ProPublica

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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When a source first told me about the case of Lloyd Gray in late 2024, I jotted down these notes: two Black jurors, a swastika and Gov. Jeff Landry. That was an oversimplification of a deeply troubling issue, but it also got to the heart of a story published this week by ProPublica and Verite News that haunts Louisiana and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Gray was just 19 in 1980 when he was tried in a New Orleans courtroom on a charge of aggravated rape. After one day of testimony, the jury returned with a 10-2 split verdict. The 10 white jurors voted guilty and the only two Black jurors not guilty. If you’re a regular consumer of courtroom dramas, you might think a split verdict would mean a mistrial, and today it would. But back then in Louisiana, where nonunanimous juries were legal, it resulted in a life sentence for Gray.

Covering the criminal justice system in Louisiana often means familiarizing myself with things people in other parts of the country might find shocking. For instance, many might be surprised to learn that here, for more than 120 years, the state allowed people like Gray to be sent to prison for life even though two jurors voted not guilty. The only other state to do the same was Oregon.

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice was unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law meant to uphold white supremacy, but the decision only applied in cases going forward; the court left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. Louisiana refused to reconsider the convictions of more than 1,000 mostly Black men sent to prison for lengthy sentences by those split-jury verdicts.

Reporting here can often be a surreal experience. Even when you think you’ve reached a level of cynicism that can’t be breached, something new comes along that shocks your system. For me, that was the swastika.

While Gray’s former attorney was explaining the ins and outs of his case to me, he mentioned that at some point, someone had drawn the Nazi hate symbol on the cover of Gray’s case file. And sure enough, when Gray’s attorneys sent me the cover page of his file, there it was, in the upper right corner: a small doodle of a swastika.

It was hard to contemplate how, even as recently as the 1980s, someone would feel comfortable enough to draw such a disgraceful thing on a government document without fear of repercussion. The district attorney’s office does not dispute its existence or that a staff member might have drawn it, but it doesn’t know who or when.

A doodle of a swastika on the upper right corner of the cover of Gray’s file (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News. Highlight added by ProPublica.)

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections denied our request to interview Gray, either by phone or in person, so the only way to communicate with him for the story was via his attorneys. I provided them with questions, and they relayed his responses.

I wanted to know what his life was like before that fateful night in 1980 when he was accused of rape. He described a happy childhood, saying: “The beauty of it is we were loved. Me and my sister, my brother, we were loved.” But he also recalled witnessing his mother’s mistreatment at a gas station at a young age. “It opened my eyes to racism at its finest,” Gray said.

Gray’s attorneys contend that the swastika, along with the two Black jurors voting to acquit, among other issues, proves that his prosecution was tainted by racial bias and should be enough to, at the very least, reconsider Gray’s sentence.

At one point, the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office appeared to agree and proposed a plea deal that would allow for Gray’s release. In Oregon, after the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling, the state vacated the sentences of everyone convicted by a nonunanimous jury, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences that allowed many to walk free.

But again, this is Louisiana. Unlike Oregon, the state Supreme Court decided not to vacate old split-jury convictions and left it to the Legislature to deal with the issue. In turn, lawmakers, backed by Landry, shut off all paths to freedom for people like Gray. They not only shot down legislation allowing for older split-jury verdicts to be reexamined, they passed a bill gutting the ability of prosecutors to offer plea deals. (The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment.)

The impact of this law played out in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court in late August when the district attorney’s office told Judge Robin Pittman that the new law prevented it from waiving a missed filing deadline by Gray and, as a result, it couldn’t broker a deal. Pittman set a new hearing for Oct. 30 at which she will decide if Gray’s case, in which he asked for his sentence to be reconsidered, can move forward.

“When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” Gray told me through his attorneys. “After 45 years, I’m no closer to freedom than the day I walked into this place.”

by Renee Dudley

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The Pentagon issued a “letter of concern” to Microsoft documenting a “breach of trust” over the company’s use of China-based engineers to maintain sensitive government computer systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week. At the same time, the Defense Department is opening an investigation into whether any of those employees have compromised national security.

The actions came in response to a recent ProPublica investigation that exposed Microsoft’s “digital escort” system, in which U.S. personnel with security clearances supervise foreign engineers, including those in China. ProPublica found that the escorts often lack the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills.

The tech giant developed the arrangement as a work-around to a Defense Department requirement that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

“The program was designed to comply with contracting rules, but it exposed the department to unacceptable risk,” Hegseth said in a video announcement posted on X. “If you’re thinking America first and common sense, this doesn’t pass either of those tests.”

The letter serves as a warning to Microsoft, which has said in earnings reports that it receives “substantial revenue from government contracts.” It is less serious than a “cure notice,” which could lead to termination of Microsoft contracts if problems are not fixed. The department did not release the letter publicly, and it did not reply to ProPublica’s request for a copy of it.

Experts have said allowing China-based personnel to perform technical support and maintenance on U.S. government computer systems poses major security risks. Laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.

Hegseth said the newly opened Pentagon investigation into the digital escort program would focus on Microsoft’s China-based employees. The probe will “help us determine the impact of this digital escort workaround,” he said, including whether “they put anything in the code that we didn’t know about.”

Hegseth said in his video announcement that the department is also requiring a new third-party audit of Microsoft’s digital escort program. It is unclear who will conduct that audit.

Microsoft started using digital escorts about a decade ago, ProPublica found, and went on to win federal cloud computing business worth billions of dollars. Through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, the system escaped the notice of Pentagon officials. ProPublica reported last week that Microsoft failed to disclose key details of the arrangement in the security plans it submitted to the Defense Department. The company has declined to comment on those omissions.

“We expect vendors doing business with the Department of Defense to put U.S. national security ahead of profit maximization,” Hegseth said in the video.

In the wake of ProPublica’s reporting, Microsoft announced last month that it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems. In a statement provided for this story, the company said that it “will continue to collaborate with the US Government to ensure we are meeting their expectations.”

“We remain committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed,” the company said in the statement.

In addition to China, Microsoft has operations in India, the European Union and elsewhere across the globe, and engineers in those places also work on Defense Department cloud maintenance.

Last month, Hegseth said on X that “foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems.” But last week, in response to ProPublica’s questions, the Defense Department left the door open to the continued use of foreign-based engineers with digital escorts, saying that it “may be deemed an acceptable risk,” depending on factors that include “the country of origin of the foreign national” being escorted.

In his announcement, Hegseth did not mention whether the escort program would continue or say whether Microsoft’s reliance on other foreign nationals to maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems would also be reviewed. The department did not respond to questions from ProPublica seeking additional information about the new investigations.

ProPublica reported last month that Microsoft has also relied on its China-based employees to maintain federal cloud computing systems beyond the Defense Department, including those of the departments of Justice, Treasury and Commerce. In response to the reporting, Microsoft has suggested that it would also discontinue the use of China-based engineers for those departments.

In this week’s announcement, Hegseth said the Defense Department was working “with our partners in the rest of the federal government to ensure that all U.S. networks are protected.”

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

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

Leaders in Alaska and elsewhere have repeatedly promised action in recent years to address the nation’s chronic failure to solve the murder or disappearance of Indigenous people.

Federal legislation backed by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski called for improving data collection and information sharing among law enforcement and tribes. Gov. Mike Dunleavy said again and again and as recently as May 5 that the state government would work with Alaska Natives to address the crisis.

“My administration will continue to support law enforcement, victim advocacy groups, Alaska Native Tribes and other entities working together to solve these cases and bring closure to victims’ families,” Dunleavy said in a news release last year.

Yet when an Alaska Native group asked state law enforcement officials in June for one of the most fundamental pieces of data needed to understand the issue — a list of murders investigated by state police — the state said no.

Charlene Aqpik Apok launched Data for Indigenous Justice in 2020 after trying to collect the names of missing and murdered Indigenous people to read at a rally, only to discover no government agency had been keeping track. Over time, the nonprofit built its own homegrown database with the help of villagers, friends and family across the state.

In 2023, the state started publishing a list quarterly with names of Indigenous people reported missing. But the state still does not issue a list for the other key piece of the group’s efforts: Indigenous people who have been killed.

So on June 4, the nonprofit filed two public records requests with the Alaska Department of Public Safety concerning homicide cases the agency had investigated since 2022. The group asked first for victims of all races and then for those identified as Alaska Native.

Apok said she didn’t think the request was controversial or complicated.

But the state rejected the requests a week later. The agency said fulfilling the request would take “several hours” and cited a state regulation allowing a denial if providing information to a requester would require employees to “compile or summarize” existing public records.

“We do not keep lists of victims of any type of crime, including homicide victims, and to fulfil this request DPS would have to manually review incident reports from multiple years to create a record that matched what you are looking for,” Austin McDaniel, communications director for the department, wrote to the nonprofit.

McDaniel offered no direct response when the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asked why the agency could not retrieve homicide records with a simple database query or why, even if the work required manual review and wasn’t required under state law, the agency didn’t simply create a list of homicide victims.

(Alaska’s public records law says any records that take state employees fewer than five hours to produce shall be provided for free, and the state can choose to waive research fees if providing records would serve the public interest. Even if an agency needs to create a new record, as McDaniel asserted in his denial, it’s allowed to “if the public agency can do so without impairing its functioning.”)

Data for Indigenous Justice appealed the denial to the head of the department, Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell, who decided in favor of the agency.

The nonprofit’s records request and the state’s denial revealed that Alaska, four years after creating a council on murdered and missing Indigenous people, cannot readily identify murder cases involving Indigenous victims. The state now employs four investigators who focus on such cases.

“How do they know which cases are Alaska Native or Indigenous people for their MMIP investigators if they cannot do a simple pull of the demographics that we are talking about?” Apok said.

Apok said tracking complete and accurate data on Indigenous people who have disappeared or been killed matters because otherwise, law enforcement can shrug off individual cases and deny the scale of the problem.

“That’s the power of data. That’s the power of collective information,” she said.

Grace Norton holds a photo of her niece, Ashley Johnson-Barr, who was murdered in Kotzebue, Alaska, in 2018. Kotzebue residents walked along Shore Avenue and scattered rose petals in remembrance of missing and murdered Indigenous people in 2023. (Marc Lester/ADN)

In lieu of answering detailed questions for this story, McDaniel provided a one-page response saying that the department receives thousands of records requests each year. He said the agency is a “leader in data transparency” for missing and murdered Indigenous people, adding that “to imply that we are not invested in this work due to the denial of one records request from an advocacy group is absurd.”

He cited as examples of transparency the department’s publication of information about missing Indigenous people and its provision of law enforcement data to tribal governments in support of their requests for federal grants.

Anchorage, which runs the state’s largest municipal police department, recently reversed a policy that withheld the identities of certain homicide victims. The police chief released the records after Daily News reporting revealed the policy had no basis in law and was opposed by some victims’ rights advocates.

State troopers, meanwhile, handle about 38% of all murders in Alaska, according to statistics that law enforcement reports each year. From 2019 to 2023, the most recent data available, troopers investigated an average of 22 murders each year. That means the agency would likely need to review just a few dozen reports to provide the requested names.

Watershed reports published in Canada in 2017 and by the Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute in 2018 revealed the scope of the crisis of missing and murdered people from Indigenous communities.

Those reports, Apok said, “named exactly what a lot of us were seeing and feeling, where we didn’t know our experiences were part of a larger collective.”

In 2021, Data for Indigenous Justice published the first report on the crisis in Alaska, highlighting the failure of media and local governments to gather data on cases of missing and murdered people to analyze patterns. A council appointed by Dunleavy even relied on Apok’s findings — including her conclusion that little data is available — when trying to describe the scope of the problem.

Dunleavy and Murkowski have been vocal on the issue in the years since.

A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions about the state’s failure to provide names of homicide victims to Apok’s group. Told of the decision not to release the names, Murkowski’s office said the senator was unavailable for an interview and offered no comment on the state’s actions.

Apok said her group will continue making public records requests to the state while building its own database through community connections.

“We’re going to keep doing what we do,” she said. “People will keep telling us names.”

by Tim Golden

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More than two decades after victims of the 9/11 attacks began trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia responsible for helping the Qaida terrorists who carried out the plot, a federal judge has ruled that a civil lawsuit against the kingdom can go to trial.

The decision on Thursday, by Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, represents a crucial victory for survivors of the attacks and relatives of the 2,977 people who were killed.

“This is a historic win for the families,” said a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, did not respond to requests for comment on the judge’s ruling.

The Saudi kingdom, which has long rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, could still appeal Daniels’ decision under special protections that are afforded to foreign governments in federal law, legal experts said. However, they added that the Saudi government might be willing to consider a settlement with the plaintiffs to avoid the scrutiny of a major trial and the expansive discovery of information that it would bring.

Already, information uncovered by plaintiffs has rewritten the history of the Sept. 11 plot as it was presented in the years after the attacks by the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

Most significantly, the plaintiffs’ evidence has undermined the FBI’s conclusion that two Saudi officials in Southern California — one a part-time spy, the other a religious official with diplomatic status — acted “unwittingly” when they helped the first Qaida hijackers who arrived in the United States.

In an email, the FBI also declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

It has long been established that in the years before 9/11, some members of the Saudi royal family and some powerful Saudi officials had supported militant Islamist movements and gave money to Islamic charities that in turn helped finance al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

However, both the FBI and the CIA emphasized in the aftermath of the attacks that the Saudi royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its banished leader, Osama bin Laden, and that senior officials of the government had not assisted the group.

The litigation in New York focused on the roles of two lower-level Saudi officials living in the United States. One, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged graduate student in San Diego who had long worked for the Saudi civil aviation agency. The other, Fahad al-Thumairy, was a religious official serving in Los Angeles as an imam at a new Saudi-funded mosque and as a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate.

The FBI quickly determined that Bayoumi met the first two hijackers near the mosque soon after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000 and that he helped them rent an apartment in San Diego, open a bank account and buy a car.

Bayoumi also introduced the two jihadists — who knew no one in the United States, spoke virtually no English and had no experience of living in the West — to a group of Muslim men who provided them with crucial support over the months that they lived in the city.

Bayoumi moved his family to Birmingham, England, in the summer of 2001. Within days of the attacks, he was detained and questioned by the British police at the FBI’s request before being allowed to return to Saudi Arabia.

In a search of Bayoumi’s home, the British authorities turned up documents, notebooks, videotapes and computer files that they shared with the FBI, officials said. But only in the last two years did lawyers for the 9/11 families obtain much of that cache — and then only from the British government.

From the start, U.S. investigators were skeptical of Bayoumi’s account. In the end, though, the FBI largely accepted his claims that he met the two Qaida operatives by chance, helped them as he would any compatriots and had no idea of their terrorist plans. Both Bayoumi and the Saudi government insisted repeatedly that he had no ties to Saudi intelligence.

Despite the efforts of a small group of FBI agents to pursue the case, it was eventually closed by the bureau. The civil lawsuit nearly died in 2016, when President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to carve out an exception to the sovereign immunity of foreign governments and permit the families to sue the Saudi kingdom. Congress overrode that veto, however, allowing the suit to go forward.

President Donald Trump later blocked the families from obtaining classified government documents on the 9/11 investigations, claiming they were state secrets. President Joe Biden later reversed that stance and declassified documents that included reporting confirming that Bayoumi was a part-time agent of the Saudi intelligence service.

The evidence that plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved even more powerful.

It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaida plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video.

In his ruling, Daniels noted that the two sides had different interpretations of almost every piece of evidence. But he endorsed the plaintiffs’ views of several key exhibits, including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks. Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son with homework.

Daniels said the plaintiffs’ evidence created “a high probability as to Bayoumi and Thumairy’s roles in the hijackers’ plans, and the related role of their employer,” the Saudi government. “In many instances,” he added, “it even appeared that Bayoumi actively injected himself” into the hijackers’ illicit activities.

Eagleson, the families’ spokesperson, noted that during the long pretrial litigation, the plaintiffs had been allowed to pursue only limited discovery about Bayoumi, Thumairy and a handful of other Saudis.

“We did all of this with our hands tied behind our backs,” he said, “and even with the FBI pushing back and President Trump invoking state secrets, we created an overwhelming picture of Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting the 9/11 hijackers.”

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom, and Yilun Cheng, Houston Chronicle

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom, the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

The devastating flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed dozens of people, inundated hundreds of thousands of homes and left the community desperate for a solution.

Since then, local flood experts have extensively studied the possibility of a multibillion-dollar tunnel system across Harris County, where Houston is located. Studies have focused on the construction of pipelines, 30 to 40 feet in diameter, that could ferry massive amounts of water out to the Gulf in the event of a storm.

Now, after years of research and discussion, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project.

An investigation by The Texas Newsroom and the Houston Chronicle has found that the billionaire, in partnership with Houston-area Rep. Wesley Hunt, has spent months aggressively pushing state and local officials to hire Musk’s Boring Co. to build two narrower, 12-foot tunnels around one major watershed. That could be a potentially cheaper, but, at least one expert said, less effective solution to the region’s historic flooding woes.

Hunt’s team has said the Boring project would cost $760 million and involve the company getting 15% of the cost up front from state and local coffers.

Within two months of this push, the Harris County Commissioners Court unanimously voted to study a pilot program that included a look at smaller tunnels, with specifications similar to what Boring had pitched. The commissioners court, made up of five elected members including a county judge, oversees the county’s budget.

Both Musk and Hunt stand to benefit should Boring be selected to build any part of the project. Hunt is reportedly considering a challenge to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary. And landing a job like this would also be a significant win for Boring, which has not completed a major public project in Texas and faces criticisms for its ventures elsewhere.

The discussions about the Boring pitch have happened mostly out of the public eye. Hunt mentioned the project in passing at a town hall in Houston in February. Since then, he has refused to answer the newsrooms’ questions about when Musk sold him on the idea and why he became its pitchman.

Efforts to reach Musk and representatives with Boring were unsuccessful.

Experts and some local officials question whether Musk and his company are the right pick for the job. The Boring Co. has focused on transportation tunnels, not flood mitigation.

“If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water,” said Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues. “So what have you saved? Have you reduced the flooding upstream by an inch? And are you going to spend multimillions of dollars to do that? Well, maybe that’s not worth it.”

In response to the newsrooms’ questions, state and local officials said no public money has been allocated to Boring. County officials added that they have not chosen a tunnel contractor and any process to do so would follow normal procurement rules.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whose staff met with Hunt’s team during the legislative session to discuss the proposal, remains open to the idea. As president of the Texas Senate with close ties to President Donald Trump, he is a powerful ally.

“If Elon Musk and the Boring Company, or any other company, can build two massive tunnels under the Houston bayous in a few years to save the city from flooding, I am always going to be interested to listen,” Patrick, a Republican, told the newsrooms. “The truth is, Elon Musk is one of the only people in the world who could accomplish this.”

Then-candidate Wesley Hunt, now a Republican representative, speaks with volunteers before they campaign on his behalf in 2020. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle) The Pitch Process Begins

In 2022, the Harris County Flood Control District released findings from its yearslong tunnel study, which has so far cost nearly $3 million in local and federal funds.

The idea was to build eight tunnels, totalling around 130 miles in length, according to the report. The tunnels would be huge, wide enough for a container ship, and buried 40 to 140 feet underground, depending on the location. Austin and San Antonio have similar systems, although on a smaller scale.

The Buffalo Bayou segment of the Houston project — which Boring has proposed to build — is a centerpiece of the design and would run through the city’s core and some of its most developed neighborhoods. The county estimated it would cost $4.6 billion.

The total cost for the system was projected to be $30 billion, funded by a potential mix of federal, state and local dollars, and the timeline was 10 to 15 years to complete construction.

Given the scope and complexity of the project, the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in discussions about the tunnels since the beginning. The corps also has jurisdiction over the two federal reservoirs in the area.

Eight years after Harvey, however, the tunnel project has not broken ground.

Hunt has accused the Army Corps of “​​dragging their feet a little bit” because its study of the tunnel system has been delayed. In December, Congress ordered the Corps to finish the analysis. Hunt hailed the decision, but to date the Army Corps has not completed the study.

Just two months later, however, his staffers and Musk’s team started shopping Boring’s proposal to politicians across the state.

Emails, text messages and policy memos the newsrooms obtained through public records requests show Hunt’s chief of staff, James Kyrkanides, repeatedly attempted to obtain public money on behalf of Boring. The documents, which have not been released previously to the public, also lay out how Hunt worked to secure Musk access to lawmakers and other officials ahead of the formal bidding process.

Kyrkanides declined to comment for this story.

In February, Boring pitched its proposal to elected officials in Harris County as an “innovative and cost-effective solution.”

“We are confident in our ability to execute this project successfully to bring peace of mind to residents of Harris County and the greater Houston area during future flood events,” Jim Fitzgerald, Boring’s global head of business development, wrote in a two-page memo about the proposal addressed to Kyrkanides and shared with local officials.

That same month, Hunt spoke at a town hall meeting about his involvement.

“I talked to him” — Musk — “about Hurricane Harvey and how we need tunnels,” Hunt said, according to Community Impact. “He told me, ‘I can do that at a fraction of the cost the Army Corps of Engineers would do it.’”

A few days later, the head of a local nonprofit wrote to a county commissioner saying she’d heard Hunt and Musk were shopping the proposal around and that the idea may have been discussed on board the president’s jet.

“I hear that Congressman Hunt talked to Elon Musk about his boring company while on a trip on Airforce 1,” Colleen Gilbert, executive director of the Greens Bayou Coalition, emailed.

It’s unclear if Trump was on board or took part in the discussions. The president’s spokespeople didn’t answer questions about the apparent meeting.

In April, Kyrkanides made a detailed pitch in an email to Patrick’s staff. He passed along Boring’s proposal and suggested that $60 million be set aside in the state budget “that will be matched with another $60 million” from the Harris County Flood Control District as a “down payment for the $760 million project Elon pitched Wesley.”

“I believe the Lt. Gov. spoke with Elon and the Boring Company this week,” Kyrkanides emailed in May, a month before the regular legislative session wrapped up. “Wesley also spoke with Elon, and everything seems on track!”

Kyrkanides followed up once more mid-month: “Anything you need from us?”

Pushing for Smaller Tunnels

As they pushed the idea to state lawmakers, Hunt’s team repeatedly lobbied Harris County officials, reaching out to at least two commissioners, the county’s legislative liaison and flood control experts.

Early on, Houston officials had concerns about what Boring proposed.

The two-page letter from Boring said its tunnels would be “no shallower than 15 feet to 30 feet below ground surface,” while the county’s previous research proposed a much deeper range for the Buffalo Bayou segment.

An engineering expert in County Commissioner Tom Ramsey’s office warned that Boring’s shallower plan could interfere with bridge foundations, utility lines and existing easements.

“It discusses that the tunnel would be much shallower then anticipated,” Eric Heppen, Ramsey’s director of engineering, wrote in an email to other staffers in his office on Feb. 17. “I would quickly confirm if it can be deeper or if that becomes a load challenge for the system.”

Boring said in its pitch that the tunnel depth is “flexible,” but the company did not respond to the newsrooms’ question about whether it can build to the standards outlined in the county’s study.

Volume was another concern. A single 40-foot-wide tunnel can move about 12,000 cubic feet of water every second, county studies show. Two 12-foot-wide tunnels, laid side by side, as Boring proposed, might struggle to keep pace in a flood emergency, according to Dunbar, the veteran water resources engineer.

“One would need eleven 12-foot diameter tunnels to provide the same flow capacity as one 40-foot diameter tunnel,” he told the newsrooms. “Providing only two 12-foot diameter tunnels does not provide the flow capacity that Harris County or the Corps of Engineers are seeking.”

Boring Co.’s Proposed Tunnels Would be Narrower and Shallower Than County Plan Calls for (Sources: Harris County Flood Control District study; Boring Co. tunnel pitch. Graphic: Ken Ellis, Houston Chronicle.)

The county continued to engage with the company despite these concerns.

In March, Scott Elmer, who’s overseen the tunnel study for the past few years at the county’s flood control district, reached out to Boring executives to set up a meeting. In the following weeks, he and other flood control officials met with Boring engineers at least twice to discuss the specifics of Boring’s capabilities.

During one of the meetings, flood control officials pressed Boring representatives on whether the company could build tunnels that are at least 20 feet wide, according to an agenda shared with attendees via email.

The company was reportedly studying how to make tunnels as wide as 21 feet several years ago. But it’s unclear if Boring ever developed that capability or what it told county officials about its potential to make bigger tunnels. On its website, Boring notes it “maintains the same tunnel design for all projects to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ for every tunnel.”

An April 10 commissioners court meeting in Houston was a turning point.

That appears to be the first time county officials brought up in public the fact that Hunt had been pitching them on a smaller-scale version of the flood plan they’d studied for years. They referred to this idea as a pilot program that would focus on just a few sections of a larger, countywide tunnel system.

Ramsey, the panel’s only Republican, specifically mentioned the pilot program tunnels could be narrower in diameter, as small as 12 feet, and shallower — specifications that would fit the kind of tunnel Boring has typically built.

Commissioner Lesley Briones, a Democrat, said a pilot project may help kick-start a huge, expensive project that the county has struggled to get off the ground.

No one mentioned Boring or Musk explicitly until Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a Democrat, said he’d gotten wind that the tech billionaire might be involved.

“I’ve heard all of the stories about Elon Musk having a tunneling company,” Ellis said. “I’ve got pretty good ears. I’ve got good Republican friends, too, now.”

He questioned the pitch, saying he was worried it would take the county off track.

However, Ellis and all of the commissioners unanimously voted to produce a white paper studying the idea of a scaled-down pilot project. They also voted to ask the state for flood mitigation funds. The vote didn’t require the county to commit to a specific project.

Later that month, records show the county’s legislative liaison reached out to staff for state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, to indicate the county’s support for a $60 million budget rider for “underground flood risk reduction systems in Harris County.”

A two-page memo explaining the pilot project included with the request did not mention Musk or Boring and still referenced the larger 30- to 40-foot tunnels.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, points to a Texas- and Tesla-themed belt buckle as he answers a question about operating his business in Texas. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle) What’s in It for Musk’s Allies

Hunt has been a leading voice on the need for flood mitigation during his short time in Congress.

Last year, he partnered with Democratic U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher to order the Army Corps of Engineers to move forward with the underground tunnel study. The effort was applauded as a bipartisan victory.

But Fletcher, a Democrat, said she was not involved in Hunt’s work with Musk on the Boring proposal and has “not heard from anyone advocating for it.” She said she’s worked with Army Corps of Engineers and local communities “on a transparent, informed, community-driven effort to address water conveyance and flood control in our region.”

A West Point graduate and former Army captain, Hunt has shaped a political brand that appeals to both GOP insiders and MAGA-leaning voters. He was a regular at Trump campaign events in and outside Texas and secured a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He is the only Black Republican in the Texas congressional delegation.

But if Hunt enters the U.S. Senate race against Cornyn, he will likely need a high-profile political win to stand out, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, as incumbent senators in Texas have won nearly every primary over the past few decades.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also challenging Cornyn in the primary.

Given the volatile dynamic between Trump and Musk, aligning with the latter carries political risk but also the potential for major reward, Rottinghaus said.

“Hunt certainly is well-known enough as a member in his district, but the problem is that when you’re in Congress running for a statewide office, your base support can sometimes be very provincial,” Rottinghaus said. “To partner with Musk would provide for a kind of national profile that Hunt would need to be successful.”

Musk has tapped local politicians when pursuing similar big projects elsewhere.

In Tennessee, Republican leaders recently announced that Boring would build a transit tunnel for cars from downtown Nashville to the nearby airport. The city’s mayor and other Democratic leaders have raised questions about a lack of transparency, competitive bidding and environmental planning. At a public meeting in early August, a Boring official said the company would seek public input for the project but did not answer reporters’ questions about why they had not yet done so, according to the Nashville Banner.

In Las Vegas, where Boring built a transit tunnel system, the company was able to avoid many of the lengthy governmental reviews typical of these kinds of projects because it is privately operated and receives no federal funding, ProPublica previously reported.

In 2022, Bloomberg reported the company had pitched eight projects to Texas officials. Two were water drainage projects in Austin and Houston. Neither appears to have been built.

If Boring secures part of the Houston job, it would appear to be the company’s first public flood control project. The company lists only transportation-related projects on its website.

Texas law requires county governments to open large public projects to competitive bidding and give all potential contractors an equal shot under the same conditions.

While the law does not explicitly bar local officials from discussing projects with individual companies ahead of time, that kind of early outreach — though common in some places — hasn’t been expressly authorized by state courts or the attorney general, according to legal guidance from the Texas Municipal League, which provides legal guidance to local government officials.

Emily Woodell, the spokesperson for the Harris County Flood Control District, said the agency has not shared any sensitive information with Boring about the Houston project and only met with the company to understand its capabilities.

Ramsey, the county commissioner, told the newsrooms he believes there’s nothing wrong with officials entertaining private pitches before the formal bidding process begins.

“All companies that might have an interest in it, that might understand and offer us information, certainly we’d be open to listening,” Ramsey said.

What’s Next

The future of the project, and Musk’s involvement, are still up in the air.

The state never granted Boring the $60 million it wanted for the project. Huffman, the senator overseeing the finance committee, confirmed the rider was never placed in the state budget and told the newsrooms she had nothing to do with the proposal.

“The only involvement my office had with this proposal was when Rep. Hunt’s chief of staff reached out to my scheduler to arrange a meeting between Rep. Hunt and me, but it never took place,” she said in a statement.

County officials also told the newsrooms that they haven’t provided any public money to Musk.

However, in June, the Harris County Flood Control District produced the pilot project report that commissioners voted for in the spring, looking at a scaled-back version of the original tunnel design. This white paper proposed focusing on only a few segments of the countywide tunnel system and considered tunnels as small as 10 feet in diameter as a real option — well within Boring’s ability to construct.

The white paper also floated the idea of a public-private partnership allowing a private firm to design, build and even run the system afterward, just as Boring has done elsewhere.

It does not appear that this report has been released to the public. The flood control district provided it to the newsrooms upon request.

Carlos Gomez, acting public affairs chief for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Galveston District, told the newsrooms he had not heard about the pilot project potentially involving The Boring Co. and could not say if his agency would be interested.

After the newsrooms presented them with the findings of this investigation, Briones and Ramsey emphasized they are not committed to one particular company and that all solutions would be subject to due diligence. Ellis told the newsrooms that Musk should not be involved, calling him “someone who has shown blatant disregard for democratic institutions and environmental protections.”

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Adrian Garcia, both Democrats, declined to comment.

Woodell, with the flood control district, said there have been no further discussions with Boring in months. She said the county has looked at smaller tunnels before but acknowledged that engineering analyses found large-diameter tunnels would be the most effective option for a countywide system. Woodell added the county might still consider smaller tunnels in “specific locations.”

“There will never be a single solution to flooding in Harris County,” she said.

If Harris County moves forward with a smaller-scale project like the one Hunt wants, which doesn’t rely on federal funding, the process to design and build it could still take up to a decade.

Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center, said Musk’s slimmer tunnels might still prove useful. But he warned against handing a project of this magnitude to a private company without proper vetting.

“The scale of the problem we have really demands, I think, all of us to be open-minded about ideas,” Blackburn told the newsrooms. “Invite them in. Just don’t give them the contract tomorrow.”

Lauren McGaughy is an investigative reporter and editor with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Yilun Cheng is an investigative reporter with the Houston Chronicle. Reach her at yilun.cheng@houstonchronicle.com.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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

In the fall of 2016, as wind-stoked wildfires raced across parched forest and threatened lives around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, state and local officials went back and forth about blasting an evacuation order over the federal government’s emergency alert system. As they consulted one another, a critical 15 minutes slipped away. Cell service and electricity failed. Many people in the fire’s path could no longer receive the alert ultimately sent out. More than a dozen people died.

A few months later, across the country, torrential storms drenched the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, flooding the area around San Jose’s Coyote Creek. Local officials there didn’t send alerts over the federal system, which can, among other things, sound a blaring alarm with evacuation orders on cellphones in geotargeted areas.

“There was a general lack of institutional knowledge on how to utilize these communications technologies,” a review of the disaster later concluded.

Fast-forward seven years and myriad disasters later. Last September, when Hurricane Helene barreled north from the Gulf of Mexico, very few officials in all of Western North Carolina sent alerts over the federal system ahead of the massive storm’s arrival to warn people of risks or suggest what they do. As ProPublica reported in May, emergency managers’ actions varied considerably across the region.

Some hadn’t become authorized to use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Others weren’t confident in using it. More than 100 people in North Carolina died.

The threats have changed, as have the places. But over the past decade, the same story has played out over and over.

The problem isn’t that there is no way to alert residents. It’s that officials too often don’t use it.

ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides.

Formal reviews after disasters have repeatedly faulted local authorities for not being prepared to send targeted IPAWS alerts — which can broadcast to cellphones, weather radios, and radio and TV stations — or sending them too late or with inadequate guidance.

In 2023, a CBS News investigation similarly found that emergency alerts came too late or not at all. Yet the same problems have persisted during recent catastrophic disasters, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the flash floods in Texas among them.

Each time these failures occur, journalists and others examining what went wrong “tend to treat it as though it’s a new problem,” said Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado Denver professor who is among the country’s top researchers of public alert and warning systems. “In fact, it is the same problem we’ve seen again and again since at least 2017.”

Local emergency managers sit at the center of alerting decisions. They are supposed to prepare their communities for disasters and guide the response when they hit. But some fear sending too many alerts to a weary public. Many are busy juggling myriad other duties in small, resource-strapped offices. More than a few face political headwinds.

“There is a certain reluctance to send emergency messages out,” said Steven Kuhr, former emergency management director for New York state who now runs a crisis management consulting firm. Counterparts in the profession have lost their jobs and faced public backlash for sounding alarms, only to see the predicted disaster fizzle. “You don’t want to get it wrong.”

Perhaps no major disaster in recent years underscores what’s at stake more than the July 4 flooding in Central Texas. Officials in Kerr County failed to adequately alert residents, tourists and the hundreds of children slumbering in summer camp cabins about raging flash floodwaters barrelling down the Guadalupe River. They sent no emergency alerts over IPAWS warning people of the threat or suggesting what they do until hours into the disaster.

Instead, as people awoke to flash floods encircling their homes and to children shrieking in terror, key county leaders were asleep or out of town. Even once roused, they sent no IPAWS alerts of their own. More than 100 people — a third of them children — died.

Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s emergency management office, where he led the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy, among other disasters. To him, skipping alerts indicates a lack of training and planning.

“As a profession, we have to get our act together,” McKinney said. “We have to emerge from our complacency.”

Failure to Initiate

Terrie Burns stands in the middle of her destroyed home in Santa Rosa, California, during the Sonoma County wildfires in 2017. The state conducted an audit of the county’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Flash back eight years to 2017, when wildfires threatened Sonoma County in Northern California. Officials sent no alerts to cellphones via IPAWS telling residents what was happening or what actions to take. They feared people outside of an intended evacuation area might get the alert, causing traffic congestion. Two dozen people died.

The local sheriff conceded, “In hindsight, we should have used every tool we had.”

California conducted an audit of Sonoma County’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. It’s the type of mistake repeated across the country.

Among the 15 major disasters ProPublica identified, reviews of local officials’ actions have been completed for 11. Nine of them identified a lack of training or planning — or both — in sending alerts as a key problem.

Some, like Sonoma officials, have taken those critical lessons and made big changes. The county expanded its emergency management office from five to 20 full- and part-time employees, including one whose job is to focus on alerting the public. That isn’t possible in many lower-resourced communities. But by the end of 2020, Sonoma had so improved its approach to alerts that it was among the counties that sent the most — 59 of them — during that dangerous wildfire season. Its two major wildfires that year, while fast and destructive, weren’t as swift-moving through densely populated areas as the worst of 2017’s wildfires. With the new protocol and staff, nobody in Sonoma died in them either.

Firefighters keep a close watch on a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. Massive wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses in 2017. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Jorge Rodriguez is the county’s current alert coordinator. He described the litany of training and exercises required of employees, including creating templates of emergency messages ahead of time. “We really prepare to push the button,” he said.

That’s not true in many places.

Art Botterell, who retired in 2018 from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services as senior emergency services coordinator, calls the nation’s alert system “a moth-eaten patchwork quilt.” Officials in different places can try to get emergency messages to the public through IPAWS, their local alert programs, social media, email, phone calls, press conferences, flyers, door knocking, sirens, bullhorns and so on. Or they can do none of those things.

But if officials tap too few of them, or wait too long as danger closes in, then the tools become useless.

“The most common mode of warning system failure,” Botterell said, “is failure to initiate warnings in the first place.”

Tragedy in Texas

A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing of the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the July 4 floods that left more than 100 people dead. (Scott Stephen Ball for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Last month, along the hills of Kerr County in Central Texas, visitors settled into RVs, residents slumbered in homes and summer campers dreamed of fun in the cabins that lace the Guadalupe River. But at 1:14 a.m., a blaring alarm punctured that calm, for those who received it. A National Weather Service alert sounded over weather radios and mobile devices in the area that had service — not a guarantee in this rural stretch — with a flash flood warning.

The weather service can, and often does, send its most pressing messages over IPAWS. But those alerts can lack important information for high-risk locations, including evacuation orders. Local officials can use the system to blast alerts that go to more specific areas — a few streets, a neighborhood, a river — along with directions for what people in those places should do to protect themselves.

It was July 4. Kerr County’s top elected official was asleep at his lake house 100 miles away. The sheriff was at home dozing, too. The emergency manager was sick in bed. That’s what each later said at a Texas legislative hearing. The weather service forecasts they’d heard the day before hadn’t struck them as particularly worrisome.

Farther up the Guadalupe River, around the town of Hunt, rain was falling. It fell and fell, pummeling the area so ferociously that children at camps along the river woke in fear and teenage counselors tried to soothe them. But the rain still poured and the power failed and the river rose. By 3 a.m., the two 911 dispatchers toiling overnight were overwhelmed with the most horrifying of calls. A deputy heard children screaming in the river.

Deputies and volunteer firefighters rushed to pound on doors and rouse people as the river hauled entire homes away, occupants trapped inside. The weather service posted on X, “A very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.”

At 3:57 a.m., someone called 911 from Camp Mystic in Hunt, where hundreds of children were attending Christian summer camp in cabins along the waterways. They climbed through windows, fought floodwaters and cowered under darkness along hillsides. The flood swept many away. At least 27 campers and counselors would die.

At 4:03 a.m., the weather service intensified its messaging for south-central Kerr County to a rare flash flood emergency — its most dire flood alert — which again blasted out over IPAWS to any cellphone that could receive it: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”

The county judge, who as the top elected official heads emergency management, still slept, as did the emergency management coordinator. The sheriff didn’t wake until 4:20 a.m. Forty minutes later, Kerr County sent out an emergency message — but not over IPAWS.

Instead, officials opted for CodeRed, their local alerting system. Using software by companies like Everbridge and Smart911, systems like these are not nearly as far reaching as IPAWS. Residents have to sign up in advance to receive the local alerts, and not many typically do. In comparison, IPAWS is designed to reach any cellphone within a selected geographic area unless a person has turned off its notifications, has the phone turned off or in airplane mode, or isn’t connected to a working cell site broadcasting the alert.

The emergency management coordinator later told Texas legislators that he had helped incorporate IPAWS into Kerr County’s emergency response plans in 2020 partly to help ensure that its large seasonal population receives alerts while in town. But when he was finally woken during the floods that morning, he didn’t use it. He said the weather service had issued more than a dozen alerts already, and he thought that was enough.

By then, more than four hours had passed since the weather service blasted out its first IPAWS alert that day, during which local officials could have started sending their own messages telling people whether to evacuate or otherwise move out of harm’s way. Almost a third of those who died were camping or staying at campgrounds, the Houston Chronicle found.

As Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican, said at a legislative hearing last month: “We have to find a way to give the locals more tools and more confidence” to make critical calls about issuing alerts quickly. “It cannot be when you see the river cresting.”

Roberto Marquez, left, created and installed crosses in Guadalupe Park in Kerrville, Texas, to honor the victims of the devastating flash flood along the Guadalupe River. (Desiree Rios for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Lack of Consistency

No federal policy tells local officials how to send emergency alerts in disasters — or whether to send them at all. Nor are there requirements of what alerts should say or who should get them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, outlines best practices but deems alerting decisions “a matter of local emergency official communications plans, governance, policies and procedures,” a FEMA spokesperson said.

Nor do local authorities have to learn a lot about IPAWS alerts to become authorized to send them. They must complete an online FEMA training module that goes over the basics, then apply for public alerting permission and sign an agreement.

“You do have to demonstrate that you have the software to utilize IPAWS, but you don’t have to demonstrate that you’re good at it,” said Jeannette Sutton, a University at Albany professor and key researcher of public alert messaging. FEMA offers alert guidance and 24/7 technical help, but using them isn’t mandatory. Its IPAWS division also will review local plans for sending alerts and suggest improvements — but local officials must request this help.

The biggest hurdle to accessing IPAWS isn’t training or testing. It is money. Local governments must pay a third-party vendor for software that can interface with IPAWS — an expense of potentially tens of thousands of dollars that rural and lower-income counties struggle to afford.

A study released in July by a team at Argonne National Laboratory found that 82% of local emergency managers cited a lack of funding as their main barrier to adopting more technology. More than half cited a lack of expertise or training.

In late 2019, Congress required FEMA to create a training and recertification process that IPAWS users would have to complete each year, but that remains in the works. Although FEMA was pursuing a contract to create the program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, did not approve the funding for it, a FEMA spokesperson said.

Despite this, FEMA “continues to lean forward to launch” the program, the spokesperson said in an email.

Using IPAWS also can be daunting. Some of the software systems that local governments purchase to interface with it are confusing and require practice, Sutton said. With a disaster looming or upon them, officials face a blank white text box. They must write the alert, code it correctly and get whatever permissions their policies require.

In the back of an emergency manager’s mind is that nagging question: What if I send out this alert and the threat turns out to be a big dud? “Then they’re going to get a lot of people who are really mad,” Sutton said.

Sending alerts also doesn’t always go perfectly. In 2018, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message said, before being corrected 38 minutes later. The employee who sent it was later fired, although his attorney argued he was made a scapegoat.

Other times, software and other technical problems play a role. In January, a wildfire evacuation order sent to cellphones over IPAWS was intended for a specific area in Los Angeles County but instead blasted to all of its 10 million residents. The error stemmed from location data failing to save properly in the IPAWS system, likely due to its software vendor’s technical glitch, according to a recent congressional report.

A few months earlier, in September, an emergency manager in North Carolina hesitated to send IPAWS alerts as Hurricane Helene closed in on his county because a past experience had left him reluctant to try again.

A water line stains the side of an antique store in Yancey County four months after Hurricane Helene hit the mountainous region of Western North Carolina in September. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Jeff Howell was the emergency manager in Yancey County, a rural expanse of mountainous beauty that Helene would soon decimate. A few years earlier, when he’d sent an IPAWS alert, the message blasted to cellphones in a neighboring county and to Johnson City, Tennessee. He fielded an angry phone call from a counterpart displeased that residents in his county had received it.

Howell, who has since retired, said was told the area’s mountainous topography played a role in the message casting too far. He didn’t want that to happen with Helene approaching.

Although the weather service warned almost 24 hours before Helene’s devastating floodwaters hit that the storm would be among the region’s worst weather events “in the modern era,” Yancey County sent no IPAWS alerts giving warnings or directions to people living along its rivers and creeks, which ferry water down steep mountains. In the end, 11 people died there, more per capita than in any other county.

In hindsight, Howell said he wished he’d tried harder to send an IPAWS alert before the unprecedented flash flooding and deadly landslides tore down the mountains. But he’d often fielded complaints from residents who told him they turned off weather notifications because they got so many of them.

Few other county or city governments across the wide swath of Western North Carolina inundated by Helene’s rainfall issued any of their own alerts over IPAWS before the storm knocked out cell service and electricity. Most used only their local systems or social media accounts, although ProPublica found wide variations across the region. Some made more aggressive efforts to warn residents, including rounds of door knocking. One county distributed flyers; another issued a dire video warning. But most residents remained in their homes, largely unaware that catastrophic danger approached. The vast majority of deaths in North Carolina were flood-related.

IPAWS asked Sutton to assess the warning messages sent during Helene. She wasn’t impressed: “There was a total lack of consistency.”

Hurricane Helene destroyed areas of Swannanoa, North Carolina, first image, as well as Micaville, where a massive fuel tank remained on its side four months after the storm hit. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) “We Need to Bring Some Coherence”

During his first weeks as a new congressman in 2023, Rep. Kevin Mullin’s district in Northern California faced flooding that left one person dead. A Democrat from the San Francisco area, he began doing research. He read about incidents in other areas where alerts were confusing, delayed or not sent, leading to terrible consequences.

“This is really at the core of what government needs to get right — protecting public health and safety, protecting lives,” Mullin said. “The emergency alert is quite literally the front line of public interface.”

He also was looking for potentially bipartisan issues to work on. He hopes he’s found one.

Mullin and his staff are crafting a bill that would authorize $30 million a year for a decade to help FEMA provide technical assistance to authorities who send alerts. The money would fund things like live testing, field training and community-based exercises that can identify weaknesses in disaster plans and alert systems. These can be tough for local governments with fewer resources to afford. FEMA also would develop metrics for assessing alerts’ effectiveness.

Mullin, who expects to introduce the bill in the coming days, also supports creating basic standard operating procedures for alerts and templates for messages. “We need to bring some coherence to the way this infrastructure is set up,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin of California and his staff are crafting a bill that would require FEMA to provide more technical and financial assistance to local authorities who send emergency alerts. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

The template piece is out there. In 2021, FEMA hired Sutton’s team at the University at Albany to create the Message Design Dashboard. The new online toolkit walks message writers through a series of prompts to more quickly create an alert that includes content that social scientists have found best reduces the time people delay before taking action.

“By giving that tool to emergency managers, it’s a game changer,” Sutton said. “They’re not staring at that blank box anymore.”

Before her team’s contract ended in May, they trained 500 emergency managers to use the software, which is now free and publicly available through FEMA. But thousands more still need to be trained. And nothing requires emergency managers to learn to use it. That is up to them, and they still ultimately must decide for themselves whether to push that button.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Jeremy Kohler

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

In late July, Missouri state troopers walked into St. Louis County government headquarters and seized the cellphone of one of the most prominent Democratic officials in this solidly red state.

Two days later, a grand jury indicted Sam Page, the St. Louis County executive. Acting as a special prosecutor, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, secured two felony counts of stealing by deceit and two election-law violations.

For Bailey, bringing felony charges against the leader of the state’s biggest blue stronghold added to the resume of a MAGA warrior who had already interviewed for a key position in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Less than three weeks later, Trump tapped Bailey to help run the FBI. He’ll serve as co-deputy director with Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conservative podcast host. Bailey said he’ll resign as Missouri’s attorney general on Sept. 8 to take the post. A spokesperson said he was not taking questions from the media.

The case against Page was the latest in a string of legal strikes against Democrats by Bailey, bringing the full weight of the state on a political adversary. It wasn’t about bribery or self-dealing. Page, the top elected official in a county with about 1 million residents, wasn’t accused of stealing a dime for himself.

Instead, the charges turned on something mundane: the printing and mailing of flyers weeks before about a measure on the ballot in April — the kind of informational material local governments often send to voters and the sort of action that experts said had never led to criminal charges in Missouri.

The election asked voters to give the County Council the power to fire the county’s department heads and its top attorney. Page spent more than $25,000 of taxpayer money to print and mail flyers to voters outlining the measure. The flyer at issue did not overtly tell voters to vote no, but it listed groups that opposed it, including the police board and NAACP, and it quoted a state judge’s ruling that the ballot language was misleading and unfair. It also suggested that a yes vote would allow directors to be fired for political reasons or in emergencies and that a no vote would maintain stable leadership.

Documents filed in the case against Page also showed that he did not follow a county lawyer’s advice to make some changes to the flyer. Bailey alleged that the flyer crossed the line from providing information, which is legal, to urging a no vote, which he said was an unlawful use of tax dollars — and, in his view, grounds to seek felony charges.

If convicted on the most serious count, Page could face three to 10 years in prison and $10,000 in fines. He could also face removal from office and sanctions against his medical license; he’s an anesthesiologist, though he doesn’t currently practice full time.

“Public officials must follow the law,” Bailey wrote in a news release, “and my Office will work to ensure that they always do.”

The playbook was familiar: Trump has talked about arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Federal agents just raided the home of John Bolton, the former national security adviser in the first Trump administration and a prominent Trump critic.

Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Ed Martin, who had worked as an attorney in Missouri, to head the U.S. Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group and to investigate two prominent Democrats, New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff of California, on allegations of mortgage fraud.

“Bailey really was auditioning for that role, or something like it, and what better way to show loyalty than to do exactly what Trump wants on the federal level, but replicated on the state level,” said Paul Nolette, the director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University. “It’s a template for what type of approach Bailey is going to take on the federal level. Political opponents are going to get targeted.”

Bailey has called himself a defender of the rule of law, portraying his high-profile lawsuits and investigations in Missouri as necessary to protect the state from what he has described as illegal or unconstitutional actions by the federal government and abandonment of the rule of law by the left.

St. Louis County Executive Sam Page (Jeff Roberson/AP Images)

Page became county executive in 2019 after a federal corruption case toppled his predecessor, Steve Stenger. Page had led a bipartisan bloc on the County Council against Stenger, who was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for a pay-to-play scheme that steered county contracts to political donors. (St. Louis County wraps around — but does not include — the much smaller independent city of St. Louis.)

The cooperative spirit collapsed as Page set St. Louis County on the aggressive end of Missouri’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing early emergency orders limiting gatherings and indoor dining. That stance put him at odds with state officials who were moving to curb local power.

Despite this and other political battles, Page has twice won countywide elections — first in 2020 to finish Stenger’s term, then in 2022 to a full four-year term. He has said he will decide by the end of the year whether to run again in 2026. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday.

“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said in brief remarks to local news reporters at a ribbon-cutting for a county road project.

A Page spokesperson referred questions to his lawyer, Jeff Jensen, a former U.S. attorney in Missouri during Trump’s first term. Jensen did not respond to requests for comment.

Many have questioned the legitimacy of the case and whether Bailey’s successor, Catherine Hanaway, will see it through. Hanaway, also a former U.S. attorney, as well as a former speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, did not respond to questions.

“It certainly seems, based on my reading of it, a stretch,” said Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in legal ethics and trial practice. “It would be an uphill battle for the state to make this charge stick.”

Ken Warren, a political scientist and pollster at Saint Louis University, said the charges were “totally phony” but that “the more outrageous you are, the more you are going to attract the attention of Donald Trump.”

“Let’s say the same thing occurred but the county executive happened to be a Republican,” Warren said. “Would Bailey go after him? Of course not.”

Missouri has become a proving ground of sorts for Trump appointees. Martin — a longtime state GOP insider with a record of stoking controversies — was named the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. After it became apparent he couldn’t win Senate confirmation, he was moved to the administration’s pardon office and the Justice Department’s weaponization group.

John Sauer, a former Missouri solicitor general and anti-abortion activist who last year helped bankroll a campaign to defeat Missouri’s abortion rights ballot issue, defended Trump’s claim to presidential immunity before the Supreme Court. Now, as U.S. solicitor general, he serves as the federal government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court.

Will Scharf, who lost a primary bid last year to unseat Bailey, pivoted straight into Trump’s legal inner circle. Then there’s Billy Long. The six-term ex-congressman was confirmed in June as IRS commissioner — despite having once pushed to abolish the agency — amid scrutiny over his ties to questionable tax-credit plans. He was recently ousted and said he will become ambassador to Iceland.

That roster of loyalists is no accident. Over the past two decades, Missouri has moved from being a competitive bellwether state to a deep-red stronghold, with a political environment that rewards the kind of hard-line conservatism and culture-war ethos that Trump prizes.

John Danforth, a Republican who served as Missouri’s attorney general from 1969 to 1976 and then as a U.S. senator until 1995, said the office has shifted dramatically from its core mission. Under him, he said, the job was to represent state agencies, handle every felony appeal, respond to legal opinion requests and manage litigation with a small staff. Asked about a move last year in which Bailey investigated a St. Louis-area school district after a student was beaten during school hours — blaming its diversity policies and removal of resource officers for safety failures — Danforth said, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

As the state has shifted right, many races are effectively decided in the primary. Candidates don’t need to win over most voters, according to political experts and observers — just the small, very political group that shows up for low-turnout, winner-take-all primaries. That favors hard-line candidates.

Nowhere is that change clearer than in the attorney general’s office.

Bailey is a U.S. Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq as an armored cavalry officer. He started his career as an assistant Missouri attorney general, then worked as a prosecutor. He joined the governor’s office as deputy general counsel in 2019 and later served as general counsel to then-Gov. Mike Parson.

His politicization of the attorney general’s office follows a path blazed by two predecessors, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, who each used relatively brief tenures as the state’s attorney general to launch themselves into the U.S. Senate. In Hawley’s case, out-of-state political consultants were embedded in the office from his first weeks on the job, directing taxpayer-funded staff, shaping his policy rollouts and boosting his national profile ahead of his Senate run. Schmitt used the office to wage headline-grabbing legal fights, from suing China over COVID-19 to challenging pandemic restrictions, elevating his profile as he prepared his own Senate campaign.

Neither Hawley nor Schmitt could be reached for comment.

After Schmitt was elected to the Senate in November 2022, Parson announced that he would appoint Bailey to fill the vacancy. That set up a high-profile Republican primary last year against Scharf, a candidate with backing from the conservative establishment. Bailey won 63% of the vote and cruised to an easy general-election victory in November.

Within a week, Bailey was interviewing with Trump for the job of U.S. attorney general in the new administration.

With no Democrats holding statewide office and a GOP supermajority in the legislature, Bailey has turned his fire on Democratic officials in Missouri’s two largest cities. He pressured St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner to resign by filing a lawsuit to remove her from office that alleged willful neglect of duty and a failure to prosecute violent crimes, and he recently sought to remove St. Louis Sheriff Alfred Montgomery, accusing him of misconduct. Gardner repeatedly denied any wrongdoing before resigning; later she acknowledged misusing some public funds. Montgomery has denied wrongdoing and has refused to resign.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has also been a frequent target: Bailey threatened a Missouri Human Rights Act investigation into Lucas and his staff after a city-run social media account, responding to a speech by the Kansas City Chiefs football player Harrison Butker about women being homemakers, named the suburb where Butker lived. The city deleted the post and apologized. Bailey framed the post as discrimination against Christians.

Last year, Lucas suggested the city could benefit from asylum-seeking immigrants joining the local workforce, then clarified that he meant immigrants who were in the U.S. legally. Bailey — who had sued the Biden administration over what he called an “illegal” parole program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — accused Lucas of trying to involve Missouri businesses in a “fundamentally unlawful program.” He posted a letter on the social media platform X calling Lucas’ comments “wildly irresponsible” and said he was “putting him on notice that it is a Class D felony to knowingly transport an illegal alien in the State of Missouri.”

Lucas responded in a statement then that Bailey’s letter was “a political campaign press release with no legal effect.”

“It’s not effective lawyering,” Lucas said in a recent interview. “It’s a whole new branch of lawyering that I, as a lawyer, didn’t grow up knowing, which is: If you get a story out, who cares if you drag people through the mud?”

Bailey, on the other hand, has stepped up to defend Republican allies. His office intervened to defend three GOP state senators who were sued for false light invasion of privacy after wrongly identifying a Kansas man as the shooter at a Super Bowl parade honoring Kansas City’s NFL team — and falsely calling him an undocumented immigrant.

Two of the senators called the lawsuits frivolous, while Bailey has argued the posts were protected by legislative immunity, as the senators were acting in their official capacity.

Lawsuits against two of the officials, who are represented by the Missouri deputy solicitor general, a high-ranking lawyer in the attorney general’s office, remain pending in federal court.

by Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education

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

When Los Angeles attorney Leo Terrell, a legal commentator, lifelong Democrat and fiery fixture on Fox News, announced on the network’s “Hannity” show that he was voting for Donald Trump in 2020, the MAGA universe went wild. Oliver North hailed him on his “Real American Heroes” podcast. Fox News signed him on as a paid contributor, at a six-figure salary.

Terrell, meanwhile, rebranded himself as “Leo 2.0,” complete with red Trump-style caps he offered for sale online. Leo 1.0 had slammed Trump for cozying up to white supremacists, blamed him for a surge in violent attacks on Jews and donated to Democrats. Leo 2.0? He attacked “DEI nonsense,” compared Black Lives Matter to ISIS and declared the 2020 election was “stolen from President Trump and America!”

In January, Terrell was rewarded for his loyalty when President-elect Trump, praising him as a “highly respected civil rights attorney and political analyst” with an “incredibly successful career,” named him senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department. Terrell assumed his marquee role a month later: as head of the multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Leo Terrell celebrated his appointment as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in an Instagram post on Jan. 23. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

As a Black, Christian former Democrat with little previous engagement with Jewish causes, Terrell, now 70, seemed an improbable pick to lead the effort to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” as the task force announcement put it. But his zealous conversion and penchant for media bombast made him a perfect bullhorn for the task force’s actual mission: to strong-arm colleges into stripping away any vestige of “wokeness” in their hiring, admissions, classes and research.

In service of that goal, the government has abandoned due process in favor of media warfare, preemptive declarations of guilt and freezes on billions in critical federal funding.

Terrell has become an invaluable player in this extraordinary pressure campaign. Before most of the task force’s investigations had even launched, he publicly promised “massive lawsuits” against “Jew-hating” universities, including Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles and dozens of others.

So far, the campaign has been effective. To preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, Columbia and Brown have struck deals with the administration that cost them $220 million and $50 million, respectively, and go far beyond pledging tougher action to combat antisemitism. Columbia agreed to open academic programs and admissions decisions to outside monitoring. Brown pledged to ban transgender women from single-sex spaces and women’s sports. Harvard has sued the administration to try to unfreeze $2.6 billion in federal research funds, but it’s also trying to negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile, colleges nationwide are eliminating any remaining vestiges of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and shuttering multicultural centers lest the government come after them.

Amid the upheaval Trump’s task force has helped to sow, the history, motivations and behavior of its blustery leader have gone largely unexamined. ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed dozens of people whose paths have intersected with Terrell’s and reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and financial records related to his career and life.

The portrait that emerged is dramatically at odds with Trump’s description of a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney. Peers in civil rights law said they always considered Terrell a minor player. Documents reveal a distinctly mixed legal track record, marred by malpractice suits, client disputes and mishandling a criminal case so badly that a federal appeals court lambasted his work as “woeful.”

Until his MAGA conversion, Terrell was beset by a litany of financial troubles, including nearly $400,000 in unpaid federal taxes, a personal bankruptcy filing and a trail of court judgments and liens brought by small businesses that worked for his law firm.

Current and former lawyers at the Justice Department say Terrell is less engaged with assessing cases or negotiating settlements than he is with scaring universities into submission. They say he’s voiced open disdain for what he calls “lawyer talk,” berating career staff who try to follow proper procedures for investigating civil rights complaints.

Despite his appetite for media attention, Terrell has volunteered little about himself. Friends and neighbors recall him walking a dog and bicycling and his fondness for golf. In the “about the author” section for a self-published book, he wrote: “In his spare time, Mr. Terrell likes to work. His hobbies are work and working.”

Terrell declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to written questions. In a brief phone conversation with a reporter, he explained, “I don’t do interviews with my life.” Told some details of our reporting, he added, “I’m not going to comment on anything,” and, finally, “I’m going to hang up respectfully.”

It is unclear whether Terrell’s previous troubles turned up in administration vetting for his current job. Officials at the Justice Department and White House did not respond to questions about Terrell’s role or his background.

Jewish activists are divided on Terrell’s approach, with some lauding it for rooting out anti-Jewish sentiment that emerged on campuses during pro-Palestinian protests and others bemoaning how he’s weaponized antisemitism.

Kenneth Marcus, an Education Department official in the first Trump administration who has spent years agitating for stronger federal action against campus antisemitism, is a fan. “What the president has gotten in Terrell,” Marcus said, “is someone with unique skills in delivering public messaging.”

Although President Donald Trump has described Terrell as a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney, peers in civil rights law said they always considered him a minor player. (Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

That messaging is camouflage, according to Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national network of Jewish groups. “No one should be under any illusion that this is about keeping Jewish students or faculty safe,” she said. “Gutting cancer and Alzheimer’s research does nothing to keep them safe.”

Terrell speaks at a news conference along with Erma Bryant, left, founder of the Christian Women for Justice, in 1996 in Inglewood, California, where the group held a fundraiser for O.J. Simpson. Terrell was a frequent TV commentator on the Simpson trial. (Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo)

Terrell grew up in Carson, in south Los Angeles County, the fourth of seven siblings. Law was his second career, following a decade as a history and economics teacher in the Los Angeles public schools. He graduated from UCLA School of Law in 1990 and opened his own civil rights firm in Beverly Hills.

Almost immediately, Terrell began making a name for himself as a media personality with a decidedly progressive voice, becoming better known for his TV and radio commentary than for his courtroom achievements.

Starting in 1991, after the police beating of a Black man, Rodney King, Terrell became a regular on local and national TV and radio condemning police brutality and racial injustice. Three years later, he snagged his breakthrough commentating gig: as a friend and supporter of O.J. Simpson. Terrell’s role as a Simpson trial analyst produced a green-room friendship with Larry Elder, a conservative Black radio host in Los Angeles, who helped Terrell land his own talk show. “I thought he was smart, feisty, opinionated and entertaining,” Elder recalled. “I thought he would be good radio, despite my disagreement with virtually everything he stood for at the time.”

Terrell became a prized guest on Fox News. He spoke fast and loud, uttered every view with absolute certainty and was quick to interrupt, shout and attack, accusing one guest of tailoring his views “to make a name for himself” and another of trying to “hustle people to make money.” Pressed during one “Hannity” interview to say on air whether Simpson was guilty of murder, Terrell ripped off his ear piece and stormed out of the studio.

Prominent Los Angeles lawyers said he was never a big player in the city’s civil rights community. Carl Douglas, part of the Simpson defense team, said “Leo was always a talker,” not “a baller.” Connie Rice, former western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said Terrell “was never at the table for the big cases that made impact. He loved holding press conferences.”

Terrell represented a Black teenager who’d been expelled from a Los Angeles high school for punching a white referee during a football game after the referee allegedly had directed racial epithets at him. He took up the cause of a mentally ill, homeless Black woman who’d been fatally shot by LA police after she wielded a 12-inch screwdriver at officers wanting to question whether she’d stolen a shopping cart. (No criminal charges were brought against the officers, but Terrell won a $975,000 settlement for her family.)

Terrell, speaking at a forum held by the Congressional Black Caucus in 1999 in downtown Los Angeles, took up the cause of a mentally ill, homeless Black woman who’d been fatally shot by Los Angeles police. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)

Now scornful of “woke” practices and bias claims, Terrell once represented himself in a race-discrimination case against a parking company after a garage attendant refused to honor his free-parking validation from a shopping mall and told him he owed $10. A supervisor let Terrell leave without paying, but he still sued, saying he was singled out for being Black and demanding damages for “humiliation, mental anguish and severe emotional distress.” The suit was later settled for a confidential amount. Reached three decades later, an attorney for the parking company called Terrell’s lawsuit “absurd — the worst discrimination case I’ve ever seen.”

Terrell always had side gigs: he self-published a book on workplace rights; he offered business consultations, corporate training seminars and mediations; he had a 900 number that charged $5 for the first minute and $2 for each additional minute for legal consultations.

In 2001, he ran unsuccessfully first for Congress, then two years later for Los Angeles City Council. He routinely promoted himself as “an NAACP attorney,” though the group said he’d never been employed there.

William Bloch, a veteran Los Angeles lawyer who brought two malpractice cases against Terrell, said Terrell acted as “the carnival barker” to attract business, then failed to do the necessary legal work. In one sex-discrimination case, according to the resulting malpractice suit brought by Bloch, Terrell accepted a settlement from the city of Beverly Hills for “a pittance” despite explicit instructions from his client, a female police officer, to zealously pursue her claim. Bloch persuaded an appeals court to undo the settlement. After the officer received a $100,000 award, plus money for attorney fees and costs, she dropped the case against Terrell. In the second matter, a jail employee for the city of Beverly Hills said she paid $6,000 to retain Terrell in 2009 after he “boasted of huge verdicts and settlements,” only to have him accept a $1,000 settlement from the city without her permission. According to her claim, Terrell conducted “little or no discovery, including taking no depositions.” The case was settled for a confidential amount, with no acknowledgement by Terrell of wrongdoing.

In court filings, Terrell denied any negligence or responsibility for harm to his clients, insisting they had approved all of his actions and saying lawyers are “not a guarantor of the results of any professional services.”

“He’s a discredit to the legal profession,” Bloch said.

A low point in Terrell’s legal career began in October 2009, when he was retained by the parents of Emond Logan, a 48-year-old California truck driver alleged to have transported more than a ton of cocaine to western Michigan as part of a multistate drug conspiracy.

Terrell rarely took on criminal cases, but he’d played Little League baseball with Logan, whose family approached him after hearing his radio show. Terrell demanded a $100,000 retainer. To pay it, Logan’s father sold much of his stock from more than 30 years at Pacific Bell Telephone and borrowed money from his daughter.

Logan faced overwhelming evidence: a leader of the drug gang had testified against him, and the arresting agents had seized five cars (including a Maserati), three Rolex watches and a $125,000 diamond ring, items well beyond his truck-driving income. His court-appointed lawyer had negotiated a plea agreement capping Logan’s prison time at 10 years.

Still, Terrell urged Logan to blow up his “bullshit” deal, according to transcripts of their recorded jailhouse calls and Logan’s later testimony. Logan followed Terrell’s advice, despite prosecution warnings that such relatively generous terms would be off the table. Terrell arranged for Logan’s pretrial release on bond. Four months later, Logan was back in custody after a government informant taped him threatening to kill his federal prosecutor. Terrell then urged him to accept a new plea offer, with no cap, and Logan was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Terrell “didn’t do what he was supposed to do for the money,” Eugene Logan, Emond’s 93-year-old father, said in a telephone interview. “He told us he could get him off. If he’d taken the plea, he’d be out by now.”

Two courts denied Emond Logan’s attempts to get his sentence overturned based on Terrell’s counsel, but they excoriated Terrell’s lawyering. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney wrote in a 2017 decision that Terrell had provided “abysmal advice.” A year later, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decried Terrell’s “woeful representation” and said his overall conduct reflected “poorly on the profession.”

Terrell’s troubled legal practice left him with a worsening tangle of financial problems. Between 2004 and 2015, the IRS filed 11 liens against him for nearly $400,000 in unpaid taxes dating back to 1997. In October 2010, Terrell filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, reporting $736,938 in liabilities, $304,650 in assets and monthly income of just $4,000. Because he stopped appearing for required meetings, his bankruptcy case was dismissed and none of his obligations were legally erased. During this period, Terrell took out six new mortgage loans against his three-bedroom West LA condominium. The property was sold at foreclosure in 2013.

Lorita Seaton was one of Terrell’s many unpaid creditors. She’d loaned him $40,000 in 2008 after he said he needed it to help cover his costs for a pending discrimination suit against Costco. In exchange, Terrell had signed a promissory note committing to pay her $60,000 by year-end. By February 2009, court records show, Terrell had won $422,000 at trial for his client and an additional $510,818 in legal fees and costs. Yet Seaton said she never got a penny.

“He had the audacity to tell me ‘there’s nothing you can do about it,’” she said in an interview. “I want to go stand on the mountain and just holler about this asshole.”

Between 2006 and 2014, more than a dozen small vendors for Terrell’s law firm went to court seeking to collect more than $170,000 in unpaid bills. A&B Reporting complained that it had prepared more than 30 deposition transcripts for Terrell, billing him more than $40,000 that remained unpaid. According to the company’s 2011 lawsuit, Terrell finally sent a $5,000 check — which bounced.

In February 2014, as his private financial straits worsened, Terrell formally updated his law office address: from the Beverly Hills tower where he’d worked for more than two decades to a “suite” on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was actually a mailbox at a UPS store. He has filed just a single case in federal court since that year, according to PACER, a public database of court filings and dockets.

Terrell’s financial troubles factored into years of legal warfare among his siblings over their mother’s care and modest estate. In a court filing, Terrell’s younger brother Zachary accused him of borrowing repeatedly from their mother to save his “flailing” law practice and keep his home. Terrell acknowledged accepting a $30,000 gift from his mother after he’d done free legal work for her. The estate case finally ended in late 2021, but Terrell received little because he had already borrowed against his expected inheritance. (Deborah Terrell-Trimble was the only Terrell sibling to respond to our calls and emails for comment, but she declined to answer questions about her brother or the case, saying the family was “trying to heal.”)

Terrell eventually paid off or settled some of his debts, but there’s no record of him paying the IRS or many of his other creditors, whose legal claims typically expire after 10 years in California unless they’re renewed.

According to publicly filed liens, he still owed the IRS $92,000 at the beginning of 2024. Yet on the financial disclosure he filed for his Justice Department job, which covered that period, he listed his liabilities as “none.”

Neither Terrell nor the Department of Justice responded to requests for comment about this omission.

Terrell speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 in Orlando, Florida. (Joe Marino/UPI/Alamy Live News)

Amid the financial pressures at home and at work, Terrell underwent a startling political transformation. In 2019 Fox interviews, he had called Trump “a racial divider” and said he sent out “dog whistles” like “no president on this planet in our country’s history.” Less than a year later, he went all in for Trump. Fox News hired him as a paid contributor soon thereafter, at an annual salary of $250,000.

In interviews on Fox and other conservative outlets, Terrell offered two reasons for his ideological makeover. The first was the growing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he complained had “hijacked” the Democratic Party, citing far-left calls to “defund the police.” He also objected to Joe Biden’s comment during an interview with a Black radio host that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black,” calling it “offensive and insulting to every African American because we don’t vote as one group.”

Over the next four years, Terrell displayed the fervor of the converted. Biden was an “idiot”; Kamala Harris (whose name he repeatedly mispronounced) was only chosen as his running mate “because she’s a woman and because of her race.” Democrats were members of the “anti-Israel” and “pro-Hamas party.” Far-right agitator Laura Loomer was “a journalist,” while NBC’s Kristen Welker was “a DEI hire.” In 2023, Terrell made a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he posed poolside, making a thumbs-up gesture. Shortly before starting his Justice Department gig, Terrell made sure he was leaving no culture-war stone unturned. “I hate anti-Semitism! I hate attacks on Catholic Families! I hate attacks on parents expressing their First Amendment Rights at School Board Meetings! I hate Sanctuary Cities! I hate DEI! I hate Critical Race Theory!” he declared on X.

“I love this guy,” Trump gushed, introducing “Leo 2.0” in February at a White House commemoration of Black History Month. “He was a radical Democrat, he became a radical Republican.” Terrell returned the love, telling the audience: “We are in the presence of the greatest president of all time!”

Terrell spoke at a White House commemoration of Black History Month in February. Trump introduced him, saying, “I love this guy.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

What motivated him? Larry Elder, who was on air with Terrell as he announced his conversion and coined the nickname “Leo 2.0,” declined to speculate: “I really don’t care about why Leo did his 180. I’m just glad he finally did!”

Juan Williams, the Fox News senior political analyst, however, called the change in Terrell’s views “performative.” He said Terrell saw an opportunity to cast himself as “coming out of the liberal matrix, and ‘now I’ve seen the light.’ He understood the value in that universe.”

If it is a performance, it’s one Terrell has continued at the Justice Department, where the effect of his pugnacious style and footloose approach to the law has alarmed career staff accustomed to following strict rules regarding regulatory due process.

“That’s lawyer talk!” Terrell regularly thundered to Justice Department lawyers. “I don’t want to hear any lawyer talk!”

In the days after his Jan. 23 appointment, several said, Terrell emphatically rejected efforts by agency veterans to explain the legally required steps to bring civil rights complaints against universities.

“Leo did not want to hear our views about how to investigate, how to find a violation, how to proceed in these cases,” said a Justice Department veteran who heard Terrell’s comments. “No ‘lawyer talk’ at the Justice Department! It was just incredibly bizarre.” The attorney was one of 10 current and former lawyers with the agency’s Civil Rights Division interviewed for this story, most of whom asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

At another meeting early in his tenure, Terrell told career Justice Department attorneys he thought they were out to thwart his agenda, according to two attendees. “He immediately came in and openly told us that he did not trust any of us or believe anything we said,” one recalled.

The Justice Department antisemitism task force, which includes officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the General Services Administration, was announced on Feb. 3. It immediately announced antisemitism investigations of four medical schools regarding “offensive” pro-Palestinian “symbols and messaging” displayed by students during their 2024 commencement ceremonies. Then, over the next five weeks, the task force and Trump administration announced plans to investigate 10 universities; the “immediate” cancellation of hundreds of millions in federal funding for Columbia; an investigation of the entire University of California System; and “potential enforcement actions” against 60 colleges in 24 states.

It’s not clear whether Terrell had a hand in choosing the task force’s targets, but he took the lead in making the government’s case against them publicly.

“We are suing every one of these universities guilty of antisemitism,” Terrell told Fox News host Mark Levin on March 9. “We’re going to bankrupt these universities. We are going to take away every single federal dollar.” Antisemitism, shouted Terrell, waving his arms, “is rampant across the country!” Hate-crime charges, he vowed, would be brought against “these people who hate Jews.” Terrell blamed campus antisemitism on the MAGA movement’s usual suspects: “the Democrat Party” and “blue cities [that] have turned their back on Jewish Americans.”

“The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left,” he declared, “has been hijacked by the Marxists!”

Four days later, the task force announced plans to meet with leaders of four cities “rocked” by campus antisemitism (New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago) to determine whether federal intervention was warranted.

Career civil rights officials, many of whom had served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, were horrified. The Justice Department didn’t publicly announce who it was investigating or planned to sue. It didn’t reach findings before it had found cause in a completed investigation that typically takes months or even years. And investigating Democratic leaders in “blue cities” in the name of fighting campus antisemitism was far outside the department’s charge.

“The process is turned upside down,” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division who left in May and is now a lecturer at Columbia Law School. “We were given a conclusion and told to find supporting evidence to justify it. It’s basically civil rights enforcement as a political tool. These things don’t actually solve antisemitism. It’s about silencing political dissent they disagree with.” Former civil rights deputy chief Jen Swedish, who worked at the Justice Department for 15 years, called the actions “cover for attacking higher ed.”

Back in early February, a division-wide posting seeking attorneys to help staff the antisemitism task force had drawn just three volunteers. Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s appointee as assistant attorney general for civil rights (and one of his former personal lawyers), later told a Federalist Society conference that this revealed the career staff’s lack of concern about antisemitism.

Current and former division attorneys interviewed by ProPublica and The Chronicle said the lawyers had misgivings about the administration’s tactics and were reluctant to work with Terrell, who already had a reputation for berating staffers. One said he’d repeatedly yelled at her.

A memorable episode came in March, when Terrell loudly berated a revered 82-year-old civil rights attorney, Franz Marshall, over the failure to quickly terminate federal oversight in a Louisiana school desegregation case, a goal of Republican state officials.

Marshall, who had represented the government in hundreds of desegregation cases over five decades, tried to explain that closing the case required a motion by the school district to lift the order, which the Justice Department could support or oppose, and review by a federal judge.

“Who told you that you had to do it this way?” Terrell interrupted. “I want you to name names!”

“This is the process,” Marshall assured him. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

“Well, maybe you’ve been doing it for too long!” Terrell snapped. The tirade, which lasted nearly an hour, was audible to dozens of attorneys waiting outside the conference room for an upcoming meeting.

Marshall (who could not be reached for comment) resigned a short time later, joining a wholesale exodus from resignations, firings and reassignments that has totaled about 70% of the Civil Rights Division’s 365 attorneys since January. The Louisiana consent decree was lifted on April 29.

In late April, Terrell had convened a meeting with some of the remaining lawyers to address concerns about working with him. “That crazy guy you see on TV is not here,” he insisted, according to one attendee. “The guy before you is a civil rights attorney. There’s an urban myth that I scream and yell. I’ve never yelled in my life.”

There’s little evidence Terrell has been directly involved in negotiations with campuses under investigation; instead, those appear to have been increasingly steered by the White House. Terrell has voiced distrust of any bargaining, preferring to “lay the hammer on them with lawsuits,” as he told Justice Department lawyers in an April meeting. In mid-July, when word leaked that the Trump administration was about to announce an agreement with Columbia to restore its funding, Terrell questioned whether it was tough enough.

“I will not ‘SELLOUT’ Jewish Americans,” he posted on X. “NO DEALS!”

Six days later, the administration announced a $221 million settlement with Columbia, setting the stage for a string of similar deals with other colleges.

The extremism of Terrell’s messaging also doesn’t bother Dov Hikind, a former New York state Democratic assemblyman representing Brooklyn and the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism. “If Leo Terrell and others are speaking tough, I don’t lose any sleep over that.”

But the administration’s approach alarms other Jewish groups and erstwhile academic allies in the fight against campus antisemitism. The task force is “using legitimate fears of antisemitism in ways that are both dangerous and wrong,” said Amy Spitalnick, of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. When Terrell proclaimed on Fox News that the task force would “bankrupt” targeted universities, “they were saying the quiet part out loud,” she added.

Whether Terrell is good for Jews or bad for Jews, his conversion has certainly been good for him. Leo 2.0 now has 2.5 million followers on his personal X account, and his speaking fee runs between $50,000 and $100,000; his government salary is $167,603. Terrell has attained “a rock star persona” in the Trump administration, said Kenneth Marcus, the former Education Department official and antisemitism activist. “People are very much drawn to him in a way that’s disproportionate to his rank in the federal government.”

There’s no sign administration officials, including Terrell, will let up in their campaign against higher education. Since late July, even as negotiations with Harvard dragged on and Brown’s settlement was announced, the administration froze $108 million in funding from Duke University’s medical system, citing “systemic racial discrimination” in hiring and admissions. It also halted more than $584 million from UCLA as punishment for tolerating a “hostile environment” for Jews and demanded $1 billion to restore the flow of government money. Duke has not publicly responded to the discrimination complaints. The University of California’s president, James B. Milliken, has pledged to work with the administration, but he said a $1 billion penalty would “completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system.”

Other colleges are just trying to stay out of the administration’s dragnet — and Terrell’s sights.

“He’s scared schools stiff, so everyone is scrambling,” said Brett Sokolow, an attorney and higher education consultant whom college and university leaders have turned to for advice.

Terrell’s approach, he said, is “way over the top — and effective as hell.”

Doris Burke of ProPublica contributed research.

by Doug Bock Clark

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

Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure.

Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’s election rules to allow Republican officials to contest a potential Trump loss in that year’s presidential race. Honey also promoted election conspiracy theories, including one Trump cited in a speech to his followers before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Though states do the on-the-ground work of running elections, DHS supports them with tasks beyond their capacities, such as protecting IT infrastructure and voter databases from foreign intrusions. The agency, with bipartisan support, took on this role in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Experts on voting and state election officials warned that Honey’s appointment as DHS’ deputy assistant secretary of election integrity could erode trust between state and federal officials, prompting states not to share information with the agency.

“We are witnessing a dangerous trend: the elevation of known bad-faith actors like Heather Honey,” said Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a statement, citing Honey’s “well-documented history of spreading election lies that have been debunked in court.”

Fontes called her involvement with DHS “deeply troubling” and said “when the agency gives a platform to individuals who have actively worked to erode public trust, it becomes harder to view DHS as a reliable partner in election security.”

A DHS spokesperson did not answer questions from ProPublica on Honey’s appointment or the exact nature of her responsibilities. Honey didn’t respond to calls or emails. The White House also didn’t respond to a request for comment. Her name is listed on the organization’s leadership structure online, and her appointment was first reported by the website Democracy Docket.

In the first Trump administration, the federal government set up programs designed to shield U.S. elections from foreign interference, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of DHS. But Trump soured on this and other initiatives after the director of CISA publicly rebutted his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Since the start of the second Trump presidency, the administration has gutted those programs, cutting hundreds of employees at CISA. Its director, Chris Krebs, is now under federal investigation, DHS has said; Krebs told CNN that the investigation appeared to be an act of political retribution. The Justice Department has also rolled back a program aimed at combatting foreign influence campaigns. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memorandum that the Justice Department’s program was disbanded to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit focused on building trust in American elections, said the cuts had dismantled “nearly all” of DHS’ capacity to protect election infrastructure. He said state elections officials feared that Honey’s appointment, combined with the program cuts, signaled the Trump administration’s intent to eliminate bulwarks of fair U.S. elections.

“The hiring of an election conspiracy theorist with no election knowledge or expertise is the culmination of this reversal,” Becker said. “DHS now appears poised to become a primary amplifier of false election conspiracies pushed by our enemies.”

Two sources familiar with Honey’s hiring at DHS said she began working for the agency last week. An organizational chart dated Aug. 18 on the department’s website identifies her as a leader in the agency’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. Her position wasn’t on a version of the website archived in July, and officials in former administrations said that there’s been no such job previously.

It’s not clear yet what Honey will oversee, but former DHS officials said that deputy assistant secretaries are typically the agency’s top experts in their subject areas. They’re often involved in drafting executive orders and crafting policies. They also serve as liaisons to the White House and the National Security Council.

Since Honey started, Trump has announced “a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines via executive order, though a top aide subsequently said the administration would pursue those goals through legislative action. DHS has also threatened to cut off about $28 million in grants to help states prepare for terrorism and disasters if they don’t change voting rules to conform to the administration’s priorities, NPR has reported.

Honey’s duties likely would include helping to organize the government’s policy responses if foreign actors make intrusions into the nation’s election systems, former officials said. To do this, and to assess the security of election infrastructure, someone in her position would typically have access to classified information, including the government’s election-related intelligence.

Experts expressed concern about Honey’s portfolio, given her history of spreading misinformation.

“Heather Honey’s past misleading claims about vote counts in Pennsylvania, among other things, have helped fuel false conspiracy theories about stolen elections,” said Larry Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a nonpartisan law and policy group.

Before becoming swept up in the “Stop the Steal” movement, Honey had no experience in the federal government or as an election administrator, working as a Pennsylvania-based private investigator.

After the 2020 election, she became a contractor for a Republican-backed audit seeking proof of fraud in ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to emails between employees working on the review, which ended up reaffirming Biden’s win, Honey helped draft the final report.

Since then, Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.

Do you have information you can share about Heather Honey or elections work being done in the federal government, especially at the Department of Homeland Security? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark at doug.clark@propublica.org or on Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

Christopher Bing and William Turton 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.

Since last year, ProPublica has been reporting on the troubled system for death investigations in Idaho, where a person’s cause of death is determined by elected coroners with no oversight or state support and, often, little training or education.

The failures documented by ProPublica left parents without answers in their baby’s sudden death and let clues vanish in the death of a woman whose family suspected foul play by her husband, a man later charged with killing his next wife.

The Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in January sent the state’s coroners a formal survey about their work, drawing responses from just over half. The office told coroners that it wouldn’t attach names to their responses when it made the survey results public, and some gave unvarnished critiques.

“The coroner system in Idaho is broken and a joke,” one wrote.

They also took the opportunity to plead for help, for changes they believe could transform Idaho into a place where death investigations consistently meet national standards.

Idaho coroners are elected to an office under county government control and funded by county budgets. Idaho politics have traditionally held the independence of local government as sacrosanct. This year’s state survey — and subsequent interviews by ProPublica — revealed a twist: Many coroners believe the state’s hands-off approach is outdated and harmful, making the quality of a person’s death investigation vary based on the county.

These local officials want the state to get involved, and they want it badly.

Jimmy Roberts of Bingham County, an agricultural area in eastern Idaho, is one such coroner. He worked with two interns in his office to draft a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system and described how states like Indiana and Arkansas addressed the same problems. In Indiana, as in Idaho, the county coroner is a constitutional elected office. But coroners in Indiana are subject to a suite of state laws that spell out what they must do.

The policies that Roberts highlighted from those states include creating a state training council for coroners, defining in law which cases must be autopsied, raising money for coroners through fees on death certificates or paying for toxicology costs through alcohol taxes, and giving coroners “first responder” status so they can access mental health care for themselves and get a supply of naloxone for reviving people who overdose.

Still, it’s unclear whether ideas like these will gain traction in Idaho after nearly 70 years of warnings and inaction on coroners.

Gov. Brad Little’s criminal justice commission has begun to take a look at the coroner system, via a subcommittee it created this year that includes coroners, the state police forensics lab director, a state legislator and others — but no county commissioners have joined yet, leaving the group without input from the people who control coroner budgets.

The subcommittee so far has drawn up a list of problems and brainstormed solutions — none of which it has endorsed — such as a state fund to help pay for autopsies, a forensic center in eastern Idaho to ramp up autopsy capacity or mandating autopsies in some child deaths.

Coroners are not united in how to make the system better and what it will take to get there.

Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, sent his 118-page report to fellow coroners and state legislators by email in October. But Roberts told ProPublica his offer to help the leaders of the Idaho State Association of County Coroners work on reform was “met with silence.”

Jimmy Roberts, Bingham County’s coroner, in his office. He drafted a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system. (Natalie Behring for ProPublica)

Torey Danner, the association’s president and a member of the governor’s subcommittee studying the issue, told ProPublica that his focus this year is on “low-hanging fruit” rather than major systemic changes. Asked about approaches that have gotten results in other states, he said he wants to review the root causes of Idaho’s problems before committing to any specific reform ideas, so that Idaho doesn’t unintentionally implement “Band-Aid” solutions in haste.

Danner said he didn’t see Roberts’ 118-page report come through his email inbox in October but plans to read it after being contacted by ProPublica. He has not deeply studied the reforms in other states.

“I haven’t taken the time because I haven’t had the time,” said Danner, one of the few coroners in Idaho to hold the job full time. “I mean, I’m still trying to do this and run my office, too.”

Here are five concrete steps other Idaho coroners have suggested.

1. More autopsies

Idaho has among the lowest autopsy rates in the U.S., with even worse rankings for autopsies in homicides and unexplained child deaths — and money is a factor. About 1 in 4 coroner’s offices answering this year’s survey said their budgets affect their ability to do autopsies.

Madison County Coroner Sam Butikofer told ProPublica that when he took office in 2019, the county’s budget for grooming snowmobile trails was larger than the coroner’s. (County budget records confirm that.)

Under Idaho’s current setup, each county sets an annual budget for its coroner’s office that estimates how many autopsies the coroner will have to order in the coming year. An autopsy in most parts of Idaho costs at least $2,300. Small counties in Idaho budget for less than a dozen a year, and a backcountry plane crash, a few unwitnessed deaths on the river, a spate of sudden infant deaths or the rare multiple homicide can quickly eat up the money that was set aside.

Lacking the kind of funding other states use to help cover the cost of autopsies, Idaho coroners must decide between forgoing autopsies or blowing the budget and having to justify it to a board of county commissioners made up of elected laypeople.

“We need to be doing more autopsies, thus we need more money to do so,” one coroner told the Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in its survey.

(Idaho counties and the state coroners association two decades ago opposed a mandate for coroners to do autopsies in sudden infant deaths, citing cost. County commissioners haven’t weighed in this year because there are no specific reforms to respond to yet, according to the Idaho Association of Counties.)

As noted in a previous report by the state office and in ProPublica’s reporting, other states — including Idaho’s neighbors Washington and Wyoming — help their local coroners pay for autopsies or the travel required to get them done.

Without a state medical examiner’s office, Idaho has no centralized setup for forensic pathologists to do autopsies. So most county coroners have contracts with the state’s largest county, Ada, where Boise is located. For the counties in Idaho’s eastern and northern reaches, the coroner has to plan for an all-day or overnight trip to the Boise area and the gas and hotel to go with it.

Autopsy tools in the Ada County coroner’s office, first image, and the morgue. The office performs most autopsies for counties in south and central Idaho. (First image: Katherine Jones/Idaho Statesman. Second image: Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman.)

Ada County is fully booked with its current workload of autopsies for dozens of Idaho counties. It has just a few forensic pathologists on staff. Its national accreditations limit how many autopsies each of those pathologists can do — a rule that’s designed to help keep the doctors from being overworked and error-prone but causes backlogs when there’s too much demand.

Coroners undertook a campaign last year to open a forensic center in eastern Idaho, as a kind of co-op with several remote, rural counties. The plan fell apart when local commissioners got spooked by the cost. Forensic pathologists, the only people who can perform the autopsies, are in high demand; it takes a salary of about $350,000 to lure one to Idaho.

“The state of Idaho needs to build an eastern Idaho forensic center and stop wasting time and money by attempting to have a county build this required facility,” one person wrote in response to the state’s coroner survey.

2. Higher pay

At least seven coroners in Idaho’s 44 counties have an annual salary below $10,000, according to an annual survey by the Idaho Association of Counties and ProPublica’s review of county budgets. Another 12 coroners’ salaries are between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.

That’s not enough to live on, so nearly all Idaho coroners either are retired from a previous career or have another job. Their ranks include medics, nurses and nurse practitioners, a physician, a library director, an attorney, 11 funeral home owners or employees, and at least three with more than two jobs.

Idaho County Coroner Cody Funke told ProPublica in July that offices like his need full-time staff. Right now, he has to respond to deaths while he’s in the middle of a workday at his main job, which is with the state prison system.

The county association’s annual survey shows that at least eight county coroners have no deputy on staff to take over when the elected coroner can’t answer a call or go to a death scene.

“Any help would be greatly appreciated but my greatest problem is low wages making it impossible to recruit deputies and any replacement for the elected officials,” one coroner told the state’s survey takers.

Another coroner who did have a deputy wrote, “My Deputy Coroner works one (1) day a month! I cannot take time off with only one day a month coverage.”

3. Office space Cody Funke, the part-time coroner for Idaho County, uses a pickup truck to do his coroner work because the county doesn’t provide a dedicated office. (Liesbeth Powers for ProPublica)

Half of the coroners who responded to this year’s survey said they didn’t do their coroner work in a county-owned office. Some did it in funeral homes or mortuaries. Some did it in other types of full-time private workplaces. Six coroners, though, said they did most of their work in their own homes.

Although the survey didn’t break down types of venues coroners used for paperwork versus examining bodies, the lack of dedicated and secure workspace poses a problem for both tasks.

Few Idaho counties have a county morgue with coolers and storage for bodies awaiting autopsy, testing or further examination. Coroners in rural areas often turn to a local funeral home or the regional hospital.

This practice can imperil a criminal prosecution, coroners told ProPublica, because the body — a crucial piece of evidence — isn’t secured through all stages of an investigation.

Without a dedicated exam room or storage for bodies, “we are not able to maintain chain of custody and funeral home staff are witness to exam details of cases that must have a high level of confidentiality,” wrote Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, in his response to the state coroner survey.

In the survey, 59% of respondents said they store dead bodies in a place that’s open to people outside the coroner’s office. Three coroners had postmortem samples, such as blood or fluids waiting for a toxicology lab test, stored in a “private residence,” and one coroner was storing unidentified or unclaimed human remains there.

Butikofer, the coroner in Madison County, had no office when he started the job. He’s asked his county commissioners for at least the past five years to give him a workspace with refrigerated and secured storage and a place to meet with families, according to public meeting minutes. The county’s master plan would fulfill that request — with construction being complete six to 10 years from now. Meanwhile, Butikofer has worked out of a truck, a card table in his family home, the local hospital’s morgue and a temporary space in the county courthouse.

“I hear rumors that the state has money,” Butikofer said in reference to Idaho’s long-running string of budget surpluses and cash reserves. “I’m just one little minnow in the pond going, ‘Hey, how ’bout some of that, you know, for the coroner system?’”

The governor early this year said he supported more resources to help coroners do their jobs. But in mid-August, with major tax cuts hitting and state revenues dropping, the governor responded by ordering spending cuts and other austerity measures — a sign that Idaho will be even tighter with money than usual in the coming year.

Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, at a budget meeting in Blackfoot, Idaho, last July. County commissioners were reluctant to increase the coroner’s budget but ultimately did so. (Natalie Behring for ProPublica) 4. Consistency statewide

One of the state survey respondents pitched an idea for holding all Idaho coroners to one standard.

“There needs to be a state run and state funded coroner system with a head coroner elected by the citizens. The top coroner would create a standardized investigation system” with protocols for coroners to follow, the anonymous respondent wrote.

Coroners interviewed by ProPublica have pointed to the system used by neighboring Montana: a hybrid coroner-and-medical examiner setup, coordinated through a coroner liaison. Montana and its counties didn’t have to bootstrap that position financially; it got funding through a federal grant from the National Institute of Justice.

Idaho’s disjointed system leaves it up to each coroner to decide how they do their job. The Legislature this year clarified which kinds of deaths coroners must investigate, but it didn’t clarify what “investigate” means. Can coroners examine the room where the person died? Get medical records to find a diagnosis that might explain the death? Order a blood test to look for fentanyl? Order an autopsy?

Other states make it clearer.

Arkansas state code expressly gives coroners subpoena power and guaranteed access to a death scene.

Laws in states including Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania direct coroners to order an autopsy in certain kinds of deaths.

Wyoming’s coroner standards board spells out what a death investigation should include: photographs, a scene investigation, an exam of the outside of the person’s body, blood or tissue samples to test for toxic substances, an inventory of any evidence or property or medications the coroner found, and, finally, a DNA sample.

5. More training

After living in an Idaho county for a year, any U.S. citizen 21 or older can become the county coroner. There’s no license or certification needed.

When coroners take office, they have one year to attend “coroner’s school,” followed by 24 hours of coroner education every two years. But there’s no enforcement mechanism for that law. At least three other Mountain West states that have coroners — Colorado, Montana and Wyoming — have penalties for not getting trained: suspended pay, forfeiture of the office or a misdemeanor charge.

ProPublica found last year that 1 in 4 Idaho coroners repeatedly fell short of training requirements. Funke, the Idaho County coroner, exceeded the requirements and sought training on his own before taking office, but he told ProPublica he still felt underprepared. Funke, in his second year on the job, signed off on cremation of a woman based on her husband’s word she died of Parkinson’s, only to learn five years later the man was indicted in the murder of his next wife in Texas.

With a decade more experience, Funke said he would do things differently now. National experts told ProPublica that Funke should have gone to the death scene and confirmed a Parkinson’s diagnosis before he ruled the Idaho County death natural. Funke said more should be done to prepare coroners for the job.

Idaho law doesn’t define what a coroner must prove they know before taking charge of death investigations in their county. At least two other states have a higher bar when it comes to deputy coroners, who often do the main work. Indiana requires deputy coroners to pass a written test and complete an externship. Arkansas requires deputy coroners to complete a training curriculum and turn in a certificate that proves they did it. Arkansas law also established a separate salary tier for coroners who complete the training.

When Idaho lawmakers made minor revisions to the state’s coroner law this year, they required training to be “approved by a nationally recognized certifying body.” But lawmakers did nothing to address the lack of consequences for coroners who skip those classes.

The Idaho performance evaluation office said two coroners it surveyed this year “urged the Idaho Legislature to step in with stronger leadership, enforceable training standards, and a sustainable funding model to ensure coroners across the state can effectively perform their duties.”

by Robert T. Garrett for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

On July 7, the Justice Department sent a harshly written letter threatening to sue the staunchly Republican state of Texas, notwithstanding its efforts to help elect Donald Trump and the fact that the president had singled out its leaders as key allies in his immigration crackdown.

The letter decried the congressional map previously passed by the state’s Republican-led Legislature as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” It demanded that Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton respond the same day with a plan to comply. Otherwise, the Justice Department said, it reserved “the right to seek legal action against the state.”

Despite its adversarial tone, the letter was hardly unwelcome. In fact, it was just the opposite.

It set in motion a chain of events that gave Abbott and Paxton the political cover needed to provide Trump with exactly what he wanted: a mid-decade redrawing of district lines designed to ease that path for his party to maintain control of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections.

Republican lawmakers prioritized passage of the new political map above nearly all other legislation during the state’s second special session, including disaster preparedness and relief for victims of the July 4 flooding that killed more than 130 Texans. The new congressional boundaries, crafted to net Republicans up to five more seats, drew an immediate legal challenge from a coalition of Black and Latino voters who, on Saturday morning, alleged that it discriminates against nonwhite voters. Abbott is expected to sign it into law this week.

“The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law,” Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. “I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise.”

The series of events is part of a larger trend this summer of the Trump administration using legal action or the threat of the courts to seemingly coerce Republican governors and other politically aligned defendants to do precisely what he wants them to do. The strategy has allowed his administration to sidestep state legislatures and Congress, according to legal experts and critics. In some cases, it has allowed red states to achieve a politically valuable goal they’d wanted all along.

In Texas, Trump has been met with state leaders who have been willing, if not eager, collaborators in carrying out his agenda.

Over the past three months, the Trump administration has employed a series of legal tactics in the state to achieve a desired outcome.

It filed a federal lawsuit and, in one day, killed a decades-old law allowing Texas students who were not U.S. citizens or permanent residents to receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities if they met specific criteria. The move came just two days after bills to repeal the law failed to pass the state Legislature.

The Trump administration also maneuvered within the court system, reaching an agreement to settle a lawsuit against the federal government that effectively gutted a ban on churches participating in political campaigns. Trump has long opposed the ban, which he vowed to end, but the president lacked congressional support for such a move.

On redistricting, Trump used his heft within the party to force the state Legislature to redraw the typically once-a-decade political map it had approved just four years earlier, leading to a standoff with the governors of Democratic states. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed measures that will ask voters in his state to approve five new districts that would favor Democrats in direct response to Texas’ redistricting.

Trump is not the first president to use a “sue and settle” strategy.

Republicans complained bitterly about the Obama administration encouraging liberal groups and Democratic state attorneys general to file suits against the Environmental Protection Agency, which then led to the rapid adoption of consent agreements for more stringent enforcement of environmental policies than Congress was likely to pass, said Marquette University law professor Paul Nolette.

But Trump’s strategy, Nollette said, is even more aggressive.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre and Andrew Mahaleris, an Abbott spokesperson, declined to respond to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The White House acknowledged an email seeking comment, but did not provide one.

Taken together, Trump’s legal strategies in Texas this summer show a win-at-all-costs mindset that is trampling on legal norms, said University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. He is among several legal scholars and lawyers representing civil rights and religious liberty groups who told ProPublica and the Tribune they fear the administration’s strategy to bypass the checks provided by the legislative and judicial branches of government will cause lasting harm.

“One ought to be extremely disturbed by this thoroughly authoritarian administration,” said Levinson, who has taught constitutional law for 45 years. He added that through such initiatives, Trump is “trying to enforce the ‘Führerprinzip’ of absolute loyalty to himself, rather than to abstract constitutional norms.”

“What is truly incredible is the extent to which the GOP has fallen in line,” Levinson said.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court over the Texas Dream Act, which allowed undocumented students to get in-state tuition at Texas universities. (Ken Cedeno/Reuters) “New Level”

The first clear sign that the administration was working with the state’s Republican leadership to bypass lawmakers was its successful June 4 effort to nullify the Texas Dream Act.

The 2001 law granted in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to students who lived in the state for three years and graduated from a Texas high school, even if they were not permanent residents or U.S. citizens.

Efforts to repeal or sharply curtail the benefit for immigrant children have gone nowhere in the Republican-led Legislature, including this year. It would never have passed, or remained in place for so long, without the support of Texas Republicans, said former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a lead sponsor of the 2001 law. The San Antonio Democrat recalled in an interview that the law, which former Gov. Rick Perry signed, had the support of most major groups representing Texas businesses because many believed that encouraging immigrant youth to pursue higher education expands their lifelong earnings, bolsters the workforce and benefits state coffers.

On June 4, two days after the Legislature adjourned, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court in Wichita Falls. There, only one district judge sits — Reed O’Connor, a Trump appointee. Within hours, Paxton, who is charged with defending the state’s laws, joined the federal government in filing a joint motion that asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional. O’Connor, who did not respond to a request for comment about the case, quickly agreed.

Paxton’s communications office did not respond to written questions from ProPublica and the Tribune. It’s unclear if Abbott, who succeeded Perry, supported the move by Bondi and Paxton to bypass the legislative process and kill the law.

Abbott has not said a lot about the issue since his initial run for governor in 2014, and Mahaleris, his spokesperson, did not respond to questions about it. Back then, pressed by Democratic opponent Wendy Davis, who predicted that GOP lawmakers would try to repeal in-state tuition for immigrant youth and said she’d veto any such legislation, Abbott suggested he supported making some changes and left the door open to signing a repeal bill.

“Greg Abbott believes that the objective of the program is noble. But he believes the law as structured is flawed and it must be reformed,” an Abbott spokesperson said at the time.

Had the Republican-led Legislature truly been interested in repealing the law, it would have done so, said Van de Putte, who pointed to this year’s passage of a program that allows families to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s private school education. “I mean, they got vouchers,” Van de Putte said. “This wasn’t a policy imperative.”

Van de Putte, now a lobbyist, said that when she heard of Paxton and Bondi’s maneuver, her “heart ripped.”

On June 5, a day after the Justice Department and Paxton worked together to overturn the law, Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli exulted over the collaboration, saying that because they “were able to have that line of communication and talk in advance, a statute that’s been a problem for the state for 24 years, we got rid of it in six hours.” In audio obtained by NBC News, Kambli told GOP state attorneys general at a private gathering that the president’s legal team was “learning how to be offensive-minded” and “brought in a lot of people from state-AG world” conversant in the tactics.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment about Kambli’s remarks. According to NBC, a department spokesperson did not dispute that Kambli made the statements and said it was “pretty standard” for department lawyers to notify state attorneys general of federal lawsuits ahead of time.

The same day Kambli spoke to the gathering with GOP state attorneys general, Bondi and Paxton issued a joint news release celebrating the victory. Bondi praised Paxton “for swiftly working with us to halt a program that was treating Americans like second-class citizens in their own country.” For his part, Paxton said he was “proud to stand with Attorney General Bondi and the Trump Administration to stop an unconstitutional and un-American law that gave in-state tuition to illegal aliens.” In ensuing weeks, the Justice Department sought to repeat its Texas victory by filing suits challenging immigrant-tuition benefits in Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma. Oklahoma joined Texas in agreeing to end its benefits, while Democratic statewide officials in Minnesota and Kentucky are pushing back.

The effort was “coordinated and planned collusion to circumvent the people and Texas’ legislative process,” said Kristin Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group.

Marquette’s Nolette, an expert on state attorneys general, said Paxton, a three-term Republican attorney general, and Trump’s Justice Department have moved to a “new level” of using the courts to achieve favored policy outcomes. He said the collaboration between Paxton and the Justice Department is an expansion of the “sue and settle” approach that the Obama administration employed. In many of those cases, there was at least a provision of the federal Clean Air Act allowing suits against the EPA administrator for lax policing, Nolette said.

“With Paxton, however, he is working with U.S. DOJ to challenge Texas’s own laws. There are no statutes that allow, or even anticipate, this behavior,” he said.

Trump addressed a National Religious Broadcasters convention during his 2024 presidential campaign. The association joined other conservative groups in a lawsuit to overturn the Johnson Amendment. (Seth Herald/Reuters) Court Tactics

Fresh off its success in dismantling the Texas Dream Act, the Trump administration moved swiftly to overturn a 71-year-old federal law banning nonprofits, including religious institutions, from endorsing political candidates.

The ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, did not specifically target religious groups, but, in the past three decades or so, evangelical churches that tend to align with the GOP have railed against it, saying it impermissibly muzzles their rights to free speech and exercise of religion.

In August 2024, the National Religious Broadcasters, the conservative group Intercessors for America, and two Texas churches — Sand Springs Church of Athens and First Baptist Church of Waskom, near the Louisiana line — sued in Tyler to overturn the Johnson Amendment’s strictures against secular nonprofits as well as churches.

On July 7, their case gained significant momentum when the Justice Department joined conservative lawyers for evangelical churches in filing a motion similar to the one used to end the Texas Dream Act. In both cases, the administration’s intervention set the stage for a consent judgment, an agreement reached between the plaintiffs and the defendants as part of a settlement submitted to the judge hearing the case.

In this instance, the Justice Department said the ban unconstitutionally prohibited nonprofit organizations from engaging in political speech and that religious leaders should be able to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The proposed settlement of the suit, however, only applied to houses of worship.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the consent judgment proposed to U.S. District Judge J. Campbell “Cam” Barker in Tyler amounts to “improper collusion between … the Trump administration and some religious extremists to achieve a policy objective.” Her group supports keeping the Johnson Amendment.

Barker, a Trump appointee, is allowing interested people and groups to file amicus briefs in the case. So far, he has not adopted or rejected the agreement between the administration and the evangelical groups.

Trump, who has said he learned about the Johnson Amendment when he collected evangelical ministers’ blessings as he first ran for the White House in 2015, sought to end it through an executive order. His Capitol Hill allies also tried in 2017 to repeal the tax code’s constraint on churches’ political activity but failed to attract the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which supports preservation of the Johnson Amendment, said that, if approved by Campbell, the consent order would amount to an end-run around Congress — and one defying most Americans’ wishes.

“The majority of Americans in poll after poll support the rule and don’t want nonprofits, including houses of worship, turned into just another partisan mechanism that divides communities,” Hollman said.

One of the leading Christian conservative lawyers trying to overturn the Johnson Amendment, Michael P. Farris, who represents the National Religious Broadcasters, pushed back on allegations of collusion.

“The answer to your question is pretty simple. This case was filed on August 28, 2024,” or before Trump reclaimed the presidency, he said. “We will not reply further,” said Farris, who played a key role in drafting Paxton’s bid to have the Supreme Court overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to The New York Times.

“We are answering no media questions until the judge rules,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica and the Tribune.

After the Justice Department complained about Texas’ congressional map, Gov. Greg Abbott pushed to include a redrawn map in the special legislative session. (Ronaldo Bolaños/The Texas Tribune)

Trump’s work with state officials to reach his desired outcomes is unprecedented and dangerous, said Jim Harrington, retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal group that advocates for voting rights and racial and economic justice. Filing “collusive lawsuits,” such as the ones over in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and revocation of tax-exempt status for churches that dabble in politics, and carefully selecting courts where the judges are likely to be sympathetic, lets Trump evade constraints created by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, Harrington said.

The administration’s tactics are a quick way to get around recalcitrant lawmakers but risk undermining the judiciary’s role as an independent branch of government, he said.

“Even conservative judges should raise their eyebrows about the undermining of the integrity of the judicial system that’s going on,” said Harrington, who has taught for 27 years as an adjunct law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is a really serious attack on our system.”

Race-Based Debates

Legal challenges to Texas’ new map have previously taken years to resolve, raising uncertainty over whether Saturday’s lawsuit will be decided before next year’s midterm election.

A decision will hinge, in part, on how the courts view an assertion by the Trump administration that the congressional map passed by the Legislature four years ago, and defended by GOP lawyers in court as race-neutral, suddenly must be changed because it paid too much attention to race.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that works on election- and democracy-related issues, said that the administration’s reasoning is flawed and that both the 2021 map and the new one discriminate against nonwhite voters.

The 2021 map drew intense criticism for its dispersal of nonwhite groups into districts where they’d have less influence. Dramatic gains among Texas’ Hispanic, Black and Asian American communities accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth. But lawmakers drew a map where 23 of the 38 congressional districts had white majorities, even though in the 2020 census, white and Hispanic Texans constituted roughly equal shares of the total population.

To reduce the threat to suburban GOP U.S. House members, diverse neighborhoods in Dallas and Collin counties were removed from districts that were becoming more favorable for Democrats and attached to sprawling rural districts dominated by white Republican voters.

“I’ve stated it, and I’ll state it again — we drew these maps race blind,” said the state Senate’s point person on redistricting at the time, Houston Republican Joan Huffman, who did not respond to a request for comment. “We have not looked at any racial data as we drew these maps, and to this day I have not looked at any racial data.”

During a four-week federal court trial in El Paso that ended last month, Texas officials denied practicing racial discrimination. The three judges hearing the case have delayed issuing a decision, citing the special session in Austin.

In their July 7 letter to Abbott, however, Justice Department lawyers Harmeet Dhillon and Michael Gates warned Texas to change its U.S. House map, which they said was overly biased in favor of creating districts that members of racial minorities could win.

Texas’ 2021 map for U.S. House districts has four suspect “coalition districts,” they wrote, citing three districts near Houston and one in Dallas-Fort Worth where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority. In recent years, all four have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats.

Neither Abbott spokesperson Mahaleris, nor Baldassarre, the Justice Department spokesperson, responded to questions.

The Brennan Center’s Li disputed Dhillon and Gates’ characterization of recent rulings by federal judges. Courts haven’t forbidden states from drawing minority-coalition districts but merely stated that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to proactively create them, he said.

“Given that Texas has consistently said it didn’t consider race at all in 2021, there’s certainly not a case for dismantling any of these districts.”

Misty Harris of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

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 our stories in your inbox every week.

When Lloyd Gray stood trial for rape in 1980, two jurors didn’t believe he was guilty and voted to acquit. Today, a split-jury verdict would mean a mistrial and possibly Gray’s freedom. But back then, in Louisiana, it resulted in a life sentence for the 19-year-old from Tunica, a rural community nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Gray, who has always maintained his innocence, spent the next four decades in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. During that time he lost everything, he said. From behind bars, he learned that his mother, who for a time was a guard at the prison where he was being held, had dementia and died in 2020. Prison officials refused to allow him to attend her funeral.

That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunanimous jury verdicts, legal in only Louisiana and Oregon, were unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law designed to uphold white supremacy.

Going forward, there would be no more Lloyd Grays.

But in fact, there are more than 1,000 people in Louisiana like Gray, convicted by split juries and still imprisoned, according to the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform. Although the Supreme Court says cases like theirs are unconstitutional going forward, it left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. And Louisiana alone says they should stay behind bars.

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Louisiana State Supreme Court declined to grant new trials for those prisoners, acquiescing to local prosecutors who feared that retrying hundreds of decades-old cases would tie up state courts. The conservative state Legislature, meanwhile, has repeatedly rejected bills that would have required a reexamination of their cases.

That left one very narrow path for Gray and others like him, mostly Black men, to have their cases revisited. If they could credibly argue that their convictions were secured illegally — if there was race-based discrimination in the case, for example — they could strike a plea deal with a prosecutor, securing their release. But a new state law, passed last year at the urging of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, limited local prosecutors’ ability to broker such deals, cutting off the last remaining avenue of relief for those imprisoned by nonunanimous juries.

The key problem, legal experts say, is that the Supreme Court did not make its 2020 ruling retroactive as it did in Montgomery v. Louisiana, a 2016 case in which the justices found that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles should be banned going forward as well as for those already convicted.

What’s more, in a separate decision in 2021, the court ruled that its 2020 opinion did not apply to older cases, like Gray’s, that had already gone through the regular state appeals process. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court’s majority, Oregon and Louisiana were still free to offer retroactive relief on their own.

In contrast to Louisiana, Oregon’s Supreme Court vacated every split-jury conviction in the state, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences to the majority of those prisoners convicted by nonunanimous juries. Verite News and ProPublica estimated about 760 prisoners were convicted by nonunanimous juries based on a 2018 list provided by the Oregon Department of Justice of people who had filed lawsuits claiming their convictions were unconstitutional.

“There are a lot of injustices in our legal system we can’t fix. And yet, here is this issue that is so clear and obvious that it’s on all of us to do the right thing,” said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, who fought for years to end the state’s split-jury system.

“When I look at Louisiana, it’s really heartbreaking.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Louisiana is the only state that says prisoners convicted long ago by split juries should remain behind bars. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment.

Zach Daniels, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, said the group, which backed Landry’s law, has attempted to reach a compromise with criminal justice reformers who want all past split-jury verdicts overturned. This included an alternative that would give those convicted by nonunanimous juries the opportunity to apply for parole instead of having their cases either vacated or reexamined. But some lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates rejected that option because they did not view the opportunity to be heard by a special parole committee appointed by Landry, as the plan called for, a compromise for people imprisoned unconstitutionally.

Gray’s case for freedom is particularly strong, his attorneys said, because there is good evidence that racial animus led to his conviction. They discovered last year that the two jurors who had voted to acquit were Black — a fact that doesn’t appear in the court records. And that someone had drawn a swastika on the upper right hand corner of the original district attorney’s case file.

In addition, the lone surviving family member of the victim told the district attorney’s office he is “fully supportive” of Gray’s release. He could not be reached for comment.

The New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had been in discussions with Gray’s legal team about a potential deal to secure his release before Landry’s 2023 election. But the governor’s new law constraining prosecutors from making such deals could ensure that Gray spends the remainder of his days in Angola. His current case before the court will next be considered Tuesday at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, where a judge will decide whether Landry’s law applies in Gray’s case.

“When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” said Gray, now 65, through his attorney because the prison rejected requests from Verite News and ProPublica to interview him directly. “After 45 years, I’m no closer to freedom than the day I walked into this place.”

Lloyd Gray has been incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the past 45 years. (Gerald Herbert/AP Photo) “Jim Crow Juries”

Louisiana began allowing nonunanimous verdicts — or “Jim Crow juries,” as they are sometimes called here — in response to the 14th Amendment, which ensured that Black citizens, including formerly enslaved people, had equal protection under the law. This included, among other things, the right to serve on juries. Until then, Louisiana had required a unanimous vote for criminal convictions. But state lawmakers did not want to give a single Black juror the power to undermine the will of 11 white people.

During an 1898 constitutional convention, Louisiana’s elected officials lowered the threshold for a criminal conviction from 12 votes to nine (and increased it to 10 in 1973). One committee chairman was cited in the Supreme Court ruling against the practice saying that the provision was meant to “establish the supremacy of the white race.”

In 1934, Oregon followed suit, becoming the only other state to ever approve the use of split-jury verdicts. (Oregon passed its law following public outrage that a Jewish man was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder in the high-profile death of a Protestant man.)

The jury’s decision at Gray’s trial in December 1980 unfolded as Louisiana legislators had envisioned nearly a century ago.

After initially charging Gray with aggravated rape, prosecutors offered him a deal, according to Gray and his attorneys. If he pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, he would receive a 10-year sentence. But Gray rejected the offer, never wavering in his claims of innocence. The district attorney’s office said there is no record of a proposed plea deal.

Gray and Dianna Knockum, the woman who accused him of rape, each testified on a single day, providing wildly divergent versions of what happened on a Wednesday night six months earlier. Gray, 19 at the time, and Knockum, 33, knew each other from frequenting a bar called Club Hollywood in the Hoffman Triangle neighborhood of New Orleans. Gray claimed they got into a fight outside the bar over $15 Knockum owed him. When she refused to pay, Gray said he hit her twice in the face, at which point a mutual friend separated them and brought him back into the club.

Knockum claimed Gray was angry after she rejected his advances. She said he followed her as she left the bar then hit her with a hard object on the back of the head. Knockum said she regained consciousness in an abandoned building where Gray raped her.

At trial, prosecutors noted that Knockum identified Gray as her attacker, and that doctors found bruises on her head. Gray’s defense team focused on the lack of physical evidence or witnesses tying him to the crime, and that Knockum’s injuries didn’t indicate she was raped. DNA testing didn’t exist at the time, and the evidence was not saved for later examination.

After 54 minutes of deliberations, the jury returned with its verdict: The 10 white jurors voted guilty, and the two black jurors, Elizabeth Sensley and Audrey Kaywood, not guilty. Gray was sentenced to life without parole.

Knockum died more than 20 years ago, according to a 2024 court filing by New Orleans prosecutors.

Sensley and Kaywood provided statements to Gray’s attorneys last year in which they said the racial makeup of the jury likely contributed to his conviction. Sensley said there were plenty of Black people in the jury pool, yet only two were selected. The prosecution used its only jury selection strike to prevent a third Black person from serving. At the time, Black people made up 67% of the city’s population.

“I knew that my voice would not matter,” Sensley told an investigator with Gray’s legal team, recounting how she felt about being Black on the nearly all-white jury. “I cannot believe that Lloyd Gray is still in prison.”

Elizabeth Sensley, a juror in Gray’s case, gave a statement to an investigator with Gray’s legal team recounting how she felt about being Black on the nearly all-white jury. (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News)

Kaywood told the investigator she had a “strong feeling” Gray might be innocent. “I wondered aloud to my husband, what if he didn’t do it. The case impacted me deeply,” she said. “I never wanted to serve on a jury again.”

Neither woman could be reached for comment.

Keeping Black people off juries was vital to prosecutors, as they were seen to be more “skeptical of the state,” according to a 2018 investigation by The New Orleans Advocate. In convictions with split-jury verdicts, Black jurors were 2.5 times more likely to dissent compared with white jurors, the report found. That’s why prosecutors used their strikes to remove prospective Black jurors at more than twice the rate as they did white jurors.

Gray’s legal team has noted that his conviction happened at a time of intense racial strife in New Orleans. Just a few years earlier, the Ku Klux Klan, led by David Duke, marched through the French Quarter to protest the city’s first Black mayor. The district attorney’s office was headed by Harry Connick Sr., whose 30-year tenure was stained by accusations of racial bias. During Connick’s time as district attorney, there were 32 cases of wrongful convictions, 27 of which involved prosecutorial misconduct, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Of those wrongfully convicted, 97% were Black.

Harry Connick Sr. in 1990. His 30-year tenure was stained by accusations of racial bias. (Bill Haber/AP Photo)

And yet Connick refused to crack down on his staff, drawing the ire of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As part of a wrongful-conviction case in which prosecutors hid blood evidence, Ginsburg said in a 2011 dissent that Connick had created a “tinderbox in Orleans Parish” where it was expected that prosecutors hide evidence from the defense. And when those violations occurred, she wrote, “Connick insisted there was no need to change anything, and opposed efforts to hold prosecutors accountable on the ground that doing so would make his job more difficult.” Five of the other eight justices disagreed with her.

After his conviction, Gray was sent to Angola, one of the most violent penitentiaries in the country at the time. The 19-year-old was frightened, but he wasn’t alone. A few years prior to his incarceration, his mother, Ora Gray, had taken a job as a guard at Angola. She worked the night shift in a watchtower that overlooked the same cell block that would briefly house her son.

Gray said he would wake up early every morning, sit by a window and look up into his mother’s tower, about 40 yards away. And every morning she would look down at him.

“I was sitting there to let her know that I was safe,” Gray said.

After about six weeks, Gray said he was transferred to another part of the prison. Gray assumed prison officials wanted to separate them, afraid his mother would hesitate to shoot if he tried to escape.

Ora Gray worked at Angola for more than three decades until she retired in 2012. She died eight years later. Lloyd Gray, wracked by guilt, said he should have cared for her in her final years and held her hand as she slipped away. Instead, he couldn’t even attend her funeral.

The system “was designed to put people of color in the situation I’m in,” he said.

Scenes from Angola in 2004. The prison is a former 19th-century antebellum plantation that was once owned by a slave trader. (Chandra McCormick via AP) A Deal Retracted

After nearly four decades in Angola, Gray had settled in as best he could. He held a mixture of jobs — tutor, office clerk, field hand, kitchen orderly — and tried to stay safe and out of trouble. But he told his lawyers he struggled to come to terms with where life had taken him.

Gray’s sister sent him a family picture, and he didn’t know who half the people were, especially the younger children. That was the hardest part, he said, contemplating everything that had been taken from him.

Gray’s prospects began to improve, however, in tandem with a growing sentiment that the criminal justice systems across the country were heavily weighted against poor and minority communities and needed to be reformed. A series of victories for this movement, on both the state and national levels, gave Gray hope, starting in 2018. That’s when 64% of Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment outlawing nonunanimous juries for any crime committed after Jan. 1, 2019.

Those who fought for the amendment focused their campaign on the damage such juries had done to the state’s minority communities: Black people make up 67% of the prison population but 80% of those convicted by split juries, according to a report from the Promise of Justice Initiative.

Split-jury verdicts also resulted in lengthier sentences. In Louisiana, 62% of all prisoners convicted by split juries are serving life sentences, like Gray, while only about 16% of the overall prison population is doing so, the report said.

That’s because the split-jury law created an incentive for prosecutors to hand down the most serious charges they could. Lesser crimes that carried shorter sentences were tried before a six-person jury that had to rule unanimously. Former prosecutor and state Sen. Dan Claitor said during a 2018 legislative hearing on nonunanimous juries that the numbers frequently led him to “up-charge” defendants “because it was easier for me to convict them with 10 out of 12 than it is six out of six.”

Louisiana’s voter referendum prohibiting nonunanimous juries was a significant victory, but it did little to address the plight of people like Gray who had already been convicted. And then, two years later, in Ramos v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 vote that split-jury verdicts violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a fair trial.

In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed to the court by President Donald Trump, wrote that the origin of split-jury verdicts could be “traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities.” In Louisiana, he wrote, the point was “to ensure that African-American juror service would be meaningless.”

In the months that followed, the Promise of Justice Initiative filed appeals for 1,049 Louisiana prisoners convicted by split juries. Hundreds of those, including Gray’s, were filed in New Orleans, where a new district attorney, Jason Williams, had just been elected.

New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams has taken on split-jury verdicts. (Jack Brook/AP Photo)

Williams took office in January 2021, one of a wave of progressive prosecutors across the country. He pledged to root out and reconsider potentially problematic cases involving wrongful convictions, excessive sentences or racial bias. He also took on split-jury verdicts.

Within days of being sworn in, Williams had established a civil rights division and hired Emily Maw, the former head of the Innocence Project New Orleans, to lead it. As of July 2024, the division had vacated or reduced the sentences of more than 350 men and women, 150 of whom were convicted by nonunanimous juries, according to the district attorney’s office.

In 2022, prosecutors with the unit proposed a potential deal to Gray’s attorneys: If he pleaded guilty to forcible rape, he would walk, according to Gray and his attorneys. The lesser charge carried a maximum sentence of 40 years; Gray had already served 41.

Such plea deals would soon prove to be the only shot people like Gray had at freedom. The same year Gray was offered a plea deal, the state’s highest court ruled in a 5-2 vote that the federal ban on nonunanimous juries was not retroactive, preventing more than 1,000 people convicted by split juries from having their day in court, according to estimates by the Promise of Justice Initiative.

The only Black member of the Louisiana Supreme Court, Justice Piper Griffin dissented, writing: “Such convictions were racially discriminatory in 1898. They were racially discriminatory in 1975. They remain racially discriminatory today.”

While he agreed with the majority that the state shouldn’t overturn all past split-jury verdicts, Justice James Genovese wrote in a partial dissent that prisoners who could demonstrate that their verdicts were “tainted by racial animus” should be “entitled to relief, regardless of the date of their conviction.” In particular, he said, new trials should be granted when it can be proven that a Black juror had voted to acquit the accused.

Louisiana’s rejection of retroactivity put a premium on the type of deals offered to Gray. But before his could be finalized and approved by the courts, it was upended in November 2023 by a massive political shift in Louisiana as Landry was elected governor.

Campaigning on a tough-on-crime platform, the former police officer and state attorney general vowed to accelerate executions, impose stiffer sentences and end the reign of “woke district attorneys” whom he accused of “playing a dangerous game of catch and release” with criminals.

Within his first few months in office, in March 2024, Landry signed Act 10, which prohibits district attorneys from waiving the two-year deadline for prisoners to challenge their convictions through post-conviction relief. Such a waiver is typically needed to revive decades-old cases like Gray’s.

It was set to go into effect Aug. 1, 2024.

Swastika on the Case File

The clock was now ticking for Gray and his attorneys. Given the drastic change in the political climate, they believed they needed to uncover additional evidence that Gray’s prosecution was unjust to increase his chances of being released. And they needed to do so before Williams lost the ability to have missed deadlines waived.

They caught their first break the same month Landry signed Act 10 into law. That’s when they requested and received Gray’s original 1980 case file from the district attorney’s office, something they had never seen before.

Colin Reingold, Gray’s attorney from 2021 to 2024, said he skimmed the file, blowing past the cover page, looking for any facts that could help secure Gray’s release. He then recalled receiving a Slack message from an investigator on his team who was also scouring through the new documents: Wow, this swastika on the front cover is sure crazy, isn’t it?

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t see it at all,” Reingold said. “And then I immediately went to the DA file and pulled it up. And, I mean, it’s unmistakable.”

That someone with the district attorney’s office would doodle the Nazi symbol on the case file of a Black man accused of rape in the early 1980s raises significant concerns about the motivations of the prosecution, Reingold said.

“You always suspect that there are, in some cases, bad actors with beliefs that could taint the whole process,” Reingold said. “But you never think that you’re going to find it in black and white like that.”

A doodle of a swastika on the upper right corner of the cover of Gray’s file (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News. Highlight added by ProPublica.)

The district attorney’s office does not dispute the swastika’s existence or that a staff member might have drawn it more than 40 years ago, according to a September filing by prosecutors. Assistant District Attorneys Jim Letten and William O’Hara prosecuted Gray’s case. O’Hara died in 2007. Letten, who would later serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Our office acknowledges that a derogatory symbol appears on a microfilmed copy of Mr. Gray’s case file,” Keith D. Lampkin, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, told Verite News and ProPublica. “There is no record indicating who drew the symbol or when it was drawn.”

The swastika was important to Gray’s claims of racial bias, but even more vital was the discovery two months later, in June 2024, that the two people who voted to acquit Gray were Black.

Erica Navalance, an attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative who currently represents Gray, said these new pieces of evidence spoke directly to the two factors Genovese said in his partial dissent should trigger a new trial: racial bias and proof that a Black juror voted to acquit.

Armed with this information, Gray’s attorneys filed a new appeal the day before Act 10 went into effect. They knew that Williams was under increasing pressure from Landry to abandon his efforts to reinvestigate old cases but hoped this new evidence would convince his office to keep their word and free Gray.

Publicly, Williams refused to back down, telling his conservative opponents during a legislative hearing last September that he could not ignore the city’s long history of wrongfully convicting Black people.

“In the city of New Orleans, we’ve been so good at mass-producing defective convictions that I think it is incumbent that we make sure that we let these cases be heard,” Williams said.

Eleven days later, Williams’ office took an unexpected position in its response to Gray’s appeal. Its hands were tied by Act 10, it said, and it could no longer waive missed deadlines. As a result, Gray would have to serve out the remainder of his life sentence, prosecutors claimed.

The district attorney’s office has maintained this position despite Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Robin Pittman stating in November as part of Gray’s case that its interpretation of Act 10 was wrong. As long as the appeal was filed before Aug. 1, Pittman said, it retained the ability to waive deadlines. Four months later, the state Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Taylor came to the same conclusion.

Navalance said she’d never before witnessed the state district attorney’s association rallying behind a law that would strip them of their own power.

“​​I thought our goal was to see justice done,” Navalance said. “I thought we all agreed that meant Lloyd Gray should come home 45 years after being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.”

Gray on a recent video call with his lawyers. He fears he will never leave Angola. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

The district attorney’s office told Verite News and ProPublica that its response to Gray’s case simply reflects statutory changes. “It is now for the court to determine whether Mr. Gray’s application overcomes those procedural requirements,” Lampkin said.

Gray said the whiplash of events over the past several years — from believing he once had a shot at freedom to fearing the door might be permanently closed — have felt like a “mirage.”

“You see it,” he said, “but when you reach for it, it’s not really there.”

Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research.

Clarification, Aug. 28, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify that Montgomery v. Louisiana retroactively barred the imposition of juvenile life without parole as a mandatory minimum sentence. The Supreme Court did not prohibit life without parole sentences for juveniles altogether.

by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.

Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.

But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”

Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.

It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.

In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.

And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.

This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.

The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.

ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.

Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Halimi was forced to flee Afghanistan in 2021. “I had no choice,” he said. (For ProPublica)

Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.

Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.

About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4x4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.

The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”

While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.

“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.

He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.

A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.

Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.

In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.

At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.

For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”

With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.

Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.

“The Taliban Gets DOGED” The segment in which Nate Cavanaugh, Elon Musk and others mislead viewers about the content in Halimi’s contract (Fox News)

Watch video ➜

At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”

Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.

Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”

“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”

“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.

He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”

In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”

In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.

While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.

Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.

Timeline of Events

March 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.

March 31, 3:58 p.m. EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.

March 31, 7:17 p.m. EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.

March 31, 7:29 p.m. EST, to April 1, 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.

April 1, 7:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.

Around April 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.

May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.

USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.

He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.

As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.

Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.

“He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known.”

After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.

Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)

The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.

“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”

It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.

When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”

Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.

Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.

Halimi, front, second from the left, with Afghan students in Egypt (Courtesy of Mohammad Halimi)

But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.

Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.

Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.

While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.

In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.

When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.

Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.

When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.

Nate Cavanaugh, the DOGE team member integral to the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.

But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.

It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.

But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.

When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.

Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.

The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.

Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.

They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.

An aircraft charter agreement shows that USIP chartered a plane during the period of the 2021 Kabul airlift in Afghanistan. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.

“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”

Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.

During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.

A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work (Obtained by ProPublica)

Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.

Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.

Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

“DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.

Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”

USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.

Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”

At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.

In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”

George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”

The USIP headquarters, with its insignia torn from the wall. The missing letters — U, S, I and P — form the group’s acronym. (Christopher Bing/ProPublica)

Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.

In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?

“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”

Design and development by Allen Tan.

by Wendi C. Thomas, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with MLK50. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Marilyn Gooch was already skeptical about one of her newest neighbors, xAI’s supercomputing facility, when her cousin walked across the street in June with a blue mailer from the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce.

Her cousin didn’t know what to make of the postcard featuring the logos of nine local, state and federal agencies and the chamber’s assurance that billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company operated “in full compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local regulations and oversight.” The facility — part of Musk’s bid to dominate the AI market — opened at a breakneck pace almost a year before, brought to Memphis, Tennessee, largely due to the efforts of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Across the country, communities are grappling with the boom of data centers and supercomputing facilities, which consume voracious amounts of electricity and water and can emit smog-producing pollutants. In places from Maricopa County, Arizona, to Prince William County, Virginia, residents have used zoning restrictions as a means to keep supercomputers at bay — an option not available to Memphians because the xAI building was already zoned for industrial use.

Since the opening of the xAI supercomputing facility, Gooch had joined residents and environmental justice advocates sounding off at meetings about potential health impacts of xAI. She learned about the area’s already high concentration of toxic emissions from nearby industrial plants, including an oil refinery, and the county’s high asthma rates.

Of greatest concern: the emissions from the dozens of methane gas turbines — each roughly the size of a semitrailer — that were initially used to power xAI’s new facility located less than 2 miles from her home in southwest Memphis. Based on its analysis of county health ordinances and federal regulations, the Southern Environmental Law Center has asserted in multiple official and legal documents that these turbines violated the Clean Air Act and should never have been allowed; the Shelby County Health Department disagrees.

Gooch saw the mailer as an attempt to quiet their concerns.

First image: Heat shimmers above gas turbines at the Memphis, Tennessee, xAI site in April. Second image: Marilyn Gooch. (First image: Ariel J. Cobbert for MLK50. Second image: Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America.)

In the face of intense public opposition, the chamber has gone to unusual lengths to promote xAI, whose $12 billion investment the chamber believes will transform the shrinking city into a global hub of technological innovation. The chamber wants Memphis to be known as part of the “Digital Delta,” expanding beyond its blue-collar identity as the distribution capital of the country and FedEx headquarters.

This all-out push includes a five-member special operations team to provide what it calls “round-the-clock concierge service” to ensure “seamless execution of the company’s rapid expansion plans.” The chamber also managed xAI’s PR efforts, and while it has not held open public meetings about xAI, it hosted at least 12 invitation-only meetings to tout the project’s benefits to Memphis. And the chamber sent its first mailer in recent memory, which spread incorrect information about the governmental oversight in place to monitor Musk’s new facility.

Former chamber president Beverly Robertson said she can’t recall another instance of the chamber doing such a full-court press for a company — but then again, she and others noted, Memphis has never attracted a company of xAI’s scale.

The public had no input into the opening of the facility in their community. As a private business, xAI had no obligation to seek community feedback, the chamber has said. And because xAI did not seek or receive tax incentives, it wasn’t subject to review from government bodies or elected officials, some of whom learned about xAI’s arrival from the news.

The community’s lone chance to hear from xAI in person came in April during a heated health department hearing about residents’ concerns over the gas turbines. Brent Mayo, an xAI executive, read a statement about the company’s plans to meet the highest emissions standards. He left before the public comment period began.

An xAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about the chamber’s mailer or to questions about the number of gas turbines powering the supercomputer.

The Chamber of Commerce announced xAI’s arrival with a page on its website titled “xAI Marks Its Spot in Memphis” over a photo of Mayo, center, flanked by chamber employees. (Screenshot by MLK50)

In this reliably Democratic and majority-Black city, some residents were upset by Musk’s alignment with President Donald Trump, his brief tenure as the chainsaw-wielding head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the antisemitic and racist posts from xAI’s chatbot Grok, which is powered by the supercomputer known as Colossus. In response to this criticism, the chamber says it defends projects, not people.

But what dominated the civic discussion was potential damage to the region’s air from xAI’s temporary turbines, especially the nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde they can emit, which contribute to smog. Even with brief exposure, smog increases the risk of respiratory problems, asthma and heart diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

The mailers sent in mid-June to residents in at least two neighborhoods, including Gooch’s, appeared to be addressing those fears, asserting that the chamber “will continue to prioritize compliance with existing standards and policies.”

For seven generations, Gooch’s family has lived in Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in southwest Memphis. Environmental justice activists say Boxtown has been plagued for decades by pollution from nearby industrial plants. In Gooch’s ZIP code, the median household income is just shy of $37,000 and the poverty rate is twice that of the city as a whole.

Boxtown residents gathered for a National Night Out event in the neighborhood in August. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America)

Gooch took the mailer from her cousin and scanned the alphabet soup of agency acronyms for the nine the chamber claims have “regulatory oversight and authority over xAI’s Supercomputing Facility.” Before retiring, she worked in human resources for 25 years and maintained workplace safety reports. “There’s no way they’re going to be monitoring and looking at all this,” she remembers thinking. “That’s so far beyond their reach.”

Only two agencies on that mailer have clear oversight over xAI’s impact on air quality and public health, the community’s primary concerns. The first is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which under the Trump administration aims to make the United States the world’s AI capital. Local oversight falls to the Shelby County Health Department, which says it is installing a long-awaited air monitor in south Memphis. Both agencies help ensure compliance with the Clean Air Act, the enforcement of which the current administration is weakening as part of a pattern of broader environmental rollbacks.

Two other agencies represented on the card — Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation — told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica that they have no authority over xAI’s supercomputing facility. The other five agencies say they do oversee some aspects of the facility, such as fire safety, zoning or potential whistleblower complaints — none of which address the health concerns that most preoccupied the community.

The mailer sent by Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce in June (MLK50)

The “Chamber’s mailer stating MLGW has regulatory oversight and authority over the xAI facility is in error. MLGW does not have regulatory authority or oversight of xAI or any business,” Ursula Madden, Memphis Light, Gas and Water’s spokesperson, said in an email.

Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation spokesperson Jennifer Donnals said in an email that “TDEC does not have regulatory oversight over supercomputer facilities.” The agency issued a permit related to construction and stormwater management at the Colossus site, she said.

Bobby White, the chamber’s chief government affairs officer, who said he wrote the text featured in the mailer, told MLK50 and ProPublica that he’d used the word regulatory “loosely.” He said the chamber sent the mailers to show residents that xAI didn’t set up shop in Memphis without consulting with anyone.

”It has been my intent to make sure people have understood that the company has essentially abided by rules and law as they currently exist,” White said in a written statement. “I have also in public and private ways tried to advise activists and leaders that changing this company’s or any company’s behavior comes down to changing the policy that allows for it.”

One of xAI’s staunchest critics is State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who represents a majority-Black district that includes Boxtown. Memphis Community Against Pollution, co-founded by Justin Pearson and now run by his brother KeShaun Pearson, was at the forefront of the fight to get the Shelby County Health Department to deny xAI’s permit for 15 permanent turbines. It was joined by other local groups including Young, Gifted & Green, the Chickasaw Group of the Sierra Club and Tigers Against Pollution.

State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, standing on the right, is one of xAI’s staunchest critics. (Andrea Morales/MLK50)

Justin Pearson said the chamber’s mailer misled residents by including agencies that have no authority or only indirect authority over xAI.

“It’s the red handkerchief of the magician,” Pearson said. “The propaganda that they are putting out to try and convince people that there’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to worry about, is only at the behest of a multibillion-dollar corporation.”

White said xAI did not ask the chamber to send the mailer and accused environmental activists of misleading residents with claims that “the turbines were somehow operating counter to existing policy and regulations.” He said he got involved after seeing his former sixth grade teacher, church members and community leaders he’s worked with for years at a “raucous town hall meeting on the subject of gas turbines, where people were being whipped into a frenzy and still leaving without good information.”

The chamber emphasized White’s message in a more nuanced way in a July webinar held less than a month after the mailers arrived in Gooch’s neighborhood: “XAl’s presence in Memphis has occurred with the oversight of, input from, and/or strategic alignment with the following agencies/organizations,” read a slide, with the logos of the same agencies.

Chambers of commerce exist to promote businesses and lobby for a pro-business climate, said Darrin Wilson, an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University who studies local economic development. But he said pro-business organizations should still be expected to provide accurate information.

“You want to make sure that the residents of Memphis and Shelby County have 100% accurate and full information around something that is going to impact their day-to-day lives,” he said, “so that they can make decisions for themselves and advocate on their own behalf.”

First and third images: Tigers Against Pollution, an environmental group, protest against xAI at the Shelby County Health Department in Memphis in July. Second image: Surveillance cameras monitor xAI’s Colossus site. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America)

The chamber maintains that xAI is an indisputable win for the city, expected to create an estimated 500 high-paying jobs and, in the first year alone, generate tens of millions of dollars in city and county property taxes, soaring to as much as $100 million next year. The city’s mayor plans to direct 25% of tax revenues from xAI’s first facility to the neighborhoods closest to the operation. xAI has recently committed to funding repairs and new athletic fields at four neighborhood public schools.

According to press reports, xAI’s presence is continuing to expand in the Memphis area. Its second supercomputer facility, Colossus 2, is expected to come online soon. Musk has announced he’s moving a power plant from overseas to power Colossus 2. And just across the state line in Mississippi, an xAI-affiliated firm purchased the site of a former Duke Energy power plant less than 2 miles from Colossus 2.

After months of weighing whether to approve xAI’s permit request to operate 15 permanent, cleaner turbines, the county health department granted the permit in July. The Southern Environmental Law Center has appealed the permit decision to the Shelby County Air Pollution Control board, an appointed body that hears such protests. The health department did not publicly explain its decision to grant the permit.

A gas turbine outside xAI in March, four months before the Shelby County Health Department approved a permit for 15 permanent turbines. (Andrea Morales/MLK50)

The chamber says that xAI has taken a number of steps to address environmental concerns. It claims that emissions from the permanent turbines, which will be a backup power source, will be far less than the maximum the EPA allows. To protect the electrical grid in times of peak demand, xAI is also using Tesla Megapack batteries as another backup power source.

In addition, the company is building an $80 million wastewater facility that will allow xAI, plus the Tennessee Valley Authority and a nearby steel manufacturer, to use recycled water to cool their plants instead of relying on the aquifer the region depends on.

“What we’re really seeing is a company that, quite frankly, is doing as much as you could hope a company would do in terms of being environmentally conscious,” White said.

Still, people in Gooch’s neighborhood have reason to worry about air quality. Last year, the American Lung Association gave Shelby County an F grade for ozone, an air pollutant that contributes to smog. The county also has the state’s highest rate of ER visits for asthma, and the city has been named an asthma capital by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

In southwest Memphis, the cumulative cancer risk associated with exposure to 13 carcinogens in the air was 4 times higher than the national average, according to a 2013 study by University of Memphis researchers.

Many of Marilyn Gooch’s relatives are buried at Boxtown’s New Park Memorial Gardens. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America)

“Every family member that I’ve had that lived in the Boxtown area has died of some form of cancer,” Gooch said, acknowledging that some were smokers.

Gooch, a member of the Boxtown Neighborhood Association, attended one of White’s xAI presentations at a nearby church this spring. She remembers White saying that Memphis needs more tax revenue and can’t afford to let xAI, or other companies, slide across the state line to Mississippi.

She’d planned to ask questions, but after listening to White focus on the finances, she decided not to.

“His whole spiel was about money, economics,” she recalled. “Not all money is good money.”

by Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, illustrations by Sam Green for ProPublica

When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat.

But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs.

Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions, ProPublica found, according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current federal employees.

Over 20,500 Workers Lost as of Aug. 16

Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.

Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines.

And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitos.

The Trump administration has refused to say how many workers have been lost so far. But ProPublica’s analysis reveals the cuts in unprecedented detail.

Who HHS Has Lost Since January

More than 3,000 scientists and public health specialists are gone.

Over 1,000 regulators and safety inspectors have also left.

In total, more than 20,500 workers, or about 18% of the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce, have left or been pushed out, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal worker departures using public information from the HHS employee directory.

The analysis is an undercount — it doesn’t include the hundreds or even thousands of workers who have received layoff notices but remain on administrative leave.

No health agency has been spared, with some important divisions losing more than 1 in 5 workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of public health, lost 15% of its staff; the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, 16%; and the Food and Drug Administration, which ensures the safety of most of what goes into people’s bodies — from baby formula to cancer drugs to hip implants — 21%.

Thousands of these employees were laid off or had their contracts cut, while some took buyouts or retired earlier than anticipated. Divisions have experienced a brain drain of epic proportions, ProPublica found, losing senior leaders behind some of the biggest health initiatives of the modern era, like the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Many of the cuts contradict what the administration has said about its priorities.

The secretary who has questioned the safety of vaccines has pushed out scores of regulators who work to make vaccines safe. And while he has declared a new era in the fight against chronic disease, he has decimated a center dedicated to that very goal.

Division leaders and staffers told ProPublica the cuts will lead their agencies to neglect their duties: Federal researchers will conduct fewer clinical trials and studies, regulators will conduct fewer or less-thorough inspections of egg farms and foreign drug factories, and public health specialists will be less prepared to combat outbreaks of deadly viruses. With exit and severance packages pending, many former and current workers would only speak anonymously, out of fear of retribution.

HHS did not dispute the findings of ProPublica’s analysis and didn’t directly respond to questions about the consequences of the cuts of thousands of scientists, public health specialists and safety inspectors. HHS also did not respond to our questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions. A spokesperson for the department said the idea that Kennedy is weakening public health is “dishonest.”

“Yes, we’ve made cuts — to bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue for accountability,” the spokesperson said in an email. “At the same time, we are working to redirect resources to science that delivers measurable impact, rebuilds public trust, and helps Make America Healthy Again.”

Former health secretary Xavier Becerra, who served under President Joseph Biden until earlier this year, called the cuts reckless.

“Public health isn’t a luxury — it’s a core function of government,” he said. “This hollowing out of expertise could leave us dangerously exposed. It takes years to build a professional workforce with the technical knowledge and public trust these roles require. Once you lose that, it’s not easy to get back.”

REGULATORS LOST

Spotlight: The Food and Drug Administration

When HHS announced the federal worker cuts, the department said that the FDA's safety inspectors and reviewers overseeing food, drugs and medical devices would be spared.

However, ProPublica has found that the FDA has lost more than 400 workers who support inspections of everything from dairy farms to seafood processors to blood banks, and who ensure that companies follow federal regulations. More than a third of them worked at its Office of Inspections and Investigations, which serves as the “eyes and ears” of the agency. More than 240 consumer safety specialists have left across the agency, including nearly 40 workers responsible for safeguarding food, plus about 220 chemists, biologists and toxicologists.

21% of FDA Workers Have Left

The Food and Drug Administration, the primary agency responsible for regulating food, drugs and vaccines, has lost over 900 scientists and health experts since January, along with over 500 regulators, investigators and compliance workers.

Many of the investigators who left had honed their skills over years of field visits and inspections, developing a sixth sense for possible violations. “I could walk into a plant and within five minutes could tell you if there was a rodent problem,” said a former division director at the investigations office who left the FDA after inspecting countless facilities over more than two decades. “Once you’ve been in a hot warehouse and you smell rodent urine, it’s like fresh-cut grass, you know exactly what it is the minute you smell it.”

With diminished capacity to spot potential problems, the system of oversight, which has historically been short-staffed, could break down, several former investigators told ProPublica. “They might miss something — a contaminant in a drug, a contaminant in a piece of food, a microbug in something because we had to freeze it for six months until they had enough person power to actually look at the sample,” the former director said. In April, CBS News reported that the investigations office was already planning on reducing routine “surveillance inspections” in response to worker cuts.

Key support staff who make sure investigators have everything they need, from essential supplies to travel visas, have also been cut. About 65% of the staff in the division responsible for budget, facilities and travel for the investigations office have left.

Dr. Peter Lurie, who was an associate commissioner at the FDA during the Obama administration, said that such drastic cuts will hamper the agency’s ability to recruit future inspectors and scientists.

“The big attraction of federal employment has always been its stability and its benefits, and we’re at the point that the stability is undermined,” said Lurie, who is currently the president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “This is a set of cuts that is going to hamstring the FDA for a decade or more.”

Vaccine Regulators Pushed Out

One of the divisions of the FDA most impacted by workforce cuts has been the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It ensures the safety and quality of biological products for human use, like red blood cells for people with sickle cell disease, immunotherapy for those battling cancer and vaccines for everyone. Since January, the center has lost about 500 people, or 26% of its workforce.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the center played a crucial role in ensuring the quick rollout of safe and effective vaccines. It reviews and approves new vaccines and oversees their manufacturing and use. The center also conducts its own research to support the development of vaccines.

But in February, when the administration began slashing the federal workforce, the research stalled. “At some point, we decided which experiments were the priority for us,” a former CBER scientist told ProPublica.

“The center was already somewhat understaffed for the workload,” said Dr. Peter Marks, who led the center from 2016 to 2025. “Now with these cuts, particularly cuts of the most experienced individuals who have left for various reasons, the agency, and in particular the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is just a shadow of its former self.”

Marks, who helped launch the program to rapidly develop COVID-19 vaccines, resigned under pressure in March, citing an “unprecedented assault on scientific truth” in his departure letter. Kennedy, who has long been a fierce critic of vaccines, has used his office to further sow doubt about immunizations, despite decades of evidence of their safety and efficacy.

Two of the center’s top cell and gene therapy officials were placed on leave this summer. HHS did not respond to questions about the high-profile exits, but it has previously suggested the gene therapy leaders weren’t aligned with the administration’s goals and said that Marks had no place at the agency if he did not support “restoring science to its golden standard.”

As civil servants have departed the center, political appointees have gained a foothold. Under the leadership of Dr. Vinay Prasad, who the administration brought in to lead CBER in May, the center “was run as a political organization,” said Marks. “Decisions were not being made on science, nor were they even being made on articulated policy. They were being made essentially on an arbitrary basis.” The New York Times reported that Prasad overruled his center’s experts on the use of COVID vaccines, recommending restricting the shots. Prasad did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

A spokesperson for HHS said in an email that Kennedy was not antivaccine and that the agency would continue to regulate immunizations. “The FDA remains steadfast in enforcing rigorous vaccine oversight, ensuring the highest standards of safety and protection for all Americans,” said the spokesperson, adding that Kennedy was “pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability.”

SCIENTISTS CUT

Spotlight: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In May, Kennedy claimed in a Senate committee hearing that HHS had not fired any “working scientists,” only targeting those in IT or administration. “In terms of working scientists, our policy was to make sure none of them were lost and that that research continues,” he said.

But ProPublica has found that more than 1,050 scientists, physicians and public health specialists — many of whom were conducting research and disease surveillance — have left or been pushed out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone since January.

Over a Thousand Scientists Lost

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost over 3,000 workers. A third of them worked as scientists or in health care roles.

One of the key responsibilities of scientists at the CDC is surveillance — gathering and studying data on deaths or disease outcomes; many of the experts leading this work are gone. The team tracking maternal and infant health outcomes, which helps the public understand how people die in childbirth, has been placed on administrative leave. The program cataloguing the frequency of common injuries, such as car accidents, overdoses, dog bites and drownings, was cut. The staff that monitors lead poisoning in children was eliminated.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, who led the CDC during the Obama administration, said the cuts were endangering the public.

“What public health does is it helps us see the invisible: See whether it’s the microbes that are killing us, or the toxins that are poisoning us, or the trends in diseases that we need to respond to protect ourselves and our families,” he said. “To the extent that these actions weaken our ability to see health trends and health risks, they make Americans less safe.”

Chronic Disease Experts Forced Out

During one of his January Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy declared war on chronic disease. “President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again,” he testified.

Despite this proclamation, Kennedy-approved cuts slashed the staff of the CDC’s chronic disease center by about 20%; nearly half of those lost were scientists and public health workers.

Several divisions of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion have also been radically diminished: 45% of its oral health division, which protects the teeth of kids whose parents can’t afford dentists, has been lost, along with more than 35% of the division that focuses on preventing heart disease and strokes.

The cuts are worse than they appear on paper because they don’t reflect the people on administrative leave. At the center’s smoking and health office, for example, our analysis shows more than a quarter of the workforce is gone, but according to multiple former staffers, only one federal employee is actually still working there.

As the office emptied out following a wave of mass layoffs and forced retirements, a handful of stragglers frantically boxed up historical research, guidance documents and reports so that they wouldn’t be destroyed. “It’s 60 years of work that could be thrown in trash dumps,” said a former staffer.

The work of the office, which tracks tobacco use and supports state smoking prevention programs, has essentially been eliminated, said multiple workers. Federal grants have been delayed, leading some states to cut their programs. While cigarette smoking has decreased in recent decades, vaping and e-cigarette use has surged, particularly among young people, even as evidence mounts of their dangers. But after this year, the office’s tracking of youth smoking and tobacco use is expected to be discontinued.

“If eliminated, the expertise that existed at the Office on Smoking and Health, it doesn’t just pause, it disappears, and that would take years to rebuild,” said Ranjana Caple, the national senior manager of advocacy at the American Lung Association. “The nation loses its ability to prevent the next wave of nicotine addiction, protect kids and help people quit.”

RESEARCH STAFF TARGETED

Spotlight: The National Institutes of Health

One of the central roles of the NIH is its funding of research at academic and biomedical institutions. It awards roughly $30 billion annually. Since January, the administration has terminated more than 1,450 research grants and withheld more than $750 million in funding.

Even the grants that survived are not being paid out, partly because the administration has fired the workers who administer the funding, said former and current staffers.

“There were all of these cuts to the people who deliver the grant funds, the people who are in charge of the funds and reviewing the funds,” said Anna Culbertson, a former NIH scientific program specialist who was a probationary federal employee and was laid off in February. “The consequence of grant funding delays is that some experiments and trials that take years may have to be restarted.”

At three NIH institutes focused on mental health, aging and infectious disease, 30% or more of the workers in divisions responsible for approving and dispatching money have been cut, leading to substantial delays in payouts. A recent analysis by STAT found that NIH grant funding levels have dropped nearly 30% compared with previous years.

The Nation’s Primary Medical Research Agency Has Lost 16% of Its Workforce

The National Institutes of Health has lost more than 7,000 workers since January. Because HHS does not provide job titles for the majority of workers at the NIH, we are unable to show worker departures by job category.

“With the resignations, retirements, firings and contractors being lost, the capacity to get grants out the door is diminished,” said a scientific review staffer still with the agency. “We just can’t get everything done.”

The delays have forced universities to pause research, fire staff and even turn away students. At the University of Washington, the renewal of 73 federal grants totaling over $61 million was delayed as of April, leading to furloughs and layoffs, court documents reveal. And at the University of California, the delays have contributed to a systemwide hiring freeze on new faculty and staff. The financial instability created by the funding delays led the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to reduce admissions to its doctoral programs by 250 students.

Infectious Disease Researchers Scaled Back

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which supports research that develops and tests vaccines, lost more than 850 workers, or roughly 17% of its workforce, since January.

The institute has long played a critical role in combating infectious disease: It funded decades of research on coronaviruses, laying the foundation for vaccines; it extensively supported HIV/AIDS research, which has transformed the disease from a death sentence to a chronic condition; and it has trained scores of scientists and researchers, fostering their careers and discoveries.

But in recent years, it has become a target of the right. Its former director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the center for nearly four decades until 2022 and was a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, was accused by Republican lawmakers of “wielding unchecked power over public health policy” by encouraging temporary stay-at-home orders. Citing his leadership, Senate Republicans in 2023 proposed abolishing the institute and divvying up its functions.

Since January, scores of senior officials at the institute have been forced out or placed on administrative leave, which several former high-level employees told ProPublica they believed was political retribution in response to pandemic policies. HHS did not respond to questions about whether the moves were retaliatory.

The most recent director of the institute, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, was forced to choose between dismissal or a reassignment in an outpost of the Indian Health Service.

“They’re taking out the head,” said a NIAID scientist who recently left, “because then there’s no one to protect us.”

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

Art Direction by Andrea Wise.

by Pratheek Rebala, Annie Waldman and Brandon Roberts

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

The Trump administration has refused to reveal how many workers have left federal health agencies amid a massive purge. Without official figures, ProPublica turned to a federal employee directory to quantify the impact.

Several news outlets — including ProPublica — have used this directory to show who is entering and leaving the federal government, spot political appointments and identify members of the Department of Government Efficiency. According to multiple former and current employees and health agency documents, the HHS employee directory helps workers locate and authenticate their colleagues. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions.

To understand staffing changes over time, ProPublica has been regularly archiving the HHS directory since before President Donald Trump returned to office. Unlike official government worker datasets, which are often months out of date and incomplete, directory data provides a more current picture of who is, and isn’t, employed at the nation’s largest health agencies.

The HHS directory covers staff in the department’s main office and across more than a dozen health agencies and institutions, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

The directory provides a worker’s name, email address, agency, office and job title. Some employees are flagged as “non-government,” indicating they may be working on contract or have another temporary status.

While official HHS employment figures suggest its workforce is about 82,000 employees, the directory contained nearly 140,000 entries. The difference is explained by nongovernment workers such as contractors, fellows, interns and guest researchers. Roughly 30,000 records in the directory were explicitly marked as nongovernment, but this label was far from comprehensive. We found hundreds of workers who had titles that suggested they were contractors but were not flagged as nongovernment.

While these workers were not directly employed by the government as civil servants, we included them in our analysis because they are crucial to agency operations, particularly at research-heavy institutions such as the NIH, FDA and CDC. We excluded interns, students and volunteers, as well as directory entries that were tied to group mailboxes or conference rooms rather than individual people.

To analyze turnover, we tracked when a worker’s email address first appeared and last appeared. When an email address disappeared, we marked it as a departure. When a new one appeared, we marked it as a hire. To quantify cuts to the workforce, we counted the number of entries that appeared in the directory before Jan. 25 and disappeared on or after that date. We chose Jan. 25 to account for delays we observed in updates to the directory. Starting the analysis a few days after Trump was sworn in should exclude most political appointees who left at the end of the Biden administration from our analysis, but there may be cases where a political appointee was dropped from the directory after this date. Our analysis includes departures through Aug. 16.

While our analysis is intended to understand workforce cuts, not all departures are layoffs. Workers may have left for other reasons, including retirements, resignations, buyouts and contract cuts.

To test the directory’s accuracy, we spot-checked employment status using LinkedIn, other open-source records and interviews. While we did not find up-to-date, publicly available profiles that matched the directory for every person we searched, we were able to confirm the employment status for dozens of current and former workers.

Some high-profile departures enabled us to test our methodology: Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was appointed to lead the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in May, left the agency in July and resumed his role again in August. The directory data accurately reflected each of these employment changes.

We also wanted to understand the role of the lost workers and how their departures would affect their agencies. For this, we relied on an “organization” field in the directory, which allowed us to link employees to their specific office within HHS using public organization charts. At large agencies, this field proved incredibly valuable to understanding the exact divisions where the losses took place.

Job titles in the directory are inconsistent, so we used a local large language model classifier to assign each title into one of four major groups: science/health, regulators/compliance, tech/IT and other. We manually reviewed the job titles in each category and looked up former employees on LinkedIn to confirm their employment status and nature of the work they performed. Our totals for the NIH are an undercount because 78% of entries there do not list a role. We relied on workers’ most recently listed role, which may reflect a job a person had for only a short time.

The employee directory is the best data we have access to, but it is not without limitations.

Our understanding is that each record represents an individual worker. There are some cases where our analysis counts a worker twice because they were seen in two agencies or had multiple email addresses, likely due to a name change or clerical fix. Our review of these records suggests these types of duplicates are uncommon.

Our rigorous review found some instances where the directory is not up to date. We excluded the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from our analysis because its directory has not received regular updates. We also excluded the Indian Health Service because it has an abnormally high rate of churn.

We are not counting about 2,500 entries that can be found in search but that are missing a detailed record or do not list an email.

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

by Drew Shaw, Fort Worth Report

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

Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, came one day after President Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots. The president lacks the unilateral power to decide how individual states run elections, but his declaration speaks to long-brewing and unfounded claims by some conservatives that the country’s electoral system is insecure and vulnerable to widespread fraud. Trump has repeatedly and falsely asserted that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden.

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, who heads up the commissioners court, has also raised numerous questions about the security of local elections, helping to launch an electoral integrity unit in the county after he became judge in 2022. As of last summer, however, the unit had received fewer than 100 allegations of voter fraud. He and fellow Republican commissioners also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” O’Hare said at the time. And commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about what they said were left-leaning groups holding registration drives. (ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have previously written about O’Hare’s political influence in North Texas.)

On Tuesday, O’Hare voted with the two Republican commissioners on the court to reduce the number of polling sites in the county to 216, down from 331 in 2023. The decision also cut down the number of early voting sites.

County officials said the move was to save money, as they historically see low voter turnout in nonpresidential elections.

Throughout the meeting, O’Hare repeatedly emphasized that the cuts were intended to make the election more efficient. He argued that both the switch to county-wide voting in 2019, which allows voters to cast a ballot at any polling site in the county, and the expected low turnout made the cuts appropriate.

"I would venture to guess 99% of the public cannot name a single thing on (the 2025 ballot),” he said during the meeting.

Fewer voting sites means fewer voters, Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told the Report.

“If you move a polling place farther away from someone’s house, then they’re less likely to vote because you’ve increased the cost of voting,” said Rottinghaus, who has studied poll placement and its impact on turnout. “The cost can be your time. It can be your gas.”

The county’s move falls in line with a national trend that generally sees Republican-led states and localities “restrain and restrict” how voting operates — often in the name of discouraging illegal voting or, in Tarrant County’s recent case, cutting costs, Rottinghaus said. This could look like reducing voting locations or shortening early voting hours, he said.

Texas has led multiple efforts to make going to the polls more difficult, he said, such as making mail-in ballots harder to obtain and requiring photo IDs when casting a ballot.

No single law dramatically impacts voter turnout, Rottinghaus said, rather, it’s the collective of ever-changing policies that can discourage people from voting.

“The more you move around how voting occurs, like the hours and the locations, the harder it is for voters to understand exactly what they’re supposed to do and when,” he said. “A confused voter is usually a nonvoter.”

This is not the first time Tarrant County has been at the forefront of changing political headwinds. Earlier this summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw the county precincts; such changes usually happen after the decennial census rather than in the middle of the decade. O’Hare admitted the goal of the redrawn maps was to favor Republican candidates.

“This is about Republican versus Democrat, period,” O’Hare told Dallas television station WFAA ahead of the commissioners’ June 3 vote. “If it passes with one of the maps that I would want to see pass, it’s a very strong likelihood that we will have three Republicans on the Commissioners Court.”

In July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added redistricting to the agenda of a special legislative session — a step he was apparently reluctant to take until he received a call from Trump to discuss the issue, the Tribune reported. The proposal has sparked a national fight over the redrawing of congressional maps. On Wednesday, the GOP-led Texas House took an initial vote adopting a new map designed to increase the number of Republican seats in the U.S. Congress.

Abbott has also fanned concerns about allegations of illegal voting, last year announcing the removal of more than 1 million ineligible voters from the state’s rolls, including more than 6,500 potential noncitizens. An investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the number of alleged noncitizens the governor cited was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

Concerns About the Cuts

More than three dozen speakers at Tuesday’s meeting denounced the move to cut polling sites and early voting locations, with some raising concerns that it amounted to the suppression of Black, Hispanic and college-age voters. Several speakers called the cuts a more extreme version of O’Hare’s failed effort to remove eight early voting locations at colleges last year. Only one person spoke in favor of the reductions.

Sabrina Ball, who opposed reducing the polling sites, said she has worked as an election judge in Republican Commissioner Manny Ramirez’s district in northwest Tarrant County. She said she’s seen firsthand people working hard to find the time to get to a polling location and vote.

“You’re not saving money. You’re sacrificing democracy to save a buck,” she said.

The two Democratic commissioners, Roderick Miles Jr. and Alisa Simmons, voted against the changes after unsuccessfully trying to delay the decision.

“Everybody deserves the right to have a place that they are comfortable with and familiar with to go and to cast their vote,” said Miles, who represents predominantly Black neighborhoods that saw a reduction in voting locations. He later added, “To dismantle or take those rights away from us that we worked hard to get is unacceptable at any level.”

Simmons said it was inappropriate to reduce voting locations as Tarrant County’s population grows. She pointed out that the Republican members of the Commissioners Court used that growth as a reason to redistrict the county’s precincts midcycle this year — a change that would significantly increase the chances of a GOP candidate defeating her in 2026.

A Texas law passed in May reduces the county’s minimum Election Day voting locations to 212 — rolling back a 2023 requirement of 347.

Tarrant County Commissioners Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, first image, and Manny Ramirez, a Republican, second image. The move to reduce polling places passed by a 3-2 vote. (Drew Shaw/Fort Worth Report)

Tarrant County Election Administrator Clinton Ludwig said the sites meet the state’s new “bare minimum,” with “a little bit of wiggle room” in case certain planned locations fall through. He told commissioners that the initially proposed cuts aimed to save about $1 million.

He said he based the reductions on voter turnout in 2023, which saw about 12.5% registered voters cast ballots, he said. Locations’ accessibility and ability to securely store voting information were also considered, Ludwig said.

He said that no commissioner had any influence on the list and that no partisan analysis was taken into account.

Ludwig and O’Hare’s office did not immediately respond to requests to comment following the vote. O’Hare has also not responded to ProPublica and the Tribune’s previous reporting about him, declining multiple interview requests and refusing to answer questions, though a spokesperson sent the newsrooms a list of eight of his major accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.

Rottinghaus said some counties “yo-yo” year to year in the number of polling places they have. Elections such as November’s typically have fewer locations than presidential and midterm ones, he said. Still, Tarrant County’s reduction seems “aggressive,” he said.

Once the number of polling places goes down, it usually stays down, Rottinghaus said.

“You’re going to generally see that same number continue for at least the near term,” he said.

Though he ultimately voted to reduce polling locations, Ramirez pushed back on the initial list of cuts to early voting sites, some of which he said were established and popular with voters. Ramirez said the county must balance access and efficiency. Commissioners then added back nine early voting locations. O’Hare was the lone vote against that move, saying some of those sites had historically low turnout.

“The formula for where you put these voting sites has to be scientific,” Ramirez told the Report ahead of the vote. “It should be population-based and proximity to additional site-based.”

Several Fort Worth City Council members urged their constituents to speak against the effort in the lead-up to the vote.

Council member Carlos Flores, who represents parts of northwest Fort Worth, issued a statement against the vote, saying fewer sites negatively impact diverse communities. In a statement to the Report, he added that limited polling locations and inconvenient voting procedures contribute to low turnout.

Mia Hall, who represents southwest Fort Worth, sent a news release to her district on Monday, decrying the proposed cuts in parts of her district that are predominantly Black or Hispanic.

“These communities have long fought for equitable access to the ballot box, and removing their polling locations is simply unacceptable,” Hall wrote. “While I understand the pressures of state regulations and budgetary constraints, disenfranchising entire communities is not an acceptable response.”

Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org.

by Sharon Lerner

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

Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.

Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.

McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.

“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.

As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.

For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.

He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.

In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”

Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”

As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.

Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.”

Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.

Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet.

The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.”

But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism.

“I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.”

McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism.

It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk?

The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized.

Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses in California. While others had asserted the rise was due to increased awareness and broadened diagnostic criteria, Hertz-Picciotto found those factors could only partially explain it. She and others went on to document additional contributors to autism risk, including parental age at the time of birth, a mother’s fever during pregnancy and more traditional environmental considerations, such as chemical exposures.

McCanlies hadn’t studied autism. But she offered Hertz-Picciotto her experience in genetics and epidemiology as well as the considerable resources of her agency. NIOSH was established in 1970 to investigate the dangers of the workplace, and its statisticians and industrial hygienists were among the world’s experts on the health impacts of chemical exposures.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Nate Smallwood for ProPublica)

Their first collaboration, published in 2012, used Hertz-Picciotto’s data to see if parents of children with autism were more likely to have been exposed to chemicals already thought to be dangerous to the developing brain. The work was technical and time-consuming, but the analysis showed a clear relationship: Mothers and fathers of children with autism were more likely than the parents of unaffected children to have been exposed to solvents such as lacquer, varnish and xylene on the job. These solvents evaporate quickly and can be easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Chemical plant workers, painters, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, cleaners and medical personnel are among those who may be exposed to these solvents.

The sample size was small — just 174 families. But the results lined up with recent findings showing possible links between autism and exposure to metals and certain solvents during pregnancy or early childhood, including a solvent called methylene chloride. They also tracked with studies linking the chemicals to miscarriage, reproductive problems, birth defects and developmental problems other than autism.

McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto followed up with a 2019 study that looked at more than 950 families. It showed that women exposed to solvents at work during pregnancy and the three months leading up to it were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism than women not exposed to the chemicals. (The study did not find a link for chemically exposed men.)

Their third study, published in 2023, took the link between solvent exposure and autism as a starting point. Using blood samples to examine the genetic makeup of the parents of children with autism, McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto found that when exposed to solvents on the job, people with specific variants of 31 genes had an especially elevated risk of having a child with autism. Their genetic makeup appeared to increase the risk that solvents by themselves posed. Some of those 31 genes help cells connect with one another; others play a role in helping cells migrate to different areas so they can grow into the various parts of the brain; still others ensure that cells clear away toxic substances.

Researchers were also making strides under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of Health and Human Services, which has financed investigations into dozens of environmental contaminants. Several have been linked to autism, including air pollution, certain pesticides, a plastic additive known as BPA and diesel exhaust, which causes “autism-like behavioral changes” in mice. In 2021, Hertz-Picciotto co-published a study linking “forever chemicals” called PFOA and PFNA with the condition. (In 2023, a second paper also found an association with PFNA.) Other government-funded research has established a link between autism and another solvent, trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines.

Together, the results have shown that many exposures can increase the likelihood of autism, and that there can be multiple causes for any one person.

At least one exposure can have the opposite effect: A study by a researcher named Rebecca Schmidt — and funded by the NIEHS and NIH — found that a B vitamin called folic acid was associated with a significant decrease in the chances of an autism diagnosis. More than a dozen studies have since confirmed the association.

One problem hung over much of autism research. The sweeping diagnosis includes everyone from people who treasure their neurological differences to those with debilitating symptoms, including repetitive behaviors, excruciating sensitivity to touch and sounds, and difficulty responding to social situations. McCanlies and Hertz–Picciotto wondered whether certain chemicals were linked to the most severe cases or to specific symptoms.

In 2023, they set about finding out.

They were preparing to submit their study for publication when newly inaugurated Trump put Kennedy in charge of America’s health.

Despite having made chronic health conditions the focus of his agenda, Kennedy has quietly abided environmental policies that will exacerbate these problems, including autism.

The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiple studies have linked to autism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditions contributing to autism. According to an EPA spokesperson, more than 2,300 workers have so far elected to leave the agency through Trump administration programs encouraging early retirement and resignation.

The EPA also began canceling grants, including one it had given to Schmidt, the researcher who studied the protective effect of folic acid. Schmidt had been awarded $1.3 million to determine whether air pollution from wildfires might increase the risk of various neurological conditions. Schmidt and her colleagues had just done preliminary analysis and found that there was a significant association between wildfire pollution exposure and autism when she received a letter saying that the grant was terminated because the project was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” After a judge ruled in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of University of California researchers alleging their funding was unlawfully terminated, her grant was reinstated last month. But the EPA has appealed the judge’s ruling, leaving Schmidt unsure about the fate of the project.

Schmidt said there is an urgent need to finish the study and warn people about how to avoid the dangers from wildfire smoke by staying indoors and using air filters and N95 masks. “Millions of pregnant women are getting exposed as we speak,” she said.

Meanwhile, Kennedy has presided over his own gutting of research. Known for sharing videos of his bare-chested workouts, he likened his agency’s cuts to getting rid of “unhealthy fat,” but his plan to reduce the staff of HHS by 20,000 amounts to slashing the workforce by roughly a quarter, including veteran scientists. Among the divisions Kennedy eliminated was one that studied air quality and collected data on chemicals found in human blood. Some workers in the division were subsequently reinstated. After a lawsuit and pressure from Congress, HHS has also rehired some NIOSH workers, though none at the division where McCanlies worked. Those whose jobs have not been reinstated remain on administrative leave.

People participated in a candlelight vigil (first image) in front of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (second image) announced cuts to HHS this year. (First image: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images. Second image: Samuel Corum/Getty Images.)

The reorganization plan for HHS involves consolidating the remnants of these parts of the agency, along with several others, into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. Asked about the transition, an HHS spokesperson told ProPublica in an email that the reorganization would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year and that “critical programs will continue.”

Meanwhile, a ProPublica review of federal data found that more than $40 million in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for dozens of autism-related research projects were canceled under Kennedy’s watch. Some had been awarded to universities the administration is now targeting, while others ran afoul of Trump’s “anti-woke” priorities by mentioning gender and other verboten terms. Among them was a grant to Harvard University to use data on nearly half a million Israeli children to evaluate whether men’s exposure to air pollution affects the risk of having a child with autism. (A small number of grants have been recently reinstated.) A survey of researchers conducted by the Autism Science Foundation, which tallied cuts to training grants and the anticipated cuts to future grants over the next few years, estimated that the total loss of funding could be tens of millions more.

“We’re talking about probably decades of delays and setbacks,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation. “To take money away from all these areas of need to focus on a question that the HHS director considers high priority seems not scientific and not the way that science is done.”

Housed under the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy’s new $50-million Autism Data Science Initiative is looking to fund two- to three-year research projects that plumb large public and private datasets to find “possible contributors to the causes of autism” as well as conduct research on existing treatments.

With the deadline for his promised discovery fast approaching, Kennedy recently acknowledged that his initial six-month timeline was overly optimistic. He told Carlson he should have “some initial indicator answers” about the causes of autism by September, his original deadline, and promised unqualified answers within another six months.

While the NIH typically releases the names of the scientists on the committees that review grant applications and the criteria they use to review them, it has not done so in this case. Nor has the agency clarified what role NIH staff will have in awarding the grants, who will make the final selection, or what terms and conditions researchers must agree to if they receive funds. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who will make the final grant selection and why the agency has not yet made this information public, but a video NIH created for applicants of the funding acknowledges that reviews of the proposals “do not follow the traditional NIH review process.” According to the video, the process was “designed to ensure integrity, fairness and transparency.”

Hertz-Picciotto, who laments the fact that Kennedy is “shutting down good studies,” is among the researchers in her field who have decided to apply for the funding. “Some of his agenda is really ridiculous and very counterproductive,” she said. “But if something good can be done with this money, I’d like to be part of that.”

If her project is approved, she plans to hire McCanlies to consult on it.

McCanlies said she agreed to work on the project because she has complete confidence in her longtime colleague, if not the health secretary. “I don’t trust him at all,” she said.

McCanlies in her home office in Morgantown, West Virginia (Nate Smallwood for ProPublica)

McCanlies had never paid much attention to Kennedy — or to politics. Throughout the seven presidential administrations that governed while she had been at NIOSH, her work had been utterly uncontroversial. But weeks after his confirmation, she knew her job was in peril. She had deleted the first email she received from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. The tone was so strange and disrespectful, hinting that she might be punished if she didn’t respond by confirming her email address, that she assumed it was a phishing attempt. By the time she received a second, suggesting that she find a “higher productivity” job in the private sector, firings and budget cuts were rolling across federal agencies.

The 58-year-old, who has short, greying hair, hazel eyes and three graduate degrees, hadn’t been ready to leave NIOSH’s Health Effects Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, a place where she had mentored young colleagues, taught a lunchtime meditation class and helped conduct several yearslong research projects. The lab is also where she met Fred, her husband, another Ph.D. scientist who studied workplace chemical hazards. She reluctantly put in for early retirement just days before the entire lab was dissolved.

McCanlies spent her final days at NIOSH finishing her last paper, which explores the association between workplace chemicals and the severity of autism. Normally, she would have her supervisor sign off on her submission to a journal, but he had already lost his job. The rest of her colleagues were gone, too, and the lab’s hallways were empty as she gave the manuscript a final edit.

She felt proud of the study, which answered some of the questions she and Hertz-Picciotto had posed years ago. There were indeed links between exposures and the severity of autism. Parents’ exposure to plastics was “consistently and significantly associated” with lower cognitive scores in their children who had autism, increases in “aberrant behaviors” and deficits in basic life skills, the study found. The exposure was also linked to particular symptoms of autism, including social withdrawal, hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping and body rocking. Higher autism severity scores and weaker daily living skills were also linked with ethylene oxide. Last year, the EPA imposed stricter limits on the chemical, which is used as a sterilizer. But the agency is now reconsidering those restrictions, and, in July, Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from them.

The paper, which is now available as a preprint, recommended that regulatory agencies “consider increasing awareness of these hazards and make clear recommendations for implementing protective measures at the worksite.”

Having just watched so many occupational health experts forced to leave their jobs, McCanlies suspected their advice was unlikely to be heeded anytime soon.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke

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Microsoft, as a provider of cloud services to the U.S. government, is required to regularly submit security plans to officials describing how the company will protect federal computer systems.

Yet in a 2025 submission to the Defense Department, the tech giant left out key details, including its use of employees based in China, the top cyber adversary of the U.S., to work on highly sensitive department systems, according to a copy obtained by ProPublica. In fact, the Microsoft plan viewed by ProPublica makes no reference to the company’s China-based operations or foreign engineers at all.

The document belies Microsoft’s repeated assertions that it disclosed the arrangement to the federal government, showing exactly what was left out as it sold its security plan to the Defense Department. The Pentagon has been investigating the use of foreign personnel by IT contractors in the wake of reporting by ProPublica last month that exposed Microsoft’s practice.

Our work detailed how Microsoft relies on “digital escorts” — U.S. personnel with security clearances — to supervise the foreign engineers who maintain the Defense Department’s cloud systems. The department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Microsoft’s security plan, dated Feb. 28 and submitted to the department’s IT agency, distinguishes between personnel who have undergone and passed background screenings to access its Azure Government cloud platform and those who have not. But it omits the fact that workers who have not been screened include non-U.S. citizens based in foreign countries. “Whenever non-screened personnel request access to Azure Government, an operator who has been screened and has access to Azure Government provides escorted access,” the company said in its plan.

The document also fails to disclose that the screened digital escorts can be contractors hired by a staffing company, not Microsoft employees. ProPublica found that escorts, in many cases former military personnel selected because they possess active security clearances, often lack the expertise needed to supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. Microsoft has told ProPublica that escorts “are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data” and preventing harm.

Microsoft’s reference to the escort model comes two-thirds of the way into the 125-page document, known as a “System Security Plan,” in several paragraphs under the heading “Escorted Access.” Government officials are supposed to evaluate these plans to determine whether the security measures disclosed in them are acceptable.

In interviews with ProPublica, Microsoft has maintained that it disclosed the digital escorting arrangement in the plan, and that the government approved it. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other government officials have expressed shock and outrage over the model, raising questions about what, exactly, the company disclosed as it sought to win and keep government cloud computing contracts.

None of the parties involved, including Microsoft and the Defense Department, commented on the omissions in this year’s security plan. But former federal officials now say that the obliqueness of the disclosure, which ProPublica is reporting for the first time, may explain that disconnect and likely contributed to the government’s acceptance of the practice. Microsoft previously told ProPublica that its security documentation to the government, going back years, contained similar wording regarding escorts.

Former Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman, who said he was unfamiliar with the digital escorting process before ProPublica’s reporting, called it a “case of not asking the perfect question to the vendor, with every conceivable prohibited condition spelled out.”

In a LinkedIn post about ProPublica’s investigation, Sherman said such a question “would’ve smoked out this crazy practice of ‘digital escorts.’” His post continued: “The DoD can’t be exposed in this way. The company needs to admit this was wrong and commit to not doing things that don’t pass a common sense test.”

Experts have said allowing China-based personnel to perform technical support and maintenance on U.S. government computer systems poses major security risks. Laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has deemed China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.”

Following ProPublica’s reporting last month, Microsoft said that it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems. The company did not respond directly to questions from ProPublica about the security plan and instead issued a statement defending the escort practice.

“Escorted sessions were tightly monitored and supplemented by layers of security mitigations,” the statement said. “Based on the feedback we’ve received, however, we have updated our processes to prevent any involvement of China based engineers.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote to Hegseth last month suggesting that the Defense Department needed to strengthen oversight of its contractors and that current processes “fail to account for the growing Chinese threat.”

“As we learn more about these ‘digital escorts’ and other unwise — and outrageous — practices used by some DoD partners, it is clear the Department and Congress will need to take further action,” Cotton wrote. He continued: “We must put in place the protocols and processes to adopt innovative technology quickly, effectively, and safely.”

Since 2011, the government has used the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as FedRAMP, to evaluate the security practices of commercial companies that want to sell cloud services to the federal government. The Defense Department also has its own guidelines, which include the citizenship requirement for people handling sensitive data.

Both FedRAMP and the Defense Department rely on “third party assessment organizations” to evaluate whether vendors meet the government’s cloud security requirements. While the government considers these organizations “independent,” they are hired and paid directly by the company being assessed. Microsoft, for example, told ProPublica that it enlisted a company called Kratos to shepherd it through the initial FedRAMP and Defense Department authorization processes and to handle annual assessments after winning federal contracts.

On its website, Kratos calls itself the “guiding light” for organizations seeking to win government cloud contracts and said it “boasts a history of performing successful security assessments.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Kratos said its work determines “if security controls are documented accurately,” but the company did not say whether Microsoft had done so in the security plan it submitted to the Defense Department’s IT agency.

Microsoft told ProPublica that it has given demonstrations of the escort process to Kratos but not directly to federal officials. The security plan makes no reference to any such demonstration. Kratos did not respond to questions about whether its assessors were aware that non-screened personnel could include foreign workers.

A former Microsoft employee who worked with Kratos through several FedRAMP accreditations compared Microsoft’s role in the process to “leading the witness” to the desired outcome. “The government approved what we paid Kratos to tell the government to approve. You’re paying for the outcome you want,” said the former employee, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential proceeding.

Kratos said it “vehemently denies the characterization from an unnamed source that Kratos’ services are pay for play.” In its statement, Kratos said that it has been “accredited and audited by an independent, non-profit industry group” for factors that “include impartiality, competence and independence.”

“Kratos hires and retains the most technically sophisticated, certified security and technology experts,” the company said, adding that its personnel “are beyond reproach in their work.”

For its part, Microsoft said hiring Kratos was simply part of following the government’s cloud assessment process. “As required by FedRAMP, Microsoft relies on this certified assessor to conduct independent assessments on our behalf under FedRAMP’s supervision,” Microsoft said in its statement.

Still, critics take issue with the FedRAMP process itself, saying that the arrangement of a company paying its auditor presents an inherent conflict of interest. One former official from the U.S. General Services Administration, which houses FedRAMP, likened it to a restaurant hiring and paying for its own health inspector rather than the city doing so.

The GSA did not respond to requests for comment.

The Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Department’s IT agency, reviewed and accepted Microsoft’s security plan. Among those involved were senior DISA officials Roger Greenwell and Jackie Snouffer, according to people familiar with the situation. Neither responded to phone messages seeking comment, and DISA and Defense Department spokespeople did not respond to ProPublica’s request to interview them.

A DISA spokesperson declined to comment for this article, saying “any responses will come from Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs.”

The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond to questions about whether Greenwell and Snouffer, or anyone at DISA, understood that Microsoft’s China-based employees would be supporting the Defense Department’s cloud. A spokesperson also did not directly respond to questions about Microsoft’s System Security Plan but in an emailed statement said the information in such plans is considered proprietary. The spokesperson noted that “any process that fails to comply with” department restrictions barring foreigners from accessing sensitive department systems “poses unacceptable risk to the DOD infrastructure.”

That said, the office left open the door to the continued use of foreign-based engineers with digital escorts for “infrastructure support,” saying that it “may be deemed an acceptable risk,” depending on factors that include “the country of origin of the foreign national” being escorted. The department said in such scenarios foreign workers would have “view-only” capabilities, not “hands-on” access. In addition to China, Microsoft has operations in India, the European Union and elsewhere across the globe.

In a statement to ProPublica on Friday, Hegseth’s office said the Pentagon’s investigation into tech companies’ use of foreign personnel “is complete and we have identified a series of possible actions the Department could take.” A spokesperson declined to describe those actions or say whether the department would follow through with them. It’s unclear whether Microsoft’s security plan or DISA’s role in approving it was a part of the review.

“As with all contracted relationships, the Department works directly with the vendor to address concerns, to include those that have come to light with the Microsoft digital escort process,” Hegseth’s office said in the statement.

Photography and text by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica

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Mireya Sandia was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. Her skin was pale, her white hair nearly gone. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer years earlier, and more recently it had spread to her brain and affected her speech. When we first met, in May, she waved me closer, grabbed my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and said, as best she could:

“I want to see my son again.” Then she began to cry.

With a knot in my throat, I held her hand, fearing that there would not be enough time for her to see her only son, Wilmer Vega Sandia.

Her health was what led her son to migrate to the United States. His detention and later deportation to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, known as CECOT, had, in turn, led me to her bedroom in a small village in the Andes.

Over the past four months, as part of a ProPublica-led investigation in collaboration with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), I have documented in photographs the lives of five families whose sons had been imprisoned in El Salvador, as well as their return to Venezuela, where I am from. I had visited with mothers like Mireya Sandia and other relatives to see how the absence of their loved ones had affected them.

I walked beside them when they protested on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. I saw them as their hopes grew when there was word that the negotiations for the men’s return were ongoing, and I saw them again when those hopes were deflated after the first negotiations failed.

I documented the homecomings, when the men were abruptly flown back.

Lina Ramos Hidalgo sits in the bedroom that used to belong to her son Juan José Ramos Ramos while he was detained in CECOT. First image: Mireya Sandia cries after eating lunch at her home while her son, Wilmer, was held in CECOT. Sandia has breast cancer, which has spread to her brain. Second image: Doris Sandia, Wilmer’s aunt, in her home. Crisálida Bastidas plays with her grandson Jared at her home in El Tocuyo, Venezuela, while her son José Manuel Ramos Bastidas was detained in CECOT.

Lina Ramos lived in a humble neighborhood on the outskirts of Caracas and attended several marches that I photographed. I knew how tight money was for the family and the incredible effort it took for her to advocate for her son, Juan José Ramos Ramos. Lina told me that she had to crowdfund and get donations from her church, family and neighbors to afford a $2 round-trip bus ticket to the capital. The anguish of his imprisonment, she told me, didn’t let her sit still.

Crisálida Bastidas’ home was also modest. Imagine a tiny kitchen in the left corner and, on the opposite wall, two big beds beside one another for several people to sleep on. Her son José Manuel Ramos Bastidas had been in CECOT for more than three months by the time we met, and I could see her hope vanishing as his imprisonment stretched on. Her sadness was visible, and she looked exhausted. She told me that she couldn’t sleep unless her 1-year-old grandson Jared was with her, the two of them nestled together, with a picture of José Manuel as a child hanging above the bed. The two were identical as children, and she clung to her grandson to feel near to her own son.

As more time passed, they sometimes slipped into speaking about their sons in the past tense. Then they’d quickly correct themselves and say, “He’s alive.”

I remember one mother on her knees, crying and asking, “Please make this stop.”

Carmen Bonilla waits for her son to arrive near their house in Valencia, Venezuela. Zoe Martínez plays with balloons used to decorate the house to celebrate the return of her uncle Juan Ramos. Lina Ramos, center, hugs family members during a march in Caracas to celebrate the release of her son and other Venezuelan men held in CECOT.

One morning, I got a call telling me that the men were coming home. It was one of the many mothers I had met in the past few months. I was wary, because this was not the first time I had gotten a call like that, and I always worried what disappointment would do to them. Doris Sandia, Wilmer’s aunt, called me and asked several times if I was sure the men were coming home. She was wary of getting her heart broken again. But this time it was true.

By the time I got out of the house, families that could afford to come to Caracas were already marching downtown. This time they were celebrating.

I ran into Lina Ramos and almost didn’t recognize her. She had a wide smile that I had never seen before. She hugged me tight, relieved to see a familiar face behind dozens of cameras. I walked next to her for miles.

The next day I was at Lina’s house at sunrise, waiting to finally photograph her son. Lina had gotten $20 in donations from family members and neighbors, and she used that money to decorate her house. She made stewed chicken with rice and plantains, her son’s favorite. Lina didn’t want to take any phone calls, to keep the line clear in case Juan called. She wouldn’t leave the house because rumors had gone around that if nobody was home, the police officers escorting the men wouldn’t drop them off. Lina was forced to stand still for the first time in four months.

Lina’s granddaughters grabbed me by the hand and took me to help them pick flowers to welcome their uncle. They spent hours making the flower arrangements, and then tied yellow, blue and red balloons into an arch. But time passed and Juan didn’t arrive. The balloons started to pop in the heat. By the time I left, the flowers had withered and the balloon arch was halfway gone.

Carmen Bonilla had to call off from one of her jobs — she drives a taxi and sometimes buys and then resells cheese — just in case someone brought her son Andry home. Those last few days, when the men were back in Venezuela but not yet home, felt longer than the rest. Nobody dared to leave the house or take a call. I remember Carmen looking through her phone and seeing a video of Andry singing a song on a bus after the men arrived back in Venezuela. Carmen was happy but puzzled. “He must be very happy to be singing,” she said. “Andry is not like that. He’s very serious.”

I think she realized at that moment that the son she’d raised might not be the same person who was coming home. That whatever had happened to them in those months in prison had probably changed them forever.

First image: Days after being released from CECOT, Juan José Ramos Ramos cries while recalling his experience in prison at his house in Guatire, Venezuela. Second image: Sara Martínez holds a flower arrangement to celebrate Ramos’ return.

When Juan José Ramos arrived at Lina’s house, he cried and pointed at the peeling paint. He said he wanted to give his mother a more decent house; it had been one of his reasons for going to the U.S. In prison, he had asked the guards to end his life rather than force him to live that way any longer. Listening to her son talk about his experiences, she tried to understand the weight of his words.

I returned to photograph Mireya Sandia once again. This time she cried in joy while her son held her. Much like his mother, he had spent four months with the daily thought that maybe he wouldn’t make it home in time to say goodbye to her.

She held my hand once again and I leaned in to listen to her speak. She’d become so weak over the previous four months that I could barely make out her words: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” It dawned on me that during this time in El Salvador, each of the men were not only losing time, they were losing loved ones. They were missing major life moments that can never be recovered. Not only did the men say they were tortured during these four months; their families said they were too.

As fireworks exploded in the town of Umuquena and residents surrounded Wilmer Vega, Mireya Sandia said, “It felt like an endless night.” Wilmer fell to his knees as if he could barely carry the joy of the moment.

Several men had said that guards told them every day that they were worthless and nobody was looking for them. I thought of those words and wondered what Wilmer Vega was thinking as the people of his hometown filled the streets to greet him.

A caravan follows Wilmer Vega Sandia as he drives into his hometown of Umuquena, Venezuela, after months in detention. Wilmer Vega Sandia kisses his mother, Mireya, after seeing her in person for the first time since he was released from detention.

The men said they returned home deeply traumatized. Most of the men I met were struggling to sleep, drink water or leave their homes. Wilmer broke into tears telling me that he had a panic attack the first time he walked down a busy commercial street. In many cases, the celebration was bittersweet. The men were home but they were scarred.

I thought this would be the end of a chapter, a long-awaited reunion. But life is more nuanced than that. Once I saw and heard from these men, it was clear the path before them was steep. They are coming back to Venezuela after losing what little they had made before. Most of them said they lost everything, either during detention in the U.S. or during their imprisonment in El Salvador.

In many cases, these men left Venezuela nearly a decade ago. Their beds, their friends, their employers, even their children are no longer here. They returned with only the clothes they were wearing, with no equipment to resume their jobs, to a country that is, in many ways, the same one they had to leave. When asked about the future, they didn’t have an answer.

Carmen Bonilla hugs her son Andry Blanco after he returned home from months in detention.

All this made me think of Venezuelans’ longing for opportunity, safety and freedom. It made sense for millions of people to imagine a life in the U.S., which has been perceived as a haven. Many Venezuelans supported President Donald Trump’s policies, especially after his first term. I don’t know how much this episode will change their views, but it has undoubtedly been a sobering moment for many.

Still, thousands of Venezuelans are packing their suitcases. Boats, planes and buses continue to depart for other destinations: Colombia, Peru, Brazil, even Spain. They are filled with people who want to give their children medical care, buy their mother a prettier house, afford a parent’s cancer treatments.

But it may not change the question that many Venezuelans now ask themselves and each other: Where will we be safe?

Wilmer Vega Sandia kisses his mother.

Photo editing by Cengiz Yar.