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by ProPublica

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A multiyear defamation lawsuit sparked by a ProPublica article officially ended on Jan. 24, marking a final victory in the case for its author, freelance journalist William D. Cohan. A New York state appeals court had ruled in his favor in 2023, and the state’s highest court left that ruling in place in September 2024, declining to hear an appeal. The plaintiff ultimately agreed to pay Cohan certain defense costs and did not pursue a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. With that, the parties concluded the case.

The suit stemmed from a July 2020 article written by Cohan titled “The Bizarre Fall of the CEO of Coach and Kate Spade’s Parent Company.” Jide Zeitlin, the subject of the article, sued Cohan in 2021, claiming that he was defamed by the story. The article chronicled Zeitlin’s “improbable” rise from modest circumstances as the son of a Nigerian maid to becoming a Goldman Sachs partner and Fortune 500 CEO. It also examined his downfall, as allegations of an extramarital affair with a woman he photographed helped lead to his resignation from Tapestry, the corporation that owns Coach and other prominent brands.

As ProPublica previously reported, the state appeals court found that the article “flatly contradicts the existence of actual malice,” the standard of proof that a public figure must meet to win a libel suit. The appeals court credited the fact that Cohan cited Zeitlin’s denials in the article, provided links to original documents so that readers could judge for themselves and relied on a “host of other sources whose reliability plaintiff does not challenge.” As the opinion put it, “plaintiff’s allegations of actual malice rest largely on his own statements.”

“This is a great victory for diligent journalism in the public interest,” said Jeremy Kutner, ProPublica’s general counsel. “We are thrilled that the courts reaffirmed protections for freedom of the press at a time when that is more important than ever.”

Jay Ward Brown and Emmy Parsons of Ballard Spahr LLP represented Cohan and ProPublica.

by Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman

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

The Trump administration is not even a month old, but billionaire Elon Musk has already brought in dozens of staffers to help him change the face of the U.S. government. ProPublica has learned the names of nine additional employees connected to Musk’s government overhaul, adding to a tracker the news organization published last week.

The additional names help reveal Musk’s sudden and far-reaching influence across government, as these individuals have moved into a wide array of powerful posts — from chief information officers deciding government IT purchases, to seasoned lawyers helping the effort.

ProPublica has confirmed the names and roles of more than 30 Musk-affiliated staffers who are helping the world’s richest man dismantle or downsize federal agencies one by one. We have received hundreds of tips from readers. Many have helped us identify the people helping Musk, who has not been elected to any office, force out government employees and shutter federal offices.

Musk and his lieutenants are reshaping the government and its mission with the blessing of President Donald Trump. The White House said Musk’s troops are acting within the law, though ProPublica’s reporting and legal scholars have raised questions about the legality of some efforts undertaken by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as the newly formed office is called.

“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said at a White House press conference on Tuesday, in which the White House doubled down on its commitment to Doge.

ProPublica has identified two groups of people linked to Musk. One group includes those with previous connections to his businesses. The other group includes those who have no obvious prior connections to Musk but have become part of his DOGE team, including many who work in the Executive Office of the President.

Among the staffers we have identified: Jennifer Balajadia, who has worked as an operations coordinator at Musk’s The Boring Company and now has an official role at DOGE in the Executive Office of the President; Nicole Hollander, who was most recently employed at Musk company X handling real estate and now works in the General Services Administration; and Ryan Riedel, a former SpaceX network security engineer who now lists himself as chief information officer at the Department of Energy. Neither they nor their agencies responded to requests for comment.

One common question has been how DOGE is organized. ProPublica learned that core members of the group use emails tied to the White House. Other members are housed within specific agencies with ambiguous job titles, including “expert” or “senior advisor.” And in several instances, DOGE members have simultaneously been assigned email addresses at numerous agencies.

Our stories have helped show the reach and expertise of those who are working as a part of Musk’s fledgling effort. We have laid out DOGE’s role in breaking the U.S. Agency for International Development. We have investigated the team’s interest in a sensitive Treasury database that tracks the flow of money across the government. We have detailed DOGE’s involvement in the canceling of $900 million in education research contracts. And we have revealed the names of the elite lawyers working for the DOGE team and their ties to Supreme Court justices.

If you work at a government agency and have experience with the DOGE team, we want to hear from you.

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Avi Asher-Schapiro, Al Shaw, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott and Kirsten Berg contributed reporting.

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

This story describes explicit details of a sexual assault.

This article was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune, a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Former Utah therapist Scott Owen admitted in a Provo courtroom on Monday that he sexually abused several of his patients during sessions.

Provo police began investigating Owen in 2023 after The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reported on a range of sex abuse allegations against Owen, who had built a reputation over his 20-year therapy career as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of the men who spoke to The Tribune and ProPublica said their bishop used church funds to pay for sessions in which Owen allegedly also touched them inappropriately.

While Owen gave up his therapy license in 2018 after several patients complained to state licensors that he had touched them inappropriately, the allegations were never investigated by the police and were not widely known. He continued to have an active role in his therapy business, Canyon Counseling, until the newsrooms published their investigation.

In pleading guilty on Monday to three charges of first-degree felony forcible sodomy, Owen for the first time publicly acknowledged that he sexually abused his patients.

Owen, 66, admitted that he sexually abused two male patients “using his position as a therapist” and led them to believe that sexual contact was part of their therapy.

He also pleaded no contest on Monday to another first-degree felony, attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child, in connection with a third patient — a woman who alleged Owen touched her inappropriately during therapy sessions in 2007, when she was 13 years old. A no-contest plea means that Owen did not admit he committed the crime but conceded that prosecutors would present evidence at trial that would likely lead a jury to convict him.

Owen faces a maximum sentence of up to life in prison during a sentencing hearing scheduled for March 31.

Prosecutors agreed in a plea deal to dismiss seven other felony charges that Owen faced in connection with the two male victims. Both told police that Owen engaged in sexual contact with them during therapy sessions — including kissing, cuddling and Owen using his hand to touch their anuses.

Owen admitted in plea documents to having sexual contact with the two patients, including putting one patient’s testicles in his mouth.

Owen admitted in plea agreement documents that, as a therapist, he was in a special position of trust when he had sexual contact with his patients, which he told them was “part of their treatment process.” Utah law says patients can’t consent to sexual acts with a health care professional if they believe the touching is part of a “medically or professionally appropriate diagnosis, counseling or treatment.”

Provo police interviewed at least a dozen of Owen’s former patients, according to court records, all of whom say he touched them in ways they felt were inappropriate during therapy sessions. Many of those patients are men who told police they were seeking therapy with Owen for “same-sex attraction.” Provo police Capt. Brian Taylor has said that some of the former patients’ reports involved allegations that were outside the window of time that prosecutors had to file a case, called the statute of limitations.

Under a negotiated settlement with Utah’s licensing division in 2018, Owen was able to surrender his license without admitting to any inappropriate conduct, and the sexual nature of his patients’ allegations is not referenced in the documents he signed when he gave up his license.

Both state licensors and local leaders in the LDS church knew of inappropriate touching allegations against Owen as early as 2016, reporting by The Tribune and ProPublica showed, but neither would say whether they ever reported Owen to the police. In Utah, with few exceptions, the state licensing division is not legally required to forward information to law enforcement.

The church said in response that it takes all matters of sexual misconduct seriously and that in 2019 it confidentially annotated internal records to alert bishops that Owen’s conduct had threatened the well-being of other people or the church.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

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

Last year, Idaho legislators approved a 10-year, $2 billion funding bill to help school districts throughout the state whose buildings were crumbling and sometimes dangerous.

But early reports from districts and a new state cost estimate show that even after passage of the historic funding bill, districts are still struggling to meet their most dire needs. That has put local school officials in the same position they have long faced: asking voters to approve additional funds.

School districts in Idaho rely heavily on taxpayers to approve local bonds to pay for school construction and repair. The state’s unusual policy, however, requires two-thirds of voters for a bond to pass, a threshold many superintendents say is nearly impossible to reach. Most states require less.

The Idaho Statesman and ProPublica reported in 2023 how the bond requirement, combined with the Legislature’s reluctance to invest in school facilities, has forced students to attend schools with faulty heating systems, leaking roofs and broken plumbing. Idaho has long ranked last or near last among states in education spending per pupil.

Much of the new money from the funding bill is being distributed based on the number of students attending school in each district — a big problem for smaller and more rural schools. An analysis by ProPublica and the Idaho Statesman shows that most of the state’s school districts will get less money than it would take to build a new school. Around 40% of the districts will receive $2 million or less, which some administrators said wouldn’t be enough to cover their biggest repairs.

District officials in Boundary County, wedged along the Canadian border with a population of just over 13,000, were grateful to receive about $5 million from the new funding bill.

Voters there in 2022 twice voted down a $16 million bond to replace an elementary school with failing plumbing, frigid classrooms and a roof that drips into buckets secured to the ceilings. One of those times, 54% of voters supported it, but that wasn’t enough to surpass the state’s required two-thirds majority.

After the state kicked in about $5 million from the new funding bill, the district in November asked voters to approve the remaining $10.5 million to build the elementary school. But the lower cost was not enough to convince residents to approve the bond.

An analysis of data from the Idaho Department of Education provided to ProPublica and the Statesman shows that the problems in Boundary County may be widespread. As of Feb. 3, all but one district had submitted the paperwork needed to receive the funds. But the demand far outstripped the supply. It would take more than $8 billion over 10 years to fix and maintain every Idaho school, according to state estimates generated from condition assessments provided by each district.

Department of Education officials say the situation isn’t quite that dire. The $8 billion figure assumes replacement of systems rather than repairs or upgrades. For example, if a school rated its electrical system as poor because its breaker panel wasn’t functioning properly, but its wiring was fine, the state might predict the entire system would need to be replaced in a year and tally the cost of replacing both parts of the system.

That could be a cost difference of millions, said Spencer Barzee, a deputy superintendent at the Idaho Department of Education.

One part of the funding bill will raise a little more than $1 billion for the School Modernization Facilities Fund. Districts can take the money as a lump sum, and every district that has applied said it would, according to funding applications submitted to the state Department of Education. That money can be used to build new school buildings or for major long-term repairs like replacing a school’s air conditioning system, but due to federal regulations on bond funding, the money can’t be used for routine maintenance, like repairing damaged walls in a single classroom. Districts can also invest the money and use it later.

School Modernization Facilities Fund Allocated Only 12% of the Estimated Cost to Fix or Maintain Every School Note: Figures are state estimates at the time of publication. Source: Idaho Department of Education. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

The other part of the bill takes $250 million in new funds and adds $500 million from state lottery money — previously directed to school districts for routine maintenance — for districts to pay off existing bonds or levies. Any remaining funds can go toward other projects. The remaining funds, around $250 million, will cover financing costs.

The smallest districts in the state will receive less than $1 million each from the modernization fund to be used over 10 years, according to state data, while the West Ada School District, the largest in the state, is expected to receive about $140 million.

In many cases, the amount of money a school district will receive is less than it would cost for it to build a school or make major renovations. Cassia County Joint School District, which is expected to receive around $21 million, said its most pressing needs include adding 13 classrooms and building a gym, which it estimates will cost around $30 million, according to its application materials. The Council School District needs a new elementary school that it estimates will cost around $8 million. It received just over $1 million. The Grace Joint School District said a new high school would cost around $40 million, but it will receive around $2 million.

Republican lawmakers recognized the new funding bill passed last year wouldn’t solve the problem.

Gov. Brad Little said in his State of the State address last month that he wants to add an additional $50 million per year, in part to help rural districts fix their buildings. That money would be split to go toward rural facilities, mental health and school safety, and literacy initiatives. The governor has not said how much of that money would go to rural school districts or how it would be distributed. Those questions will be up to the Legislature.

District administrators say they are grateful for the funds they’ve received from the $2 billion bill but warn that even with the additional funds, it won’t be enough.

“The money is helpful, and I appreciated the effort, but our needs exceed the amount we received,” Joe Steele, the superintendent in the Butte County School District, said in an email. “Even spread out over several years to address issues, it won’t be enough to cover all the needs.”

Many School Buildings Rated Fair, Poor

When the Legislature proposed new school facilities funding last year, the state had not conducted a comprehensive assessment of school buildings — during which building experts physically inspect buildings — in three decades.

To fill in the gaps, ProPublica and the Statesman in 2023 surveyed every district in the state on the condition of its facilities and found nearly every one struggled to fix and replace facilities. Superintendents told the publications they were often left putting Band-Aids on issues they didn’t have enough money to fully fix, creating even more problems further down the line.

Then last year lawmakers went further, mandating in the bill that school districts submit a plan that included what it would take to bring every student-utilized building up to good or perfect condition. The Idaho Department of Education asked districts to assess each building in 42 categories, including plumbing, heating and cooling and electrical, and to grade each part as “replace,” “poor,” “fair” or “good.” Then the department used software to predict when each part of a building would need to be replaced and estimated the cost based on the square footage of the buildings.

At the end of the assessment, the program produced an estimate for how much it would cost to bring every building into “good” condition over the next 20-plus years. ProPublica and the Statesman requested all data on how districts rated their schools in the assessment, the state’s estimate of each district’s monetary needs and how much money each district received.

In more than a third of the assessment categories, districts rated a majority of buildings as “fair,” “poor” or “replace.” These include some critical parts of a building’s infrastructure: roofs, heating systems, exterior doors, walls and windows. In other categories, such as security systems and cooling systems, around one-third of buildings were marked as N/A, meaning they don’t have those systems to rate, according to state officials. In around 40% of buildings, foundations, water piping and fire alarm systems were rated as “fair,” “poor” or “replace.” On average, one-third of all of the ratings were “good.”

Less Than Half of All School Buildings in Idaho Were Rated “Good” on Heating, Cooling, Windows and Roofs Note: Ratings are self-reported by individual schools. Source: Idaho Department of Education. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Some districts want to use the money for major upgrades, according to the applications provided to the Statesman via a records request.

But the money has to last 10 years, and plans submitted by state school districts show a single project could quickly deplete the funds.

Even smaller upgrades can prove costly. Replacing a sprinkler system could cost over $500,000, according to estimates from the Basin School District; in one of the districts that got less than $1 million, such a project would significantly reduce what it has for future needs.

In Swan Valley, a small district of 50 students in eastern Idaho, Superintendent Michael Jacobson said the lump sum of about $200,000 will allow the district to finish addressing a big need: replacing its heating and air conditioning system, a $1 million project. But it’s nerve-wracking to think the district might not get any more money for its facility for nearly a decade, he said. The conditions assessment survey estimated the district would need $3.3 million over 10 years to fix and maintain its building.

“How are we going to continue to take care of all of our day to day needs? What if there is a major facilities situation at our school? How will we take care of it?” he said in an email to the Statesman and ProPublica. That’s a question many superintendents are asking.

Superintendents Worry About Losing Maintenance Funds

The new funding bill adds money to school budgets for big projects, but that money can’t be used for routine maintenance. With the loss of maintenance funding, districts said they will now have to find money to pay for smaller repairs like fixing a few windows in a school or paying maintenance staff.

Scott Woolstenhulme, the superintendent in the Bonneville School District, a larger district of over 13,000 students in eastern Idaho, said the funding shift left the district with about a $1 million budgetary shortfall — money it had used, in part, to pay maintenance staff. The district is drawing from its general fund to make up the difference, but that is a short-term solution: If the money isn’t restored, he said, the district will have to ask voters to approve a tax increase to pay for these operating costs. “This is a significant issue for us,” he said in an email.

The Twin Falls School District also used the funds to pay for its maintenance staff, “critical staff members who take on everything from plowing the snow and mowing lawns to repairing roofs and replacing bathroom fixtures,” spokesperson Eva Craner said. The district asked taxpayers for more money to make up for the loss in the November election, and the increased supplemental levy passed, but Craner is hopeful the Legislature will restore maintenance funding. “Without this kind of manpower, our buildings would not be the community assets we are proud of today,” she said.

Jan Bayer, the superintendent in Boundary County, said now that the district’s bond has failed again, trustees worry that Valley View Elementary, with its deteriorating plumbing, freezing classrooms and cracking walls, will soon be in such disrepair that it will no longer be safe for students or staff.

For now, the money the district has received from the state is sitting in an account accruing interest. The funds are a lifeline, Bayer said, but they’re not enough to meet the district’s most dire need.

“It’s getting to the point where we’re just getting nickeled and dimed to death,” Bayer said.

The Idaho Statesman and ProPublica are working on a new project focused on special education in Idaho. If you or a loved one has experience with special education in the state, we would love to talk to you. You can reach reporter Becca Savransky at bsavransky@idahostatesman.com.

by Heather Vogell

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

When SpaceX’s Starship exploded in January, raining debris over the Caribbean, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded the rocket program and ordered an investigation. The move was the latest in a series of actions taken by the agency against the world’s leading commercial space company.

“Safety drives everything we do at the FAA,” the agency’s chief counsel said in September, after proposing $633,000 in fines for alleged violations related to two previous launches. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s response was swift and caustic. He accused the agency of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk wrote on X.

Today, Musk is in a unique position to deliver that change. As one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers and head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he’s presiding over the administration’s effort to cut costs and slash regulation.

While it’s unclear what changes his panel has in store for the FAA, current and former employees are bracing for Musk to focus on the little-known part of the agency that regulates his rocket company: the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST. “People are nervous,” said a former employee who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Musk.

The tech titan and his company have been critical of the office, which is responsible for licensing commercial rocket launches and ensuring public safety around them. After the fines in September, SpaceX sent a letter to Congress blasting AST for being too slow to keep up with the booming space industry. That same month, Musk called on FAA chief Mike Whitaker to resign and told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.”

FAA leadership seems to have heard him. The day of Trump’s inauguration, Whitaker stepped down — a full four years before the end of his term. And experts said the pressure is almost certain to grow this year as Musk pursues an aggressive launch schedule for Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built.

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment.

Part of the problem for AST, experts say, is bandwidth.

The office has seen a sixfold increase in launches in the past six years, from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year — with SpaceX leading the pack. At the same time, AST’s staffing and budget have not kept pace. The agency has roughly 160 people to oversee regular flights by private rocket companies — sometimes more than one a day — bringing satellites to orbit, giving rides to astronauts, assisting with national security surveillance efforts and carrying tourists to the edge of space.

Launch traffic “has increased exponentially,” said George Nield, who led the office from 2008 to 2018. “No signs that that’s turning around or even leveling off.”

For each launch, AST’s staff calculate the risk that “uninvolved” members of the public, or their property, will be harmed. They also consider whether the launch will cause environmental damage or interfere with other airspace activities like commercial flight, as well as make sure a rocket’s payload received the proper approvals. The office licenses space vehicle reentries, too, though, as yet, there are far fewer of them.

The process, on average, takes five months. “It takes a certain amount of time to do the work to protect the public, and you do want to do that right,” Nield said. The consequences of shrinking the office or eliminating it altogether could be devastating, he said. “If a rocket goes off course, and nobody’s double-checked it, and so you have a major catastrophic event, that’s going to result in a huge backlash.”

But Musk has criticized AST for focusing on “nonsense that doesn’t affect safety.” He’s also emphasized that his company moves quickly and must have failures to learn and improve. Within SpaceX, this approach is known as “rapid iterative development.” And it is not without risk. Last month, when Starship blew up shortly after liftoff, dozens of airplanes scrambled to avoid falling debris. Residents of the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the craft on beaches and roads, and the FAA said a car sustained minor damage.

Get in Touch

Have you worked for the FAA or the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST? Heather Vogell wants to hear from you. Here’s how to contact Heather on Signal.

SpaceX has said it was reviewing data to determine the cause, pledging to “conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk, however, downplayed the explosion as “barely a bump in the road.” Moreover, he seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” He also said nothing suggested the accident would push plans to launch the next Starship this month — even though the FAA investigation was still pending.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said that Musk’s response was “recklessness … at a minimum,” given that people were alarmed by the falling rocket debris, which streaked fire and smoke across the sky before landing in and around the islands.

“That he now gets to provide government oversight over the things that he is trying to get permission to do is one of the most significant conflicts of interest I’ve seen in my career, and it’s inexplicable to me,” said Jah, who served on a federal advisory committee for AST.

The White House did not answer questions from ProPublica about DOGE’s plans for AST. Officials referred to comments by Trump, who said last week that if a conflict arises for Musk between one of his businesses and his government work, “we won’t let him go near it.” Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, also said Musk “will excuse himself from those contracts” if needed.

Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions.

Jah said Musk and others advocating for less regulation have what he called a “launch, baby, launch mentality” that could push the FAA office in the wrong direction.

Industry representatives and members of Congress have accused the FAA of being more risk averse than necessary, stifling innovation.

“With nations like China seeking to leapfrog our accomplishments in space, it is even more imperative that we streamline our processes, issue timely approvals, minimize regulatory burdens and advance innovative space concepts,” said Rep. Brian Babin, a Republican from Texas and the incoming chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, at a hearing in September. He said he was concerned the FAA’s regulations could result in the mission to return astronauts to the moon being “unnecessarily delayed.”

Babin did not respond to a request for an interview about AST.

Sean Duffy, Trump’s new transportation secretary, has already indicated his department will take a more business-friendly approach.

Last month during his confirmation hearing, when Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the FAA’s enforcement action against SpaceX and asked Duffy whether he would “commit to reviewing these penalties and more broadly to curtailing bureaucratic overreach and accelerating launch approvals,” Duffy said he would. “I commit to doing a review and working with you, and following up on the space launches and what’s been happening at the FAA with regard to the launches.”

Duffy has since said he’s spoken to Musk about airspace reform and is looking to DOGE to “help upgrade our aviation system” — a move that drew a quick rebuke from Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington last week. She called Musk’s involvement in FAA matters a conflict of interest.

The Department of Transportation did not make Duffy available for an interview, and the FAA did not answer written questions provided by ProPublica, despite multiple requests for comment.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat of the Science committee, said streamlining the regulation of commercial space launches has bipartisan support.

Still, she said, the safety of crews and launchpads’ neighbors, as well as noise and pollution, need to be managed. “There needs to be a traffic cop here,” she said, especially given increased launches and issues such as space debris. “This can’t just be the Wild West, right?”

The $42 million allocated annually to AST is less than 1% of the FAA’s budget.

Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space launches at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said the office needs the resources and authority to hold companies accountable as the industry grows and has more impact. “Government will need to play a role,” he said, “and they’re going to have to sort it out.”

Last year, a government advisory committee recommended the AST move out of the FAA and become a standalone agency within the Department of Transportation.

Proponents argue the move would help AST get more attention, and potentially resources. Industry supporters also say the FAA’s culture of allowing no failures — a bedrock of its oversight of the commercial airline industry — is culturally a bad fit for what AST does, given how young the space industry is.

AST does not require that each mission succeed in the conventional sense, said Caryn Schenewerk, an industry consultant who sat on the advisory committee. “They can’t,” she said. Launching rockets is still so new, the office’s goal is to make sure failures don’t hurt anyone — not to prevent them altogether, she said.

As launches have become more common, though, so too have problems like the Starship explosion. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that in the three years before its 2023 review, commercial space launches experienced roughly two dozen mishaps, the industry’s term for “catastrophic explosions and other failures.”

While the report noted that none of those incidents resulted in fatalities, serious injuries or significant property damage to the public, there have been other impacts. Starship’s first launch in April 2023, for example, blew a cloud of dust and grime that stretched miles across Texas. Debris like concrete and shrapnel rained down on an environmentally sensitive migratory bird habitat near the company’s Boca Chica launchpad. Residents have complained, Jah said, but “citizens of that community aren’t feeling that they’re being heard.” A report in The New York Times noted egg yolk staining the ground near a bird’s nest.

In response, Musk wrote on X: “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week.”

SpaceX’s plans to launch the next Starship this month are part of the accelerated schedule the company has been pushing AST to approve. The company launched four of the vehicles in 2024, and officials said it wants to launch 25 this year.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools.

The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said.

IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.

Its total annual budget is about $815 million, or roughly 1% of the Education Department’s overall budget of $82 billion this fiscal year. The $900 million in contracts the department is canceling includes multiyear agreements.

The vast trove of data represents much of what we know about the state of America’s roughly 130,000 schools, and without a national repository of data and statistics, it will be harder for parents and educators to track schools or compare the achievement of students across states.

There’s been a federal education statistics agency since 1867, though the current iteration was established in 2002 under President George W. Bush. Congress sets aside funding for the institute’s work.

Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, told ProPublica she could not provide details about the canceled contracts, saying that “my understanding is we don’t release specific information.”

But she said there were 90 contracts that had been identified as “waste, fraud and abuse.” She said canceling them was “in line with the department’s goal of making sure it is focused on meaningful learning” and to “make sure taxpayer funds are used appropriately.”

She directed a reporter to the DOGE account on X for more details.

DOGE wrote in a post: “Also today, the Department Of Education terminated 89 contracts worth $881mm. One contractor was paid $1.5mm to ‘observe mailing and clerical operations’ at a mail center.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly expressed a desire to “return” responsibility for schools to the states, although state and local governments already control the largest share of funding for education. There’s no national curriculum; states and districts decide what to teach and dictate their own policies.

The American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit that conducts research in education and other areas, said Monday that it had received termination notices for multiple contracts that are underway, and that canceling them early would be a poor financial decision.

“This is an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars, which have been invested — per Congressional appropriations and many according to specific legislation — in long-standing data collection and analysis efforts, and policy and program evaluations,” spokesperson Dana Tofig said in an email. The nonprofit has contracted with the department for years.

Schools and districts across the country rely on research from the IES and contractors such as the American Institutes for Research to guide best practices in classrooms.

“These investments inform the entire education system at all levels about the condition of education and the distribution of students, teachers, and resources in school districts across America,” Tofig said.

“If the purpose of such cuts is to make sure taxpayer dollars are not wasted, and used well, the evaluation and data work that has been terminated is exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, blasted the contract terminations at IES. “An unelected billionaire is now bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education — taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools,” she said in a statement. “Cutting off these investments after the contract has already been inked is the definition of wasteful.”

We are continuing to report on the U.S. Department of Education. Are you a former or current Education Department employee? Are you a student or school employee impacted by changes at the department? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

by Jake Pearson and Anjeanette Damon

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When the federal courts first blocked the Trump administration’s funding freeze, Jessyca Leach was cautiously optimistic.

For days, the pause had prevented her from accessing the money she needs for her Phoenix health clinic to serve thousands of at-risk people, most of them poor and many of them members of the LGBTQ+ community. Things had gotten so bad that she had to lay off three employees and cut the salaries of her leadership team, including her own.

So when the funding started to flow again last week, days after the court orders, Leach hoped her ordeal would be over. It wasn’t.

Her federal dollars were accompanied by an ominous note from the payment processing arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Citing “Executive Orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments,” the agency said that it would continue “taking additional measures to process payments” and that its reviews “will result in delays and/or rejections of payments.”

“If it’s not there,” Leach said of the federal money that covers the salaries for 40% of her staff, “things get really bad, really fast.”

The notice Leach received was one of several indications over the past week that the Trump administration is not backing down in its fight to slash spending and dramatically reshape the federal government, despite multiple court orders explicitly restraining the president’s sweeping executive actions. In some cases, to get around the judges’ rulings, the administration has cited a memo that it says is not subject to the existing orders. In others, it denied funding to organizations because their granting agencies are not defendants in one of the ongoing legal challenges. In others still, it has withheld funds by citing the agencies’ own judgment, not the president’s directives.

That argument in particular has been met with skepticism by one of the federal judges hearing lawsuits over the administration’s spending freeze. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan wrote in a Feb. 3 temporary restraining order that “the court is not persuaded that the continuing freezes are solely due to independent agency action” and that “both logic and record evidence point to the opposite conclusion.”

Nevertheless, the administration is pressing the same argument in a separate case brought by a coalition of 23 state attorneys general, who assert that the government continues to effectively pause spending in defiance of the court’s rulings. The administration denied that claim in a filing on Sunday, arguing that it is making “good-faith, diligent efforts to comply with the injunction” and that to the extent the court doesn’t agree with the government’s interpretation of the order, it should clarify “the intended scope of its temporary restraining order.”

On Monday, the judge overseeing that case, John J. McConnell Jr., did just that, ruling that the Trump administration had violated his restraining order by keeping funds frozen. He wrote that the government’s “broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds” was “likely unconstitutional” and that it must immediately restore funding across the board, unless it could show the court “a specific instance where they are acting in compliance with this order but otherwise withholding funds due to specific authority.”

The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and spend, but legal experts say the Trump administration’s actions set the stage for major challenges to that authority — and the well-established limits on the chief executive’s power to unilaterally cut off money that Congress has appropriated to groups he disagrees with. Many of the cuts are related to climate and diversity programs.

Past presidential administrations have tried to exert more control over spending, and President Richard Nixon took the fight to withhold funding to the U.S. Supreme Court. But his administration argued, unsuccessfully, on statutory grounds. No administration has found a constitutional argument compelling enough to bring to the U.S. Supreme Court, said David Super, constitutional law professor at Georgetown Law.

“The only hope the administration will have is someone will recognize the heretofore unrecognized power of the president to withhold money on their own,” Super said.

David Cole, a former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union who also teaches at Georgetown Law, agreed, saying the president already has the means to pursue changes to federal spending, including majorities in both houses of Congress. “If he disagrees with the law that Congress has enacted, including an appropriation, he can urge Congress to amend the law,” Cole said. “Ideological disagreement with a law is not a justification for refusing to execute that law.”

Still, the Trump administration seems to be girding for potentially thousands of contract disputes. Super, however, said contract law is clear there too: both parties to the contract are bound to its terms.

“No contract I’ve seen has terms that allow a contractor to be dumped because someone doesn’t like their ideology,” Super said.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Health and Human Services responded to requests for comment for this story. But on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance telegraphed on social media the administration’s view on the series of court rulings blocking executive actions in the first three weeks of Trump’s presidency. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote on X.

The legal battle kicked off after the Office of Management and Budget issued a two-page memo on Jan. 27 that required all agencies to identify and pause funding to programs that didn’t comply with executive orders Trump issued on his first day in office, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

That prompted two lawsuits — one filed in Washington, D.C., by a group of nonprofits and another in Rhode Island by states. Budget officials withdrew that OMB memo two days later. But the White House’s top spokesperson announced the following day that the executive orders would continue “in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

Judges in both cases have temporarily blocked the administration from withholding spending based on the executive orders and the since-rescinded OMB memo.

In its notice to agencies about the rulings, though, government lawyers told leaders that they were still free to pause federal grants. In that document, the Department of Justice wrote that while federal officials couldn’t “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” obligated money based on the administration’s January directives, agencies “remain free to exercise their own discretion under their ‘authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms,’ including any exercise of discretion to pause certain funding.”

It’s unclear how the administration will respond to Monday’s court order to unfreeze federal funding. But the resulting confusion caused by the various executive actions and court rulings may be the goal of the administration’s rapid-fire directives and its evolving justifications for withholding funds even after the judicial intervention, experts said. In the absence of clarity, groups that rely on federal funding could be forced to scale back or suspend operations.

“There are policy decisions that are being made by simply stirring all this up and creating uncertainty and confusion,” said Don Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

That’s what’s happening at the Walker Basin Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit that is relying on federal grants to restore a shrinking lake in rural Nevada.

“On the same day, I will have conversations with different people, often in the same office, who have different understandings,” said Peter Stanton, the group’s CEO. “It’s just a mess.”

The conservancy needs the money for restoration work on public lands in the basin, work that creates local jobs. But in a phone call on Wednesday with the Department of Interior agency that oversees the group’s grants, Stanton said he was told he would get no money from awards that involve funds from two laws that were passed by Congress while Joe Biden was president: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. The Interior Department did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

The confusion is influencing big spending decisions that need to be made soon, such as hiring a seasonal workforce. “There will be an inflection point where the chaos and lack of clarity itself begin to drive those decisions,” he said.

Injecting even more uncertainty into the mix, Trump can issue executive orders “faster than opponents can file suits to stop them or courts can decide the cases,” Kettl said.

On Thursday, Trump did just that, issuing another order that directs agency heads to review grants to nongovernmental organizations, many of which, the order said, “are engaged in actions that actively undermine the security, prosperity, and safety of the American people.”

Legal observers say these moves should not have come as a surprise.

Four years ago, on the last day of Trump’s first presidency, Russell Vought and Mark Paoletta, who then, as now, served as top budget officials, wrote in a 14-page letter to a congressional committee that a 1974 law asserting Congress’ powers over the purse was “an albatross around a President’s neck.” In another part of the letter, they said that the president “must be permitted to take time to consider how to best execute” spending federal dollars and that “if that requires a temporary pause in spending, it must be permitted.”

The extent and breadth of the administration’s efforts to control domestic spending appropriated by Congress is still unclear. In affidavits filed late Friday night, officials from across the country detailed the scope and disruption at the state level.

In New York, a top accounting official wrote that, as of Wednesday, the state could not access money that low-income people use to buy groceries, a block grant for maternal and child health services and nearly $6 million in education funding. In New Mexico, the official who heads services for the elderly and disabled adults said further spending pauses could force them to stop delivering hot meals.

Individual grantees who received far smaller sums were no less concerned as they struggled to get clear answers from the government.

Soon after Trump issued his executive orders, Hally Strevey emailed her grant officers at the Bureau of Reclamation about the $600,000 in grants her organization had been awarded under the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to restore a section of the Poudre River in Colorado to prevent future floods. “Since your agreement is already in place and awarded, you should actually be fine,” one wrote back on Jan. 23, “and this current situation will not impact your ability to draw down funding.” Four days later, she wrote again, pasting a link to a Washington Post story detailing the budget memo that called for a sweeping freeze of federal funds and asked, “Is our funding still safe given this latest news?”

An official confirmed receipt of that email but didn’t answer her question. Unable to access her money, she emailed the help desk of the federal grant payment system on Wednesday, after the court rulings, and finally learned the truth: “the grants are suspended.” The next day, her federal grant officer responded, citing another budget memo, which was not at issue in either of the cases challenging the administration’s spending pauses. Pursuant to that document, all funding related to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act “has been paused,” the official wrote.

“Even though I was anticipating it, deep down you’re like, that’ll never happen,” Strevey said. “And then it did.”

The Bureau of Reclamation did not respond to a request for comment.

Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, said that by freezing the grants, the Trump administration had broken a binding contract. “It is illegal to pause legally obligated funds for policy reasons without congressional approval, which is what is happening,” she said.

The administration has not always stated policy reasons though. Instead, in some cases, it has blamed the grinding machinery of government bureaucracy.

On Thursday, for example, a Department of Justice lawyer denied the administration was not abiding by the court’s rulings in one of the two cases challenging the government’s spending freezes, this one brought by a coalition of state attorneys general. He told an attorney representing Oregon that the Environmental Protection Agency was “working through the process of unsuspending grants, which is taking some time given the nature of the process.”

In another email, the same official wrote to a lawyer for New York that the delays in releasing funds to the state were not examples of the administration’s obstinance but were instead “very likely related to” the federal Payment Management System’s “ongoing process of working through the unusually large number of payment requests they received.”

In a filing, the lawyer explained the cause of the “operational delay,” writing that in the four days after OMB issued the spending freeze memo that kicked off the litigation, so many grantees tried to draw down funds — in many cases for their full grant balance — that the payment system automatically flagged 7,000 of them as unusual, prompting further review. As of Sunday, the lawyer wrote, the backlog was fewer than 600 requests.

ProPublica is reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government. If you’re a federal worker or the recipient of federal funding and you want to send us a tip, please contact us. Jake Pearson can be reached by phone or on Signal at 917-512-0276 or by email at jake.pearson@propublica.org. Anjeanette Damon can be reached on Signal at 775-303-8857 or by email anjeanette.damon@propublica.org.

Sharon Lerner, Topher Sanders and Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.

by Hannah Allam

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

The day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a surprise visitor joined the crowd outside the D.C. Jail, drawing double takes as people recognized his signature eyepatch: Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers movement.

By the cold math of the justice system, Rhodes was not supposed to be there. He’d gone to sleep the night before in a Maryland prison cell, where he was serving 18 years as a convicted ringleader of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Yale-educated firebrand who once boasted a nationwide paramilitary network had seen his organization collapse under prosecution.

For the Justice Department, Rhodes’ seditious conspiracy conviction was bigger than crushing the Oath Keepers — it was a hard-won victory in the government’s efforts to reorient a creaky bureaucracy toward a rapidly evolving homegrown threat. On his first day in office, Trump erased that work by granting clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, declaring an end to “a grave national injustice.”

Rhodes, sporting a Trump 2020 cap, was back in Washington with fellow “J6ers” within hours of his release in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2025 . In the frigid air outside “the gulag,” as the D.C. Jail is known in this crowd, he was swarmed by TV cameras and supporters offering congratulations. Nearby, far-right Proud Boys members puffed cigars. A speaker blared Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

“It’s surreal,” Rhodes said, absorbing the scene.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, right, met supporters in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill after his release from prison as part of President Donald Trump’s clemency for Jan. 6, 2021, defendants. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

The shock of the moment has continued to reverberate far beyond the jailhouse parking lot.

Trump’s pardons immediately upended the biggest single prosecution in U.S. history and signaled a broader reversal that threatens to create a more permissive climate in which extremists could regroup, weaken the FBI’s independence and revive old debates about who counts as a terrorist, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials and national security experts.

In the whirlwind of the last three weeks, the Trump administration has purged federal law enforcement agencies of prosecutors and investigators who’d been pursuing homegrown far-right groups that the FBI lists as among the most dangerous threats to national security. The Biden administration’s 2021 domestic terrorism strategy — the nation’s first — was removed from the White House website. And some government-funded extremism-prevention programs were ordered to stop work.

“There’s no indication that he engaged in any kind of assessment or has even stopped to think, ‘What did I just unleash on America?’” Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw domestic terrorism cases as a senior Justice Department official, said of Trump’s actions.

Colin Clarke, an analyst at the nonpartisan security-focused Soufan Center, said “far right” and “domestic terrorism” are now “kind of dirty words with the current administration.”

Far-right movements that openly promote violence have suddenly been invigorated, he said. “Does this become a four-year period where these groups can really use the time to strengthen their organization, their command and control, stockpile weapons?” he said.

The scene outside of the Central Detention Facility, commonly known as the D.C. Jail, on Jan. 20 (top photo) and 21 (bottom photo) of this year. (Kayla Bartkowski and Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images) A Sudden Departure

The changes are a departure even from the first Trump White House, which ramped up attention on domestic terrorism in 2019 after attacks including the deadly white supremacist rampage that August targeting Latino shoppers in El Paso, Texas.

The next month, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report that described domestic terrorism as a “growing threat,” that had “too frequently struck our houses of worship, our schools, our workplaces, our festivals, and our shopping spaces.”

Joe Biden made violent extremism a central theme of his 2020 presidential campaign, saying that he’d been inspired to run for office by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent, leaving one person dead. His administration’s steps borrowed from previous campaigns to combat AIDS and framed radicalization as a public health priority. Biden also made efforts to address extremism in the ranks of the military and Department of Homeland Security.

Experts described the effort as modest, but the moves were welcomed among counterterrorism specialists as an overdue corrective to a disproportionate focus on Islamist militant groups whose threat to the United States has receded in the decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaida.

A failure of authorities to pivot to the homegrown threat was cited in the findings of a Senate panel that examined intelligence missteps ahead of the Capitol attack. The report called for a reevaluation of the government’s analysis of domestic threats, finding that, “Neither the FBI nor DHS deemed online posts calling for violence at the Capitol as credible.”

This Trump administration has shown no appetite for such measures. Instead, the White House pardons are nudging fringe movements deeper into the mainstream and closer to power, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads an extremism research lab at American University and has testified before Congress about the threat.

“It creates immediate national security risks from people who are pledging revenge and retribution and who have now been valorized,” Miller-Idriss said.

Within 24 hours of his release, Rhodes had embarked on a comeback blitz. He visited the Capitol and stopped by a Dunkin’ Donuts in the House office building. Three days later, he was in a crowd standing behind Trump at a rally in Las Vegas.

Rhodes was among 14 defendants whose charges were commuted rather than being pardoned. Though he didn’t enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was convicted of orchestrating the Oath Keepers’ violent actions that day. At trial, prosecutors played a recording of him saying, “My only regret is they should have brought rifles.”

At the Capitol after his release, he told reporters he plans to seek a full pardon.

Extremists Reconnect, Rejoice on X

Emboldened by the pardons and Trump’s laser focus on mass deportations, which is redirecting authorities’ attention, far-right extremists rejoiced at the idea of having more space to organize.

Chat forums filled with would-be MAGA vigilantes who fantasize about rounding up Democratic politicians or acting as bounty hunters to corral undocumented migrants. Researchers noted one Proud Boys chat group where users had posted the LinkedIn pages of corrections officers who purportedly oversaw Jan. 6 detainees.

Newly freed prisoners, no longer subject to orders to stay away from extremists and co-defendants, gathered for a virtual reunion, hosted on Elon Musk’s X platform the weekend after their release. For hours, they talked about what led them to the Capitol, how they were taken into custody and the harsh jail conditions they faced — a vivid, albeit one-sided, oral history of life at the center of what the Justice Department had hailed as a landmark domestic terrorism investigation.

The reunion on X offered a glimpse of men juggling the thrill of their vindication with the mundane logistics of reintegrating to society. One former defendant called in from a Florida shopping mall where he was buying sneakers with his mom. A Montana man who embraces the QAnon conspiracy theory said he was experiencing the most exciting time of his life.

Some were too flustered to articulate their thoughts beyond a deep gratitude for God and Trump. Others sounded fired up, ready to run for office, join a class-action lawsuit over their prosecution or find others ways to, as one pardoned rioter put it, “fight the hell out of this thing.”

Outside the D.C. Jail, pardoned defendants described the whiplash of their sudden status change from alleged and convicted criminals to freed patriots.

William Sarsfield III, a tall, gray-bearded man in a camouflage cap printed with “Biden Sucks,” sipped coffee outside the jail. Before dawn that morning, he’d been released from a Philadelphia detention center where he was awaiting sentencing on felony and misdemeanor convictions.

Court papers, backed by video evidence, describe Sarsfield as joining other Capitol rioters in trying to push through a police line with such force that “one officer could be heard screaming in agonizing pain as he was smashed between a shield and a metal door frame.” Sarsfield insists the charges were inflated, noting that he also helped officers escape the mob that day.

In the runup to Trump’s inauguration, rumors had swirled about an imminent pardon, though details were fuzzy. Sarsfield said his girlfriend was so certain Trump would deliver that she hopped in a truck and raced from Gun Barrel City, an hour southeast of Dallas, to the jail in Philadelphia, a 22-hour drive.

“She drove all the way from Texas on faith,” he said. “Because we both knew it was going to be right. A man’s word is what his word is.”

After his release, Sarsfield said, he headed straight to the D.C. “gulag” to make sure others were getting out, too. He still wore his jail uniform of sweats and orange slippers. The miracle of his freedom was just beginning to sink in.

“I got pardoned by a felon,” Sarsfield said with an incredulous chuckle, referring to Trump’s distinction as the only U.S. president to serve after a felony conviction.

Sarsfield said he planned to show his appreciation by helping Trump “clean up in local communities,” which he said meant working at the grassroots level to expose prosecutors and politicians he believes have corrupted the justice system.

“When people decide not to use the rule of law, that becomes tyrannical,” Sarsfield said. “And in our Constitution I’m pretty sure it says when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

William Sarsfield was released from Philadelphia Federal Detention Center after Trump pardoned him for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images) An “Inflection Point” for Political Violence

The uncertainty of what comes next is nerve-wracking for longtime monitors of violent extremists. Even in their worst-case scenarios, they said, few foresaw the Trump administration sending hundreds of diehard election deniers back into their communities as aggrieved heroes.

“A lot of these people will have martyrdom or legendary status among extremist circles, and that is a very powerful recruiting tool,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group.

ACLED research shows extremist activity such as demonstrations and acts of political violence has declined since 2023, which saw a 35% reduction in mobilization compared to the previous year. Doyle and other monitors credit the drop in part to the chilling effect of the Justice Department’s post-Jan. 6 crackdown on anti-government and white supremacist movements.

Doyle cautioned that it’s too early to assess the ripple effect of Trump’s clemency on extremist activity. Their ability to regroup depends on several factors, including fear of FBI infiltration, which could subside now that hard-right Trump loyalists are overseeing the Justice Department.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Doyle said.

At the FBI, the Trump administration’s post-clemency vows of payback have sidelined a cohort of senior officials who oversaw the Jan. 6 portfolio of cases, resulting in the loss of some of the bureau’s most seasoned counterterrorism professionals.

Without that expertise, investigators run the risk of violating a suspect’s civil rights or, conversely, overlooking threats because they are assumed to be constitutionally protected, said a veteran FBI analyst who has worked on Jan. 6 cases.

“It has the potential to cut both ways,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Many longtime monitors of extremist movements have themselves become targets of threats and violence from Jan. 6 defendants and their supporters, raising anxiety about their release from prison.

Megan Squire, a computer scientist who in 2017 was among the first academic researchers documenting the Proud Boys’ increasingly organized violence, said members are already “saber-rattling and reconstituting dead chapters.”

The group’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, released from prison in Louisiana, told the far-right Infowars podcast: “Success is going to be retribution.”

Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys, center, walks in the Million MAGA March in Washington, D.C., in 2020. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

All five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack were in Squire’s original dataset. Another member who was a Jan. 6 defendant had previously blasted Squire on social media and posted her private information on Telegram.

Squire, who has since joined the civil rights-focused Southern Poverty Law Center, said she finds herself wondering, “Are they going to come after me now?”

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy

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It was the week President Donald Trump had signed a sweeping executive order shutting off the funding for foreign aid programs. Inside the U.S. Agency for International Development, his political appointees gathered shell-shocked senior staffers for private meetings to discuss the storied agency’s new reality.

Those staffers immediately raised objections. USAID’s programs were funded by Congress, and there were rules to follow before halting the payments, they said. Instead of reassuring them, the agency’s then-chief of staff, Matt Hopson, told staff that the White House did not plan on restarting most of the aid projects, according to two officials familiar with his comments.

Then Hopson added a stark coda: Trump could not have a higher tolerance for legal risk, the officials recalled. They understood the message to mean that the administration was willing to bend or even break laws to get what it wanted, and then take the fight to court. (Hopson, who resigned shortly after, did not respond to numerous phone calls and written messages requesting comment, and he turned away a reporter who came to his door.)

No president in history has unilaterally shuttered an agency formally enshrined in law — let alone deputized his wealthiest donor, Elon Musk, to carry out that task in his name with little oversight or accountability.

While USAID was first created by President John F. Kennedy in a 1961 executive order, Congress passed a law in 1998 to make it an “independent establishment” like others in the cabinet. Multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, built USAID into an institution that has helped save millions of lives around the world, promoted U.S. interests in remote corners of the globe and employed thousands of Americans.

Now Trump and Musk have nearly destroyed it in three weeks. “It’s very hard not to see what’s going on as a constitutional crisis,” said Peter Shane, a law professor and one of the country’s leading scholars on the Constitution. “It’s very scary and tragic.”

Several experts consulted by ProPublica said the new administration may have broken the law almost immediately.

Around Jan. 31, Jason Gray, the acting administrator of USAID, passed along orders to the agency’s IT department to hand the entire digital network to Musk’s engineers, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, among others. (Farritor, Kliger and Gray did not respond to requests for comment.)

Get in Touch

Do you work in the federal government? Have information about humanitarian aid? Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

From there, the engineers from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency quickly gained access to USAID’s financial system. On top of that, they became “super administrators” and had access to thousands of employees’ personal information, including their desktop files and emails, two USAID officials told ProPublica. The material also included information gathered during security clearance background checks, ranging from Social Security numbers and credit histories to home addresses.

“They had complete access to everything you could think of,” one official said. “The keys to the kingdom.”

By providing that access, USAID may have violated the Privacy Act of 1974, three experts on the law told ProPublica, regardless if the engineers were government employees at the time. The law requires consent from individuals before the government gives their private information to anyone.

“It is a catastrophic privacy and information security violation for a band of some government and some nongovernment personnel to barge into an agency and take over systems that contain personal information,” said John Davisson, director of litigation at Electronic Privacy Information Center and one of the country’s foremost authorities on the Privacy Act. Breaking the law can carry civil penalties and a minimum $1,000 fine for each violation if the victim can prove they were harmed, or much more if there were damages like loss of income.

With a series of executive orders, Trump established DOGE as a technology unit to improve IT and human resources functions at government agencies. He ordered his cabinet to give “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” There are exemptions to the Privacy Act if those accessing the personal files have proper authorization, which includes special training and other rules for each set of records, and if they are conducting routine USAID business. But the three experts ProPublica consulted said that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Davisson and others said that the law, which Congress passed with overwhelming support from both parties in the wake of Watergate, is meant to prevent presidents and others in high office from abusing their access to records for political ends. “The Privacy Act stands at the fountainhead of all this,” he added. “It stops that constitutional crisis from tipping off in the first place.”

For this story, ProPublica spoke with dozens of current and former USAID officials — many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retribution from the administration — and consulted the country’s leading authorities in government structure, federal law and the Constitution. While other media accounts have detailed several key moments in the blitzkrieg on USAID, this article provides new details about what Trump and Musk’s lieutenants did, what they said at the time and the objections that those within the government raised along the way.

In addition to the Privacy Act, experts told ProPublica the administration may have broken other laws while violating the Constitution itself, including the separation of powers and a president’s duty to faithfully execute the laws of the land. Failing to notify Congress before making major changes to the agency may have transgressed the Administrative Procedures Act, and freezing money appropriated by Congress for foreign aid could be in violation of the Impoundment Control Act.

Officials and experts have been closely watching the developments at USAID out of fear that Trump will deploy the same playbook to target other agencies he has publicly criticized, including the Department of Education.

The Republican-controlled Congress and Trump’s Department of Justice are unlikely to initiate investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by administration officials. In fact, the DOJ’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington, who was a lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants, signaled the very opposite in a recent series of letters to Musk, promising to investigate people who illegally impeded DOGE’s efforts or even those who just acted unethically “and chase them to the end of the Earth.” The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.

That leaves lawsuits. On Thursday, federal worker groups sued the administration, accusing Trump of violating the Constitution by systematically disemboweling the agency without congressional approval. The next day, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction temporarily halting a major part of the administration’s efforts to reduce USAID’s more than 10,000-person workforce to a few hundred.

The administration argued during a hearing on Friday that the president has acted within his authority and continues to press its case. Trump and his advisers have long planned to assert in court that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike.

The lawsuit is so far the only substantive challenge Trump and Musk have faced since they began dismantling the agency. The judge’s ruling raises questions about what will happen if workers try to use USAID systems or buildings on Monday and are denied access.

“USAID is driving the radical left crazy, and there is nothing they can do about it,” Trump posted that same day, in all capital letters. “Close it down!”

The White House, USAID, the State Department and Musk did not respond to detailed lists of questions for this article. Previously, the administration has said, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

Over the past week, they have defended their assault on the agency by repeatedly amplifying the once-fringe sentiment that USAID had become a conduit for wasteful spending, fraud and corruption. The judge on Friday noted the administration provided no evidence to support those claims. But Musk and Trump have successfully fueled intense animosity toward the agency anyway, drumming up support for their effort to destroy it.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper,” Musk posted Monday on X. He is the richest man in the world, and his company SpaceX has received at least $15.4 billion in contracts over the past decade from the same government he has pledged to cleanse of wasteful spending.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk said on X. “Time for it to die.”

In the frenzied days after the arrival of Musk’s engineers at USAID, they used their access to the agency’s IT systems to begin identifying bureaus to cull and programs to terminate, USAID officials told ProPublica. They were working under the direction of another political appointee named Peter Marocco, the director of foreign affairs at the State Department.

Around that time, Marocco drafted the order that required American-funded aid projects around the world to close down. Marocco — who held a leadership role at USAID during Trump’s previous administration, where staff formally accused him of undermining the agency’s mission — did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica.

After the stop-work orders began going out, Trump’s aides and the DOGE team then turned their focus to the agency’s workforce, which is staffed by civil servants, foreign service officers and contractors. Their initial step was to oust about 60 top supervisors, including the agency’s attorneys.

Next, the administration issued stop-work orders to staffing companies in Washington, effectively laying off hundreds of workers at once. Presidents generally have wide latitude to cancel such contracts, though there is typically a deliberative process. A move like that has never been done at this scale before, experts said. The workers who lost their jobs had no civil service protections.

But that still left the bulk of the direct government workforce. The administration managed to figure out a way to sideline civil servants without officially firing them: They placed hundreds of USAID’s career staff on indefinite administrative leave — with pay but without explanation — or simply locked them out of the agency systems. Some who received no notice used their personal email addresses to ask about their status and received a reply from human resources that they “have likely been placed on administrative leave,” without official confirmation, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

Taxpayers are currently paying for them not to work. That maneuver went at the heart of what was regarded as a sacrosanct tenet in American government: that civil servants remain outside partisan politics and can’t be fired without due process.

In another stunning move, Marocco recalled back home 1,400 of USAID’s overseas foreign service officers, who were supposed to have similar job protections.

“This is a masterpiece of administrative design,” said Donald Kettl, the former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland who has written multiple books about government structure. “It’s unprecedented in its scale,” Kettl added. “Each of these things has been done individually, but never all rolled together as one package and focused strategically like a series of intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

Musk’s employees told staff they could not come to USAID’s headquarters. Guards now stand sentry with a clipboard to block almost everyone from getting inside. On Friday, a maintenance crew took the agency’s title off the building’s facade.

What happens now is unclear. Friday’s court injunction temporarily prevents the administration from placing about 2,000 more people on leave, orders the reinstatement of 500 others and stops the recall of foreign service officials from abroad.

In recent days, ProPublica has interviewed dozens of USAID officials and contractors who have found themselves suddenly out of work and cut off from the government they had devoted their lives to serving. “I am a combat veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and not a deranged Marxist as Elon is shouting,” one employee told ProPublica.

“I have lived through a dictatorship before,” said another. “I know what these look like, and the writing is on the wall for me.”

A third: “I don’t think Americans seem to understand what’s at stake here. This is a heist. It’s a hostile takeover by malicious actors of our entire government.”

At various points, those within the agency who tried standing up against what they considered to be illegal abuses or immoderate management say they were punished for it. “There are no guardrails left,” another USAID official told ProPublica. “And there’s nobody left to stop it.”

The agency’s heads of security were put on leave after they blocked Musk’s engineers from accessing the classified servers last weekend. Then the same happened to the top human resources officer after he refused to put an additional 1,400 staffers on leave Tuesday. Both episodes were first reported by the trade publication Devex.

Likewise, when the USAID labor director reversed the administration’s decision to place almost 60 senior civil servants on leave at the onset, he was put on leave too. “The agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices,” the labor director wrote in an email to staff.

“It is and has always been my office’s commitment to the workforce that we ensure all employees receive their due process,” he added. “I will not be a party to a violation of that commitment.”

A security guard stands at the entrance to the USAID headquarters on Monday. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Early last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a staunch supporter of USAID during his time in the Senate — sent Congress a letter saying that the administration “may move” some of the agency’s bureaus under the State Department, the kind of notification that is required 15 days before any major overhaul can take place, according to federal law. He told the lawmakers that the administration intended to work with them on a “review and potential reorganization of USAID’s activities,” and that Marocco would lead the effort.

If it were true, experts say his sentiment would more closely reflect the legal requirements that Congress has laid out since establishing USAID as an independent agency. But experts and government officials said the letter is an inadequate attempt to retrospectively justify what has already occurred.

That difference — between what the administration told lawmakers it was doing to USAID and what it was actually doing — was on display during a previously unreported episode in late January.

Peter Marocco (U.S. Department of Defense)

In late January, Marocco spoke with congressional aides representing both parties and both chambers. During a series of a half dozen phone calls — he declined to see them in person — the aides asked him to explain the rationale behind the stop-work orders the administration had sent around the world and the process for organizations to receive a waiver from program freezes.

Marocco declined to give substantive responses and claimed the waiver process was operating smoothly, one of the aides told ProPublica.

Marocco said shutting down USAID programs would give the administration an opportunity to see which ones would make America safer and stronger, which was Trump’s promise to voters. He added that he would be personally reviewing programs that requested a waiver and decide which ones should go to Rubio for final approval.

Meanwhile, organizations all over the world remain either grounded under stop-work orders or unable to draw on U.S. funds to continue working, as ProPublica previously reported. The agency put many people who could help process those payments on leave. Among the programs affected were efforts to feed malnourished children in Sudan, bring clean water to refugees in Yemen and deliver medicines to people living with HIV.

During the briefings, the congressional aides acknowledged that there are legitimate things to criticize about USAID. In the past, the agency has been accused of poor oversight of its contractors and interminable support for projects that were meant to end years ago. “I believe the purpose of foreign assistance should be ending its need to exist,” the agency’s former administrator Mark Green once said. And it was the president’s prerogative to focus on programs that align with his agenda. “But,” one of the aides told Marocco, “none of that justifies anything you’re doing.”

Days later, during a recent meeting with USAID staff in Guatemala, Rubio claimed they’d had a “problem” with some people back in the U.S. and that some of the agency’s programs undermined the Trump administration’s goals, according to a transcript of his comments. He also suggested that exceptions to Marocco’s foreign service recall could be made for people with extenuating circumstances, such as pregnant staffers in their third trimester or a person on dialysis.

By Thursday, there were plans to decimate entire USAID bureaus without inviting back the majority of staff on administrative leave. A group tracking the fallout estimates nearly 52,000 American jobs, including those working for vendors and contractors, were already eliminated in the last two weeks. “I fail to understand how having thousands of Americans lose their jobs puts America first,” said Nidhi Bouri, who worked for nearly a decade at USAID, the last two as a political appointee of President Joe Biden.

It’s legally murky if Trump simply keeps them on indefinite administrative leave. Under the Administrative Leave Act of 2016, an individual can only be placed on paid leave for 10 days a year. But a regulation issued by the Biden administration specifies that limitation only applies when that person is under investigation. Legal experts say the interpretation has since been that if there is no investigation, an employee can be placed on leave indefinitely, so long as they continue receiving a paycheck.

Not everyone is sure the Biden-era regulation will hold up in court. “That hasn’t been challenged, and it’s relatively new,” said Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “There’s enough of us that think that regulation is inconsistent with statute and if argued in court it might be considered invalid.”

The USAID office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras (Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)

It is illegal for the Trump administration to unilaterally dissolve an agency created by Congress, according to legal scholars, government experts and the congressional research facility.

“For all intents and purposes you are dismantling an agency created by Congress, and that’s a violation of the law,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law. “It can’t stand unchallenged, in my view.”

And while a president has broad discretion to make changes to programs and reduce the workforce, the Impoundment Control Act prevents him from withholding money appropriated by Congress, the experts said.

“If it turns out that the president can eliminate or defund an agency on a whim, then ultimately Congress is stripped of all power over the budget,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “That would create a precedent that destroys the separation of powers.”

It will be the courts that decide if and to what extent Trump’s takeover of USAID violated federal law.

Many legal experts in and outside of government believe this was the administration’s plan all along: drag out Trump’s most aggressive and controversial policy decisions in court for so long that by the time any permanent judgment comes down, favorable or not, USAID will be nothing but a memory.

“They don’t seem to care what the statutes say,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who represents both management and federal workers in employment disputes. “The plan from the employment perspective was to fire them all and make them sue. If the administration loses the court cases, so be it. The damage is done.”

Do you work in the federal government? Have information about humanitarian aid? Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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The U.S. Department of Education told employees late Friday that it will end all programs, contracts and policies that “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex,” carrying out President Donald Trump’s vow to restrict transgender rights.

The broad language in the email did not specify which programs or policies would be impacted, or how many schools or students might be affected. But the order appears designed to target programs that in recent years supported transgender students — school-based mental health services and support for homeless students, for example.

“These corrective measures will include thorough review and subsequent termination of Departmental programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices,” according to the email sent to department employees and obtained by ProPublica.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The email, which was unsigned and sent from “ED Internal Communications,” also takes aim at employee programs at the Education Department. Employees across the federal government already have been instructed to remove preferred pronouns from their email signatures.

“Employee resource groups that promote gender ideology and do not affirm the reality of biological sex cannot meet on government property or take place during official work hours,” the email said.

It’s not clear what resource groups the email is referencing or whether they exist.

The Trump administration has curbed transgender rights in other federal agencies; it has barred transgender people from serving in the military, reinstating a policy from Trump’s first term, and in federal prisons it has tried to move transgender women to male facilities, an effort a judge has blocked.

The sweeping directive outlined in Friday’s Education Department email follows two recent executive orders targeting “gender ideology.” The first, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” ordered federal agencies to scrub references to transgender people from documents, rules and policies. The department appears to have complied with the order by, for example, removing resources like tips for schools on how to support homeless LGBTQ+ youth.

Another executive order issued this week, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” barred transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports at school. The Education Department on Thursday announced investigations into two universities and an athletic association related to transgender athletes and the institutions’ alleged violations of Title IX, a federal law that is part of the Civil Rights Act and prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. The same day, the NCAA reacted by barring athletes who were identified as male at birth from playing women’s sports.

The email sent to employees Friday afternoon stated: “The deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology — whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms — negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”

Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, is still awaiting confirmation.

She is co-founder with her husband of World Wrestling Entertainment and chair of the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit that has campaigned against transgender rights in schools.

Even without McMahon, like-minded colleagues already are working in the department, including several staff members from her conservative think tank. The bio of newly appointed Deputy General Counsel Candice Jackson, for instance, touts her experience “challenging the harmful effects of the concept of ‘gender identity’ in laws and policies in schools.”

Schools have experienced whiplash in recent years as presidents imposed — and then removed — protections for transgender youth.

Under President Barack Obama in 2016, the department issued guidance to schools that the federal Title IX law protects the right of transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms at school that match their gender identities.

Schools “must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity,” the letter said.

Trump rescinded that guidance after he came into office in 2017, though the letter remained on the Education Department’s website. The Biden administration took the position in 2021 that transgender students deserved protection from discrimination under Title IX and publicized resources for schools and the LGBTQ+ students they serve.

Now that Trump is back in office again, many of those resource documents appear to have been wiped off the department’s website.

“President Trump is being the bully-in-chief. This administration wants to outlaw kindness and common decency in schools and make it illegal for teachers to call their students by the name they want to be called,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, in a statement about the administration’s “Defending Women” executive order.

Trump’s vision in his second administration includes dismantling the Education Department altogether. It’s unclear if there’s a legal pathway to do so, but already the administration has placed more than 50 department employees on administrative leave who appear to be associated with diversity, equity or inclusion efforts.

Concerns have mounted at the Education Department all week. Members of Elon Musk’s team reportedly have accessed sensitive department data, and some members of Congress went to department headquarters to question the team but were denied access. Responding to the social media posts of one representative who was blocked from the building, Musk posted on X: “No such department exists in the federal government.”

We are continuing to report on the U.S. Department of Education. Are you a former or current Education Department employee? Are you a student or school employee impacted by changes at the department? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

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

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

Long before 17-year-old Solomon Henderson walked into his school cafeteria with a gun, authorities in Tennessee were alerted to his threatening and violent behavior.

In 2020, when he was 13, his mom called the police, saying he punched her in the face and tried to hit her with a chair after she asked him to clean up the backyard. An officer with the Clarksville Police Department charged Henderson with simple assault, according to an incident report that ProPublica and WPLN News obtained through a records request. The arrest has not been previously reported.

In 2023, Nashville police officers visited the family’s home and said they removed two guns. A Police Department spokesperson said the guns belonged to adults in the home, but the incident report could not be released because the visit involved a minor.

At Antioch High School a year later, Henderson pulled a knife on a 15-year-old girl. For that, he was charged with reckless endangerment, according to a court document the girl’s mother shared with ProPublica and WPLN. School officials responded by suspending Henderson for two days, according to WSMV-TV, which obtained a disciplinary record that refers to the weapon as a “box cutter.”

Two months after that, in December 2024, a user on X flagged one of Henderson’s accounts and tagged the FBI, encouraging the agency to look into his connections with school shooters. Henderson’s accounts, which did not use his first or last name, were suspended in December and in January for violating “rules against perpetrators of violent attacks.” In school, his grades were slipping. A teacher told WSMV that Henderson was a “walking red flag.”

On Jan. 22, Henderson came to school with a pistol. He fired 10 shots in 20 seconds in the cafeteria, killing 16-year-old Josselin Corea Escalante before he turned the gun on himself.

It’s unclear how many of Henderson’s red flags were heeded. In response to questions about Henderson’s past interactions with law enforcement, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department declined to comment. When asked if the incident in Clarksville came up during its investigations, a spokesperson indicated the department did not know about it. And school officials declined to say whether they considered incidents from his past when determining his suspension, citing student confidentiality laws.

Henderson’s suspension for threatening another student with a weapon stands in stark contrast to other far harsher penalties students have faced under a series of recently passed state laws designed to prevent school shootings and crack down on hoax threats. A 10-year-old who points a finger gun can get kicked out of school for a year, and an 11-year-old who’s rumored to make a threat can be charged with a felony. Neither of those children, or others whose punishments ProPublica and WPLN examined last year, brought a weapon to school.

The girl Henderson threatened, Gemima, told ProPublica and WPLN that she was surprised to see him in the hallways just days after the incident. ProPublica and WPLN are using just her first name because she is a minor. “He had a whole knife in school, and he didn’t get expelled,” she said. “It just doesn’t sit right with me.”

Lawmakers say that the harsh punishments are necessary to deter students from making hoax threats that frighten students and teachers and waste time and resources to investigate. But lawyers and judges say the approach floods the justice system with cases that could be handled at school, making it harder to focus on the real dangers.

“Any time when you have an influx of cases that are threats or conversations that have to be investigated, I think it does take away valuable resources for the actual, real cases that we need it for,” said Judge Sheila Calloway of the Davidson County Juvenile Court.

State Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat and former special education teacher, says Tennessee’s Republican supermajority should focus more on implementing protections that will actually help stop mass shootings rather than teaching a lesson to kids who have no intention of carrying one out.

“Every time we try to come up with something to prevent these incidences, they’re not interested,” Johnson said. “But they are interested in enhancing penalties and convicting 7-year-olds of felonies.”

Henderson had complained about the students who had gotten in trouble for making threats at his school, worried that the increased police presence would get in the way of his planning. In an online diary that he made public before the shooting, he wrote that he would never have called attention to himself like other kids were, calling them “clowns.” In order to carry out an attack, he wrote, the attacker needed the “element of surprise.”

Antioch High School, first image. A parent prays as she waits for her daughter following a shooting at the school in January. (First image: Paige Pfleger/WPLN. Second image: George Walker IV/AP Photo.)

Tennessee requires school officials and police to work together on “threat assessment teams” to investigate cases where students show “dangerous or threatening behavior.” They are supposed to resolve problems before they escalate to violence and determine whether troubled students need additional resources like counseling or other mental health services.

“When you’re looking at children who might have behaviors that are concerning or other stressors going on in their lives, we want to be capturing and digging into that right away,” said Melissa Nelson, a school safety and security consultant who has trained thousands of school employees on managing threats.

School shooters usually plan their attacks in advance, federal research shows, and most act out in concerning ways well before they attack. When the process is working at its best, threat assessment teams can step in early to set students on a better path. If a kid is acting out because he is being bullied, for example, the team might switch his lunch hour to separate him from the bully or help mediate a better relationship between the students. These interventions may not have been enough to deter Henderson, but repeated contact and observation over the years he was in the district is considered best practice by experts.

Under state law, law enforcement and school districts don’t have to publicly disclose their threat assessment process or how effective it is at stopping violence. As a result, the public has little transparency into what steps are being taken to keep students like Henderson from becoming the next school shooter.

“When we aren’t using evidence-based practices and we don’t have a good framework of specific things we should be looking for,” Nelson said, “then we do have a very high potential of missing warning signs.”

Metro Nashville Public Schools declined to comment on why they gave Henderson a two-day suspension instead of a harsher punishment for pulling out a knife or whether they completed a threat assessment. But according to the district’s discipline chart, its schools are not required to complete a threat assessment for students punished for reckless endangerment, which was what Henderson was charged with in court.

If school staff and police did complete an assessment, they would have been required to consider Henderson’s history of violence and risk of acting aggressively in the future, according to a copy of a threat assessment questionnaire the district shared with ProPublica and WPLN. They also would have had to decide how to address any concerns they had about Henderson, such as monitoring his social media, randomly checking his backpack or locker and helping him to get counseling.

Henderson’s online diary lends insight to warning signs that officials may have missed. He wrote that police once found a gun at his house that belonged to him, but his dad took the blame. He also wrote that his mom had been abusing him for years, including putting a gun to his head when he was young. ProPublica and WPLN made multiple attempts to reach Henderson’s parents for comment but did not hear back.

The diary also revealed he was active in online groups that glorified mass shooters and that he promoted racist, antisemitic, anti-LGBQT+ and violent misogynistic views. He wrote that he felt lonely at school and wanted to stab his classmates to death.

The way the school district handled Henderson’s behavior has frustrated Gemima and her family. The family made the decision to not go to court in the case against Henderson — they wanted the school to get him counseling or remove him to an alternative school, and they worried about overly harsh punishment in the justice system. It’s a decision that her mom, Patricia Lerime, said she now regrets.

“I should have gone to court,” she said, pointing out that he might have been required to get help. “But I felt like Metro failed him.”

Gemima recalled that when a school administrator confronted Henderson about threatening her with a knife, he began yelling at Gemima and called her the N-word. No one told her that he would be back at school days later. On the day of the shooting, she said, it didn’t take long for information to spread among students that Henderson was the assailant. It struck her, because of her history with Henderson, that she could have been one of his victims.

“Y’all failed me, and y’all failed everybody else in the school,” Gemima said. “I just feel like the situation should have been handled differently.”

Mollie Simon of ProPublica and Phoebe Petrovic of Wisconsin Watch contributed research.

by Justin Elliott, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Andy Kroll

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As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.

But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.

Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.

Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.

All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.

Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”

However, DOGE’s aggressive actions across the government have already drawn lawsuits contending that the group has broken the law.

The legal challenges brought by several groups could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. This week, for example, more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general said they would sue to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and federal employee unions sued to challenge the DOGE-led dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“What’s striking is how contemptuous the administration seems to be of traditional administrative law limitations — in ways that might get them into trouble,” said Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University. “When this stuff goes to the courts, one important question is going to be: How well-lawyered was it?”

Trump formally created DOGE with an executive order on the first day of his administration. The order describes teams of at least four people — a leader, a lawyer, a human resources professional and an engineer — who would be detailed to government agencies. Exactly how DOGE is currently structured is not clear, nor are the specific assignments of each of the DOGE lawyers identified by ProPublica.

Trump has granted Musk, the world’s richest man, vast powers to seize control of government agencies, their offices and staff. “He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs, and we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers,” Trump said of Musk on Monday, adding that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”

The Trump administration has declined to provide information on who is working in Musk’s DOGE group. More than two dozen members of the effort have been identified, and ProPublica is compiling them as part of an ongoing reporting project.

A bit more about the three DOGE lawyers most recently identified by ProPublica:

James Burnham, whose title at DOGE is listed internally as general counsel, is a prominent lawyer in conservative legal circles. In Trump’s first term, Burnham said he was brought to the White House counsel’s office by the office’s top lawyer, Don McGahn. He said he worked on the administration’s judicial selection process, including Gorsuch’s appointment to the high court. He went on to work in the Trump Justice Department and clerk for Gorsuch in 2020.

"He’s a smart guy, and a very conservative lawyer,” Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the first Trump White House, said of Burnham in an interview.

Burnham later launched a boutique law firm and a litigation finance fund that seeks to “ensure righteous lawsuits never falter for lack of financial resources,” according to its website. Burnham was also helping DOGE with legal matters before Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times reported in January.

Keenan Kmiec’s career veered from elite law to, more recently, crypto. After clerking for then-Judge Samuel Alito on a federal circuit court, he clerked on the Supreme Court for Roberts in the 2006-2007 term, according to his LinkedIn. He did a stint at a corporate law firm and had his own firm focused on insider-trading litigation.

Kmiec appears to have become interested in crypto long before it went mainstream. A friend wrote an essay published online recalling meeting Kmiec at an Irish pub in Washington’s Dupont Circle in the mid-2010s, where the men spoke about “the errors of central banks, the libertarian movement, and Bitcoin.”

In 2021, Kmiec began working for a Swiss foundation that promotes a blockchain called Tezos, according to his LinkedIn. He then served for nine months as CEO of a now-defunct startup called InterPop, which described itself as “forging the future of digital fandom with comic, game, and collectible NFTs minted responsibly on the Tezos blockchain.” A former staffer at InterPop described the company in an interview as a refinement of the Magic: The Gathering card game. But the former staffer added, “We ran out of money and the game failed.”

There’s little in the public domain about Kmiec’s political views. In 2009, he wrote a column for Politico critiquing the widespread use of the term “judicial activism,” which he called an ill-defined “empty epithet.” The previous year, he gave $500 to Barack Obama’s campaign, according to federal election records. Kmiec’s father, Douglas Kmiec, a former Reagan administration lawyer and prominent conservative law professor, also made headlines for endorsing Obama. (Obama later named Douglas Kmiec ambassador to Malta.)

DOGE lawyer Jacob Altik is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Altik was selected to clerk for Gorsuch at the Supreme Court in the term that starts this summer, according to an announcement by his law school that was confirmed by a Supreme Court spokesperson.

Altik recently worked as a corporate litigation associate at Weil and previously clerked for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee known for critiquing the administrative state. He also interned at a nonprofit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which has been at the forefront of legal efforts to rein in the power of federal agencies.

We’ve added these names — along with more than 20 others — to ProPublica’s ongoing project tracking DOGE members.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

Kirsten Berg, Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.

by Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi

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

After creating an uproar last week for demanding access to a sensitive system at the Treasury Department, officials affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are expected to turn their attention to another restricted database next week, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.

The new target, the sources said, is a database that tracks the flow of money across the government, from the Treasury to specific agencies and then to the ultimate destination of the funds.

The data in the system, known as the Central Accounting Reporting System, or CARS, is considered sensitive. Many transactions flowing to the same place, for example, can suggest a new national security priority for the U.S. government. People who work with the system have in the past been briefed that the database may be of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, said a third source who has familiarity with the system.

Musk’s affiliates are expected to arrive at Treasury offices in Parkersburg, West Virginia, next week, according to two sources, prompting concern among the staff there. The offices house a large number of staffers who work for the previously obscure Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the part of the Treasury that manages accounting and payments systems.

A spokesperson for DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did a Treasury spokesperson.

CARS is intended to standardize accounting across government agencies and account for how money is moved. It’s unclear what specifically the DOGE team’s interest in the system is. When government auditors have examined the system in the past, the Treasury has pushed for them to do it in secure environments or on the Fiscal Service’s laptops.

DOGE’s earlier actions at the Treasury have become a focus of congressional scrutiny and a federal court battle in recent days. Musk’s team initially tried to halt money going to the U.S. Agency for International Development from the Treasury’s payment system.

A veteran career official within the Treasury pushed back and then retired in the face of the demands. On Friday morning, The Washington Post reported that one of the DOGE-affiliated staffers involved in that standoff, Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley tech executive, would be replacing the career official who resigned, which would give him power over the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment and accounting systems.

Federal workers unions took the matter to court, and a judge on Thursday temporarily limited Musk’s team to read-only access.

The Treasury has assured Congress that the DOGE-affiliated staffers have read-only privileges for the payment system, but Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has raised concerns that the agency may have misled lawmakers, citing reports from Wired that a DOGE staffer had “read-write” access for several days. “Treasury’s refusal to provide straight answers about DOGE’s actions, as well as its refusal to provide a briefing requested by several Senate committees only heightens my suspicions,” Wyden said in a statement on Friday.

One of the two Musk-affiliated officials probing the Treasury’s systems resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal discovered racist posts on a social media account linked to him.

The posts included “I was racist before it was cool” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

It’s not clear which personnel are scheduled to make the trip to West Virginia or if the resignation will affect those plans. By Friday morning, Musk was posting on X about bringing the staffer back, and Vice President JD Vance backed the idea, saying, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” In a press conference, Trump said he wasn’t familiar with the situation but backed Vance’s take.

Do you have any information about DOGE and the Trump administration’s moves at Treasury that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Mica Rosenberg, and Perla Trevizo, design by Zisiga Mukulu

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

President Donald Trump promised a radical reset on immigration, and he didn’t waste any time getting started. Just hours after being sworn in on Jan. 20, he was seated in the Oval Office with a black permanent marker and a stack of leather-bound executive orders. By the end of Day 1, he’d revived many of the same programs and policies he’d previously carried out over four years during his first administration.

There were 10 orders related to immigration in all. And within them lay dozens of policy changes that, if implemented, would upend the immigration system and the lives of millions.

The blitz of executive order signing has continued, so fast and sweeping that it’s been hard to keep up, much less gauge its potential future impact. Trump has paused the resettlement of tens of thousands of refugees who’d already been vetted and approved to relocate to the United States, including as many as 15,000 Afghans. He ended humanitarian parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua leaving more than 500,000 already living here in legal limbo. He launched his promised effort to round up and remove millions of unauthorized immigrants starting with those accused of violent crimes, though less than half of the approximately 8,200 people arrested from Jan. 20 through Feb. 2 so far have criminal convictions, according to government data obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Taken individually, many of the measures could be considered controversial, said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, but by the time experts get their mind around one new initiative, they learn there’s been another. “It’s really hard for outside organizations, politicians or the public in general to focus on any one of them,” he said.

In the meantime, some pushback has begun. Two federal judges swiftly blocked an order seeking to end birthright citizenship, calling it unconstitutional, while about a dozen other lawsuits have been filed by civil rights groups, religious organizations and states. Advocates sued this week to reverse an order that declared migrants were invading the country and that authorized the president to use extraordinary powers to stop them. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

In order to provide a glimpse of the enormity of the changes that are underway, ProPublica and the Tribune identified nearly three dozen of the most impactful policy changes set in motion by the orders signed on the first day. Most were pulled from the playbook of Trump’s previous presidency. Others are unprecedented.

Trump Tried It Before

Some of the measures in the executive orders revived policies from Trump’s first administration, including several blocked in court or rescinded following national outcry. Others are expansions of practices that have been carried out by various administrations, both Republican and Democratic.

1. Declare a national emergency at the border

Invokes special presidential powers that allow Trump, among other things, to circumvent Congress to unlock federal funding to build additional border barriers, as well as to deploy the military as needed.

HISTORY

Trump was the first president to declare a national emergency in relation to the border in 2019 to tap into funding to build border barriers after Congress stymied his efforts. The order was legally challenged, and President Joe Biden rescinded it upon taking office.

SOURCE

2. Halt refugee admissions

Temporarily suspends refugee admissions into the United States.

HISTORY

Trump initially paused the refugee resettlement program when he first took office in 2017. He then capped the number of refugees allowed into the country at 18,000, the lowest number in the more than 40-year history of the program.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

Thousands of refugees who already had their travel booked saw their plans canceled. Trump also suspended federal funding to all groups who assist refugees already in the United States, including helping them with housing, finding work and other needs.

SOURCE

3. End “catch and release”

Seeks to end the practice of releasing some immigrants from detention while they await immigration court proceedings.

HISTORY

For years, federal officials under Republicans and Democrats have released certain immigrants they can’t detain, either because of capacity or health or humanitarian concerns. During his first term, Trump ordered an end to “catch and release” practices. But, as did his predecessors, the president had to release tens of thousands of family members and unaccompanied minors because of judges' rulings and laws that ban prolonged detentions for minors, as well as a lack of family detention space.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the agency is detaining everyone who crosses the border and holding them until they can be processed or transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

SOURCE

4. Make asylum seekers wait in Mexico for U.S. hearings

Orders most non-Mexican immigrants and asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases go through the U.S. immigration court system.

HISTORY

Trump first launched the policy known as the Migration Protection Protocols in 2019 to deter unauthorized crossings. Under the program, the administration returned about 70,000 people to Mexico. Biden sought to end the policy when he first took office, saying it was dangerous and inhumane. A federal judge ordered the Biden administration to restart it, resulting in around 15,000 more immigrants to be placed in the program until the judge's order was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Jan. 21 that it was immediately restarting the practice, but it’s unclear how it would be applied since other Trump orders have suspended asylum at the border.

SOURCE

5. Promotes third-country asylum agreements

Allows the U.S. government to reach agreements with other governments to send back immigrants to places other than their home countries where they can seek asylum.

HISTORY

While Trump reached what they called Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala during his first term, only the Guatemalan policy went into effect, with 945 asylum seekers being transferred to the Central American country over a year.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, reached an agreement with El Salvador that would allow the U.S. to send deported immigrants from other countries to the Central American nation.

SOURCE

6. DNA testing of some immigrants

Requires the DNA testing of some unauthorized immigrants and asylum seekers, in particular families.

HISTORY

During his first term, Trump required that the Department of Homeland Security collect DNA samples from immigrant families, which was later expanded to include others in its custody. The Biden administration revoked the DNA testing contract in 2023.

SOURCE

7. Expanding who is targeted for deportation

Expands the focus of arrests of immigrants beyond those who pose a security threat to include anyone who is in the country illegally.

HISTORY

ICE during the Biden administration was instructed to focus the arrests of immigrants on those in the country illegally who posed threats to the country, border security or public safety. Due to limited resources, agents could decline to take action when there were mitigating factors like age, health, military status, length of time in the country or pending humanitarian applications. Those priorities were challenged and ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

On Jan. 21, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman issued a directive rescinding ICE guidelines, in place since 2011, that required officers to get prior approval to conduct arrests at certain “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals and churches. Media reports have already detailed some ICE arrests near churches. A group of Quakers sued over the policy, saying it violates the First Amendment.

SOURCE

8. Focus Homeland Security Investigations on immigration enforcement

Calls for the “primary mission” of the investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department to be enforcing laws related to illegal immigration, rather than its broad mandate to tackle human trafficking, drug smuggling, child sexual abuse and a host of other complex crimes.

HISTORY

A 2019 ProPublica investigation found that the Department of Homeland Security had shifted money away from more complex investigations to support Trump’s push to arrest and deport unauthorized immigrants during his first term, including reassigning hundreds of agents to low-level enforcement tasks.

SOURCE

9. Expansion of expedited removal

Expands fast-track deportation proceedings for people who cannot prove they have been in the country for more than two years.

HISTORY

In 2019, Trump implemented a similar policy to expand the fast-track deportation proceedings, known as “expedited removal.” Before, the practice only applied to people apprehended within 100 miles of a land border who couldn’t prove they had been in the United States for 14 days, as opposed to the broader time frame of two years. Immigrant advocates sued the previous Trump administration over the rule, but the case became moot after Biden reversed the policy.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

A Jan. 24 Federal Register notice put the policy into effect. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups have already filed a lawsuit challenging the policy.

SOURCE

10. Put pressure on “recalcitrant countries” to take back deportees

Pushes foreign governments to accept the deportation of their own nationals.

HISTORY

For years, the U.S. has kept track of “recalcitrant countries,” such as Venezuela and Cuba, whose governments have refused to take back their own nationals, hampering deportation efforts. Trump’s first administration issued visa sanctions against Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone for failing to accept deportees.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

In a brief diplomatic blow-up, the president of Colombia refused to accept two U.S. military planes carrying deportees, citing concerns about the migrants’ treatment. Trump responded by threatening to impose retaliatory tariffs and visa restrictions on officials and members of the president's family, and the U.S. Embassy in Bogota cancelled visa appointments. Colombia in turn promised to levy its own tariffs on U.S. imports but then backed down and agreed to accept the flights.

SOURCE

11. Create an office to assist victims of crimes committed by immigrants

Establishes a hotline for people to inform the government about immigrants involved in crimes.

HISTORY

The order reestablished the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, which Trump created in his first administration. Biden dismantled the office and established what he called the Victims Engagement and Services Line to support all crime victims regardless of immigration status. It also included information about reporting abuses inside immigration detention facilities and immigration benefits for crime or trafficking victims.

SOURCE

12. Limit Temporary Protected Status

Says that the legal status that temporarily protects some immigrants from deportation should be “limited in scope.”

HISTORY

Trump in the first administration sought to end Temporary Protected Status for thousands of immigrants living in the country legally, impacting some 400,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan. The ACLU and other advocacy organizations won a lawsuit challenging the policy. The Biden administration extended TPS to hundreds of thousands of people, including Venezuelans.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

The Trump administration revoked deportation protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans that Biden had granted before leaving office.

SOURCE

13. Increasing scrutiny of work permits

Says the administration will ensure employment authorization is provided in a manner consistent with immigration law. Does not provide many specifics.

HISTORY

Various Trump-era rules tried to make it more difficult for asylum-seekers to access work authorizations while they waited — sometimes for years — for their claims to be resolved in immigration court. Several nonprofit organizations sued over the policies, later vacated by a federal judge.

SOURCE

14. Target sanctuary jurisdictions

Bars so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that don’t cooperate with immigration enforcement from accessing federal funds and instructs the attorney general to take civil or criminal action against them.

HISTORY

The measure goes further than similar attempts in Trump’s first term to halt some specific law enforcement grants to targeted localities. From the first day of his previous administration, Trump battled against local jurisdictions that refused to cooperate with parts of his immigration crackdown by threatening to limit Department of Justice law enforcement grants as well as suing California over its sanctuary law.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

On Jan. 21, the Justice Department instructed U.S. attorneys offices to investigate and prosecute noncompliance with immigration enforcement initiatives.

SOURCE

15. Information sharing

Ensures more information is shared with the Department of Homeland Security for law enforcement or immigration status verification and anti-human trafficking efforts.

HISTORY

Unaccompanied migrant children who arrive at the border and are taken into custody have protections under U.S. law and a long-standing legal settlement that says they are supposed to be released to sponsors — usually parents or relatives — in the U.S. In the first Trump administration, the agency in charge of their care began sharing information with ICE and expanded the collection of fingerprints from people in the sponsor’s household to aid in the arrest and deportation of those in the country illegally. Congress moved to place some limitations on the practice. Cases have emerged of migrant children working illegally, sometimes in dangerous jobs, after being released from federal custody to sponsors.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

ProPublica reported that a longtime immigration enforcement official has been tapped to run the agency responsible for managing unaccompanied migrant children, in a move that has alarmed experts and advocates who are concerned about further information-sharing between the two agencies. ICE has been granted access to a database with information on unaccompanied kids, according to media reports and a former government source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continued relationships with the government.

SOURCE

16. Denying public benefits to unauthorized immigrants

Revokes the eligibility for public benefits of immigrants living in the country illegally.

HISTORY

Unauthorized immigrants are already ineligible for many public benefits. The first Trump administration introduced a new rule that said immigrants likely to become a “public charge” would be ineligible for admission into the country or unable to adjust their immigration status once here. The rule was subject to litigation and blocked in court.

SOURCE

17. Travel bans

Seeks to identify countries considered to have “vetting and screening information” that is “deficient” in order to determine whether it is fully or partially suspending entry of those nations’ citizens to the U.S.

HISTORY

Soon after taking office, Trump issued a sweeping travel ban that barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries as well as North Korea and Venezuela. The order was immediately challenged in court. After several revisions, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld a third version of the order.

SOURCE

18. Denaturalizing U.S. citizens

Puts resources toward revoking U.S. citizenship for certain offenses.

HISTORY

The first Trump administration launched an effort to strip a large number of Americans of their citizenship, including a new section created by the Department of Justice in 2020 dedicated to these cases. According to the ACLU, under past administrations, those targeted for denaturalization were often Nazis and other war criminals, but the first Trump administration included a broader swath of people.

SOURCE

19. Expulsion based on public health concerns

Suspends or restricts entry of immigrants who pose a public health risk.

HISTORY

In March 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration implemented a public health rule, known as Title 42, that rapidly expelled back to Mexico almost all migrants without giving them a chance to seek asylum. Biden continued that policy for two years before ending it.

SOURCE

20. Deploy military troops to the border

Tasks the secretary of defense with deploying troops to help secure the southern border.

HISTORY

During his first term in office, Trump ordered the deployment of more than 5,000 troops to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border, something both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did during their administrations. Military bases have also been used in the past to temporarily house migrants.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

The Defense Department has sent 1,500 additional active-duty service members to the border, on top of the 2,500 members already in the region. U.S. military aircraft have also started flying undocumented immigrants out of the country, and a base in Colorado will be used to process immigrants arrested in enforcement operations.

SOURCE

21. Build border barriers

Orders the secretaries of defense and homeland security to build additional border barriers and to coordinate with state governors willing to assist.

HISTORY

Trump first ordered the erection of a border wall in 2017 and used a national emergency declaration to divert military funds for its construction. By the end of his first term, his administration had built about 450 miles, most of it replacing existing structures. Border barriers had mostly been in place since 1996, their construction happening under Democratic and Republican administrations.

SOURCE

22. Land acquisition for border barriers

Allows the attorney general to seize land adjacent or near the border to build barriers or for other uses.

HISTORY

The Department of Justice used eminent domain to speed up the construction of border barriers during Trump’s first term, an issue he campaigned on and that was later the subject of an executive order he signed. The federal government previously used the legal maneuver after President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act in 2006.

SOURCE

23. Ramping up criminal prosecutions of people crossing the border illegally

Directs U.S. agencies to prioritize the prosecution of entering and reentering the country illegally, which under U.S. law is a crime.

HISTORY

In Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented a zero-tolerance policy to prosecute all border crossers, which led to family separations affecting thousands of children. The Biden administration formed a task force to reunite families that remained separated years later, but on Day 1 Trump disbanded it.

SOURCE

24. Expanding detention

Calls for the Homeland Security Department to “take all appropriate action” to expand facilities to detain immigrants.

HISTORY

Trump early in his first term also pledged through executive action to expand detentions. And while space to hold people is limited and dependent on funding from Congress, his administration opened new facilities. Detentions also grew under Obama, who expanded family detention.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

The Washington Post reported that ICE is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening four new 10,000-bed facilities and 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people, with the Department of Defense potentially using military bases. The White House also said it would expand capacity at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain some unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal backgrounds.

SOURCE

25. Local cooperation for immigration enforcement

Authorizes state and local law enforcement officials to perform the functions of immigration officers under the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security and through so-called 287(g) cooperation agreements.

HISTORY

In his first term, Trump also moved to expand 287(g) agreements, which have been around since the early 2000s. Biden kept many of them in place and as of December 2024, there were dozens of local law enforcement agencies participating in them across the country. Critics say the program has been costly for localities and has led in the past to racial profiling and caused distrust between police and local communities.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

Following the order, the Texas attorney general entered into an agreement with the administration to help with immigration enforcement, and Gov. Greg Abbott gave the state’s National Guard the authority to arrest immigrants at the border, which they weren’t allowed to do before. Experts say Texas, which already has gone further than any other states on immigration, could serve as a model under this order.

SOURCE

26. Increase immigration agent hiring

Increases the number of ICE and border agents.

HISTORY

Trump in his first term also pledged to hire 15,000 new Border Patrol agents and immigration officers, but those plans fell short. Previous administrations have also pledged to hire more customs officers and border agents, but the agencies have struggled to find and retain qualified personnel.

SOURCE

27. Enhanced vetting

Pledges to ensure that all migrants seeking entry into the United States “are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

HISTORY

During Trump’s first term, he also promised “extreme vetting” and early on began collecting social media handles from visa applicants and refugees, even though refugees have long been one of the most thoroughly vetted categories of people entering the country. Immigrant advocates sued over some of these changes when they alleged it resulted in blanket denials of refugee admissions.

SOURCE

Policies He Hasn’t Tried Before

Some of Trump’s measures have never been tried before, like his bid to end birthright citizenship. Others, if implemented, would push the powers of the presidency much further. Orders that declare an invasion of migrants on the border or designate drug cartels and certain transnational gangs as terrorists could have wide-reaching implications that are not yet completely clear.

1. Defines situation at the border as an “invasion”

Suspends the entry of immigrants across the southern border until Trump determines the “invasion” has concluded. Cites a lack of capacity to properly screen people’s criminal history and a public health risk at the border due to the large number of border apprehensions in recent years.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

On Jan. 23, the acting homeland security secretary used the invocation of an invasion to call on states and local governments to help the federal government with immigration enforcement. The ACLU and a coalition of immigrant rights advocates sued to block the order, arguing it cuts off access to asylum in violation of U.S. law.

SOURCE

2. Make the border a military priority

States that it is the mission of the U.S. Armed Forces to seal the borders and maintain the “sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States.” Until now, immigration has not been part of the military’s core mission.

SOURCE

3. Seeks to end birthright citizenship

Attempts to end birthright citizenship of children born to parents either illegally in the United States or under a temporary legal status, something Trump had only said he wanted to do in his first term.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

Two federal judges immediately blocked the order after at least two dozen Democratic-led states and immigrant rights groups filed multiple lawsuits seeking a temporary restraining order.

SOURCE

4. End Biden-era humanitarian programs at the border

Ends programs that had allowed some immigrants and asylum-seekers to legally enter and work in the United States temporarily.

HISTORY

Under the programs put in place by Biden, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans could apply for humanitarian parole from abroad and fly to the U.S. if approved, while migrants waiting in Mexico could apply to enter the U.S. through a cellphone app known as CBP One and then seek asylum.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

A Jan. 23 Department of Homeland Security memo gives immigration officials the power to quickly deport more than a million immigrants who were allowed into the country under the two Biden-era programs. Migrants who had pending appointments to approach the border on the CBP One app saw them abruptly canceled.

SOURCE

5. Immigrant registration

Invokes a law that requires all noncitizens to register and present their fingerprints to the U.S. government or be subject to criminal penalties.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

A Jan. 21 Justice Department memo mentions it could prosecute and fine immigrants in the country who fail to register with the government.

SOURCE

6. Ending and clawing back funding from organizations that support migrants

Seeks to stop or limit money to nongovernmental organizations that provide shelter and services to migrants released at the border, as well as legal orientation programs for people in immigration proceedings.

HISTORY

The Biden administration distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to support these programs. During the first Trump administration, Department of Justice officials told providers it was halting its legal orientation program, but then Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed course after pushback from Congress and advocates.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

The Department of Justice told legal service providers who receive federal funding to stop holding legal orientation and other programs with immigrants. Legal service providers sued to reestablish the services in detention centers. Some services reportedly have been restored following a ruling in a separate lawsuit.

SOURCE

7. Designating international drug cartels, gangs as terrorists

Starts a process to designate drug cartels, the Central American gang MS-13 and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations. Also threatens to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which experts said would have the effect of allowing people suspected of being members of those organizations to be deported even if they had legal status in the U.S.

SOURCE

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw

On President Donald Trump’s authority alone, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. Employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems.

While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing.

Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has already thrown entire swaths of the federal government and its programs into disarray — programs that serve millions of Americans.

Musk himself has made no secret of his intentions, saying that DOGE is a “wood chipper for bureaucracy” and that he is “deleting” agencies.

A White House spokesperson wrote, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.” None of the people identified responded to requests for comment.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201 . Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

Jacob Altik, 32

Lawyer

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Altik is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. He clerked for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee known for critiquing the administrative state. For the last year and a half, he worked as a corporate litigation associate at Weil, where he co-authored a detailed legal analysis on administrative law jurisprudence at the Supreme Court. Last year, he was selected to begin a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in the 2025 term, which is set to begin this summer.

Anthony Armstrong, 57

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Worked on Musk’s purchase of Twitter

Armstrong is a technology banker at Morgan Stanley who worked on Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter — since rebranded as X — in 2022. He has been given an influential role at OPM, which handles personnel issues across the federal government. Since Trump took office, OPM has spearheaded the new administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and roll back telework and remote work policies.

Jennifer Balajadia, 36

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Musk link: Worked at The Boring Company

Balajadia, who also goes by “Jehn,” is an official member of the DOGE team, according to federal records viewed by ProPublica. She worked as an operations coordinator at The Boring Company for seven years, according to her LinkedIn page. Recent media reports have described her as Musk’s assistant and close confidant , traveling with him and assisting with scheduling and daily tasks.

Alexandra T. Beynon, 36

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Beynon is an official member of the DOGE team, according to federal records viewed by ProPublica and media reports . According to her LinkedIn page, she most recently worked as the head of engineering at her husband’s startup, Mindbloom, which provides “guided at-home ketamine therapy.” She previously worked as a software developer at investment banking company Goldman Sachs. When reached by ProPublica and asked about her involvement in the new administration and DOGE, she said, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” She did not respond to additional requests for comment.

Riccardo Biasini, 39

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Former engineer at Tesla, executive at the Boring Company

Biasini is an engineer and former executive who has worked at two of Musk’s companies, the Boring Company and Tesla. He has also taken a high-ranking role at OPM. Biasini was listed as the contact person for the government-wide email system put in place by the Trump administration and used to send messages directly from OPM to millions of federal workers across the government, according to a recent court filing .

Brian Bjelde, 44

Senior Adviser

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Vice president of people operations at SpaceX

Bjelde is a longtime SpaceX employee who’s spent more than 20 years at the company, according to his LinkedIn profile, where he’s had a variety of jobs, including as managing director of the “food services group.” He previously worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s been referred to in press reports as a “top DOGE Lieutenant,” working at OPM to slash head count. CNN previously revealed that Bjelde had informed OPM staff of a plan to cut 70% of the agency’s workforce. The New York Times reported that Bjelde helped Musk cut staff at Twitter following its takeover.

Akash Bobba, 21

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Bobba was named by Wired magazine as part of a team of six young engineers picked by Musk for his DOGE team. A recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Bobba worked as an intern at Meta, the social media company, and at Palantir, the software and data analytics firm that is a major defense contractor. Bobba is listed in personnel records as an “expert” at OPM, where he has reportedly been able to access internal databases. He graduated from high school in 2021; in his graduation speech, featured in the Spotlight New Jersey newspaper, he told his fellow graduates that, in life, the “answers we deserve demand discomfort.”

James Burnham, 41

General Counsel

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Burnham is a former litigation partner at Jones Day and a high-ranking Justice Department and White House official from the first Trump administration. The New York Times first reported his involvement with DOGE as a lawyer in January. His title at DOGE is listed internally as general counsel, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Burnham previously served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. On a website for one of his past companies, Burnham is described as having played a “central role” in the selection and confirmation processes for Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Nate Cavanaugh, 28

Connected to: General Services Administration

Cavanaugh is an entrepreneur who has founded companies focused on intellectual property management and small-business finance. He has been interviewing staffers at the GSA as part of the DOGE team, according to those who have spoken with him. GSA procures technology tools, real estate, and other services for federal government agencies. In published interviews, Cavanaugh has expressed an admiration for tech luminaries, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and has said he is “very interested in crypto.”

Edward Coristine, 19

Expert

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Interned at Neuralink

Coristine is a recent undergraduate student at Northeastern University and part of the group of young DOGE staffers detailed to OPM, the government’s human resources office. Wired reported that Coristine interned at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company. Friends of Coristine told Northeastern University’s independent student newspaper that Musk was one of Coristine’s idols and that while he finished the fall 2024 semester, he did not return to school for the spring term. According to CBS News, Coristine has been seeking access to the Small Business Administration’s internal records on behalf of DOGE.

Steve Davis, 45

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Musk link: Longtime Musk lieutenant, CEO of the Boring Company

Davis has been a senior executive and close associate of Musk’s for over two decades, working with him at SpaceX, X and the Boring Company. He was one of the first people to be associated with the DOGE effort last year. The New York Times reported he was on early calls with Musk as they conceived of the DOGE effort and explored ways to cut federal programs. Bloomberg reported that Davis has helped recruit staffers for DOGE.

Marko Elez, 25

Connected to: Treasury Department

Musk link: Worked as an engineer at X and SpaceX

Elez works at the Treasury Department, a staffer at the office of the Secretary of Treasury confirmed in a call with a ProPublica reporter. Wired reported Feb. 4 that Elez, who graduated from Rutgers in 2021 and studied computer science, has gained access to the highly sensitive payment systems of the U.S. Treasury Department. According to Elez’s LinkedIn bio, which was recently deleted, he was most recently an engineer at X in New York for roughly a year and an engineer at SpaceX in the Los Angeles area for around three years before that. Elez reportedly resigned Feb. 6 after The Wall Street Journal reported that he has links to a social media account that posted racist comments online. Musk said publicly he planned to rehire the engineer, saying that “to err is human, to forgive divine.”

Luke Farritor, 23

Executive Engineer in the Office of the Secretary

Connected to: Department of Health and Human Services

Musk link: Former SpaceX intern

Farritor works as an executive engineer at the HHS, according to agency data. He studied computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and interned at SpaceX, working on its Starlink Wi-Fi team and Starship launchpad software, according to his Linkedin profile. In March 2024, he received a Thiel fellowship , a two-year program founded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel that awards a $100,000 startup grant to students who drop out of college.

Nicole Hollander, 42

Connected to: General Services Administration

Musk link: Worked at X

Hollander is working at the GSA. She most recently worked at X, where she handled the company's real estate . She is married to longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, according to media reports.

Stephanie Holmes, 43

Human Resources

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Holmes is running human resources at DOGE, according to government workers who have been in meetings with her. A former lawyer with Jones Day, a firm that frequently represents Trump, she was previously the chief people officer at Oklo, a nuclear energy company chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. She also ran her own HR consulting firm, BrighterSideHR, which advised companies to pursue “non-woke” approaches to diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Gautier “Cole” Killian, 24

Federal Detailee

Connected to: Environmental Protection Agency

Killian works at the EPA, according to agency data. His position is a federal detail, which typically allows government employees to transfer between agencies for temporary roles. He studied math and computer science at McGill University, where he conducted blockchain-related research. He recently worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, an algorithmic financial trading company, and is a member of the DOGE team, according to recent media reports .

Gavin Kliger, 25

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Personnel Management

Kliger is a senior adviser at OPM, according to his LinkedIn profile. He spent nearly five years as a software engineer at Databricks, a cloud-based AI company. He is widely reported to be part of Musk’s DOGE team. On his personal Substack, he wrote an essay titled “Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America,” according to press reports, and described failed U.S. attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, as a “victim” of the deep state. On Feb. 3, workers at USAID received an email announcing that their Washington offices would be closed that day. Replies to the email were directed to Kliger at a USAID email address.

Keenan D. Kmiec, 45

Lawyer

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Keenan Kmiec’s career veered from elite law to, more recently, crypto. After clerking for then-Judge Samuel Alito on a federal circuit court, he clerked on the Supreme Court for Chief Justice John Roberts in the 2006-2007 term, according to his LinkedIn. He did a stint at a corporate law firm and had his own firm focused on insider-trading litigation. In 2021, Kmiec began working for a Swiss foundation that promotes a blockchain called Tezos, according to his LinkedIn. He then served for nine months as CEO of a now-defunct startup called InterPop, which described itself as “forging the future of digital fandom with comic, game, and collectible NFTs minted responsibly on the Tezos blockchain.”

Tom Krause, 47

Expert

Connected to: Treasury Department

Krause is a part of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to sensitive federal payment systems as part of Musk’s larger effort to root out spending perceived as wasteful. According to the Treasury Department , Krause leads a team of people who have been granted “read-only” access to the code for the agency’s Fiscal Service payment system, which processes payments for major programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The department has clarified he is designated as a “special government employee.” The New York Times reported that Krause is affiliated with Musk’s DOGE team.

Kendall M. Lindemann, 24

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Lindemann is an official member of the DOGE team, according to federal records viewed by ProPublica. According to her LinkedIn page, she most recently worked as an associate at Russell Street Ventures, a health care firm founded by fellow DOGE associate Brad Smith. She also previously worked as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company.

Katie Miller, 33

Spokesperson

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

In December, during the transition, Trump named Miller, who served in the first administration as a press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence, as one of the first members of DOGE. She is the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. After reports that DOGE personnel accessed internal USAID data, Katie Miller defended the group, saying that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”

Justin Monroe, 36

Adviser

Connected to: FBI

Musk link: Senior director for security at SpaceX

Monroe is working as an adviser within the office of the director of the FBI, according to three people familiar with the matter. NBC News previously reported that an unnamed SpaceX employee has been placed in the FBI director’s office but said it could not confirm the individual’s identity. Monroe is a seasoned information security professional who previously served in the U.S. Navy as an information warfare officer .

Nikhil Rajpal, 30

Expert

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Former Twitter employee

Rajpal is listed as an “expert” now working for OPM. An archived version of his personal website from 2018 lists his job title as an engineer at Twitter. Rajpal has extensive access to sensitive personnel data used by OPM, according to a source familiar with his role. Wired reported Feb. 5 that Rajpal also sought and was later granted access to data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Wired magazine reported that he is part of the DOGE team.

Adam Ramada, 35

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Musk link: Previously part of an investment firm with links to a SpaceX alumnus

Ramada is an official member of the DOGE team, according to federal records viewed by ProPublica. He previously worked for Spring Tide Capital, a venture capital company. Spring Tide Capital previously invested in Impulse Space, an aerospace company founded in 2021 by Tom Mueller, a founding member of SpaceX. Ramada has reportedly appeared at the Energy Department and General Services Administration, according to E&E News .

Ryan Riedel, 37

Chief Information Officer

Connected to: Department of Energy

Musk link: Worked as SpaceX network security engineer

Riedel emerged in early February as the new chief information officer at the Department of Energy. His position was confirmed in a LinkedIn post by the former CIO, Ann Dunkin, who wrote, “Handing the keys over to you, virtually.” Riedel, who now lists himself online as the department's CIO, has worked at SpaceX since 2020. He previously served in the U.S. Army Cyber Command.

Rachel Riley, 33

Senior Adviser in the Office of the Secretary

Connected to: Department of Health and Human Services

Riley works as a senior adviser at HHS, according to agency data. She previously worked for consultancy firm McKinsey & Company for about eight years, most recently as a partner leading teams advising the company’s state and federal government clients. She has been working closely with Brad Smith, a former health official in Trump’s first administration who ran DOGE during the transition period, according to media reports .

Michael Russo, 67

Chief Information Officer

Connected to: Social Security Administration

Musk link: Former chief technology officer of Starlink payment processor Shift4 Payments

Russo is a top-ranking technology official at the SSA, which disburses over $1.5 trillion in benefits annually. Russo spent over seven years as an executive and senior adviser with Shift4 Payments, a payment processing company that is both an investor in SpaceX and a payment processor for StarLink, according to his Linkedin . The CEO of Shift4 Payments, Jared Isaacman, has been nominated by Trump to lead NASA and is a friend of Musk’s who has purchased multiple spacewalks with Musk’s SpaceX company. Russo’s office will oversee the SSA’s over $2 billion IT budget.

Amanda Scales, 34

Chief of Staff

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Previous employee of xAI

Scales’ name came to light in the first week of the Trump administration as federal employees received a memo putting them on notice that diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives in the federal government were now barred through an executive order — and to report efforts to conceal them. The message listed Scales as the point of contact for questions. Scales worked in the human resources department at xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, prior to OPM. Before that, she worked in recruiting at ridesharing company Uber. She is reportedly an integral part of OPM’s sweeping efforts to restructure the federal workforce.

Kyle Schutt, 37

Connected to: General Services Administration

Schutt is a DOGE software engineer working at the GSA. He was previously the chief technology officer at Revv, an online fundraising platform that’s a frequent vendor for the Republican Party. According to his recently deleted LinkedIn profile, Schutt led the development and launch of WinRed, the GOP’s major online fundraising platform, which helped raise $1.8 billion for Republicans in the 2024 election cycle.

Ethan Shaotran, 22

Connected to: General Services Administration

Musk link: Participated in a hackathon organized by Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI

Shaotran is part of the DOGE team. He recently attended Harvard University and studied computer science. He founded Spark, a scheduling assistant startup, for which he said he received a $100,000 grant from OpenAI. He was a member of a team that was a finalist in a hackathon organized by xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company. Shaotran’s name first came to light in an article by Wired magazine about a group of young software engineers recruited by Musk to analyze internal government data and technology programs.

Thomas Shedd, 28

Federal Acquisition Service Deputy Commissioner and Director of Technology Transformation Services

Connected to: General Services Administration

Musk link: Software engineer at Tesla

Shedd’s work at Tesla focused on building software that operates vehicle and battery factories, according to a GSA press release . The office Shedd runs, known as TTS, helps federal agencies improve their tech practices. GSA leaders have told employees they plan to cut 50% of the budget. Shedd has told colleagues he plans to run TTS like a “startup software company,” according to Wired magazine , which will reportedly involve the use of artificial intelligence to analyze government contracts.

Brad Smith, 42

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Smith was among the earliest names associated with DOGE outside of its founder. The New York Times reported he was helping lead the group. He served in a series of health-related policy roles during the first Trump administration, including being part of the board of Operation Warp Speed, the historic COVID-19 vaccine development program. According to The New York Times, which first reported Smith’s involvement in DOGE, he is a friend of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Christopher Stanley, 33

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Musk link: Senior director for security engineering at X and principal engineer at SpaceX

Stanley is an experienced information security professional who has worked at multiple Musk-related companies. He is reportedly an aide to Musk at DOGE, according to The New York Times , and has a role at the White House. He was part of the initial transition team after Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile . On inauguration day, Stanley assisted in the release of individuals associated with the Jan. 6 riots, he wrote on X.

Jordan M. Wick, 28

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Wick is an official member of the DOGE team, according to federal records viewed by ProPublica. According to his personal website , which has recently been taken offline, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and recently worked at autonomous car company Waymo as a software engineer. Before joining the government, Wick was listed as the co-founder of an e-commerce startup named Intercept, which is affiliated with the California-based tech incubator Y Combinator. The incubator has featured speaker events with Musk and other AI leaders.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed above? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201 . Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

by Alec MacGillis

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

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. That sweeping clemency order — “Fuck it, release ’em all,” Trump said, according to Axios — prompted a wave of outrage, and criticism even from some Republicans. “I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.

As some have noted, this push to whitewash recent history carries a disconcerting echo of countless autocratic regimes, from the Chinese Communist Party’s memory-holing of the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Argentine military junta’s “disappearing” of dissidents in the 1970s. It comes at the same time as the administration is also seeking to whitewash the teaching of American history, more generally: Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 29 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” that threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that teach that the country is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory” and instructs the government to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” One wonders: Would teaching the Tulsa massacre be allowed?

But the removal of the database is troubling for another reason, too: It undermines our ability to consider the events of Jan. 6 in all their complexity and particularity.

I was made aware of that complexity when I spent several days after the riot immersing myself in the more than 500 smartphone videos that participants had shared on the Parler social-media app, for an essay accompanying ProPublica’s compilation of the video trove. What struck me perhaps more than anything else about the videos was the sheer diversity of the motivations, profiles and actions that they put on display. Yes, seen from afar, the mob seemed to assume the unity of purpose of a single, organized mass bent on destruction.

But seen in the close-up of the videos, heterogeneity emerged. There were young women with puffy jackets and pompom hats, middle-aged women who could have been coming straight from a business lunch, young men furtively removing their black tactical gear under the cover of a tree to pull on red MAGA sweatshirts to pass as mere Trump supporters. There were people viciously attacking police officers and denigrating them (“You should be ashamed, fucking pansies”), others pleading with them not to (“Do not throw shit at the police!” “Do not hurt the cops!”) and still others thanking the cops who were arriving on the scene (“Back the blue! We love you!”). There were people smashing in windows and others decrying them for doing so (“Oh, God no. Stop! Stop!” “What the fuck is wrong with him?” “He’s Antifa!”) There were people who, in a matter of moments, swung from being pitchfork-carrying marauders to wide-eyed tourists, as they deferentially asked a Capitol police officer for directions or swung their cameras up to capture the inside of the dome. (“This is the state Capitol,” an awestruck man says to his young female companion.)

This was the great, necessary undertaking of the four-year effort by the Department of Justice: to draw distinctions for the sake of allocating individual accountability. By poring over countless such videos and other evidence, investigators zeroed in on the hundreds of people who could be identified as engaging in and instigating the most violence. There was Daniel Rodriguez, who could be seen on camera driving a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone; he was sentenced to more than 12 years. There was Thomas Webster, a former New York City police officer and member of the Marine Corps who swung a metal flagpole at an officer; he got 10 years. There was Peter Schwartz, a Pennsylvania welder who attacked the police with a chair and chemical spray; he got 14 years.

Thomas Webster at the Jan. 6 Rally

Watch video ➜

Inevitably, some of the outcomes were ripe for second-guessing. Kerstin Kohlenberg, the former U.S. correspondent for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, reported recently on the case of Stephen Randolph, a 34-year-old Kentucky man who received an eight-year sentence for his role in pushing over one of the metal security barriers on the Capitol grounds, injuring a police officer in the process; others in the same group received much milder sentences. Trump and his allies could have chosen to comb through cases and pardon only the defendants who they could argue had been painted with too broad a brush.

But that’s not what Trump did. Instead, he himself took up the broadest brush possible and wiped it all clear. In doing so, he let the defendants off the hook. But in another sense, with the mass pardon and deletion of the database, he deprived all of the Jan. 6 participants of individual agency, of individuality, period. In a sense, he rendered them just what the most ardent castigation on the other side had cast them as from the outset: a mindless mob.

As chance has it, at the end of Trump’s first week in office, I was in Tulsa. I went to the Greenwood Rising museum, which tells the story of the rise of the neighborhood and its sudden destruction. It is a powerful presentation despite the dearth of documentation of the violence: snatches of oral history from survivors play over a video simulation of gunfire and arson; before and after photos capture the near-total obliteration of the neighborhood’s prospering commercial core by first the attack and later urban renewal.

One of the museum’s central preoccupations is the attempt by Tulsa authorities and leading white denizens to downplay the massacre, by framing it as a “Negro uprising”; only a couple decades afterward, the museum notes, many in Tulsa were barely aware it happened at all. This cover-up came with lasting consequences for Greenwood survivors, who were denied insurance claims for their destroyed homes, not to mention any form of civic restitution.

Even now, many Black residents of Tulsa are left wondering why the reckoning represented by the Department of Justice investigation is not joined by substantive reparations of any sort. The last two living survivors of the massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, said in a statement responding to the report, “The DOJ confirms the government’s role in the slaughter of our Greenwood neighbors but refuses to hold the institutions accountable under federal law.” Still, they said, “We are relieved to see one of the biggest cover-ups in American history come crashing down.”

And now, back in Washington, the federal government has embarked on an entirely new cover-up of another day of enormous violence. The erasure will not be nearly as successful this time around. There are, after all, all those videos, which live on ProPublica’s website, among other places, while much of the deleted database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (And ProPublica is one of 10 media organizations that have jointly sued the federal government, seeking to obtain 14,000 hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage.)

But for the time being, at least, those seeking to preserve the record of one of the darkest days in recent U.S. history will be doing so, like the survivors of Greenwood and other outbursts of violence around the world, in direct opposition to their own government.

Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed research.

by Sharon Lerner and Pratheek Rebala

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

In the face of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency and drive out its workers, more than 300 career employees have left their jobs since the election, according to a ProPublica analysis of personnel data.

The numbers account for a relatively small share of the overall workforce at the EPA, but those who have departed include specialist civil servants crucial to its mission: toxicologists, lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxic waste specialists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts.

Gary Jonesi made the decision to leave on election night. An attorney who helped enforce environmental laws for almost 40 years, he had loved working for the agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But he feared what the incoming administration might do.

In the past weeks, as the Trump administration has signaled radical changes at the agency and attempted to entice workers into leaving, he feels he made the right choice. “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Jonesi, who worked on litigation related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as cases that involved both water and air pollution. “I feel for my old colleagues. And I feel for the American public, who are being put in danger.”

Other career employees expressed a mixture of fear, resignation and quiet defiance as they faced a painful decision: quit or work for an administration that has openly proclaimed its intention to radically transform the agency in addition to rolling back environmental protections.

In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump announced plans to reverse efforts to address climate change, abandon the EPA’s decadeslong focus on protecting the most vulnerable communities from pollution and step away from other key initiatives at the heart of the agency’s work.

At the same time, Trump has embarked on an unprecedented government-wide campaign to drive workers from their jobs. Employees throughout the federal government received offers to resign but get paid through September — a move experts say is legally questionable and unions have challenged in court. Some recently hired workers who are still on probation have been told their agencies have the right to immediately let them go.

EPA workers face additional threats. Trump’s team has discussed relocating the agency’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., a move that would likely force many of the roughly 7,000 employees who work there to quit. And he issued an executive order on “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” which included a directive to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental justice offices and positions. The order could result in the firing of hundreds of staff members who work on pollution in disproportionately burdened areas, which often have lower incomes, higher percentages of residents of color or both.

At a sometimes tearful meeting held at EPA headquarters and online on Wednesday, leaders of the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights told staff members that the EPA was beginning to implement that directive. “We’re all preparing for the worst,” said one environmental protection specialist who attended the meeting, where workers were instructed to prepare for the possibility of being placed on administrative leave and download their human resources files. “We’re preparing to be laid off.”

Employees in other parts of the agency are similarly distraught.

“We feel terrorized,” said one of the more than 20 current EPA employees who communicated with ProPublica about their experience of working at the agency under the second Trump administration. None said they planned to take up the offer to resign, a proposal that the agency said in numerous emails is open to staff until Thursday.

While there is an obvious appeal of quitting a job when your employer is aggressively trying to oust you, the EPA staffer, whose work involves measuring pollution levels in air, water and soil at contaminated sites, said he felt a moral obligation to stay.

“If I leave, my experience would go with me and there would be no replacement,” he said. (Along with the other EPA employees quoted in this story, the scientist spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution by the Trump administration.)

Others found the financial enticements to leave insulting. “I don’t work here for the fucking money,” said one longtime agency employee who works on air pollution. “I work here because I believe in it, and I want to serve the public.”

An emergency worker who responds to chemical fires, oil spills and national disasters echoed that sentiment, saying he has no intention of walking away from the work he’s done for more than 20 years, which he described as “the most challenging and amazing job there is.”

Other EPA employees are already bracing themselves for the possible end of their stints at the agency. One young scientist was winding down a day spent reviewing reports on drinking water last week when she received the email informing her that she had been identified as likely being on a probationary period and laying out the process for terminating her.

Until that point, she had been thinking of her first months in what she described as a “dream job” at the EPA as the beginning of a long career in civil service. “All that came crashing down when I got that email,” said the scientist, who recently finished graduate school and is now steeling herself for the likelihood that she will have to move back in with her parents.

If she goes, the scientist will join the more than 300 career staffers who have left since the election. That group is part of a brain drain of more than 500 EPA workers ProPublica identified as having departed since Nov. 22; the full group includes political appointees and short-term staff. Changes in administrations typically trigger turnovers at federal agencies, but ProPublica found the number leaving the EPA appears to have already eclipsed by more than 60 the number that left after President Joe Biden was elected in 2020. It is unclear exactly what motivated staffers to leave in recent weeks and how many more might be forced out or quit on their own terms in the coming days.

The shakeup is unprecedented, according to some veteran employees. “When you take a job at a federal agency, you know there are elections every four years. You know there are going to be changes in administration priorities,” said a scientist who has weathered many of these transitions during her more than 20 years working in the federal government. “This is something else.”

The EPA did not respond to questions for this story, including how many employees had taken the agency up on its offers to resign.

Taking the Side of Polluters

The EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment requires it to do the often difficult work of regulating powerful companies. Under any administration, the agency faces intense lobbying from these entities as they seek to avoid expense and the burdens of compliance. Corporate pressure on the EPA was considerable under Biden as his administration attempted to tackle climate pollution.

But Trump appears eager to both scale back the agency, which has more than 15,000 employees, and align what remains of it with the companies it regulates. During the campaign, he asked oil executives for $1 billion while promising to cut environmental regulations, according to The Washington Post.

On Friday, two days after the Senate confirmed Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, the agency put out a press release supporting Zeldin’s ability to “Unleash American Greatness.” Among those quoted were representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Mining Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, all of which have recently challenged the agency in court.

In a brief welcome address, Zeldin discussed making the nation “energy dominant” and “turning the U.S. into the AI capital of the world.” (AI is widely recognized as a climate threat because it consumes vast amounts of energy.) Other Trump appointees have worked for fossil fuel and chemical companies and have previously opposed stricter environmental regulation. David Fotouhi, whom Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, recently tried to overturn its ban on asbestos.

The administration is planning to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, which would allow some positions now held by highly skilled personnel to be reclassified so they could be filled based on loyalty to the administration rather than expertise. The move could have tremendous implications for the EPA, whose workforce includes thousands of highly trained experts.

“If he replaces EPA scientists and lawyers with people who just want to say yes to him, it will be the death knell for the EPA,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The Human Costs

The redirection of the agency and the loss of experienced professionals who respond to emergencies, monitor pollution, clean up highly contaminated areas and enforce environmental laws will have profound effects across the country.

“Nastier stuff than usual will come out of factories. More people will get cancer. More people will get heart disease. People will die sooner and they’ll be sicker,” said one Ph.D. scientist who works at the agency.

Because he spends part of his time focusing on health in particularly polluted areas, the scientist may find himself in the crosshairs of Trump’s order to eliminate all environmental justice work and positions. The order could directly affect as many as 250 EPA employees, according to Matthew Tejada, who served as the EPA deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice during the Biden administration.

The environmental justice office was established in 1992, after research done in the 1980s showed that communities with hazardous waste sites had higher percentages of Black and low-income residents. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to make environmental justice part of their mission. As of publication, a page about the 1994 executive order had been removed from the EPA website. The agency also disabled EJScreen, an online mapping tool that was used to identify pollution levels in communities around the country, along with other information about environmental justice and climate change.

The Ph.D. scientist described the mood within his office as “a combination of exhaustion and exasperation with what’s very clearly a calculated campaign of harassment.” Still, he is hoping he will escape the apparently imminent purge of EPA staff working on environmental justice.

For some staff, the rapid changes are a bridge too far. One chemist who has worked at the agency for more than a decade described himself as seriously thinking about leaving — though on his terms, not in response to the administration’s resignation offer. “My motivation to work at EPA was because I want to protect human health and the environment and the lure of a stable job,” he told ProPublica. “But now all that’s gone.”

Others say the administration’s aggressive efforts to drive them out of the EPA have left them only more determined to stay. “Personally, it makes me want to hang on until I have the chance to do (or not do) something worth getting fired for,” one lawyer said.

Another scientist, who oversees the cleanup of highly contaminated sites, agreed. He saw the departures from EPA norms and repeated offers to resign as designed to scare him and others out of the agency — and vowed that the tactics would not work on him.

“It won’t make me quit,” the scientist said. “Nothing is going to make me quit.”

Instead, the scientist recently bought a new Black history month T-shirt that he plans to wear when he is required to return to the office full time in late February. “I’m going to dare somebody to say something to me,” he said. He acknowledged that the move, which would broadcast his derision for the Trump administration’s retreat from environmental justice, could get him fired. But he said he didn’t care.

“I’m going to stand up to them,” the scientist said. “I may lose the battle, but principally I will have won the war.”

Do you have any information about the EPA that we should know? Sharon Lerner can be reached by Signal at 718-877-5236.

If you have other information you can share about the federal government, you can reach ProPublica’s tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201.

Kirsten Berg, Mollie Simon and Mariam Elba contributed research. Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

by Jeremy Kohler

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

Three months after Missouri voters enshrined reproductive rights in the state constitution, abortion remains unavailable as the state’s main provider fights legal hurdles to resume offering the procedure.

At the same time, opponents of abortion in the state Legislature, stung by the passage of Amendment 3 in November, have filed a raft of bills aimed at thwarting implementation of the measure or undercutting its goals while they try to find a unified strategy to prevent the return of abortion services.

This week, state lawmakers held a hearing on a conservative-backed plan to put a new amendment on the ballot that would block most abortions. If passed by the General Assembly, the measure could go to voters as soon as this year.

The proposed amendment would ban abortion except for in medical emergencies, when a fetus has abnormalities, or in cases of rape or incest, with rape or incest cases requiring a police report and subject to a 12-week limit. It would also prohibit public funding for abortions. What’s more, it would ban providing surgeries, hormones or drugs to assist a child with a gender transition, procedures that are already illegal in Missouri.

At a hearing on the proposed amendment before the House Children and Families committee on Tuesday, its sponsor, state Rep. Melanie Stinnett, a Republican from Springfield, acknowledged that some might say she was trying to subvert the people’s will. But Stinnett said she’d heard concerns about the language in Amendment 3 and that this was an attempt to clarify the state’s abortion laws.

Stinnett said voters might not have understood what they were voting for.

Some members of the committee pushed back.

“Did voters know what they were voting for when they voted for you?” asked state Rep. Marlene Terry, a Democrat from the St. Louis suburbs.

The delay in providing abortion access after the election was “a very positive turn of events” that gave conservative legislators time to strategize, state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, said in an interview. He said it gave his party “time to chip away at certain aspects of Amendment 3.”

Missouri had heavily restricted abortion access long before the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion by striking down Roe v. Wade, with the state’s strict regulations leaving only one clinic — Planned Parenthood in St. Louis — operational by 2018. In 2019, the state passed a trigger law that would ban abortion entirely if Roe fell, except in cases of medical emergencies but with no exemptions for rape or incest. That ban took effect in 2022.

Planned Parenthood stopped performing any abortions in Missouri at that time, and many people traveled to neighboring states to access abortions. In 2023, about 2,850 Missourians obtained abortions in Kansas, while about 8,750 sought the procedure in Illinois, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

In response, a massive campaign gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put abortion rights on the ballot. Amendment 3 — which established a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including in making decisions about prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care and respectful birthing conditions — passed by a 51.6% to 48.4% margin.

The amendment guaranteed the right to abortion up to the point of fetal viability, which it defined as the stage at which, in the judgment of a treating physician, a fetus could survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical measures. While the amendment allowed the state legislature to regulate abortion after viability, it required that any such regulations not interfere with abortions necessary to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

After the amendment took effect in December, Planned Parenthood said it was ready to begin providing abortions at three locations across the state but that it felt limited by Missouri’s ban and other regulations targeting abortion providers, which are designed to make it harder for clinics to operate. It sued.

In December, a state court judge in Kansas City temporarily blocked the ban and most of the rules, including the mandatory 72-hour waiting period and bans based on gestational age. The final outcome will be determined at trial, which is scheduled to begin in January 2026.

The state court ruling left several abortion restrictions in place. Those include strict structural requirements for clinics — such as specific hallway, room and door dimensions — and a mandate that providers perform invasive pelvic exams before prescribing abortion medication.

Abortion rights advocates argue these regulations are medically unnecessary and create barriers to care. At a hearing last week in Kansas City, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood asked the judge to reconsider, emphasizing that the restrictions make it impossible for clinics to resume offering full services.

Planned Parenthood’s lawyer argued that it was because of the licensing requirement that abortion access had been confined to one location in St. Louis in the final years of Roe, and that “such extreme restriction on abortion access is not the result contemplated” by those who voted for the amendment.

The state’s solicitor general, Josh Divine, argued that Planned Parenthood could have requested waivers for the regulations instead of challenging them in court. He noted that the state has granted such waivers in the past, but Planned Parenthood did not submit a request. The judge gave both sides until the end of this week to submit further briefings before her ruling.

The delay has had another effect: fueling division among abortion rights supporters. Some of them opposed Amendment 3, arguing it didn’t go far enough and gave the state too much power to regulate abortion. They note that while the amendment guarantees the right to abortion before fetal viability, it also cements the state’s authority to impose restrictions afterward, giving abortion foes a foothold. (Supporters say they settled on the language as a compromise they believed would appeal to a broad majority of voters, and that an amendment offering unrestricted access to abortion would not have succeeded.)

Representatives for Planned Parenthood did not respond to requests for comment.

The effort to tie abortion to transgender rights mirrors the preelection campaign, where abortion opponents deliberately conflated the two issues on billboards and in radio ads. Critics said this strategy was a distraction — an attempt to shift focus from abortion rights, which had strong voter support, by exploiting voter unease over transgender rights.

Jamille Fields Allsbrook, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and a former policy analyst for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sees Republicans taking a two-pronged approach in response to Missouri’s abortion amendment. With President Donald Trump back in power, she expects them to push familiar strategies, like cutting off Medicaid and Title X funding to clinics that provide abortions.

She said she had expected the Republicans to attack abortion rights in “sneaky, more maneuvering ways” like redefining fetal viability or pushing fetal personhood laws, measures that might sound reasonable to voters but still effectively restrict access.

But she said she was surprised by the Republican effort to simply gut Amendment 3.

“Seems naive politically to try to advance the exact same thing that voters rejected,” she said. “Either they don’t believe that voters have already spoken out loudly and clearly or they think that voters are not smart enough to recognize what they’re trying to do, which is undermine the will of the people.”

by Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times

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

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson on Tuesday signed an executive order forming a team to evaluate the impact of data centers on energy use, state tax revenue and job creation.

The order follows a Seattle Times-ProPublica investigation last year into the clean-energy and economic impacts of the state’s power-guzzling data center industry, the backbone of the modern internet. Data centers — warehouse-like structures filled with computer servers — receive some of Washington’s largest corporate tax breaks. They require enormous amounts of electricity, a need that is only expected to grow with increasing reliance on artificial intelligence.

“We must ensure Washington remains a leader in technology and sustainability — these experts will help us do that,” Ferguson said in a news release. “This group will help us balance industry growth, tax revenue needs, energy constraints and sustainability.”

Ferguson’s order, one of his earliest actions since he took office this year, authorizes a workgroup of state officials and industry stakeholders to study the impact of data centers and recommend policies that balance industry growth with tax revenue needs, energy constraints and sustainability, according to the executive order. That includes evaluating the state’s robust tax incentives for the data center industry, according to the governor’s office.

State lawmakers encouraged the dramatic growth of the data center industry by offering lucrative tax breaks in the name of bringing jobs to rural areas. The Times and ProPublica reported last year that data centers have grown into a major consumer of electricity in some of Washington's greenest counties, threatening the region’s ability to meet power demand while phasing out fossil fuels.

In 2022, then-Gov. Jay Inslee blocked efforts to study data center electricity use, the news organizations reported. State lawmakers included a provision to measure how much power data centers use in a bill that expanded tax breaks for the industry. Inslee signed into law the tax break expansion but vetoed the study.

Inslee’s office said last year that the study would have duplicated work underway by regional power planners, who have produced wide-ranging forecasts about data centers’ power use in the Pacific Northwest. Still, no agency or entity has assessed the industry’s growing energy demands in Washington specifically or the impact of the state’s tax break on its power grid.

As of July, Washington was home to at least 87 data centers, according to the industry-tracking website Baxtel.

Ferguson’s workgroup will be led by the Department of Revenue, the state agency responsible for determining the eligibility of data centers for tax breaks.

Ferguson’s team will include participants from state agencies responsible for tax incentives, clean energy goals, the environment and utility regulation, as well as private representatives from labor organizations and the data center industry.

In addition to examining energy use, Ferguson’s office said the workgroup will review data on job creation in the industry — a key measure for understanding the success of Washington’s tax incentive program, which has been shielded from transparency and accountability for years.

It’s unclear how many high-paying tech jobs the tax break has created at individual data centers because state revenue officials aren’t allowed to say.

The group is tasked with producing findings and recommendations by December, according to the governor’s office.

by Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan

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

Arthur Douglas has been passionate about guns his entire life. He spent his childhood hunting, then amassed a treasured collection of firearms, including antique rifles he considers priceless. For years, he’s worked as a firearms instructor for the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Concealed Carry Association.

But the 61-year-old building contractor was incensed to learn from ProPublica that his name, age, New Hampshire address, phone number and registered voting status were in a database compiled by the gun industry’s chief lobbying group to help friendly politicians win elections.

Ingram holds one of his firearms. He was dismayed to learn his information was in a dataset that the National Shooting Sports Foundation gave to Cambridge Analytica in 2016. “I think it’s horrible that there is such a thing,” he said. (John Tully for ProPublica)

Douglas said he never gave anyone permission to use his personal information for political purposes. He considers his privacy rights sacrosanct, like those bestowed by the Second Amendment. “I like the idea that they’re pro-gun advocates,” he said of the gun industry. “I don’t like the idea that they’re getting information, possibly illegally, to forward their agenda.”

Douglas is one of millions of people whose sensitive personal information was compiled over two decades by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, working with some of America’s most iconic gun-makers and retailers. As ProPublica previously reported, the industry group assembled data on this collection of gun owners and others without their knowledge or consent to persuade them to vote in the industry’s interests. The NSSF credited the campaign with landmark victories that vanquished gun control efforts.

What happened to Douglas’ data in the past decade has never before been revealed. It involves a transatlantic transfer to a now-disgraced political firm, questions of illegality and concerns from insiders about the repercussions should authorities discover the secret data sharing. This story, built on interviews and a new cache of internal documents obtained by ProPublica, details for the first time the sophisticated and invasive nature of the gun industry’s electioneering.

Arthur Douglas, a contractor by profession, is also a gun collector, a member of the National Rifle Association and a firearms instructor with years of experience. (John Tully for ProPublica)

The NSSF, based in Shelton, Connecticut, represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors and retailers, along with publishers and shooting ranges. While not as well known as the NRA, the trade group is considered the voice of the industry and is a power broker in business and politics.

In 2016, as part of a push to get Donald Trump elected president for the first time and to help Republicans keep the Senate, the NSSF worked with the consultancy Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge the information it had on potential voters. The U.S. subsidiary of a London-based firm, which would later go out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data, Cambridge matched up the people in the database with 5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources.

The details were far-ranging and intimate. Along with the potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts learned whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.

Cambridge analysts ran the enhanced data through an algorithm to create psychological profiles that allowed for more incisive targeting. Potential voters were assigned one of five personality groups: risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Each got a tailored message. Risk-takers were viewed as highly neurotic and susceptible to ads that pricked their fears, Cambridge records show. Go-getters, on the other hand, would respond better to messages of optimism and the promise of a better future.

Privacy experts told ProPublica that companies that shared information with the NSSF may have violated federal and state prohibitions against deceptive and unfair business practices. Under federal law, companies must comply with their own privacy policies and be clear about how they will use consumers’ information, privacy experts said. A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from those gun-makers found that none of them informed buyers that their details would be used for political purposes.

“There’s a pretty clear argument that in some of these cases, there is deception and practices that go against the language in the privacy policy,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

As it did after the presidential election of George W. Bush, the NSSF credited itself with helping Trump win in 2016, paving the way for a radically different American and global era.

The NSSF declined to comment for this story. It previously defended its data collection, saying 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.”

ProPublica obtained a portion of the NSSF database that contains the names, addresses and other information of thousands of people. The list was created by Cambridge for a voter survey. ProPublica is not making the record public but reached out to 6,000 people on the list.

Almost all of the 38 people who responded expressed outrage, surprise or disappointment over learning they were in the database.

Alvin Ingram, a retired chemist in Virginia who worked in the aerospace industry and is an avid hunter, described himself as a stickler for “accuracy and precision,” especially in legal matters. Ingram was dismayed to learn he was in the NSSF data given to Cambridge. “I think it’s horrible that there is such a thing,” he said.

Joseph LeForge, a self-described “privacy nut,” struggled to understand how it could’ve happened. The 74-year-old contractor has no Facebook account or email address and spoke to ProPublica on a flip phone. He wondered if he tripped a wire when he bought shotgun shells over a decade ago. “I don’t recall having to give them a driver’s license or anything,” he said, “but I might have.”

Kathy Gavin at her home in Keene, New Hampshire. Gavin, who works in sales and marketing, does not own firearms. (John Tully for ProPublica)

Kathy Gavin, who briefly owned guns in the late 1980s, remembered that a dealer at the time had filled out and mailed a warranty card on her behalf. She shopped at Cabela’s, first in person and later online, for equipment for her father, an avid fisherman. ProPublica previously found that the sporting goods store was among those that shared information for the database.

For years, Gavin received loads of mail during election season, urging her to vote for pro-gun politicians. She threw it away without much thought. But now that she knows about the database, she wants answers from the NSSF: “Why is my information in there? Why did you need it or want it? Yes, you could use it to pummel me with postcards, but what else are you doing with it?”

A High-Stakes Election

The 2016 election was a critical crossroads for the gun industry.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, the industry fought repeated attempts to enact gun control legislation after a series of horrific killings.

In November 2009, a psychiatrist committed the deadliest mass shooting ever at an American military base, killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 others at Fort Hood in Texas. An attempted assassination of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 left six dead and more than a dozen wounded, including the Arizona Democrat.

The next year, during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” a young man killed 12 and wounded 70 at a theatre in Aurora, Colorado. And five months later, less than three miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, another young man, armed with an assault rifle, slaughtered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, including 20 children.

The Sandy Hook massacre prompted Obama to make gun control a priority. He announced 23 executive actions, but his most ambitious proposals, including an assault weapons ban and universal background checks, failed to win enough support in Congress amid fierce opposition from the NRA and the NSSF.

For the gun industry, a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Hillary Clinton presidency would have meant more legislative battles and a possible return to gun restrictions and loss of profits. Patrick O’Malley, the man who had been running the NSSF’s largely successful electioneering effort for more than a decade, realized it needed to modernize, according to Cambridge emails.

So in April 2016, O’Malley, an NSSF contractor and political consultant, hired Cambridge Analytica. The written agreement called for Cambridge to mobilize supporters of the Second Amendment in the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

The aim, according to staffers on the project, was to help the GOP win the presidency and retain control of the Senate.

Since 2002, the NSSF had paid O’Malley millions to help oversee its voter outreach campaign, called GunVote, internal records show.

For the effort, the trade group had created a huge database of potential supporters. From the late 1990s on, at least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Mossberg, had handed over names, addresses and other private data on their customers, NSSF records show. (Most of the companies named in the NSSF documents declined to comment or did not respond to ProPublica. One denied sharing customer data, and the new parent company of another said it had no evidence of data sharing with the NSSF under prior ownership.)

By 2002, the database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.

In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the significance of the database and said the trade group’s 2016 campaign involved only commercially available data, not information from gun-makers’ warranty cards.

But an internal Cambridge email from before the work began said O’Malley had been “leveraging a database of firearms manufacturing warranty cards” over the years for the NSSF and that Cambridge would receive the trade group’s data. O’Malley signed the contract and Cambridge received the data in April 2016, records show.

A report by Cambridge said the files included 20 years of information about gun buyers harvested from manufacturer warranty cards along with a database of customers from Cabela’s, the outdoor and sporting goods store.

Questions of Privacy

Douglas is among millions of people whose sensitive personal information was compiled over two decades by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, working with some of America’s most iconic gun-makers and retailers. (John Tully for ProPublica)

For the 2016 campaign, records show, the NSSF attempted to acquire even more personal details about gun owners beyond the warranty card information obtained from gun-makers.

Keane and O’Malley launched talks with Gunbroker.com, the largest online firearms auction site in the U.S., and Bass Pro Shops, one of the nation’s largest sporting goods retailers.

During a June 13 conference call, O’Malley, Keane and Steve Urvan, Gunbroker.com’s founder and then-CEO, hashed out the details of a possible data transfer.

“At a minimum,” O’Malley wrote in an email to Urvan later that day, “we’re keenly interested in the buy/sell records of your users, specifically rifle, shotgun or handgun and sale/purchase frequency.”

The next day, Urvan said he could provide data on about 1.1 million registered users of the website in the states Cambridge planned to target.

He also sent a link to the company’s privacy policy, which said: “We hire contractors to provide certain services on our behalf, including trend and statistical analysis, marketing campaigns, information processing and storage, and development of new products and services.”

The policy did not mention using customer information for political purposes.

“This project,” Urvan wrote, “would fall under trend and statistical analysis.”

He asked that Cambridge certify that it would destroy the records once the analysis was done.

“In an era where a large part of the population posts every tidbit of personal info about themselves online for anyone to see, the [Federal Trade Commission] has backed down from privacy substantially,” Urvan said in an email sent on June 15. “Still I don’t want the FTC or some state agency to come knocking on our door saying we violated the privacy of our users.”

Cambridge pushed back, saying destroying the records after conducting its analysis would be like “an engineer shredding his blueprints after handing over designs to the client: counterintuitive, counterproductive and detrimental to the knowledge accumulation process.”

Urvan refused to back down, and the talks fizzled.

“Much of this data is HIGHLY sensitive,” Urvan said. “If you have it, it can be leaked, subpoenaed, or misused, and under any of those cases the data would point back to our company. Those are substantial business risks we are not willing to take.”

O’Malley and Urvan did not respond to requests for comment. During an interview in September, Keane said he didn’t remember discussions with Gunbroker.com and Cambridge about turning over customer information. He said Gunbroker.com worked with the NSSF to send election-related messages to customers but that the company didn’t provide names and addresses to his organization.

Unlike in Great Britain, France, Italy and other major democracies, the U.S. has no federal or state laws that require companies to notify consumers and gain clear, specific informed consent before their data is shared, privacy experts said. And since 1995, the European Union and its member countries have allowed individuals to object to using their information for direct marketing purposes. Only a handful of states, such as California, have in recent years adopted privacy laws that give consumers the ability to opt out of their information being shared.

Despite those weaknesses in American privacy protections, several experts who reviewed the emails at ProPublica’s request concluded that if the deal had actually been done, Gunbroker.com would have broken its privacy agreement with customers and possibly violated federal and state laws. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act’s prohibition against deceptive or unfair business practices, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how their information will be used. Many states have adopted similar legal requirements.

Matt Schwartz, privacy analyst at Consumer Reports, said the NSSF and Cambridge would have had to provide “trend and statistical analysis” directly to Gunbroker.com, rather than using it for their own political purposes, for the information exchange to comply with the company’s policy.

“It seems like a stretch,” Schwartz said.

Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by George W. Bush and served as chair under Obama, said even if Gunbroker.com’s CEO truly believed Cambridge and the NSSF would do a trend or statistical analysis, it would not justify giving customer information to Cambridge.

“Here, consumers believed their data would be used for commercial purposes and for high level trends, not for political purposes of convincing individual voters,” Leibowitz said, adding that the deal would have involved “an element of either deception or unfairness by Gunbroker.”

Like Gunbroker.com, Bass Pro Shops demanded secrecy and the destruction of its data, but it also had other conditions.

Instead of sending its customer databases directly to Cambridge, Bass Pro wanted to direct the files to the credit reporting company Experian — and for Cambridge to work through Experian to retrieve the information about its customers, emails show.

Cambridge’s decision to do the data analysis in London also meant Bass Pro attorneys would have to “verify we have appropriate rights” from customers before the retailer could send the dataset overseas. They were concerned that they might otherwise run afoul of the United Kingdom’s tougher privacy laws.

“To avoid this, is there a U.S.-based alternative?” emailed Marsha Green, paralegal to Larry Wilcher, Bass Pro’s vice president and general counsel at the time.

The final sticking point was Bass Pro’s demand that Cambridge purchase insurance to protect the transfer, which Bass Pro insisted was standard for all its data recipients.

Cambridge decided the cost was too onerous and quit the pursuit.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Bass Pro’s general counsel, Colby Irving, stressed that “safeguarding our customers’ privacy is something we take very seriously.” Irving provided a 2016 email from Bass Pro’s legal office that emphasized any agreement with Cambridge had to be “consistent with our privacy policy,” and he said none of the Bass Pro employees in the emails obtained by ProPublica had the authority to finalize a deal with Cambridge. Irving said Bass Pro, which acquired Cabela’s in 2017, 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.”

Turbocharged Targeting

Ingram, a retired chemist, at his home in Virginia. (John Tully for ProPublica)

The Cambridge alchemy had three phases.

First, the company compared the NSSF and Cabela’s data with information about consumer purchases, supplied by data broker companies L2 and Infogroup. That produced more than 1.3 million matches.

Included were details about whether people donated to children’s causes and international aid, had retail store cards, owned antiques or were interested in wine, smoking, audiobooks, board games, camping, scuba diving or cars and auto parts.

Next, analysts used an algorithm to score each person’s behavioral traits based on their habits and shopping history. From those scores, Cambridge placed each of the potential voters into one of the five personality groups.

The third phase involved reaching out to potential voters. Lists and maps were generated and given to NSSF contractors responsible for mailings. Cambridge also found the targeted people on Facebook.

A sample of the NSSF database, containing more than 6,300 people in the 10 battleground states, was given to the Tarrance Group, a Republican research firm, for the first of many polls, conducted over the phone.

The survey included a critical question asking if people would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported nominating a new Supreme Court justice “who would uphold our Constitutional gun rights.” An overwhelming majority, 86%, indicated they would be much more likely to vote for such a candidate.

The response drove the first set of Facebook ads 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 used the Supreme Court to promote support for Republican Sens. Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Ron Johnson.

They were sent to potential voters in key states from June 21, 2016, through July 1, 2016, tailored to the leanings of each personality group. The ads highlighted the role that the senators played in blocking the appointment of Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

The fear-susceptible risk-takers were targeted with ads that introduced negative scenarios before providing a reassuring and authoritative tone. In Missouri, risk-takers were told, “Senator Blunt is working hard to keep Obama from turning the Supreme Court into an enemy to your gun rights.”

The forward-focused go-getters, however, were shown what appeared to be a father and his son hunting together. In North Carolina, they were told, “Join us in thanking Senator Burr for opposing Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to protect your future and your gun rights.”

Nearly 817,000 people saw the ads, according to Cambridge’s internal metric reports. For the next three months, Cambridge blasted other ads and videos across social media. All together, they garnered nearly 378 million views and drove more than 60 million visitors to the NSSF’s website.

“Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again”

The evening of Nov. 8, 2016, was triumphant for the NSSF.

Republicans maintained control of the Senate, which guaranteed continued protection from gun proposals opposed by the industry. Surveys indicate 62% of gun owners voted for Trump over Clinton.

Political observers widely credited Cambridge Analytica’s data work on behalf of the Trump campaign for the historic victory, but the firm’s work for the NSSF to reach gun owners and others sympathetic to the Second Amendment wasn’t publicly known.

In a report titled “Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again,” Cambridge concluded that its campaign for the NSSF had encouraged nearly 10,000 more voters to turn out in Missouri, 7,744 more voters in Ohio, 6,979 more in North Carolina and 4,743 more in Pennsylvania. The numbers weren’t pivotal, but they contributed to victory for the NSSF’s preferred senatorial candidates in all those states. The back page of the report featured the cartoon character Yosemite Sam holding a six-shooter in each hand.

At 9:17 the morning after the election, Keane, the NSSF vice president, fired off an email of praise to Cambridge’s project managers.

“Thank you for all your hard work on an incredibly successful #GUNVOTE campaign. NSSF and our 13,000 members are grateful to you all for your efforts,” Keane wrote.

Throughout the organization, there was a collective sense of relief.

“After a long eight years of President Obama,” an NSSF report reviewing 2016 said, “the firearms industry can finally operate without daily attacks from the Oval Office thanks to the election of Donald J. Trump.

“Furthermore, thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

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Janet Eastham of The Telegraph contributed research.