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by Amy Yurkanin

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Georgia recently relaunched its maternal mortality review committee after dismissing all 32 of its members last year. But state officials won’t say who the current members are.

The dismissals were in response to ProPublica obtaining internal reports in which the committee detailed the “preventable” deaths of two women who were unable to obtain legal abortions or timely care after Georgia banned abortion.

In September, ProPublica published stories on the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller. They were the first reported cases of women who died without access to care restricted by a state abortion ban. Before those stories, the state Department of Public Health had released the names of committee members to ProPublica. Now it’s saying that releasing the names would be a violation of state law.

The law states that the work of the committee is confidential and that some records and reports obtained and created by the committee are not covered by public records laws. The law does not state that committee members’ identities are confidential. However, Department of Public Health spokesperson Nancy Nydam said the department’s review of the law “determined that the broad confidentiality protections directed toward the committee should be extended to the identities of the committee members.” She did not respond to questions about why the department could share committee members’ names in August but not now.

The newly appointed committee, which reviews maternal deaths and makes recommendations to improve care for pregnant women, held its first meeting Feb. 21.

If the public doesn’t know who is on a committee, it could create mistrust of its findings, said Elizabeth Dawes, director of maternal and reproductive health at the Century Foundation, a public-policy nonprofit. She has been an advocate for Black mothers, who die from causes related to pregnancy or birth at higher rates than other groups.

“If everything is confidential, there’s no way to really be able to trust what comes out of it,” Dawes said. “They could completely ignore abortion. They could completely ignore race, racism, discrimination, and say what they want to say.”

Dawes said those questions are particularly important in Georgia. The state has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal death, especially among Black women, who die at twice the rate of white women.

The stories of Thurman and Miller sparked widespread outrage about the effects of abortion bans; Georgia law bans the procedure after six weeks.

Thurman, who traveled to North Carolina and obtained abortion pills, died from sepsis after doctors in Georgia delayed the removal of infected tissue that remained in her uterus. Her case, and others identified in Georgia and Texas, show the dangers women face in states that force hospitals and doctors to weigh criminal laws against abortion before providing care.

Less than two months after ProPublica published the stories, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, sent a Nov. 8 letter to all members of the committee stating that information had been inappropriately shared with an outside source.

“Even though this disclosure was investigated, the investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information,” Toomey wrote. “Therefore, effective immediately the current MMRC is disbanded, and all member seats will be filled through a new application process.”

That application process ended earlier this year. The Department of Public Health denied ProPublica’s Open Records Act request for the names of new members on Feb. 27, three weeks after the request was made. In a response, a staff member said 30 people had been appointed to the board and attached language from a letter inviting new members to the committee’s first meeting on Feb. 21.

All 50 states, as well as other localities, have maternal mortality review committees. They examine the deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to identify gaps in care and provide recommendations to improve treatment. ProPublica recently found that the names of committee members in 18 states with abortion restrictions were publicly available, or accessible through a public records request.

Recently, some states have come under fire for allegedly politicizing the work of these committees.

The maternal mortality review committee in Idaho was allowed to go dormant in 2023 after conservative groups attacked its recommendation to expand Medicaid for postpartum women. The state has since revived the committee as an advisory body to the State Board of Medicine.

Also in 2023, Texas lawmakers changed the composition of the state’s committee more than a year after a member spoke out about a delay in releasing a report. She lost her seat. Officials later appointed an anti-abortion obstetrician, Dr. Ingrid Skop, to the group. The Texas MMRC is also not reviewing deaths from 2022 or 2023, a period covering the first year and a half after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

In the letter last year dismissing the members of Georgia’s committee, Toomey wrote that the shake-up of the board would not delay its work. Nydam said in February that Department of Public Health staff members have continued their work while the committee has been inactive.

“The work of the MMRC has not stopped,” Nydam wrote in an email. “It has continued with our staff doing case abstractions, which they do regardless, before the cases go to the MMRC.”

However, a person familiar with the committee’s work, who because of her continuing work with the Department of Public Health asked not to be named, said the full committee usually met every other month. Subcommittees met even more frequently to review cases.

“There’s no way there’s not going to be a delay unless they are going to meet every week,” she said.

The Georgia MMRC was beginning to identify deaths from 2023 when all members were dismissed.

Kavitha Surana and Cassandra Jamarillo contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Emily Schwing, KYUK

This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR's Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Nearly two dozen children in the tiny village of Sleetmute, Alaska, arrive for school each morning to a small brown building that is on the verge of collapse.

Every year for the past 19 years, the local school district has asked the state for money to help repair a leaky roof. But again and again, the state said no. Over time, water ran down into the building, causing the supporting beams to rot. A windowpane cracked under pressure as heavy snow and ice built up on the roof each winter. Eventually, an entire wall started to buckle, leaving a gaping hole in the exterior siding.

In 2021, an architect concluded that the school, which primarily serves Alaska Native students, “should be condemned as it is unsafe for occupancy.”

The following year, Taylor Hayden, a resident who helps with school maintenance, opened a hatch in the floor to fix a heating problem and discovered a pool of water under the building, where years of rain and snowmelt had reduced several concrete footings to rubble.

“Just like someone took a jackhammer to it,” Hayden said.

The Sleetmute school, nestled on the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River, amid the spruce and birch forest of Alaska’s Interior, has few options. Like many schools in Alaska, it’s owned by the state, which is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance projects.

Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, according to an investigation by KYUK and ProPublica.

In a tight crawl space under the Sleetmute school, Taylor Hayden discovered that the building’s foundation has deteriorated. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Local school districts are generally responsible for building and maintaining public schools in the United States and largely pay for those projects with property taxes. But in Alaska, the state owns just under half of the 128 schools in its rural districts, a KYUK and ProPublica review of deeds and other documents found. These sparsely populated areas rely almost entirely on the state to finance school facilities because they serve unincorporated communities that have no tax base.

To get help for repairs, school districts are required to apply for funding each year, and then the state compiles a priority list. Since 1998, at least 135 rural school projects have waited for state funding for five years or more, an analysis of data from Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development shows. Thirty-three of those projects have languished on the state’s funding list for more than a decade.

The state’s Indigenous children suffer the greatest consequences because most rural school districts are predominantly Alaska Native — a population that was long forced to attend separate and unequal schools.

A small atrium is one of the few spaces Sleetmute students can use. They eat breakfast and lunch here, surrounded by portraits of the village’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders. (Michael Grabell/ProPublica) Sleetmute students play soccer during recess last spring. In the coldest months, when temperatures fall well below zero, the kids can’t have recess because the gym is closed. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

State education Commissioner Deena Bishop acknowledged that the state’s capital improvement program isn’t working. But she said her department is limited by state lawmakers’ funding decisions.

Rep. Bryce Edgmon, an Alaska Native and speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, also said the program isn’t working.

“I think the evidence speaks for itself,” he said after touring the Sleetmute school in October. “These bright young children show up every morning to go to school in a building that’s not fit for even anything but being ready to be demolished.”

Edgmon, who co-chaired the House Finance Committee for the past two years, conceded he and other lawmakers could have done more and promised to “raise some Cain” in the state Capitol. This year’s legislative session has seen a lot of debate about education funding. Alaska has no statewide income or sales tax and instead relies on oil revenue, which has declined in recent years.

As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. Over the past year, KYUK and ProPublica crawled under buildings and climbed into attics in schools across the state and found black mold, bat guano and a pool of raw sewage — health hazards that can cause respiratory problems, headaches and fatigue. The conditions exacerbate the risks for Alaska Natives, who already face some of the highest rates of chronic illness in the nation.

In Venetie, a village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, exposed electrical wiring hangs close to flammable insulation. Thorne Bay, on an island in Southeast Alaska, has requested money to replace the fire sprinklers 17 times, without success. And in the Bering Sea coastal village of Newtok, the school’s pipes froze and broke, so for most of the last school year, kids rode a four-wheeler, known as the “bathroom bus,” twice a day to relieve themselves at home.

Students in Newtok, near the Bering Sea, ride home to use the bathroom last spring after the school’s water pipes froze and broke, leaving the school without running water. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

After Hayden’s discovery in Sleetmute, the portion of the building that posed the most serious safety risk, which includes the wood shop, the boys’ bathroom and the gym, was closed. Now, kids ranging in age from 4 to 17 are confined to three classrooms and an atrium lined with portraits of the community’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders.

“There’s not much we can do anymore,” said Neal Sanford, 17, who misses playing basketball and learning carpentry and woodworking. He left the village of fewer than 100 people after his sophomore year last spring to attend a state-run boarding school more than 800 miles away.

In October, it was quiet outside the Jack Egnaty Sr. School in Sleetmute, save for a dog that barked now and then and the distant revving of a four-wheeler. The air smelled of wood smoke and two-stroke engine exhaust. Without a gym to play in, the kids bundled up for recess as temperatures dipped below freezing.

“Cold hands,” said fourth grader Loretta Sakar, as she shook out her fingers after crossing the monkey bars. Her squeals and giggles echoed across the playground while other kids played soccer or spun on a tire swing.

Kids including Loretta Sakar (left) take advantage of the old playground equipment during recess outside. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

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Andrea John, a single mom whose three kids, including Loretta, go to the Sleetmute school, said the state wouldn’t treat Alaska’s urban kids this way.

“They should have helped us when we needed help in the beginning, not wait 20 years,” she said. “They are choosing to look the other way and say the hell with us.”

“Arbitrary, Inadequate and Racially Discriminatory”

When Alaska became a state in 1959, its constitution promised a public school system “open to all children of the State.” But for decades, it was far from that. Many Indigenous children attended schools owned and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Alaska’s plan was to eventually take over those schools, but the state repeatedly argued it didn’t have enough money to pay for them. The development of Alaska’s oil industry, starting in the 1960s, brought in revenue for education, but state officials noted that BIA schools were in bad shape and insisted the federal government fix them before the state assumed responsibility.

Many Alaska children “go to school in buildings that should be condemned as fire traps or unsafe dwellings,” then-U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel said during a 1971 congressional hearing. It wasn’t until well into the 1980s that all BIA schools were transferred to the state.

At a 1971 congressional hearing, Sen. Mike Gravel described conditions in public schools operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Obtained by KYUK and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Yet even as the state began to take over, education remained inequitable for Alaska Natives. Many small villages didn’t have high schools, so students had to attend boarding schools or receive and submit assignments by mail. A group of those students sued the state in the 1970s to change that. Known as the Molly Hootch case, the suit resulted in a consent decree that forced the state to build 126 new schools in rural communities.

Teenagers board a plane in Shungnak, Alaska, on their way to Oregon to attend boarding school. The people were identified as, from left, George Cleveland Sr., Lena Commack Coffee, Angeline Douglas, Genevieve Douglas Norris, Wynita Woods Lee, Virginia Douglas Commack and Harold Barry. (Kay J. Kennedy Aviation Photograph Collection, archives of the University of Alaska Fairbanks)

In the early 1990s, the Alaska Legislature started a program to fund school construction and major maintenance projects. Schools districts would apply for grants, and the state education department would rank projects based on need. But the Legislature provided little money for the need-based program. Instead, a small group of powerful lawmakers allocated funding to projects in their own districts, favoring urban areas.

In 1997, a group of Alaska Native parents sued the state, arguing that the funding system violated Alaska’s constitution and the federal Civil Rights Act. State Superior Court Judge John Reese agreed.

“Because of the funding system, rural schools are not getting the money they need to maintain their schools,” he wrote in a 1999 order. “Deficiencies include roofs falling in, no drinkable water, sewage backing up, and enrollment up to 187% of capacity. Some rural schools have been at the top of the priority list for a number of years, yet have received no funding.”

In another order, he called the state’s system “arbitrary, inadequate and racially discriminatory,” and said the state had a responsibility to provide education to Alaska Native children “even if it costs more in the rural areas.”

A 2001 order from Alaska Superior Court Judge John Reese (Obtained by KYUK and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

A 2011 consent decree and settlement required the state to build five new rural schools, and the Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to more equitably allocate funds to rural districts.

Yet more than a decade later, the problems pointed out by Reese persist. Every year, rural school districts make more than 100 requests, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Legislature funds only a tiny fraction of those projects. In five of the last 11 years, it has approved fewer than five requests.

An analysis by KYUK and ProPublica shows that Alaska’s education department has received 1,789 funding proposals from rural school districts since 1998. But only 14% of them have received funding. This year, requests from rural school districts to the state’s construction and maintenance program stand at $478 million.

Edgmon acknowledged that the Legislature’s funding decisions don’t come close to meeting the needs of Alaska’s rural public schools. “We have not upheld our constitutional duty to provide that quality of education that the courts have said time and again we’re bound to be providing,” he said.

When pressed on why funding is so hard to secure, state education commissioner Bishop told KYUK last year that rural schools were good for the community. “But, at the same token, it’s unsustainable to have $50 million go to 10 students,” she said. “I mean, think about the unsustainability of that in the long run.”

Allowing projects to sit on a waitlist for years also means they can become more expensive over time. The Kuspuk School District’s first request to repair Sleetmute’s school was for just over $411,000 in 2007. By 2024, the request had climbed to $1.6 million — more than twice the original cost, even after adjusting for inflation.

“To me that’s neglectful,” Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said. “Our cries for help haven’t been heard.”

“Just seeing the conditions that the districts and the state were expecting students to thrive in,” said Madeline Aguillard, the superintendent of the Kuspuk School District, “they’re not conducive for academic achievement.” (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Roughly 200 miles southwest, the coastal village of Quinhagak waited 15 years for a renovation and addition to its Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat School that would allow it to meet the state’s space requirements. The school serves 200 students, more than twice the number it was designed for.

In addition to its fire sprinklers, Thorne Bay in the Southeast Island School District has asked the state 18 times to replace a pair of aging underground heating-fuel tanks that the district worries could start to leak. Superintendent Rod Morrison, whose district spans an area of Alaska’s southern archipelago that’s roughly the size of Connecticut, said his district’s list of maintenance needs is seemingly endless.

“Education is supposed to be the big equalizer,” said Morrison. “It is not equal in the state of Alaska.”

Rural school district officials say, given their scarce resources, the state’s construction and maintenance program creates burdens. The application for funding comes with a 37-page guidance document, loaded with references to state statute and administrative code. It also requires districts to include a six-year capital improvement plan. Meeting these requirements can be challenging in rural school districts, where administrative turnover is high and staffing is limited.

To increase the likelihood that a project gets funded, some rural superintendents say they feel pressure to provide engineering inspections or site condition surveys with their applications.

“There’s only a few needles that you can move,” said David Landis of the Southeast Regional Resource Center, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps school districts compile their applications for a fee.

Landis said inspections and surveys are likely to increase the ranking for a project proposal, but “those documents are really foundational and expensive. They might very well be over $100,000.”

The Kuspuk School District has spent more than $200,000 since 2021 to beef up its applications for the Sleetmute school, Aguillard said. It’s also paid tens of thousands of dollars to a lobbyist to persuade legislators to increase maintenance funding for schools the state itself owns.

Some school districts said they simply can’t afford such costs. “We don’t have that ability,” said Morrison of the Southeast Island School District. “We’d have to cut a teacher or two to make that happen.”

“Too Little, Too Late”

Last summer, Sleetmute got some good news. After ignoring 19 requests, the state had finally approved its roof repair after Alaska legislators passed a bill that boosted school maintenance and construction funding to its highest level in more than a decade.

But it’s “too little, too late,” Aguillard said. The building’s condition has deteriorated so much that Sleetmute now needs a new school.

As a result, the district has asked if it could use the roof repair money to shore up the school to prevent a collapse, to bring in modular classrooms or to have school in another community building. But, Aguillard said, Alaska’s education department has been reluctant to approve any of those options. Instead, she said, the department made a baffling request: It asked for proof that the state had never paid to repair Sleetmute’s leaking roof — something clearly outlined in state records — and that the neglect had caused the additional damage.

In an email, the education department wrote, “This step was taken to ensure proper use of funds and to understand the full scope of work required.”

Sleetmute residents especially worry in the winter when snow and ice build up on the school’s roof. The back end of the building is buckling under the weight. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

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A KYUK and ProPublica analysis found that in at least 20 cases, funding requests waited for so long that cheaper repairs morphed into proposals to tear down and replace schools. Those schools that were rebuilt cost the state tens of millions of dollars more than the initial estimates.

The Auntie Mary Nicoli Elementary School project in Aniak, about 100 miles downriver from Sleetmute, started as a $9.5 million renovation in 2007. But after waiting 11 years, the state spent $18.6 million to replace it in 2018.

A few districts are still waiting for schools they say need to be replaced. The first request for the Johnnie John Sr. School project in Crooked Creek, 40 miles downriver from Sleetmute, in 1998 was for a $4.8 million addition. But by 2009, the district was asking for a $19 million replacement. The Legislature failed to fund the project even after the district pared down its request. Unable to secure funding for a new school, the district is now trying to stretch $1.9 million it received from the state last year to make the most necessary repairs: upgrades to heating and electrical systems and the removal of hazardous materials.

In most of Alaska’s rural communities, life often requires making do with what’s available: People keep piles of old machinery in their yards to mine for parts. In villages that aren’t on the road system, almost everything is either shipped in by barge or delivered by air. In Sleetmute, a 24-pack of soda costs $54 — about four times the price in the Lower 48.

Sleetmute, home to fewer than 100 residents, is nestled alongside the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River in Alaska’s Interior. (Emily Schwing/KYUK) There are no roads to and from Sleetmute, so residents rely mostly on airplanes to travel and receive goods. When the Kuskokwim River thaws, a barge makes summer deliveries. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

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This is also why construction projects are extremely expensive: Skilled workers have to be flown in, housed and fed. Heavy equipment has to zigzag up the Kuskokwim River, which is frozen for half the year. The school district was hoping to reduce costs by sharing machinery with a project to upgrade the community’s runway. But when that project wrapped up this fall, the state transportation department shipped its equipment out of Sleetmute.

So the school is left to make do. Everyone has to share one bathroom. A manila folder hangs from a pink thread on the door. It reads “Boys” on one side and “Girls” on the other to indicate whose turn it is.

After an architect said Sleetmute’s school “should be condemned,” half the building was closed. Now students, staff and teachers all share one bathroom, and a sign lets students know whose turn it is to go. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Sleetmute’s school is also full of black mold that covers the buckling wall in the wood shop, a gear closet in the gym and a huge section of drywall in the ceiling just above the door to the kitchen.

Water from a leaky roof has seeped into the walls and floor of the Sleetmute school’s wood shop. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

This fall the community discovered another problem. Sheree Smith, who has taught in Sleetmute for 12 years, found herself swinging a tennis racket at a bat that swooped through her classroom as her middle and high school students sat reading quietly. The bats live above the gym bleachers in a small utility closet, where the floor is covered in guano.

Black mold had spread through the Sleetmute school, including in a utility closet, a hallway ceiling and the back wall of a gear closet in the gym. (Emily Schwing/KYUK) Playtime in the Sleetmute school gym is rare. The space, which also served as an emergency shelter and a place for social functions, has been closed for two years. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Without a gym, students miss out on events that connect the school to both the community and the outside world. Every year, the Sleetmute school would host basketball tournaments and movie nights to raise money for field trips to places like Anchorage and Washington, D.C. — a luxury for many families in Sleetmute and other rural communities in Alaska. The students “feel the pain of that, like just not having the extra opportunities,” said Angela Hayden, Sleetmute’s lead teacher.

Over the holiday break, the school district reinforced the back end of the building with floor-to-ceiling supports to keep the woodshop from collapsing.

But it’s only a temporary fix. The roof has been leaking since Hayden started teaching there 17 years ago.

“When I come in the building, especially after a lot of rain or a lot of snow,” she said, “I just think, ‘OK, what am I going to have to deal with before I can deal with my classroom?’”

Students start their day with the Pledge of Allegiance in Sleetmute, where the school’s roof has been leaking for longer than they’ve been alive. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

If you have information about school conditions in Alaska, contact Emily Schwing at emily@kyuk.org.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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

For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.

Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.

The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.

The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.

Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.

Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.

Following a series of lawsuits challenging their constitutional authority to lay off or place on leave thousands of employees and freeze nearly all foreign aid, Rubio and Marocco have defended their actions by arguing that the president has the right to cancel programs, and that they were conducting a careful review of the government’s foreign aid programs to make sure they aligned with Trump’s agenda. The administration says it is rooting out waste and fraud, while Musk has publicly vowed to destroy USAID altogether.

However, as ProPublica reported Saturday, officials throughout the government say the process was actually cursory and haphazard, so much so that the programs’ contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts, had no idea what had been canceled or why.

Enrich’s memos offer additional evidence calling into question the administration’s claims in court while projecting the dire consequences that will play out for both the U.S. and vulnerable people around the world.

One of the documents said that the sweeping cuts to foreign aid promise to reignite outbreaks of preventable, deadly illnesses; fuel instability in war-torn areas; and put the U.S. at risk for outbreaks of infectious disease. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” it says.

Take tuberculosis, which kills more than 1.25 million people a year and is already the deadliest infectious disease on the planet. New infections are expected to surge by 30% more as a result of the terminations, and disruptions to treatment will cause people to develop drug resistance, making any future treatment options far more difficult and costly, the memo said.

That global surge will inevitably lead to more cases in the U.S. USAID staff forecast there would be around 80 additional cases of multi-drug-resistant TB here each year because of the cuts across USAID, the memo added. Even a few dozen cases would cost the U.S. millions in tax dollars; it takes nearly $500,000 on average to treat someone with the most drug-resistant forms of the illness, the memo notes.

Enrich’s bureau also warned that the foreign aid cuts will destabilize entire regions around the globe. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.S. withdrawal of aid has led health services to collapse as an ongoing conflict flares, the memos noted. They said more than 400 mpox patients were left stranded and that more than a million people face critical shortages of food and water, supplies the U.S. has promised to provide. Malnutrition, cholera and measles are all projected to increase as well.

Across the Sahel, the transition zone between Africa’s northern deserts and southern savannahs, malaria season is fast approaching. The U.S. has already purchased mosquito nets, diagnostic tests and treatments that cannot be delivered, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the programs. Canceled programs there and elsewhere are expected to cause between 12 million and 18 million additional malaria infections over the next year, the document estimates.

And those infections are likely to be more deadly. Spread via mosquito, malaria is particularly lethal for children under 5. The U.S. was paying to help roll out drugs that are highly effective at preventing children from getting sick or dying. Those programs have been canceled.

The potential for death and the spread of disease is not new to Rubio or his top aides who ordered the mass termination of nearly all foreign aid programs, according to the documents and interviews.

USAID staff repeatedly lobbied to keep the most critical programs running, sharing specifics about patients served for individual programs and the likely harm of cutting them with political appointees, sometimes on multiple occasions. In response, political leadership “wholly prevented” staff from implementing Rubio’s promise to continue lifesaving aid, according to Enrich’s memo.

In public statements and court filings, Rubio and Marocco have said there was a waiver exemption process in place for lifesaving programs to remain funded and online.

But behind the scenes, the few employees remaining at USAID struggled to get basic information, like how to submit waivers to Marocco for approval. And when organizations did get an approved waiver, they couldn’t restart work because the administration still hadn’t paid them. (The Trump administration has refused to reimburse almost $2 billion to foreign aid contractors for work they’ve already completed.)

Agency staff had no way to send payments to organizations because their access to the financial systems had been severed, one memo said.

On Feb. 8, global health staff learned that Rubio planned to cancel many programs the bureau had identified as lifesaving. Those in the bureau appealed to Borkert and Mark Lloyd, an assistant administrator at the agency, to keep those operations alive. (Borkert and Lloyd did not respond to questions about this story.)

Lloyd asked for more information. But that same day, staffers in the bureau also received a response from DOGE. “I am hearing that Global Health is conducting supplemental reviews of awards slated for termination by Secretary Rubio and Acting Deputy Administrator Marocco,” DOGE adviser Jeremy Lewin emailed Enrich, according to one of Enrich’s memos. “This is delaying the timely processing of these termination notices and is unacceptable. … Bureaus should not be conducting their own policy and program reviews before acting on these termination instructions.” (Lewin did not respond to questions for this story.)

Enrich also said he received written instructions to pause approving waivers for lifesaving humanitarian assistance, a directive he passed along to the rest of his bureau, which had been working to identify the programs that needed money the most.

In a subsequent exchange spelled out in one memo that illustrates the frequently conflicting guidance, Enrich said that two political appointees, Tim Meisburger and Laken Rapier, along with Bokert, shouted at him during a Feb. 13 meeting that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to draft another memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause” on the bureau’s waivers for lifesaving programs. (Meisburger and Rapier did not respond to questions about this story.)

During a meeting on Feb. 24, Meisburger and Lloyd told those in the bureau to not bother trying to submit waivers for programs involving infectious diseases like mpox, polio and Ebola because they wouldn’t be approved, according to Enrich.

Then, two days later, the administration suddenly terminated about 10,000 programs across the State Department and USAID. Agency staff responsible for maintaining those contracts say they were not consulted before the move. Enrich immediately reached out to Borkert and others to warn them of the “grave impacts on lifesaving activities,” he said in the memo.

Borkert responded, indicating that many of the programs were terminated by mistake. “There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind,” Borkert wrote to Enrich. “We need to identify what those are.”

In recent days, government officials and aid groups have told ProPublica that the administration appears to be trying to reverse-engineer its most sweeping actions to figure out which lifesaving operations were canceled. Staff have been told to report information about terminated contracts to agency leaders. It’s not clear what programs, if any, will be restored.

“It is an incompetent mess,” one official said.

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

by Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois

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A new Illinois bill aims to add some oversight of families who homeschool their children, a response to concerns that the state does little to ensure these students receive an education and are protected from harm.

The measure, known as the Homeschool Act, comes after an investigation by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica last year found that Illinois is among a small number of states that place virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children. Parents don’t have to register with any state agency or school district, and authorities cannot compel them to track attendance, demonstrate their teaching methods or show student progress.

Under the new bill, families would be required to tell their school districts when they decide to homeschool their children, and the parents or guardians would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent. If education authorities have concerns that children are receiving inadequate schooling, they could require parents to share evidence of teaching materials and student work.

Illinois Rep. Terra Costa Howard, a Democrat from a Chicago suburb who is sponsoring the legislation, said she began meeting with education and child welfare officials in response to the news organizations’ investigation, which detailed how some parents claimed to be removing their children from school to homeschool but then failed to educate them.

The investigation documented the case of L.J., a 9-year-old whose parents decided to homeschool him after he missed so much school that he faced the prospect of repeating third grade. He told child welfare authorities that he was beaten and denied food for several years while out of public school and that he received almost no education. In December 2022, on L.J.’s 11th birthday, the state took custody of him and his younger siblings; soon after, he was enrolled in public school.

“We need to know that children exist,” said Costa Howard, vice chair of the Illinois House’s child welfare committee. The legislation is more urgent because the number of homeschooled children has grown since the pandemic began, she said. “Illinois has zero regulations regarding homeschooling — we are not the norm at all.”

The most recent numbers available at the time of the news organizations’ investigation showed nearly 4,500 children were recorded as withdrawn from public school for homeschooling in 2022 — a number that had doubled over a decade. But there is no way to determine the precise number of students who are homeschooled in Illinois, because the state doesn’t require parents to register.

The bill would require the state to collect data on homeschooling families. Regional Offices of Education would gather the information, and the state board would compile an annual report with details on the number, grade level and gender of homeschooled students within each region.

Homeschool families and advocates said they will fight the measure, which they argue would infringe on parental rights. Past proposals to increase oversight also have met swift resistance. The sponsor of a 2011 bill that would have required homeschool registration withdrew it after hundreds of people protested at the Illinois State Capitol. In 2019, a different lawmaker abandoned her bill after similar opposition to rules that would have required curriculum reviews and inspections by child welfare officials.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which describes itself as a Christian organization that advocates for homeschool freedom, said it plans to host virtual meetings to educate families on the bill and ways they can lobby against it.

Kathy Wentz of the Illinois Homeschool Association, which is against homeschool regulations, said she is concerned about the provision that would allow the state to review education materials, called a “portfolio review” in the legislation. She said visits from education officials could be disruptive to teaching.

“There is nothing in this bill to protect a family’s time so they can actually homeschool without interruptions,” Wentz said. She pointed to a 1950 Illinois Supreme Court ruling establishing that homeschooling qualified as a form of private education and that the schools were not required to register students with the state.

The bill would require all private schools to register with the state.

The Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica investigation found that it’s all but impossible for education officials to intervene when parents claim they are homeschooling. The state’s child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services, doesn’t investigate schooling matters.

Under the proposed law, if the department has concerns about a family that says it is homeschooling, the agency could request that education officials conduct a more thorough investigation of the child’s schooling. The new law would then allow education officials to check whether the family notified its district about its decision to homeschool and compel parents to turn over homeschool materials for review.

The increased oversight also aims to help reduce truancy and protect homeschooled students who lose daily contact with teachers and others who are mandated to report abuse and neglect, Costa Howard said. Some truancy officials said that under existing law they have no recourse to compel attendance or review what students are learning at home when a family says they are homeschooling.

Jonah Stewart, research director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a national organization of homeschool alumni that advocates for homeschooling regulation, said the lack of oversight in Illinois puts children at risk. “This bill is a commonsense measure and is critical not only to address educational neglect but also child safety,” Stewart said.

by Heather Vogell

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A high-ranking NASA official warned his employees Friday to “use discretion” in public when displaying badges or emblems that identify them as federal workers — part of an effort, the agency says, to protect its employees amid “stories of possible harassment” outside of work.

“We are all very proud to work for the space program,” wrote Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer. “But in the current environment, with a lot of negative rhetoric coming in our direction, I want you all to please use caution.”

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration and allies have used strong language to disparage federal workers, whom they have been firing en masse. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job,” the president said on Feb. 26 during his first Cabinet meeting.

Polk’s warning to employees came two days later, after receiving a report about an employee who was “assaulted” at a Starbucks. “This is probably one of the saddest emails I have had to write of late,” he said in the email, which was obtained by ProPublica.

Polk wrote that Nicola Fox, an associate administrator at NASA, said at a meeting that an employee was confronted at a Starbucks by someone “because she was a federal employee.” The worker was working on her computer and was identified by her badge and a logo, he wrote.

Reached Saturday, Polk said the email was not intended for anyone outside NASA. He said he did not have additional details about the incident and declined to comment on it or on his email to staff, which did not name the employee. Fox declined to comment.

NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said the agency was “hearing stories of possible harassment toward employees, but not assault,” the term used in the email.

“Our managers are hearing information thirdhand and using this as an opportunity to remind our teams to be mindful of their surroundings and to report any incidences to the Office of Protective Services,” she said.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

It was not clear where the incident took place.

The email was circulating among NASA employees, some of whom said they are concerned by the Trump administration’s rhetoric regarding government workers. The president, his advisers and his congressional allies have all sharpened their attacks on federal employees over the past week as the administration undertakes expansive efforts to reduce the size of the federal government

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who Trump named the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has been leading the way.

A week ago, he demanded federal employees respond to an email asking them to list five things they’d accomplished in the previous week — or be fired. “What he’s doing is saying ‘Are you actually working’?” Trump said.

On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said during a committee meeting that “federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.”

And senior Trump officials on Wednesday sent out a memo on reducing the federal workforce that said, “The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024, by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

NASA sidestepped expected layoffs in February, but it is still losing personnel due to a buyout plan.

Polk urged his staff to stay vigilant.

“Be aware of your surroundings and keep good situational awareness and operational security,” he wrote. “Use caution when on the phone in public places, and ensure you are aware of those around you.”

If you’re a federal worker and you think you were harassed outside work as a result of your status as a government employee, ProPublica wants to hear from you. Contact our tips number on Signal at ‪917-512-0201‬. Here’s more detail on how to send us information securely.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy

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After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that lifesaving operations would continue. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters in early February.

Aid organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives, seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to continue operating.

The administration conceded that many programs prevent immediate death and should remain online: field hospitals in Gaza, an HIV drug supplier for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syrian refugee food programs, health clinics that combat Ebola in Uganda and most of the landmark President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR.

In late January, Rubio and one of his top aides, Peter Marocco, said those programs and dozens of others could continue, granting them temporary waivers while the officials conducted what they have called a “targeted, case-by-case review” of all foreign aid programs managed by the State Department and USAID. That review, they said, would take three months.

Four weeks later, on Wednesday, Rubio and Marocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Now, as the administration faces multiple lawsuits challenging its actions, the court fights largely hinge on whether government officials deliberated responsibly before cutting off funding. The U.S. has also refused to pay almost $2 billion that the government owes aid organizations for work they’ve already completed.

Rubio and Marocco appear to have taken their dramatic steps without the careful review they’ve described to the courts, according to internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen officials from the State Department and USAID, which raises fresh questions about the legality of President Donald Trump’s evisceration of the American foreign aid system.

Current and former officials say that Marocco and Rubio cut critical programs without consulting contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts. “None of us believe that they’re conducting a careful, individualized review,” one official said.

In an episode that highlights how cursory and haphazard their efforts appear to have been, Marocco and Rubio ordered the cancellation of contracts, including for cellphone service, at an office they do not control. The move stranded people in war zones without phones, according to multiple officials and internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica. On Wednesday, AT&T received a termination notice for a $430,000 contract with USAID’s Office of Inspector General. That office is meant to be independent from USAID so that it can effectively audit the agency.

For more than 24 hours, OIG staff, including people in Ukraine and Haiti, did not have access to their government phones. No one at the OIG, including contract officers, knew it was coming, according to the officials. “This is an urgent issue for us, as we have OIG staff in warzones with no ability to receive security alerts,” a senior official in the agency wrote in an email to the company.

Eventually USAID reversed the termination.

Current and former officials throughout USAID and the State Department said the breakneck pace, lack of input from key officials, mistaken cancellations and boilerplate language in Wednesday’s termination notices undermine Marocco’s claims of a deliberative process.

“It’s a pretext,” one USAID official told ProPublica. “The review was supposed to take 90 days. An actual review based on substance requires laying out a process with guidelines, identifying info on each project, and selecting working groups to review. Any review they did was fake.”

If that turns out to be the case, legal experts and government officials say, the administration will have defied a federal judge’s order in a brazen gambit to continue dismantling USAID.

The morning after the mass termination notices went out, a senior USAID official sent an email saying Marocco and Rubio had canceled awards for essential services that the agency now wanted reinstated, telling staff, “We need your immediate input on any awards that may have been terminated that contain essential services related to the safety, security, and operations of USAID staff,” according to a court filing.

Since the initial decision to suspend foreign aid, humanitarian organizations and labor groups have taken the government to court, arguing that only Congress can dismantle USAID and that Trump’s blanket actions are unconstitutional. The government has told the courts that it has the right to cancel contracts, dismiss staff and reorganize USAID to align with Trump’s agenda.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting USAID and the State Department from following Trump’s executive orders to stop all foreign aid and to force the agency to pay its bills. When it didn’t comply, the judge issued another order, giving the government until midnight Wednesday to pay what it owes to aid groups.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the last order over unpaid bills to conduct further legal review. That same day, aid organizations around the world began receiving termination notices.

More than 90% of USAID’s global aid operations and half of those managed by the State Department received termination notices. The move is already putting children and refugees in gravely dangerous situations. The administration canceled almost 50 United Nations Population Fund projects worth more than $370 million, including programs to address maternal deaths and gender-based violence in Egypt, Nigeria and several other member nations around the world.

In early February, the nonprofit Alight received waivers for its programs supporting refugees in war-torn Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. On Wednesday, they were all terminated.

Alight runs six centers for extremely malnourished children in Sudan, where the organization treats babies and infants so sick that they will die within hours without ongoing care. The centers cost about $120,000 a month to operate. Alight is trying to fundraise to keep them open, knowing that the day they close their doors, children will die, CEO Jocelyn Wyatt told ProPublica.

In the meantime, they have been forced to close other lifesaving programs. In Somalia, around 700 malnourished children visited Alight clinics every day for weight check-ins and to pick up special food. Thirteen health clinics and a mobile unit served around 1,200 patients a day. On Thursday, all of those clinics closed, Wyatt said.

Alight also shuttered 33 primary health clinics in Sudan and stopped providing water to three refugee camps that house people displaced by decades of war. Alight had kept all those programs running these past five weeks, even though the organization hasn’t received any payments since Trump took office.

“We believed when Rubio said that there was no intention of cutting emergency lifesaving services that would basically cause immediate death,” said Wyatt. “We trusted that those would be protected.”

One of the State Department’s highest-ranking humanitarian aid officials, Jennifer Davis, stepped down this week, according to her resignation letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. During a meeting earlier this week, Davis, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s refugees bureau, told staff she believed she was bound by the judge’s order to restore programs and their funding, according to an attendee. “She was in tears about it,” the attendee said. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department, USAID and the White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. The State Department did not make Rubio available for an interview. Marocco also did not respond to questions.

By Thursday, hundreds of workers had returned to USAID’s former headquarters, where the name has been removed from the building facade, to collect their personal items. They left with boxes and suitcases. Some were crying. Dozens of people cheered and rang bells each time someone exited the building; many of them had recently lost humanitarian aid jobs as well.

“This is more than lost jobs. We’re losing the sector,” a former USAID employee said through tears as she waited for her allotted 15-minute time window to pick up her belongings. “The U.S. government is losing its influence. We’re now more unsafe as a country.”

In the early hours of Feb. 13 at a refugee camp in northern Syria, two armed men wearing masks and police uniforms broke into offices and a warehouse for the aid group Blumont, stealing more than $12,000 worth of laptops and other supplies the U.S. government had already paid for. Because the organization hadn’t received any funds since Trump took office, it no longer had personnel at the camp full time and had paused all its U.S.-funded work except a daily bread delivery.

The armed theft was the result of the U.S. not paying its bills, the group told USAID officials, according to an internal agency email obtained by ProPublica.

Shortly after the incident, the government started paying Blumont’s invoices and the aid group brought back staff and food services that had received a waiver. It is one of the few programs still online and receiving money.

Prior to Jan. 20, the U.S. spent about $60 billion on nonmilitary humanitarian and developmental aid each year — far more than any other country in total dollars, but less than 1% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that money is managed by USAID and the State Department. A network of aid organizations carry out the work, which is funded by Congress.

Since Trump took office, Marocco and Rubio have not only halted foreign aid, laid off thousands of workers and put many more on administrative leave, they have also stopped paying bills for work that has already been done. In one of several lawsuits related to the administration’s dismantling of USAID, aid groups are suing the federal government over the mass program closures and unpaid bills. It was that case that led federal district court Judge Amir Ali to order the administration to settle those bills, which by Feb. 13 totaled nearly $2 billion, according to figures Marocco gave the court. Almost none of it has been paid, the court filings show.

U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for interest and damages from the unpaid bills and broken contracts, legal experts told ProPublica.

Organizations have struggled to get through the opaque waiver process, and programs that succeeded were often so strapped for cash because the government hadn’t reimbursed them that they remained inoperative. Medicines that were already purchased by U.S. taxpayers are languishing in warehouses instead of being delivered to the people who need them, several contractors told ProPublica.

On Wednesday, as Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the district court’s order to the federal government to pay its bills, the administration told the court it had terminated 5,800 of the 6,300 foreign aid programs that USAID administered. The government also shuttered 4,100 programs managed by the State Department, about 60% of the total.

In Marocco’s own testimony to the court on Feb. 18 about the process, he said that senior staff and political appointees choose “specific awards” to be evaluated for termination or suspension. He said he personally examines the program and any potential consequences of terminating it before making final recommendations to Rubio.

But USAID staff say that subject-area experts and key personnel who are responsible for the programs were not involved in many terminations, while most others had already lost their jobs.

In the case of the phone contract for the OIG office, for example, the contract officers had no idea the termination notices were coming, officials said. Those officers are specially trained in contract law and regulations to manage these agreements and make sure the government is in compliance. But they were cut out of the process and only learned about it from AT&T, according to the officials and internal emails obtained by ProPublica. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.)

The one-page notice to the telecom giant said that Rubio and Marocco had “determined your award is not aligned with Agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest.” The notice added: “Immediately cease all activities.”

The notice came as an emailed PDF and not through the normal file management and correspondence system, which led multiple OIG officials to question whether anyone even looked at the contract’s basic information, like its statement of work, much less conducted a careful review.

David Black, an attorney specializing in government contracts, said that the law requires contract officers to approve termination notices and that the episode with the OIG raises questions about Marocco’s claims in court about careful reviews. “It suggests the process was done very hastily,” he said.

On the ground, in the places where the aid kept starvation at bay and deadly viruses in check, program directors say there will now be little to stop those threats.

“What really bothers me is that we’re just looking at numbers, we’re not thinking about real people who are actually going to suffer the consequences of these terminations,” said Dr. Anja Giphart, the acting president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which had HIV programs terminated in Eswatini, Lesotho and Tanzania.

Pulling treatment away from pregnant women means children will be infected with HIV in the weeks ahead, Giphart said. And doing it so suddenly means other governments and donors don’t have the opportunity to step in. Half of children who are undiagnosed and untreated for HIV die before their first birthday. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting months and months to get this back on track again,” she said.

In Uganda, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, which is funded by USAID, treats tens of thousands of patients for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition, it has for years been one of the only organizations in the country that helps contain Ebola outbreaks — including the current one, which has so far killed two people and infected at least eight others. Earlier this month, the U.S. government issued the foundation a waiver and said it could continue its lifesaving work.

So those who run the foundation were shocked to receive a termination notice hours later. The foundation’s executive director, Dr. Dithan Kiragga, told ProPublica his staff had just begun contact tracing patients with Ebola. He said they will likely now have to halt all U.S.-funded operations and hope that the Uganda health ministry can step in.

“The patients will be told that we are closing,” Kiragga said. “They’ve relied on our systems and support for quite a few years. We saved lives.”

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

Maryam Jameel and Ashley Clarke contributed reporting.

by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica, Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica

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Less than a week after deporting Venezuelans detained at Guantanamo Bay, the Trump administration has again flown about two dozen migrants to the U.S. naval base in Cuba. This time, however, the migrants are from countries across the world, including from places that are willing to take them back, which has raised additional questions about whom the government is choosing to send there and why.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune interviewed Angela Sequera, the mother of one of the first migrants sent to Guantanamo. She described her fear and desperation upon learning that her son, Yoiker Sequera, had been transferred to the facility, which she knew only as a place where terrorists were held and tortured after the 9/11 attacks.

On Feb. 9, Sequera was waiting for her daily phone call from Yoiker, who had been in an El Paso immigration detention facility since he was charged with entering the U.S. illegally late last year. When the phone finally rang, it wasn’t her son but another detainee who told her that Yoiker had been taken to Guantanamo.

“It hit me like a bucket of cold water. I asked the man: ‘Why? Why? Why?’” Sequera recalled. She said the detainee told her that the federal government was trying to link Yoiker to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for migrant smuggling and other crimes in Latin America.

She panicked. She couldn't understand why this was happening. She and some of the relatives of 178 Venezuelans who were among the first migrants transferred to Guantanamo by the U.S. government scrambled to try to establish contact with their loved ones, scoured the internet and exchanged messages on an impromptu WhatsApp group.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained records about Yoiker and two other Venezuelans taken to Guantanamo. A search of U.S. federal court records found that Yoiker and another man had no crimes except for illegal entry, while a third had been convicted for assaulting a federal officer during a riot while in detention. “My son is not a criminal. He has no record. He has nothing to do with gangs. He does not belong to any Tren de Aragua,” said Sequera, who shared documentation from Venezuelan authorities that stated he did not have a criminal history.

On Feb. 21, after 13 days without hearing from her son, Sequera got a call from Yoiker. He had been released and was back in Venezuela, but he refused to discuss the time he spent detained at the naval base. “I think he does it to not make me worry,” said Sequera, who is among the plaintiffs named in a lawsuit filed by immigrants’ rights advocates seeking legal access to the migrants in Guantanamo.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said this week that nearly half of the Venezuelans originally detained at Guantanamo were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and that many had serious criminal records. DHS did not provide evidence to support that assertion.

DHS also said in court filings this month that Guantanamo will continue to “temporarily house” migrants before they are “removed to their home country or a safe third country.”

Migrants on recent flights to Guantanamo have come from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Guinea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Senegal, according to government data shared with ProPublica and the Tribune. DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the most recent transfers.

“We continue to know very little about the conditions there, who the government is sending there and why this is happening,” said Zoe Bowman, an attorney with the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Watch the video: Mother Speaks Out Against Trump’s Detention of Her Son at Guantanamo

Mauricio Rodríguez Pons contributed to the production.

by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica.

The house is owned by a major Republican donor and Tennessee car magnate who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress.

Pastor Steve Berger, left, with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Johnson’s wife, Kelly, in what appears to be the Capitol Hill home the two men have been sharing (via Facebook)

Over the past four years, Berger and his wife, Sarah Berger, have dedicated themselves to what they call their D.C. “ministry center.” In addition to Johnson, who is an evangelical conservative, the pastor has built close relationships with several other influential conservative politicians. Dan Bishop, now nominated for a powerful post in the Trump White House, seems to have also lived in the home last year while he was still a congressman, according to three people.

A spokesperson for Johnson said that the speaker “pays fair market value in monthly rent for the portion of the Washington, D.C. townhome that he occupies.” He did not answer a question about how much Johnson is paying. House ethics rules allow members of Congress to live anywhere, as long as they are paying fair-market rent.

The spokesperson added that Johnson “has never once spoken to Mr. Berger about any piece of legislation or any matter of public policy.” Berger and Bishop did not respond to requests for comment.

The Bergers have described their mission as galvanizing political allies to take action. “It’s just iron sharpening iron,” Sarah Berger said on a podcast last summer, explaining the couple’s approach to political influence. “Like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I’m standing firm on this policy.’”

Steve Berger claims to have personally spurred legislation. “It’s a humbling thing,” he said in a sermon in late 2022. “You get a text message from a senator that says: ‘Thank you for your inspiration. Because it has caused me now to create a bill that is going to further righteousness in this country.’”

Berger’s interests extend beyond his staunch social conservatism. He and the donor who owns the house, Lee Beaman, have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, including a bill that would make it easier to fire federal employees and a regulation that would reduce fuel efficiency standards for the automotive industry. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that President Donald Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results.

Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, did not respond to questions about how he ended up staying at the home. Beaman did not respond to requests for comment.

The earliest date ProPublica was able to confirm Johnson being at the Berger house was in mid-December. A video reviewed by ProPublica shows Johnson visiting the home on Dec. 15 with two women who appear to be his wife and daughter. They lingered outside before entering, while Johnson pointed around the building and down to the basement entrance as if he was giving a tour. Two days later, Berger sent a note to his supporters on social media: “I so wish I could tell you all the massive doors that broke open this week.”

Since the beginning of the year, videos and interviews show, Johnson has regularly left the house in the morning and returned in the evening. One day that Johnson was there recently, Berger was also at the home, opening the front door barefoot in pajama bottoms. (It appears Johnson may primarily be staying in the home’s two-bedroom basement.)

Washington pieds-à-terre can prove a significant expense for members of Congress as they split time between the capital and their home districts. Johnson is less wealthy than many other lawmakers. He worked at conservative nonprofits before he entered public service, and on his most recent financial disclosure form he did not declare a single asset. When Johnson was elevated to the speakership in 2023, news reports indicated that rather than renting an apartment, he might be sleeping in his office. (Lawmakers must report debts, income and many financial holdings on disclosure forms but aren’t required to list living expenses like rent.)

The Berger home is in an upscale D.C. neighborhood full of lobbyists and corporate attorneys. Though it’s not clear what the home’s basement would fetch on the open market, it’s not unusual for two-bedrooms in the area to rent for as much as $7,000 a month. Discounts on rent are generally prohibited by House ethics rules as improper gifts, experts said.

In sermons and on social media, Berger has mentioned some of the topics he’s discussed with Johnson and other members of Congress. Last year, Berger, a passionate supporter of the Israeli right-wing, said he’d had “a great conversation” with the speaker about Israel.

An Instagram post from Pastor Steve Berger (via Instagram)

Recently, Johnson has described his conversations with Trump to the pastor, according to Berger. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Berger said in a sermon that he’d advised “some congressmen” to see the conflict through the lens of Ezekiel 38 and 39, parts of the Bible some see as prophesying a great war before the Second Coming. He did not specify what that meant from a policy perspective.

An energetic 60-year-old with a white goatee and penchant for preaching in sneakers and jeans, Berger has strong views on a wide range of issues, including economic policy and public health. He is vehemently opposed to the World Health Organization, which Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from last month, and recently predicted that COVID-19 vaccines will result in “young people dropping dead all over the place.” He attacked the World Economic Forum at length in a recent sermon, accusing it of “taking advantage” of COVID-19 “to implement their satanic plot.”

Berger is also against same-sex marriage, saying “it opens the door to all manner of sexual depravity and wickedness” — though he has said he has “friends who are practicing homosexuals, people I care about.” He opposes homosexuality and “heterosexual sin” in equal measures, he’s said, referring to acts like watching pornography and sex between unmarried adults.

Berger’s operation is organized as a nonprofit called Ambassador Services International, which runs on a budget of around $1 million per year, according to tax filings. The home where it is registered in Washington — and where Johnson has been staying — was purchased in early 2021. Once the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and later housing the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, it was advertised at the time as a “four-level Second Empire-style townhouse of impeccable elegance and exceptional scale,” offering “bespoke tranquility in a coveted location.”

The buyer was Crockett Ventures LLC. Corporate filings show its sole owner is Beaman, the donor and businessman, who built a fortune on a chain of car dealerships started by his father. He has given millions to Republican political groups, including large donations to the Trump campaign and political committees for the Heritage Foundation and the House Freedom Caucus. He’s also served as the treasurer of a congressional campaign.

Beaman was once so fed up with the restrictions that came with owning a home on a “government-controlled lake” that he bought a sprawling property with a 50-acre private lake of its own, according to a profile in an architecture book. He became a fixture of Nashville media in recent years because of sordid allegations made by his fourth wife during their divorce, including that he made her watch what he called “training films” of him having sex with a prostitute. Beaman’s lawyers wrote at the time that his wife’s filing contained “impertinent and scandalous matter only meant to harass Mr. Beaman.”

Beaman has attended a Tennessee church that Berger founded, but it’s not clear what role, if any, he plays in the pastor’s influence project in Washington. It’s also unclear whether the pastor’s nonprofit pays for the use of the Capitol Hill townhouse.

Berger came to prominence in his home state as the longtime pastor of Grace Chapel, a large church outside Nashville whose members have included the current governor of the state. In 2021, Berger left the church and he and his wife launched their project in Washington.

He soon began Bible study sessions with senators, representatives and congressional aides, according to the Bergers. Meanwhile, Sarah Berger spent her time “in relationship with and pouring into the lives of congressional wives,” tax filings say.

“Iron Sharpening Iron”

Pastor Steve Berger and his wife spoke about their project to influence politicians in a podcast last year.

(via Youtube)

Watch video ➜

Steve Berger quickly made connections at the highest levels of the Republican Party.

“Listen, I have confessed things to Steve that I wouldn't normally confess to anyone else,” Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff in the first Trump administration who remains an important ally of the president, said at a 2023 event with Berger. “We have been praying together, having a Bible study each and every week. Not just me, but several members of Congress.”

A group of congressmen gathered on stage together to speak at the pastor’s 60th-birthday party in October, including Bishop, Rep. Barry Moore, Rep. Andy Ogles and Rep. Warren Davidson. All four are current or former members of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus. (None of the four responded to requests for comment.)

Evidence suggests that Bishop also recently lived at the Capitol Hill townhouse. Three neighbors told ProPublica that the FBI visited them this month asking about Bishop, seemingly as part of the background check for his White House job. “They said that address,” said one neighbor, adding that the agent showed a photo of Bishop. “They said: ‘He lived there up to a couple months ago. Do you know him?’”

Trump has nominated Bishop to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, the powerful White House office that recently moved to freeze funding streams across the federal government. Berger celebrated the nomination on Instagram: “I want to congratulate my dear friend and brother, Congressman Dan Bishop, for accepting this incredible opportunity.”

Do you have any information we should know about Steve Berger or Speaker Mike Johnson? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Jeff Frankl contributed research.

Correction

Feb. 28, 2025: This story originally incorrectly said Steve Berger and Dan Bishop did respond to requests for comment. They did not respond.

by Agnel Philip and Lisa Song

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A few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he had uncovered $2 billion of science grants funded by former President Joe Biden’s administration that prioritized “radical political perspectives” or “neo-Marxist theories.’’ His aides on a congressional committee assembled the list by searching the project descriptions for 699 key terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture.”

When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.

We found that Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.

Among them, for example, was a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best we can tell, the project ran into trouble with Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.

Other projects our AI assistant led us to included:

• Developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It seems to have caught the committee’s attention for using the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”
• Creating biosensors to detect infectious diseases. The grant appears to have been tagged for the repeated use of “POC,” an acronym often used for “people of color” but in this context meaning “point of care” — that is, the place where people receive medical treatment — and “barrier,” referring to a part of the biosensor itself.
• Designing eye-tracking technology for diagnosing and treating concussions. It appears to have gotten flagged for referencing “traumatic” brain injuries and the “status,” meaning the condition, of patients.

It’s “very frightening,” said Charlotte Lindqvist, a biology professor at the University at Buffalo who is conducting the research on mint plants.

Lindqvist spends hours a day grinding up plant samples and analyzing their DNA to identify genetic differences between species. Studying plant diversity, she said, could help secure more resilient food systems. “We are really trying very, very hard ... to move our world forward, understanding it better through our sort of foundational, sometimes groundbreaking research,” she said, “and then you get flagged and blacklisted because there is a word like ‘female’ in your project.”

Staff for the Republicans on the Senate committee assembled their report by examining all NSF grants awarded to projects that began between January 2021 and April 2024. Using their list of keywords, they flagged those earmarked for research that they said was “often based on neo-Marxist theories that identified merit by physical or ethnic attributes, not one’s talent, work ethic, or intellectual curiosity.”

Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people.

Cruz released the full database just as the Trump administration’s NSF said it was examining research grants to make sure they complied with the president’s executive orders terminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cruz said he requested “significant scrutiny” of the grants in his database. At the time, the NSF was using a similar list of keywords for its review.

Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the committee responded to requests for comment.

It’s not clear if approved projects that are still waiting for payments will get their money. A federal judge ruled last Friday that the administration can’t cancel or freeze grants for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When asked how it would respond to the judge’s preliminary injunction, an NSF spokesperson directed ProPublica to an agency webpage, which had not been updated with information about the court ruling at the time of publication.

“NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a spokesperson told ProPublica in response to questions about its review process.

The Senate committee’s list includes words like “diversify” and “biases,” which have technical meanings unrelated to social issues. Although the report’s authors worked to remove grants flagged for those reasons, some, like Lindqvist’s, slipped through.

The lack of precision in the committee’s methodology is “obviously laughable,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional governments. But she also worries about what might happen if lawmakers take a more serious approach, such as trying to ban research on racial inequality, similar to how Congress severely limited studies on gun violence.

The NSF evaluates grant proposals based on two factors. The first is intellectual merit. Every application is reviewed by a panel of experts — often other academics — who specialize in the same topic. They pore over detailed applications that include data, references and researchers’ qualifications, far more information than the brief summaries evaluated by the Senate committee.

The other factor is “broader impacts,” which could include how the research might benefit societal well-being or make science more inclusive.

Currently, federal laws require the NSF to support research at historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions that serve groups who are underrepresented in science. Congress also ordered the NSF to fund efforts “designed to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement” of members of these groups in scientific careers.

“All of that is hard-wired into federal funding,” Scheppele said. “If anyone was ‘woke,’ it was Congress.”

Laws passed by Congress have more legal weight than executive orders, so the NSF shouldn’t prioritize Trump’s order over its mandate to support underrepresented people in science, Scheppele said. The White House, she said in an email, is “literally asking the NSF to violate the law!”

The committee report singled out some projects for simply acknowledging that people from certain demographics face unique challenges. That includes a University of Houston study of maternal mortality that examines why Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the U.S. are nearly three times as likely as white women to die during pregnancy or within the first year after childbirth. Another project, which involved using drones to deliver defibrillators to people suffering cardiac arrest, appeared to be flagged because it noted that emergency response times are slower in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

In other cases, the keywords that caught the committee’s attention may have come from outreach efforts meant to broaden the impact of the research. A $6 million nuclear astrophysics project to study the origins of the universe includes a reference to attracting a “diverse group” of students interested in the subject and a summer school program for increasing interest in nuclear-science careers, “especially among women and minorities.”

That’s in line with a 1998 law that ordered the NSF to develop “intellectual capital, both people and ideas, with particular emphasis on groups and regions that traditionally have not participated fully in science, mathematics, and engineering.”

Congress recognized “you’re going to get better science” that way, said Melissa Finucane, vice president of science and innovation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. When you get different perspectives interacting and thinking about complex problems, she said, you’ll get different and new ways of solving a problem.

The report’s “sledgehammer” methodology ignores the substantial scientific merit of these projects, many of which address “critical national needs in areas such as aerospace, agriculture, and computing infrastructure — as well as the need to broaden the talent pool,” a spokesperson for Democrats on the Senate committee said in an email. The email said that ranking Democrat Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington “understands that there is no way the United States can compete” with the rest of the world on innovation “without ensuring that NSF funding emphasizes the participation of women and minorities in STEM,” a reference to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Rice University professor Vicky Yao has seen firsthand how efforts to broaden participation can increase excitement and interest in science.

When Yao applied for a research grant in 2022, she included outreach to community college students, many of whom are from underrepresented populations and don’t have access to research opportunities.

When ProPublica informed Yao her $610,000 project was on the Senate committee’s list, she found it bizarre that such technical work on DNA methylation — a process that can affect cancer and neurological diseases — could be labeled as “woke.”

The committee’s choice of keywords is so sweeping that shutting down the research that uses those terms would end not just diversity programs but also vast fields of research on social science (“Black communities,” “racial inequality,” “LGBT”), climate change (“net zero,” “climate research,” “clean energy”) and medicine (“white women,” “victims,” “trauma”).

If any research related to women or minority populations is under fire, then “we’re talking about maybe 65% of the American population. So at that point, what’s left?” said Dominic Boyer, an anthropology professor at Rice University whose project on reducing flood risk was flagged by the committee. “Under what authority, or according to what philosophy, can a government invalidate or discredit research that’s focusing on two-thirds of the population?”

Boyer received an award of $750,000 to use nature-based solutions like rain gardens to reduce flooding in Houston, where Hurricane Harvey displaced tens of thousands of people in 2017. His team has begun collaborating closely with residents from three neighborhoods: two lower-income communities where the residents are mostly Hispanic, Black or Asian, and a middle-income neighborhood with mostly Hispanic and white residents.

He initially assumed that’s why his research was flagged. But it turned out that the triggering keywords may have come from boilerplate language that describes the specific NSF program that funded Boyer’s work: Strengthening American Infrastructure. The portions of the grant’s program description containing those keywords were written by the NSF during Trump’s first term. It used the words “socioeconomic” and “equal opportunity” to explain why infrastructure is important to society. The same description is found in more than two dozen other grants on the committee’s list.

Boyer said it speaks to a kind of “Orwellian absurdity” that “these words can only have one meaning, and it’s the meaning that they would like to politicize.”

Sharon Lerner contributed reporting and Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.

by Jeremy Kohler

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The last time Missouri took control of St. Louis’ police force was just before the start of the Civil War, when the state’s secessionist-leaning leaders were trying to prevent police officers from taking up arms against the Confederacy.

The law that put the police department under state control was in effect for the next 152 years. In November 2012, nearly two-thirds of voters approved a statewide ballot measure, pushed by police reform activists and elected officials, that restored local authority and placed the department under the mayor’s jurisdiction.

Now, the state’s Republican governor and GOP-led legislature are again pushing to take over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. They argue that the Democratic-run city government is responsible for a drop in officer morale and that statistics that show a decline in crime are inaccurate.

The Missouri House voted 106-47 last week to transfer control from the city to a state-appointed board this summer. The five-member board would be made up of the mayor and four commissioners appointed by the governor, essentially leaving the governor with the votes to control the police department.

The state Senate is debating the measure, but a vote has not yet been scheduled.

The attempt to reverse a measure overwhelmingly approved by state voters, albeit more than a decade ago, is part of a broader pattern of Missouri’s conservative-led government trying to override the will of the electorate, from repealing voter-approved redistricting reform to trying to reinstate an abortion ban even though voters approved a constitutional amendment last year legalizing the procedure.

State takeovers of metropolitan police departments are rare; Kansas City, Missouri, remains the only major U.S. city with its police force under state control. Its arrangement dates to Reconstruction, when Missouri lawmakers, aiming to limit Black political influence, stripped the city of its oversight role.

After a brief return to local control in the 1930s, the state reasserted authority over Kansas City police to weaken political boss Tom Pendergast, who had used the department for patronage and election fraud.

Baltimore recently regained control of its police department after 160 years of state control.

Republican-led states have taken away control of other aspects of government from local leaders in other cities with majority-Black populations. In Mississippi, officials have expanded the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police beyond government buildings into residential and commercial areas in Jackson, the state capital. They’ve also created a state-run court with appointed judges and increased police funding while the Black-led Jackson Police Department struggles to respond to calls.

Texas and Missouri have intervened in local schools and city governments, leading to disputes about local control — though these takeovers have generally been temporary, with a path to restoring local authority. In Tennessee, the state comptroller backed down from taking over the majority-Black city of Mason after local officials agreed that a certified public accounting or law firm would help the town complete audits, balance its budget and train officials on proper use of tax revenue. It happens in states led by Democrats, too, but less frequently.

“It really is removing this political power from residents, allowing them to have less authority, oversight and voice in how their system of public safety and policing operates,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a senior researcher at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute.

Some St. Louis leaders see the current effort there as echoing 19th-century efforts to limit Black political power. They argue that a majority-white, conservative government is again moving to strip authority from local officials and diminish Black influence over policing.

State Sen. Karla May, a Black Democrat from St. Louis who has testified against the push for state control, said it’s no coincidence that the plan became an urgent matter for legislators, and is advancing, during the tenure of Mayor Tishaura Jones, who also is Black.

May said the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the collective bargaining unit for city police officers, “does not want to be controlled by an African American mayor.” Representatives from the union did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Jones did not make her available for an interview. But the mayor said in an emailed statement that “I don’t think Republican legislators want to give a Black woman who is also a Democrat credit for dramatically reducing crime, increasing officer pay and building out successful public safety programs.” She said advocates for state control have never explained how it would improve public safety.

The push to take control of the St. Louis police is a top priority for Gov. Mike Kehoe, a newly elected Republican whose State of the State address framed the issue in economic terms. He said what mattered was whether businesses felt “safe enough to invest in our cities.” Kehoe, who is white, frequently invokes his upbringing in St. Louis to push for state control.

The House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Brad Christ, a white Republican from the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis, argues that calling his proposal “state control” is misleading because the governor’s appointees would be required to have lived in the city for at least three years.

He noted that the effort to return the police to the state predates Jones’ term as mayor. A Black Democrat from St. Louis filed a similar bill that stalled in the House in 2019 during the tenure of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is white. Christ said in a text that this was “clear evidence that the wild assertion that this effort has been race motivated is completely false.”

The Ethical Society of Police, a group that represents Black police officers in St. Louis, also supports a state takeover. Its president, Donnell Walters, wrote an opinion piece in 2023 with then-Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, calling for state control and alleging mismanagement and low morale under city control.

Walters did not return messages seeking comment.

Heather Taylor, a retired sergeant who led ESOP from 2015 to 2020 — and who later worked in the Jones administration before resigning in 2023 after criticizing the mayor and the department on social media — said she worries the department will suffer under state control. But, she said, ESOP members believe that the city lacks urgency in providing basic support for officers and that the state might do a better job addressing those needs.

Jones has repeatedly pointed to city crime data showing a decline since she hired Robert Tracy as police chief two years ago. Notably, the city’s murder totals have plummeted.

But many argue that the city’s statistics on other types of crimes don’t reflect the sense of lawlessness in St. Louis. Ness Sandoval, a professor of sociology and demography at Saint Louis University who studies crime trends, said he believes the city underreports crime and lacks transparency. “Most people who rely on the data believe there probably should be an asterisk,” he said. Jones has stood behind the crime numbers, saying they are accurate.

Still, the mayor and her police chief maintain that state control does not necessarily reduce crime. In 2012, while the police were still under state oversight, Forbes magazine ranked St. Louis as the second-most-dangerous city in the nation.

Kansas City, which is still under state control, continues to struggle with violent crime. Efforts to restore local oversight have never gained much traction there. Despite past studies and proposals — including a 1968 report listing local control as the top recommendation after police killed six Black residents during riots, and a 2013 mayoral committee vote for local control that failed by a single vote — no serious push has materialized.

by Corey G. Johnson, design by Anna Donlan

For years, some of America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on customers — without their knowledge or consent — to the gun industry’s main lobbying group. Political operatives then employed those details to rally firearms owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House.

The strategy remained a secret for more than two decades.

In a series of stories in recent months, ProPublica revealed the inner workings of the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s project, using a trove of gun industry documents and insider interviews.

We also showed how the NSSF teamed up with the controversial political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge its outreach to gun owners and others in the 2016 election.

Additional internal Cambridge reports obtained by ProPublica now detail the full scope and depth of the persuasion campaign’s sophistication and intrusiveness.

The political consultancy analyzed thousands of details about the lives of people in the NSSF’s enormous database. Were they shopaholics? Did they gamble? Did women buy plus-size or petite underwear?

This story contains interactive graphics that are not displayed here. Read the full story on our website.

The alchemy had three phases.

Phase One: Amassing the Data

Some of the data, excerpted here, was basic information you might find on a census, like marital status or ethnic group.

But the data also contained much more specific information about a person’s aesthetic preferences, purchasing habits and hobbies.

Other data highlighted consumers’ personal opinions, histories and even vices.

How Cambridge converted those tiny bits of data into massive political wins has never before been made public. Its methods raise disturbing questions about how our personal data can be used to manipulate us.

“There is a natural desire to stay anonymous and keep your own information, and this is such a violation of that,” said Calli Schroeder, privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The NSSF has said its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.” Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, said the trade group’s 2016 voter outreach campaign involved only commercially available data.

But Cambridge emails and a report on the NSSF campaign said the data included 20 years of information about gun buyers harvested from manufacturer warranty cards given to the NSSF. A contractor for the trade group also handed Cambridge a database of shoppers at Cabela’s, a popular sporting goods retailer. (The general counsel for Bass Pro, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said the company had been unable to find evidence of Cabela’s “sharing customer information that was not compliant with their privacy policies at or prior to the time of acquisition.”)

Cambridge documents show the firm compared names and addresses in the NSSF and Cabela’s data against the same names and addresses found in a vast array of consumer purchase and lifestyle information, supplied by data broker companies.

Phase Two: Creating the Profiles

Next, analysts used an algorithm to profile and score each person’s behavioral traits based on the data and a psychological assessment tool called OCEAN that measures a human being’s openness to new and different experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. From those scores, Cambridge organized people into five groups it called risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Members of each group received Facebook ads tailored to their group’s psychological profiles.

Below are political ads and descriptions of those personality groups pulled from Cambridge documents for the NSSF project. The ads include hypothetical messages along with the actual versions the firm sent for the NSSF’s election campaign, called GunVote.

The Risk-Taker

Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring high on the scale for neuroticism, risk-takers are “easily frustrated, disorganized, often late and more prone to addiction than others.” They are “attracted to risky situations,” known for “overreacting to various situations,” act “without thinking” and are “often perceived to be outsiders.” Keywords include “security,” “enemies” and “take action.”

Persuasion Tactics: Messaging “could be constructed by first introducing negative scenarios, before providing a reassuring and authoritative solution.”

Sample Ad

Among examples Cambridge gave of ads targeting risk-takers is one that depicts a masked person breaking into a home with the message, “What would you do? Protect the Second Amendment.” The sample ad creates a negative scenario that spotlights the concept of enemies and taking action.

Actual Ad

The ad Cambridge sent to risk-takers conjures the specter of the Supreme Court turning into “an enemy to your gun rights.”

The Go-Getter

Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring low on the neuroticism scale, go-getters are “efficient, productive, and focused on their goals,” often perceived as “self-assured, direct, welcoming and friendly,” as well as being “upbeat about the future.” They are self-aware, in control of their emotions and “like to keep busy and enjoy shared adventures with friends and family.” Keywords include “future” and “hope.”

Persuasion Tactics: Go-getters are best persuaded with messaging that “clearly aligns with the goals to which they are already committed,” according to Cambridge documents. “Imagery should show people collectively taking actions to solve problems in a positive environment.”

Sample Ad

Cambridge’s example of an ad targeting go-getters focuses on shared adventures and a positive future by depicting young men hunting together with the message, “Help the next generation enjoy the hunt.”

Actual Ad

The ad Cambridge sent shows what appears to be a father and son on a hunt, wearing matching camouflage jackets with rifles slung over their left shoulders. The image urges the go-getters to “protect your future.”

The Supporter

Cambridge Analytica Description: Primarily conscientious on the OCEAN scale, supporters are “relaxed and down to earth” and care about their communities, but “prefer not to be the center of attention.” They act judiciously and “react calmly in a crisis.” They are “rule followers” who “uphold traditional values” and “like their own space, which they share with a select few.” Keywords include “community,” “responsibility,” “reality” and “facts.”

Persuasion Tactics: Because supporters value consistency and commitment, they will respond to messages that include “the concept of reciprocity.” Ads should focus on the idea that “helping is a question of responsibility” between the individual and the people they care about.

Sample Ad

The sample ad presents the phrase, “Protect your right to safe firearms use,” over the image of what appears to be a father and son standing in front of a picturesque, well-preserved landscape dotted by mountains.

Actual Ad

The image Cambridge sent features a couple who appear to be on a hunt, looking directly at the camera. Hoping to spur supporters’ leanings toward reciprocity, the message says, “Senator Burr is working hard to protect your gun rights.”

The Carer

Cambridge Analytica Description: Found primarily in the late 50s to early 70s age range, carers are “often led by their emotions but are reluctant to express them, directing their anger inwards against themselves.” They gain control in life through caring for others and focusing on their jobs. They “enjoy voluntary and hands-on activities.” Keywords include “family,” “community,” “cooperation” and “values.”

Persuasion Tactics: Messaging should “appeal to their altruistic side” and should put forward concepts that “will enhance their family life or their lifestyle.” The carer is motivated by altruism, so messages should “appeal to their sensitivity and emotionality, directly leading to a ‘call to action.’”

Sample Ad

The sample ad shows multiple generations of a family spending time together, with a message that appeals to the carer’s focus on family values and emotionality: “You take care of your family. Now take care of your country.”

Actual Ad

The image Cambridge sent to carers depicts a happy family on a sunny day holding hands and surrounded by nature. The message refers to U.S. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina “protecting your family’s way of life.”

The Individualist

Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring low in openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism, individualists are “stubborn,” “introverted homebodies” who “view others as potential enemies.” They “prefer the simple things in life and like to pursue activities alone.” Individualists tend to “lack empathy” and have “strong and unchanging beliefs about social norms and morality.” Individualists approach issues with “strict discipline and a ‘get-tough’ attitude.” Keywords include “traditions” and “concrete actions.”

Persuasion Tactics: Messaging to individualists should be “direct and straightforward.” They respond with appeals to “their traditional side and their independent approach to life.”

Sample Ad

The sample ad shows a man holding a gun behind his back with the message, “If you can’t protect yourself, who will?” This approach focuses on the isolation and “get-tough attitude” that speaks to individualists.

Actual Ad

The ad Cambridge sent to individualists depicts rows of U.S. flags in a field, an image widely associated with military sacrifice and remembrances of war. The message emphasizes the Supreme Court’s role as “the last line of defense for your rights.”

Phase Three: Delivering the Ads

Cambridge found the targeted people on Facebook and delivered ads through the platform aimed at voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Each pop-up ad said it came from the NSSF’s GunVote page, but they were crafted by Cambridge. The ads sent to potential voters in key states from June 21, 2016, through July 1, 2016, promoted Republican Sens. Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Ron Johnson.

Nearly 817,000 people saw the messages, according to Cambridge’s internal metric reports.

For the next three months, Cambridge included voters in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada in the multistate blast of ads and videos on social media. Altogether, they garnered nearly 378 million views and drove 60,140,280 visitors to the NSSF’s website.

Cambridge also mapped out the locations of people in the five personality groups in the key states and gave NSSF contractors lists containing their names and addresses. The contractors examined the numbers and locations of each persona on a county-by-county basis. Then they mailed to the potential voters’ homes messages designed to persuade them to cast ballots for the gun industry’s preferred candidates.

Targeting Voters at the County Level

Cambridge Analytica's maps show voters broken down by psychological groups.

Ohio

Wisconsin

Missouri

(Persona maps from Cambridge Analytica documents)

See a detailed view of voters grouped by persona in each of the states targeted by Cambridge.

by Talia Buford

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For the third year, ProPublica will invite up to 10 news editors from media companies across the country to participate in a yearlong investigative editing training program, led by the newsroom’s award-winning staff.

Applications are now open for the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program. Submissions are due March 24 at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

As the nation’s premier nonprofit investigative newsroom, ProPublica is dedicated to journalism that changes laws and lives and to advancing the careers of the people who produce it. The goal of this program is to address our industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. Building a pipeline of talent is a priority that serves us and our industry.

“A great investigative editor can be a force multiplier for change; they not only make stories better, but journalists better,” said Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas, an architect of the editor training program. “Unfortunately, it’s one of the most difficult jobs to break into. Many who have succeeded learned from other investigative editors, so we created this program to seed those opportunities. We’ve been amazed at how well it’s worked.”

This year’s program will begin in June 2025 with a weeklong boot camp in New York that will include courses and panel discussions on how to conceive of and produce investigative projects that expose harm and have impact. The editors will also get training in how to manage reporters who are working with data, documents and sensitive sources, including whistleblowers, agency insiders and people who have suffered trauma. The program also includes virtual continuing education sessions and support from a ProPublica mentor.

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

Frequently Asked Questions What is this?

The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program is designed to help expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, to help better reflect the nation as a whole.

What kind of experience can you expect?

The program kicks off with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, which includes a series of courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors, veteran reporters and other newsroom leaders. The boot camp will include hands-on editing exercises and opportunities for participants to workshop projects underway in their own newsrooms.

Afterward, participants will gather virtually for seminars and career development discussions with their cohort and ProPublica journalists. Each of the participants will also be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on story and management challenges or on how to most effectively pursue their own professional aspirations.

What skills should I expect to learn?

• How to evaluate story ideas and determine the right scope, length and time for getting the work done.
• How to manage a reporter through a complicated accountability story and communicate feedback in ways that build trust and confidence.
• How to edit investigative drafts, spot holes in reporting logic, organize a narrative and guide the reporter through the fact-checking process.
• How to work collaboratively with research, data and multimedia teams to elevate an investigative project.

When is the boot camp?

The five-day, all-expenses-paid boot camp will be held June 1 to June 5, 2025, in New York, with remote sessions via Google Meet throughout the year.

Is there a virtual option for the boot camp?

We are planning for the 2025 boot camp to be held in person and will not have a virtual option.

Will I be responsible for my expenses in New York?

ProPublica will cover participants’ expenses for meals, travel and lodging during the boot camp.

How many participants will be selected each year?

Up to 10 journalists.

Who is eligible?

The program is open to all. The aim is to help broaden our industry’s investigative editing ranks to include journalists from a wide array of backgrounds. We encourage everyone to apply, including those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and rural news organizations, as well as women, people of color, veterans, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. Past participants have come from a wide range of news outlets across the country.

The ideal participants will have:

• A minimum of five years of journalism experience, either as an editor or as a reporter primarily doing work with an investigative or accountability focus.
• A strong grasp of the basics of editing, storytelling, structure and framing.
• Experience managing a team of journalists or a complicated multipronged reporting project.
• An accountability mindset: You don’t have to have been on the investigative team, but we are looking for people with an eye for watchdog reporting and editing.

Am I eligible if I live outside of the United States?

No.

How do I apply?

The application period opens Wednesday and closes March 24 at 9 a.m. Eastern time. You can apply via this link.

How can I learn more about the program?

You can view playback of our informational webinar from 2024 here. The dates have changed, but the rest of the program information remains the same.

What if I have other questions?

Send an email to Assistant Managing Editor Talia Buford at talent@propublica.org.

by Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press, and J. David McSwane, ProPublica

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In late 2020, St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, Montana, fired its oncologist, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, and took the extraordinary step of publicly accusing him of hurting patients. The hospital said the doctor overprescribed narcotics and gave chemotherapy to patients who didn’t have cancer, among other allegations.

Despite being notified by St. Peter’s that it had revoked Weiner’s privileges, the Montana Board of Medical Examiners renewed his license in 2021 and 2023. This week, the board renewed his license again for another two years.

Questions about whether Weiner would be permitted to continue practicing medicine intensified after a December ProPublica investigation exposed a trail of patient harm and at least 10 suspicious deaths tied to his practice. That investigation, which relied on thousands of pages of court records and dozens of interviews, detailed how Weiner built a high-volume business that billed as much as possible to public and private insurance while many of his patients received unnecessary, dangerous or substandard care.

While it’s unclear what the medical board considered before renewing Weiner’s license, the investigation published by ProPublica and Montana Free Press caught the attention of law enforcement. Criminal investigators with the Montana Department of Justice launched an official inquiry this month, according to three sources directly involved in the matter.

Weiner has denied mistreating his patients. He did not respond to a request for comment about his license being renewed and the Montana Department of Justice investigation.

After St. Peter’s fired Weiner, he sued the hospital for wrongful termination and defamation. After a four-year legal battle, the Montana Supreme Court sided with the hospital in a ruling this month. The court wrote that the hospital’s peer-review process leading to Weiner’s dismissal was “reasonable and warranted due to the quantity and severity of Weiner’s inappropriate patient care.”

After it fired Weiner, the hospital inspected the files of more than 2,000 patients to whom he had prescribed controlled substances. Court records show that medical reviewers hired by St. Peter’s highlighted the case of Sharon Dibble, a 75-year-old patient who died shortly after Weiner doubled her morphine prescription. That increase in morphine “led to respiratory arrest and the patient’s demise,” a medical expert hired by St. Peter’s concluded.

Dibble’s son, Tom Stevison, called the medical board’s decision to renew Weiner’s license “ridiculous.”

“There’s just too much evidence against him, pointing to wrongdoing, to recklessly relicense this guy,” he said, referring to the hospital’s allegations and ProPublica’s reporting. “I do believe he should be held accountable.”

Weiner previously denied the allegation that he overprescribed patients, including Dibble, and was critical of the medical review.

In the months after Weiner was fired, thousands of friends and former patients formed Facebook groups in support of him. They raised funds to rent a billboard in Helena that read, “WE STAND WITH DR. WEINER.” On Tuesday, Dayna Schwartz, who led that effort, posted on Facebook, “Congrats Doc on your license renewal!!”

A spokesperson for the state Board of Medical Examiners referred a request for comment about Weiner’s license renewal to its umbrella agency, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry. An agency spokesperson did not respond to questions before publication.

St. Peter’s did not respond to requests for comment on the renewal of Weiner’s license.

The medical board does not typically release information about current or past investigations unless it substantiates allegations of professional misconduct. If it does, a doctor’s license can be suspended or revoked for many reasons, including billing fraud, unprofessional prescribing practices and failure to appropriately document patient care.

The criminal inquiry, led by the Montana Attorney General’s Office, comes just months after the federal government settled with St. Peter’s for making false claims when it billed government health programs for Weiner’s services. The hospital agreed to pay back $10.8 million. The hospital has previously said it provides quality care and “this situation is isolated to a single, former physician, and we remain confident in the exceptional care provided by St. Peter’s medical staff.”

Federal prosecutors also sued Weiner, accusing him of an array of fraudulent practices, including billing federal insurance programs for unnecessary treatments or more expensive treatments than were delivered. Weiner has denied the allegations and, through attorneys, has moved to dismiss the case.

by Jesse Coburn

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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has gained access to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development system containing confidential personal information about hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of housing discrimination, including victims of domestic violence.

Access to the system, called the HUD Enforcement Management System, or HEMS, is typically strictly limited because it contains medical records, financial files, documents that may list Social Security numbers and other private information. DOGE sought access, and HUD granted it last week, according to information reviewed by ProPublica and two officials familiar with the matter.

This is just the latest collection of sensitive personal information that DOGE has tried to access in recent weeks. It has also sought personal taxpayer data kept by the IRS and information on Social Security benefit recipients, and it attempted to enter the Treasury Department’s payment systems. DOGE’s stated mission is to modernize government technology and cut excessive or improper spending. The administration of President Donald Trump has argued that DOGE needs “direct access” to such systems to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE’s data-gathering moves at some agencies have sparked forceful pushback, including lawsuits over alleged privacy violations and opposition from career officials who have resigned or retired following access requests. Judges have temporarily blocked DOGE from gaining access to records at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department. And, faced with resistance, DOGE agreed to view only anonymized taxpayer data at the IRS.

Few records in the HUD system are redacted or anonymized, and many contain deeply personal material about those who have alleged or been accused of housing discrimination. Domestic violence case files can list addresses to which survivors have relocated for their safety. Harassment cases can include detailed descriptions of sexual assaults. Disability cases can include detailed medical records. Lending discrimination files could feature credit reports and bank statements. The names of witnesses who offered information — in some cases anonymously — about landlords accused of discrimination are among the files as well.

HUD enforces numerous civil rights laws, including the Fair Housing Act and aspects of the Violence Against Women Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Such statutes collectively prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, disability and other characteristics.

HUD officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, voiced concern that DOGE’s access to HEMS could violate the privacy rights of discrimination victims and potentially put them at risk if their information is mishandled or leaked.

The episode is one of many roiling HUD, where the Trump administration is reportedly considering a 50% cut to the nearly 10,000-person workforce. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which combats housing discrimination, may see its roughly 500-person staff cut by as much as 76%, according to an unconfirmed projection circulating widely among HUD employees and viewed by ProPublica.

Civil liberties advocates expressed alarm about DOGE’s access to the HUD data, saying it may violate the Privacy Act. “It’s difficult to see why a system dedicated to civil rights complaints would have any impact whatsoever on a department looking for inefficiencies in governmental spending,” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Venzke suggested DOGE may use HEMS data as a basis for scaling back housing discrimination enforcement. “There is deep concern that DOGE is not there to identify government inefficiencies, but rather to shutter programs that the administration disagrees with,” he said.

John Davisson, director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is suing DOGE and other federal agencies and officials over DOGE’s access, contended that the department had gained access to HEMS and systems like it “under the false pretenses of identifying fraud and abuse, when what’s really going on is DOGE is trying to gain control over these databases to direct the activities of federal agencies.”

Spokespeople for HUD, the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment (including a question to DOGE about what it plans to do with HEMS). After this article was published, Kasey Lovett, HUD’s head of public affairs, emailed ProPublica and stated, “to be clear, DOGE does not have access to HEMS.” Lovett declined to provide on-the-record evidence for her assertion.

HUD’s Fair Housing office receives tens of thousands of housing discrimination allegations or inquiries annually and investigates — or assigns to state or local agencies — around 8,000 of them each year. Those investigations can last months or years and lead to financial settlements, compliance monitoring and policy reforms by landlords, mortgage lenders, local zoning officials and homeowners associations.

Access to HEMS is usually limited to Fair Housing staffers, HUD attorneys and auditors, and state and local investigators. However, DOGE requested entry, and HUD granted read-only access last week to Michael Mirski, who has a HUD email address and whom officials at the housing agency have identified in internal discussions as being affiliated with DOGE. Mirski did not respond to a request for comment.

Update, Feb. 26, 2025: This article has been updated to include comment from HUD’s head of public affairs, which was provided only after the article was published.

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Vernal Coleman

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In 2021, the number of people in Illinois killed from acts of domestic violence was growing at an alarming pace, and state legislators acted with a sense of urgency.

In a near-unanimous vote, they passed legislation designed to blunt the trend. The state would establish a network of panels to review killings related to domestic violence and identify whether existing strategies for preventing them fell short.

But since then the state has made only meager progress in implementing the plans laid out in that law, and the number of domestic violence killings continues to increase.

The bill called for building the network over six years, but nearly four years after Gov. JB Pritzker signed it, only seven of the state’s 102 counties have helped establish fatality case review teams.

The first reviews began only late last year, and key deadlines have been missed. An initial report of statewide policy recommendations based on reviews by the panels was expected to be delivered to lawmakers in April 2024. But that has yet to happen.

The most glaring absence from the program is Cook County, which is home to Chicago and accounts for nearly 40% of the state’s population. Discussions between organizers of the initiative and agencies that could take charge of a local review panel in the county have failed to yield a commitment.

People familiar with the effort say a lack of funding and a gap in leadership have slowed the initiative’s progress. The law does not provide money to staff the local review panels, hampering recruitment of people to serve. Moreover, a top state administrator in charge of developing the network abruptly left the project and was only recently replaced.

Illinois Sen. Celina Villanueva, one of several sponsors of the bill creating the initiative, acknowledged the delays but expressed confidence in the overall direction. “My hope is that once everything is fully established, that it’s a strong working mechanism to be able to address the larger issues of why we passed this bill to begin with,” she said.

Cristin Evans, spokesperson for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, the state agency that oversees the review effort, said that “the amount of time it has taken for teams to conduct their first review is not unexpected given the structure and complexity of the initiative.”

The current teams are on track to complete a minimum of two cases in 2025, she added.

Chicago police respond to the fatal stabbing of Lacramioara Beldie in the Portage Park neighborhood in November. (Molly DeVore/Block Club Chicago)

Recent killings underscore the urgency of addressing breakdowns in the systems designed to protect people from domestic violence. In November, Chicago police found Lacramioara Beldie stabbed to death in an apparent murder-suicide at the hands of her estranged husband, Constantin. Court records that surfaced after Beldie’s death detailed a disturbing timeline.

Six weeks before he allegedly killed his wife, Constantin Beldie appeared inside a Cook County court to face accusations he’d assaulted and held her inside a car against her will. Prosecutors did seek to detain Beldie ahead of his trial over the incident but failed to submit evidence of his alleged prior abuse. Judge Thomas E. Nowinski denied the state’s petition, noting that state prosecutors had failed to establish Beldie’s alleged history of violence toward his wife and concluded he was a “medium-low risk.” The judge released him on electronic monitoring.

In a letter to the chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, nearly 30 Chicago-area elected officials, including several city alderpersons, blasted the “multiple systemic failures” that led to Beldie’s killing and called for Nowinski to be removed from domestic violence court.

He was later transferred to municipal court, where he will oversee traffic and misdemeanor cases. But the chief judge has defended Nowinski, emphasizing prosecutors’ role in the hearing’s outcome.

Learning from Failure

With the goal of learning from past failures, the fatality review legislation calls for a two-tiered approach, with county-based review teams and oversight from a statewide committee.

The county teams are supposed to review the circumstances surrounding certain killings to assess how systems designed to intervene and prevent domestic violence performed. Just a few counties have joined review teams since 2021: Kankakee, Lake and Will, with joint teams operating in Madison and Bond counties as well as Winnebago and Boone counties. Those teams represent five of the state’s 25 judicial circuits.

The statewide committee consists of representatives of law enforcement, academics and social service providers. Drawing on the local teams’ reviews, it is supposed to submit a report every two years outlining specific recommendations for “legislative, systemic, policy, and any other changes to reduce domestic violence and domestic violence related fatalities.”

In its first report, in 2024, the committee revealed it could not yet provide recommendations because none of the local teams had been formed.

Fatality review committees first appeared around 1995, as advocates and lawmakers around the United States began searching for new ways to stem the tide of domestic violence. In the years since, all but five states have established processes for reviewing fatal cases of domestic or intimate partner violence, according to the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative, an Arizona nonprofit that helps states develop review boards.

Those who back these efforts say they’re a tool that can improve outcomes for the vulnerable people domestic violence prevention policies are intended to protect.

A 2013 University of Washington study of outcomes in states that had established fatality reviews found that recommendations made by the panels had successfully prioritized issues related to their work. But prioritization alone “may not translate into organizational and institutional changes,” the study found.

Other states have experienced similar difficulties to Illinois’, not only in establishing a review process but maintaining it over time.

In South Carolina, implementation of the 2016 law establishing a review process of those killings has been “uneven,” said Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

The state’s apparatus is overseen by a central committee, with local teams operated by county-based district attorneys. But similar to Illinois’ law, the South Carolina law does not include new funding. With resources already stretched thin, that has led to spotty participation among local groups.

Many of the local teams meet only infrequently, Barber said. “I don’t want to say that there hasn’t been progress, but there’s more that could be done,” she said.

Even with all the attention the issue has received, not all states compile tallies of domestic violence-related killings. Tracking those numbers is notoriously difficult. Federal law requires law enforcement agencies to report general crime statistics. But determining whether there was domestic violence leading up to a killing requires collecting and analyzing records from disparate sources, something advocates say not all city or state governments require.

That said, estimates made by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from death certificates, police reports and other sources reveal a steady increase in domestic violence killings across the nation.

Signed by the governor earlier this month, Karina’s Law is named after Jesus Alvarez’s late mother, Karina Gonzalez, and is aimed at giving additional protections to victims of domestic violence. Gonzalez and her daughter, Daniela Alvarez, were shot to death in 2023, allegedly by José Alvarez, Gonzalez’s husband, who has pleaded not guilty. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

In 2017, 1,070 people were killed in the United States in circumstances involving domestic or intimate partner violence. By 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that number had skyrocketed to 1,800.

Illinois’ own tally reflects the national pattern. The total rose from 34 killings to 49 over that same period, according to the CDC tallies.

Lawmakers and advocates in Illinois continue to look for ways to address the problems. Last month, after three failed attempts, the Illinois General Assembly passed Karina’s Law, which will require police to confiscate firearms from anyone whose Illinois gun permit has been revoked because a judge issued an emergency order of protection against them. Pritzker signed the bill into law earlier this month.

The bill is named after Karina Gonzalez, who in 2023 was shot to death along with her 15-year-old daughter in their Chicago home. Her estranged husband has been charged with the killings and has pleaded not guilty.

Jesus Alvarez, Gonzalez’s son, said he believes it’s important not only to pass laws aimed at domestic violence, but to make sure they work as intended. There are obviously flaws in the system, Alvarez said. “But if you get these laws right, it should hopefully be a little bit easier for people, and they won’t have to face the same kind of situation that I faced.”

Two Counties, Two Paths

With so many horrific examples of domestic violence taking place in Chicago and Cook County suburbs, the county’s omission from the review effort remains glaring.

Nonetheless, it was not an initial target as the statewide program launched, said Sara Block, a managing director at the nonprofit social service provider Ascend Justice and volunteer co-chair of the statewide effort.

“There’s just more dynamics to consider in Cook,” she said. “It’s not that it’s not a priority. We very much hope that every single circuit will have one in the end. But some just aren’t ready yet, and it will take more groundwork, it takes more education, more relationship building, before they are.”

The law enforcement and social service agencies asked to lead efforts in Cook County and elsewhere are already stretched for time and resources, said Jennifer Greene, advocacy director for nonprofit service provider Life Span and a member of the statewide overseeing committee.

“You have to have someone who can run that team — who can handle administration and making contact, and there’s just not any funding attached to it to do those things,” she said.

Officials and advocates in Winnebago County, in northwest Illinois, have found a way to overcome those and other obstacles.

When state lawmakers passed legislation calling for the review panels, the city of Rockford’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention saw an opportunity and took a leadership role.

Jennifer Cacciapaglia, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention in Rockford, says there has been wide support for forming a local review panel in Winnebago and Boone counties. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

Forming a local committee wasn’t a hard sell, said Jennifer Cacciapaglia, director of that Rockford office, which is in Winnebago County. A foundation grant to pay for staff and research time helped ease concerns about capacity.

“I think countywide there was a recognition that this could really create positive outcomes for people, so support has been wide,” she said.

Last month, she joined a small group of county advocates and officials to conduct the county’s first reviews of domestic violence killings, focusing on two cases. Cacciapaglia said the panel’s goal is to continue examining cases through the end of the year and submit findings to the statewide committee.

In early February, the statewide committee came together for its bimonthly virtual meeting. These gatherings begin with a moment of reflection, to pause and be reminded of what’s at stake by recalling a recent victim.

“We do this simply to keep survivors and those who have died due to domestic violence in the forefront of our minds,” said Andrea Wilson, recently installed director of the committee, to the assembled group.

The committee’s attention turned to Tanisha Weeks. A judge had granted the 41-year-old mother an order of protection against her ex-boyfriend last December. She was shot dead in January in an apparent murder-suicide in Chicago involving an ex-boyfriend.

Because the killing occurred in Cook County, there is no panel to review the circumstances.

by Mary Hudetz

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Museums, universities and government agencies continued to make headway last year toward repatriating the remains of thousands of Native American ancestors to tribal nations after decades of slow progress drew national attention.

Nowhere was the shift more apparent than at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the agency charged with enforcing the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires items and remains taken from Indigenous gravesites to be returned to tribes.

The department’s subagencies, including the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, collectively repatriated the remains of 1,366 Native American ancestors last year, more than a third of the number in its possession at the start of the year. The department’s efforts reflected an awareness, documented in an internal memo in late 2023, that it has a crucial leadership role to play under NAGPRA. Only the Illinois State Museum, an institution that ProPublica has reported on in-depth, came close to repatriating as many, with the transfer of more than 1,320 remains excavated from a single site.

The emphasis on repatriation increased in tandem with reporting by ProPublica in 2023 about failures to comply with the law.

“For too long ancestors and Tribal cultural items have been disconnected from their communities and resting on museum shelves,” Interior officials said in an October 2023 memo.

In response to questions from ProPublica, an Interior spokesperson did not say whether the department’s focus on repatriation will continue under Donald Trump’s second presidency but pointed to new regulations finalized in 2023 that aimed to speed up the process. The regulations, which took effect last year, require institutions to defer more to tribal accounts of their histories and ties to the regions from which remains were removed; the rules also set new deadlines for institutions to comply with the law.

In total, museums, universities and agencies across the country returned more than 10,300 Native American ancestors to tribes last year. The total makes 2024 the third-biggest year for the repatriation of ancestral remains under NAGPRA, according to an online ProPublica database that allows the public to look up the records of more than 600 museums and universities that must comply with the law. Today, ProPublica is updating the database to show repatriation progress through Jan. 6, 2025.

Outside of the Interior Department and the Illinois State Museum, state universities also recorded significant progress. For example, California State University, Sacramento repatriated the remains of 873 Native Americans previously held in its collection.

The progress made last year followed a record number of repatriations in 2023, when institutions returned 18,000 Native American ancestors.

“The progress shows the regulations are working,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, the chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that advocates for Native American rights.

Nearly 60% of ancestral remains reported as falling under NAGPRA over the years have now been repatriated, but that still leaves at least 90,000 that must be returned to tribes. The Interior Department has acknowledged that many of the human remains it must eventually repatriate have long been unaccounted for in federal inventories. Many of the department’s collections are scattered across the country in university and museum repositories over which the federal government has no oversight, officials said.

Agency staffers also said last year that they would need continued funding for their efforts — a factor that may prove challenging under an administration focused on cutting spending and staffing.

“We need to sustain this work until all of the ancestors that are in DOI control have been repatriated,” one Interior Department employee last year told the National NAGPRA Review Committee, a federal advisory board made up of museum, science and tribal representatives.

The Arizona State Museum in Tucson is among the institutions that have gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government. (Michael Barera/Wikimedia) More Work to do at the Interior Department

Just over a year ago, the Interior Department had yet to repatriate more than 3,000 ancestors, many of which were excavated in 20th century archaeological digs and infrastructure projects on federal and tribal lands.

The department’s progress repatriating 1,366 Native American ancestors last year comes after top officials sent directives in late 2023 instructing Interior agencies to prioritize the work. Some agencies also set aside more money for repatriation work.

“If you look at previous budgets, we weren’t allocated any funding for NAGPRA,” Tamara Billie, the chief of cultural resource management for the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, told the National NAGPRA Review Committee last May.

She estimated it could cost several million dollars over the next three to five years for the bureau to repatriate the hundreds of ancestors it has yet to reunite with tribes.

Since Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, federal staffers have tried to locate the collections excavated on federal and tribal lands, but they have often found that museums and universities transferred their holdings to other institutions without leaving much of a paper trail.

Last year, officials said only a handful of repositories, like the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, had gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government — an early step in the often long repatriation process.

“Some have submitted very detailed, in some cases itemized inventory information,” said Bridget Ambler, with the Bureau of Land Management, during a National NAGPRA Review Committee hearing last year. “But to be honest, for the vast majority we’re not fully aware of what the nature of those collections are and if they include human remains or NAGPRA cultural items.”

Under the new NAGPRA regulations, museums and universities had a deadline of January of this year to hand in lists of items in their facilities that should be included in federal inventories. The requirement resulted in museums and universities submitting roughly 1,000 new notices to the Interior Department, the manager of the National NAGPRA Program said during a recorded training last month. It’s not clear how many ancestral remains are accounted for in those notices.

A display case at the Dickson Mounds Museum previously held human remains. (Sky Hopinka for ProPublica) Progress in Illinois and Ohio

At the Illinois State Museum, which holds the second-largest collection of Native American remains, leadership was already focused on improving their repatriation record. Then, a new state law, along with the Interior Department’s updated regulations, went into effect. The state law, which followed ProPublica’s reporting, gave tribes more control over reburials. It also established a fund for repatriation work, such as paying for tribal members to travel to the museum to consult on collections, and for the reburials of remains.

Many of the remains held by the state museum came from a burial mound dug up in the 1920s by Don Dickson, a chiropractor. He turned the burial site into a roadside attraction. Over the years, Native Americans, whose tribes had been forcibly removed to other states, protested the exhibit that later became the Dickson Mounds Museum, a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

The state eventually closed the burial mounds exhibit, but the museum kept the human remains, maintaining that they could not be traced to living people and therefore would not be repatriated. That was until this past year.

On Feb. 24, 2024, the Illinois State Museum published a notice in the Federal Register saying that 1,325 ancestors and thousands of items buried with them were available to tribes for repatriation. As of the start of this year, the Illinois State Museum held the remains of an estimated 5,800 Native American ancestors.

Only the Ohio History Connection now holds more unrepatriated human remains, over 7,900 in total, according to federal data. In the roughly three decades prior to 2024, the Columbus institution had returned fewer than 20 ancestors to tribes. But it showed signs of progress last year in making more than 150 ancestral remains, or roughly 2% of its skeletal collection reported under NAGPRA, available to be repatriated. In an email, a spokesperson for the museum said it expects to complete more repatriations in consultation with tribal partners, who have asked the museum “not to rush this critical work.”

As in Illinois, the Ohio institution’s collections largely originate from centuries-old burial mounds in a state where tribal nations were forcibly removed.

“It Is Time for the State to Take Repatriation Seriously”

More state support for repatriation also could be on the horizon in Arizona. Last month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced she would ask lawmakers for $7 million to support repatriation efforts at the Arizona State Museum.

The museum on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson is a repository for the state and federal government. Over the years, records show, it has conducted repatriations but has yet to return more than half of its collection reported under NAGPRA — the remains of 2,600 ancestors total — to tribes mostly in the Southwest.

“The hard-working staff at the museum have done their best to repatriate human remains and artifacts to tribes without any significant financial investment from the state,” Hobbs, a Democrat, said in prepared remarks to tribal leaders last month. “It is time for that to change. It is time for the state to take repatriation seriously.”

One of the museums’ challenges in trying to reach full compliance with the law stems from the fact that it continues to receive human remains because of its status as a state repository. Arizona medical examiners have sent the museum human remains that they come across in their investigations, including the ancestors of Native Americans. In some instances, looters have surrendered items and bones unearthed from graves, according to Jim Watson, associate director at the Arizona State Museum. (Looting violates federal laws.)

“We will receive an individual or remains in the mail or objects from private citizens, particularly when individuals pass away and their relatives are going through their stuff,” he told the NAGPRA Review Committee last spring. “They find a box in the garage or the attic, for example, and it says, ‘from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Phoenix’ or ‘ancestral remains.’ So, they will ship them to the University of Arizona, often without contacting us first.”

He estimates the museum receives such packages two to three times per year.

Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.

by Craig Silverman

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

Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people.

“BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called NO Filter Seeking Truth, adding, “Cash in folks.”

Check Your Fact, Reuters and other fact-checkers debunked the claim, and Facebook added labels to posts warning that they contained false information or missing context. ICE has a tip line but said it does not offer cash bounties.

This spring, Meta plans to stop working with fact-checkers in the U.S. to label false or misleading content, the company said on Jan. 7. And if a post like the one about ICE goes viral, the pages that spread it could earn a cash bonus.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduce the spread of false information. At the same time, Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook Content Monetization program is currently invite-only, but Meta plans to make it widely available this year.

The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta, according to former professional Facebook hoaxsters and a former Meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety.

ProPublica identified 95 Facebook pages that regularly post made-up headlines designed to draw engagement — and, often, stoke political divisions. The pages, most of which are managed by people overseas, have a total of more than 7.7 million followers.

After a review, Meta said it had removed 81 pages for being managed by fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves as American while posting about politics and social issues. Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, declined to respond to specific questions, including whether any of the pages were eligible for or enrolled in the company’s viral content payout program.

The pages collected by ProPublica offer a sample of those that could be poised to cash in.

Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims.

With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist.

“The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added.

In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.”

Clayton said Meta’s community standards and content moderation teams are still active and reiterated the company’s Jan. 7 statement that it is working to ensure it doesn’t “over-enforce” its rules by mistakenly banning or suppressing content.

Meta’s changes mark a significant reversal of the company’s approach to moderating false and misleading information, reframing the labeling or downranking of content as a form of censorship. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement. His stance reflects the approach of Elon Musk after acquiring Twitter, now X, in 2022. Musk has made drastic cuts to the company’s trust and safety team, reinstated thousands of suspended accounts including that of a prominent neo-Nazi and positioned Community Notes, which allows participating users to add context via notes appended to tweets, as the platform’s key system for flagging false and misleading content.

Zuckerberg has said Meta will replace fact-checkers and some automated systems in the U.S. with a version of the Community Notes system. A Jan. 7 update to a Meta policy page said that in the U.S. the company “may still reduce the distribution of certain hoax content whose spread creates a particularly bad user or product experience (e.g., certain commercial hoaxes).”

Clayton did not clarify whether posts with notes appended to them would be eligible for monetization. He provided links to academic papers that detail how crowdsourced fact-checking programs like Community Notes can be effective at identifying misinformation, building trust among users and addressing perceptions of bias.

A 2023 ProPublica investigation, as well as reporting from Bloomberg, found that X’s Community Notes failed to effectively address the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Reporting from the BBC and Agence France-Presse showed that X users who share false information have earned thousands of dollars thanks to X’s content monetization program, which also rewards high engagement.

Keith Coleman, X’s vice president of product, previously told ProPublica that the analysis of Community Notes about the Israel-Hamas conflict did not include all of the relevant notes, and he said that the program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

Allen said it takes time, resources and oversight to scale up crowdsourced fact-checking systems. Meta’s decision to scrap fact-checking before giving the new approach time to prove itself is risky, he said.

“We could in theory have a Community Notes program that was as effective, if not more effective, than the fact-checking program,” he said. “But to turn all these things off before you have the Community Notes thing in place definitely feels like we’re explicitly going to have a moment with little guardrails.”

Before Facebook began cracking down on content in late 2016, American fake news peddlers and spammers based in North Macedonia and elsewhere cashed in on viral hoaxes that deepened political divisions and played on people’s fears.

One American, Jestin Coler, ran a network of sites that earned money from hoax news stories for nearly a decade, including the infamous and false viral headline from 2016 “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” He previously told NPR that he started the sites as a way to “infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.” Coler said he earned five figures a month from the sites, which he operated in his spare time.

When people clicked on the links to the stories in their news feed, they landed on websites full of ads, which generated revenue for Coler. That’s become a tougher business model since Meta has made story links less visible on Facebook in recent years.

Facebook’s new program to pay publishers directly for viral content could unlock a fresh revenue stream for hoaxsters. “It’s still the same formula to get people riled up. It seems like it could just go right back to those days, like overnight,” Coler told ProPublica in a phone interview. He said he left the Facebook hoax business years ago and won’t return.

In January, ProPublica compiled a list of pages that had been previously cited for posting hoaxes and false content and discovered dozens more through domain and content searches. The pages posted false headlines designed to spark controversy, such as “Lia Thomas Admits: ‘I Faked Being Trans to Expose How Gullible the Left Is’” and “Elon Musk announced that he has acquired MSNBC for $900 million to put an end to toxic programming.” The Musk headline was paired with an AI-generated image of him holding a contract with the MSNBC logo. It generated over 11,000 reactions, shares and comments.

Most of the pages are managed by accounts outside of the U.S., including in North Macedonia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, according to data from Facebook. Many of these pages use AI-generated images to illustrate their made-up headlines.

One network of overseas-run pages is connected to the site SpaceXMania.com, an ad-funded site filled with hoax articles like “Elon Musk Confronts Beyoncé Publicly: ‘Stop Pretending to Be Country, It’s Just Not You.’” SpaceX Fanclub, the network’s largest Facebook page, has close to 220,000 followers and labels its content as satire. One of its recent posts was a typo-laden AI-generated image of a sign that said, “There Are Only 2 2 Genders And Will Ban Atheletes From Women Sports — President.”

SpaceXMania.com’s terms and conditions page says it’s owned by Funky Creations LTD, a United Kingdom company registered to Muhammad Shabayer Shaukat, a Pakistani national. ProPublica sent questions to the site and received an email response signed by Tim Lawson, who said he’s an American based in Florida who works with Shaukat. (ProPublica was unable to locate a person by that name in public records searches, based on the information he provided.)

“Our work involves analyzing the latest trends and high-profile news related to celebrities and shaping it in a way that appeals to a specific audience — particularly conservatives and far-right groups who are predisposed to believe certain narratives,” the email said.

Lawson said they earn between $500 and $1,500 per month from web ads and more than half of the traffic comes from people clicking on links on Facebook. The pages are not currently enrolled in the invitation-only Facebook Content Monetization program, according to Lawson.

The SpaceXMania pages identified by ProPublica were recently taken offline. Lawson denied that they were removed by Meta and said he deactivated the pages “due to some security reasons.” Meta declined to comment.

It remains to be seen how hoax page operators will fare as Meta’s algorithmic reversals take hold and the U.S. fact-checking program grinds to a halt. But some Facebook users are already taking advantage of the loosened guardrails.

Soon after Zuckerberg announced the changes, people spread a fake screenshot of a Bloomberg article headlined, “The spark from Zuckerberg’s electric penis pump, might be responsible for the LA fires.”

“Community note: verified true,” wrote one commenter.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Stephen Engelberg

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.

By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.

It’s also completely untrue.

You might ask why it’s worth grabbing onto one particular false assertion when there are so many incorrect facts and figures flooding the zone of public conversation. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Musk shared a video of the briefing on X, saying it was the tip of the iceberg. Days later, the president doubled down, saying his administration prevented delivery of $100 million of “condoms to Hamas.”

A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from the U.S. Agency for International Development showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; and it would mean more than 1 billion condoms for the roughly 1 million Palestinian males living in Gaza.

It took Musk two weeks to disavow the condom claim, saying that “we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

A look at how the administration handled the quickly debunked and obviously wrong statement about who is working from home shows that correcting “mistakes” is far from standard practice recently for either the White House or prominent Republicans.

The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support DOGE, and she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as wasteful spending.

The claim was immediately picked up by The New York Post, commentator Sean Hannity and other Trump allies. Hannity tweeted “JOB FOR DOGE: Only 6% of Federal Employees work from an Office Full-time, Some not working at All: Audit.”

The Post followed up hours later with an editorial that derided federal employees for their “privilege” and asked, “How many does the nation actually need?” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, “That is absurd, and it’s not something the American people will stand for.”

Musk retweeted the Post story to his more than 200 million followers soon after it appeared. He said things were even worse than the report had found, asserting that “if you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.”

The 6% figure struck me as highly implausible. I began my career at a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest Navy base. I thought about the number of people needed to staff an aircraft carrier battle group on deployments that last for many months. After Norfolk, I spent years covering national security. Given the restrictions on handling classified information, hardly anyone at the intelligence agencies, the State Department or the Pentagon can work from home.

I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office.

The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.”

The editors said they had also added data from an August 2024 study by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that 54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.

In the world of journalism, this is how editors try to address egregious misreadings of their work. Jared Serbu, the deputy editor of Federal News Network, said he and his colleagues were taken aback by how his organization’s clearly unscientific survey had somehow been transformed into a defining statistic about federal employees.

“It was a survey of our niche audience for our niche audience,” Serbu said. “Nobody’s ever been confused about it before this.”

Later in December, a TV report cited the editor’s note and labeled the 6% number as “false.” At about the same time, PolitiFact looked at Johnson’s claim that only 1% of federal workers show up to work each day and labeled it “pants on fire,” the fact-checking site’s lowest rating for a statement that is “not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

That should have ended the conversation. But it didn’t.

On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, the White House issued a statement that obliquely referred to Musk’s coming assault on federal agencies. It said Trump was “planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.”

A week after that, a senior administration official cited the 6% figure in explaining plans to slash the size of the federal workforce through buyouts. “We’re five years past COVID and just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office,” the official told Axios and NBC News. The quotation also appeared in a memo sent by the White House to Republican allies, the Daily Wire reported.

I asked Ernst’s press secretary, Zach Kraft, whether the senator planned to correct the record or amend her report. He said neither was in the offing.

“To set the record straight — If federal employees were indeed showing up in large numbers, then calling them back to work wouldn’t be controversial,” Kraft said in an email. He noted that a bill introduced by Ernst would require federal managers to “take daily attendance, so everyone knows who is showing up to work and who isn’t.”

The White House did not respond to my questions about why its Jan. 20 statement cited a claim about federal workers that had been so clearly refuted. The portrayal of federal workers as lazy and indolent continues to be a central aspect of the president’s plans to slash government employment.

On Wednesday in Miami, Trump said federal workers should “show up to work in person like the rest of us,” adding that: “You can’t work at home. They’re not working. They’re playing tennis, they’re playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard.” (Multiple news outlets noted that Trump had golfed on nine of his first 30 days in office.)

It’s said that we live in a post-fact society, that everything is arguable and nothing is truly knowable. I vehemently disagree. Now, more than ever, facts matter, and ProPublica is going to continue to track how and when patently false statements are injected into momentous conversations about this country’s future.

by Eli Hager

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

President Donald Trump was asked at a press conference this month if there were any federal agencies or programs that Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency wouldn’t be allowed to mess with.

“Social Security will not be touched,” Trump answered, echoing a promise he has been making for years. Despite his eagerness to explode treaties, shutter entire government agencies and abandon decades-old ways of doing things, the president understands that Social Security benefits for seniors are sacrosanct.

Still, the DOGE team landed at the Social Security Administration this week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments. DOGE has begun installing its own operatives, including an engineer linked to tweets promoting eugenics and executives with a cut-first-fix-later philosophy, in multiple top positions at the Social Security Administration.

Their first wave of actions — initiating the elimination of 41 jobs and the closing of at least 10 local offices, so far — was largely lost in the rush of headlines. Those first steps might seem restrained compared with the mass firings that DOGE has pursued at other federal agencies. But Social Security recipients rely on in-person service in all 50 states, and the shuttering of offices, reported on DOGE’s website to include locations everywhere from rural West Virginia to Las Vegas, could be hugely consequential. The closures potentially reduce access to Social Security for some of the most vulnerable people in this country — including not just retirees but also individuals with severe physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as children whose parents have died and who’ve been left in poverty.

The Social Security Administration, headquartered just outside Baltimore, has more than 1,200 regional and field offices — nearly a fifth of all of the federal government’s offices nationwide. There are 119,000 visitors to these brick-and-mortar facilities every business day. Many of them do not have high levels of computer and internet literacy and need someone to help them through all the legalese of a nearly century-old social program with a wonky user interface. This is also where elderly people can apply for Medicare, which doesn’t have physical outposts of its own. And it’s where hearings are held — due process provided — for beneficiaries who believe that they have been unfairly kicked off of desperately needed assistance.

“It’s where people access government,” said Kathleen Romig, a longtime expert on the program at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who recently served at the Social Security Administration in a temporary capacity.

In the event of more Social Security office closures like the ones that the Trump administration has begun pursuing — the president is broadly moving to close a range of offices and has even floated the idea of terminating every single federal lease — it is disproportionately poor people with lower levels of education who will become less likely to apply for and get help, research on past closures has found.

The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent Fox News interview, press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized “fake news reporters” for “fear-mongering” about Social Security’s future under the Trump administration. She said that Musk is only going after fraud and waste in the program.

The roughly 15 million recipients of Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance benefits — many of whom are severely disabled and destitute, or are orphans — are among the least politically powerful people in the U.S. Many told ProPublica that the distance to their closest Social Security office is already long, and that wait times to get a representative on the phone or a claim or an appeal processed can range from hours to years. Even before Trump was inaugurated, the agency’s staffing levels were at a 50-year low due to a decade of budget caps and cuts authored by congressional Republicans.

Several SSI and SSDI beneficiaries in rural areas told ProPublica that they have been watching with anxiety as Trump and Musk slash through federal agencies, knowing that any further office or staffing cuts to the Social Security Administration could be catastrophic for them.

Bryan Dooley, a 34-year-old with cerebral palsy who lives outside of Winston Salem, North Carolina, uses a wheelchair and struggles with speaking (he communicated with me through a caretaker). He said that his Social Security benefits, which he receives directly because of his disability and because that disability entitles him to a portion of his late mother’s Social Security, were mistakenly cut off several months ago. As he fights to get the assistance turned back on, he has been depleting his savings account trying to pay his mortgage.

“I really want to stay in the house where I lived with my mother,” he said. “Otherwise it’s a 24-hour care facility for me.”

Dooley, who works part time for a nonprofit called Solutions for Independence that helps others with disabilities, said that “we’re all watching” the developments at the Social Security Administration. If his local office were to be closed, he noted, he might have to coordinate with a caretaker or family member to take him 100 miles to Raleigh for administrative hearings on his benefits; scheduling appointments, already extremely difficult, would become almost impossible. “It would be a nightmare for all of us,” he said.

That nightmare is now on its way to becoming a reality in White Plains, New York, the site of one of the agency’s hearing offices on DOGE’s list of closures. According to a letter that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recently sent to the Social Security Administration, the White Plains office, which serves beneficiaries across seven counties, currently has more than 2,000 cases pending. Starting in May, elderly and disabled people across the region will have to travel up to 135 miles to the next-closest office, which for some of them will be in another state.

“Does the Administration have plans to close additional SSA offices?” Gillibrand asked.

The Social Security Administration declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about DOGE’s recent efforts at the agency, including the 10 office closures and staffing reductions. A spokesperson did provide a brief statement on the White Plains situation, saying that the agency had been informed by the General Services Administration that the White Plains office’s lease would not be renewed and that there are no plans to replace the office. Many hearings will take place online through video and audio, the spokesperson said.

DOGE’s capture of the Social Security Administration began this week when Trump elevated to acting commissioner a low-level official named Leland Dudek.

In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, Dudek acknowledged that he had been surreptitiously feeding information to DOGE before his promotion. “I confess,” he wrote. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE… I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” He added: “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”

After Dudek was put in charge of the agency, he told staff that he hoped to reassure them that “our continuing priority is paying beneficiaries the right amount at the right time, and providing other critical services people rely on from us.” He also rebutted some of Musk’s claims regarding widescale Social Security fraud.

In a separate meeting, he told Trump administration officials and congressional staffers that one of his new ideas is to “outsource” the jobs of Social Security Administration call center employees, The Wall Street Journal reported late this week.

Still, DOGE has proceeded more carefully with firings and layoffs at the Social Security Administration than it has at other agencies. Whereas aviation safety and nuclear security specialists, veterans affairs staff and firefighters, medical researchers and many others have all been forced out of their jobs by DOGE in recent weeks, it wasn’t until this Thursday that a much smaller number of recently hired or recently promoted Social Security staff started receiving emails saying that their jobs were not “mission critical.” According to emails shared with ProPublica, these staff members had eight hours to decide if they wanted to request another job within the agency, likely at lower pay and in another city (such a job would not be guaranteed, and relocation expenses would not be covered).

These emails appear to have gone out largely to Social Security Administration policy staff and lawyers, including those who help administrative law judges write decisions in disability cases — decisions that may now take longer and potentially have more errors in them as a result, one agency official told ProPublica. “Claimants will have adverse effects in terms of delay and also losing benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Social Security disability cases already have huge backlogs at the hearing stage, often taking more than a year.

Still, notably, employees “serving the public directly,” like those in field offices, were spared from these layoffs, at least for now.

That said, staff at Social Security’s regional offices around the country were not listed as “mission critical,” reflecting a further misunderstanding on DOGE’s part of what disabled people in particular need from the agency, legal aid attorneys in multiple states told ProPublica. When a low-income SSI or SSDI recipient has a problem that a front-line rep at a field office can’t explain or fix, or is just too overloaded with cases to deal with, it is regional staff who can help resolve the situation. When a person with an intellectual disability doesn’t understand why their benefits are being cut off or why they haven’t received notices in the mail about their case, regional staff can look through the case file and figure out what to do.

Regional staff do not yet appear to have been affected by DOGE’s layoffs, but many are now feeling on edge. One regional team leader, who also spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, said that “nobody knows how the RIF [Reduction in Force] is going to work” in the coming days, weeks and months. Offices could be closed at the same time that remote staff are ordered to return to an office, creating a situation in which some SSA employees will face multiple-hour commutes each way every day, all but forcing them to leave their jobs and thus stop serving beneficiaries.

“We think that’s the plan, so that they don’t have to explicitly do as many layoffs” at an agency as popular and heretofore untouchable as the Social Security Administration, said Jessica LaPointe, a council president for the American Federation of Government Employees. LaPointe represents Social Security’s field office and teleservice workers.

That’s not to mention the attrition that could result from the low morale that has been spreading across Social Security Administration employees’ Signal threads and blogs this week; the agency is already the most overworked and demoralized of nearly any across the federal government, surveys of federal workers have found.

“And meanwhile the beneficiary ranks just keep exploding,” the regional team leader said. (The number of Social Security recipients has grown by over 13 million since 2010, as Baby Boomers surge into retirement.)

Even maintaining level staffing, several Social Security experts told ProPublica, would, in population-adjusted terms, amount to a major reduction in the program’s ability to provide benefits and services to its clients.

Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who was commissioner of the Social Security Administration from December 2023 to November 2024 and also previously served as governor of Maryland, told ProPublica that he believes this week marked just the start of what might be a long four years for Social Security. “The American people through a lifetime of work earn not only these benefits but the customer service necessary to process these benefits,” he said. “Their money went to that, too.”

Trump and Musk “are going to break the largest, most important social program in America,” O’Malley predicted — even if they have to do so gradually.

In recent years, the Social Security Administration along with the U.S. Digital Service were working to make it simpler for people with disabilities to apply for Social Security benefits. Officials conducted surveys of poor, elderly and disabled SSI applicants about what would make the process less burdensome, and they then began creating a simplified application — with plain-language questions and some pre-populated answers — that would eventually be available to complete on paper, by phone or online.

The goal was to reduce the time that applicants spend applying for benefits as well as the time that agency staff spend processing those applications. Or, in other words: government efficiency.

Yet these efforts have been slowed now that Trump has renamed the U.S. Digital Service the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service.

“In conversations with regular people about how Social Security could be more efficient, they usually say that they want more staff on the phone lines and taking appointments, and more office locations, so that they don’t have to wait 60 days after their spouse or parent died, or wait for months after developing a life-changing disability,” said Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Right now we’re hearing all these generalities about the government being too big, rather than a focus on individual people trying to access services from that government.”

Which of these philosophies the Social Security Administration adheres to for the remainder of Trump’s time in office will depend in part on which is embraced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to become the permanent agency commissioner, who will replace Dudek once confirmed by the Senate. Bisignano’s attitude toward Social Security, its staffing, its regional and field offices, and its customer service hasn’t yet fully come into focus. He hasn’t yet been questioned at a confirmation hearing.

What is known about Bisignano is that he’s an experienced finance executive who oversees a $20 billion company. And that during his time as CEO of Fiserv, the payment-processing giant, his company generated savings by closing about a hundred locations and terminating thousands of employees, providing them with the opportunity to apply for other roles.

by Annie Waldman and Duaa Eldeib

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

Every day, they tackled complex issues with life-or-death stakes:

A failure to get donor organs to critically ill patients.

Tobacco products designed to appeal to kids.

Maternal and infant death.

They were hired after lawmakers and bureaucrats debated and negotiated and persuaded their colleagues — sometimes over the course of years — to make those problems someone’s job to solve.

Then, this month, they were fired as part of President Donald Trump’s widespread purge of federal workers. Suddenly, the future of their public health missions was in question.

The White House hasn’t released figures on how many have been fired, but news reports have begun to take stock: about 750 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plays a central role responding to pandemics; more than 1,000 staffers at the National Institutes of Health, which funds and conducts life-saving research; dozens at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages public health care and insurance programs; and scores of employees at the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of food, drugs and medical devices.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to gut the federal health centers, stating “entire departments” at the FDA should be cut. Neither the administration nor the federal agencies responded to ProPublica’s questions, but a White House spokesperson has previously said they were removing newer employees who were “not mission critical.”

“The implications for the health of the public are grave,” said Susan Polan, an associate executive director at the American Public Health Association, which is suing the Department of Government Efficiency, the group leading the firings, for violating federal transparency laws. “It is unfathomable that anybody thinks these cuts have value and are doing anything other than being performative.”

ProPublica reporters have spoken with dozens of federal workers employed in roles safeguarding the American public from harm. They described losing critical positions they’d spent years training for. Many expressed fear at what would happen to the work they left behind.

ProPublica is recording the casualties of the purge, highlighting the scale of what is being lost as public health programs and seasoned experts are caught in the Trump administration’s blunt-force drive to shrink the federal government.

Protecting Kids From Tobacco

Dustin Brace (Courtesy Dustin Brace)

For more than a decade, Dustin Brace has worked various federal jobs, serving as an emergency 911 dispatcher for the Navy and, as a member of the Coast Guard, responding to major chemical and oil spills. “I loved working to protect the American people,” he said. “I never thought that I would leave the government.”

Last year, when he joined the FDA, his mission was no different. As a social scientist at the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, he helped regulate e-cigarettes and related items. Some were being designed to look like kid-friendly foods, resembling cans of grape soda, or decorated with cartoons, like unicorns eating pancakes. In recent years, more young children had been landing in emergency rooms, poisoned by liquid nicotine. And once in a while, devices explode — in people’s pockets, or hands, or faces. One man died after shrapnel entered his brain.

Every week, Brace scrutinized new product applications to ensure that they would not appeal to children and that the devices were safe for consumer use. The work required a close and careful review of thousands of pages of documents, combing them for hidden hazards. “The work takes time to be done properly,” he said.

His job, and the center as a whole, were born out of a bipartisan understanding that the tobacco industry needed to be regulated. It wasn’t until 2009, after decades of industry pushback, that the FDA finally gained the broad legal authority to do so.

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The agency has historically struggled to recruit enough scientists and experts, who could receive higher salaries in the private sector. “People don’t come to agencies like the FDA and centers like CTP for the money,” said Mitch Zeller, who was the center’s director from 2013 through 2022. “They come because they believe in the mission.”

Notably, the center’s regulatory activities are funded through tobacco industry fees, and it does not rely on direct federal support. “Not one taxpayer dollar is spent to regulate the tobacco industry,” said Zeller.

Last Saturday, Brace received a termination notice along with other newer employees on his team. Like those sent to other federal workers, his contained boilerplate language citing poor performance, even though Brace had received favorable reviews over the past year, according to his assessment records.

Brace estimated that more than 10% of staff at the center’s science office were terminated in the past week.

“Things are going to slow down,” Brace said. “More mistakes may be made because the workload is so much higher.”

Keeping Mothers and Babies From Dying

Arielle Kane (Courtesy Arielle Kane)

When Arielle Kane last year joined a team working on an innovative federal program to make childbirth safer in the U.S., the mission spoke to her.

She could save lives.

America has the worst mortality rate among high-income countries for pregnant and postpartum women, and those in underserved communities face some of the highest risks. Their babies also are in danger if their moms can’t access prenatal care or be seen quickly for complications because they live in so-called “maternal deserts” where obstetric care isn’t available or is limited.

Kane’s program, housed under CMS, was created to support mothers on Medicaid — increasing access to birth centers, doulas and midwives, cutting down on risky procedures like C-sections and tracking outcomes like low infant birth weight. Better blood-pressure monitoring could prevent life-threatening complications like preeclampsia. Extra attention paid to depression and substance use could head off equally devastating consequences.

It officially launched on Jan. 1, and Kane was excited about the possibilities.

But after Trump’s inauguration, they were instructed to halt data collection on race and ethnicity, which troubled many of them. Racial disparities are pervasive in maternal health. Black women are three times more likely than white women to die from a pregnancy-related cause and more than twice as likely to have a stillbirth. Kane said she also was told not to communicate with state officials or attend an upcoming conference on maternal health.

Then, just a month and a half after the launch, Kane and three of her colleagues were fired. With two others planning to leave at the end of the month, she said, the team will be reduced by nearly half.

“I’m just so angry,” Kane said. “This model that has a lot of potential is just being gutted. What does that mean for all of the potential impacts we could have had?”

Keeping Donor Organs From Getting Lost

Amy Paris (Courtesy Amy Paris)

For more than a decade, Amy Paris worked for federal agencies as a problem solver: retooling overly bureaucratic and cumbersome processes to make them easier for the public to navigate.

Last year, she was hired to help reform the nation’s organ procurement and transplantation network, a public-private partnership that connects organ donors to patients in vital need of a transplant.

The program had recently come under fire. As thousands of patients were dying on waitlists, some donor organs weren’t even being used. Multiple kidneys had to be thrown out because of transport delays — couriers not picking them up in time or airlines misplacing them. One was accidentally left on an airport luggage trolley.

After federal and Senate investigations detailed numerous failures, including an archaic information technology system, the Health Resources and Services Administration announced a modernization initiative in March 2023.

Paris joined the team last October as a deputy digital services lead, working with transplant surgeons, technology experts and data scientists on upgrades. “We were making headway,” she said. “We had alignment from Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, we had funding, and they were hiring more of us.”

As a new employee, she figured she would be one of the first to go in the federal workforce purge. Even so, she was devastated when she received her notice.

About half of her team was laid off, she said, which sets the reform effort back indefinitely. After her firing, a planned trip to investigate the underlying technology of the network system had to be canceled.

“We are hollowing out our government in a way that is going to hurt people and is going to get people killed,” she said. “That is the scariest thing in the world.”

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