. Holman had fallen in with youths who discovered how easy it was to buy synthetic drugs online. In late 2016, Holman overdosed on U-47700, street name “pinky,” that arrived by mail from southern China. His father, Don, performed CPR before paramedics rushed Holman to the hospital. Although he survived, another overdose killed him just days before his 21st birthday in February 2017.

Garrett Holman (U.S. government)

“My son’s opioid exposure was less than two months,” Don Holman told a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee the next year. “At 20 years old, I do not believe my son deserved to die for his initial bad choices.”

The father handed over evidence, including the envelope in which the drugs arrived, to federal agents, who traced about 20 shipments back to the same sender in China, he said in an interview. Don Holman blames the fentanyl crisis on the American appetite for opioids as well as the Chinese government. He has spent eight years telling anyone he can, from drug czars to fellow parents, about the experience that shattered his family.

“I’ve had to hit parents right between the eyes, like: ‘Hey, your child is not going to be here if you don’t do something,” he said. “You need to wake up.’”

No link to Yafeng surfaced in that case. The firm’s sales of U-47700 and other illicit drugs occurred during a period when its sole owner and controlling shareholder was the Shijiazhuang prison, according to the House inquiry, Sayari and C4ADS.

One of Yafeng’s street addresses was that of the prison, ProPublica determined through satellite photos and public records. Another Yafeng address next door also houses the offices of a clothing firm owned by the provincial prison administration. A third Yafeng address a few blocks away is a former municipal police station, records and photos show.

The director of the prison, Liu Jianhua, left his post after becoming the target of a corruption inquiry in 2021, according to Chinese media reports. It’s unknown how that investigation was resolved or if his fall had anything to do with the drug activity. Liu could not be reached for comment. The prison administration did not respond to requests for comment.

Yafeng stopped doing business under that name at some point between 2018 and 2022, records show. Yet the Yafeng group continued to function through at least one of its affiliated websites, protonitazene.com, the congressional report said. As of last year, the site was still advertising “hot sale to Mexico” of drugs including nitazenes, which are 25 times more powerful than fentanyl.

Government Incentives

Yafeng is not the only company with connections to the Chinese state and fentanyl.

Gaosheng Biotechnology in Shanghai is “wholly state-owned,” congressional investigators found. The company sold fentanyl precursors and other narcotics — some illegal in China — on 98 websites to U.S., Mexican and European customers, the report says. Senior provincial development officials visited Gaosheng and praised its benefits for the regional economy. Gaosheng did not respond to requests for comment.

The Chinese government owned a stake in Zhejiang Netsun, a private firm that had a Chinese Communist Party member serving on its board of directors as a deputy general manager, the congressional report says. Netsun carried out over 400 sales of illegal narcotics, the report says, and served as a billing or technical contact for over 100 similar companies — including Yafeng. Netsun did not respond to requests for comment.

And the Shanghai government gave monetary awards and export credits to Shanghai Ruizheng Chemical Technology Co., a “notorious seller of fentanyl products, which it advertises widely and openly on Chinese websites like Alibaba,” the report says. Chinese officials invited company reps to roundtable discussions about technology and business. Shanghai Ruizheng did not respond to requests for comment.

Chinese government officials who interact with the trafficking underworld are often prominent in provincial governments, where corruption is widespread, said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im, who led investigations focused on China. Not only can they make money through kickbacks or investments, but they benefit politically, rising in the Communist Party hierarchy if their local chemical industries prosper.

“Key government officials know about the fentanyl trade and they let it happen,” Im said.

China’s central government also plays a vital role by providing systemic financial incentives that fuel fentanyl trafficking to the Americas, U.S. officials say. The House inquiry discovered a national Value-Added Tax rebate program that has spurred exports of at least 17 illegal narcotics with no legitimate purpose. They include a fentanyl product that is “up to 6,000 times stronger than morphine,” the House report says.

This state subsidy program has pumped billions of dollars into the export of fentanyl products, including ones outlawed in China, according to the report and U.S. officials. The tax rebate is 13%, the highest available rate. To qualify, companies have to document the names and quantities of chemicals and other details of transactions, the report says.

The existence of this paper trail refutes a frequent claim by Chinese leaders: that weak regulation of the chemical sector makes it impossible to identify and punish suspects.

Chinese officials did not respond to specific questions about the government financial incentives or the state-connected companies involved in drug trafficking. But the embassy spokesperson said China has targeted online sellers with a “national internet cleanup campaign.”

During that crackdown, Liu Pengyu said, Chinese authorities have cleaned “14 online platforms, canceled over 330 company accounts, shut down over 1,000 online shops, removed over 152,000 online advertisements, and closed 10 botnet websites.” He said Chinese law enforcement has determined that many illegal ads appear on foreign online platforms.

Collage by Mike McQuade for ProPublica. Source images: U.S. government. Wall of Resistance

In May 2018, Cronin — then a federal prosecutor based in Cleveland — went to Beijing in pursuit of one of the biggest targets in the grim history of the fentanyl crisis: the Zheng drug trafficking organization, an international empire accused of trafficking in 37 U.S. states.

Cronin and his team of agents hoped to persuade Chinese authorities to prosecute Guanghua and Fujing Zheng, a father and son who were the top suspects. They ran into a wall of resistance.

In an interview, Cronin recalled walking into a cavernous room in China’s Ministry of Public Security where a row of senior officials and uniformed police waited at a long table. A curtain-sized Chinese flag covered a wall.

Cronin took a breath, opened a stack of binders he had lugged from Cleveland and presented his case. The prosecutor laid out evidence connecting the Zhengs, who were chemical company executives based in Shanghai, to two overdoses in Ohio. The U.S. distribution hub was a warehouse near Boston run by a Chinese chemist, Bin Wang. Later, Wang said he simultaneously worked for the Chinese government “tracking chemicals produced in China” and traveled home monthly from Boston “to consult with Chinese officials,” a memo by his lawyer said.

The response of the Chinese counterdrug chiefs was a brush-off, Cronin recalled in the interview. Essentially, he said, they told him: “You are right that the Zhengs are exporting these drugs that are killing Americans. But unfortunately, technically what they are doing is not a violation of Chinese law.”

Cronin pulled out another binder. He went over evidence and an expert analysis showing that the Zhengs had committed Chinese felonies, including money laundering, manufacturing of counterfeit drugs and mislabeling of packages.

Tensions rose when the Chinese officials responded that, unfortunately, the police unit that handled such offenses was not available; they rebuffed Cronin’s offer to delay his return flight in order to meet with that unit, he said.

After the U.S. Justice Department charged the Zhengs that August with a drug trafficking conspiracy resulting in death, a Chinese newspaper reported that a Chinese senior counterdrug official criticized the case. The U.S. “failed to provide China any evidence to prove Zheng violated Chinese law,” the official said.

Thomas Rauh (Courtesy of James Rauh)

Later, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Zhengs and designated the son as a drug kingpin. U.S. investigators told ProPublica they concluded that the Zhengs operated with the blessing of the Chinese government, citing the defendants’ sheer volume of business, high-profile online activity and open communications on WeChat, the Chinese messaging platform that authorities heavily monitor.

Ohio courts granted millions of dollars in civil damages to the family of Thomas Rauh, a 37-year-old who died of an overdose in Akron in 2015. The family never received any money, however.

Rauh’s father, James, who traveled and did business in China in his youth, has become an antidrug activist. He said the U.S. government must do more to crack down on China’s role and counter public stigma that still blames addicts.

“I don’t think the U.S. government wants to take the responsibility for confronting this,” he said.

A decade of frustration has compelled James Rauh to call for a drastic solution. He wants the U.S. to designate fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction in response to what he sees as an intentional Chinese campaign.

“It’s asymmetric warfare,” he said.

The Zhengs remain free in China and have never responded to the allegations in court. During a brief encounter with a “60 Minutes” journalist in Shanghai in 2019, Guanghua Zheng denied he was still selling fentanyl in the United States and said the Chinese government “has nothing to do with it.” Wang pleaded guilty and served prison time.

The Zheng case is typical, said Im, the former senior DEA official. Thousands of DEA leads relayed to Chinese counterparts over the years have been “met with silence,” he said. In other cases, Chinese officials have asked for more details about the targets of U.S. investigations — and then warned suspects linked to the Communist Party, Im said.

Most U.S. national security officials interviewed for this story described similar experiences, citing a few exceptions, such as a joint U.S.-Chinese operation in Hebei province in 2019.

A former DEA agent, William Kinghorn, recalled the dispiriting aftermath of an investigation he oversaw centered on Chuen Fat Yip, whose firms allegedly distributed more than $280 million worth of drugs. Yip has denied wrongdoing and denounced U.S. criminal charges and sanctions. He is on the DEA’s 10 most wanted fugitives list and remains free in China, U.S. officials said.

“We obtained information that the Chinese authorities did ban or shut down the companies” the DEA targeted in the case, Kinghorn said in an interview. “We learned that afterward these same people [linked to Yip] were now owning or managing similar companies. Even though they had been banned, they basically just changed the name of the company.”

A sense of impunity persists in the chemical industry, according to a 2023 inquiry by Elliptic, a U.K. analytics firm. It reported that many of the 90 Chinese companies contacted by its undercover researchers were “willing to supply fentanyl itself, despite this being banned in China since 2019.”

The final year of the Biden administration brought signs of modest progress in China, including new regulations, shutdowns of firms, and arrests of a suspected money launderer and four senior chemical company employees charged by U.S. prosecutors.

Citing those cases from 2024, spokesperson Liu Pengyu said China has “collaborated closely” with the U.S., adding, “Multiple major cases are making great progress.”

Meanwhile, U.S. overdose deaths fell by 33% compared with the previous year, according to the annual threat assessment by the U.S. intelligence community released March 25. The drop may be tied to the increased availability of naloxone, a drug for treating overdoses, the report said.

The threat assessment report warned that “China likely will struggle to sufficiently constrain” companies and criminal groups involved in the U.S. fentanyl trade, “absent greater law enforcement actions.”

Cronin, the former federal prosecutor, went on to become chief investigative counsel for the House Select Committee. He led last year’s inquiry into China’s role in the fentanyl crisis. The committee’s review of seven Chinese company websites found over 31,000 instances of firms offering illegal chemicals during a period of about three months in early 2024.

Undercover communications with the firms “revealed an eagerness to engage in clearly illicit drug sales,” the report says, “with no fear of reprisal.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Eli Hager

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The clear-cutting across the federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.: children.

Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

These stark reductions have been centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billion in pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

Some local Head Start programs are already having to close their doors, and many program directors are encountering impediments to spending their current budgets. When they seek reimbursement after paying their teachers or purchasing school supplies, they’re being directed to a new “Defend the Spend” DOGE website asking them to “justify” each item, even though the spending has already been appropriated by Congress and audited by nonpartisan civil servants.

Next on the chopping block, it appears, is Medicaid, which serves children in greater numbers than any other age group. If Republicans in Congress go through with the cuts they’ve been discussing, and Trump signs those cuts into law, kids from lower- and middle-class families across the U.S. will lose access to health care at their schools, in foster care, for their disabilities or for cancer treatment.

The Trump administration has touted the president’s record of “protecting America’s children,” asserting in a recent post that Trump will “never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing.” The statement listed five examples of that commitment. Four were related to transgender issues (including making it U.S. government policy that there are only two sexes and keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports); the other was a ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools that receive federal funding.

The White House, and multiple agencies, declined to respond to most of ProPublica’s questions. Madi Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, addressed the elimination of pandemic recovery funding, saying that “COVID is over”; that the Biden administration established an “irresponsible precedent” by extending the deadline to spend these funds (and exceeding their original purpose); and that the department will consider extensions if individual projects show a clear connection between COVID and student learning.

An HHS spokesperson, in response to ProPublica’s questions about cuts to children’s programs across that agency, sent a short statement saying that the department, guided by Trump, is restructuring with a focus on cutting wasteful bureaucracy. The offices serving children, the statement said, will be merged into a newly established “Administration for Healthy America.”

Programs that serve kids have historically fared the worst when those in power are looking for ways to cut the budget. That’s in part because kids can’t vote, and they typically don’t belong to political organizations. International aid groups, another constituency devastated by Trump’s policy agenda, also can’t say that they represent many U.S. voters.

This dynamic may be part of why cuts on the health side of the Department of Health and Human Services — layoffs of doctors, medical researchers and the like — have received more political and press attention than those on the human services side, where the Administration for Children and Families is located. That’s where you can find the Office of Child Support Services, the Office of Head Start, the Office of Child Care (which promotes minimum health and safety standards for child care programs nationally and helps states reduce the cost of child care for families), the Office of Family Assistance (which helps states administer direct aid to lower-income parents and kids), the Children’s Bureau (which oversees child protective services, foster care and adoption) and the Family and Youth Services Bureau (which aids runaway and homeless teens, among others).

All told, these programs have seen their staffs cut from roughly 2,400 employees as of January to 1,500 now, according to a shared Google document that is being regularly updated by former HHS officials. (Neither the White House nor agency leadership have released the exact numbers of cuts.)

Those losses have been most acutely felt in the agency’s regional offices, five out of 10 of which — covering over 20 states — have been closed by the Trump administration. They were dissolved this month without notice to their own employees or to the local providers they worked with. It was these outposts that had monitored Head Start programs to make sure that they had fences around their playgrounds, gates at the top of their stairs and enough staffing to keep an eye on even the most energetic little ones. It was also the regional staff who had helped state child support programs modernize their computer systems and navigate federal law. That allowed them, among other things, to be able to “pass through” more money to families instead of depositing it in state coffers to reimburse themselves for costs.

And it was the regional staff who’d had the relationships with tribal officials that allowed them to routinely work together to address child support, child care and child welfare challenges faced by Native families. Together, they had worked to overcome sometimes deep distrust of the federal government among tribal leaders, who may now have no one to ask for help with their children’s programs other than political appointees in D.C.

In the wake of the regional office cuts, local child services program directors have no idea who in the federal government to call when they have urgent concerns, many told ProPublica. “No one knows anything,” said one state child support director, asking not to be named in order to speak candidly about the administration’s actions. “We have no idea who will be auditing us.”

“We’re trying to be reassuring to our families,” the official said, “but if the national system goes down, so does ours.”

That national system includes the complex web of databases and technical support maintained and provided by the Office of Child Support Services at HHS, which helps states locate parents who owe child support in order to withhold part of their paychecks or otherwise obtain the money they owe, which is then sent to the parent who has custody of the child. Without this federal data and assistance, child support orders would have little way of being enforced across state lines.

For that reason, the Trump administration is making a risky gamble by slashing staffing at the federal child support office, said Vicki Turetsky, who headed that office under the Obama administration. She worries that the layoffs create a danger of system outages that would cause child support payments to be missed or delayed. (“That’s a family’s rent,” she said.) The instability is compounded, she said, by DOGE’s recent unexplained move to access a highly confidential national child support database.

But even if the worst doesn’t come to pass, there will still be concrete consequences for the delivery of child support to families, Turetsky said. The staff members who’ve been pushed out include those who’d helped manage complicated, outdated IT systems; without updates, these programs might over- or undershoot the amount of child support that a parent owes, misdirect the money or fail to give notice to the dad or mom about a change in the case.

When Liz Ryan departed as administrator of the Department of Justice’s juvenile division in January, its website was flush with opportunities for state and local law enforcement as well as nonprofits to apply for federal funding for a myriad of initiatives that help children. There were funds for local police task forces that investigate child exploitation on the internet; for programs where abused children are interviewed by police and mental health professionals; and for court-appointed advocates for victimized kids. Grants were also available for mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

But the Trump administration removed those grant applications, which total over $400 million in a typical year. And Ryan said there still hasn’t been any communication, including in what used to be regular emails with grant recipients, many of whom she remains in touch with, about whether this congressionally approved money even still exists or whether some of it might eventually be made available again.

A spokesperson for the Office of Justice Programs within the DOJ said the agency is reviewing programs, policies and materials and “taking action as appropriate” in accordance with Trump’s executive orders and guidance. When that review has been completed, local agencies and programs seeking grants will be notified.

Multiple nonprofits serving exploited children declined to speak on the record to ProPublica, fearing that doing so might undermine what chance they still had of getting potential grants.

“Look at what happened to the law firms,” one official said, adding that time is running out to fund his program’s services for victims of child abuse for the upcoming fiscal year.

“I never anticipated that programs and services and opportunities for young people wouldn’t be funded at all by the federal government,” Ryan said, adding that local children’s organizations likely can’t go to states, whose budgets are already underwater, to make up the funding gap. “When you look at this alongside what they’re doing at HHS and the Department of Education and to Medicaid, it’s undercutting every single effort that we have to serve kids.”

by Sharon Lerner

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Environmentalists have long faced harassment, imprisonment and other forms of retribution in some parts of the world. The U.S. has largely been an exception, a place where people and organizations can freely and safely pursue efforts to protect human health and nature — sometimes working hand in hand with the government.

But the treatment of people who fight pollution has palpably changed in recent months.

Nonprofit environmental groups are facing attacks from the Trump administration, subpoenas from criminal investigations, online harassment and industry lawsuits they say are designed to intimidate them into silence. In recent weeks, fears have grown that the administration will seek to revoke the nonprofit status of at least some groups.

Today, on Earth Day, ProPublica is publishing an interview with Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, the country’s biggest public interest environmental firm, about the escalating hostility environmentalists face. Over the past five decades, Earthjustice’s lawyers have helped to establish the first federal limits on mercury and other chemicals emitted by power plants, successfully pushed for bans on toxic pesticides and fought to protect hundreds of endangered species.

But the future of the environmental movement is in peril. The shift has been led in no small part by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is tasked with protecting the public’s air and water. President Donald Trump’s head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, has defunded and sharply criticized some environmental organizations. For eight nonprofit groups that received $20 billion in federal money aimed at promoting clean energy, Zeldin has gone further, working with the FBI on a criminal investigation into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the grant program that funds them.

The EPA moved to cancel the funding in February after Zeldin likened the congressionally authorized grant program to throwing gold bars off the Titanic. Zeldin told Fox News that “the entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal,” suggesting there was self-dealing and conflicts of interest. A grand jury was launched to investigate his claims. Although a judge has found that the EPA has yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing, the agency froze the funds and federal authorities sent subpoenas to the organizations that received the money.

Zeldin and Trump have publicly called out environmental activists by name. After Fox News showed a picture of Beth Bafford, the executive director of one group, during an interview with Zeldin, she said she received dozens of messages and threats on her voicemail. On social media, people have responded to Zeldin’s online allegations with calls to imprison the people he is targeting, charge them with treason and even execute them.

Meanwhile, green groups are facing threats from lawsuits they say are designed to intimidate and wear down advocacy organizations. Dozens of states have adopted laws to discourage so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits. In March, a jury in North Dakota, which does not have an anti-SLAPP law, found the environmental organization Greenpeace liable for more than $660 million for its role in protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer, argued in court that Greenpeace defamed the company and orchestrated criminal behavior by protestors. Greenpeace has vowed to appeal the verdict.

These events have taken place as the new administration makes energy production a main focus, shifting the EPA’s priorities to include deregulation and “restoring energy dominance,” making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and bringing back jobs in the auto industry. The agency claims that, contrary to what a lot of its critics have said, these changes won’t affect its commitment to protecting clean air and clean water.

Dillen sees the Greenpeace case and the increase of lawsuits targeting free speech more broadly, as just one of the growing threats to organizations that work to preserve the environment — and the people who staff them. She spoke to ProPublica about the targeting of nonprofit groups, how the second Trump administration is different from the first and what keeps her up at night. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ProPublica reached out to the EPA and the White House for comment but did not receive a response.

Nonprofit executives have recently told me about having their lives transformed. One day they’re working on fulfilling grant requirements, the next they’re being accused of participating in a criminal “scheme.” Do you know of others in this situation?

Yes. I have heard of people being harassed at their homes. This is what happens when the federal government sends a signal that people who have lawfully been granted money by the government are actually scammers and fraudsters. This effort to criminalize people who have properly received government grants has outsized impacts online and in real life.

Is this new?

I can’t remember any instance of the kind that we’re seeing now. It’s not the first time that clients of ours have received threats. Earthjustice has received threats over the years. But it’s a very different thing when the federal government — the EPA administrator, the president himself — are personally targeting people online. That is fundamentally different and it’s having a fundamentally different impact.

Earthjustice recently hired an outside law firm to help the organization’s clients with SLAPP suits. Why did you feel the need to do that now?

SLAPP suits are not new. And in part that’s why we have anti-SLAPP legislation in many states. What’s happened now is the tone that the president is setting from the top, popularizing the idea that people trying to work in the public interest are actually hurting the country. That gives license to big corporations to be deploying highly disfavored tactics like SLAPP suits. I’m concerned that the attitude this administration is projecting about civil society is so negative that it will encourage more hostile activity by the private sector. I also fear that the very notable ruling in the SLAPP suit against Greenpeace will embolden other companies and other big law firms.

We’ve seen the administration make plans to rescind Harvard University’s nonprofit status. Do you worry about the same thing happening to environmental groups?

I worry about this administration in all ways. But of course, any action of that kind would be illegal. The president cannot weaponize the IRS by directing audits or stripping away tax-exempt status without due process and legitimate reasons. This kind of attack would strike at the core of our democracy and set a precedent that threatens not only environmental groups but all kinds of charitable organizations, from neighborhood churches to disaster relief and medical research institutions.

(Editor’s note: While many experts agree it would be illegal for Trump to instruct the IRS to remove Harvard’s nonprofit status, the president has argued that being tax exempt is “a privilege” that can be revoked. On Monday, Politico reported that Zeldin told reporters he did not think the government should broadly reconsider the nonprofit status of environmental groups.)

I’ve noticed that environmental leaders are more hesitant to talk publicly. What do you think they stand to lose by speaking out?

Across the board, this administration is deploying federal power and the power of the Justice Department, even the FBI, in ways that make it increasingly frightening for anyone to speak out. Now there is clearly a risk that by doing your ordinary job, you may become a target of the administration. For the recipients of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, that targeting has taken the form of a grand jury inquiry.

How is the new administration’s approach to environmental issues different from that of the first Trump administration?

In the first Trump administration, you had a very aggressive agenda to roll back environmental protections, but the method was not so different from what past administrations had done. It was largely hewing to the legally mandated process of proposing new rules, finalizing replacement policies and putting in place weaker policies. In retrospect, it looks quite conventional because there was at least an optical compliance with the normal process.

Now you have the administration pushing an even more radical agenda to deregulate and so far they’re dispensing with the usual process. So you have the declaration of the energy emergency, and that is becoming the pretext for making decisions without complying with the usual permitting process. You have this new announcement that regulated industries can apply for presidential exemptions that would relieve them of compliance obligations. Now note that that would apply to even Biden administration regulations that the Supreme Court has declined to stay. This is an end run around regulations that are on the books today.

So has Earthjustice’s strategy changed, too?

It has. When I imagined what our first cases would be, I imagined we would be fighting efforts to stay life-saving regulations, that we would be fighting over efforts to pause compliance obligations in federal court. And that certainly has been happening. But I would not have imagined that we would be working around the clock to challenge paused funding for farmers or that we would be fending off immediate efforts by the Trump administration to block congestion pricing in NYC.

I do believe there are remedies in the court for what is happening.

What if the courts find in your favor, but the administration doesn’t abide by their decision? Is that something that keeps you up at night?

I worry very much about losing the rule of law in this country.

Are you sleeping well?

No.

What do you think the targeting of environmentalists achieves or aims to achieve?

The Trump administration is very significantly bankrolled by the fossil fuels industry. It has been widely reported that the president promised to give many favors to the industry while asking for their financial support. And the president is delivering on those promises by taking aim at climate policies and the groups that have successfully advocated for them. There is, I think, something larger in play, which is that climate solutions are going to drive significant changes in our economy and the president is choosing to throw in with powerful incumbent industries rather than allowing for fair competition in the country. And one part of justifying this approach publicly is to silence groups who are effectively lifting up the reality of climate change and the urgent need to address it.

Do you fear that this country is becoming a dangerous place for people who do environmental work?

I hope with every fiber of my being that we are not becoming one of those countries. But do I see it as possible? Absolutely.

by Mary Hudetz

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Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has signed legislation increasing oversight of sober living homes, two years after state officials announced that a Medicaid fraud scheme had targeted Native Americans seeking drug and alcohol treatment.

The bill, sponsored by three Republicans, amends state law for the regulation and licensing of sober living homes. It places new demands on the Arizona Department of Health Services, though a lawmaker from the Navajo Nation expressed concern that the bill does not go far enough in addressing root causes of the fraud.

Hobbs’ office announced late Friday that the bill, expected to take effect in the fall, was among dozens she had signed into law. The governor did not explain her decision to sign the legislation but she has been vocal in her support of reforms over the past two years to help authorities “go after bad actors.”

The legislation’s passage comes after ProPublica and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting reported in January that former state Medicaid officials had failed for years to stem the $2 billion fraud scheme, despite repeated warnings. Starting around 2019, people were lured into substance abuse treatment programs and housed in sober living homes where operators often allowed patients to continue using drugs and alcohol, according to officials. Meanwhile, many providers excessively billed the state’s American Indian Health Program, Medicaid insurance available to tribal citizens, for treatment they did not deliver.

At least 40 people died in sober living homes from the spring of 2022 to the summer of 2024 as the crisis escalated, Maricopa County Medical Examiner records reviewed by the news organizations showed. Victims’ advocates say they are certain the scheme’s toll is far higher. In interviews, victims’ relatives told ProPublica and AZCIR that they had been left in the dark about the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths, including not knowing the names or addresses of the facilities where their family members had been staying because no one had informed them.

“I believe that this bill will set standards,” Rep. Cesar Aguilar, a Democrat from Phoenix, said before voting for the measure. “It will force businesses to actually help the most vulnerable.”

The League of Arizona Cities and Towns, a nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of municipalities and that supported the measure, said in a news release that a noteworthy component of the bill includes “mandating timely reporting” to the Arizona Department of Health Services — in addition to family members and emergency contacts — when a resident dies, overdoses or suffers severe harm in a facility. The health department will also be required to notify local governments when new licenses are issued to operators of sober living homes, which the league said will “improve transparency and community awareness.”

Under the bill, the health department’s director will set standards and requirements for sober living homes to maintain a drug- and alcohol-free environment and promote health and addiction recovery. Health officials could revoke or suspend licenses depending on the severity of a violation or issue fines of up to $1,000 for each day that a violation goes unaddressed.

At a minimum, the health department will conduct annual inspections of facilities and report to lawmakers on the number of complaints received regarding licensed or unlicensed facilities and how many resulted in investigations or other enforcement actions.

The bill received bipartisan support. However, critics said it did not address additional factors that contributed to the fraud scheme: Many victims stayed in unlicensed facilities and, despite warnings, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state’s Medicaid agency, was slow to grasp the scope of the fraud and stop it.

It wasn’t until May 2023 that AHCCCS and the governor, who took office that year, announced a sweeping investigation of hundreds of facilities and launched a hotline to help victims who were recruited into fraudulent programs or displaced after AHCCCS suspended payments to the businesses. The agency has since enacted a series of reforms in response to the fraud. In an interview last year, a deputy director for AHCCCS also acknowledged that the agency’s American Indian Health Program lacked safeguards for fraud.

Supporters of this year’s bill have touted support from tribes.

Reva Stewart, who is Diné and an advocate for victims of the scheme and their families, opposed the bill. She anticipates the measure will make it more burdensome for licensed facilities to help people seeking treatment, while failing to stop the unlicensed homes, where most of the harm was done. ProPublica and AZCIR found that officials’ botched response to the crisis resulted in Native Americans losing access to behavioral health services that were being provided to them.

Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, a Democrat from Coalmine Mesa on the Navajo Nation, was also critical of the legislation. She voted against it, noting that a bill she sponsored last session would have required more accountability not only from the health department related to its oversight of the homes but also from the Arizona Corporation Commission, where the businesses must be registered.

Hatathlie, whose niece died in one of the homes, said this year’s Republican sponsors of sober home legislation did not include her in their discussions.

“We’re actually not solving the problem,” she said during a Senate floor vote last month. “So to say it’s good enough now, when we still have people dying and getting lost in the system, is a disservice to human lives. These are my relatives. These are my family members.”

Sen. Frank Carroll, the bill’s lead sponsor, didn’t immediately respond to an email and phone calls requesting comment.

Maria Polletta, a senior reporter and associate editor at AZCIR, contributed reporting.

by Robert Faturechi

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After President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs earlier this month, the White House released a list of more than a thousand products that would be exempted.

One item that made the list is polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET resin, the thermoplastic used to make plastic bottles.

Why it was spared is unclear, and even people in the industry are confused about the reason for the reprieve.

But its inclusion is a win for Reyes Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the U.S. and is owned by a pair of brothers who have donated millions of dollars to Republican causes. Records show the company recently hired a lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump White House to make its case on tariffs.

Whether the company’s lobbying played any role in the exemption is unclear. Reyes Holdings and its lobbyists did not respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not comment, but some industry advocates say the administration has rebuffed requests for exemptions.

The resin’s unexplained inclusion on the list exemplifies how opaque the administration’s process for crafting its tariff policy has been. Major stakeholders are in the dark about why certain products face levies and others don’t. Tariff rates have been altered without any clear explanation for the changes. Administration officials have given conflicting messages about the tariffs or declined to answer questions at all.

The lack of transparency about the process has created concerns among trade experts that politically connected firms might be winning carve-outs behind closed doors.

“It could be corruption, but it could just as easily be incompetence,” a lobbyist who works on tariff policy said of PET resin’s inclusion. “To be honest, this was such a hurried mess, I am not sure who got into the White House to talk to folks about the list.”

During the first Trump administration, there was a formal process for seeking an exemption from tariffs. Companies submitted hundreds of thousands of applications making the case for why their products should be spared. The applications were public, so the machinery of the tariff crafting process could be more closely examined. Such transparency allowed academics to subsequently analyze thousands of the applications and determine that political donors to Republicans were more likely to be granted exemptions.

In Trump’s second term, at least thus far, there has not been a formal application process for tariff carve-outs. Industry executives and lobbyists are making their case behind closed doors. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last week called “the opacity of the process” for getting an exemption “the Beltway Swamp’s dream.”

In the executive order formalizing Trump’s new tariffs, including baseline 10% tariffs for almost all countries, exemptions were broadly defined as products in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, lumber, copper, critical minerals and energy sectors. An accompanying list detailed the specific products that would be spared.

But a ProPublica review of that list found many items that don’t fit neatly, or at all, in those broad categories, and some items that fall squarely within the categories were not spared.

The White House exclusions list, for example, included most types of asbestos, which is not generally considered a critical mineral and doesn’t seem to fit in any of the exempted categories. The cancer-causing mineral, which is not generally considered critical to national security or the U.S. economy, is still used to make chlorine, but the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency banned imports of the material last year. The Trump administration has signaled it may roll back some of those Biden-era restrictions.

A spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, which had pushed back on the ban because it could hurt the chlorine industry, said the trade group played no role in lobbying for asbestos to get a tariff exemption and didn’t know why it was included. (Two major chlorine companies also showed no indication of lobbying on the tariffs in their disclosure forms.)

Other items that landed on the list, despite not falling into exempted categories, are far more innocuous. Among them: coral, shells and cuttlebone, a part of the cuttlefish that is used as a dietary supplement for pets.

PET resin also doesn’t fit neatly in any of the exempted categories. It’s possible the administration counted it as an energy product, experts said, because its ingredients are derived from petroleum. But other products that would have met that same low bar were not included.

“We are as surprised as anybody,” said Ralph Vasami, executive director of the PET Resin Association, a trade group for the industry. The resin, he said, has no application for the exempted categories, unless you count the packaging those products come in.

During the fourth quarter of last year, the same period when Trump won the election, records show Reyes Holdings, the Coca-Cola bottler, enlisted Ballard Partners to lobby on tariffs. During the first quarter of this year, when Trump was inaugurated, records show that Ballard began lobbying the Commerce Department, which shapes trade policy, on tariffs.

The firm has become a destination for companies looking for an in with the Trump administration. It once lobbied for Trump’s own company, the Trump Organization, and its staff has included top officials in the administration, such as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Brian Ballard, its founder and a prolific fundraiser for Trump, was named by Politico “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” He was one of two lobbyists from the firm who lobbied on tariffs for Reyes Holdings, federal disclosure records show.

The billionaire brothers behind Reyes Holdings, Chris and Jude Reyes, also have their own political ties. While they have given to some Democratic candidates, the bulk of their political donations have gone to Republican causes, campaign finance disclosures show. And after Trump’s first election win, Chris Reyes was invited to Mar-a-Lago to meet privately with Trump.

The PET resin carve-out isn’t just a break for Reyes Holdings. It’s a boon to other firms that buy the resin to manufacture bottles and the beverage companies that use them. Earlier this year, the CEO of Coca-Cola said the company would transition to using more plastic bottles in the face of new tariffs on aluminum, a plan that might have been dashed if the thermoplastics were also hit with new tariffs. Disclosure records show the company also lobbied this year about tariffs on the Hill, but the documents don’t provide detail about which policies in particular, and the company did not respond to questions from ProPublica. (Coca-Cola has looked to make inroads with Trump, donating about $250,000 for his inauguration, and the CEO presented Trump with a personalized bottle of his favorite soda, Diet Coke.)

Another industry that appears to have done relatively well lobbying for carve-outs from the recent tariffs is agriculture. The exemption list includes various pesticide and fertilizer ingredients.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural lobby, took credit for some of those exemptions in an analysis posted on its website recently, calling exemptions for peat and potash “hard fought for by agricultural organizations such as the American Farm Bureau Federation” and “a testament to the effectiveness of farmers’ and ranchers raising their collective voice.”

There are a number of other imports that don’t neatly fall into any of the exempted categories but might if the categories were defined loosely.

One example is sucralose, the artificial sweetener. Its inclusion will largely help companies that use the product in food and beverages. But sucralose is also sometimes used in drugs to make them more palatable. It’s not clear if the White House gave it a pass under the pharmaceutical exemption or for some other reason.

Even for the items that were spared, the reprieve may just be temporary.

The broad categories exempted are largely industries that are being investigated by the administration for potential future tariffs under its authority to administer levies to protect national security.

Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed research.

by Mark Olalde

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.

When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.

That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.

But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.

At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.

Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.

“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.

The fatality investigation team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the layoff notices arrived. Those probes are now unlikely to be completed, the investigator said.

“The whole intent of this program was that people would learn through tragedy — what happened to one person — so we can prevent it from happening to others,” the investigator said.

The administration’s moves will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases and disrupt a program that provides health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.

ProPublica spoke with five NIOSH employees who either led or contributed to firefighter health initiatives and received layoff notices. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the administration.

“The existence of NIOSH is a hard-earned right by the people of America to have a healthy and safe working environment,” said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840, which represents agency employees. “This is an attack on NIOSH employees and federal employees, but it is also an attack on American workers generally.”

Neither the White House nor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has called the shots on many of the administration’s cuts, responded to a request for comment. A NIOSH spokesperson referred questions to HHS.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made some public indications that aspects of the World Trade Center program could be spared, but details remain sparse. The department’s spokesperson said in a statement that programs required by law — such as some of those focused on firefighter health — will continue to operate.

They did not respond to a follow-up question about how those programs will continue after their staffs were terminated.

“It Breaks My Heart”

The investigations performed by the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program are initiated at the request of the fire department that suffered the casualty. The findings are shared with the firefighter’s family in hopes of providing some closure. And the reports are then published, so the broader firefighting community can strengthen its procedures to avoid similar losses.

The Trump administration had already hamstrung the program shortly after the inauguration, initially barring the investigative team from traveling to conduct research, communicating with other agencies and publishing reports, according to the investigator. While the department eventually allowed several of the casualty reports to be published, the rest remain unfinished.

“It breaks my heart that we’re going to just destroy these programs that have made so much progress in protecting the health and safety of our firefighting community,” the investigator said.

The layoff notice the investigator received from HHS said that termination of much of the agency’s staff was “because your duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”

“Leadership at HHS are appreciative of your service,” the notice stated.

The federal firefighting force faces a daunting year, with spending cuts canceling prescribed burns to reduce flammable vegetation and the termination of hundreds of firefighting support staff, even in the face of climate-change-lengthened wildfire seasons.

“At a time when we need to be bolstering these efforts and personnel, it’s pretty damn appalling that we’d be trying to diminish the health benefits for our firefighters and first responders,” a Forest Service firefighter said.

Dismantling the World’s Largest Firefighter Cancer Study

On April 1, the Trump administration also began laying off much of the staff working on the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer.

Its creation in 2018 was a landmark win in a yearslong fight to study why firefighters suffer from certain types of cancer at vastly higher rates than the general population. Both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the bill to create the registry. Trump signed it into law during his first term.

While HHS said in a statement that programs required by law would remain intact, it did not answer a question about whether it would bring back staff to keep the registry running.

Wildland firefighters don’t typically wear respirators while they’re exposed to high levels of smoke. And the protective clothing firefighters wear while battling active blazes contains high levels of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” that have been linked to various types of cancer. But the exact causes of some cancers that occur at high rates among firefighters are not well understood. Female-specific cancers such as ovarian and cervical, for example, have only recently been linked to firefighting.

More than 23,000 firefighters have signed up to participate since the registry launched in April 2023, and the research team recently began an outreach campaign to get to 200,000 participants. With this trove of data, NIOSH researchers planned to dig into numerous under-studied questions, such as what workplace exposures led to cancers that specifically harmed female firefighters, a NIOSH scientist who worked on the program told ProPublica.

Among the thousands who signed up was a federal wildland firefighter who was concerned about spending a career breathing wildfire smoke without a respirator. The decision to throw away such research is disturbing, the firefighter told ProPublica. “I was hoping that something would happen with all that research, that they would protect wildland firefighters.”

With a hollowed-out IT department, the registry’s portal to enroll firefighters quickly went offline.

“It’s devastating,” said Judith Graber, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-chair of the board that advises the registry research team. She said the study is “the largest effort ever taken anywhere to understand cancer in firefighters,” but it’s an effort that can’t simply be restarted after the researchers running it are laid off.

Diane Cotter became an activist when her husband, a career firefighter, developed prostate cancer, and she fought for funding of research such as the registry. While she’s a Kennedy supporter, Cotter said the administration went too far in cutting the program and other first responder health initiatives such as the World Trade Center program, which she called “sacred.”

“It’s very important we hold the line on these studies,” she said.

by Alec MacGillis

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

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

by Audrey Dutton

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

Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has shut down a program that helped tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other educational expenses.

The Republican leading the push to defund Idaho’s Empowering Parents grants said it had nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative group, a strong supporter of the private school tax credit, drew the connection directly.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation, on its website, proposed adding the $30 million that fueled Empowering Parents to the newly created tax credit, paying for an additional 6,000 private and homeschool students to join the 10,000 already expected to benefit from the program.

The new voucher-style tax credits have major differences from the grants lawmakers killed.

The tax credits are off-limits to public school students, while the grants went predominantly to this group. And there’s limited state oversight on how the private education tax credits will be used, while the grants to public school families were only allowed to be spent with state-approved educational vendors.

Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a Democrat who works in a low-income public elementary school in Boise, condemned the plan to kill the grants in a speech to legislative colleagues.

“I have to go back to the families that I serve, the parents that I love, the kids that I teach, and say, ‘You no longer can get that additional math tutoring that you need,’” she said, “that ‘the state is willing to support other programs for other groups of kids, but not you.’”

When states steer public funds to private schools, well-off families benefit more than those in lower income brackets, as ProPublica has reported in Arizona. The programs are pitched as enabling “school choice,” but in reality, research has found the money tends to benefit families that have already chosen private schools.

Idaho lawmakers passed such a program this year with the new tax credit, which some describe as a version of school “vouchers” that parents in other states spend on schools of their choosing.

The credit allows private and homeschool families to reduce their tax bills by $5,000 per child — $7,500 per student with disabilities — or get that much money from the state if they owe no taxes. Lower-income families have priority, and there’s no cap on how many credits each family can claim. The law says funds must go to traditional academic expenses like private school tuition or homeschool curricula and textbooks, plus a few other costs like transportation. But families don’t have to provide proof of how they spent the money unless they’re audited.

The Empowering Parents grant program that lawmakers repealed was open to students no matter where they learn, although state data shows at least 81% of the money went to public school students this academic year — more than 24,000 of them. It offered up to $1,000 per student, with lower-income families getting first dibs and a family limit of $3,000.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little created a similar program in 2020 called Strong Families, Strong Students with federal pandemic funds, to help families make the abrupt shift to remote learning. State lawmakers created the current program in 2022, also using one-time federal pandemic recovery money, and liked it so much they renewed it with ongoing state funding in 2023.

Charlene Bradley used the grant this school year to buy a laptop for her daughter, a fifth grader in Nampa School District. Before the purchase, Bradley’s daughter could use computers at school, but there was no way to do schoolwork at home, “besides my cell phone which we did have to use sometimes,” Bradley said in a Facebook message.

Debra Whiteley used it for home internet and a printer for her 12-year-old daughter, who attends public school in north-central Idaho. Whiteley’s daughter resisted doing projects that needed pictures or graphs. “Now when she has a project she can make a tri fold display that’s not all hand written and self drawn, which looking back on, I didn’t have a clue she may have been embarrassed about,” Whiteley said in a Facebook message.

Annie Coltrin used it to get “much needed” tutoring for her daughter, a sophomore in an agricultural community in southern Idaho. The grant paid for Coltrin’s daughter to receive math tutoring in person twice a week, which took her grade from a low D to a B+.

Such families were on the minds of education leaders like Jason Sevy when they advocated for preserving the Empowering Parents program this year.

Sevy, who chairs a rural public school district board in southwestern Idaho and is the Idaho School Boards Association’s president-elect, said families in his district used the Empowering Parents grants for backpacks and school supplies, or laptops they couldn’t afford otherwise.

“You’re looking at families with five kids that were only making $55,000 a year. Having that little extra money made a big difference,” Sevy said. “But it also closed that gap for these kids to feel like they were going to be able to keep up with everybody else.”

Few families in Sevy’s district will be able to use the state’s new tuition tax credits for private education, he said. A tiny residential school is the only private school operating in Sevy’s remote county. The next-closest options require a drive to the neighboring county, and Sevy worries those schools wouldn’t take English-language learners or children who need special education. (Unlike public schools, private schools can accept or reject students based on their own criteria.)

“This is the program that was able to help those groups of people, and they’re just letting it go away” to free up money for private schools, Sevy said.

The freshman legislator who sponsored the bill to end Empowering Parents is Sen. Camille Blaylock, a Republican from a small city west of Boise.

Blaylock’s stance is that the grants aren’t the proper role of government.

Speaking on the Senate floor in March, Blaylock highlighted the fact that the vast majority of the Empowering Parents money went to electronics — mostly computers, laptops and tablets.

“This program has drifted far from its original intent,” Blaylock said. “It’s turning into a technology slush fund, and if we choose to continue funding it, we are no longer empowering parents. We are creating entitlements.”

In an interview, Blaylock denied any desire to divert public school money to private education and said she was unaware the Idaho Freedom Foundation took that “unfortunate” position.

“The last thing I want is for this to be a ‘taking away from public schools to give to school choice,’ because that is not my intent at all,” Blaylock said.

She told the Senate’s education committee this year that her hope in ending the grants was to cut government spending by $30 million. But if the savings had to go somewhere, she’d want it to benefit other public school programs, especially in a year when lawmakers created the $50 million tax credit for private and homeschooling.

Regardless of how the $30 million in savings will be spent in the future, Blaylock’s assertion that the grants weren’t supposed to help families buy computers goes against what’s in the legislative record.

Lawmakers pitched Empowering Parents three years ago as a way to help lower-income students be on equal footing with their peers, with one legislator arguing that tablets and computers are such a part of education now that “without the ability of families to afford those devices, a student’s learning is substantially jeopardized.”

Republican Sen. Lori Den Hartog, opening debate on her bill to create Empowering Parents in 2022, said it was partly to address pandemic learning loss. “But,” she said, “it’s also a recognition of the ongoing needs that students in our state have, and that there is a potential different avenue to provide resources to those students.”

First in the list of eligible expenses Den Hartog spelled out: computer hardware, internet access, other technology. Then came textbooks, school materials, tutoring and everything else. (Den Hartog, who voted to repeal the program this year, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Killing the grants also went against the praise that Little, the state’s Republican governor, has showered on it. He has described the program as itself a form of “school choice,” touting how it helped low-income parents afford better education.

“The grants help families take charge of tools for their children’s education — things like computers and software, instructional materials and tutoring,” Little said in January 2023 when announcing his intent to make Empowering Parents permanent.

He called the grants “effective, popular and worthy of continued investment” because they “keep parents in the driver’s seat of their children’s education, as it should be.”

In the months before Idaho lawmakers voted to kill the program, Little again cited Empowering Parents as a success story, a way “to ensure Idaho families have the freedom and access to choose the best fit for their child’s unique education and learning needs.” He pointed out that the grants mainly went to public school students. He again touted it in his State of the State address in January, not as a temporary pandemic-era program but as “our popular” grant program “to support students’ education outside of the classroom.”

Nonetheless, the Idaho House and Senate both voted to kill the grant program by wide margins, and Little signed the bill on April 14.

Blaylock disagreed that the grant’s creators foresaw it would be used mostly for laptops and electronics. And, despite acknowledging state lawmakers decided to make it permanent, she disagrees that it was intended to be an ongoing program. She said public schools already get $36 million a year from the state to spend on technology, which they use to furnish computers students can take home, so families don’t need state money to buy more.

Little, in a letter explaining his decision to join lawmakers in killing the grants, said he was “proud of the positive outcomes” from the program. But, he wrote: “Now that the pandemic is squarely in the rearview mirror and students have long been back in school, I agree with the Legislature that this program served its purpose.”

When looking back at how Empowering Parents was created, Sevy, the local school board chair, suspects it was a soft attempt “to get the foot in the door” toward vouchers, not purely an effort to meet the needs of all students.

He remembers telling Den Hartog that the program was helping low-income families in his district. “She was super-excited to hear that,” Sevy said. “It’s like, OK! And here we are two years later, just getting rid of it.”

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and James Bandler, ProPublica

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A Wisconsin teenager accused of murdering two family members and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was inspired by Terrorgram, a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade, according to federal court records.

The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.

The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”

In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, Terrorgram was a constellation of scores of Telegram channels and chat groups focused on inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism and anti-government sabotage. At the network’s peak, some Terrorgram channels drew thousands of followers. Over the past six months, however, the network has been disrupted as authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have arrested key Terrorgram influencers and community members.

But the violence hasn’t stopped.

Casap in February allegedly shot and killed his mother, Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, Donald Mayer; stole their property; and fled in their Volkswagen Atlas, Waukesha County prosecutors say. He was arrested in Kansas. Prosecutors have charged the teen with two counts of first-degree homicide, as well as identity theft and other theft charges. He is expected to be arraigned on May 7, according to court records.

A witness told local investigators that Casap “was in touch with a male in Russia through the Telegram app and they were planning to overthrow the U.S. government and assassinate President Trump,” according to charging documents in the Wisconsin case.

The newly unsealed federal court filings indicate that the FBI is investigating Casap in connection to the alleged assassination plot.

The bureau declined to comment on the matter.

Last fall, federal prosecutors accused two Americans of acting as leaders of the Terrorgram Collective and charged them with soliciting the murder of federal officials and a host of other terrorism-related offenses. The U.S. State Department has officially designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, as have officials in the United Kingdom and Australia. The two Americans have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“Do absolutely anything you can that will lead to the collapse of America or any country you live in,” Casap allegedly wrote in his manifesto, according to an FBI affidavit. “This is the only way we can save the White race.”

The teen’s writings and online postings that are cited in the affidavit indicate that he is a believer in militant accelerationism, a concept that has become increasingly popular with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists over the past decade. Militant accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern society through acts of spectacular violence; from the ruins of today’s democracies, they aim to build all-white ethno-states organized on fascist principles.

Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, a nonprofit think tank, called the alleged Casap plot unique. “It’s the first time we’re explicitly seeing an individual tie an accelerationist act or plot with the president of the United States as a means of collapsing society,” Kriner said. “I think what we have here is a fairly clear-cut case of an individual who is being groomed to take drastic terrorist action in an accelerationist manner.”

Casap’s public defender could not be reached for comment.

A Telegram spokesperson said, “Telegram supports the peaceful exchange of ideas; however, calls for violence are strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service and are removed proactively as well as in response to user reports."

A ProPublica and FRONTLINE review shows that Casap was recently active in at least five extremist Telegram channels or chat groups, including a Russian-language neo-Nazi chat in which posters uploaded detailed instructions for crafting explosives, poisons and improvised firearms. He was also a member of a chat group with more than 4,300 participants run by the Misanthropic Division, a global neo-Nazi organization.

Casap, according to the federal documents, also sought out information online about the Order of Nine Angles, a cult that blends Satanic concepts and Nazi ideology and has increasingly turned to Telegram to recruit and proselytize.

“This is a clear example of how Terrorgram continues to influence murder,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who studies online extremism. “Nikita was influenced online by an assortment of ideologies and groups that intersect with the Terrorgram ecosphere.”

by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro

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Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, financial technology startup Ramp published a pitch for how to tackle wasteful government spending. In a 4,000-word blog post titled “The Efficiency Formula,” Ramp’s CEO and one of its investors echoed ideas similar to those promoted by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk: Federal programs were overrun by fraud, and commonsense business techniques could provide a quick fix.

Ramp sells corporate credit cards and artificial intelligence software for businesses to analyze spending. And while the firm appears to have no existing federal contracts, the post implied the government should consider hiring it. Just as Ramp helped businesses manage their budgets, the company “could do the same for a variety of government agencies,” according to the blog and company social media posts.

It didn’t take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump’s first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president’s appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. Some of the meetings were organized by the nation’s top procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.

GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.

Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.

To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.

The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.

A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.”

GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Ramp did not respond to requests for comment.

Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.

Rabois sits on Ramp’s board of directors. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added.

Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.”

Thrive Capital, Kushner’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Thiel did not provide a comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I’ll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise.

Ramp’s meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and preparations are afoot for the next generation of the program. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank.

Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp’s January memo.

Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts, as well as former GSA officials, describe that view as ill-informed. SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas.

The cards typically are used to fund travel and purchases up to $10,000.

“SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” said former GSA commissioner Sonny Hashmi, who oversaw the program. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”

Jessica Riedl, a GOP budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said the notion that there was significant fraud in the charge card technology was far-fetched. She had criticized waste in government credit card programs before the latest SmartPay system was implemented in 2018.

“This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.”

A 2017 audit of the program by the Government Accountability Office concluded there was “little evidence of potential fraud” in SmartPay small purchases, though it found documentation errors. More recent government audits found some instances where officials did not always use anti-fraud tools.

GSA’s new leaders are convinced SmartPay is entirely broken, a view they shared in private meetings, sources said. In February, they put a temporary $1 limit on government cards and severely restricted the number of cardholders, choking off funds to workers in the field.

Chaos ensued across the government, news organizations reported: Staff at the National Institutes of Health were reportedly unable to purchase materials for experiments, Federal Aviation Administration workers worried they would be unable to pay for travel to test systems in the field, and National Park Service employees could not travel to oversee road maintenance projects.

At the time, GSA released a statement saying the limitations were “risk mitigation best practice” and internally began moving to revamp SmartPay.

$25 Million Opportunity

Ramp’s first bite of the SmartPay business could come through a pilot program worth up to $25 million that GSA announced several weeks after agency leadership began meeting with the company.

At the tail end of the Biden administration, GSA had sent out a request for information, or RFI, seeking industry input about how to improve the next iteration of SmartPay. But some industry players who submitted responses said they did not hear back from the government. Instead, GSA started meeting with Ramp.

GSA put out a new RFI for the pilot program on March 20, 2025, leaving it open for less than seven business days.

John Weiler, co-founder of the nonprofit research group the IT Acquisition Advisory Council, said such a short window appeared unusual. “A week is nothing, it gives the impression they had already picked the winner,” said Weiler, who has worked with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to investigate IT contracting issues.

Ramp is the clear-cut “favorite,” to secure this work, one source inside GSA and another former official told ProPublica. The winner has not yet been announced.

Procurement experts told ProPublica that consulting with industry leaders before a major overhaul is good practice — but that the fact-finding process must be evenhanded and led by professional contracting officers.

The GSA spokesperson said that “any and all communications with potential vendors, of which there were multiple, has been a part of market research in order to provide the best solution for American taxpayers.” The agency declined to answer questions about whether Ramp had already been chosen internally for SmartPay work.

The pilot program is unique because it uses a special GSA purchasing authority known as commercial solutions opening. This process has been used by the Pentagon to help speed up the acquisition of products for fighters in armed conflict zones. The designation means the chosen contractor can be selected faster and without the same level of controls.

It’s not clear how Ramp originally secured private meetings with GSA leaders. Nor is it clear if Ramp will ultimately take over the entire SmartPay contract from Citibank and U.S. Bank. Spokespeople for U.S. Bank and Citibank declined to comment.

It is clear that Ramp has never had a client like the federal government. The only public-sector partner listed on its webpage is a charter school network in Nashville, Tennessee.

Still, even before the RFI was publicly announced, Ramp had begun reaching out to contacts in the payment industry asking about the special bank identification numbers required to process government payments, said an industry source. Such steps, two former GSA officials said, were another sign that Ramp was preparing to work on the program.

Ramp’s meetings with GSA come as the agency is poised to take on a more significant role in spending decisions across government. The same day the SmartPay pilot was announced, Trump issued an executive order that seeks to centralize much of government procurement inside of GSA. The DOGE initiative has been effectively headquartered out of the agency — staffers have installed beds and dressers for overnight stays in the building, and Musk’s right-hand man Steve Davis is a key adviser to the agency’s leadership.

The SmartPay contract negotiation has so far flown under the radar. But changes to the credit card program could further transform daily life for federal employees and fundamentally change how agencies operate. It also represents a giant business opportunity.

“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi, the former GSA official. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

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

Update, April 18, 2025: After this story was published, the family of a transgender boy who changed his legal name at 15 years old learned a judge approved their request to retroactively seal his name-change documents. Wisconsin state Sen. Melissa Ratcliff and other Democrats have also introduced the bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record.

In 2022, after living as a boy and going by a new name for several years, a 15-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, wanted to make it official. Like most teenagers, he dreamed of getting his driver’s license, and his family wanted his government identification to reflect who he really was.

But Wisconsin law has a caveat: He would have to publish his old, feminine name and new name in the local newspaper for three weeks — essentially announcing to the world that he is transgender.

In many instances, if he had committed a crime, the law would afford him privacy as a minor. But not as a transgender teenager changing his name.

His parents worry the public notice now poses a risk as President Donald Trump has attacked transgender rights, asserted that U.S. policy recognizes only two sexes and described efforts to support transgender people as “child abuse.” The publication requirements endanger the community, lawyers working with trans people say, by creating a de facto dataset of likely transgender people that vigilantes and even the government could use for firing, harassment or violence.

Transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violence, research shows. Most transgender people and their families agreed to be interviewed for this story only if they weren’t named, citing safety concerns.

“Publication requirements really leave folks open and vulnerable to discrimination and to harassment more than they already are,” said Arli Christian, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are.”

Wisconsin’s legal process stems from a 167-year-old law, one of many statutes across the country that Christian said were intended to keep people from escaping debts or criminal records. Changing one’s name through marriage is a separate process that does not require publication in a paper.

Although the right to change one’s legal name exists in every state, the effort and risk required to exercise it vary. Less than half of states require people to publicize their name changes in some or all cases, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that tracks voting and LGBTQ+ rights.

Wisconsin law grants confidentiality only if a person can prove it’s more likely than not that publication “could endanger” them. But the statute does not define what that means. For years, some judges interpreted that to include psychological abuse or bullying, or they accepted statistics documenting discrimination and violence against transgender people nationwide.

In 2023, however, a state appeals court set a stricter standard after a trans teenager was denied a confidential name change in Brown County, home to Green Bay. The teen said he had endured years of bullying, in which peers called him slurs and beat him up. Court records show the Brown County judge asserted that publishing the teen’s name wouldn’t expose him to further harm because his harassers already knew he was transgender.

The teen argued that a public process would create a record available to people he met in the future. While the appeals court conceded a “reasonable judge” could agree, it found the Brown County judge had not improperly exercised her discretion in denying the request. Crucially, the appeals court determined that “endanger” meant only physical harm. The case wasn’t appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Both of these trans girls living in Wisconsin requested the confidential name-change process after the 2024 presidential election. First image: A 14-year-old likes cuddling her cat, playing video games and practicing piano. Second image: A 12-year-old shares her artwork. (Illustrations by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)

The combination of Wisconsin’s public requirement, the restrictive ruling and the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies has dissuaded at least one person from going through with a name change.

J.J Koechell, a 20-year-old LGBTQ+ advocate from suburban Milwaukee, tried to change his name in November but decided against it after a judge denied his request for confidentiality, ordering him to publish his change in the local paper and create a public court record if he wanted to proceed.

“That’s already dangerous,” Koechell said of a public process, “given our political atmosphere, with an administration that’s trying to erase trans people from existence completely, or saying that they don’t exist, or that there’s something wrong with them.”

At the end of March, Wisconsin Democrats announced plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record. Republicans, who control the Legislature, will decide whether it will receive a hearing or vote.

There has been a push in some states to make it easier and safer for transgender people to update their legal documents. Michigan and Illinois laws removing publication requirements took effect earlier this year. And a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would retroactively seal all transition-related court records.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to emails and a phone call to his office seeking comment. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica sought comment from four other Republican leaders in the Assembly and Senate. Of the two whose offices responded, a staffer for Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, said, “It doesn’t look like something we’d consider a priority,” and a staffer for Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, said he was not available for comment.

Asked about the safety concerns people raised, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has vowed to defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the Federal government.”

No Exceptions for Minors

Wisconsin’s law requires a transgender person to publish the details of their identity to change their name whether they are an adult or a child. The notice requirement makes no distinction based on age.

This is less privacy than the legal system typically affords young people, confirmed Cary Bloodworth, who directs a family law clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Bloodworth said both child welfare and juvenile courts tend to keep records confidential for a number of reasons, including that what happens in a person’s youth will follow them for a lifetime.

“I certainly think having a higher level of privacy for kids is a good thing,” Bloodworth said, adding that she thinks the publication requirement is unnecessary for people of any age.

An 11-year old trans girl recently went through the name-change process. She enjoys playing with her dog and swimming, and her mom describes her as a “major science geek.” (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

A mom living near the Wisconsin-Illinois border whose 11-year-old daughter recently went through the name-change process said these proceedings should automatically be private for children.

“The fact that we still have to fight to get something as simple as a confidential name change for a minor who is obviously not running away from criminal or debt charges is just so frustrating and overwhelming,” she said.

The judge deciding their case seemed reluctant to grant confidentiality at first, questioning whether her daughter was being threatened physically, she said. The judge granted the confidential change. But the family remains shaken.

“We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child,” she said. “All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”

Right before the pandemic, a teenager told her parents she was transgender. She spent much of that first year of her transition at home, attending virtual school like the rest of her peers in the Madison school district. She came out to only a few friends and wanted to keep her gender identity private, so she kept her camera off and skipped her high school graduation.

When she decided to legally change her name, the prospect of publicizing her transition terrified her, according to her mom.

“I explained to her that it’s in tiny, tiny print, and it’s in some page of the paper that no one is going to read,” her mom said. “But it felt to her like she was just standing out there in public with a ‘TRANS’ sign on her.”

A trans teenager was terrified of the public name-change requirement. She loves playing board games, reading and spending time with friends and her partner. (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)

While fewer people read physical newspapers these days, much of their content gets published online and is easily searchable. The court case, too, becomes a public record that is stored online and sometimes aggregated by other websites that show up at the top of search results.

The parents of the then-15-year-old boy who changed his name before getting his driver’s license discovered that happened to their son. When anyone — say, a prospective employer — searches the young man’s name, one of the first results shows his old name and outs him as trans.

“This is what somebody would use as their first judgment of him,” his mom said. “We certainly don’t want that to be something that people would use to rule him out for a job, or whatever it is he might be doing.”

Like many other states, Wisconsin does not have laws that ban discrimination against transgender people in credit and lending practices or in public spaces like stores, restaurants, parks, doctor’s offices and hotels. However, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, issued an executive order in 2019 banning transgender discrimination in state employment, contracting and public services.

After Trump took office again and began issuing executive orders attacking trans rights, the boy’s family started to investigate how they could retroactively seal the court records related to the name change. It wouldn’t change what was in the newspaper, but it could help them remove the online records. The court records also contain sensitive information like their home address that someone could use to harass them.

A friend who was a retired attorney helped their son craft an affidavit describing his experiences. His mom read from it during an interview. “‘Because of recent political events, I fear violence —’” she said before breaking off. “Oh God, I hate even reading this. ‘I fear violence, harassment, retribution because of my status as a transgender person.’”

Her son, who is now 18, shared a statement over email.

“At this moment in time I’m probably more scared about being a trans person than I ever have been before, with the public record if you have my first and last name you can easily find my deadname and therefore find out I’m trans,” he said. “I would love to say that I feel safe and valued in our society but unfortunately I can’t, at times I feel that my personhood is being stripped away under this government.”

A trans teenager officially changed his name and now fears violence because that information is public. He enjoys doing puzzles with his family and creating metal artwork. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

Anne Daugherty-Leiter, who has guided transgender clients and their families through the name-change process as board president of Trans Law Help Wisconsin, said where a person lives in Wisconsin, and therefore what court they must petition, affects their likelihood of getting a confidential change.

Confidentiality is important, she said, because of how the state handles changes to birth certificates. Wisconsin birth certificates that are issued through a confidential name change show only the new name. But if a person has to announce their name change publicly, birth certificates are amended to list both the person’s old and new names. Any time the person has to use that document, at the DMV or while getting a loan, it outs them, she said.

“This Is Not Who I Am”

Koechell, a trans man and LGBTQ+ activist, was unwilling to go through with the name-change process after being denied confidentiality by a judge late last year.

Koechell lives in Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold where multiple schools have enacted policies critics have called anti-LGBTQ+.

A judge denied J.J Koechell’s confidential name change with an order that referred to the trans man as “she” and “her.” (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images courtesy of J.J Koechell, obtained by ProPublica.)

In a letter to the judge, Koechell wrote that people had sent him multiple threats and posted his family members’ addresses online, all for “being an advocate and being transgender openly in my community.”

“I do not want to publish my deadname for people to use against me,” he said in an interview, using a term common among transgender people to refer to their birth names. “I don’t see a reason why people who are not particularly fond of me wouldn’t show up at a hearing like that and try and cause trouble.”

Court records show the judge denied Koechell’s confidentiality request and his request to reconsider. The judge’s order referred to Koechell, a trans man with a masculine voice and beard, as “she” and “her.”

Koechell decided the public process wasn’t worth the risk. But it’s hard, he said, to move through life with his old identification.

“When I go to a new doctor or new appointment or something, then that’s the name on my chart, and then I get called that in a waiting room full of people, and it’s super uncomfortable. I just want to disappear,” Koechell said. “Then eventually, I have to correct the doctors, and I’m like, ‘Hey, just to let you know, I don’t go by that name. This is not who I am.’”

Data from the latest U.S. Transgender Survey found that 22% of people who had to show an ID that did not match their identity experienced some form of negative consequence, including verbal harassment, discrimination or physical violence.

If the U.S. Senate passes the SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove citizenship with a passport or birth certificate, those consequences could include disenfranchisement. Transgender people who can’t change the name on their birth certificate or passport would be ineligible to vote, according to the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and chief sponsor of the bill, has said the legislation directs states to create a process for citizens with a “name discrepancy” to register. “No one will be unable to vote because of a name change,” he said.

Trace Schlax, a trans man in Wisconsin, has tried to change his gender marker and name on official documents. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

After Trump won in November, Trace Schlax, a 40-year-old IT project manager, decided to expedite changing his gender marker on his passport, figuring he could update his name later in state court.

“It matters,” Schlax said. He loves to travel but has encountered extra scrutiny from airport security with outdated documents. “I get comments from TSA when I go through to travel domestically, about my hair, about how I look. I get extra pat-downs."

He sent his application in early December and crossed his fingers. He received it back in February, rejected. By that time, Trump had issued an executive order banning trans people from changing the gender markers on their passports.

Schlax decided to continue updating what records he could, like his birth certificate and driver’s license. He worries about having conflicting documents. Will he get accused of fraud? Will he have trouble flying?

But in the end, he decided it was still important to change his name and update his license to improve his day-to-day experience.

And he decided to go about it publicly. It felt less painful, he said, to accept the risks rather than detail his personal, traumatic experiences to a judge only to have them decide he hadn’t endured sufficient danger.

“Me changing my name and my gender marker affects absolutely no one but me,” said Schlax, who has a court date to change his name in late April. “Why does this have to be so hard? Why do I have to prove myself so hard?”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and photography by Cengiz Yar, ProPublica

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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.

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump declared an emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him authority to unilaterally spend billions on immigration enforcement and wall construction. He has since reportedly urged Congress to authorize an additional $175 billion for border security, far exceeding what was spent during his first term.

In the coming months, border towns in Texas and Arizona will receive more grants to fund and equip police patrols. New wall construction projects will fill border communities with workers who eat at restaurants, shop in stores and rent space in RV parks. And National Guard deployments will add to local economies.

But if the president asked Sandra Fuentes what the biggest need in her community on the Texas-Mexico border is, the answer would be safe drinking water, not more border security. And if Trump put the same question to Jose Grijalva, the Arizona mayor would say a hospital for his border city, which has struggled without one for a decade.

Although billions of state and federal dollars flow into the majority-Latino communities along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, many remain among the poorest places in the nation. In many towns, unemployment is significantly higher and income much lower than their interior counterparts, with limited access to health care, underfunded infrastructure and lagging educational attainment. Security walls are erected next to neighborhoods without running water, and National Guard units deploy to towns without paved roads and hospitals.

By some estimates, about 30,000 border residents in Texas lack access to reliable drinking water, among more than a million statewide. For 205,000 people living along Arizona’s border with Mexico, the nearest full-service hospital is hours away.

Such struggles aren’t confined to the border. But the region offers perhaps the most striking disparity between the size of federal and state governments’ investment there and how little it’s reflected in the quality of life of residents.

“The border security issue takes up all the oxygen and a lot of the resources in the room,” said state Rep. Mary González, a Democrat from El Paso County who has sponsored bills to address water needs. “It leaves very little space for all the other priorities, specifically water and wastewater infrastructure, because most people don’t understand what it’s like turning your faucet and there’ll be no water.”

Here’s how residents in two border towns, Del Rio, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, experience living in places where the government always seems ready to spend on border security while stubborn obstacles to their communities’ well-being remain.

Nearly a fifth of the nearly 50,000 residents in Val Verde County, Texas, live in poverty, compared with the state’s 14% average.

When Cierra Flores gives her daughter a bath at their home in Del Rio, she has to keep a close eye on the water level of the outdoor tank that supplies her house. Like any 6-year-old, her daughter likes to play in the running water. But Flores doesn’t have the luxury of leaving the tap open. When the tank runs dry, the household is out of water. That means not washing dishes, doing laundry or flushing the toilet until the trip can be made to get more water.

Flores lives on a ranch in Escondido Estates, a neighborhood where many residents have gone decades without running water. Flores’ family has a well on their property. But during the summer and prolonged droughts, as the region is now experiencing, their well runs dry.

At those times, the family relies on a neighbor who has a more dependable well and is willing to sell water. Flores’ husband makes hourlong trips twice on weekends to fill the family’s water tank. Their situation has felt even more tenuous lately, as her neighbor’s property was listed for sale, prompting worries about whether they’ll continue to have access to his well.

“I have no idea where we would go here if that well wasn’t there,” Flores said. “It’s frustrating that we don’t have basic resources, especially in a place where they know when the summer comes it doesn’t rain. It doesn’t rain, we don’t have water.”

Val Verde County, where Del Rio is located, is three times the size of Rhode Island and hours from a major city. About a fifth of its nearly 50,000 residents live in poverty, a rate nearly twice the national average. Some live in colonias — rural communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, including illegal subdivisions that lack access to water, sewers or adequate housing.

The county has worked for years to bring water to residents, piecing together state and federal grants. Yet about 2,000 people — more than 4% of the county’s population — still lack running water, according to a database kept by the Texas Office of the Attorney General. For those residents, it means showering at fitness centers and doing the dishes once a week with water from plastic jugs.

Some neighborhoods along the Mexican border on the outskirts of Del Rio, such as the area where Cierra Flores and her 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, live, still lack infrastructure like paved roads and access to safe drinking water.

In the early 1990s, then-Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat, toured some of the state’s colonias along the border to assess the living conditions. After stepping into the mud on an unpaved street, she’s said to have been so moved by the scene that she told a staffer, “Whatever they want, give it to them.”

Fuentes, a community organizer, likes to tell that story because it drives home how long residents have fought for water and other improvements but been stymied by state and local politics and limited funds.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle, but we are going to keep on battling,” she said. “What else is there to do?”

Over the past 30 years, the state has provided more than $1 billion in grants and loans to bring drinking water and wastewater treatment to colonias and other economically distressed areas. Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, estimates Texas needs nearly $154 billion by 2050 to meet water demands across the state amid population growth, the ongoing drought and aging infrastructure.

Texas state leaders said they are committed to investing in water projects and infrastructure. Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said he is calling on the Legislature to dedicate $1 billion a year for 10 years and is looking forward to working with lawmakers “to ensure Texans have a safe, reliable water supply for the next 50 years.”

Kim Carmichael, a spokesperson for Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, said, “Texas is at a critical juncture with its water supply, and every lawmaker recognizes the need to act decisively and meaningfully invest to further secure our water future.” The Texas House’s base budget proposes $2.5 billion for water infrastructure.

One of the challenges — at the federal and state level — is that infrastructure needs often exceed available funds, said Olga Morales-Pate, chief executive officer of Rural Community Assistance Partnership, a national network of nonprofits that works with rural communities on access to safe drinking water and wastewater issues. “So it becomes a competitive process: Who gets there faster, who has a better application, who is shovel ready to get those funding opportunities out?” she said.

Community organizer Karen Gonzalez is frustrated that residents of the Del Rio area still lack water access while state leaders focus on border security.

The plight of people without water often gets overlooked, said Karen Gonzalez, an organizer who used to work with Fuentes. Even though she grew up in Del Rio, it wasn’t until she started to work with the community that she learned some county residents didn’t have water.

“Every person that I come across that I tell that we’re working this issue is like, ‘There’s people that don’t have water?’” she said. “It’s not something that is known.”

Unlike border security, which is constantly in the spotlight.

During his inauguration, Trump praised Abbott as a “leader of the pack” on border security. In 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar effort aimed at curbing illegal immigration and drug trafficking. As part of the operation, the state has awarded Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio more than $10 million in grants, state data obtained by The Texas Tribune shows.

A state-funded border wall that has gone up in the county a short distance from the Rio Grande stretches in fits and starts, including next to a neighborhood without running water. As of November, about 5 miles of it had cost at least $162 million, according to the Tribune. The state Legislature’s proposed budget includes $6.5 billion to maintain “current border security operations.”

Meanwhile, organizers, elected officials and residents say state and federal programs to fund water infrastructure will continue to fall short of the need. Last year, the state fund created by lawmakers in 1989 to help underserved areas access drinking water had $200 million in applications for assistance and only $100 million in available funding.

When grants are awarded, water projects can take years to complete because of increasing costs and unforeseen construction difficulties — like hitting unexpected bedrock while laying pipe, said Val Verde County Judge Lewis Owens. Project delays — some of them, Owens acknowledged, the county’s fault — impede the ability to get future grants.

Organizers like Fuentes and Karen Gonzalez said their frustration with the slow progress on water has grown as they’ve watched the border wall go up and billions more dollars spent to deploy state troopers and the National Guard to aid federal border security officers.

“It’s just infuriating,” Karen Gonzalez said. She said she hopes elected officials “focus on what our actual border community needs are. And for us, I feel like it’s not border security.”

Sections of the border wall are being built as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star on the outskirts of Del Rio, near neighborhoods without access to safe drinking water.

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As paramedics loaded her 8-year-old son into a helicopter in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Nina Nelson did her best to reassure him. Days earlier, Jacob and his father had been riding ATVs on their ranch in far southeastern Arizona, along the U.S.-Mexico border. Dust irritated Jacob’s lungs, and over the next few days his breathing deteriorated until Nelson could see him fight for every breath.

He needed care that isn’t available in Douglas, a town of about 15,000. And he would have to make the trip without her.

“Buddy, you’re gonna be OK,” she recalled telling him. She knew it would take more than twice as long to drive the 120 miles to Tucson and the nearest hospital that could provide the care he needed. “I’m gonna be racing up there. I’ll be there. I’m gonna find you,” she said.

Douglas lost its hospital nearly a decade ago. Southeast Arizona Medical Center had struggled financially for years and by 2015 was staffed by out-of-state doctors. When it ran afoul of federal rules too many times, jeopardizing patient safety, the government pulled its ability to bill Medicare and Medicaid and it closed within a week.

As her son’s breathing took a turn for the worse, Nelson considered the variables everyone in Douglas confronts in a medical emergency. Should she go to the town’s stand-alone emergency room, which treats only the most basic maladies? Drive the half hour to Bisbee or an hour to Sierra Vista for slightly higher levels of care? Or could Jacob endure the two hours it takes to drive to Tucson?

“That is the kind of game you play: ‘How much time do I think I have?’” Nelson said.

Nina Nelson’s son Jacob has been transported twice by helicopter to get medical care because Douglas lacks a full-service hospital.

Arizona hasn’t been as aggressive as Texas in funding border security. But when concerns about the border surge, money often follows.

In 2021, the state created the Border Security Fund and allocated $55 million to it. A year later, then-Gov. Doug Ducey asked state lawmakers for $50 million for border security. They gave him more than 10 times that amount, including $335 million for a border wall. The measure was proposed by Sen. David Gowan, a Republican who represents Douglas. In October 2022, crews began stacking shipping containers along the border in Cochise County, where Douglas is located. Gowan’s spokesperson said he wasn’t available for comment.

The container wall wasn’t effective. Migrants slipped through gaps between containers, and a section toppled over. When the federal government sued, claiming the construction was trespassing on federal land, Ducey had the container wall removed.

The cost of erecting, then disassembling the wall: $197 million. (The state recouped about $1.4 million by selling the containers.)

Daniel Scarpinato, Ducey’s former chief of staff, said border security is a significant issue for nearby communities and requires resources, “especially given the failures of the federal government.” He noted that the Ducey administration didn’t ignore other needs in the area, including spending to attract doctors to rural Arizona. “But we will make no apologies for prioritizing public safety and security at our border,” he said.

Southeast Arizona Medical Center closed in 2015, leaving the Douglas area without a full-service hospital.

Grijalva, a Douglas native, was sworn in as mayor in December with a list of needs he is determined to make progress on: a community center, more food assistance for the growing number of hungry residents and a hospital. Money the state spent on the container wall would’ve been better used on those projects, he said. “I appreciate Doug Ducey trying that, but those resources could have gone into the community,” he said.

The median income in Douglas is $39,000, about half the state’s median income, and almost a third of the town’s residents live in poverty. A shrinking tax base makes it difficult for Douglas to provide basic services. The town doesn’t have enough money for street repairs, let alone to reopen a hospital. The backlog of repaving projects has climbed to $67 million, while Douglas nets only $400,000 a year for street improvements.

Money for wall construction or National Guard units gives a short-term boost to the economy, but those efforts can also interfere with the economic lifeblood of towns like Douglas: cross-border traffic.

Both Trump and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, have deployed hundreds of guard members and active military personnel to the border. None have shown up in Douglas yet, Grijalva said. When they do, they’ll spend money. But a couple dozen troops don’t compare to the 3.6 million people who cross the border each year. The Walmart in Douglas, a stone’s throw from the port of entry, is packed daily with shoppers from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Grijalva said. More troops on both sides of the port bottleneck traffic and raise people’s fears of being detained, which may discourage them from crossing, even when they are doing so legally, he said.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Grijalva declared a state of emergency, which could make the city eligible for federal aid if its economy takes a hit. “I know the executive orders didn’t do anything to stop the legal immigration, but it’s the perception,” Grijalva said. “If our economy dips in any way, they could give us some funding.”

Douglas’ new mayor, Jose Grijalva, declared a state of emergency in January over concerns that Trump’s executive orders on border security and immigration will harm the border town’s fragile economy.

Attracting a new hospital is a longer-term effort. Construction alone could cost upwards of $75 million. But then it would have to be staffed. In its final years, the hospital in Douglas suffered from the shortage of health care professionals plaguing much of rural America. The year it closed, it had no onsite physicians, said Dr. Dan Derksen, director of the Arizona Center for Rural Health. The state has programs to address that problem, including helping doctors in rural areas repay school loans. But the shortage has persisted. If a hospital were to open again in Douglas, it could cost as much as $775,000 to launch a residency program there, according to Derksen and Dr. Conrad Clemens, who heads graduate medical education for the University of Arizona.

“There’s policy strategies that you can do at the state level that help, but there’s no single strategy that is a cure-all,” Derksen said. “You have to do a variety of strategies.”

Border security funding, on the other hand, is easier to get.

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is known for his aggressive border enforcement activities. His office soaks up state and federal grants to help with drug interdiction, human trafficking and surveillance equipment on the border. The state also awarded him $20 million for a new jail and $5 million to open a border security operations center, a base for various agencies enforcing the border, in Sierra Vista, about an hour from Douglas.

At its grand opening in November, Dannels said all he had to do was ask for the money.

“I was speaking with Gov. Ducey and the governor asked me, ‘What do you guys need?’” Dannels said. “I said, ‘We need a collective center that drives actions.’” Shortly after, the plan came together, he said.

However, if Cochise Regional Hospital were still open, Dannels’ office would have one less security concern. The abandoned building, which is deteriorating in an isolated pocket of desert on the outskirts of Douglas, is a common waypoint for smugglers.

Lexi Churchill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune and Dan Keemahill of The Texas Tribune contributed research.