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by Anna Clark

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Just one year ago, JD Vance was a leading advocate of the Great Lakes and the efforts to restore the largest system of freshwater on the face of the planet.

As a U.S. senator from Ohio, Vance called the lakes “an invaluable asset” for his home state. He supported more funding for a program that delivers “the tools we need to fight invasive species, algal blooms, pollution, and other threats to the ecosystem” so that the Great Lakes would be protected “for generations to come.”

But times have changed.

This spring, Vance is vice president, and President Donald Trump’s administration is imposing deep cuts and new restrictions, upending the very restoration efforts that Vance once championed. With the peak summer season just around the corner, Great Lakes scientists are concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people.

Cutbacks have gutted the staff at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Severe spending limits have made it difficult to purchase ordinary equipment for processing samples, such as filters and containers. Remaining staff plans to launch large data-collecting buoys into the water this week, but it’s late for a field season that typically runs from April to October.

In addition to a delayed launch, problems with personnel, supplies, vessel support and real-time data sharing have created doubts about the team’s ability to operate the buoys, said Gregory Dick, director of the NOAA cooperative institute at the University of Michigan that partners with the lab. Both the lab and institute operate out of a building in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was custom built as NOAA’s hub in the Great Lakes region, and both provide staff to the algal blooms team.

“This has massive impacts on coastal communities,” Dick said.

Gregory Dick, director of the Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research, which works side by side with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, says that cuts to the lab will have a massive impact on coastal communities. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Multiple people who have worked with the lab also told ProPublica that there are serious gaps in this year’s monitoring of algal blooms, which are often caused by excess nutrient runoff from farms. Data generated by the lab’s boats and buoys, and publicly shared, could be limited or interrupted, they said.

That data has helped to successfully avoid a repeat of a 2014 crisis in Toledo, Ohio, when nearly half a million people were warned to not drink the water or even touch it.

If the streams of information are cut off, “stakeholders will be very unhappy,” said Bret Collier, a branch chief at the lab who oversaw the federal scientists that run the harmful algal bloom program for the Great Lakes. He was fired in the purge of federal probationary workers in February.

The lab has lost about 35% of its 52-member workforce since February, according to the president of the lab’s union, and it was not allowed to fill several open positions. The White House released preliminary budget recommendations last week that would make significant cuts to NOAA. The budget didn’t provide details, but indicated the termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy” of ending “‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.”

An earlier document obtained by ProPublica and reported widely proposed a 74% funding cut to NOAA’s research office, home of the Great Lakes lab.

Vance’s office didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about how federal cuts have affected Great Lakes research. The White House also didn’t respond to messages.

Water samples from bodies of water in the Great Lakes region (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Municipal water leaders in Cleveland and Toledo have written public letters of support on behalf of the lab, advocating for the continuation of its work because of how important its tools and resources are for drinking water management.

In a statement to ProPublica, staffers from Toledo’s water system credited the Great Lakes lab and NOAA for alerting it to potential blooms near its intake days ahead of time. This has saved the system significant costs, they said, and helped it avoid feeding excess chemicals into the water.

“The likelihood of another 2014 ‘don’t drink the water’ advisory has been minimized to almost nothing by additional vigilance” from both the lab and local officials, they said.

Remaining staff have had to contend with not only a lack of capacity but also tight limits on spending and travel.

Several people who have worked in or with the lab said that the staff was hampered by strict credit card limits imposed on government employees as part of the effort to reduce spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheaded by presidential adviser Elon Musk.

“The basic scientific supplies that we use to provide the local communities with information on algal bloom toxicity — our purchasing of them is being restricted based on the limitations currently being put in by the administration,” Collier said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s custom-built hub for the Great Lakes region in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

NOAA and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the agency, didn’t respond to messages from ProPublica. Neither did a DOGE official. Eight U.S. senators, including the minority leader, sent a letter in March to a top NOAA leader inquiring about many of the changes, but they never received a response.

The department described its approach to some of its cuts when it eliminated nearly $4 million in funding for the NOAA cooperative institute at Princeton University and emphasized the importance of avoiding wasteful government spending. ProPublica has reported on how the loss of research grants at Princeton and the more significant defunding of the NOAA lab it works with would be a serious setback for weather and climate preparedness.

A number of the staffing losses at the Great Lakes lab came when employees accepted offers of early retirement or voluntary separation; others were fired probationary workers targeted by DOGE across the government. That includes Collier, who had 24 years of professional experience, largely as a research professor, before he was hired last year into a position that, according to the lab’s former director, had been difficult to fill.

A scientist specializing in the toxic algal blooms was also fired. She worked on the team for 14 years through the cooperative institute before accepting a federal position last year, which made her probationary, too.

A computer scientist who got real-time data onto the lab’s website — and the only person who knew how to push out the weekly sampling data on harmful algal blooms — was also fired. She was probationary because she too was hired for a federal position after working with the institute.

And because of a planned retirement, no one holds the permanent position of lab director, though there is an acting director. The lab isn’t allowed to fill any positions due to a federal hiring freeze.

At the same time, expected funds for the lab's cooperative institute are delayed, which means, Dick said, it may soon lay off staff, including people on the algal blooms team.

In March, Cleveland’s water commissioner wrote a letter calling for continued support for the Great Lakes lab and other NOAA-funded operations in the region, saying that access to real-time forecasts for Lake Erie are “critically important in making water treatment decisions” for more than 1.3 million citizens.

In 2006, there was a major outbreak of hypoxia, an issue worsened by algal blooms where oxygen-depleted water can become corrosive, discolored and full of excess manganese, which is a neurotoxin at high levels. Cleveland Water collaborated with the lab on developing a “groundbreaking” hypoxia forecast model, said Scott Moegling, who worked for both the Cleveland utility and Ohio’s drinking water regulatory agency.

“I knew which plants were going to get hit,” Moegling said. “I knew about when, and I knew what the treatment we would need would be, and we could staff accordingly.”

The American Meteorological Society, in partnership with the National Weather Association, spotlighted this warning system in its statement in support of NOAA research, saying that it helps “keep drinking water potable in the Great Lakes region.”

Collier, the former branch chief, said that quality data may be lacking this year, not just for drinking water suppliers, but also the U.S. Coast Guard, fisheries, shipping companies, recreational businesses and shoreline communities that rely on it to navigate risk. In response to a recent survey of stakeholders, the president of a trade organization serving Great Lakes cargo vessels said that access to NOAA’s real-time data “is critically important to the commercial shipping fleet when making navigation decisions.”

Because federal law requires NOAA to monitor harmful algal blooms, the cuts may run against legal obligations, several current and former workers told ProPublica. The blooms program was “federally mandated to be active every single day, without exception,” Collier said.

First image: Harmful algal bloom on Lake Erie, observed during weekly sampling in 2022. Second image: A beaker holding a water sample taken from Lake Erie during a peak harmful algal bloom, shown at its natural concentration in 2017. (The Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan)

The 2024 bloom in Lake Erie was the earliest on record. At its peak, it covered 550 square miles. Warming temperatures worsen the size and frequency of algal blooms. While the field season was historically only about 90 days, Collier said, last year the team was deployed for 211 days.

As the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is typically first to show signs of problems. But it’s also an emblem of environmental stewardship, thanks to its striking recovery from unchecked industrial pollution. The lake was once popularly declared “dead.” A highly publicized fire inflamed a river that feeds into it. Even Dr. Seuss knocked it in the 1971 version of “The Lorax.” The book described fish leaving a polluted pond “in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”

But the rise of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA, and labs like the one protecting the Great Lakes, along with legislation that protected water from pollution, led to noticeable changes. By 1986, two Ohio graduate students had succeeded in persuading Theodor Geisel, the author behind Dr. Seuss, to revise future editions of his classic book.

“I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the happy home of smiling fish,” Geisel wrote to them.

Early this year, headlines out of the Midwest suggested that “Vance could be a game-changing Great Lakes advocate” and that he might “save the Great Lakes from Trump.”

A 2023 report to Congress about the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a popular funding mechanism for projects that protect the lakes, including the research lab’s, described the lab’s work on harmful algal blooms as one of its “success stories.” Last year, with Vance as a co-sponsor, an act to extend support for the funding program passed the Senate, but stalled in the House. Another bipartisan effort to reauthorize it launched in January.

Nicole Rice was recently fired from her position at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory after 10 years with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A promotion put her on probationary status. She’s worried that federal cuts are placing the Great Lakes system at risk. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Project 2025, the plan produced by the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term, recommended that the president consider whether NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

NOAA is “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” the plan said, and this industry’s mission “seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

“That is not to say NOAA is useless,” it added, “but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

When asked at his confirmation hearing in January if he agreed with Project 2025’s recommendation of dismantling NOAA, Howard Lutnick, head of the commerce department, said no.

One month later, the Great Lakes lab’s probationary staff got termination notices. That includes Nicole Rice, who spent a decade with NOAA. A promotion made her communications job vulnerable to the widespread firings of federal probationary workers.

In recent testimony to a Michigan Senate committee, Rice expressed deep concern about the future of the Great Lakes.

“It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said. “But these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.”

Vernal Coleman contributed reporting.

by Eric Umansky, Vernal Coleman and Maryam Jameel

As the Trump administration pledges to eliminate 80,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, ProPublica reporters are investigating how changes at the VA are affecting veterans themselves. Trump has promised to put veterans first, but our reporting shows veterans’ care is suffering amid wide-ranging cuts. If you’ve experienced setbacks in your care, we want to hear from you.

We would also appreciate firsthand insights about changes happening within the VA from agency employees. Please do not fill out this form if you work for the VA or another federal agency. Instead, contact our reporters via the encrypted messaging app Signal:

• Eric Umansky: Ericumansky.04
• Vernal Coleman: vcoleman91.99

We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

by Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman

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

If you’ve experienced setbacks in your care or benefits amid the changes at the Department of Veterans Affairs, ProPublica wants to hear from you. Share your story.

Earlier this year, doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. Sweeping cuts imposed by the Trump administration, they told higher-ups in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”

The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”

The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.

President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize veterans.

“We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”

After the Department of Veterans Affairs began shedding employees and contracts, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, pledged, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”

But dozens of internal emails obtained by ProPublica reveal a far different reality. Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care. The VA provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans.

In March, VA officials across the country warned that a critical resource — databases for tracking cancer — would no longer be kept up to date. As officials in the Pacific Northwest explained, the Department of Government Efficiency was moving to kill its contract with the outside company that maintained and ran its cancer registry, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked it for “immediate termination.”

Officials at the VA centers in the Pacific Northwest said funding for their cancer research was “updated for immediate termination” after a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. (Obtained by ProPublica)

The VA in Detroit raised a similar alarm in an email, warning of the “inability to track oncology treatment and recurrences.” The emails obtained by ProPublica detail a wide variety of disruptions. In Colorado, for instance, layoffs to social workers were causing homeless veterans waiting for temporary housing to go without help.

The warnings, sent as part of a longstanding system at the VA to alert higher-ups of problems, paint a portrait of chaotic retrenchment at an agency that just three years ago was mandated by Congress through the PACT Act to expand care and benefits for veterans facing cancer and other issues after exposure to Agent Orange, burn pits or other toxins.

Doctors and other health care providers across the VA have been left scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of cuts, hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House.

VA officials in Pittsburgh sent warnings about studies being impacted by a hiring freeze. These included studies on cancer, suicide prevention and exposure to toxins. (Obtained by ProPublica)

The upheaval laid bare in the emails is particularly striking because the cuts so far would be dwarfed by the dramatic downsizing in staff and shift in priorities the administration has said is coming.

The VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year. But the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months. The agency, which is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., currentlyhas nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

Despite an expanded role mandated by Congress through the PACT Act, administration officials have said their goal is to trim the agency to the size it was before the legislation passed.

“The Biden Administration understood what it meant to pay for the cost of war; it seems the Trump Administration does not,” said Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat and chief author of the PACT Act.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to “transform” the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefits claims. One DOGE document proposed closing 17 hospitals — and perhaps a dozen more.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz told ProPublica that there would be no hospital closures. “Just because a VA employee wrote something down, doesn’t make it VA policy,” he said in a written statement. But he did say that use of AI will be a big part of what he called VA’s “reform” efforts.

Kasperowicz dismissed the idea that the emails obtained by ProPublica show chaos.

“The only thing these reports show is that VA has a robust and well-functioning system to flag potential issues and quickly fix them so we can provide the best possible care to Veterans,” he wrote.

DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

Have You Been Affected by Changes at the Department of Veterans Affairs? Tell Us About It.

The White House released a budget proposal last week that calls for a 4% increase in the VA’s budget. That total includes more money for medical care, though a portion of that would be used to pay for veterans to seek care outside the VA medical system.

More answers to the VA’s larger plans may come today, when Collins is scheduled to testify before the Senate Veterans Committee, his first hearing on Capitol Hill since coming into office.

David Shulkin, who headed the VA in Trump’s first term, said the administration is too focused on cuts rather than communicating a strategy for improving care for vets.

“I think it’s very, very hard to be successful with the approach that they’re taking,” Shulkin told ProPublica.

One way local VA officials have tried to limit the damage has been by sending warnings — formally known as an issue brief — to higher-ups. And sometimes it works.

After officials in Los Angeles warned that “all chemotherapy” would stop unless Washington backed off killing a service contract, the VA reversed its decision.

And, amid growing scrutiny, the administration also made some researchers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere exempt from cuts. The laid-off social workers who helped homeless vets in Colorado were also brought back after about a month away from their jobs. Kasperowicz said that four social workers were affected but “their caseload was temporarily redistributed to other members of the homeless team.”

The warnings from officials across the country underscore how the comparatively modest cuts so far are already affecting the work of the VA’s medical system, with the study and treatment of cancer cited in multiple warnings to agency leadership.

“We have absolutely felt the impact of the chaos all around us. We’re already losing people,“ said one senior researcher, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously for fear of retaliation.

Referring to studies, he added: “We’re going to be losing things that can’t restart.”

And while Kasperowicz told ProPublica that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, locals there said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing.

In Pittsburgh, two trials to treat veterans with advanced head and neck cancer, which officials in March had warned were at risk because of hiring freezes, have still not started, according to Alanna Caffas, who heads a Pittsburgh nonprofit, the Veterans Health Foundation, that partners with the VA on research.

“It’s insane,” Caffas said. “These veterans should be able to get access to research treatments, but they can’t.”

VA employees in Pittsburgh sent a warning that they had lost research staff because of the hiring freeze. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

A third trial there, to help veterans with opioid addiction, wasn’t halted. Instead, it was hobbled by layoffs of key team members, according to Caffas and another person involved in the research.

Regarding the issues with cancer registries, Kasperowicz said there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer those registries.

Rosie Torres, founder of Burn Pits 360, the veterans advocacy group that also pushed hard for the legislation, called the emails showing impeded cancer treatment a “crisis in the making” and “gutwrenching.”

That the decisions are being made without input from the communities of vets they affect is worse, she added.

“If they are killing contracts that may affect the delivery of care, then we have a right to know,” she said.

Last week, as the second Trump administration marked its first 100 days in office, Collins celebrated what he described as its achievements.

In a recorded address, he said that under his stewardship the VA processed record numbers of benefit claims, ended “divisive” spending on diversity initiatives and redirected millions of agency dollars from “non-mission-critical” programs back toward services to benefit veterans.

“We will not stop working to put veterans first,” he wrote in an accompanying op-ed.

Others say Collins has done no such thing. Instead of focusing on veterans, said one VA oncologist, “we’re spending an enormous amount of time preparing for a staffing catastrophe.”

“Veterans’ lives are on the line,” the doctor said. “Let us go back to work and take care of them.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research, and Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.

by ProPublica

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ProPublica on Monday won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for public service for the series “Life of the Mother,” which the judges described as “urgent reporting about pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgently needed care for fear of violating vague ‘life of the mother’ exceptions in states with strict abortion laws.” The prize is given to the staff of a news organization that performed “meritorious public service.” This is the second consecutive year the organization was awarded the distinction. It is the eighth Pulitzer for ProPublica.

“America’s Mental Barrier,” an examination of how insurance companies interfere with access to necessary mental health care across the United States, was named a finalist in the explanatory reporting category. In addition to the Pulitzer winners, the designation is ProPublica’s 12th Pulitzer finalist in 17 years.

The “Life of the Mother” series, which ProPublica continues to pursue, is a landmark investigation into the unexamined, irreversible consequences of state abortion bans. Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Cassandra Jaramillo mined hospital and death records in states whose strict abortion bans threatened physicians with prosecution. From the tragic death of Amber Thurman in Georgia to gutting accounts of women denied lifesaving miscarriage care in Texas, the investigations illuminated the profound human cost of these policies. They exposed the chilling impact on medical professionals forced to choose between their oath and the law, the anguish faced by families and the broader erosion of women’s health and autonomy.

Stacy Kranitz’s immersive photo essay, “The Year After a Denied Abortion,” documented the unraveling of a Tennessee family after a denied abortion for a life-threatening pregnancy, especially in a state with meager support for poor mothers. The piece, reported with Surana, helped audiences see, feel and understand how decisions made by those in power impact families.

These stories ignited outrage around the country, became talking points during the presidential election and inspired action. Lawmakers have filed more than a dozen bills to expand abortion access in at least seven states.

Last week, the Texas Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 31, called The Life of the Mother Act, which aims to prevent maternal deaths under the state’s strict abortion ban by making clear that a life-threatening medical emergency doesn’t need to be imminent for doctors to follow their medical standards and intervene to terminate pregnancies.

The bill represents a significant reversal for Republican leaders who had for years insisted no changes were needed. It was written by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of the original ban who initially said that exceptions for medical emergencies were “plenty clear.” The bill stops short of removing what doctors say are the ban’s biggest impediments to care, including its threat of major criminal penalties for medical professionals, and it doesn’t expand abortion access to cases of fetal anomalies, rape or incest. Sen. Carol Alvarado, the Democratic lawmaker who co-authored the bill, said that its limits were a “real hard pill to swallow” but that it could still make a difference. “I believe this bill will save lives,” she said.

A U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation, launched in response to our reporting, released a 29-page report in December 2024 that found that hospitals are providing minimal guidance to doctors navigating abortion restrictions, often leaving them without clear protocols in life-or-death situations.

A host of ProPublicans helped elevate this project, including Alexandra Zayas, Ziva Branstetter, Andrea Wise, Tracy Weber, Boyzell Hosey, Mariam Elba, Robin Fields, Anna Donlan, Allen Tan, Kirsten Berg, Jeff Ernsthausen, Doris Burke, Lexi Churchill, Andrea Suozzo, Audrey Dutton, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Amy Yurkanin, Emily Goldstein, Diego Sorbara, Samantha Cooney, Grace Palmieri, Colleen Barry, Kassie Navarro, Sarah Childress, Lynn Dombek, Sophie Chou and Sophia Kovach.

From left: visual strategy editor Andrea Wise, Zayas, Presser, Surana, Jaramillo, editor Ziva Branstetter and research reporter Mariam Elba. ProPublica continues to pursue stories in the “Life of the Mother” series. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

“We knew early that abortion bans were likely to have deadly consequences for women, and not just those seeking abortions,” said Weber, ProPublica’s managing editor for the national staff. “Our reporters and their editor, Alex Zayas, were endlessly creative, dogged, humane and careful in surfacing the deaths of these women when the states themselves were not looking. We are so honored that the Pulitzer Board has recognized their efforts.”

In the series honored as a Pulitzer finalist in explanatory reporting, reporters Annie Waldman, Duaa Eldeib, Max Blau and Maya Miller revealed how health insurers are engaging in aggressive tactics that push therapists out of networks; deploying an algorithmic system to limit coverage; creating “ghost networks”; cutting access to treatment for children with autism; relying on doctors whose judgments have been criticized by courts; and using patients’ progress to justify denials.

The reporters crowdsourced thousands of tips; obtained explosive internal company documents; reviewed thousands of pages of lawsuit filings to identify the doctors doling out denials; and included shattering and intimate stories of patients for whom care was prematurely cut off, leading to devastating consequences.

In September 2024, the Biden administration announced that it had finalized new regulations to strengthen protections for mental health care coverage and hold insurance companies accountable for unlawfully denying it. In December 2024, following several of ProPublica’s stories, U.S. Sens. Chris Murphy, Tina Smith and Ben Ray Luján reintroduced the Parity Enforcement Act to better hold insurance companies accountable by providing the U.S. Department of Labor the authority to impose civil monetary penalties for violations of the mental health parity law. The following month, the Labor Department found widespread noncompliance and violations of federal law in how health plans and insurers cover mental health care, findings that mirrored ProPublica’s investigation. The department also began investigating the oversight and management of doctors hired by insurers who repeatedly denied mental health coverage for patients.

Steve Mills, Mara Shalhoup, Charles Ornstein, Ariana Tobin, Zisiga Mukulu, Tony Luong, Alex Bandoni, Agnel Philip, Vanessa Saba, Chris Morran, Cengiz Yar, Isabelle Yan, Lena Groeger, Zayas, Weber, Berg, Ernsthausen, Tan, Goldstein, Palmieri, Sorbara, Wise, Barry, Cooney and Paige Pfleger of WPLN/Nashville Public Radio contributed to the series. Some of the pieces were published in collaboration with NPR.

“People who need mental health care often cannot get it. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, insured or uninsured, the lack of access is widely felt,” said Ornstein, ProPublica’s managing editor for local. “So many people on our staff wanted to be a part of this project. Through immersive storytelling and investigative digging, they adeptly documented the causes of the crisis, those responsible and the regulators who have stood by and done little to fix it.”

ProPublica received Pulitzers for public service in 2024, national reporting in 2020, feature writing in 2019, public service in 2017, explanatory reporting in 2016, national reporting in 2011 and investigative reporting in 2010. Local Reporting Network partner Anchorage Daily News won the Pulitzer for public service in 2020.

by Peter Elkind

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 eliminated or stifled critical data at dozens of federal agencies. Now the administration’s actions are hitting a new realm: the energy industry.

For decades, the Energy Information Administration, an independent agency housed inside the Department of Energy, has provided crucial reports on everything from oil and gas to the future of alternative energy. Relied on by oil company CEOs and government policymakers alike, the EIA’s data has been called the “gold standard” by Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global and an éminence grise in the world of oil. No less a source than Project 2025 described the EIA as historically providing “independent and impartial analysis.”

Last month, the EIA released its signature report: the Annual Energy Outlook for the United States. Largely based on data gathered during the administration of Joe Biden, the report projected rapid growth in alternative energy and declines in American reliance on coal, oil and natural gas. Agency officials feared that the findings would rankle the “Drill, Baby, Drill” proponents in the Trump administration, according to multiple EIA sources. So instead of promoting the report’s publication with an hourlong webcast and PowerPoint presentation spotlighting key findings, as it has in recent years, the agency released it without any of that. And at a late stage, the EIA deleted the analytical narrative — then 53 pages in draft form — that is typically the centerpiece of the report. Instead the agency posted links to hundreds of data-filled tables and charts and a seven-page explanation of its methods.

That didn’t stop the Energy Department from pillorying the findings. In a press release on the same day the report was published, a department spokesperson attacked the EIA’s report for featuring “the disastrous path for American energy production under the Biden administration” and failing to reflect Trump-initiated policy changes aimed at “ensuring America’s future is marked by energy growth and abundance — not scarcity.”

Now the EIA has privately informed staff that it is scrapping publication of its closely followed International Energy Outlook for 2025. The previous edition of the international outlook, released every two years, contained 70 pages detailing global trends. The paradox: That will leave the field open to the equivalent publication from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which conservatives accuse of bending its forecasts to promote climate-change goals. (Unlike the U.S. agency, whose projections take into account only formally adopted policies, the international one includes some policies that haven’t been adopted and are considered “aspirational.”)

In an April 16 internal email announcing the cancellation of the international report, which has not previously been reported, Angelina LaRose, assistant administrator in the EIA’s office of energy analysis, blamed the decision on the departure of so many staff experts. More than 100 of the EIA’s 350 staff have left as a result of firings or resignations, in the wake of “Fork in the Road” buyout offers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. “At this point, you can assume we will not be releasing the IEO this year,” she wrote. “This was a difficult decision based on the loss of key resources.”

In the same memo, LaRose ordered an “‘all hands-on-deck’ type of effort,” before even more EIA analysts departed, to “try to preserve as much institutional knowledge as possible” about the models and procedures used to formulate the international report.

Failing to publish that report is viewed as consequential. Amy Myers Jaffe, a prominent energy consultant and research professor at New York University, called the EIA’s reports and analysis essential. “These are global markets,” she said. “The only way to figure out which policies work or don’t is to have accurate EIA data. Everybody benefits from that analysis, whether you’re in the private sector or the public sector.”

The EIA was established nearly a half-century ago, amid the energy crises of the 1970s, to tackle what had become an urgent need: to collect and report objective data on energy production and consumption. Its regular stream of postings now track oil and gasoline prices, electricity rates, natural gas and crude oil exports, automobile fuel consumption, wind and solar energy generation, coal production and nuclear plant outputs.

Its U.S. Annual Energy Outlook projects long-term trends, based on multiple scenarios, and customarily provides detailed analysis discussing key takeaways from reams of data. For 2025, its baseline “reference case” projected how markets would operate through 2050 under laws and regulations in place as of December 2024, prior to the Trump administration’s efforts to promote fossil fuels. In addition to eight “side cases” based on variations in economic growth, energy pricing and supply, the EIA also modeled two “alternative policy” scenarios. These projected impacts from the elimination of Biden-era laws and regulations reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants and boosting adoption of electric vehicles.

According to the contents pages from the draft, which ProPublica obtained, the deleted narrative highlighted projections in the reference case showing that increased electricity demand would be met through 2050 “mainly by generation from renewable sources”; that “coal generation falls to close to zero”; and that there would be “declines” in domestic consumption of oil and natural gas.

The decision to jettison the report’s traditional explanatory narrative was announced to EIA staff in a March 10 internal email, after the document was largely complete following months of work. “After conferring with the [EIA] front office, we are shifting gears on the material that will be released with this year’s AEO,” assistant administrator LaRose wrote. “We will not be releasing the narrative as currently written and will not be hosting a release event.”

The omission of the analytical section left readers to sort through the data for themselves. Joseph DeCarolis, who served as EIA administrator under Biden and is now an engineering professor at North Carolina State, called the annual outlook’s narrative “extremely important. It’s important to be able to look at the results, interpret them, and explain to your audience what you think the insights are.”

EIA employees said they believe the changes were made out of fear that spotlighting unwelcome findings and projections would make the agency a Trump target. “There was a concern that any narrative we put out would be seen as ideological,” said Emily Schaal, an EIA statistician who worked on the U.S. report. Another EIA employee commented: “Fewer people were going to get mad if we just threw the numbers out.”

Asked about the decision, EIA spokesperson Chris Higginbotham said the agency’s leadership jettisoned the analysis because it “decided it was most important to prioritize getting our AEO results to the public as soon as we could rather than waiting longer to complete a written market analysis.” He added, “We do not make decisions about our data or our analyses with the goal of influencing outcomes or avoiding pushback.”

With regard to EIA’s international report, Higginbotham said, “We remain committed to maintaining our long-term energy modeling capabilities.” He asserted that the staff reductions will not compromise the agency’s work. “We are committed to meeting EIA’s quality standards,” he said, “and we will not publish any data or analysis that doesn’t meet those standards.”

Meanwhile, the EIA has canceled or delayed other data reports and projects. Those moves, combined with the turmoil and departures, have devastated morale, according to current and former EIA employees.

Schaal was among those grappling with the tumult. After completing a doctorate in math, Schaal, 28, joined the EIA as a statistician in June 2024, working remotely from Michigan, and expected to remain at the agency for years. Instead, she was one of about 30 probationary employees who were abruptly terminated on Feb. 13, just weeks into the new administration. A lawsuit challenging firings at six agencies, filed by a union that represents government workers, prompted a federal judge to order their reinstatement, and Schaal returned to the EIA in mid-March.

“Everyone at EIA had been through a month of torture,” she told ProPublica. Employees were dealing with chaos, uncertainty and fears of termination. In early April, Schaal accepted a new deferred resignation offer, with plans to depart on April 19.

On April 11, hours before a midnight deadline for the resignation program, EIA’s acting administrator presided over an all-hands meeting with a top deputy, where he read a prepared statement urging employees to take the offer. Then the two managers gave assurance they had done “a great job” defending the agency in a meeting with DOGE officials, who were certain to treat them all “appropriately,” according to four people who attended the all-hands meeting.

Schaal was furious. After the session ended, she pounded out an angry email to the two bosses and then shared it with everyone who still remained at EIA. “DOGE doesn’t care what we do and will treat us the same as all other agencies: with contempt,” she wrote. “Shame on you for falling in line and giving up without any perceptible effort to fight. Shame on you for keeping those you purport to lead in the dark. Shame on you for betraying the mission set to us by Congress and selling out the American people.”

On the following Monday, Schaal was summoned to a virtual meeting with her supervisor, where she was presented with a formal letter of reprimand for her “unprofessional and disrespectful email,” as well as a second letter notifying her that she was being placed on administrative leave, a week ahead of her planned departure. The episode made her something of a hero among colleagues who remained behind, who have taken to sharing their frustrations with one another on private Signal groups. (EIA’s spokesperson declined to comment on the episode. Neither DOGE nor the White House replied to requests for comment for this article.)

The EIA, whose director is a presidential appointee, typically chosen from among apolitical academic or industry figures, is poised to get new leadership. Trump’s nominee is Tampa energy consultant Tristan Abbey, a self-described “think-tanker” at conservative groups who has called U.S. dominance in natural gas exports a “generational opportunity.” Abbey, 39, served as an energy staffer on the National Security Council in the first Trump administration. His financial disclosure reports $103,083 in “senior fellow fees” since 2024 from the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and $435,833 in income from his consulting business, whose clients included Thiel Capital. (Abbey worked for Trump-friendly billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firms before going into government.) Abbey’s consulting firm also has an eclectic side business focused on publishing books written by or about explorers and historical figures in philosophy and math.

Abbey enjoyed a friendly confirmation hearing on Wednesday before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee. He testified that he would leave his “policy role” behind and affirmed his commitment to the EIA providing “nonpartisan facts.”

Abbey praised the EIA as “the world’s premier energy data agency” but also said it is “in urgent need of revitalization.” He presented an ambitious must-do list seemingly at odds with the current administration’s wholesale cuts. The EIA, Abbey declared, “must clear the decks of unfinished projects,” “recruit and retain the best talent” and “develop the most powerful analytical capabilities.” Among his top priorities, Abbey testified: “the expansion of global energy data collection and analysis.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Adam Friedman, Tennessee Lookout

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

We are continuing to report on flex loans. Have you been sued by Advance Financial, Harpeth Financial or another flex loan lender? To share your experience, call or text reporter Adam Friedman at 615-249-8509.

Rosita Hansen was working an evening shift at a tubing factory in 2023 when a sheriff’s deputy showed up and handed her a court summons. She was being sued for failing to pay off a loan of $2,050. What confused Hansen was she had already paid a couple thousand more than she borrowed. But now the company, Advance Financial, said she owed more. Between what she’d already paid the company and the lawsuit, Advance stood to receive over $12,500 from Hansen, records show.

Hansen, 57, had taken out the loan in 2021 after her mortgage company threatened to foreclose on her modest three-bedroom house outside Morristown, a small city in East Tennessee. Hansen made enough money to support herself, but after taking in her four grandchildren, she struggled to cover the costs of extra food and school supplies, and she stopped paying her mortgage. That’s when she turned to Advance.

“I was providing for all of them,” Hansen said. “Financially, it was rough.”

Like most borrowers, Hansen could not afford an attorney to handle the suit, but she hoped to work out a payment plan with Advance. When she arrived at the Hamblen County courthouse in Morristown in May 2023, she was directed to a line of half a dozen people waiting to meet with an attorney representing the company.

Across Tennessee, Advance has sued over 110,000 people since 2015, significantly more than any other payday lender, making it one of the largest plaintiffs of any Tennessee-based company collecting debt. In Hansen’s Appalachian county of 66,000, where nearly half the households make less than $50,000, the company has filed one case per every 32 residents over that time, the Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica found.

Advance began filing thousands of lawsuits soon after Tennessee lawmakers approved the Flex Loan, a product pioneered by Advance in Tennessee. The loan’s $4,000 cap is nine times higher than the limit for most payday loans, and the company charges the equivalent of a 279.5% annual interest rate. Before Flex Loans became legal in 2015, payday lenders could only lend $425, and the borrower could never be required to pay back more than $500. Since then, those protections have been eliminated and thousands of borrowers have been defaulting.

Flex Loans only stop growing when they’re completely paid off, when a flex lender declares the loan is in default or when it sues the borrower. If the loans do end up in court, the law allows lenders to recoup attorneys fees — which can’t be done with payday loans — a practice that can add up to a third of the loan amount. Court judgments against customers are often thousands of dollars, with some exceeding $10,000, records show. About 40% of all cases end up with a wage garnishment, court records show.

The consequences of Flex Loans were predicted when the Tennessee legislature legalized them 10 years ago, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wanted to regulate products like Flex Loans when Congress created the agency in 2011. The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the CFPB are currently being reviewed by the courts.

Advance has argued that the new product would help consumers by offering them loans that are technically cheaper than a payday loan. It downplayed concerns from consumer advocates that these high-interest loans targeted and trapped low-income borrowers in debt they could never pay off. The company’s leaders made their case just as federal regulators planned to crack down on other Tennessee lenders for making different high-interest loans to people they knew could not pay them back.

After just a few years, evidence started mounting that the loans were exacting a high toll on low-income borrowers while generating huge profits for lenders. Since then, the Flex Loan has buried tens of thousands of Tennesseans such as Hansen in a deep financial hole.

Gabe Kravitz, a consumer finance researcher at The Pew Charitable Trusts, said loans above $1,000 paired with triple-digit interest rates are hard to pay off.

“It gets very expensive very quickly,” he said.

Only a few other states have approved products similar to the Flex Loan but, unlike Tennessee, when other states saw problems with the loans, they acted to rein them in.

Virginia allowed banks to make line-of-credit loans but had never seen the need to cap interest rates as banks competed for customers. But soon after Advance showed up, regulators noticed the company filing thousands of lawsuits. The state attorney general’s office investigated the company for deceptive practices in 2020, ultimately labeling the company as “predatory” and helping to pass legislation to shut down Flex Loan-like products in the state. Advance declined to answer a question about the Virginia attorney general’s investigation. California and North Dakota also passed bills capping interest rates on open-ended lines of credit after Advance and other companies began to operate in those states.

The Lookout and ProPublica sent Advance Financial detailed questions about its operations, including each of the cases cited in the article.

Cullen Earnest, the senior vice president of public policy at Advance Financial, declined to answer specific questions and said he could not discuss individual cases due to privacy concerns. Earnest said in an email that the company has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. He added that the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions has received just 91 complaints on flexible credit lenders since 2020, representing less than 0.001% of all new flex loan agreements, and that this data reflects the satisfaction of the vast majority of Advance’s customers.

Company records show Hansen made her twice-a-month payments on time, paying over $6,600 in 10 months. The required minimum monthly payments are supposed to act like a safety net, ensuring borrowers pay enough to cover the interest, fees and 3% of the principal.

But many times after Hansen made a payment, the company allowed her to immediately borrow the principal back, which she often did, extending the time it would take to pay off the loan. After almost a year of payments, she still owed more than $3,000.

One Borrower Owed Over $8,000 in Interest and Court Fees Sources: Rosita Hansen’s loan billing statements and court records. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Hansen said she knew the loan was costly — every loan statement warns, “This is an expensive form of credit. Only borrow what you can afford to pay back” — but she didn’t realize how hard it would be to keep up with the interest and fees.

The loan from Advance only made Hansen’s financial situation worse. As the payments became too much to handle, she lost the house. But the Flex Loan continued to grow, almost doubling in size by the time she received a court summons a year later.

Who Is Advance?

Michael and Tina Hodges started their payday lending business in the 1990s with a few stores in Nashville.

The company, then called Advance Pay Day, steadily expanded, making payday loans and offering products like bus passes, check cashing and money transfers. In 2009, the Hodges told a local news outlet that they wanted to shed the image of a “simple payday advance company,” so the company took on a new name, Advance Financial.

By 2010, Advance had generated a modest $15 million in revenue from about two dozen stores, according to statements it made in news reports at the time.

Not long after, the growing business collided with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal regulator Congress created after the banking crisis. The CFPB had started to take aim at high-interest payday lenders, releasing a 2013 report on the dangers of the loans as debt traps. A subsequent agency report found that payday lenders, particularly in Tennessee, relied heavily on offering loans to those who couldn’t afford them. Advance declined to respond to a question about the CFPB report.

Advance Financial lobbied Tennessee lawmakers to approve bigger loans that accumulate higher fees, saying the new offering would be “a little bit more expensive” but arguing it would be good for consumers. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

Looking for an alternative product that wouldn’t fall under the CFPB’s looming regulations, Advance turned to Tennessee lawmakers, who have power over statewide interest rates. The company hired Earnest, the former top aide for the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions, which regulates payday lenders. It also opened up a political action committee and began to push lawmakers to allow it to create the Flex Loan.

In a hearing discussing the Flex Loan legislation before its passage, Earnest told a Tennessee Senate committee the new loan was like a line of credit you could get at a bank, acknowledging it would be “a little bit more expensive.”

But the proposal added significant potential costs. To allow lenders to circumvent the state’s interest rate cap, the legislature simply called the interest something else: a “customary fee.” The law would permit flex lenders to charge 24% interest plus a daily fee until the loan is paid off. The fee is calculated by multiplying the loan amount by 0.7%. Over 365 days the fee adds 255.5% to the cost of the loan. Advance’s own documentation tells borrowers that although the state and Advance call it a fee, the federal government sees it for what it is, an interest rate.

The bill passed the state Senate without opposition. In the House, only Democratic state Rep. Mike Stewart spoke against the bill, which passed overwhelmingly and was later signed by Republican Gov. Bill Haslam.

Stewart pointed out the new law allowed companies to recoup attorneys fees in court, something payday lenders had not been allowed to do, and a practice he knew as a lawyer would likely increase the number of lawsuits.

“The legislation was structured to maximize the amount of money they could extract from these debtors,” Stewart, who has since left the legislature, said in an interview.

After legalization of the Flex Loan, Advance Financial’s business boomed. The company expanded to all corners of Tennessee, growing to 105 locations by the end of the 2010s.

As a private company, Advance is not required to release financial information. But Advance and the Hodges were vocal about their success, at least at first. The company self-reported to the Nashville Business Journal in 2019 that it made $392 million, quintupling its revenue from the year before it started offering the Flex Loan, and making more than 25 times as much as it had at the start of the decade. Advance’s revenue no longer appeared on any of the business journals’ lists after 2019.

Those numbers parallel the growth of the flex loan industry in Tennessee. By 2019, all flex lenders across the state had generated about $730 million in operating income, a number that has continued to grow, according to state records. In 2022, the latest available year of data, flex lenders earned $880 million in operating income.

The company is one of the top campaign donors to Tennessee politicians, having spent roughly $2.5 million since 2014. Advance has also spent over $3 million lobbying state lawmakers over the past decade.

The Hodges have also made roughly $10 million in political donations to federal candidates since 2014, including over $3 million to support President Donald Trump’s campaigns. In a 2019 recording obtained by The Washington Post, Hodges told a payday lending industry group his political donations granted him better access to Trump. Hodges told the Post he was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump and never used his status to ask the Trump administration for help.

A Trump-appointed CFPB director rescinded most of the payday lending regulations in 2020.

The new Trump administration has tried to gut the CFPB, but an appeals court on April 28 upheld a lower court ruling preventing the acting CFPB director from firing about 90% of the department’s employees.

Today, Advance’s only product is the Flex Loan.

A Wave of Lawsuits

Before the Flex Loan, court records show that payday lenders like Advance rarely took borrowers to court. The low $500 cap on loan amounts and the prohibition on collecting attorneys fees often made suing people unprofitable.

The Flex Loan law changed all that, unleashing a wave of lawsuits.

Across the 59 counties where electronic court records are available — home to over four-fifths of the state’s roughly 7 million people — Advance has brought one lawsuit for every 50 residents since 2015, according to a data analysis by the Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica.

For Tonya Davis, a single mother who works at a local hospital, Advance waited six years to sue. Tennessee’s debt collection law allows lenders to file a suit within six years and, if the company wins a judgment in court, to pursue the debt for another decade.

Davis lives in Davidson County, where Advance operates more stores than in any other county in Tennessee. Advance has filed over 22,000 lawsuits in Davidson over the decade since it began offering Flex Loans, its highest county total. Its stores in Nashville, which is located in that county, are generally in neighborhoods where households have lower incomes.

Davis said Advance contacted her in 2018, claiming she owed money on a Flex Loan taken out the previous year. Davis said she never borrowed the money and was the victim of identity theft, a claim the company told her it would look into after she told Advance in a phone call that the Social Security number on the account wasn’t hers.

The company never reached back out to her, she said, and for years, she heard nothing from Advance, but in 2024, she received a summons declaring it was suing her for almost $4,800.

Tonya Davis says she never borrowed money from Advance and was a victim of identity theft. The company told her it would look into the matter and then, almost six years later, sued her for $4,785. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

At the time Davis was caring for her dying mother and missed her court hearing. Because she didn’t appear, Advance won a default judgment against her for the full amount.

Davis could not afford an attorney, so she filed an appeal on her own, but she never got a chance to challenge the judgment. Soon after the hearing began, attorneys for Advance noted that Davis had filed her appeal one day past the filing deadline and the judge denied her appeal.

The company’s default judgment means Davis is required to pay Advance $175 a month.

“I’m not a lawyer,” Davis said in an interview. “I’m trying to do the best I can with what I have. I don’t know anything about this, or I would have paid, but they didn’t even give me the opportunity to present my information.”

Challenging Advance in court can be daunting. When Advance goes to court for a Flex Loan, it wins a majority of the time, in part because borrowers often fail to show up and in part because the company has more legal resources. The company has won over $200 million in judgments since the start of 2015.

Mandy Spears, the deputy director of the Tennessee-based think tank The Sycamore Institute, said in court that lenders have all the advantages because they have lawyers with vast experience in the system.

“It’s just complicated for the average person versus a more sophisticated business or law firm,” she said. “It’s really a gap in knowledge and expertise.”

Many defendants don’t realize that when they fail to appear in court, the company doesn’t have to provide detailed documents proving what a borrower owes.

Tessa Shearon, a 27-year-old mother in McMinnville, thought she paid off her loan with Advance Financial in 2020. When the company sued her almost three years later, she missed her court hearing because she was eight months pregnant and on bed rest. A judge ruled her in default and Advance won a judgment for $4,700.

Tessa Shearon thought she paid off her loan with Advance in 2020. The company sued her three years later. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

Shearon didn’t keep any documentation after paying off her loan, but she said she reached out to Advance’s lawyer to dispute the lawsuit. The company has not sought to garnish her wages. But she remains in limbo: Under the law, the company can choose to file a wage garnishment any time in the next 10 years to recover the judgment amount.

“My only worry is them attempting to collect,” Shearon said. “I don’t have anything.”

Marla Williams, a consumer law attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee, is one of a handful of lawyers who’ve helped defend borrowers against Advance.

In several cases, Williams has been able to block wage garnishments and reduce the customary fee the company charges.

Marla Williams is a lawyer who has helped defend borrowers against Advance. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

Williams said that in a 2024 case, she was able to lower the payments from an unaffordable several hundred dollars a month to around $50 per month, which her client could afford. Advance fought the reduction, but a judge ruled in her favor.

In another case, Williams said Advance tried to charge a borrower thousands of dollars in additional fees months after he stopped paying the loan. After a hearing, which most borrowers without lawyers don’t ask for, a judge reduced the fees, calling the added charges “unconscionable and unjust,” court records show.

Williams said the company often uses aggressive tactics in court, something that she’s observed over the past decade.

“This is their business model,” she said.

Advance declined to discuss its business model or legal strategy.

Sometimes Advance has already made money off the borrower before suing them, as in the case of Hansen. Over 10 months, Hansen paid Advance nearly $2,200 more than she borrowed, records show.

She still owed almost $3,000 when she stopped paying Advance. The company waited around three months before declaring her in default, letting her debt grow before it sued her several months later. With the addition of attorneys fees and court-added interest, the company sued her for $6,000.

Hansen, who asked to use her maiden name because she’s no longer married, lost her home in 2022, moving into an apartment, which she said costs more than her mortgage had.

Hansen said she plans to pay Advance by the summer. A February bonus check, which the company garnished 25% of, has helped.

“I understand it’s every person for themselves, and they’re out to make a buck,” Hansen said about Advance. “But you know what, people out there are struggling every single day, and that’s what they take advantage of.”

How We Tracked Advance Financial’s Lawsuits

For this story, the Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica used online portals to find civil cases in Tennessee General Sessions Courts for the 59 counties where electronic court records are available. More than four-fifths of the state’s population lives in these counties. Our analysis included cases filed and uploaded to the online portals from 2009 through 2024. We filtered the data for cases brought by payday lenders in Tennessee, using company names, and found that Advance was filing significantly more suits than any other payday lender, according to court records.

Advance Financial often uses a related company called Harpeth Financial Services to file lawsuits against borrowers. Not every case listed the type of loan behind the lawsuit, but a pattern emerged: After Advance started offering Flex Loans in 2015, the number of lawsuits it filed significantly increased.

Of the cases in our data that were filed by Advance, over half had a judgment amount awarded, indicating the company won its lawsuit. About three-quarters of the cases filed had information on whether a wage garnishment was or wasn’t filed against a borrower. Our analysis found that among cases where that information was available, 40% included wage garnishment.

Have you taken out a flex loan and struggled to pay it back? Have you been sued by Advance Financial, Harpeth Financial or another flex loan lender?

Reporters at the Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica want to hear from you as they investigate flex loan lenders, who have sued more than 100,000 Tennesseans.

To share your experience, call or text reporter Adam Friedman at 615-249-8509.

Mollie Simon contributed research and Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting.

by Mary Hudetz

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

The director of Arizona’s embattled Medicaid agency resigned this week, just as she was expected to face questions from lawmakers about her handling of a massive fraud scheme that largely targeted Native Americans.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, announced Wednesday that she had accepted the resignation of Carmen Heredia, director of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. The governor lauded Heredia’s leadership of the agency while blaming Republican lawmakers for politicizing the confirmation process, saying it had become clear they would not confirm Heredia’s nomination.

Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Republican and chair of the Senate’s Committee on Director Nominations, said in a statement that in responding to the fraud scheme, Heredia had “poorly executed” the suspensions of hundreds of behavioral health providers. Heredia had served as the head of AHCCCS without Senate confirmation since early 2023, several years after officials say the fraud likely began during the Republican administration of former Gov. Doug Ducey. In the year before Heredia became director, records show that officials were warned that the fraud was harming patients, but they struggled to respond and failed to alert the public, which Heredia did along with other state leaders in May 2023.

(Earlier this year, a spokesperson for Ducey did not comment on missed opportunities to stop the fraud but said that the former governor went to great lengths to assist in Hobbs’ transition.)

Under Heredia’s leadership, AHCCCS withheld payment to more than 300 businesses as the agency investigated allegations that they were fraudulently billing Medicaid for treatment services. Often, the services had not been provided, and business owners were accused of allowing patients to continue the substance use they had hoped to overcome through treatment.

In a statement, Heredia said she submitted her resignation with a heavy heart and expressed concern that a partisan agenda had resulted in professionals being dragged “through career damaging hearings.” Two years ago, Senate Republicans derailed the nomination of one of Hobbs’ previous picks to lead the health department.

Last September, more than a year after the crackdown began, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica reported that the suspensions had rendered patients homeless. Victims of the scheme, some from other states, were also left without access to the drug and alcohol treatment they were seeking.

Over several years, businesses across much of Arizona, but mostly in Phoenix, reaped huge Medicaid reimbursements by enrolling Native Americans in their programs and billing the state’s American Indian Health Program at exorbitant rates for services, like counseling sessions. (The AIHP is a Medicaid insurance option that, until the fraud was discovered, had no set limit on the amount of money providers could bill for services.)

At a news conference Thursday, Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said there had been more than 100 indictments and 25 convictions so far related to the scheme. She also said she expected more indictments to come.

AHCCCS said over the past two years that officials’ top priority was patient safety, and in May 2023, the agency set up a hotline for victims. It provided brief hotel stays for people displaced from shuttered facilities. However, AHCCCS said last year that it had no record of what happened to a majority of the hotline’s then 11,400 callers, largely because after six months it had stopped tracking outcomes for people who did not stay in a hotel. According to available data, more than 575 people ended up without housing as of last September. AZCIR and ProPublica also found that at least 40 Indigenous residents of sober living homes and treatment facilities in the Phoenix area died as the state fumbled its response.

A handful of the suspended providers, out of hundreds investigated, were allowed to resume billing Medicaid after clearing allegations with the state. But they said the suspensions still pushed them to the brink financially and upended their patients’ care, AZCIR and ProPublica found. As a result, Heredia’s swift and aggressive response to the crisis — which authorities said was needed to root out fraud and save lives — caused concerns that behavioral health care, especially for Native Americans, was increasingly difficult to access.

“Under Katie Hobbs’ leadership, Heredia’s response has been incredibly disturbing, to say the least,” Hoffman said. “We are left with a broken system due to Heredia’s mismanagement, and our vulnerable populations are caught up in this collapse.”

A spokesperson for Senate Republicans declined a request for an interview with Hoffman.

While Hoffman’s statement mostly focused on the fraud scheme that authorities say cost the state $2 billion, he said he also took issue with other matters within AHCCCS involving long-term care.

In addition to Heredia’s resignation, Jennifer Cunico, the director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, also stepped down this week. Like Heredia, Cunico was set to appear before lawmakers for a confirmation hearing. Cunico said she was proud of her work at the department but made the difficult decision to withdraw her nomination after it became clear she wouldn’t be confirmed either. Her resignation comes two years after Hobbs’ previous pick to lead the health department withdrew her nomination following a heated confirmation hearing.

Hoffman said Cunico had defended public health officials’ pandemic response during meetings with lawmakers but did not provide details. Hoffman previously sponsored legislation that prohibited state and local agencies from enacting vaccine mandates.

The governor defended Heredia’s response to the fraud crisis and said both Heredia and Cunico had worked on a range of initiatives, including improving access to maternal health care.

“Carmen Heredia helped root out a multi-billion dollar wave of Medicaid fraud and the related humanitarian fallout which the previous administration ignored,” Hobbs said in a statement. “Her work to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in our healthcare system is a model for the nation, and she always ensured people who needed help continued to get it.”

She added, “The Senate’s unprecedented politicization of the director confirmation process has ended the directorship of two healthcare professionals who have made our state government run more efficiently and more effectively.”

Christopher Lomahquahu, an investigative reporter and Roy W. Howard fellow for AZCIR, contributed reporting.

by Asia Fields, Ashley Clarke, Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

Since President Donald Trump took office, his administration laid off nearly half of the Department of Education division that handles civil rights investigations and shifted its focus. The administration halted work on thousands of pending discrimination cases while ordering investigations aligned with its priorities.

Some people have spoken out about their cases being in limbo or about not receiving updates. We know there are thousands of other people who are affected. We need your help to see the full picture of how the dismantling of the Office for Civil Rights is affecting students, parents, school employees and their wider communities.

If you submitted a complaint or had a case closed this year, or if you have a currently pending case, we want to hear about your experience. We’re also interested in connecting to people with other insights about the Department of Education.

If you work or worked for the Department of Education, please do not fill out the form. Instead, use Signal to contact reporter Jennifer Smith Richards at jsmithrichards.93 or reporter Jodi Cohen at jodireporter.88.

We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our reporting.

As journalists, our role is to write about issues. We cannot provide legal advice or other support. However, there are resources available. We know these cases can stem from painful experiences, and mental health support is available if you need it:

• The National Sexual Assault Hotline is available online or by calling 800-656-4673.
• The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available online or by calling or texting 988.
• The Trevor Project provides support to LGBTQ+ youth. You can connect online, by calling 866-488-7386 or by texting 678678.

You can share your experience using our form.

If you would prefer to connect using the encrypted messaging app Signal, our number is 917-512-0201. You can also contact ocr@propublica.org with any questions.

If you would like to connect with ProPublica reporters about other topics, you can reach out to a reporter or send a tip to our newsroom.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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

In California, the federal government was deep into an investigation of alleged racial discrimination at a school district where, a parent said, students called a Black peer racial slurs and played whipping sounds from their cellphones during a lesson about slavery. Then the U.S. Department of Education in March suddenly closed the California regional outpost of its Office for Civil Rights and fired all its employees there. That investigation and others went silent.

In South Dakota, the OCR abruptly terminated its work with a school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. The same office that helped craft the agreement to treat indigenous students equally made a stunning about-face and decided in March that helping Native American students would discriminate against white students.

During its first 100 days, as the Trump administration has dismantled the Education Department, one of its biggest targets has been the civil rights arm. Now, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is “reorienting” what’s left of it.

Part of that shift has been ordering investigations related to the administration’s priorities, such as ending the participation of transgender girls and women in girls’ and women’s sports. After hearing that a transgender woman from Wagner College in New York competed in a women’s fencing tournament at the University of Maryland last month, the head of the OCR launched a special investigation into both schools and threatened their access to federal funding.

Through internal memos and case data, interviews with more than a dozen current agency attorneys, and public records requests to school districts and other targets of investigations across the country, ProPublica has documented how the Trump administration has radically reshaped the OCR.

Only 57 investigations that found a civil rights violation and led to change at a school or college were completed in March, ProPublica has learned. Only 51 were resolved by finding violations in April. The Biden administration completed as many as 200 investigations a month.

Leadership under President Donald Trump also has made it easier for the OCR to drop discrimination complaints quickly. In March, 91% of cases closed by the office were dismissed without an investigation, and 89% were dismissed outright in April, according to internal case data obtained by ProPublica. Typically, 70% of cases are dismissed because they don’t meet criteria to warrant an investigation.

With more than half of the Education Department’s civil rights offices closed and the division reduced to a fraction of its former staff, families’ pleas for updates and action have gone unheard. One OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told ProPublica that their caseload went from 60 to 380 as they absorbed cases previously handled by employees who worked in offices that had been closed. Some remaining employees have not been able to access documents, voicemail and email of fired employees.

As with civil rights divisions in other federal agencies that the Trump administration has fundamentally altered, the OCR has worked for decades to uphold constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race and gender.

“OCR is the most useless it’s ever been, and it’s the most dangerous it’s ever been. And by useless, I mean unavailable. Unable to do the work,” said Michael Pillera, who until recently was an OCR attorney in Washington, D.C. He is now with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Investigating cases that allege racism, discrimination based on sexual orientation or mistreatment of students with disabilities now requires permission from Trump appointees, according to a memo from OCR leadership. As a result, thousands of discrimination investigations are idled, even ones that were nearing a resolution when Trump took office again.

“I thought we were somewhere, and now we are back to square one because they are closed,” said K.D., the mother of the Black California student who said her daughter has been called racial epithets by her classmates. She emailed the agency more than a month ago to try to get an update on the investigation, but said the agency has not responded. ProPublica is identifying her by initials to protect her child’s privacy. “I never would have imagined that something so essential would go away,” she said.

Education Department spokespeople did not respond to questions and requests for comment sent over several weeks about changes in the civil rights division.

The OCR attorney who said they are working through 380 cases said the job is now “impossible.”

“The people who remain are doing all they can. We’re doing all we can. But it isn’t enough, and it keeps us up at night,” they said.

Another OCR attorney who, like others, asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said the administration’s new vision for civil rights enforcement has harmed families.

“We were sort of the last bit of hope for them,” he said, “and now they’re calling and emailing and saying, ‘Hey, I thought you all were going to help me.’”

Protesters rally outside of the headquarters of the Department of Education in Washington in March. More than half of the department’s Office of Civil Rights outposts have been closed, and more than half of its employees have been laid off since the new administration took over. (Jason Andrew for ProPublica) A Shadow Division

The arduous, grinding work undertaken by OCR attorneys is starkly different from the high-speed investigations that the Education Department announces in press releases every few days.

The OCR, historically one of the government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been known for being a neutral fact-finder. Its investigators followed a process to determine whether complaints from the public met legal criteria for a civil rights claim, then carried out investigations methodically.

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The vast majority of investigations were based on discrimination complaints from students and families, and a large share of those were related to disability discrimination. The inquiries typically took months and, in complex cases, years. The lengthy investigations sometimes were a source of criticism. The agency didn’t share details of the investigations until they were completed, and the agreements often involved federal oversight going forward.

Investigations being publicized now have largely bypassed the agency’s civil rights attorneys, according to Education Department employees. McMahon and OCR head Craig Trainor created what amounts to a shadow division.

The Trump administration has ordered more than a dozen investigations in the past three months on its own, not initiated by an outside complainant. These “directed investigations” are typically rare; there were none during President Joseph Biden’s administration.

The investigations have targeted schools with transgender athletes, gender-neutral bathrooms and initiatives that the administration views as discriminatory to white students. OCR attorneys told ProPublica they’ve been given prewritten letters, which they’ve reluctantly signed, to send to targets of these investigations. Some letters describe transgender girls as “biological males,” which is ideologically pointed language that OCR attorneys say they’ve never used before.

“They’re blowing through past precedents, past practices, best practices,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under former Presidents Barack Obama and Biden and departed the office in January. “And they’re not even attempting to appear like neutral arbiters of the law.”

In a first, McMahon and Trainor created ways to divert complaints and investigations away from the OCR’s legal experts entirely. The administration made an “End DEI” portal that bypasses the traditional online complaint system and seeks only grievances about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. Unlike the regular complaint system, the diversity portal submissions are not routed to OCR staff.

“We have no idea where that portal goes, who it goes to, how they review the cases. No idea,” said the attorney who said he struggles with being unable to help families. “That avoids us interfering with the games they’re trying to play, if they silo off the real civil rights lawyers.”

McMahon then announced a “Title IX Special Investigations Team” last month to work with the Department of Justice and appointed Trainor to it. It launches its own investigations into schools that include transgender girls in athletics.

In an internal memo to the new team that was obtained by ProPublica, Trainor defined the special team’s purpose: “To effectively and efficiently address the increasing volume of Title IX single-sex sports/spaces cases, expedite those investigations and resolutions, and collaborate seamlessly with DOJ to conclude investigations that go to DOJ for enforcement.”

There’s no indication that more complaints related to transgender students are coming from the public, according to internal case data. Last month, in what appears to be the first case assigned to the Title IX team, the group notified the University of Maryland and Wagner College that it would investigate each school. The investigation began after Fox News and other media reported about a fencing tournament at the University of Maryland in which a transgender player from Wagner competed. Trainor signed the notification letters himself, a departure from Lhamon’s practice.

A Wagner College spokesperson declined to comment. A University of Maryland spokesperson declined to comment about the investigation but said the tournament, while on the university’s campus, was run by USA Fencing.

The public used to be able to see what the OCR was investigating. But an online database that is supposed to list all investigations underway hasn’t been updated since Trump took office.

At that time, about 12,000 pending investigations were listed. Among them were two related to a family’s complaints that their California school district discriminated against students with disabilities, including by barricading them inside what it called a “reset” room. But then the OCR closed its California office and fired its employees.

“All work came to a halt. They stopped responding. Nothing was being done to stop the practice and protect kids,” Genevieve Goldstone, the parent of the Del Mar Union School District student who filed the disability discrimination complaint, said in an interview. “My federal complaints were meant to protect more kids and stop the abuses in the district.”

The district said it could not comment on the pending investigation but said it participated in more than a dozen interviews with an OCR attorney. It also said it conducted its own review of the allegations and determined that they were unsubstantiated.

OCR attorneys say they have been repeatedly blindsided by public announcements about policy changes and investigations. To find out what Trainor and McMahon have launched on their behalf, they check the Education Department’s website daily for press releases.

Those statements sometimes quote Trainor preemptively saying a school “appears to violate” civil rights law. The attorneys worry they will have no choice, despite what their investigations uncover, but to find against schools that have already been excoriated by the department publicly.

For example, in a press release announcing an investigation into a transgender athlete participating in girls’ track and field in Portland Public Schools in Oregon, Trainor said, “We will not allow the Portland Public Schools District or any other educational entity that receives federal funds to trample on the antidiscrimination protections that women and girls are guaranteed under law.”

A third current OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of losing her job, said the administration is misinterpreting civil rights law. “It’s subverting our office, or weaponizing it in these ways, without following our process,” she said.

Conservative groups with complaints about diversity or transgender students have been able to file complaints directly with Trainor and get quick results — another norm-breaking way to operate outside of the OCR’s protocol.

America First Legal, a group founded by Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that considers itself the “answer to the ACLU,” emailed Trainor a few days after Trump’s “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” executive order. The order directs schools to stop teaching about or supporting diversity, equity and gender identity.

“AFL respectfully requests that the Department of Education open investigations into the following public-school districts in Northern Virginia for continuing violations of Title IX,” the letter read, listing five districts that have policies welcoming to transgender students.

Senior leadership in Washington opened the cases the following week. America First issued a press release headlined “VICTORY.” The group declined to comment further.

First image: A letter from Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, claims that American educational institutions have discriminated against white and Asian students. Second image: A letter addressed to the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools announces a Title IX investigation into a gender-neutral bathroom. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica) Backtracking on Civil Rights

Remaking the OCR isn’t just about increasing caseloads and reordering political priorities. The Trump administration now is taking steps to roll back OCR’s previous civil rights work.

Last month, Trump issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies, including the Education Department, to stop enforcing cases involving policies that disproportionately affect certain groups — for example, when Black students are disciplined more harshly than white students for the same infractions or when students with disabilities are suspended more than any other group even though they represent a small percentage of student enrollment.

Trump’s order requires the agencies to “assess all pending investigations, lawsuits, and consent judgements” that consider disproportionate discipline and “take appropriate action.” Complaints made to the OCR that students were unfairly disciplined could be thrown out; existing enforcement actions or monitoring of schools that had disciplined students disproportionately could be revoked.

The OCR under Trainor did this in Rapid City, South Dakota — even before the executive order. About a year ago, the office had signed an agreement with Rapid City Area Schools after an investigation found that the district’s Native American students were disciplined far more harshly than white ones. They also were kept from enrolling in advanced courses.

The OCR said that when speaking with an investigator, the superintendent of schools at the time said that Native American students in her district had higher truancy rates because they operated on what she termed “Indian Time.” She said, too, that they don’t value education, according to the investigation’s findings.

The former superintendent, Nicole Swigart, denied saying any of that.

“I recognize those comments are horrendous,” Swigart said in an interview with ProPublica. She noted that the OCR investigation was opened in 2010 and that she first spoke to an investigator in 2022. “I’m not lying when I say I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it, and I don’t know where it came from.”

In the agreement with the OCR, the district promised to examine its practices and make things right; the OCR would monitor its progress. The district also brought in a new superintendent.

But last month, the OCR abruptly terminated that agreement, based on its differing interpretation of civil rights law. The OCR’s new view is that equity and diversity efforts discriminate against white students. It was, in the view of agency attorneys, the most severe breach of the OCR’s mission and methods to date. There was no public announcement.

“Native students in Rapid City just lost a layer of protection,” the Lakota People’s Law Project announced on Facebook. “Native students are still being pushed out of classrooms and denied opportunities.”

Darren Thompson, who is Ojibwe, said the OCR’s decision to abandon the agreement was “another cycle of the federal government failing to uphold its promises.”

“And this time, they are partisan, political,” said Thompson, who works for the nonprofit Sacred Defense Fund affiliated with the Lakota group in Rapid City.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the school district said it has completed much of the work — including broader access to educational opportunities and an improved behavior tracking process — and plans to continue it even without federal oversight. But it also said this week that under the OCR’s new directives, “we must shift our approach.” The district did not elaborate on what will change.

It’s unclear whether the OCR has ended agreements with other districts or colleges. Education Department spokespeople did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Pushing Back

Some subjects of the OCR’s new directives and investigations have capitulated. A school district in Tumwater, Washington, that Trainor targeted for allowing a transgender basketball player from an opposing team to compete responded by voting to support the state athletic association excluding trans players altogether.

But some are pushing back.

Denver Public Schools was the first target of one of Trainor’s “directed investigations” in late January — over the existence of one all-gender, multistall bathroom on one floor of a Denver high school. According to communication obtained by ProPublica through public records requests, the district called out the OCR for “continuing to take a different approach with this case without explanation, a case with no complainant who is awaiting any form of relief or remedy.”

Kristin Bailey, a Denver Public Schools attorney, wrote to an OCR supervisor that the way the investigation is being handled “appears to be retaliatory.”

Since February, at least half a dozen lawsuits have been filed to try to stop the dismantling of the Education Department and its civil rights functions — among them, suits by Democratic state attorneys general and from the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. A recent suit by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates on behalf of children and their parents — all of whom have pending complaints alleging discrimination — claims they’re suffering from the OCR’s “abandonment” of its core mission.

The NAACP also sued the department, McMahon and Trainor, citing the “End DEI” portal and seeking a halt to such anti-diversity efforts. And the Victim Rights Law Center, representing students and parents, sued to try to restore what has been cut from the OCR so the agency can fulfill its mandate. It noted that under McMahon and Trainor, “cherry-picked investigations appear to be the only matters the Department is currently pursuing.” Those lawsuits are pending. The government has argued in the NAACP lawsuit that the group lacks standing, and in the other it has not filed a response.

Several OCR attorneys told ProPublica that they hope these groups and school districts continue to push back. In the meantime, they said, they will continue to try to work on behalf of the public to uphold the nation’s civil rights laws.

“I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, helping the people I can help, and keep my eye on the long game,” said a fourth OCR attorney. “Hopefully we’re still here and can help rebuild in the future.”

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Lizzie Presser

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

The Texas Senate has unanimously passed legislation that aims to prevent maternal deaths under the state’s strict abortion ban.

Written in response to a ProPublica investigation last year, Senate Bill 31, called The Life of the Mother Act, represents a remarkable turn among the Republican lawmakers who were the original supporters of the ban. For the first time in four years, they acknowledged that women were being denied care because of confusion about the law and took action to clarify its terms.

“We don’t want to have any reason for hesitation,” said Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who authored the state’s original abortion ban and sponsored this reform with bipartisan input and support. Just last fall, he had said the law he wrote was “plenty clear.”

The bill stops short of removing what doctors say are the ban’s biggest impediments to care, including its major criminal penalties, and doesn’t expand abortion access to cases of fetal anomalies, rape or incest. Sen. Carol Alvarado, the Democratic lawmaker who co-authored the bill, said that its limits were a “real hard pill to swallow” but that it could still make a difference. “I believe this bill will save lives,” she said.

ProPublica’s reporting showed how doctors in states that ban abortion have waited to intervene in cases where women ultimately died of high-risk complications.

To address that problem, Senate Bill 31 states that a life-threatening medical emergency doesn’t need to be “imminent.” It also says doctors can terminate ectopic pregnancies, which occur when the fertilized egg implants outside of the uterine cavity. It would allow for a pregnant patient to receive cancer treatment, Hughes said, even if doing so threatened the viability of a fetus.

The bill also clarifies that medical staff or hospital officials can discuss termination with patients without violating a provision of the law that criminalizes “aiding and abetting” an abortion. It had been unclear to doctors whether simply discussing the option could lead to steep criminal penalties; patients have reported not being able to get straight answers from their providers about their prognosis and options for treatment.

It remains to be seen how the bill, if made law, would be interpreted by doctors and hospitals, and whether risk-averse institutions would still delay care during pregnancy complications.

Many reproductive rights advocates are skeptical given that the bill does not explicitly address many high-risk pregnancy complications. The most common one in the second trimester, previable premature rupture of membranes, or PPROM, occurs when someone’s water breaks early. In these cases, the chance of the fetus surviving is low, but delaying a pregnancy termination leaves the patient at risk of infection, which can lead to sepsis, a potentially deadly condition. Since the state banned abortion, lawyers at many hospitals across Texas have advised physicians not to empty the uterus until they can document signs of infection — an indication of a life-threatening emergency.

The death of Josseli Barnica, which ProPublica reported last year, reveals the dangers of forcing miscarrying patients to wait for care. Diagnosed with an “inevitable” miscarriage at 17 weeks, she showed symptoms similar to PPROM without an official diagnosis — her water had not yet broken. While stable, she was made to wait 40 hours until the fetal heartbeat ended before doctors induced delivery. She later died of sepsis, which medical experts say she likely developed because of the wait.

In addition to documenting cases in which women died of sepsis, ProPublica has shown how rates of the potentially deadly complication spiked by more than 50% statewide in second-trimester pregnancy-loss hospitalizations after Texas banned abortion.

Officials with the Texas Medical Association, the Texas Hospital Association and major anti-abortion groups — Texas Right to Life, Texas Alliance for Life and the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs — told ProPublica they believed that this bill would now allow doctors to offer a termination at the point of a PPROM diagnosis, before infection set in.

Dr. Zeke Silva, chair of the Texas Medical Association’s Council on Legislation, included PPROM on a list of potentially life-threatening conditions he believed may fall under the bill’s clarified exception. The list, which is not exhaustive, includes preeclampsia, renal failure, liver failure, cardiac disease, pulmonary hypertension and neurological conditions. He added that decisions to intervene because a medical condition could be life-threatening “are, by definition, subjective, based on multiple clinical considerations” and must be based on “sound medical judgment.”

However, ProPublica spoke with six legal experts who said they were unsure whether hospitals, wary of litigation or penalties, would interpret the bill to mean that doctors can offer a termination to patients with PPROM.

Some PPROM patients can remain pregnant for weeks and not develop infections, while others can contract an infection and deteriorate very quickly, noted Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I could see some doctors saying this means, ‘I have more leeway to intervene in all PPROM cases,’ and others saying, ‘I still don’t know, so I’ll wait until signs of infection.’”

The largest association of OB-GYNs, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in an emailed statement that it did not support the bill: “This bill would keep Texas’ abortion ban in place and we strongly oppose the abortion ban and will continue to do so.”

Yesterday, the Texas Senate also passed Bill 2880, which would authorize civil lawsuits against anyone in or outside of Texas who distributes or provides abortion medication to someone in the state. It is expected to face pushback in the state House.

The Life of the Mother Act now goes to the House, where it must be voted out of committee before it heads to the House floor. Both chambers would need to agree on a final version before the governor could sign it into law.

ProPublica

ProPublica announced on Thursday that Gus Garcia-Roberts has been hired as a national reporter.

Garcia-Roberts comes to ProPublica from The Washington Post, where he published investigations into the overdose death of Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs; the sexual abuse allegations against Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer and Major League Baseball’s secretive system in examining domestic abuse and sexual assault; and how the NFL has failed in hiring Black coaches, part of a series that won the Associated Press Sports Editors top prize for projects and the Online Journalism Awards’ prize for excellence in sports reporting.

Before joining the Post, Garcia-Roberts worked on investigative teams at Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. At Newsday, he was a part of the team whose series on hidden police misconduct was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service. He is the author of “Jimmy the King: Murder, Vice, and the Reign of a Dirty Cop” and the co-author of “Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball’s Steroid Era.”

“We are so thrilled to welcome Gus and his enviable reporting and writing chops to ProPublica and excited to turn ProPublica’s lens on the world of sports,” said managing editor Tracy Weber. “Stay tuned.”

“I’m beyond excited to be joining ProPublica, an institution whose mission and work I’ve admired for years,” said Garcia-Roberts. He starts next week.

by Rob Davis

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches, to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In Phnom Penh’s hot season, when the Cambodian capital’s sweltering, subtropical air routinely soars to 100 degrees, more workers than usual visited the infirmaries inside a factory that made baby clothes for Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel brand.

As many as 15 people a month typically became too weak to work in May and June, according to a medical worker employed by the factory. Even at other times of year, she said, eight to 10 workers wound up in the clinic monthly because they felt weak, including one or two a month who fell unconscious and needed to go to the hospital.

Other former employees told ProPublica they sometimes saw two or three people a day taken to an on-site clinic. One described how he carried workers too weak to walk. Another said she saw thin workers being taken to the clinic, their faces pale and eyes closed.

Y&W Garment’s employees — at one time numbering around 4,500 — operated sewing machines and packaged clothing in cavernous buildings with fans but no air conditioning. The fans sometimes broke and weren’t fixed, one worker said. Another said the inside of the factory could get hotter than it was outdoors. “It’s so hot,” said Phan Oem, 53, who started working there shortly after the factory opened in 2012. “I’m sweaty. It’s too hot.”

Phan Oem said it was “so hot” inside the Y&W Garment factory. She started working in the factory shortly after it opened in 2012. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Workers have fainted for years inside Cambodia’s garment factories, where more than 57,000 people now produce Nike goods. People at Nike’s suppliers fainted en masse in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to news reports at the time, part of a string of events in which thousands of Cambodians got sick, vomited or collapsed on the job. (The term “fainting” in Cambodia is used for conditions that range from losing consciousness to becoming too dizzy or weak to work.)

Nike had moved into Cambodia in 2000, just two years after co-founder Phil Knight promised to end labor abuses that accompanied its push into Southeast Asia.

Nike took action after faintings made headlines. It sent executives on a fact-finding mission in 2012. It asked for international labor officials to investigate. Nike in 2017 told The Guardian, “We take the issue of fainting seriously, as it can be both a social response and an indication of issues within a factory that may require corrective action.”

Yet for all the measures Nike says it relies on to keep workers safe, which include heat standards in factories, internal and external audits, announced and unannounced visits, Y&W workers said fainting persisted during the two years Nike products were made there.

Jill Tucker, who led the U.N.-backed oversight group Better Factories Cambodia from 2011 to 2014, said she was not surprised to hear that workers regularly fainted at Y&W Garment.

The problem is “a consequence of low wages and poor working conditions that continue, even after decades of work on this issue,” Tucker said. “People work very hard for very little pay.”

Workers at closely packed tables stitch hats for babies in the Y&W Garment factory, which produced clothing for Nike and other brands. The photo was provided by a former employee who asked not to be identified.

Representatives of Y&W Garment and its parent company, Hong Kong-based Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to emails, text messages or calls.

It’s unclear what Nike knew about working conditions at the Phnom Penh factory. Better Factories Cambodia, whose audits Nike has said in the past it relied on to monitor suppliers, told ProPublica it did not know workers were fainting at Y&W. ProPublica previously reported on low wages at Y&W, where just 1% of workers made what Nike says is typical of workers in its supply chain.

Nike didn’t answer ProPublica’s questions, including about whether it stopped working with the Y&W factory because of any violations of its code of conduct. Y&W Garment stopped making Nike apparel in late 2023, shortly before going bankrupt, workers told ProPublica. Nike said in a statement that it is “committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing” and sets clear expectations for its suppliers through its code of conduct.

Workers said Nike garments at Y&W were produced under the auspices of Haddad Brands, a private New York company whose website says it produces Nike children’s clothing and enforces Nike’s code of conduct. Haddad did not respond to repeated emails; someone who answered its phone hung up on a reporter who called, and no one responded to a subsequent voicemail.

On its website, Haddad says it works directly with its factories “to ensure that each of our suppliers has the ability to not only manufacture our product, but to do so responsibly — for the workers, for the environment, and for our customers.”

At Y&W Garment, a set of corrugated metal buildings along both sides of a busy road in rapidly developed southern Phnom Penh, two workers said faintings were so frequent that they were no longer surprising. The medical employee interviewed by ProPublica blamed overtime hours and workers not sleeping much or eating enough.

If employees fell unconscious, they went to the hospital, the medical worker said. Otherwise, they were given calcium pills and allowed to rest on a thin mat spread on a metal cot.

Then, she said, they typically went back to work.

Y&W is not an isolated case. The Cambodian government reported more than 4,500 faintings in factories between 2017 and 2019, according to news reports, a problem it has attributed to pesticide spraying, chemicals used in manufacturing, heat, poor nutrition and inadequate ventilation. Media reports also quoted the government citing psychological factors, such as workers’ beliefs in supernatural forces.

Bill Clinton set out to alleviate harsh working conditions in Cambodia’s factories in 1999, when as president he signed a trade deal that greatly expanded Cambodian garment exports to the United States.

Cambodia’s emerging industry at the time was helping to shore up the country’s economy as it recovered from war and the 1970s Khmer Rouge genocide. A few months after the trade deal was signed, an incident illustrated why labor issues were a concern. More than two dozen exhausted workers fainted at a Phnom Penh garment factory. A union representative told a local newspaper they’d been working 14-hour days, fearful they’d be fired.

The Clinton trade agreement called for creating a labor monitor to bring Cambodia’s factories up to international standards. If the manufacturers improved their working conditions, the United States would expand its import quotas. Better Factories Cambodia, which is part of the United Nations’ International Labor Organization and has been funded by the U.S. Labor Department, began operating in 2001.

Police and unionists told Agence France-Presse that at least 500 garment workers, mostly women, fainted at work on Oct. 12, 2009. The factory where a police official said the incident occurred was not part of Nike’s supply chain, according to Nike’s factory list at the time. (AFP via Getty Images)

The group would ensure “American companies like Gap or Nike feel safe placing orders in Cambodia, knowing that factories comply with human rights, labor laws and good working conditions,” Van Sou Ieng, then-president of the Cambodian garment industry’s trade association, told Vogue in 2002.

Nike, which had withdrawn from the country when a BBC investigation in 2000 found children as young as 12 working for a Nike supplier, returned after Better Factories Cambodia launched. The company has repeatedly pointed to Better Factories Cambodia as an essential part of its factory oversight over the years. In 2012, Nike said that it relied on the group’s factory audits, rather than conducting its own, to ensure adequate working conditions in the country. (Nike did not respond when asked about Better Factories Cambodia’s current role in auditing.)

Unlike workplace safety regulators in the United States, Better Factories Cambodia was not given enforcement power to fine or shut down problem factories. In addition, industry and government made up two-thirds of the organization’s advisory committee. That gave them much more influence than workers, according to Tucker.

In 2012, Better Factories Cambodia took on mass faintings with something called the One Change Campaign. It followed a string of media reports that prompted a frantic search for solutions, Tucker said. The idea was to get each factory owner to do one thing to reduce fainting that the law didn’t already require. It might be free lunches, snacks or twice-daily paid exercise programs to combat fatigue and monotony — aerobics for workers who were at risk of being malnourished.

“It was just lame,” said Tucker, who was the organization’s leader at the time. She said she came to realize that the agency was taking the wrong approach, focusing on short-term initiatives instead of tackling the root causes of problems.

Better Factories Cambodia has had a mixed record since then.

It has called attention to the failure of Cambodian factories to obey labor standards. The organization in February reported that almost half of the more than 350 factories it inspected in 2023 made employees work excessive overtime hours, while two-thirds of factories were hotter than the organization’s recommended 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The report didn’t identify the factories.

Daramongkol Keo, a Better Factories Cambodia spokesperson, said the organization has seen meaningful improvements in wage compliance, gender equality, working hours and workplace safety while it has been operating. He said the group has consistently monitored and reported fainting incidents in Cambodia.

For all the issues it’s uncovered, though, labor advocates say its inspectors miss many more.

A 2024 report from the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, a Cambodian legal aid group, found that Better Factories gave perfect marks for labor union compliance even at factories where employees said union busting was pervasive.

If Better Factories’ findings don’t reflect actual working conditions, the report said, “then everyone is participating — whether willingly or not — in a large-scale whitewashing scheme.”

When asked for a response to the criticism, the leader of Better Factories Cambodia, Froukje Boele, told ProPublica, “we appreciate the report’s focus and emphasis on working conditions, freedom of association and collective bargaining.”

Cambodia’s garment industry praises Better Factories Cambodia’s work. Ken Loo, the current head of the industry’s trade group, said the program complements government and industry efforts “to ensure high levels of social and labor compliance.”

Better Factories Cambodia was unaware of the incidents at Y&W Garment that former workers described to ProPublica, according to Keo, the spokesperson. That’s despite conducting four inspections from March 2020 through July 2023.

The organization acknowledged some shortcomings of its two-day, unannounced audits in a report this year. It said problems like sexual harassment and efforts to interfere with union organizing are hard to verify.

“If fainting incidents were known but not adequately addressed at the factory level,” Keo told ProPublica, “it underscores the broader challenges of enforcement and accountability within the industry.”

Had the issue of faintings been confined to Cambodia, the shortcomings of Better Factories Cambodia might explain Nike’s failure to rid its supply chain of the problem. That wasn’t the case, according to findings of a labor monitoring group in Vietnam in 2016.

That year, the Worker Rights Consortium described numerous faintings at a Vietnamese supplier of Nike and other Western brands. Workers at Hansae Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City told the group that pressure to meet production targets in the un-air-conditioned factory was so high that they didn’t drink water to save time visiting the toilet. Hundreds of workers went on strike, twice.

The Worker Rights Consortium reported in 2016 that workers at Hansae Vietnam were skipping breaks and avoiding drinking water even as temperatures in the factory soared. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

The consortium called in a certified industrial hygienist, Garrett Brown, to conduct an independent investigation.

It was months before Brown was allowed to enter the 12-building factory complex that employed roughly 10,000 people. Inside, he and another colleague recorded temperatures as high as 95 degrees, he said.

“It was goddamn hot inside those plants, for sure,” Brown told ProPublica. By the end of the day, he said, he was exhausted.

“You’re sweating profusely, walking between the buildings and in the buildings as well,” he said. “And we were just doing it for eight hours — and a lot of workers were going for 10, 12, 14 hours.”

Hansae, which didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica, developed a remediation plan to fix the problems Brown and others had identified. It included installing cooling systems and shutting off the electricity in production areas to ensure that workers took lunch breaks. Nike no longer produces at the factory.

Temperatures came down far faster in 2021 when Nike was confronted with an employee complaint about dizziness and dehydration at Nike’s retail store in downtown Portland, which sits not far from the company’s suburban corporate headquarters.

Unlike in Vietnam, the complaint was about temperatures in the low 80s — “super hot,” one worker told an inspector from the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division — not the mid-90s that Brown measured in Ho Chi Minh City. And unlike in Vietnam, it took days, not months, for workplace safety inspectors to get inside.

According to a state report, the inspectors quickly discovered that the problem was already being addressed, at least temporarily. Nike had brought in five portable air conditioners, spending what a company official would later estimate was $40,000 to get the summer heat under control.

Keat Soriththeavy and Ouch Sony contributed reporting and translation. Kirsten Berg of ProPublica and Matthew Kish of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed research.

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

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

Josh Dallin spends his workdays talking to Utahns who raise cattle and grow crops, and knew that many were in distress. Everyone from neighbors to fertilizer dealers to equipment suppliers were telling him they were worried that a farmer or rancher they knew was at risk of suicide.

Then in 2023, with money allocated by Congress, Dallin had new help to offer: As executive director of an agriculture center at Utah State University Extension, he had scores of $2,000 vouchers that Utahns working in agriculture could use to get free therapy.

Dallin feared no one in the typically stoical farming community would take him up on the federally funded offer. He was wrong.

Farmers and ranchers across Utah quickly accepted the money, which ran out in just four months — well before he expected — and his office had to start turning people away. It convinced Dallin of the deep need in the state’s agricultural communities, and people’s openness to getting help when cost is not a barrier. “I want you to know,” he recalled one voucher recipient telling him, “that this saved my life.”

“It was heartbreaking,” he said, to have to put “the brakes on the program.”

The money for the vouchers was part of a one-time $28 million allocation sent to states to help Americans producing food handle the extra stresses of the coronavirus pandemic. Any state that applied to the U.S. Department of Agriculture was awarded up to half a million dollars — which was used to hold trainings, start hotlines staffed by mental health workers and, like in Utah, provide therapy.

With that funding now mostly spent, leaders in some states have tapped state funds or leaned on private donors to ensure mental health support continues.

Josh Dallin helped run a program that used federal money to connect Utah farmers and ranchers to free therapy. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Utah has not — and, at least according to one legislator, has no intention to do so.

Republican state Sen. Scott Sandall, a third-generation rancher and farmer who is the Executive Appropriations Committee vice chair, criticized Congress for creating a program with a one-time boost of money, saying that without ongoing funding it was destined to fail.

“The way they set it up,” he said, “was eventually to have it go away.”

The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reached out to Gov. Spencer Cox — himself a farmer who has advocated for better mental health resources in the state. In 2022, he acknowledged in a Utah Farm Bureau article that poor mental health was a problem affecting the state’s farmers and said he hoped investments in rural mental health could better support the agriculture industry. His office did not respond to interview requests for this story.

If You or Someone You Know Needs Help

Although Utah does not currently have funds to pay for therapy for the agricultural industry, there is still support available.

You can dial 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you live in Utah, it will route you to the Utah Crisis Line, which is staffed by certified crisis workers at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute. The call is free and confidential, and you can reach someone at any time of day.

Another hotline, 1-800-FARM-AID, has staffers who can talk with you about what you are going through and connect you to resources.

Utah State University Extension has other resources available as well. You can listen to its podcast, “AgWellness,” which organizers say is aimed at teaching you to open up about what concerns you and how to help others who feel stressed. There are also free online courses that can teach you how to find relief from stress, or learn what to say and how to help if you know someone else who is struggling.

Farmers in the United States are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, according to the National Rural Health Association. Utah’s suicide rate has consistently been among the nation’s highest, and farmers and ranchers struggle with the volatility that comes with working in the dry mountain region. They die by suicide at the third-highest rate by vocation in the state, according to state data, behind miners and construction workers.

Fluctuating market prices, unpredictable weather and a stigma that farmers should be “tough” and can handle their mental stress themselves were constant pressures described by more than a dozen people The Tribune and ProPublica interviewed — farmers and ranchers, their families and those who support mental health programs for them.

The American Farm Bureau has emphasized in recent news releases that the Trump administration’s shifts in policy around tariffs and federal grant funding have increased the uncertainty faced by America’s farming communities — a population that overwhelmingly backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, according to an analysis by the nonprofit newsroom Investigate Midwest.

Trump acknowledged in his March speech to Congress that tariffs in particular may bring “a little bit of an adjustment period” for America’s farmers but said that he believes they will ultimately help by reducing competition from producers in other countries.

President Donald Trump said during an address to Congress in March that he thinks new trade policies will benefit American farmers. (Win McNamee/Pool Photo via AP)

“Our farmers are going to have a field day right now,” Trump said. “So, to our farmers, have a lot of fun. I love you, too.”

Federal funding to support farmer mental health is tied up with ongoing debates over the Farm Bill, a sweeping package of legislation that Congress has been unable to move forward since it expired in 2023. The USDA said it will be ready to implement mental health programs if federal lawmakers appropriate more money for them.

Sandall, the state legislator, said he knows that the stress of working in an unpredictable industry like agriculture can cause anxiety and mental health challenges. But when he was presented with the data about the high suicide rates in Utah agricultural communities, he said he doesn’t think Utah lawmakers would be interested in funding a program intended to help one specific profession. There is “so much demand” for mental health support throughout the state, he said, adding that targeting certain professions would create a “battle for funding.”

“Whether they’re a mechanic,” he said, “or whether they’re a school teacher, or a doctor, or someone in agriculture, I just think it would be a little hard to start separating out and creating just mental health programs for individual industries.”

“We Carry the Burden”

Mitch Hancock, owner of NooSun Dairy in Corinne, Utah (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune)

The stress of owning a dairy fell on Mitch Hancock’s shoulders overnight after his father-in-law died by suicide in 2014. Hancock’s father-in-law hadn’t shared with his family that he was in crisis.

Mental health, Hancock said, isn’t a topic discussed often among farmers. “I think we struggle in quiet.”

For Hancock, too, there was no time for him to grieve. It was early August, and there were still two more cuttings of alfalfa that needed to be made, another month of harvesting corn and the daily needs of milking cows.

He had been involved with the dairy because his father-in-law had been hoping to transition into retirement, Hancock said. Still, “I had never driven a tractor,” he said. “Never driven a semi in harvest, never driven a chopper. Never done any of that. So it was very much, ‘Well, let’s figure it out as we go.’”

That was more than a decade ago. Hancock and his wife have run NooSun Dairy since on 2,400 acres of land in Box Elder County, where the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains stretch to the east and the Great Salt Lake can be seen past acres of fields and homes looking west.

When he speaks, Hancock is taciturn and straightforward, a trained civil engineer who takes a pragmatic approach to running the dairy farm. But he has new insight now into what his father-in-law faced, he said, a weight far heavier than just having a successful business. He has employees who need these jobs and neighbors who count on him to buy their crops to feed his cows.

“We carry the burden to make sure that we can take care of all of those around us like we always have,” he said, “even in times of low milk prices.”

But being able to pay the dairy’s bills can be challenging, Hancock said, because the price he can sell at can fluctuate. Milk price regulations are set by a complex government process that can cause prices to change as often as daily. When prices are volatile, Hancock said, “it’s hard to look past the doomsday.”

NooSun Dairy (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Like fluctuating market prices, farmers face other elements of their work they can’t control: the price of fertilizers and equipment, how much it rains or whether animals get sick. And their workdays are long.

In addition, in Utah and the arid West, farmers and ranchers worry about water, said Craig Buttars, the outgoing Utah Department of Agriculture and Food commissioner. In one recent year when rainfall was particularly scarce, he recalled, ranchers scrambled to find enough feed and had to haul water to cattle — many of which graze on remote public lands.

“That just added another level of stress,” he said. “It seems like those things can just add on to one another. And at some point, producers, sometimes they just feel like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

Some farmers have also felt villainized by the public for their water use, including by a recent study that suggested that farmers need to cut back or stop growing altogether in order to help stop the shrinking of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. This takes a toll, said Caroline Hargraves, the marketing director with the state agriculture department. “I can’t tell you how often I hear people say that farmers should just quit. Like we shouldn’t even grow our own food,” she said. “Just really demonizing anyone for their water use.”

Chris Chambers is an alfalfa and hay farmer in northern Utah who sells his crop to local cattle producers. He said it’s frustrating to read online comments posted in response to news articles about declining lake levels from people who think farmers should give up their water rights or stop farming.

“It’s your livelihood,” he said. “Water is the key, and we’ve got the senior priority rights to use the water from the state of Utah. And now we’re bad guys for doing it? We feel like we’re doing a good service for feeding people.”

In Rural Utah, Few Therapists and More Guns

In a state that has consistently higher rates of self-reported depression than the rest of the United States, residents in rural areas — where many farmers and ranchers live — face unique challenges in getting help. In the two counties that have the highest amount of farmland in the state, each has about one therapist for every 550 people, according to County Health Rankings, which pulls data from the National Provider Identification registry. (The national ratio is one therapist for every 300 people.)

Without that type of specialized care, doctors in rural areas often rely only on prescription medications, said Tiffany McConkie, a rancher in northeastern Utah who also works as a nurse at a clinic in the town of Altamont, in a three-room medical office decorated with photos of sun-drenched farm landscapes. It’s where people can go for general medical care in their own town in the Uintah Basin, a rural area known for its oil production and agriculture.

But if someone is seeking behavioral health treatment from that same medical system, Uintah Basin Healthcare, the only two therapists on staff work at a larger medical clinic that’s about 20 miles away, according to the health care system’s online provider list.

McConkie said some people hesitate to ask for mental health care, telling her that they are afraid of being medicated or that health care workers will call the police and they’ll be put into a “mental home.”

“And that’s not the case,” she said. “We just want to get them the help they need.”

Where rural Utah lacks easy access to therapists, there is also an abundance of firearms — and a higher suicide rate compared with urban areas, according to a 2018 Harvard study. That study found that the elevated suicide rate in rural Utah is not because people there attempt suicide more often but because they are using guns, which are more lethal than other methods.

“We all feel like we’re tough, right?” said Tiffany McConkie, a Utah rancher and a nurse. “I just feel like we still have that stigma that we can’t say that we’re struggling. We can’t go for help.” (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune)

In the basin where McKonkie lives, the local state-run mental health clinic has responded to those statistics by focusing on gun safety, handing out gun locks and secure ammo boxes at gun shows. They also travel to oil fields to do suicide prevention trainings with workers, an effort to meet their most at-risk population — middle-aged men — where they are.

“It has required some creativity on our part,” said Catherine Jurado, who works at Northeastern Counseling Center, adding that being in a smaller rural area allows them better opportunities to create relationships. “Who else in the United States thinks, ‘I need to go to a beef expo to do suicide prevention?’”

Seeking a Way Forward

The shortfall in funding for farmer mental health has been going on for years. In 2008, Congress created the federal Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network but, for more than a decade, put no money into it. The network eventually was funded as part of the 2018 Farm Bill, but its annual $10 million covers the entire country across four regional offices and today generally does not support individual therapy.

Since the Farm Bill expired in September 2023, Congress has been unable to agree on a new legislative package, nor did it pass a proposed bill last year to give $5 million more in funding for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network. Right now, the network has continued to be funded through temporary extensions.

When the pandemic-era funding injected a new surge of money at the state level in 2021, Utah’s agriculture department and Utah State University Extension — the state’s land-grant university — jumped at the opportunity.

The two organizations used some of the money at first for an educational podcast and online stress courses. And in 2023, they paid for therapy for about 240 farmers and ranchers. There are about 33,000 producers in Utah, according to 2022 Census of Agriculture data, most of whom work other jobs besides farming, which makes up nearly 3% of the state’s economy. As is the case throughout the United States, most Utah farms are family-run.

Buttars, the Utah agriculture department commissioner, said he was surprised by how many people sought the therapy vouchers.

“It really did wake me up to the number of people we have in the state, in our agricultural community, that felt the need for this type of program,” he said.

Dallin, with Utah State, said health care providers reported that those using the vouchers were improving, and that they were receiving positive feedback from those who went to therapy. But the money ran out more than a year ago, and the program has been halted.

In the absence of federal funds, some states have locked in state funding or private donations to keep supporting their farmers.

In Michigan, a program offering free therapy and online stress courses has been in place for nearly a decade, according to Remington Rice with Michigan State University Extension. He said state agriculture leaders advocated for the program after seeing distress among dairy farmers.

“Agriculture is a pillar of society,” Rice said. “No farmers, no food. … And so we need to address an issue that threatens our food supply.”

More recently, he said, a private business — a company that makes cherry products — reached out to donate a portion of its sales to help pay for therapy.

In Washington, a private donor — from a farming family who lost someone to suicide — has provided funding for no-cost therapy sessions for farmers and ranchers, said Don McMoran, who works at Washington State University Extension and is the Western regional lead for the national Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network.

In Utah, those who ran the therapy voucher program have been hesitant to approach lawmakers for state support.

Hargraves, with the state’s agriculture department, said it can be tough to get state legislators to fund new programs. And Dallin said his office has shied away from approaching legislators because the money would be earmarked as part of the higher education budget due to its association with the university. Utah’s legislative leadership has cut $60 million in funding from the public higher education system this year — the biggest budget cut to schools here in at least a decade.

Since the therapy voucher program ended, USU Extension has continued to run awareness campaigns encouraging farmers to invest in their mental health care. And the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food has also introduced mental health workshops into some certifications and courses that farmers and ranchers enroll in.

Dallin said his office has also been working with the University of Utah — a health research university that runs its own hospital system — to try to collect survey data to prove the voucher program’s effectiveness as they try to drum up more money in the future. He said he hopes by partnering, they can lean on the other university’s medical expertise and designation as a health care system.

“I honestly believe,” he said, “that if the government or if some organization were to give us a million dollars a year, I think we could spend it.”

by Tim Golden

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 spring of 2019, as a new Mexican government shut down most of its cooperation with the United States in the fight against drug trafficking, a small group of American drug agents decided to confront the problem in a different way.

Sifting through databases and court files, they compiled dossiers on Mexican officials suspected of colluding with the mafias. Months later, federal prosecutors used the evidence to indict a former security minister, Genaro García Luna, the most important Mexican figure ever convicted on U.S. drug corruption charges.

The senior agent who led the team, Terrance C. Cole, was not rewarded for his efforts. He sought a promotion to run the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Mexico City office but was passed over. Frustrated with the agency’s direction and his own career trajectory, he retired in 2020 to take a job with a software company before becoming Virginia’s secretary of public safety in 2023.

Five years later, Cole is returning to run the DEA, having emerged as President Donald Trump’s unexpected choice for the position.

Unlike other former agents who have led the DEA, Cole never rose to its top ranks or even ran one of its 23 domestic field divisions. His most significant leadership experience has been overseeing police, prisons and emergency response agencies under Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Trump ally who championed Cole for the DEA post.

But with the White House promising an all-out fight against the traffickers who have flooded U.S. markets with fentanyl and other illegal drugs, Cole would bring an unusual background to the job. That includes some searing experiences with the corruption that sustains the drug trade, and a conviction that the United States cannot successfully fight the traffickers without also taking on the officials who abet their operations.

“The Mexican drug cartels work hand-in-hand with corrupt Mexican government officials at high levels,” Cole said in an interview with the far-right news site Breitbart shortly after his retirement. “If the average taxpayer had a basic understanding of how these two groups work together still — to this minute — they would be sickened.”

The Trump administration has warned that it is prepared to take unilateral actions against drug mafias in Mexico if the government there does not greatly escalate its own efforts. But current and former officials said White House discussions have been more focused on the tactics it could use against the traffickers — from drone strikes to cyber operations — than on any longer-term strategy to weaken them.

The administration may also have set in motion a new era of interagency competition on the issue, with the CIA and the Defense Department presenting proposals to expand U.S. intelligence collection on traffickers in Mexico and try to disrupt their operations in ways that may or may not complement the efforts of the DEA and other law enforcement agencies.

How U.S. officials might confront Mexico’s endemic corruption remains an open question. But after decades in which the problem has been mostly subordinated to other U.S. interests, it is likely to command a higher priority in American policy — and to unsettle the U.S. relationship with Mexico.

In its first announcement of punitive tariffs on Mexico, the White House cited “an intolerable alliance” between the government and the drug trade. “This alliance endangers the national security of the United States, and we must eradicate the influence of these dangerous cartels,” it said.

Hoping to avoid an economic calamity, Mexico has conspicuously intensified its own drug enforcement efforts since then. But when asked about Cole’s nomination, President Claudia Sheinbaum warned that she would uphold the sharp restrictions on DEA activities in Mexico imposed by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

“We will never permit interventionism or violations of our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said. “It will not be like before President López Obrador, no.”

Privately, some DEA veterans have lobbied against Cole. Those former officials, most of them associated with the agency’s Special Operations Division, have questioned Cole’s qualifications for the job in discussions with Senate staff aides, but they have been unwilling to air their criticism publicly.

A former college lacrosse player, Cole was described by colleagues as a driven, competitive and sometimes abrasive agent and supervisor. As a rookie agent in McAlester, Oklahoma, Cole made enough of an impression to be sent in 2002 to Bogotá, Colombia, in the early years of the billion-dollar U.S. aid program known as Plan Colombia.

The ambitious U.S. effort sought to help Colombia transform its criminal justice system, root out corruption, and combat the interwoven threats of drug gangs, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups. At the center of the plan was the creation of elite police teams, vetted and trained by the DEA, that operated alongside U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The team that worked with Cole and several other agents was among Colombia’s most effective, former DEA officials said. In Bogotá, it made a series of arrests and drug seizures that struck at the Norte del Valle Cartel and its leader, Diego Montoya. It also uncovered evidence that the cartel had co-opted high-level officials in both the police and military, they said.

“We were doing amazing things,” Cole recalled last year on a podcast with Republican former U.S. Rep. Mary Bono. “Working some of the biggest corruption cases, against some of the highest-level Colombian government officials. But on May 22, 2006, that’s when it all came crashing down for me.”

That day, an informant walked into the Colombian team’s offices in Cali offering a tip that Montoya’s men had stashed some cocaine in the nearby town of Jamundí. After seeking approval from senior police officials but not the DEA, agency officials said, the team leader gathered nine of his agents and drove off with the informant to investigate.

As they pulled up to the isolated location, the police came under a barrage of gunfire. The shooting continued for 20 minutes until all 10 agents and their informant were dead. When Cole arrived at the scene that night with the Colombian attorney general and the head of the national police, they found the agents’ bodies on the ground; the Colombian army soldiers who attacked them were still on the hillside above them.

Cole was devastated.

“Those guys worked very closely with him,” his supervisor, Matthew Donahue, said. “We depended on them, and they depended on us. It was like having your partner killed.”

Although the army claimed that the shootings were a tragic accident, the attorney general found that the informant had been planted by the traffickers and that the lieutenant colonel who led the troops had organized the ambush. In 2008, he and 14 soldiers were convicted of aggravated homicide.

A few months after the killings, Cole went ahead with a planned tour of duty in Afghanistan. There, he found again that U.S. allies in the war were sometimes as involved in the drug trade as the Taliban insurgents they fought.

In 2008, Cole moved to Dallas, where he earned a reputation as a sharp-elbowed group supervisor who pushed his agents to get their photographs on the office wall by making the biggest cases and seizing the biggest loads. He was regarded highly by his superiors, several former colleagues said, but less popular with some of his peers.

By 2010, Cole’s squad was focused on the Texas distribution network of the Zetas, then widely seen as the most violent of Mexico’s drug mafias, and one of its leaders, Miguel Treviño Morales.

By leveraging the cooperation of traffickers facing prosecution, one of Cole’s agents obtained a list of cellphone numbers being used by Treviño; his brother, Omar; and their lieutenants. It was a coup — a way to perhaps intercept the Zeta leaders’ calls and encrypted text messages or even track their movements in real time.

On March 9, 2011, government records show, Cole entered the eight numbers and a PIN code for one of the phones into a secure agency database. He then forwarded them to the DEA’s Special Operations Division, which could sometimes intercept or geolocate cellphones overseas with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Cole also sent the numbers to the DEA offices in Mexico City and Nuevo Laredo, where other agents were investigating the Zetas, officials said. Ten days later, gunmen led by the Treviño brothers roared into the Mexican border town of Allende, where the DEA’s informants had been operating. The traffickers began torturing and murdering anyone who they suspected might be connected to the men they thought had betrayed them, killing as many as 200 men, women and children.

In a 2017 article, ProPublica reported that Cole’s forwarding of the numbers to U.S. agents in Mexico — who then shared them with a DEA-trained Mexican police unit that warned the Zetas — led to the Treviños’ rampage. Only years later did the DEA, prodded by Congress, even review its files on the case; it never investigated its possible role in the massacre.

Cole declined to be interviewed for ProPublica’s article, and a White House spokesperson said he could not comment on the case now because the Treviño brothers, who were handed over to the United States by Mexico on Feb. 27, are facing prosecution for trafficking, murder and other crimes. They pleaded not guilty last month in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

A home in the Mexican border town of Allende eight years after it was destroyed by the Zetas cartel (Eduardo Verdugo/AP Images)

The White House spokesperson said “of course” Cole and other DEA officials considered the sensitivity of sending the Zetas’ phone information to Mexico but followed standard protocols in doing so. A former deputy head of the DEA office in Dallas, Daniel Salter, said he and the special agent in charge there made that decision, not Cole.

At least three senior Mexican police officials who might have had access to the phone numbers shared by the DEA have since been charged in the United States with colluding with the traffickers. But officials said that subsequent DEA reporting also pointed to another reason why the Treviños might have turned on the informant who was their primary target in Allende: He owed them some $30 million and was blamed for some earlier U.S. seizures of drugs and cash.

After Dallas, Cole spent four years at the agency’s Washington-area headquarters, watching as U.S. law-enforcement agencies struggled with the Mexicans to hunt down well-protected drug bosses, like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, without making any substantial impact on the flow of drugs.

But even that halting cooperation came to an end as Mexico’s new president, López Obrador, took office promising to fight the drug trade with “hugs, not bullets.” He sidelined police teams trained by the DEA, shut down a Mexican marine commando unit that had been the country’s most effective weapon against the traffickers and even refused to grant visas to DEA agents assigned to Mexico.

Former officials said Cole, who arrived in Mexico City in late 2018 as a deputy director of the DEA’s regional office, soon proposed a radical solution: If the agents couldn’t get Mexican officials to work with them to pursue the traffickers, what about going after the corrupt officials who were protecting the traffickers’ operations?

For decades, U.S. investigators had generally avoided such targets, lest they be seen as interfering in internal Mexican politics. But the extradition of high-level Mexican traffickers over the previous decade had created a pool of criminals eager to reduce their sentences by helping U.S. prosecutors, and many were willing to testify about the officials they had bribed.

A team of DEA agents pulled together files on some 35 possible targets, ranging from police and military commanders to Mexican cabinet officials. One target that stood out was García Luna, the once-powerful security minister who had worked closely with U.S. officials.

While the Biden administration hailed García Luna’s prosecution in 2023 as proof of its mettle in pursuing corruption, it also worked assiduously to avoid drug enforcement actions that might antagonize López Obrador and jeopardize his help in controlling illegal migration.

Cole was by then gone from the DEA, having left Mexico City after just a year. He had once hoped to succeed Donahue there but was not seriously considered for the post. He retired from the agency after 22 years.

Matthew Donahue, right, Cole’s former superior, and Cole, left, with the former head of the Colombian National Police, Gen. Jorge Eliécer Camacho (Courtesy of Matthew Donahue)

As Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, Cole focused on trying to limit fentanyl trafficking, an effort that drew the attention of Trump supporters. While he kept a fairly low public profile, Cole’s tough rhetoric on Mexico was also very much in line with Trump’s.

“Mexico has been a failing state for years,” he told Bono. Referring to the reported recruitment of foreign mercenaries by the drug gangs, he added, “Now we’re seeing Mexico turn into a terror training camp similar to what we saw in the Middle East years ago.”

Although the Trump administration’s attention to the drug issue has raised the DEA’s profile, Cole will, if confirmed as the administrator, likely have to fight for its place in a growing bureaucratic scrum.

Already, officials said, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations have been pushing to lead the Trump administration’s campaign against trafficking groups that it has designated as terrorist organizations. The CIA and the Defense Department have also expanded their efforts to collect intelligence on the traffickers and put forward options for more aggressive actions to strike at their operations.

With Sheinbaum still attacking the DEA as a symbol of American interventionism, all four of those competing agencies may have an easier time rebuilding trust with the Mexican government. But while Mexican leaders insist they will act on hard evidence of corruption in their ranks, many U.S. officials remain skeptical that they will be able to make a serious push for such action without upending the two countries’ relationship.

by Jake Pearson

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

A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency’s dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the investments earlier this year in his public financial report, which lists as much as $365,000 worth of shares in four companies that the CFPB can regulate. According to court records and government emails, he later helped oversee the layoffs of more than 1,400 employees at the bureau.

Ethics experts say this constitutes a conflict of interest and that Kliger’s actions are a potential violation of federal ethics laws.

Executive branch employees have long been subject to laws and rules that forbid them from working on matters that “will affect your own personal financial interest.” CFPB employees are also required to divest from dozens of additional, specific companies that engage in financial services and thus either are or could be subject to agency supervision, rulemaking, examination or enforcement.

The CFPB oversees companies that offer a variety of financial services, including mortgage lending, auto financing, credit cards and payment apps.

Two of the companies in which Kliger is invested — Apple and Tesla — are on the CFPB’s list of prohibited holdings. Two others — Bitcoin and Solana — aren’t on the list but are nevertheless barred under agency guidance on investing in cryptocurrency firms.

Court records show that Kliger was among a small handful of top CFPB and administration officials discussing the implementation of the layoffs in emails. Separately, a federal employee who works on the layoff team said that Kliger “managed” the firings of about 90% of the bureau’s staff earlier this month, according to a sworn declaration filed by lawyers opposing the administration.

The employee, using the pseudonym Alex Doe for fear of retaliation, said they learned of Kliger’s role from colleagues and described Kliger keeping the CFPB employees “up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out,” the declaration states. “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough” and “calling them incompetent.”

Among those fired were the bureau’s ethics team, according to an agency lawyer, who wrote in an April 25 court filing that “I am not aware of anyone remaining at the CFPB who has the requisite expertise to fulfill the CFPB’s federal ethics requirements.”

Ethics experts said that getting rid of government regulators who oversee companies and set industrywide rules could impact the share price of the businesses subject to that regulation, since doing away with oversight can free companies from compliance costs and the exposure that stems from enforcement actions.

“Destroying the CFPB is likely to have, I believe, a direct and predictable effect on his financial stock,” Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics at the Washington University in St. Louis, said of Kliger.

Unionized bureau employees have sued the agency’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop the administration’s efforts to wind down its operations and reduce its staff. The subsequent months of litigation have been head-spinning.

At the end of March, a district court judge issued a sweeping stay on the administration’s actions. Then on April 11, an appeals court in Washington, D.C., partially lifted that stay. In its order, the panel wrote that bureau leaders must conduct a “particularized assessment” before firing workers.

Days later, most of the agency’s staff was notified that they were being fired.

The bureau’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, and two other lawyers conducted the court-ordered review, the government said in legal papers. In a recent filing, Paoletta wrote that the administration is attempting to achieve a “streamlined and right-sized Bureau.” Instead of 248 enforcement division employees and 487 in the supervision division, he wrote, he planned to keep 50 workers in each.

But on Monday evening, amid vigorous dispute over the legality of the firings and the definition of “particularized assessment,” the appeals court backtracked, upholding the trial court’s initial stay on the mass layoffs as the case plays out. The CFPB then notified the more than 1,400 employees who’d been laid off that their firings were being rescinded. The lawsuit is ongoing, with oral arguments before the appeals court scheduled for next month.

Kliger didn’t respond to voicemails or emails seeking comment for this story. The CFPB didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the White House said that “these allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission.”

Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, the statement said, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.”

Asked to clarify Kliger’s role in the administration's cuts, a spokesperson said, “You have 90 days from the start date to divest which is May 8th — it is only April 28th.” It’s unclear what rule the White House was referencing; the spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions. But ethics experts said there are two scenarios that could apply: Sometimes, high-level government officials pledge to divest their holdings by a certain date to avoid conflicts of interest. And at the CFPB in particular, regulations give employees 90 days to divest prohibited holdings.

In either case, though, the employee is required to recuse themselves from any actions that could affect their investments.

Delaney Marsco, a government ethics expert at the Campaign Legal Center, said Kliger’s holdings and his involvement in winding down the agency erode the public’s faith that government officials are serving its best interests.

“When you have these facts, it raises the question, which is just as bad as when you have the actual violation because it makes the public question,” she said.

Kliger owns between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in Apple, which the CFPB regulates. The company agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty last October following a bureau investigation into Apple Card, a credit card in the company’s software. The bureau said that Apple did not have a proper transaction dispute system when it launched and also that it misled some customers about its financing. The company ​​agreed to the consent order, records show, “without admitting or denying any of the findings of fact or conclusions of law.” In a statement at the time, Apple said that “while we strongly disagree with the CFPB’s characterization of Apple’s conduct, we have aligned with them on an agreement.”

Kliger also owns between $100,000 and $250,000 of Tesla stock. The company, founded by DOGE boss Elon Musk, falls under the bureau’s purview because it offers financing, a key area of scrutiny for the CFPB.

Kliger also owns cryptocurrencies: between $1,000 and $15,000 of Solana and between $15,000 and $50,000 of Bitcoin.

Any federal worker who “holds any amount of a cryptocurrency or stablecoin may not participate in a particular matter if the employee knows that particular matter could have a direct and predictable effect on the value of their cryptocurrency or stablecoins,” according to a legal memo issued in July of 2022, under then-President Joe Biden, by the independent federal agency tasked with advising executive branch employees on how to avoid conflicts of interests.

An internal notice to CFPB employees the following month instructed anyone with such a holding to “immediately recuse yourself from working on any Bureau particular matter,” report the ownership and divest within 90 days, records reviewed by ProPublica show.

Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second presidency, the administration has sought to significantly reduce the size, scope and nature of America’s consumer watchdog, which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

ProPublica reported last month that dozens of investigations the agency had launched were stalled amid stop-work orders.

In a recent court filing that supplements a newly released policy memo, Paoletta wrote that, in recent years, “the Bureau has also engaged in intrusive and wasteful fishing expeditions against depository institutions and, increasingly, non-depository institutions” and that it had “pushed into new areas beyond its jurisdiction such as peer-to-peer lending, rent-to-own, and discrimination as unfair practice.”

by Corey G. Johnson

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

A group representing firearms owners has asked three federal agencies to investigate how the gun industry’s main lobbying group secretly used the intimate details of weapons buyers for political purposes.

In making the request, Gun Owners for Safety cited a ProPublica investigation that detailed how the National Shooting Sports Foundation turned over sensitive personal information on gun buyers to political operatives while presenting itself as a fierce advocate for the privacy of firearms owners. The letter — sent last week to the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — called the NSSF’s secret program that spanned nearly two decades "underhanded.”

“Gun owners’ privacy is not a partisan or ideological issue,” wrote Malcolm Smith, a Gun Owners for Safety member. “No matter the industry, exploiting customers’ private data like their underwear size and children’s ages in a secret scheme is reprehensible and cannot be permitted.”

Gun Owners for Safety has been operated since 2019 by the gun violence prevention organization Giffords, which was co-founded by Gabby Giffords, the Arizona lawmaker who survived an attempted assassination in 2011. It has chapters in nine states and consists of gun owners and Second Amendment supporters who believe in what they call “common sense” measures to reduce gun-related deaths like safety locks and improved background checks on firearm purchases.

The ATF acknowledged receiving the letter but had no other comment. The FBI, FTC and NSSF didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions and requests for comment.

The NSSF 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.” The organization represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors and retailers, along with publishers and shooting ranges. While not as well known as the chief lobbyist for gun owners, the National Rifle Association, the NSSF is respected and influential in business, political and gun-rights communities.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told ProPublica he agreed with Smith’s call for an investigation. Last November, Blumenthal, then chair of a Senate subcommittee on privacy, asked the NSSF for details on the companies that contributed information to the trade group’s database, the type of customer details that were shared and whether the data is still being used. The trade group did not answer the senator’s questions.

“The NSSF’s disturbing, covert data collection raises serious safety and privacy concerns,” Blumenthal said. “And the American people deserve answers.”

It’s unclear how successful any request for an investigation will be under the Trump administration, especially given the NSSF’s past political support for the president.

ProPublica’s investigation identified at least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson and Remington, that handed over hundreds of thousands of names, addresses and other private data — without customer knowledge or consent — to the NSSF, which then entered the details into what would become a massive database. The database was used to rally gun owners’ electoral support for the industry’s preferred candidates running for the White House and Congress.

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. (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.)

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. 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. 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.

ProPublica obtained a portion of the NSSF database that contains the names, addresses and other information of thousands of people. ProPublica reached out to 6,000 people on the list. Almost all of those who responded, including gun owners, expressed outrage, surprise or disappointment over learning they were in the database.

In his letter seeking an investigation, Smith noted that the FBI’s new director, Kash Patel, has spoken out in favor of protecting gun owners’ privacy rights.

“Surely, then,” Smith wrote, “the FBI understands the importance of ensuring no organization or government agency maintains a secret database of firearm customers and gun owners. As many high-profile hacks and data leaks have shown, private data can easily be mishandled and exploited for nefarious purposes.

Smith, a 69-year-old retired executive of J.P. Morgan bank and registered Republican, told ProPublica his love of guns started as a teen when his father bought him a Remington rifle for bird hunting. The passion intensified over the years, and Smith started collecting guns heavily in response to political efforts to restrict gun access.

“Anytime I heard Nancy Pelosi not like something, I felt like I had to have it,” Smith said.

But he joined Giffords in 2020 after growing uncomfortable with extremism in gun rights circles. More recently, he said, the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempt to grab large amounts of confidential citizen data from the Social Security Administration and IRS inspired his request for government action. (DOGE officials did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The initial disclosures about the National Shooting Sports Foundation was an alarm bell. But now this is a four-alarm fire,” Smith said. “We’re supposed to have some sort of privacy in our lives, and apparently the NSSF decided I didn’t have to have it. And DOGE really thinks I’m not entitled to it.”

by Andy Kroll and Jeremy Kohler

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

When President Donald Trump chose Ed Martin, the Missouri lawyer and political operative, to be the top U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., the decision came as a shock to current and former federal prosecutors as well as outside legal experts. Martin had no prosecutorial experience. He was best known as a conservative activist, the former right-hand man to influential anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and a loyal Trump surrogate.

Since taking charge of the office in January, Martin has launched controversial investigations, rushed to defend Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and vowed to change how his office prosecutes crime in the District of Columbia.

His actions have been met with fierce pushback from Democratic lawmakers, watchdog groups and legal experts. There have been at least four disciplinary complaints filed against him with the D.C. and Missouri bars. One of the D.C. complaints has been dismissed; the other three appear to be pending. If Martin has responded to the complaints, his statements have not been made public.

Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Here are some of Martin’s most contentious moves so far.

Jan. 6 Retribution

At Trump’s direction, Martin has presided over the dismissal of outstanding cases that were part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.

But Martin got tripped up by what should have been a legal formality: In one of the cases he dismissed, he was still listed as counsel of record for the defendant, a possible conflict of interest. The incident prompted bar complaints against Martin in D.C. and Missouri. (The D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel dismissed the complaint, saying Martin had been acting at the behest of the president. The Missouri complaint appears to be pending.)

Martin fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. He demoted seven senior lawyers in his office, including the two prosecutors who led the Jan. 6 team, to low-level roles in D.C. Superior Court, which handles local prosecutions. (Most of the affected attorneys have not commented publicly, but those who have are critical of Martin’s tenure.)

Martin has opened an investigation into supposed leaks related to Jan. 6 cases, saying the information was used “by the media and partisans as misinformation.” He also ordered an investigation into past charging decisions made as part of the Jan. 6 cases. In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the DOJ’s use of an obstruction statute in those prosecutions. In an office-wide email obtained by ProPublica, Martin quoted an unnamed contact who compared the DOJ’s use of the obstruction statute to President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to imprison more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

DOGE Enforcer

Martin has published several open letters to Musk on the Musk-owned social media platform X.

In the first letter, dated Feb. 3, Martin asked Musk to “utilize me and my staff” to protect the people and the work of DOGE. He vowed to take “any and all legal action against anyone” who impeded DOGE’s work.

“We will not act like the previous administration,” Martin added, “who looked the other way as the Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city.”

In his second letter, dated Feb. 7, Martin expanded on his pledge to his office’s legal powers in support of Musk and DOGE’s work. “Please let me reiterate again: If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable,” Martin wrote.

He urged his employees to respond to Musk’s demand that all federal employees list five things they accomplished that week, adding: “DOGE and Elon are doing great work! Historic.”

And when DOGE employees attempted to seize control of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a private nonprofit that receives government funding, Martin and his office assisted so that DOGE could take over and wind down the nonprofit.

“We Will Defend You”

The U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. is unique in that it prosecutes both federal and local crimes. In his tweets and public statements, Martin has vowed to “Make D.C. Safe Again,” even though violent crime has broadly declined in the District in recent years.

While his public safety agenda is light on details so far, he has pledged to be a stalwart defender of the D.C. police. In yet another open letter posted on X, Martin wrote that the “radical ‘Defund the Police’ movement by Black Lives Matter is over” and that it was “time to get back to protecting and supporting our law enforcement officers.”

“At every turn, we will defend you,” he said.

Yet current and former federal prosecutors in D.C. say Martin’s actions so far have undercut morale in the office while his proposed reforms could make it harder, not easier, for prosecutors to do their jobs.

In February, Martin removed the chief and deputy chief of the Federal Major Crimes section, which oversees cases involving drugs, firearms possession, child exploitation, human trafficking and immigration violations. The two lawyers, who had decades of experience between them and were widely respected, were demoted to low-level roles; the more senior of the two, Melissa Jackson, resigned soon afterward. (Jackson declined to comment; her deputy did not respond to requests for comment.)

Martin also said he was “rewriting” the office’s policy for the so-called Lewis list, a repository of police officer disciplinary records. Prosecutors consult the Lewis database when they decide whether to put a police officer on the witness stand. They also use the Lewis list to identify officers about whom they need to disclose information to defense attorneys that bears on a witness’s credibility or potential bias to fulfill their constitutional obligations.

Martin framed his decision to reform the Lewis list as part of a broader shift to be more pro-police. “USAO will no longer allow judges or others to gratuitously damage your careers because of the outsized impact of inexact characterizations,” he wrote.

Michael Romano, a former federal prosecutor in the D.C. office, said that any effort to weaken or eliminate the Lewis list will only make it harder for prosecutors to argue and win cases because it would deprive them of information that they must disclose in court. “Gutting the Lewis list,” Romano told ProPublica, “makes it less likely that prosecutors will obtain convictions at trial, makes it more likely that convictions will be reversed on appeal and puts prosecutors’ licenses to practice law at risk.”

Investigating Democrats

Martin has initiated multiple inquiries into critics and opponents of Trump.

Martin asked Rep. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., for information about a business that Vindman and his brother, Alexander, started to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, The Washington Post reported. Vindman and his twin brother, Alex, both blew the whistle on Trump’s attempt to withhold military aid to Ukraine while pressuring the country’s leader to investigate the family of President Joe Biden. Eugene Vindman said that Martin’s letter was part of Trump’s “retribution campaign” and that those who wrote the letter and “encouraged this weird attempt at intimidation are lying.”

Biden’s family members and former officials from his administration received letters from Martin’s office related to the ex-president’s decision to grant pardons to people close to him, The New York Times reported. Trump has pushed an unproven theory that Biden’s actions weren’t valid because he wasn’t mentally competent.

He also sent letters to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Robert Garcia of California, both Democrats, asking them to answer questions about incendiary public comments they had made. The inquiries appeared to have fizzled out and did not result in any charges.

Targeting Medical Journals

On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”

Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rob Davis, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The garment workers said they took what they could get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ngin feeds her son rice porridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nike is not a signatory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The factory doctor made $581.

About the Numbers

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