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ProPublica’s Coverage of Donald Trump’s Appointments — and How They Could Reshape Federal Agencies

4 months 4 weeks ago

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During his campaign, Donald Trump vowed to remake the federal government, promising to cut jobs, slash spending, end diversity and inclusion programs, and dismantle the Department of Education. Now, he’s chosen a slate of nominees for cabinet posts and other key positions who have a history of pushing back against the work of the departments and agencies they’ve been tapped to lead.

When Doug Burgum was governor of North Dakota, the state sued the Department of the Interior at least five times, ProPublica reported in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Trump selected Burgum to lead that same department. Meanwhile, Scott Turner, Trump’s nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has a history of voting against protections for poor tenants. And Trump’s choice to lead the Internal Revenue Service once supported legislation to abolish it entirely.

As confirmation hearings continue in the Senate, read through ProPublica’s reporting on how some of Trump’s selections could reshape federal agencies.

Doug Burgum, Department of the Interior

Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, has been confirmed as the secretary of the interior, which manages federal lands and natural resources.

North Dakota sued the same department at least five times, ProPublica and the North Dakota Monitor reported this month.

One of the lawsuits took aim at the agency’s rule that limited the amount of methane oil companies could release. Another targeted the department’s Public Lands Rule, which places conservation of public lands on equal footing with natural resource exploitation. Burgum did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment, but he has previously said that many of the environmental policies of the administration of President Joe Biden posed “an existential threat to the energy and ag sectors, our economy and our way of life.”

Read more.

Billy Long, Internal Revenue Service

Trump chose Billy Long, who represented Missouri in the U.S. House of Representatives for over a decade, to lead the Internal Revenue Service. Long previously supported legislation that would have abolished the agency altogether. Trump has said he wants to end “IRS overstepping” and issued an executive order that places a hiring freeze on the agency until the new Treasury secretary “determines that it is in the national interest to lift the freeze.”

Tax experts told ProPublica’s Jeremy Kohler and Alex Mierjeski last month that they believe Long doesn’t have the right credentials to oversee the agency. Long, who didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request for comment, labeled himself as a certified tax and business advisor, or CTBA, on the social network X. That designation — which tax experts told ProPublica they hadn’t heard about — is offered only by a small, Florida-based firm after the completion of a three-day seminar.

Read more.

Scott Turner, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Trump nominated Scott Turner to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees federal efforts to provide housing assistance to low-income residents. But, as ProPublica’s Jesse Coburn and Andy Kroll reported in December, Turner has previously opposed legislation that would provide aid and protections for poor tenants.

During his time in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner opposed legislation to expand affordable rental housing in the state and endorsed a bill to allow landlords to turn down applicants because they received federal housing assistance. Turner has also previously described welfare as “one of the most destructive things for a family.”

A spokesperson for Turner told ProPublica in December: “Of course ProPublica would try and paint a negative picture of Mr. Turner before he is even given the opportunity to testify. We would expect nothing less from a publication that solely serves as a liberal mouthpiece.”

Read more.

Paul Atkins, Securities and Exchange Commission

Paul Atkins is Trump’s choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. Atkins, who worked as an SEC commissioner under George W. Bush before serving as the co-chair of a crypto advocacy group, will be responsible for regulating Trump’s own publicly traded company.

Current and former SEC officials told ProPublica’s Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Mierjeski in December that they worried the agency wouldn’t aggressively regulate Trump Media, which has previously tangled with the commission. Trump’s crypto investments — which include a Trump-affiliated token by a company called World Liberty Financial and a memecoin known as $Trump launched days before his second inauguration — could also come into conflict with the agency.

Under Biden, SEC chair Gary Gensler led a crackdown on crypto. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to deregulate the industry.

Read more.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, National Institutes of Health

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, has said he wants to dedicate half of the National Institutes of Health’s budget toward “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” Kennedy has also said he wants to replace 600 employees at the NIH.

Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, if confirmed as the head of the NIH, would get to appoint the next director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which plays a key role in researching infectious diseases and developing treatments. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya became a vocal critic of how then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci handled the federal response. He also helped author the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against restrictions for those “at minimal risk of death” until herd immunity is reached.

Experts and advocates told ProPublica’s Anna Maria Barry-Jester this month that overhauling the NIH’s and NIAID’s work could deter research and hamstring the development of future treatments. Bhattacharya declined an interview request.

Read more.

David Fotouhi, Environmental Protection Agency

Trump tapped lawyer David Fotouhi for the second highest role at the Environmental Protection Agency. If confirmed by the Senate, he’ll be the deputy administrator under Lee Zeldin, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives chosen to lead the agency.

This month, ProPublica’s Sharon Lerner reported that Fotouhi played a critical role in pushing to roll back climate regulations while working as a lawyer in the department during Trump’s first term. He has since worked on a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s water quality standards for PCBs, toxic chemicals linked to some cancers. In October, Fotouhi, who declined to comment to ProPublica, challenged the EPA’s ban on the cancer-causing substance asbestos.

Read more.

Russell Vought, Office of Management and Budget

Trump chose Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, sparking concerns from Democratic lawmakers, who, ahead of his Senate confirmation vote, led an all-night protest of his nomination over concerns about his plans to dramatically shrink the federal government. In October, ProPublica’s Molly Redden and Andy Kroll and Documented’s Nick Surgey obtained videos of private speeches given by Vought in 2023 and 2024 that outlined an agenda for a second Trump presidency. In the speeches, Vought said one priority was targeting career government workers, saying “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” He also said that he wants to defund the Environmental Protection Agency and invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to shut down domestic “riots.” Vought, who led the OMB during Trump’s first term before becoming one of the architects of Project 2025, did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Read more.

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

Update, Feb. 6, 2025: This story was updated to include Russell Vought.

by ProPublica

Boxed Up: A Portrait of an Immigrant Community Living Under Threat of Deportation

4 months 4 weeks ago

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A blender, still in its box, won at a grocery store raffle. Framed photos from a child’s birthday party. A rabbit-hair felt sombrero and a pair of brown leather boots that cost more than half a week’s pay.

Box by box, the Nicaraguans who milk the cows and clean the pens on Wisconsin's dairy farms, who wash dishes at its restaurants and fill lines on its factory floors, are sending home their most prized possessions, bracing for the impact of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

In the contents of the boxes is a portrait of a community under pressure. The Nicaraguans are as consumed as everyone else by the unfolding of Trump 2.0, wondering whether the bluster about deporting millions of people, most of whom live quiet lives far from the southern border, is going to mean anything in the Wisconsin towns where they’ve settled. For now, many are staying in their homes, behind drawn curtains, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as they travel to and from work or pick up their kids from school. Few have given up on their lives in America, but they’re realistic about what may be coming. Methodically, they have begun packing their most cherished belongings into boxes and barrels and shipping them to relatives back in Nicaragua, ahead of their own anticipated deportations.

“We don’t have much, but what we do have is important,” said Joaquín, the man with the love of western boots and sombreros. He’s 35 years old and has worked over the last three years as a cook at the restaurant below his apartment. “We have worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to acquire these things,” he added.

The packing is happening all across Wisconsin, a state that in recent years has become a top destination for Nicaraguans who say they are fleeing poverty and government repression. And it is happening among immigrants of varying legal statuses. There are the undocumented dairy workers who came more than a decade ago and were the first from their rural communities to settle in Wisconsin. And there are the more recent arrivals, including asylum-seekers who have permission to live and work in the U.S. as they await their day in immigration court.

Nobody feels safe from Trump and his promises; in just his first week back in office, the president moved to end birthright citizenship, sent hundreds of military troops to the southern border and launched a flashy, multi-agency operation to find and detain immigrants in Chicago, only a few hundred miles away.

Yesenia Meza, a community health worker in central Wisconsin, began hearing from families soon after Trump’s election; they wanted help obtaining the documents they might need if they have to suddenly leave the country with their U.S.-born children, or have those children sent to them if they are deported. When she visited their apartments, Meza said, she was stunned to discover they had spent hundreds of dollars on refrigerator-sized boxes and blue plastic barrels that they’d stuffed with nearly “everything that they own, their most precious belongings” and were shipping to their home country.

At one home, she watched an immigrant mother climb into a half-packed box and announce, “I’m going to mail myself.” Meza knew she was joking. But some of the immigrants she knew had already left. And if more people go, she wonders what impact their departures — whether voluntary or forced — will have on the local economy. Immigrants in the area work on farms, in cheese-processing factories and in a chicken plant — the kind of jobs, she said, that nobody else wants. She’s talked to some of the employers before and knows “they’re always short-staffed,” Meza said. “They’re going to be more short-staffed now when people start going back home.”

Last week, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, I traveled to Wisconsin along with photographer Benjamin Rasmussen to capture what sounded like the beginning of a community coming undone. We talked to Nicaraguans in their kitchens and bedrooms, and in restaurants and grocery stores that have sprung up to cater to them. Many of the people we met either were packing themselves or knew someone else who was, or both.

Some were almost embarrassed to show us what they were packing — items that might have been considered frivolous or extravagant back home. Nicaragua was already one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere before its government took a turn toward authoritarianism and repression, further sinking the economy. But thanks to their working-class jobs at American factories and restaurants, they could afford these things, and they were determined to hold on to them. Some of their belongings carried memories of loved ones or of special occasions. Other items were more practical, tools that might help them get started again in Nicaragua.

From the stories these immigrants told about their belongings emerged others, stories about what had brought them to this country and what they have been able to achieve here. They spoke about the panic that now traps them in their homes and keeps them up at night. And they shared their hopes and fears about what it might mean to start over in a country they fled.

Yaceth plans to send a plastic barrel filled with shoes to her mother in Nicaragua for safekeeping. What’s in the Boxes

Yaceth’s guilty pleasure is shoes. The 38-year-old left Nicaragua nearly three years ago and works in the same restaurant kitchen as Joaquín. Her wages allowed her to buy a pair or so a month on Amazon, mostly Keds lace-up sneakers, though she also owns glittery stilettos and knee-high red boots. The boxes fill the top half of her closet. Some pairs have never been worn.

We stood along the edge of her bed, admiring her collection. “I’m a bit of an aficionado,” she said sheepishly. Like the other immigrants we spoke with, Yaceth asked not to be identified by her full name to lessen the risk of deportation.

Yaceth said she stopped buying shoes after Trump’s election, uncertain how her life, not to mention her finances, might change once he took office. By the time we met, she had already packed one box of belongings and sent it to her mother in Estelí, a city in northwestern Nicaragua. In the corner of her already crowded bedroom, she kept a blue plastic barrel, which is where she’d planned to put the shoes, hoping it would keep them dry and undamaged during the shipping. If she goes, they’re going, too.

She rents a room in the apartment of another family. They, too, are thinking about what it might look like to return to Nicaragua. Hugo, 33, is setting aside items that might help him make a living back in his hometown of Somoto, about an hour and a half north of Estelí. This includes a Cuisinart digital air fryer he bought with his wages from a sheet-metal factory. Hugo used to sell hot dogs and hamburgers at a fast food stand in Somoto. If he has to return, he envisions starting another food business. The air fryer would help.

Hugo plans to send an air fryer to Nicaragua in the hopes of using it to start a business if he’s deported.

We visited a new Nicaraguan restaurant in Waunakee, a village in Dane County that’s seen significant numbers of Nicaraguan arrivals in recent years. One diner, a 49-year-old undocumented dairy worker, told me he plans to send barber trimmers and other supplies for the barbershop he’d like to open up if he’s deported. As we spoke, his dinner companion called a friend who lives a few towns away and handed me the phone; that man, also a dairy worker, told me he is sending back power tools he bought on Facebook Marketplace that are expensive and difficult to find in Nicaragua.

Other immigrants expressed deep uncertainty about whether they might face jail time or worse if they are deported, due to their previous involvement in political activities against the Nicaraguan government. If you don’t toe the party line, said Uriel, a former high school teacher, “they turn you into an enemy of the state.”

Uriel, 36, said he never participated in any anti-government marches. But he worried that local party leaders had been watching him, that they knew how he spoke about democracy and free speech in the classroom.

Uriel bought a plastic barrel to send belongings, like a guitar he was given, to his wife and children in Nicaragua.

He said he left Nicaragua almost four years ago both because of the political situation and because he knew he could make more money in the U.S. He has an ongoing asylum case, a work permit and a job at a bread factory. His wages have allowed him to buy a plot of land for his wife and two children, still in Nicaragua, and begin construction on a house there.

He’d hoped to stay in Wisconsin long enough to pay to finish it. But bracing for the inevitable, he’s got a barrel too. Soon, he plans to pack and send a used Yamaha guitar he was given as a gift a few years earlier. Uriel learned to play the instrument by watching YouTube videos and now plays Christian hymns that he said make him feel good inside.

This summer, he plans to return as well. His children have been growing up without him. He has been told his 6-year-old daughter points to planes in the sky and wonders whether her father is inside. He worries that his son, 11, will grow up believing he has been abandoned.

It has been hard to be separated from his children, he said. But he left in order to provide them a life he didn’t believe he could have if he had stayed — a reality he thought was missing from so much of the new president’s rhetoric on immigration. “We are not anybody’s enemy,” Uriel said. “We simply are looking for a way to make a living, to help our families.”

Joaquín plans to send his clothing to family in Nicaragua. He’s afraid it will end up in a landfill if he’s deported. A Life in Hiding

It used to be that on Sundays, his day off, Joaquín would pull on his favorite boots and sombrero to drive somewhere — to a restaurant or to visit family and friends who had settled in south-central Wisconsin. But ever since Trump’s election, he doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to. Some days, he says, he feels like a mouse, scurrying downstairs to work and upstairs to sleep and back downstairs again to work, always alert and full of dread.

The gray 2016 Toyota 4Runner that he bought last year, his pride and joy, sits mostly unused behind his apartment building. He’s too afraid of driving and getting pulled over by police officers who, by randomly checking his vehicle’s plates, could discover he doesn’t have a driver’s license. Joaquín doesn’t have the documents he needs to qualify for one. He worries that drawing the attention of police, even for the smallest of infractions, could get him swept into the immigration detention system and deported. “What’s happening now is a persecution,” he said.

On a recent Sunday, his apartment was filled with the sweet, warm smell of home-baked goods. Joaquín said he spent two hours making traditional Nicaraguan cookies called rosquillas and hojaldras, one savory and the other sweet. We talked over coffee and the cornmeal cookies. Half of his living room floor was covered with piles of clothes and shoes, and one tall, empty box. There were shirts, pants and sneakers for each of his three children, who remain in Nicaragua. Most of the clothes belonged to Joaquín: a crisp pair of tan Lee jeans, rarely worn; several pairs of boots; a box of sombreros.

Joaquín said he plans to send all of it to relatives in Nicaragua in February. It pains him to imagine being trotted onto a deportation flight and leaving everything he owns here to get tossed in a landfill somewhere.

Another day, I spoke by phone with an immigrant named Luz, 26. Like Joaquín, she said she rarely leaves her apartment anymore. The week Trump was inaugurated, she stopped going to her job at a nearby cheese factory, afraid of workplace raids. She now stays home with their 1-year-old son. A woman she knows picks up the family’s groceries so they don’t have to risk being out on the street.

Like many of her friends and relatives, Luz came to the U.S. as an asylum-seeker almost three years ago. She missed an immigration court hearing while pregnant with her son and now worries she has “no legal status here.”

“Those of us who work milking cows, we can’t afford to hire a lawyer,” she said. “We don’t even know what’s happening with our cases.”

After Trump’s election, she began packing some of the things she’d accumulated in her time in Wisconsin, including some used children’s clothes she’d received from Meza, the community health worker. She packed most everything in her kitchen: most of her pots and pans, some plates and cups, knives, an iron and “even chocolates,” she said, almost laughing. “It is a big box.”

Luz said she wants all of her household items to be in Nicaragua when she returns with her family. They hope to leave in March. “I don’t want to live in hiding like this,” she said.

Isabel sent her 14-month-old son’s toys and stuffed animals in a cardboard box to Nicaragua. Family Separation Redux

Isabel’s son cried as she filled her box. In went the shiny red car, big enough for the 14-month-old to sit in and drive. It had been a gift from his godfather on his first birthday. She added other, smaller cars and planes and stuffed animals. A stroller. A framed photo from the birthday party, the chubby-cheeked boy surrounded by balloons.

The 26-year-old mother knew her son was too young to understand. But she hoped he would if the dreaded time came when they had to return to Nicaragua.

And to make sure she wouldn't be separated from him, she applied for his passport early last fall, when she became convinced that Trump would win the election. She could see his lawn signs all around her in the rural community in the middle of the state where she lives. Her husband, who works on a dairy farm, told her he’d begun feeling uncomfortable with the way people glared at him at Walmart. Sometimes, they shouted things he didn’t understand, but in a tone that was unmistakably hostile.

Their son was born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents — exactly the kind of child Trump says does not deserve citizenship here. Isabel got his passport both to secure his rights as an American citizen and to secure her rights to him. She wants to make sure there is no mistaking who the boy belongs to if she gets sent away.

We met Isabel about a week after she’d shipped off the box with her son’s red toy car to her mother’s home in southern Nicaragua. It was the morning of Trump’s inauguration, and Isabel welcomed us into her apartment, her eyes still red and bleary from an overnight shift at a nearby cheese-processing factory.

She said they were ready to go “if things get ugly” and the people around her start getting picked up and sent back. But there was another box, still flat and unpacked, propped up against a wall in the living room. That one, she explained, belonged to a neighbor with the same game plan.

I ask her what happens if they don’t get deported, but their most precious belongings are gone. Won’t they miss those things? “Yes,” she said. But it would be even worse to go back to Nicaragua and have nothing.

Additional design and development by Zisiga Mukulu

by Melissa Sanchez, photography by Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica

The Rewriting of a Pioneering Female Astronomer’s Legacy Shows How Far Trump’s DEI Purge Will Go

5 months ago

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During his first presidential term, Donald Trump signed a congressional act naming a federally funded observatory after the late astronomer Vera Rubin. The act celebrated her landmark research on dark matter — the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe — and noted that she was an outspoken advocate for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.

“Vera herself offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” the observatory’s website said of Rubin — up until recently.

By Monday morning, a section of her online biography titled, “She advocated for women in science,” was gone. It reappeared in a stripped-down form later that day amid a chaotic federal government response to Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

While there are far more seismic changes afoot in America than the revision of three paragraphs on a website, the page’s edit trail provides an opportunity to peer into how institutions and agencies are navigating the new administration’s intolerance of anything perceived as “woke” and illuminates a calculation officials must make in answering a wide-open question:

How far is too far when it comes to acknowledging inequality and advocating against it?

“Vera Rubin, whose career began in the 1960s, faced a lot of barriers simply because she was a woman,” the altered section of the bio began. “She persisted in studying science when her male advisors told her she shouldn't,” and she balanced her career with raising children, a rarity at the time. “Her strength in overcoming these challenges is admirable on its own, but Vera worked even harder to help other women navigate what was, during her career, a very male-dominated field.”

That first paragraph disappeared temporarily, then reappeared, untouched, midday Monday.

That was not the case for the paragraph that followed: “Science is still a male-dominated field, but Rubin Observatory is working to increase participation from women and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Rubin Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science, and takes steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with less privilege.”

That paragraph was gone as of Thursday afternoon, as was the assertion that Rubin shows what can happen when “more minds” participate in science. The word “more” was replaced with “many,” shifting the meaning.

A portion of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s page about its namesake as of Jan. 29 (first image), compared to the original portions of the same page as of Jan. 15 (second image), as captured by the Internet Archive. (Screenshots highlighted by ProPublica)

“I’m sure Vera would be absolutely furious,” said Jacqueline Mitton, an astronomer and author who co-wrote a biography of Rubin’s life. Mitton said the phrase “more minds” implies that “you want minds from people from every different background,” an idea that follows naturally from the now-deleted text on systemic barriers.

She said Rubin, who died in 2016, would want the observatory named after her to continue her work advocating for women and other groups who have long been underrepresented in science.

It’s unclear who ordered the specific alterations of Rubin’s biography. The White House, the observatory and the federal agencies that fund it, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

The observatory’s page on diversity, equity and inclusion was also missing Thursday afternoon. An archived version from Dec. 19 shows that it described the institution’s efforts “to ensure fair and unbiased execution” of the hiring process, including training hiring committee members “on unconscious bias.” The DEI program also included educational and public outreach efforts, such as “meeting web accessibility standards” and plans to build partnerships with “organizations serving audiences traditionally under-represented” in science and technology.

Similar revisions are taking shape across the country as companies have reversed their DEI policies and the Trump administration has placed employees working on DEI initiatives on leave.

If the changes to Rubin’s biography are any indication of what remains acceptable under Trump’s vision for the federal government, then certain facts about historical disparities are safe for now. But any recognition that these biases persist appears to be in the crosshairs.

The U.S. Air Force even pulled training videos about Black airmen and civilian women pilots who served in World War II. (The Air Force later said it would continue to show the videos in training, but certain material related to diversity would be suspended for review.)

One of Rubin’s favorite sayings was, “Half of all brains are in women,” Mitton said. Her book recounts how Rubin challenged sexist language in science publications, advocated for women to take leadership roles in professional organizations and declined to speak at an event in 1972 held at a club where women were only allowed to enter through a back door.

Jacqueline Hewitt, who was a graduate student when she met Rubin at conferences, said she was inspired by Rubin’s research and how she never hid the fact that she had kids. “It was really important to see someone who could succeed,” said Hewitt, the Julius A. Stratton professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It felt like you could succeed also.”

Rubin was awarded the National Medal of Science by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993. The observatory, located in a part of Chile where conditions are ideal for observational astronomy, was named after her in 2019 and includes a powerful telescope; it will “soon witness the explosions of millions of dying stars” and “capture the cosmos in exquisite detail,” according to its website.

Mitton said the observatory is a memorial that continues Rubin’s mission to include not just many people in astronomy, but more of those who haven’t historically gotten a chance to make their mark.

“It’s very sad that’s being undermined,” she said, “because the job isn’t done.”

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

by Lisa Song

To Pay for Trump Tax Cuts, House GOP Floats Plan to Slash Benefits for the Poor and Working Class

5 months ago

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One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a promise of sweeping tax cuts, for the rich, for working people and for companies alike.

Now congressional Republicans have the job of figuring out which of those cuts to propose into law. In order to pay for the cuts, they have started to eye some targets to raise money. Among them: cutting benefits for single mothers and poor people who rely on government health care.

The proposals are included in a menu of tax and spending cut options circulated this month by House Republicans. Whether or not Republicans enact any of the ideas remains to be seen. Some of the potential targets are popular tax breaks and cuts could be politically treacherous. And cutting taxes for the wealthy could risk damaging the populist image that Trump has cultivated.

For the ultrawealthy, the document floats eliminating the federal estate tax, at an estimated cost of $370 billion in revenue for the government over a decade. The tax, which charges a percentage of the value of a person’s fortune after they die, kicks in only for estates worth more than around $14 million.

Among those very few Americans who do get hit with the tax, nearly 30% of the tax is paid by the top 0.1% by income, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center think tank. (Many ultra-wealthy people already largely avoid the tax. Over the years, lawyers and accountants have devised ways to pass fortunes to heirs tax free, often by using complex trust structures, as ProPublica has previously reported.)

Another proposal aims to slash the top tax rate paid by corporations by almost a third.

Trump promised such a cut during the campaign. But Vice President JD Vance came out against it before Trump picked him as his running mate. “We’re sort of in line with the OECD right now,” he said in an interview last year, referring to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 38 wealthy developed nations. “I don’t think we need to be cutting the corporate tax rate further.”

In Trump’s first term, he brought the top corporate rate down from 35% to 21%, where it’s at now, taking the U.S. from a high rate compared to other OECD nations to about average. The proposed cut to 15% would make the United States’ rate among the lowest of such countries.

To pay for new tax cuts, the House Republicans’ proposal floats a series of potential overhauls of government programs. One major focus is possible cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for people with low incomes that is administered by the states. Medicaid expansion was a key tenet of the Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama. Many Republican governors initially chose not to take advantage of the new federal subsidies to expand the program. In the intervening years, several states reversed course, and the program has expanded the number of people enrolled in Medicaid by more than 20 million, as of last year.

The deep cuts to the program floated in the document include slashing reimbursements to the states. States would need to “raise new revenues or reduce Medicaid spending by eliminating coverage for some people, covering fewer services, and (or) cutting rates paid to physicians, hospitals, and nursing homes,” according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy organization.

Trump has been inconsistent in his position on Medicaid over the years. He sought to slash the program in his first term. But he has also made statements about protecting it over the years.

As recently as a 2023 campaign event, Trump promised that “we’re not going to play around with Medicare, Medicaid.” But it’s not clear whether the comment was a throwaway: While preserving Medicare, the program that covers health care for the elderly, has been a focus for Trump, maintaining Medicaid has not. The official GOP platform rolled out by Trump last year, for example, promised not to cut “one penny” from Medicare but was silent on Medicaid. In separate remarks during the campaign last year, Trump appeared to endorse cuts to "entitlements," after an interviewer asked about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Other proposals would eliminate tax breaks for families with children.

Currently, parents can get a tax credit of up to $2,100 for child care expenses. The House Republican plan floats the elimination of that break. The cut is estimated to save $55 billion over a decade.

Vance, in particular, had promised economic policies that would lessen the load on parents. “It is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids,” he said last week. (He campaigned on a proposal to more than double the child tax credit.)

Another proposal in the list of options takes aim squarely at parents raising children on their own. The provision would eliminate the “head of household” filing status to collect almost $200 billion more in taxes over a decade from single parents and other adults caring for dependents on their own.

The “head of household” status was created in the 1950s under the rationale that single parents should have a lighter tax burden. Eliminating it would affect millions of Americans, largely women. (The after-tax pay of people with incomes between the 20th and 80th percentiles, those making between about $14,000 and $100,000, would fall by the highest percentage, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.)

Democrats have criticized the proposals as a gift to the wealthy at the expense of the working class. “Republicans are gearing up for a class war against everyday families in America,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to questions about the specifics in the House GOP document but said in an email that “This is an active negotiation and process one that the President and his team are working productively with congress. His visit to the House Retreat [Monday] was a sign that he wants to prioritize unity and a good deal for American that achieves his campaign promises.”

A spokesperson for the House Budget Committee declined to answer specific questions but said “this is a menu of policy options for authorizing committees to consider as members navigate the reconciliation process.”

Some of the proposals would fulfill Trump’s campaign promises geared toward the working class.

The document includes a plan to eliminate income taxes (but maintain payroll taxes) on tips, at a cost of $106 billion over a decade. The proposal is one Trump touted while campaigning in Las Vegas to win support from the city’s huge contingent of service workers. Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, later pledged to do the same. Economists have criticized the idea as one that unfairly benefits one group of working-class employees over others who get paid the same but work in other industries that don’t deal in tips.

Another Trump campaign promise included in the document is ending taxes on overtime pay, at a price of $750 billion over a decade. That proposal has also been criticized by tax experts as an inefficient way to provide relief for lower-paid workers who are eligible for overtime because they’re paid hourly and perform repetitive tasks. The provision, critics say, would invite gaming and further complicate tax reporting by creating new reporting requirements about the hours a taxpayer worked.

One of the biggest-ticket proposals to raise new revenue in the House Republicans’ document would hit a tax break cherished by upper-income Americans: eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The document estimates $1 trillion in savings over 10 years by eliminating the break. Because of a complex interplay of different features of the tax code, an estimated 60% of the value of this deduction flows to Americans making over $200,000 per year, according to the Tax Foundation.

Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction would have an uneven geographic impact: analyses have found the tax break is more valuable to Americans in Democratic-dominated states such as California, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

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

by Robert Faturechi and Justin Elliott

In the Wild West of School Voucher Expansions, States Rely on Untested Companies, With Mixed Results

5 months ago

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Last April, West Virginia awarded a nearly $10 million contract to a company called Student First Technologies to manage the state’s Hope Scholarship program, which gives families about $4,900 per child to spend on private-school tuition and homeschooling expenses. The company’s founder, Mark Duran, reacted with delight. “We are very excited to serve your great State,” he wrote.

But problems soon emerged, as reflected in emails obtained by a ProPublica public-information request. Some private schools were so late in receiving their voucher payments from families that they were having trouble meeting payroll. In late August, a state official wrote to Duran with a list of invoices that needed to be paid promptly, including three from a school, Beth Haven Christian in Chauncey, that had “called and indicated they are experiencing significant cash flow issues.” The email continued, “We need to make sure they have their funds early in the day if at all possible.”

The school eventually got its funds. But the episode highlights the challenge that states are facing with their rapidly expanding school-choice programs: making sure the taxpayer money they are allowing families to spend on behalf of their kids is being processed efficiently and properly. To do so, they are relying on a small group of fledgling companies that have seized the opportunity to serve as middlemen for this fast-growing market. The work can be lucrative, but it has also proven so daunting that in several states, the companies that carry it out have ended up losing contracts to their rivals — sometimes less than a year after winning them — as questions arise and audits and lawsuits pile up.

An idea sold on the basis of its simplicity — give parents money to spend on their kids’ education as they see fit — has turned out to be anything but simple in practice. And this complexity comes at a cost: paying companies to run the programs.

There are now a dozen states in the country that offer universal private-school vouchers, making them available to families of any income level. The largest of those programs, in Florida, is now costing taxpayers nearly $3 billion a year, with the programs in Arizona and Ohio each drawing around $1 billion a year from taxpayer funds.

In some of the states, the money comes to parents in the form of “education savings accounts,” which can be used on education-related expenses other than tuition. These programs are especially complex to implement, since some form of oversight is needed to make sure families are spending the money in ways that comply with the rules.

Angling for the task of managing this spending are four companies. The largest is ClassWallet, which is based in Hollywood, Florida. Its founder, Jamie Rosenberg, initially offered its online procurement technology to teachers and administrators to reduce the amount of paperwork involved in school expenditures. But the company has shifted to capitalize on the school-choice market. With backers including Lazard Family Office Partners, a global investment firm, ClassWallet has more than 200 employees and contracts in more than 10 states, among them Florida and Arizona, the latter of which has faced headlines about some parents using state education aid for questionable purchases as the cost of its program has swelled far beyond projections.

The smallest is Student First, based in Bloomington, Indiana, with 14 full-time employees. Both its founder, Duran, and its chief technology officer were educated in alternative settings, including homeschooling and so-called learning pods — kids from multiple families clustered together — and say they view the company as part of the larger cause of promoting school choice. Duran, 30, previously worked for his family’s homebuilding company in northern Michigan, served as lifestyle assistant and boat captain for an executive couple and their family, and helped deliver a yacht on a 4,000-mile journey from northern Michigan to Key Largo, Florida, via Nova Scotia, Canada, and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

The other two companies fall in between in scale. Odyssey, based in lower Manhattan, was founded by Joseph Connor, 37, a former teacher and lawyer who had previously created a company called SchoolHouse, which connected teachers with the learning pods that sprouted up during the pandemic. Odyssey, with about 40 employees, has received investor funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Tusk Venture Partners, among others. It works with Iowa and Wyoming and recently won contracts for the newly expanding voucher programs in Georgia and Louisiana.

The fourth, Merit International, is based in Silicon Valley, and it likewise has considerable venture-capital backing, including from Andreessen Horowitz; its contracts include programs in Ohio and Kansas. The 100-person company also manages payments for government programs outside of education. One of its co-founders, Jacob Orrin, said in an interview that he, too, was drawn to the school-choice business by his background: He struggled in school when he was young, and he says he would have greatly benefited from having had more educational options. “We’re mission-driven — but we make a profit,” he said.

Competition among the companies often gets fierce as they face off in state after state. They dispatch lobbyists to cast aspersions on their rivals with legislators and state officials. They try to influence the legislation creating the voucher programs to tailor them to their company’s offerings. They feed whisper campaigns among parents about problems arising in states where their rivals are in charge.

In Iowa, after Odyssey won that state’s contract in 2023, Student First and an Iowa organization it was partnering with brought a legal challenge, alleging “substantial material misrepresentations” by Odyssey; an administrative judge dismissed the suit.

In Arkansas, the state had selected ClassWallet in 2023 to manage its Education Freedom Accounts, which give families about $7,000 per student. But last spring, the state considered switching to Student First to save money. A lobbyist for ClassWallet paid visits to state legislators, warning them that this was a bad idea. “They sent someone to talk to me,” recalled state Sen. Bart Hester, a Republican from Cave Spring. The lobbyist for ClassWallet explained that the company has three times the number of employees as Student First. “‘There’s no way they can do it,’” the lobbyist said, according to Hester.

Student First won the contract, worth about $15 million over seven years. But by October, state officials had decided to switch back to ClassWallet, saying that Student First had missed deadlines to set up the program, was late in processing payments, and owed the state $563,000 in fees as a result of the delays. “Student First Technologies is proud of our work to empower Arkansas families,” Duran wrote in a response to questions from ProPublica. (Of Student First’s experience in West Virginia, he said the company has been making “month-on-month improvements, and this will never stop.”)

ClassWallet previously became embroiled in difficulties one state over, in Oklahoma. A 2022 investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch found widespread questionable spending under a program in which Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, provided $18 million in federal pandemic-relief funds for families to use for private-school vouchers or educational materials, to be overseen by ClassWallet. Some used the state aid to buy Christmas trees, gaming consoles, electric fireplaces, outdoor grills, dishwashers, pressure washers, car stereo equipment, coffee makers, exercise gear, smartwatches and at least 548 TVs.

The 2022 article quoted Rosenberg, the ClassWallet CEO, praising the program at a 2020 panel discussion: “They were literally able to deploy $18 million without having to engage any human capital from the government agency, and for it to be almost hands-free and incredibly, incredibly streamlined.” But a subsequent federal audit reported that ClassWallet had blamed Oklahoma for the abuses, saying that the company had offered to limit purchases to items preapproved by the state, but that a teacher who helped arrange the contract — Ryan Walters, now Oklahoma’s education secretary — had declined this option. (Walters did not respond to a request for comment.)

The problems with the program sparked an odd three-way legal fight, with Stitt attempting to sue ClassWallet and Oklahoma’s own attorney general opposing the governor and blaming problems on poor state oversight. (The Stitt administration is still pursuing the case, now using outside lawyers. ClassWallet has said the claims are “wholly without merit.”) The company declined to respond to specific questions, but spokesperson Jason Hart provided a statement saying “ClassWallet is the country’s most trusted citizen digital wallet technology platform.”

In Idaho, ClassWallet had the contract to administer an early-pandemic initiative that evolved into what is now called Empowering Parents, a $30 million state program that gives families up to $3,000 each for supplemental educational expenses. The current system could be a possible prelude to a full voucher program, which is up for debate now in the Legislature. Odyssey won the contract in 2022, for $1.5 million per year. A year later, the state ordered an audit after receiving reports of spending on clothes, TVs, smartwatches and other noneducational items. The audit found that only a tiny sliver of purchases were inappropriate, but it ordered Odyssey to pay back the state for $478,656.22 in interest it had collected from unspent federal funding for the program.

Meanwhile, parents and business owners were reporting other issues with the program under Odyssey’s oversight, as reflected in emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by ProPublica. Last February, Tina Stevens, the owner of a music store and academy in Coeur d’Alene that is one of the program’s biggest vendors, wrote to her state senator saying that she had lost $10,000 because families were unable to access their funds to pay for music classes. She also wrote that Odyssey’s requirement to ship all purchases to families was wasting money. (Odyssey said the shipping requirement was imposed by the state.) The system, Stevens wrote, is “rife with more fraud than we ever saw last year and super easy to cheat.” Stevens elaborated in an interview, saying that in one instance, she was required to ship a digital piano via a freight truck, at a cost of $423, even though the family it went to had come in person to select it. And it took her 1,000 hours, she said, to list and update her products on Odyssey’s online marketplace for the program.

Still, she said, the difficulties had not undermined her support for the program. “Parents and kids need musical products and a lot of kids can’t afford it,” she said. “I’ve had mothers coming in the door crying, saying ‘I never thought I could get a musical instrument, and now my kid can have something I never thought they could have.’”

In September, the director of the Idaho State Board of Education, Joshua Whitworth, wrote to Odyssey’s CEO, Connor, listing problems, including “ongoing customer service concerns,” sales taxes charged in error, and vendors being owed payments since January 2024. Connor replied with a lengthy email defending the company, saying that the company had an above-average customer satisfaction rating in Idaho and paid out the “vast majority” of orders within a week. But days later, Idaho said it was switching back to ClassWallet.

Emails show ClassWallet executives and lobbyists celebrating their victory and collaborating with state officials over how to word the announcement. “The tone of this one was markedly more vicious,” said one of the participants in the Idaho competition, describing the latest round. “It’s like two heavyweights exchanging blows.”

In response to questions about the loss of the Idaho contract and the problems that preceded it, a company spokesperson said, “Odyssey’s bid was undercut on price and the decision to rebid had nothing to do with performance.”

In an interview, Orrin, the Merit co-founder, said the programs’ problems were due partly to states coming under pressure to limit costs and expecting companies to operate them at thin margins. “At a certain level, as states continue to squeeze on these budgets, it will be hard for anyone to deliver successfully,” he said. Some companies were contributing to this by making unrealistically low bids and were then having trouble delivering. “Some of the companies in this space are trying hard to chase the dragon,” he said.

Vanessa Grossl, who worked for ClassWallet before being elected last fall as a Republican state representative in Kentucky, calls the new mode of spending “Venmo government” and predicts it will improve with time. The novelty of the programs has “gotten some of them in trouble,” she said. “But you have to uncover those bugs in any new system. It’s worth the price of innovation and discovery for working through the bugs.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Correction

Jan. 30, 2025: This story inaccurately described the effort Tina Stevens spent 1,000 hours on. It took her that long to update her products on Odyssey’s online marketplace, not to build a separate website required by Odyssey.

This story has also been updated to include additional comment from Odyssey.

by Alec MacGillis

A Defense Department Directive to Expand Access to Military Courts Falls Short of Federal Law’s Requirements

5 months ago

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More than two years after ProPublica sued the Navy over its failure to provide public access to military courts, the Department of Defense has for the first time directed U.S. military branches to give advance public notice of preliminary hearings, a crucial milestone in criminal cases.

These “Article 32” hearings end with a recommendation about whether the case should move forward, be dismissed or end in a nonjudicial punishment.

DOD General Counsel Caroline Krass issued the guidance earlier this year, directing the secretaries of the Navy, Army, Air Force and Homeland Security (which oversees the Coast Guard) to post upcoming preliminary hearings, provide access to certain court records and publish results of military trials — known as courts-martial — on a public website.

But legal experts say the new guidance falls short of the conditions laid out in a federal law requiring the military to dramatically increase public access to its justice system.

The military has long resisted opening its proceedings to the public. The 2016 law, passed after revelations about rampant sexual assault in the armed forces, instructs the DOD to develop policies similar to civilian courts that provide public access to “all stages of the military justice system.” The federal court system gives the public wide-ranging, real-time electronic access to hearing schedules and filings in all but the most sensitive criminal cases.

In contrast, the military typically withholds all court records while cases are active and keeps records secret indefinitely if a defendant is found not guilty. It also grants no public records access to cases in the preliminary hearing stage, including reports recommending whether cases should be dismissed or move forward to court-martial.

Experts say the lack of transparency robs the public of the ability to understand whether the military justice system operates fairly and how the branches are responding to issues like sexual assault within the ranks.

The new guidance doesn’t change any of that. It requires the military to disclose outcomes of court-martial hearings, but not until up to seven days after they conclude. Records from trials and appeals don’t have to be made public until 45 days after the record is “certified,” which can be months after a trial or appeal concludes.

And the new guidance requires the military to give at least three days’ notice of upcoming preliminary hearings in its courts. That gives anyone interested in attending a preliminary hearing just a few days to obtain clearance to enter a military base where the hearing is scheduled to be held and travel to the base, possibly across the country. Getting clearance to enter a military base can take a week or more depending on the location.

Even then, attendees wouldn’t know the significance of the case or even the accused’s full name unless they were directly involved. The Navy began posting notices of preliminary hearings late last year on its court website, but those postings currently lack the full name of the accused and don’t explain what the person is accused of beyond a crime category.

“The preliminary hearing phase is often when public interest in a controversy is highest,” said Franklin Rosenblatt, associate professor at the Mississippi College School of Law and president of the National Institute of Military Justice. “News media, affected communities and others now have more of a glimpse into the military justice process than they had before. But ultimately these are half measures. This is not the kind of contemporaneous access to criminal dockets that the rest of the country has come to expect.”

ProPublica’s lawsuit seeks contemporaneous access to court records at all levels, including to cases that resulted in acquittals, and a ruling that this kind of information is presumed open unless the military shows on a case-by-case basis that there’s a compelling need to withhold it.

The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press and 34 media organizations have filed an amicus brief in the case, arguing that the military’s opaque practices don’t comply with federal law and decades of court rulings, including several from the U.S. Supreme Court. ProPublica is represented in the suit by its deputy general counsel, Sarah Matthews, and by pro bono attorneys at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP.

“We’re happy to see some incremental progress, but it is far less than what the First Amendment and a congressional mandate demand,” said Matthews. “Three days is often not enough time to get access to the base, and since the Navy withholds charge sheets until a case is over, the public won’t even know what the hearing is about or whether it’s worth attending. And the Navy still withholds all court records while the case is happening, only releasing a tiny fraction of the record months or even years after a case has ended, and then only if the defendant is found guilty.”

Matthews said this practice “makes it virtually impossible for the public and press to know if military courts are treating service members fairly and if justice is being done.”

The Navy does not comment on pending litigation, a spokesperson said.

In a December motion, attorneys representing the Navy, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other defendants asked a judge to dismiss the suit, arguing that decisions about military policy on court access are not up to the judicial branch and that the First Amendment does not require contemporaneous or “unfettered” access to such records and hearings. ProPublica opposed that motion in January.

The Navy has repeatedly and broadly invoked the federal Privacy Act as a reason to withhold military court records, a law ProPublica argues does not apply because the act does not trump the First Amendment or permit blanket sealing of court records. The DOD has also acknowledged it can release records despite the Privacy Act.

The Navy’s handling of a high-profile arson case prompted ProPublica’s lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of California’s U.S. District Court. In 2020, the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire and burned for more than four days. The ship was destroyed, a more than $1 billion loss to the Navy.

The Navy prosecuted Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays on charges of aggravated arson and willfully hazarding a vessel. ProPublica found there was little to connect him to the blaze, including no physical evidence that Mays — or anyone — set the fire.

Mays was found not guilty at his court-martial in 2022, and ProPublica sued that year over the Navy’s refusal to release any court documents associated with his case.

ProPublica has asked the court to order the secretary of defense to issue proper rules for the release of records, hearing schedules and other information. The government tried to get that part of the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that Austin was allowed to decide how to implement the law.

A federal judge ruled last year that ProPublica’s claims against Austin should move forward. The judge wrote that ProPublica has “plausibly alleged that the issued guidelines are clearly inconsistent with Congress’ mandate.”

A recent independent federal review of the military justice system by a panel of experts recommends that the DOD fully comply with the 2016 law by developing electronic access to public dockets and providing “direct public access to pretrial, trial and appellate court-martial records at the time of filing.”

“More accurate data and greater transparency are needed to enhance trust and confidence in the system,” the review states.

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Megan Rose contributed reporting.

by Ziva Branstetter

How Many Students Have Been Expelled Under Tennessee’s School Threats Law? There’s No Clear Answer.

5 months ago

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When a mother in Tennessee reached out to ProPublica last year to share that her 10-year-old had been kicked out of school for making a finger gun, she wondered how many other kids had experienced the same thing.

The state had recently passed laws heightening penalties for making threats of mass violence at school, including requiring yearlong expulsions. There was a lot of speculation among advocates and lawyers about how broadly schools and law enforcement would apply the law. As a longtime education reporter with experience reporting on student discipline, I assumed I would be able to get meaningful data to help me understand whether this 10-year-old’s experience was a fluke or a trend.

After several months of investigating, I found that the state laws had resulted in a wave of expulsions and arrests for children accused of making threats of mass violence, sometimes stemming from rumors and misunderstandings.

But in the course of publishing stories on that 10-year-old and other children ensnared by these laws, I realized that the process of determining just how many students were affected was more frustrating than illuminating. I learned that Tennessee gives public agencies wide latitude to refuse to release data, which could reveal whether the laws were working as intended or needed to be fixed. And due to inconsistencies in how school districts collect and report information, lawmakers themselves are sometimes as in the dark as the public.

I began my quest by asking a couple dozen school districts, including 20 of the state’s largest, how many students they had expelled for making threats of mass violence over the past few years. I also wanted, if possible, the demographics of those students. I live in Georgia, and Tennessee allows agencies to deny records requests from people without a Tennessee address — so I partnered with Paige Pfleger of WPLN News in Nashville, who has spent years reporting on guns and criminal justice in Tennessee.

Tennessee, like all states, must submit school disciplinary data to the federal government, and it requires school districts to collect this data throughout the year. Some districts like Metro Nashville Public Schools and Rutherford County Schools provided us with numbers relatively easily, which showed they expelled students for making threats more often once the zero-tolerance law was on the books, despite investigating similar or smaller numbers of incidents.

But other districts fought against releasing data, claiming in some cases that sharing any of this basic information would violate the confidentiality of their students or even lead to violence on their campuses. “We believe that it would have an adverse impact on our security plans and security operations,” a private lawyer for the Putnam County School System, east of Nashville, emailed back. Publishing the data “could lead to threats and/or actual incidents,” the lawyer added.

Several said they didn’t maintain a database that would make it easy or possible to give us the information, citing state public records law they said allowed them to deny the request.

In other instances, districts released incomplete or inconsistent data. Several were willing to tell us how many times their staff investigated alleged threats from students but said they couldn’t share the number who had been expelled. Some lumped together threats of mass violence with a number of other disciplinary offenses, inflating the numbers.

I wondered how lawmakers would be able to assess whether the expulsions were working if they didn’t even know how many students had been expelled. So I asked the state’s Department of Education to let me know what it was seeing. Turns out school districts were also sending their inaccurate data directly to the state. The department told me that school districts had reported about 170 “incidents” of threats of mass violence last school year. But our sample from fewer than 20 school districts showed almost 100 more incidents than that, and I couldn’t get a clear explanation about the discrepancy.

One Nashville reporter found that the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System wrongly reported data about disruptive school incidents, including threats of mass violence. When I reached out to a representative for the district, he told me that it had improved its records but that he couldn’t “pull accurate data for the past.” He recommended I ask the county sheriff’s office for data about the number of students charged with threats of mass violence. (The sheriff’s office had already denied my request, claiming it was confidential information.)

This year, as the legislative session ramped up in Tennessee, I asked Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat and a former special education teacher, to see if she could succeed where I failed. She asked the Education Department for the number of expulsions for threats of mass violence last school year.

Likely due to reporting errors, the department could only definitively confirm 12. Our digging had uncovered 66 expulsions for threats of mass violence across just 10 school districts.

In response to questions about the difficulties I encountered, an Education Department spokesperson said that the agency is training districts on how to accurately report their data.

The spokesperson also said the department had passed along the responsibility of tracking threats of mass violence to the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which has been helping investigate them at schools. Early this year, I asked that department what it would be tracking and whether any of that data would be public in the future.

That information, a spokesperson responded, was confidential.

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by Aliyya Swaby

They Followed North Carolina Election Rules When They Cast Their Ballots. Now Their Votes Could Be Tossed Anyway.

5 months ago

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A Republican judge has spent more than two months trying to overturn his narrow defeat for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by arguing that around 60,000 ballots should be tossed out. But many residents have only recently learned that their votes are in danger of not being counted and say they have done nothing wrong.

ProPublica has heard from dozens of voters who expressed astonishment and anger at state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin’s ongoing attempts to cancel their ballots. The claim at the heart of Griffin’s challenge: No ballot should be counted for a voter whose registration is missing a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

The state election board and a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge have dismissed Griffin’s argument that the missing information should invalidate votes. What’s more, state election officials have made clear that there are many legitimate reasons for driver’s license or Social Security information to be missing. And it’s not as if voters can cast ballots without confirming who they are. North Carolina law requires that people verify their identity at the polls — in most cases by showing a driver’s license.

Elizabeth MacDonald, who registered as an unaffiliated voter and lives in an area of Western North Carolina ravaged by Hurricane Helene, made sure to cast a ballot, even though she was still consumed by both the devastation of the storm and the demands of caring for her infant. “The prospect of losing my vote for arbitrary and political reasons is especially painful given the personal and communal trauma we’ve endured over the past several months,” MacDonald wrote in a letter to Griffin, which she shared with ProPublica.

“We’re extremely upset,” said Frank Jarvis, whose wife’s registration was challenged and who lives on the state’s eastern coast. “We’re traditional conservatives and Republicans — but it leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, no matter what side it is doing this. I don’t need that kind of person representing me on the Supreme Court.”

Multiple data analyses show that the voters whose ballots were targeted by Griffin are disproportionately Black, Democratic and young. Griffin’s lawyers have written in a legal brief that if a court grants their requests to nullify the ballots, Griffin will likely be able to overturn his 734-vote loss to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs. The majority-Republican Supreme Court has issued an order blocking certification of Riggs’ win until Griffin’s challenge can be heard in a lower court.

Voters gathered in New Bern, North Carolina, in mid-January to learn about Judge Jefferson Griffin’s ballot challenge. (Rachel Jessen for ProPublica)

Griffin responded to a list of detailed questions from ProPublica by writing, “I can’t comment on pending litigation. It would be a violation of our Judicial Code of Conduct for me to do so.”

Below are the stories of four of the dozens of voters ProPublica heard from, whose experiences reflect various reasons that driver’s license and Social Security information could be missing from their registration. One has a health condition that prevents him from driving and therefore doesn’t have a license. Another is among the voters who claim that their registration application was filled out correctly and that a clerical error is likely to blame. A newcomer to the state is among the many who didn’t yet have a North Carolina driver’s license when they registered to vote. And, at the other end of the spectrum, a longtime North Carolina voter is one of millions who registered before the information was marked as required on a state voter registration form.

“Today It’s North Carolina, and Tomorrow It’s Another State”

In mid-January, dozens of mostly Black voters gathered in a historical church in New Bern, North Carolina, to learn why a white judge was trying to throw out their votes. The congregation of St. Peters AME Zion Church was established during the Civil War for newly emancipated African Americans, and since then it has remained a central stage for the state’s political struggles. One of the organizers of the gathering was Vicki Sykes, a 58-year-old poll worker, who had been surprised one evening in early January to receive a call from a voting rights advocate informing her that her ballot was among those Griffin was attempting to disqualify.

Vicki Sykes helped organize an event for voters whose ballots were challenged. (Rachel Jessen for ProPublica)

“The audacity of challenging me was shocking,” Sykes said. “I know the rules.”

Sykes said she brought her driver’s license with her when she registered to vote in 2024 after moving to another North Carolina county and gave it to an election worker — and now suspects an administrative error could have been to blame for her driver’s license number not being entered on her form. Concerned that many people weren’t aware that their votes were in danger of being nullified, Sykes and her sister-in-law, a pastor, arranged the gathering, putting out the word through Facebook messages, calls, voting rights groups and flyers.

“I want people to know today it’s North Carolina, and tomorrow it’s another state,” said Sykes. “It could be a blueprint for what’s to come. So we’re going to fight like hell for that not to happen.”

“It Felt Like Griffin Was Trying to Cast Me Aside”

Connor Addison has epilepsy, a condition that makes it dangerous for him to drive if seizure were to strike while he was behind the wheel. But Addison never expected his medical condition would affect his ability to vote.

He said that around 2022, when he turned 18, he registered in Wake County using his Social Security number. He voted in the 2022 and 2024 elections without problems using a state-approved ID card.

Connor Addison didn’t provide a driver’s license when he registered to vote because he doesn’t have one. (Rachel Jessen for ProPublica)

Then, a few weeks ago, his mother told him his registration had been challenged by Griffin, after she heard about the challenges and searched a copy of them available online. “I was almost in disbelief. I’d had to take special actions already to make sure I could vote,” Addison said. “It felt like Griffin was trying to cast me aside.”

Since then, Addison has been speaking out about the challenges, especially in online communities, where he spends much of his time, as his health limits his ability to move about in the physical world. “I want people to understand that what is happening shouldn’t be happening,” said Addison.

“Make Sure Your Vote Counts”

One afternoon last week, Sofia Dib-Gomez, an 18-year-old college freshman, set up a table in Duke University’s main dining hall with a sign declaring, “Make Sure Your Vote Counts.” Then she began asking passersby hurrying to class if they knew whether their ballot was being challenged in the 2024 election. The first student who stopped by was shocked to find that his was.

Sofia Dib-Gomez talks with other Duke University students about Griffin’s challenges to voters. (Rachel Jessen for ProPublica)

Dib-Gomez is a member of the Student Voting Rights Lab at Duke and North Carolina Central University, a group that combed the list of Griffin’s challenges to identify around 750 students from Duke whose ballots were targeted and around 4,300 more from other colleges. Research by the group suggests that Griffin’s challenges disproportionately affect young voters. According to the research, people between the ages of 18 and 25 were 3.4 times more likely to be challenged than those over 65.

While assisting with the research, Dib-Gomez was surprised to discover that she was among the challenged voters. When she moved from New York to North Carolina last year, she registered to vote by providing her Social Security number, since she lacked a state driver’s license.

“This was the first election I was able to vote in, so I was very frustrated when I found out,” said Dib-Gomez, who provided her passport to prove her identity when voting. “Students shouldn’t have to feel that this is their fault or they did something wrong. This is targeting them in an attempt to overturn an election.”

“He Might Really Actually Get Away With This”

Mindy Beller and her husband, Scott Evans, in their home (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

When Mindy Beller was growing up, her mother would take her to the polls and talk to her about how important voting was. In November, Beller took her own daughter to vote for the first time. Afterward, they went out to eat at an Indian restaurant to celebrate. “I said, ‘Thanks for voting,’ and she said, ‘Thanks for raising me to be a voter,” Beller recalled.

Not long after, a voting rights group contacted Beller to let her know that her vote was being challenged by Griffin. It’s been more than two decades since Beller, who is 62, registered to vote. Until about a year ago, the state’s voter registration form did not require people to include their drivers license or Social Security information, instead coding it as optional, before updating it after a complaint to the state election board pointed out that the form should require the information. Beller felt especially frustrated with Griffin’s challenge, as she lives outside Asheville, North Carolina, portions of which were wiped away by Hurricane Helene, and felt that neither she nor other impacted voters needed the additional stress of the challenges after striving to vote in the storm’s aftermath.

“I keep thinking it can’t be real,” said Beller. “But as it gets closer, he might really actually get away with this.”

Rachel Jessen contributed reporting.

Correction

Jan. 30, 2025: This story originally misspelled a voter’s surname on a subsequent reference. She is Elizabeth MacDonald, not McDonald.

by Doug Bock Clark

Dozens of People Died in Arizona Sober Living Homes as State Officials Fumbled Medicaid Fraud Response

5 months ago

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At least 40 Native American residents of sober living homes and treatment facilities in the Phoenix area died as state Medicaid officials struggled to respond to a massive fraud scheme that targeted Indigenous people with addictions.

The deaths, almost all from drug and alcohol use, span from the spring of 2022 to the summer of 2024, according to a review of records from the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner. Over half died as officials ignored calls to address lax oversight later shown to have contributed to thousands of patients being recruited into sham treatment programs.

Patients continued to die even after Arizona officials in May 2023 announced a sweeping investigation of hundreds of facilities. By then, the fraud was so widespread that officials spent the next year seeking to halt Medicaid reimbursements to behavioral health businesses accused of wrongdoing.

The state’s Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, acknowledged the fraud cost taxpayers as much as $2.5 billion. But it has not accounted publicly for the number of deaths tied to the scheme.

Many of the deaths in sober living homes reviewed by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica happened as officials in at least five instances across Republican and Democratic administrations failed to act on evidence that rampant fraud was imperiling Native Americans whose care was paid for by the agency, according to court documents, agency records and interviews.

A class-action lawsuit filed last month by families who allege the state’s inaction harmed or killed loved ones seeking addiction treatment names three people who died outside of sober living homes or treatment programs. Their deaths are not among the 40 fatalities tied directly to the facilities in medical examiner records.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who took office in January 2023, blamed her Republican predecessor, Doug Ducey, for failing to relay the scale of the scheme that persisted for years under his leadership. However, AZCIR and ProPublica found that the leader Hobbs appointed at AHCCCS also stalled a key reform the agency would later credit with helping to stem the fraud.

In a brief statement, Daniel Scarpinato, a Ducey spokesperson, did not comment on missed opportunities to detect and stop the fraud under his administration. But he said that the former governor went to great lengths to ensure a smooth transition for Hobbs and that members of Ducey’s staff continued to make themselves available to her administration after he left office. “All they needed to do was pick up the phone,” Scarpinato said.

AHCCCS declined to comment or to make Director Carmen Heredia available for an interview because of the ongoing class-action lawsuit.

Reva Stewart, a community advocate who started a nonprofit to help victims and their families, estimates the crisis led to hundreds of deaths, extending beyond those that occurred in sober living facilities. She said many people recruited into programs were reported missing and some lost access to treatment or became homeless when the state’s crackdown led to the abrupt closure of facilities that housed people.

Stewart and others fault AHCCCS for not acting sooner.

“I had family members who died in these group homes,” said Lorenzo Henry, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe who said he was recruited into multiple inadequate treatment programs before finding a facility that helped him. “I would like to see at least AHCCCS take accountability for their actions, for how they let this fraud go on for so long.”

Among the victims was Jeffrey Hustito, a 43-year-old uncle, brother and son from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. He had been a caretaker for his father when he was on dialysis and awaiting a kidney transplant. In the fall of 2021, Hustito sought treatment for alcoholism in Arizona, his family said. His father, an Army veteran and custodian for the local Indian Health Service hospital, was relieved to learn about his son’s decision. The two were close, living in the family’s home in a historic tribal village surrounded by high desert and mesas.

But in Phoenix, the younger Hustito became difficult to keep track of. He was caught up in a murky network of treatment programs, according to interviews with his family, social media posts, and state and county records. Sober living home operators always seemed to be moving him, his father said.

“We were really thrilled when he decided to get treatment,” said Anders Hustito, who is slender and soft-spoken. “He just got worse over there.”

Jeffrey Hustito died in a sober living home on Dec. 27, 2022.

A person walks past the location where, according to Anders Hustito, white vans stopped to collect people and bring them to sober homes in Arizona. (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) Skyrocketing Reimbursements and Fraud Allegations

The fraud flourished for years under the state’s American Indian Health Program, a Medicaid insurance option for tribal citizens that allowed providers to set their own reimbursement rates. This fee-for-service model, established as a result of federal requirements, aimed to ensure coverage for Native Americans living in areas not typically served by insurance companies. But with no limit on how much they could bill, some behavioral health providers claimed tens of thousands of dollars for a single counseling or treatment session.

The first uptick in behavioral health reimbursement claims came in 2019. That same year, Ducey appointed Jami Snyder, a deputy director at AHCCCS and former head of Texas’ Medicaid agency, to serve as director of AHCCCS. She pursued new initiatives, like additional mental health services and housing options for Medicaid recipients. She also had a more hands-off approach to agency operations, including fraud prevention, than her predecessors, according to former AHCCCS employees.

During the pandemic, Snyder enacted changes to increase access to care. One allowed the state Medicaid program to bypass background checks for providers and in-person inspections of facilities. Another let providers continue collecting Medicaid payments after their health department licenses lapsed, meaning AHCCCS no longer had updated information on clinics’ certifications or ownership. The changes were not communicated beyond Snyder’s senior leadership team for nearly two years, according to documentation provided by an AHCCCS spokesperson.

Snyder declined requests for an interview or comment for this story.

Medicaid, which provides essential health care for lower-income people, was known to be susceptible to fraud, in part because of the breadth of services offered; the American Indian Health Program especially was at higher risk because providers could set their own rates with no cap. But the failure to communicate licensing changes to staff made the agency and program even more vulnerable. Markay Adams, former assistant director of the division within AHCCCS that administers the American Indian Health Program, said that had she known about the changes she could have advocated for more audits or staff to safeguard against fraud.

(Managed care organizations, which oversee services to 90% of Medicaid members, also were unaware of the changes.)

Between 2020 and 2021, spending on the American Indian Health Program skyrocketed from roughly $690 million to nearly $1 billion, according to internal documents.

Behavioral health outpatient clinics drove the most significant increase, with officials later saying that many of these facilities were part of the multilayered scheme to defraud Medicaid. The clinics would often coordinate with unregulated sober living homes to house patients eligible for the program. The clinics would then pay the homes for supplying patients, using a cut of the outsize profits they made billing the American Indian Health Program.

AHCCCS did not appear to grasp the scope and complexity of the fraud scheme for another year, despite red flags and the spike in payments to treatment programs, Adams said. The Arizona Republic last year also reported that a medical director at the agency became concerned in 2021 about unsafe behavioral health settings.

In June 2021, AHCCCS terminated its contract with a facility that had unlicensed staff, overbilled for services and housed patients in a decommissioned hotel, a matter that Snyder was notified about in internal emails. However, the extent of the agency’s probes, conducted by its Office of Inspector General, weren’t fully shared with other AHCCCS divisions, and the executive team did not effectively coordinate or communicate its response within the agency, Adams said.

Mark Brnovich, then Arizona’s attorney general, announced indictments in October 2021 of 13 people and 14 businesses accused of defrauding AHCCCS by billing excessively for treatments and claiming to treat patients never served by their behavioral health operations. (All entered plea agreements, except for L&L Investments, which was found guilty at trial last year.)

Meanwhile, word spread on social media that white vans were appearing on reservations and people with addiction were disappearing, said state Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, a Democrat from Coalmine Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Hatathlie said the behavioral health facilities’ tactics of sending vans to tribal communities grew increasingly aggressive as they recruited clients with promises of free food, housing and clothing. Police intervened but didn’t yet fully understand what was happening, the state senator said.

“I Thought Everything Would Be OK”

Jeffrey Hustito decided to seek treatment in Phoenix based on a recommendation from friends at Zuni Pueblo. In the fall of 2021, he entered a program paid for by Medicaid that offered a room at a sober living home, his father said. Hustito believed treatment would provide a stepping stone to steady employment, maybe as a welder or a cook.

At home, he liked to make pasta and enchiladas, and he often had dinner ready in the evenings after his father’s custodial shifts at the local Indian Health Service hospital.

“He was always helpful,” Anders Hustito said.

The family knew they would miss him when he enrolled in the Phoenix treatment program. But they also knew he needed help.

The place where he stayed in Phoenix, a two-story house with a hot tub and swimming pool, looked like a mansion in the photos that Jeffrey Hustito shared in text messages, his sister, Katherine Hustito, said. She was pleased he seemed happy, though she was surprised the treatment program operators had helped him get an Arizona identification card and sign up for Medicaid in the state.

“He was taking pictures of himself in the pool,” his sister said. “I thought everything would be OK.”

Hope eventually faded. Around February 2022, Hustito called home scared, thirsty and unsure of his whereabouts, she said. His family believed he may have been kicked out of his sober living home, leaving him with no place to stay. By the time his father drove the four and a half hours to Phoenix, Hustito had figured out he was in Maricopa, a bedroom community more than 30 miles south of the city.

“That’s way out of Phoenix,” Anders Hustito said. “When I finally saw him, boy, I was so glad. We hugged.”

He said he took his son home, only for him to go back to Phoenix a month later and enter a new treatment program.

Anders Hustito did not yet know about the fraud in Arizona or that the programs might be enabling his son’s drinking, rather than helping him quit. But according to public records, there were signs of trouble within facilities and problems with providers’ licenses.

In early February 2022, Brnovich’s office received a 107-page memo from a private citizen that spelled out alleged schemes of more than 30 sober living homes in the Phoenix area believed to be targeting Native Americans and billing for treatment services that were not provided. (Three of the four individuals named in the memo, including a state health department employee, would be indicted by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, in September 2024.)

At AHCCCS, staff received news in March of a death inside a residential treatment program, Adams said. In an interview, she could not recall details of the death or the facility where it occurred. But she said a health and safety committee reviewing the death discovered the facility did not have a health department license, a key detail that would repeatedly appear in later investigations.

Adams, who was present for the review, questioned how the provider could collect Medicaid payments without a license that’s required of every health care provider. Soon after escalating the issue with senior leadership, a top AHCCCS manager disclosed the changes that allowed unlicensed providers to remain in AHCCCS’ enrollment system. The agency would later find more than 13,000 unlicensed providers eligible to receive Medicaid reimbursements, though only a fraction were behavioral health or accused of wrongdoing.

The Office of Inspector General undertook a manual review of behavioral health residential facilities’ licenses, Adams said, and Snyder began meeting that spring with AHCCCS’ top managers to identify weaknesses that fraudsters could exploit.

Evening on the edge of Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) “They Didn’t Really Teach Us Anything”

By the summer of 2022, Jeffrey Hustito was enrolled in Beyond4Wallz Health and Wellness. The new outpatient treatment program held classes in an office building in north Phoenix and placed its clients in houses throughout Phoenix, according to the owner.

State records show the business, which received a state health department license in April 2021, was reimbursed $3.5 million from Medicaid that year. The next year, Beyond4Wallz’s Medicaid claims more than tripled, to $11.1 million.

At the same time, state health inspectors were discovering that Beyond4Wallz failed to supervise staff, according to state health department records. Inspectors also said the company could not provide proof that its counselors were qualified to work with clients.

A former client, who said she was enrolled in the program at the same time as Hustito, recalled some clients smoked fentanyl in the treatment center’s bathroom. (She asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation from the business’ owner.)

She said she slept on a mattress on the floor of a rundown house and didn’t get the treatment she needed. “They didn’t really teach us anything. It was just like a room-and-board thing,” she said. Eventually, she left.

In a brief phone interview, Darielle Magee, the owner of Beyond4Wallz and a hairstylist, said she opened the business after losing loved ones to drugs. She built her clientele by asking people on the street and at her salon if they needed help recovering from addiction. “Some people would say no; some people would say yes,” Magee said, adding that she worked with property owners to find shelter for clients and also bought property to house them. Her former clients were “entitled to their own opinions” about the program, she said.

Magee didn’t comment on accusations of substance use among clients in her program or the health department citations, which records show were initially resolved with plans to correct each violation. She also would not comment on Hustito’s time at Beyond4Wallz, citing the “sensitive nature of the topic.”

A Google listing for the business shows photographs of Hustito in a carpeted office with other clients, his husky, 6-foot frame wedged in a small classroom desk. Other photos show him on a trip to California in July 2022, wearing a neon green T-shirt that says “The Sober Life.”

Hustito’s sister described the trip as a high point for him that year. She keeps photos on her phone that he sent from the beach in Los Angeles. In one, he’s wearing the “Sober Life” shirt and beaming with the ocean behind him.

“That’s the Jeffrey we know,” Katherine Hustito said. “Always smiling.”

But as the days passed in California, he no longer appeared to be sober in the photos he sent home. His father wondered if the trip was just a “big old party.”

Photos of Jeffrey Hustito at the beach in California (top row and bottom left) and the Grand Canyon in Arizona (bottom right), photographed on the Hustitos’ dining room table in Zuni Pueblo (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) Resistance to Reforms

Even as AHCCCS struggled to stop the schemes, it was clear the behavioral health care industry was aware of fraudulent billing, according to agency documents.

That summer, AHCCCS staff were wrestling with how to keep providers from reaping huge profits with a single billing code meant for serving people in need of intensive outpatient help for addiction, including counseling. Reimbursement claims had ranged from roughly $150 to $2,500 for the same service, according to interviews and internal records. Staff would later find one provider charged AHCCCS $60,000 for one treatment session with a single client.

In July 2022, AHCCCS publicly posted a proposal to set a reimbursement rate of $138 per claim for intensive outpatient addiction treatment. The team responsible for setting rates had determined that amount was in line with industry standards.

Yet Snyder heard concerns from more than 10 facility operators, some of whom acknowledged certain clinics were abusing billing rates but said capping reimbursements could put them out of business and trigger a surge in homelessness.

The Arizona Council of Human Service Providers, a group with influential board members, complained the proposed rate change was “premature” and “insufficient” to cover costs of treatment. Among them: Heredia, CEO of Valle del Sol, a behavioral health and primary care organization. She would later replace Snyder as head of AHCCCS, with the agency touting her experience with the two nonprofits.

The agency scrapped the rate change.

Cottonwood trees tower over the gravel road leading to Anders Hustito’s home. (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) “Are You Sure You’re in a Safe Place?”

In the fall of 2022, Hustito spent a week at home in Zuni Pueblo. His sister recalled asking him to stay in New Mexico for good. But he was anticipating another California trip with his treatment program, she said.

A white van pulled up to the Hustito family’s house to take him back to Phoenix. Anders Hustito couldn’t believe the driver had the nerve to show up at the family’s home, shaded by a cottonwood tree along a quiet gravel road.

Things didn’t go as Hustito hoped. The California trip didn’t happen. He was cited for shoplifting. He left Beyond4Wallz, according to the owner. She did not say why.

Hustito listed three addresses that fall, a medical examiner reviewing his health records said. One was a gray one-story house on the far west edge of Phoenix. Anders Hustito said his son gave the impression that the different sober living homes he stayed in were run by the same family, though he did not say who they were.

In November, Katherine Hustito noticed a warning on Facebook from the Zuni Police Department. It said to beware of scammers from Arizona who were trying to recruit tribal members into sham treatment centers. She sent it to her brother. “Are you sure you’re in a safe place?” she recalled asking. “I just want to know you’re OK.”

Jeffrey Hustito responded that he was fine, though that fall he also cried on a phone call with his sister and told her that he hated where he was. He was homesick and said he wanted to return home for an annual tribal ceremony. When that event came and went, he said he would be home by Christmas. He continued sending his sister texts each day to say good morning. She wondered what he wasn’t telling her.

A medical examiner would later note that in his final weeks, Hustito made multiple emergency room visits. One trip to Banner Desert Medical Center was on Dec. 9, a day after he turned 43. Authorities said he drank a half bottle of rum and smoked fentanyl at his sober living home. He was treated and released.

Two days later, he needed medical treatment again, for alcohol poisoning. He was taken to another hospital and released to his sober living home.

On Dec. 23, AHCCCS published for the first time an alert on its website warning of fraudulent sober living homes recruiting Native Americans from reservations.

“We Let Them Drink a Little Bit to Calm Down”

Anders Hustito last heard from his son on Christmas. Jeffrey Hustito was upset about not getting to see the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals play that day, even though he believed his behavioral health provider planned to give him tickets. His family said they sent him money for the game, only for him to learn he was being disciplined and wouldn’t attend the game after all.

His father couldn’t reach him after that.

According to police, Jeffrey Hustito checked into another sober living home on Dec. 26, this one in the suburb of Glendale. He later smoked fentanyl with another resident and laid down to sleep around 1 a.m. People in the house found him unresponsive 45 minutes later, police said. In addition to the drugs, he had alcohol in his system.

Authorities called Anders Hustito on Dec. 27 to tell him his son had died. He blamed himself for not driving to Phoenix a day earlier to search for his son.

But he was also angry with the sober living home owner. When Anders arrived to collect Jeffrey’s belongings with his oldest son and daughter-in-law, Anders asked a man who came to the door how residents could have access to alcohol while seeking treatment.

The answer infuriated him. “He said, ‘Since they have an alcohol problem, we let them drink a little bit to calm down,’” Anders recalled.

Anders Hustito last heard from his son on Christmas in 2022. (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) “It Was Obviously a Systemic Issue”

Jeffrey Hustito was one of at least two Native Americans to die in sober living homes in December 2022 as AHCCCS tried to root out fraud by suspending payments to providers. At least 10 behavioral health providers, including Beyond4Wallz, received suspension notices from AHCCCS that month.

In a letter sent the day after Hustito died, officials accused Beyond4Wallz of billing excessively for services that could not have been provided to patients. Magee, the Beyond4Wallz owner, said she tried to address the state’s allegations and stay open, but eventually closed. Despite the timing, there’s no indication the letter was spurred by Hustito’s death. Magee said she had no ties to sober living homes Hustito entered after he was no longer her client, including the one where he died. And Magee is not facing charges related to the defrauding of AHCCCS.

“So many people were being closed, and we were just one of the first,” said Magee.

Meanwhile, Native Health and Native American Connections, two well-established providers in Phoenix, pressed authorities to do more. As Hobbs took office in January 2023, the organizations held a meeting with other community health centers, law enforcement, AHCCCS and state health officials to discuss human trafficking and Medicaid fraud.

“It was obviously a systemic issue,” Walter Murillo, chief executive officer of Native Health, said in an interview. “I assume that they had to be aware of it by then.”

Snyder did not mention the fraudulent facilities several days later when she went before a legislative committee to discuss a recent audit shortly before stepping down as AHCCCS director. The audit, conducted every 10 years, is used by legislators to evaluate the future of state agencies. It determined, among other findings, that AHCCCS could have made more than $1.7 billion in improper payments between 2019 and 2020 because it did not properly determine providers’ eligibility before making reimbursements. The audit did not indicate if this was related to the growing crisis. Snyder defended the agency’s handling of Medicaid funds.

“It has nothing to do with member abuse,” she said of the payments.

The Hobbs administration began to grasp the scope of the fraud scheme in the weeks that followed, said Christian Slater, the governor’s spokesperson. Hobbs asked the health department to develop a plan to address it, and asked AHCCCS to prepare for a humanitarian response and create a list of providers suspected of fraudulently billing Medicaid.

But if Arizona’s top leaders had made a response to the fraud a priority, key staff members within AHCCCS said the recommendations they provided AHCCCS’ new director were dismissed. Adams and another former staffer, who helped prepare AHCCCS’ financial records but asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said they each presented Heredia with financial reports that showed skyrocketing spending under the American Indian Health Program. (Adams resigned from AHCCCS in April 2023.)

Heredia then briefly blocked another attempt by AHCCCS’s billing experts to cap reimbursement rates, this time at $158, records obtained by ProPublica and AZCIR show. Public responses to the proposed change, including from long-standing community health organization Native American Connections, said capping the existing rate would help curtail massive amounts of fraud and the exploitation of Native Americans.

On April 17, 2023, Heredia emailed the CEO of the Arizona Council of Human Service Providers, the industry group where she had been a board member. The proposal was “completely being pulled off the table for the time being,” she said.

“I apologize for the confusion and stress it caused,” she added in her email. “In the event that anything similar is rolled out, we will do so in collaboration with the Arizona Council and with other stakeholder input.”

At the same time, records show, the human toll of the crisis was escalating. At least five people died in sober living homes in April 2023 from drug and alcohol use, medical examiner records show. And at the end of the month, AHCCCS and health department officials found a distressing scene at a former hotel where a treatment program operator was housing dozens of patients, including children. Armed guards patrolled the exits to keep people from leaving, the governor’s office said.

In May, the cap on reimbursement rates went into effect, though it’s not clear what prompted AHCCCS to address vulnerabilities that staff had identified more than a year earlier.

Within weeks, Heredia and the governor stood with tribal leaders and law enforcement officials to announce a sweeping investigation into fraudulent facilities. AHCCCS also created a hotline that victims displaced from shuttered programs could use to request temporary housing, transportation back to their tribal communities and treatment. More than 11,700 people called it over the next year and a half, state figures show.

But many people still became homeless as facilities closed their doors with little notice or coordinated care for patients, according to advocates.

“The state of Arizona owes our tribal nations an apology,” Mayes, the attorney general, said during the May 2023 press conference. In November 2024, her office announced a $6 million grant program for tribal nations affected by the sober living home fraud. A spokesperson said only tribes and nonprofits in Arizona can apply for the money.

The Hustitos never received an apology. Nor have they received an acknowledgment of their loss — not from AHCCCS or the owners of the sober living homes where he stayed. Anders Hustito said he continues to grieve.

“I’m still hurting,” he said.

“We owe it to him to get justice for him,” Katherine Hustito said.

Mariam Elba contributed research. Nicole Santa Cruz contributed reporting.

by Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Hannah Bassett, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

Madison and Nashville School Shooters Appear to Have Crossed Paths in Online Extremist Communities

5 months ago

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

Moments before 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire inside her Madison, Wisconsin, school, killing two people and herself last month, a social media account believed to be hers posted a photograph on X showing someone sitting in a bathroom stall and flashing a hand gesture that has become a symbol for white supremacy.

As news about the shooting broke, another X user responded: “Livestream it.”

Extremism researchers now believe that second account belonged to 17-year-old Solomon Henderson, who police say walked into his high school cafeteria in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday and fired 10 shots, killing one classmate and then himself. Archives of another X account linked to him show that he posted a similar photo to Rupnow’s in his final moments.

If you or someone you know needs help:

  • Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
  • Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741
  • If you or someone you know has been harmed online, you can contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST or https://report.cybertip.org/.

While there isn’t any evidence that Rupnow and Henderson plotted their attacks together, extremism researchers who have tracked their social media activity told Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica that the two teenagers were active in the same online networks that glorify mass shooters, even crossing paths. Across various social media platforms, the networks trade hateful memes alongside terrorist literature, exchange tips on how to effectively commit attacks and encourage one another to carry out their own.

The researchers had been tracking these networks for months as part of work looking into growing online extremist networks that have proliferated across gaming, chatting and social media platforms and that they believe are radicalizing young people to commit mass shootings and other violence.

The researchers’ analysis found only a few instances in which Rupnow and Henderson appeared to interact directly. But in the hours, days and weeks that followed the Madison shooting, Henderson appears to have become fixated on Rupnow. He boasted on X that Rupnow and him were “mutuals,” a common internet term for following each other, and shared another post that said, “i used to be mutuals with someone who is now a real school shooter ;-).”

In the hours after Natalie Rupnow opened fire in her school in Madison, Solomon Henderson posted numerous times on X, supporting her and boasting that they were “mutuals.” (Obtained by Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica. Screenshots by ProPublica. Blurred by ProPublica.)

The researchers, who have collaborated with counterterrorism organizations, academics and law enforcement to prevent violence by tracking how extremist networks radicalize youth online, agreed to share information as long as they weren’t named out of concerns for their physical safety. The news outlets vetted their credentials with several experts in the field.

It’s impossible to know with complete certainty that online accounts belong to particular people without specialized access to devices and accounts from law enforcement. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department has acknowledged the existence of two documents they believe Henderson created, both of which contain details about his social media accounts. Other researchers and groups — including the Anti-Defamation League, Canadian extremism expert Marc-André Argentino and SITE Intelligence Group — have also determined these likely belong to Henderson.

The extremism researchers linked accounts to Rupnow, who went by Samantha, by tracing her activity across multiple social media profiles that revealed common biographical details, including personal acquaintances and that she lived in Wisconsin. On the bathroom post, one person the account regularly interacted with referred to Rupnow by her nickname, “Sam.” Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica were able to verify the social media posts and the connections between the accounts by retracing the researchers’ steps through archived social media accounts and screenshots.

On Thursday, ABC News cited law enforcement sources in reporting that a social media account connected to Henderson may have been in contact with Rupnow’s social media account. The information reviewed by Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica details their suspected connections and interactions. Nearly all of the accounts that researchers have linked to Rupnow and Henderson have now been suspended.

A Madison Police Department spokesperson said the agency knows Rupnow “was very active on social media” and it is “just starting” to receive and review documents from tech companies. The Nashville police said they had nothing further to add beyond their previous statements.

Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14, and Erin West, 42, were killed at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison. Josselin Corea Escalante, 16, died at Antioch High School in Nashville. Both attackers also killed themselves.

Rupnow and Henderson each had multiple X accounts, the extremism researchers told Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica. At the time of her attack, Rupnow followed just 13 other users. Two of those accounts have been linked to Henderson.

In November, Rupnow shared a post from Henderson, which appeared to wish a happy Veterans Day to the man who killed more than a dozen people at University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

After the Madison attack, someone wrote to Henderson and others on X, saying that one of their “buddies” may have “shot up a school.” Henderson told another user, “I barely know her,” and said he had never exchanged private messages with her. Later, in a 51-page screed that Nashville police are examining, he emulated and praised several past attackers including Rupnow and said, “I have connections with some of them only loosely via online messaging platforms.”

After Rupnow’s shooting, Henderson called her a “Saintress,” using a term common in the networks, and posted or reshared posts about her dozens of times, celebrating her racist, genocidal online persona and the fact that she had taken action. On one platform, he used a photograph of her as his profile picture. In his writings, he said he scrawled Rupnow’s name and those of other perpetrators on his weapon and gear.

The online networks the two teenagers inhabited have an array of influences, ideologies and aesthetics. To varying degrees of commitment and sincerity, they ascribe to white supremacist, anti-Semitic, racist, neo-Nazi, occult or satanic beliefs.

In this online world, the currency that buys clout is violence. This violence often involves children and teenagers harming other children and teenagers, some through doxing or encouraging self-harm, others, like Rupnow and Henderson, by committing mass attacks in the nonvirtual world.

“This network is best described as an online subculture that celebrates violent attacks and radicalizes young people into committing violence,” said one of the violence prevention researchers. “Many of the individuals involved in this network are minors, and we'd like to see intervention to give them the help and support they need, for their own safety as well as those around them.”

Members of some of these communities, including Terrorgram, 764 and Com, have engaged in activities online and offline that have led to convictions for possessing child sexual abuse materials and sexually exploiting a child and indictments for soliciting hate crimes and soliciting the murder of federal officials. The cases are pending, and the defendants have not filed responses in court. This month, the U.S. State Department designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, saying “the group promotes violent white supremacism, solicits attacks on perceived adversaries, and provides guidance and instructional materials on tactics, methods, and targets for attacks, including on critical infrastructure and government officials.”

When details of the Nashville shooting began to emerge, researchers realized they had seen some of Henderson’s accounts and posts within the network of about 100 users they are tracking. They had previously reported one username of an account belonging to Henderson, as well as others within the network, to law enforcement and filed several reports with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

They had not been aware of Rupnow’s accounts before her attack but were able to locate her within the network after the fact, discovering she had regularly interacted with other accounts they had been following.

Alex Newhouse, an extremism researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said these subcultures have a long history of lionizing and mimicking past attackers while goading one another to enact as much violence as possible — even by assigning “scores” to past attacks, something Henderson engaged with online. “The Antioch one is very obviously copycat,” Newhouse said.

Although Henderson’s diary indicates he had been contemplating an attack for months prior to Rupnow’s, her shooting drew his attention. Hours after, he retweeted another post that said: “There should be a betting market for which rw twitter figure will radicalize the next shooter.” (RW stands for right-wing.)

However the two teens entered this online subculture, their writings reveal despair about their personal lives and the world around them and expressed violent, hateful views.

After the Madison shooting, a separate social media user noted their association and tweeted at the FBI, accusing Henderson and others of having prior warning. They “need to be locked up,” the poster said, “no questions asked.”

The FBI declined to comment. After Henderson’s attack, social media users returned to the tweet: “hey so this guy literally just ended up calling a future school shooter a month ahead of time and the FBI did nothing about it.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

Insurers Failed to Comply With Mental Health Coverage Law, Department of Labor Report Finds

5 months ago

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The U.S. Department of Labor found widespread noncompliance and violations of federal law in how health plans and insurers cover mental health care, findings that mirror a recent ProPublica investigation.

Health plans, and the companies that administer them, have excluded key behavioral treatments, such as therapies for substance use and autism, and offered inadequate networks of mental health providers, according to a 142-page report released Jan. 17 in conjunction with the Treasury and Health and Human Services departments.

The report, which the agencies are required to file regularly to Congress, also detailed the results of secret shopper surveys of more than 4,300 mental health providers listed in insurance directories and found an “alarming proportion” were “unresponsive or unreachable.” Such error-ridden plans, commonly known as ghost networks, make it harder for patients to get the treatment they need, ProPublica has previously found.

Since 2021, the Labor Department has addressed violations in health plans that serve more than 7 million people, according to the report. The agency has worked to remedy the problems by seeking changes to plan provisions, policies and procedures, as well as working to ensure wrongly denied claims were paid.

But the report acknowledged that while plans and insurers have made some progress, they continue to fall short. For instance, federal officials wrote that insurers were working faster to fix problems in their plans once they had been identified, but officials had not seen sufficient improvement overall.

The report examined the enforcement and implementation of the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which requires health insurance plans to provide the same access to mental health care as they do to medical care. Last week, on the same day the report was released, department staff told ProPublica that the agency was investigating issues related to our reporting.

ProPublica has spent the last year investigating how insurers interfere with mental health treatment, including employing aggressive tactics that push therapists out of network; 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 Labor Department regulates insurance plans for about 136 million Americans who receive health coverage through their employers and is responsible for enforcing federal protections around their mental health claims. Federal regulators have struggled to hold insurance companies accountable for improperly denying mental health coverage, in part because of staffing and budgetary constraints.

The agency has asked Congress for additional funding on multiple occasions and, in its most recent congressional report, wrote that the agency is left with one investigator for every 13,900 plans it regulates, a higher workload than in previous years. Some temporary funding runs out in September, and its “full depletion will likely have catastrophic effects” on its enforcement capabilities, according to the report.

Timothy Hauser, a deputy assistant secretary of labor, said in an interview on the day of the report’s release that the agency is investigating the oversight and management of doctors hired by insurance companies who repeatedly deny mental health coverage for patients — and may open additional investigations.

Hauser, who has worked at the agency for more than three decades and is staying on in the new administration, said the agency is probing how insurers use and supervise doctors they rely on to conduct reviews of coverage and whether those doctors review cases in a “fair and dispassionate” way. ProPublica’s reporting raised serious concerns around those issues.

Last month, ProPublica examined how insurance companies, including UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield, rely on doctors to make crucial decisions on whether to approve mental health coverage even after courts have criticized their judgment. Judges have ruled that in denying such coverage, insurers violated federal law and acted in ways that were “puzzling,” “disingenuous” and even “dishonest.”

Some insurers and doctors, according to court records, engaged in “selective readings” of the medical evidence, “shut their eyes” to medical opinions that opposed their conclusions, and made critical errors in their reviews that were sometimes contradicted by medical records they had said they read.

Hauser said he could not comment on specific investigations but said that agency officials have discussed the ProPublica story, which he said “will have an impact on the questions we ask” and the “approaches we take.”

At least one investigation in the past has resulted in the removal of a doctor and the outside review organization they worked for, a spokesperson for the Labor Department said previously.

Insurance companies across the country rely on doctors working on their behalf to determine whether the treatment sought by the patients’ own doctors is medically necessary. If they determine it is not, they recommend denying coverage, which can leave patients in crisis and without the treatment they need. In some cases, those decisions have led to fatal consequences.

“It’s supposed to be done with impartiality and without having been structured in such a way as to incentivize the physicians to favor denying claims as opposed to granting claims,” Hauser said. “Similarly, the physicians and the providers should not be selected because of their propensity to to deny claims.”

United, Cigna and Blue Cross and Blue Shield did not immediately respond to requests for comment but in the past have said they employ licensed physicians to conduct reviews and work to ensure the doctors issue appropriate coverage decisions. The companies have said they conduct regular audits of doctors’ decisions, provide mentorship and coaching opportunities and are committed to providing access to safe, effective and quality care to patients.

Hauser said he was struck by the story of Emily Dwyer, who was featured in a ProPublica article that examined the role of company psychiatrists. She was 15 and suffered from severe anorexia — she arrived at a residential treatment center wearing her 8-year-old sister’s jeans — when United Healthcare denied her coverage.

United argued that three separate doctors had reviewed her case. The Dwyers sued and lost, but appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed that decision and ruled unanimously in favor of the family. In a harshly critical opinion, the judges wrote that the denial letters issued by the three doctors were “not supported by the underlying medical evidence.” In fact, the court found, they were “contradicted by the record.”

Dwyer, who was pleased to learn of the agency’s investigation, said she hopes it results in “substantive action.”

“I never would have thought that our story would be part of that,” she said. “I think it’s incredible that the Department of Labor is paying attention to this issue and is investigating the insurance doctors. But I also hope they look beyond the actions of the individual doctors to deeper issues of the way insurance companies operate more systematically.”

by Duaa Eldeib, Maya Miller, Annie Waldman and Max Blau

North Dakota Sued the Interior Department at Least Five Times Under Gov. Doug Burgum. Now He’s Set to Run the Agency.

5 months ago

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During Doug Burgum’s two terms as North Dakota governor, the state repeatedly sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, attempting to rip up rules that govern federal lands in his state and across the country.

Now, Burgum is poised to oversee that same department as President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the interior. Those lawsuits and a host of others the state launched against the federal government, some of which are ongoing, reveal the worldview he’ll bring to a department that touches nearly every aspect of life in the West. Its agencies oversee water policy, operate the national parks, lease resources to industries including oil and ranching, provide services across Indian Country and manage more land than any person or corporation in the nation.

During his confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Burgum portrayed the Interior Department as key to geopolitical power struggles. On energy policy, he said that growing consistently available types of energy production — namely nuclear and climate-warming coal, oil and gas — is a matter of national security; he claimed that greenhouse gas emissions can be mitigated with carbon capture technology that’s unproven at scale; and he argued that renewable energy is too highly subsidized and threatens the electrical grid.

The committee advanced his nomination to the full Senate on Thursday.

The North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reviewed the nearly 40 lawsuits in which the state was a named plaintiff against the federal government at the time Burgum left the governor’s office. In addition, the review included friend of the court briefs the state filed to the Supreme Court and Burgum’s financial disclosures and public testimony. Many of the nearly 40 suits were cases North Dakota filed or signed onto with other Republican-led states, although the state brought a handful independently. Five of the cases were lodged against the Interior Department.

Burgum is a relative newcomer to politics who initially made his fortune when he sold his software company. But the cases and disclosures highlight his deep ties to the oil and gas industry, which have aided his political rise. The records also put on display his sympathy for Western states that chafe at what they believe is overreach by the Interior Department and that attack federal land management.

Notably, the litigation includes a case aimed at undoing the Interior Department’s hallmark Public Lands Rule that designated the conservation of public lands as a use equal in importance to natural resource exploitation and made smaller changes such as clarifying how the government measures landscape health. Additionally, North Dakota filed a case to roll back the agency’s rule intended to limit the amount of methane that oil companies could release, a practice that wastes a valuable resource and contributes to climate change. North Dakota also cosigned a brief in support of a controversial, although ultimately futile, attempt by Utah to dismantle the broader federal public lands system.

While some of the cases mirror his party’s long-running push to support the oil and gas industry over other considerations, including conservation, the litigation over public lands represents a more extreme view: that federal regulation of much of the country’s land and water needs to be severely curtailed.

Burgum did not respond to requests for comment but made clear many of his positions in public statements. A spokesperson did not answer a question on whether Burgum would recuse himself from matters pertaining to the cases his state filed.

While the state’s attorney general handled the lawsuits, Burgum emphatically supported them, urging state lawmakers last spring to fully fund the legal fights. He also cited the litigation during his confirmation hearing to assure Republican lawmakers that he would increase oil and gas leasing on public lands.

While speaking to North Dakota lawmakers about federal actions, Burgum characterized the Biden administration’s environmental policies as “misguided rules and regulations proposed often by overzealous bureaucrats.” The rules, he said, pose “an existential threat to the energy and ag sectors, our economy and our way of life.”

Burgum is considered less controversial than some other Trump nominees and is expected to gain Senate approval in the days ahead. Outdoor recreation groups and multiple tribes publicly supported his nomination, and he was lauded at his confirmation hearing by Republican as well as some Democratic senators. “If anybody is the pick of the litter, it’s got to be this man,” said Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican of West Virginia, another key fossil fuel-producing state.

Conservation groups, meanwhile, decried Burgum as an anti-public lands zealot who does oil companies’ bidding. Among them is Michael Carroll, who runs the Wilderness Society’s Bureau of Land Management campaign.

“If you’re not a reality TV star or under investigation for ethics violations or misconduct, you’re considered a normal nominee,” Carroll said of Trump’s picks. But, he continued, that obscures how Burgum and a Republican sweep of the federal government present a threat to public lands that’s “as extreme as we’ve seen. Period. Full stop.”

Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, talks with Burgum during the Republican National Convention in July. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images) “Giveaways of Federal Public Lands”

The federal government manages significant portions of the West. Most of that comes through the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees an area more than five times the size of North Dakota. As a result, public lands management is a local flashpoint.

North Dakota has had a particularly contentious relationship with the federal government over its management of public lands that intermingle with parcels owned by the state or private citizens.

Lynn Helms was the state’s top oil regulator for more than 25 years before retiring last year, and he witnessed constant conflict over how federal agencies wanted to manage land in the state. “From the time I took this office until the day I walked away, there has always been at least one federal resource management plan or leasing plan under development and in controversy,” he told the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica.

Two titanic legal fights will shape the future of federal land management. North Dakota is not a named plaintiff in the cases, but the state and Burgum have made known their opposition to federal authority in both.

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Last August, Utah sued the United States, asking the Supreme Court to rule that the federal government’s oversight of 18.5 million acres of public land in the state was unconstitutional. Utah, in its founding documents, forswore any unappropriated public lands to the federal government. Still, legal scholars and environmentalists worried a conservative Supreme Court might remove land management responsibilities from the federal government, which is widely seen as more favorable to conservation than Republican-led states are.

“Few issues are as fundamentally important to a State as control of its land,” a coalition that included North Dakota wrote in support of Utah’s case in a friend of the court brief during Burgum’s tenure.

Carroll, of the Wilderness Society, said that North Dakota siding with Utah was cause for concern about Burgum leading the Interior Department. “Supporting that lawsuit suggests that he’d be willing to support large-scale sell-off or giveaways of federal public lands, which, for most of us who live in the West and are concerned about the future of those public lands, is a very extreme position,” he said.

The Supreme Court in mid-January declined to take up the case, but Utah pledged to keep fighting. Burgum expressed sympathy for the state during his confirmation hearing, agreeing with Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican and champion of the anti-federal movement, who said that Western states feel like “floating islands within a sea of federal land.”

Meanwhile, Republicans and industry groups also have their sights set on the 118-year-old Antiquities Act, which gives the president authority to create national monuments to protect areas of cultural, historical or scientific significance. Using the act, former President Joe Biden set aside more land and water for conservation than any previous president.

Burgum’s stance on the act is key, as the Interior Department typically handles details of these monuments, including where their borders are drawn.

During his confirmation hearing, Burgum said the Antiquities Act should be used for limited “Indiana Jones-type archeological protections,” not the sweeping landscapes that recent Democratic presidents have protected. While various tribes supported the use of the Antiquities Act in recent years, Burgum suggested monument designations have hurt tribes.

In western North Dakota, tribal representatives, conservation groups and others have pushed for a monument — which they’ve suggested calling Maah Daah Hey National Monument — to preserve 140,000 acres considered sacred by members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation and other nearby Indigenous cultures. Burgum has expressed concern that such a designation would impede oil and gas drilling. And while he boasted at his confirmation hearing about conservation wins in his home state — such as creating the North Dakota Office of Outdoor Recreationhe didn’t mention the monument proposal.

In addition to legal challenges against the Interior Department, North Dakota is part of 14 lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency and at least five cases that challenge environmental or climate-related regulations against other federal agencies.

One of those cases, led by Iowa and North Dakota, seeks to roll back updates to Biden-era rules concerning the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, one of the nation’s core environmental laws. The legal battle will have sweeping implications for the government’s environmental permitting process, influencing major construction projects across the country, including those aimed at building infrastructure to meet the ongoing surge in electricity demand.

Pump jacks in Williston, North Dakota. The state is one of the country’s top oil and gas producers. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images) “Blatant Conflicts With the Oil Industry”

In North Dakota’s litigation and Burgum’s record, one idea stands out for how often it is repeated: the opinion that the federal government impedes oil and gas drilling. The state, one of the country’s top oil and gas producers, has consistently pushed for more drilling on public lands. Burgum has been cheerleading the industry for years.

Shortly before completing his term in mid-December, Burgum appealed a Bureau of Land Management land-use plan for the state, saying it hindered oil and gas development by barring oil, gas and coal leasing on several hundred thousand acres of federal mineral rights. (The agency denied Burgum’s appeal and finalized the plan.)

Under Burgum, North Dakota also sued the Bureau of Land Management over the agency’s handling of mineral lease sales, a system that allows companies to drill for and profit off publicly owned natural resources and that Helms labeled as “badly broken.” In the lawsuit, which is ongoing, the state argued the bureau neglected its duty to host quarterly lease sales under the Mineral Leasing Act. (A federal judge has ordered the bureau to address this issue.)

Environmental groups worry that Burgum’s ties to the oil industry influence his oversight of fossil fuels. Trump also picked Burgum to run the nascent National Energy Council, which will focus on boosting energy production.

His relationship with oil magnate Harold Hamm, the richest man in Oklahoma and a pioneer in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology, has been well-documented.

Hamm pledged $50 million to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a favored project for Burgum. When Burgum ran for president before dropping out and supporting Trump, he received nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests, about half of which came via a PAC sponsored by Continental Resources, which Hamm founded. Burgum also has acknowledged that he attended an April 2024 meeting at Mar-a-Lago that Hamm helped organize for oil executives to meet with Trump and pledge financial support for his campaign.

Burgum’s financial disclosure reports reveal a personal fortune spread across software companies, real estate ventures and farmland. He also listed royalties from oil and gas leases involving Hess Corporation, Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. and Continental Resources.

In his required ethics agreement to become secretary of the interior, Burgum committed to resign from several companies, divest from energy-related holdings and work with agency ethics officials to avoid conflicts, including those tied to his home state. He also testified at his confirmation hearing that he had no outstanding conflicts of interest.

“Doug Burgum’s blatant conflicts with the oil industry cast doubt on his ability to fairly manage our public lands,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of government ethics watchdog Accountable.US.

“He Wants to Cut Tape So That the Benefits Actually Get to the Tribes”

Among its many mandates, the Interior Department is tasked with fulfilling the United States’ trust responsibility to 574 federally recognized sovereign tribes. This includes providing schools and health care, representing tribes as they negotiate water rights settlements and liaising between tribes and the federal bureaucracy.

Burgum has had good relationships with tribal leaders in North Dakota. He partnered with tribes to pass tax-sharing agreements, was the first North Dakota governor to permanently display tribal nations’ flags outside his office and created an annual conference to bring together leaders of tribal and state governments.

Burgum also found common ground with a local tribe seeking to expand oil and gas drilling. “He wants to cut tape so that the benefits actually get to the tribes,” said Chairman Mark Fox of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, who hopes to see more wells drilled on the Fort Berthold Reservation.

Fox said that he stays in touch with the former governor and that Burgum has asked him for input on issues affecting Indian Country, although he declined to share specifics.

“The No. 1 priority in discussion is: How do we enhance our opportunity to develop our trust resources of oil and gas?” Fox said.

But the state, under Burgum’s leadership, has also taken opposing positions on major issues to tribes, both inside and outside its boundaries.

When Burgum assumed the governorship in December 2016, a monthslong protest was raging against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which transports oil from North Dakota to Illinois. Thousands of protesters joined with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who assert that the pipeline infringes on its tribal sovereignty, disrupts sacred cultural sites and poses an environmental hazard.

Burgum supports the project.

Burgum appeared at a 2017 news conference to discuss protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Stephen Yang/Getty Images)

North Dakota sued the federal government over claims that the Army Corps of Engineers should have done more to quell the demonstrations, leaving state and local law enforcement and first responders to step in at a cost of $38 million. During the case, which went to trial in early 2024 and is yet unresolved, Burgum also criticized other agencies, including the Interior Department, alleging they sided with protesters.

“It’s dangerous in our country where politics on either side — either party, either direction, whatever — can somehow inject themselves in a permitting process,” Burgum said, according to court records.

The difference between Burgum’s views and that of many tribes around the country is especially stark on conservation.

The state became a co-defendant in December in a separate lawsuit the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe brought against the Army Corps of Engineers calling for the pipeline to be shuttered. Parties to the litigation have filed briefs, and the case is ongoing.

And the state and some tribes are at odds over the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, which clarified the role of a land designation called “areas of critical environmental concern.” A central purpose of the designation is to protect “rare or sensitive archeological resources and religious or cultural resources important to Native Americans.” Various tribes support the rule, but North Dakota is suing to halt it.

Despite those disagreements, tribal leaders in North Dakota said they respect Burgum, and several credited him with rebuilding relations. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairwoman Janet Alkire said Burgum has a strong grasp of issues facing Indian Country, while Fox said Burgum has been willing to work with tribal leaders.

As Burgum takes the reins at the Interior Department, Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington School of Law, said he is watching how Burgum will work with tribes that favor conservation over natural resource extraction.

It remains to be seen if keeping the federal government’s commitments to Indian Country are a priority for Burgum, Mills said, or whether tribal issues are “only really taken up where they align with other priorities of the administration.”

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by Mary Steurer, North Dakota Monitor, and Mark Olalde, ProPublica

This Icebreaker Has Design Problems and a History of Failure. It’s America’s Latest Military Vessel.

5 months 1 week ago

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The icebreaker Aiviq is a gas guzzler with a troubled history. The ship was built to operate in the Arctic, but it has a type of propulsion system susceptible to failure in ice. Its waste and discharge systems weren’t designed to meet polar code, its helicopter pad is in the wrong place to launch rescue operations and its rear deck is easily swamped by big waves.

On its maiden voyage to Alaska in 2012, the 360-foot vessel lost control of the Shell Oil drill rig it was towing, and Coast Guard helicopter crews braved a storm to pluck 18 men off the wildly lurching deck of the rig before it crashed into a rocky beach. An eventual Coast Guard investigation faulted bad decision-making by people in charge but also flagged problems with the Aiviq’s design.

But for all this, the same Coast Guard bought the Aiviq for $125 million late last year.

The United States urgently needs new icebreakers in an era when climate change is bringing increased traffic to the Arctic, including military patrols near U.S. waters by Russia and China. That the first of the revamped U.S. fleet is a secondhand vessel a top Coast Guard admiral once said “may, at best, marginally meet our requirements” is a sign of how long the country has tried and failed to build new ones.

It’s also a sign of how much sway political donors can have over Congress.

Edison Chouest, the Louisiana company that built the icebreaker, has contributed more than $7 million to state and national parties, to political action committees and super PACS, and to members of key House and Senate committees since 2012. Chouest spent most of that period looking to unload the vessel after Shell, its intended user, walked away.

Members who received money from Chouest pressured the Coast Guard to rent or buy the Aiviq from the company. One U.S. representative from Alaska, where the ship will be stationed, told an admiral in a 2016 hearing that his service’s objections were “bullshit.”

And there would be even tougher pressures to come.

It’s now been a dozen years since the Aiviq set out on its first mission to Alaska, long enough for its troubles to fade from public memory.

The ship, though owned and operated by Chouest, was part of Shell’s Arctic fleet, designed for a specific role: as a tugboat that could tow Shell’s 250-foot-tall polar drill rig, the Kulluk, around the coast of Alaska and help anchor it in the waters of the Far North. At its christening ceremony in Louisiana, attended by Shell executives, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, it was named after the Iñupiaq word for walrus.

As a journalist, I’d been following the oil company’s multibillion-dollar play in the warming Arctic with interest. One June morning in 2012, I got word that Shell was on the move near my Seattle home, so I sped to a narrow point in Puget Sound with a good view of passing traffic. It was sunny, the water calm. The Aiviq bobbed past with Kulluk in tow. The icebreaker’s paint — blue at the time — was fresh, its hull shiny. It looked capable.

The problems began once the Aiviq was out of view. A Coast Guard report said that while the ship towed the Kulluk northward through an Arctic storm, waves crashed over its rear deck and poured into interior spaces, which investigators determined may have caused it to list up to 20 degrees to one side. The water damaged cranes, heaters and firefighting equipment, and the vents to the fuel system were submerged.

On its way back from Alaska’s Beaufort Sea two months later, the Aiviq suffered an electrical blackout, and one of its engines failed, necessitating a repair in Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

Then the Aiviq and Kulluk set out on a wintertime voyage back to Seattle. The National Weather Service issued a gale warning predicting 15-foot seas and 40-knot winds. The sailors aboard the Aiviq and Kulluk exchanged worried messages.

The cable with which the Aiviq was towing the Kulluk came free two days later when a shackle broke. The icebreaker’s captain made a U-turn in heavy swells to hook up an emergency tow line, and water again poured over its deck and into the fuel vents. The Aiviq’s four diesel engines soon began to fail, one after another.

Although a Chouest engineer later testified that an unknown fuel additive must have caused the failures, Coast Guard investigators believe the likely cause was “fuel contamination by seawater.” They said the fuel system’s design, which they described as substandard, made contamination more likely.

The Aiviq and Kulluk were reattached — but now, and for the next two days, adrift. Storms pushed them ever closer toward land.

First image: The Aiviq’s crew tries to tow Royal Dutch Shell’s drill rig Kulluk away from the rocky coastline of Alaska during a December 2012 storm. Second image: Waves crash over the Kulluk after it ran aground. Third image: A salvage team returns to the Coast Guard station in Kodiak after working aboard the Kulluk. (U.S. Coast Guard)

By the time the engines were repaired, it was too late. The Kulluk ran aground at an uninhabited island off Kodiak, Alaska, on New Year’s Eve. Shell’s Arctic dreams began to unravel. The oil company sold its drill rig off for scrap. (It did not respond to a request for comment.)

And the Aiviq? A month after the accident, I visited Kodiak to report on what went wrong. I saw it anchored in the safety of a protected bay, an expensive, purpose-built ship now stripped of its purpose.

Shell formally abandoned its Arctic efforts in 2015, after failing to find oil. The Aiviq eventually steamed back south. Chouest began looking around for someone to take the troubled icebreaker off its hands. The Coast Guard, which had criticized the ship’s role in the Kulluk accident, now became a potential customer.

For weeks after their accident at sea, the refloated drill rig Kulluk, background, and the icebreaker Aiviq, right, parked in the safety of a Kodiak Island bay. (McKenzie Funk/ProPublica)

Traffic in the warming Arctic has surged as countries eye the region’s natural resources, and it will grow all the more if the storied Northwest Passage melts enough to become a viable route for freight in the decades ahead. The number of ships in the High North increased by 37% from 2013 to 2023.

It’s the U.S. Coast Guard’s job to patrol these waters as part of an agreement with the Navy, projecting military strength while monitoring maritime traffic, enforcing fishing laws and rescuing vessels in distress. Although surface ice in the Arctic Ocean is shrinking on average, it can still form and move about the ocean unpredictably. A Coast Guard vessel needs to be able to cut through it to be a reliable presence.

But the U.S. icebreaker fleet is deteriorating. The Coast Guard began raising alarms about the problem decades ago, starting with a study published in 1984. Russia, with its extensive northern coastline, now has over 40 large icebreakers, and more under construction. The United States has barely been able to keep two or three in service.

The Yakutia, a Russian nuclear icebreaker capable of cutting through ice up to nearly 10 feet thick, during sea trials in St. Petersburg this month. (Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

An urgent Coast Guard report to Congress in 2010 highlighted what has become known as the “icebreaker gap”: If we didn’t quickly start building new ships, our existing icebreakers could go out of commission before replacements were ready. The study called for at least six new icebreakers. Subsequent Coast Guard analysis has called for eight or nine. To date, the United States has built zero.

Congress dragged its feet for years on funding icebreaker construction. But the Coast Guard also slowed progress with overly optimistic timelines, fuzzy cost estimates and a tendency to keep fiddling with new designs, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report. More than a decade in, construction on the first of the new ships has finally just begun. The Coast Guard’s latest cost estimate is $1 billion per icebreaker, while the Congressional Budget Office last year put it at $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion.

Icebreakers have “been the penultimate studied-to-death subject for 40 years,” said Lawson Brigham, a former Coast Guard heavy icebreaker commander who has a doctorate from Cambridge University and has researched polar shipping since the 1980s.

The longer the Coast Guard failed to build the ships it did want, the more pressure it faced to settle for one it didn’t. Chouest seized the opportunity. The company invited Coast Guard officers to tour the Aiviq as early as 2016 and soon sent over a lease proposal.

Canada rejected similar overtures that year. A middleman for Chouest promised Canadian lawmakers a “fast-track polar icebreaker” — the Aiviq — “at less than one-third of the price of the permanent replacement.” Also on offer were three smaller, Norwegian-built icebreakers. Canada bought those instead.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s problem with the Aiviq, retired officers told ProPublica, was the ship’s design. Originally built for oil operations, it had a low, wet deck and a helipad near its bow, where it would be ill suited for launching rescue operations. Its direct-drive propulsion system was both less efficient and more likely to get jammed up in ice than the diesel-electric systems the Coast Guard used.

“I mean, on paper it’s an icebreaker,” Adm. Paul Zukunft, the then-commandant of the Coast Guard, told Congress in 2017. “But it hasn’t demonstrated an ability to break ice.” (Years later, in 2022 and 2023, the Aiviq would make two successful icebreaking trips to Antarctica under contract with the Australian government.)

The Aiviq completes a chartered refueling operation at Davis research station in Antarctica. Its 2022 and 2023 voyages for the Australian government were among the only times the 13-year-old icebreaker has encountered ice. (Kirk Yatras/Australian Antarctic Program)

The service estimated it would take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade the Aiviq’s features to near-standard for a Coast Guard icebreaker. Even then, it wouldn’t be able to move forward through ice thicker than about 4.5 feet. The Coast Guard’s most immediate need was for heavy icebreakers, burlier ships that can handle missions in the Arctic as well as supply runs to the U.S. research station at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

So how would the U.S. Coast Guard use the Aiviq beyond flag-waving and general presence in the near Arctic? According to Brigham, the former icebreaker captain and polar-shipping expert, “No one that I know, no study that I’ve seen, no one I’ve talked to really knows.”

But it wasn’t for the Coast Guard alone to turn down Chouest’s bargain offer. Members of Congress had their own ideas.

The late U.S. Rep. Don Young represented Alaska, a state thousands of miles from Chouest’s home base in Louisiana. But as of 2016, when Chouest was looking to sell the Aiviq, Young had taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from the company — so many donations in one year that he had once faced a congressional ethics investigation concerning Chouest money. (He was cleared.)

Young became the most vocal of many congressional critics to publicly dress down the Coast Guard for resisting Chouest’s offering of the Aiviq.

At a House hearing that July, he began grilling the Coast Guard’s second-in-command, Adm. Charles Michel, about a “privately owned ship” with a “tremendous capability of icebreaking power.”

“I know you have the proposal on your desk,” he scolded Michel. “It is an automatic ‘no.’ Why?”

“Sir,” the admiral said, “that vessel is not suitable for military service without substantial refit.”

Michel’s response sparked derision from Young.

“That is what I call,” Young muttered, “a bullshit answer.”

Michel, now retired, declined to comment on his exchange with Young.

According to the representative’s former chief of staff Alex Ortiz, Young’s frustration stemmed from the fact that the Coast Guard lacked the money to build an icebreaker from scratch but showed “an unwillingness to accept the realities of that.” Young and many other lawmakers also supported getting new icebreakers, but perfect had become the enemy of the good the Aiviq had to offer right away. “I genuinely don’t think that he was advocating for leasing the vessel just because of Chouest’s support,” Ortiz said.

Chouest, Young’s benefactor, is based in Cut Off, Louisiana. It’s led by its founder’s billionaire son and has long provided ships for the oil and gas industry. At the time of the 2016 hearing, Chouest was relatively new to Coast Guard contracts. One of the company’s affiliates would later take over the contract to build new heavy icebreakers, in 2022, making Chouest the supplier of both a ship the Coast Guard desired and the one it resisted.

Chouest did not respond to questions for this article.

More than 95% of Chouest’s $7 million in political contributions since 2012 has gone to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money from family members, employees and corporate affiliates.

But when it comes to lawmakers who oversee the Coast Guard, Democrats also have been major recipients. The late Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, head of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation for five years, received $94,700 in the decade before his 2019 death. Rep. John Garamendi of California, a longtime committee member, started taking Chouest donations in 2021 and has since received a total of $40,500.

(Garamendi’s office acknowledged the recent donations but issued a statement saying he has for many years “pushed the Coast Guard to build icebreakers expeditiously, particularly given the aging fleet and the national security imperative.”)

Alaska politicians are particular beneficiaries of Chouest’s largesse, second only to those from Louisiana. Chouest’s interests in the 49th state, beyond icebreakers, have included a 10-year contract to escort oil tankers through Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Federal Elections Commission records show that Young, before his death in 2022, collected a career total of almost $300,000 from the company. Sen. Dan Sullivan has taken in at least $31,500, Sen. Lisa Murkowski $84,400.

From left: Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska; Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska; and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, at a news conference in 2015. The lawmakers played key roles getting the Coast Guard to buy an icebreaker whose previous owner, Edison Chouest, donated to their campaigns. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP)

The year after Young swore at the Coast Guard admiral in public, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of California brought up the issue once more at a different House hearing featuring a different admiral, Zukunft. Hunter’s total from Chouest would be $58,800 before he pleaded guilty to stealing campaign funds and stepped down in 2020.

“Icebreakers,” Hunter said. “Let’s talk icebreakers.”

Hunter was backed up by Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, whose Chouest contributions now total $240,500. “Admiral, I think every time you’ve come before this committee, this issue has come up,” Graves said. “We need to see some substantial progress.”

Weeks later at yet another hearing, Rep. John Carter of Texas, whose single biggest donor the previous election cycle was Edison Chouest at $33,700, pressed Zukunft again. “There’s this commercial ship that has been offered …” Carter began.

Rep. John Carter of Texas, right, asks Adm. Paul Zukunft about Coast Guard use of the Aiviq at a hearing in 2017. (House Appropriations Committee video, screenshots by ProPublica)

In the end, the advocates for Chouest’s ship prevailed. The Alaskans played a particular role.

In 2022, after Young’s death, Sullivan helped author the Don Young Coast Guard Authorization Act, which included an approval for the service to buy a “United States built available icebreaker.”

Sullivan, who would later be praised for leading a revolt against his Senate colleague Tommy Tuberville’s blockade on promotions of military officers, also engaged in some quiet hardball. Until the country can complete a long-delayed near-Arctic port, icebreakers have been based in Seattle, where there are working shipyards and experienced contractors to do maintenance. But as a recent press release describes it, Sullivan “put a hold on certain USCG promotions until the Coast Guard produced a long promised study on the homeporting of an icebreaker in Alaska.”

Last year, Sullivan, Murkowski and former Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska announced that Congress had finally appropriated $125 million for the Aiviq. The Coast Guard took possession of the ship last month. (Murkowski and Peltola, along with Hunter, Graves and Carter, did not respond to requests for comment.)

In a statement to ProPublica, a Sullivan spokesperson wrote that the senator “has long advocated for the purchase of a commercially available icebreaker of the Coast Guard’s choosing but has never advocated for the purchase of the Aiviq specifically.” The way Congress wrote the specifications for a “United States built” icebreaker, however, ensured there was only one the Coast Guard could choose: the Aiviq.

The icebreaker's new home — based on the findings of the Coast Guard’s urgently completed port study — will be Alaska’s capital, Juneau. The city is facing what the Juneau Empire has called “a crisis-level housing shortage,” and it remains unclear how it will manage an influx of hundreds of sailors and family members. Juneau also lacks a shipyard. For repairs and upgrades, the Aiviq will have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles out of state.

Former Coast Guard icebreaker captains were reluctant to criticize the purchase of the Aiviq when contacted by ProPublica, in part because it has taken impossibly long for the service to build the new heavy icebreakers it says it needs.

“Is the Coast Guard getting the Aiviq a bad thing? No,” said Rear Adm. Jeff Garrett, a former captain of the Healy icebreaker. But “is it the ideal resource? No.”

To reach the Arctic from Juneau, Garrett noted, the Aiviq will have to regularly cross the same storm-swept stretch of the Gulf of Alaska where it once lost the Kulluk.

Lawson Brigham said he had questions about the Aiviq “since it’s our tax dollars at work,” but he granted that “it’s bringing some capability into the Coast Guard at a time when we’re awaiting whenever the shipbuilder can get the first ship out, which is still unknown.”

Zukunft, who retired in 2018, stands by his past opposition to the Aiviq.

“I remain unconvinced,” he wrote in response to questions from ProPublica, that it “meets the operational requirements and design of a polar icebreaker that have been thoroughly documented by the Coast Guard.” By acquiring the Aiviq, “the Coast Guard runs the risk that those requirements can be compromised.”

In a statement, the Coast Guard described the purchase of the Aiviq as a “bridging strategy” and said the ship “will be capable of projecting U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic and conducting select Coast Guard missions.”

The fuel vents that flooded during the Kulluk accident have since been raised, a Chouest engineer has testified. The Coast Guard did not respond to questions about the Aiviq’s fuel consumption or whether its waste systems will comply with polar code. It did not say whether its helicopter deck will be moved aft for safer search-and-rescue operations. It confirmed that there will be no changes to the propulsion system. “Initial modifications to the vessel will be minimal,” the statement reads. The Aiviq will be put into service more or less as is.

Last month, an amateur photographer spotted the Aiviq at a Chouest-owned shipyard in Tampa, Florida, and posted images online. It had been repainted, its hull now a gleaming Coast Guard icebreaker red.

Photographs posted to Reddit show the Aiviq — now Storis — in a tarp and then, several days later, with its new red Coast Guard paint job. (Courtesy of Wake Foster)

New lettering revealed that the ship has been renamed the Storis, after a celebrated World War II vessel that patrolled for 60 years in the Bering Sea and beyond. From a distance, the icebreaker looked ready to serve.

“The question is,” said Brigham, “What is this ship going to be used for? That’s been the question from Day 1. What the hell are we going to use it for?”

Clarification, Jan. 24, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify that $1 billion is the Coast Guard’s latest estimated cost for new icebreakers and that it differs from recent projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

by McKenzie Funk

Is a New Mississippi Law Decreasing Jailings of People Awaiting Mental Health Treatment? The State Doesn’t Know.

5 months 1 week ago

This article was produced by Mississippi Today, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023-24. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Last year, Mississippi passed a new law aimed at decreasing the number of people being jailed solely because they need mental health treatment. Officials say it has led to fewer people with serious mental illness detained in jails.

But the data submitted by different entities is contradictory and incomplete, making it impossible to know if the numbers are really going down.

“It’s been inconsistent. It’s been sometimes just absent in different parts of the state,” said Rep. Sam Creekmore IV, a Republican from New Albany who chairs the Public Health and Human Services Committee and who sponsored legislation related to civil commitment during the last two sessions. “And so it’s really hard for us to evaluate how well or how bad we’re doing when the numbers aren’t consistent.”

The Legislature approved changes to the state’s civil commitment law last year after reporting by Mississippi Today and ProPublica revealed that hundreds of people with no criminal charges were held in Mississippi jails each year as they awaited involuntary mental health evaluation and treatment. They frequently received no mental health care in jail and were treated like criminal defendants. The investigation found that since 2006, at least 17 people have died after being jailed during this process; and a nationwide survey as part of that series found that Mississippi is unique among states in its heavy use of jails for people who are civilly committed.

Under the new law, which went into effect in July, a person cannot be held in jail unless all other options for care have been exhausted and unless they are “actively violent”; and they can never be held for more than 48 hours. The new law also requires that people in crisis see mental health professionals first, who can recommend commitment or suggest voluntary treatment options that are more suitable, avoiding the civil commitment process entirely.

In the first three months that the law was in effect, more than 1,300 people were screened statewide for possible civil commitment, and over 500 were diverted to a less-restrictive treatment option, according to community mental health center reports. But during the same period, from July to September 2024, a state agency, counties and community mental health centers all reported vastly different numbers of people who spent time in jail during the process.

Community mental health centers reported that 43 people were jailed in that period, less than half the number the Department of Mental Health reported: 102 people. And the department’s figure is likely an undercount because it only includes people who were admitted to a state hospital after their time in jail. Department of Mental Health spokesperson Adam Moore told Mississippi Today he couldn’t explain the discrepancy.

And only 43 of Mississippi’s 82 chancery court clerks submitted data during the same period, despite a law from 2023 that required the courts to report psychiatric commitment data to the state. Those counties reported a total of 25 people being held in jail from July to September 2024 while in the civil commitment process.

Creekmore said he plans to propose a bill this year that would ensure more counties submit mandatory data.

“It really makes it impossible to legislate changes to (the new civil commitment laws) when our data is not complete,” he said.

Last year, Creekmore said the Department of Mental Health would “police” counties to ensure compliance. But the agency itself said something different: Moore told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that it would educate county officials and mental health workers on the new law but wouldn’t enforce it.

The Department of Mental Health sends quarterly reminders to clerks about reporting deadlines, has provided access to training videos and written instructions, and established a help desk for technical questions, Moore said.

Most states do not regularly hold people in jail without charges during the psychiatric civil commitment process. At least 12 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the practice entirely. And only one Mississippi jail was certified by the state to house people awaiting court-ordered psychiatric treatment in 2023.

Sheriffs, who have long decried the burden of housing people with mental health concerns in jails as inappropriate and unsafe, have been largely supportive of changes to the law.

“It’s fantastic for the sheriffs, because the sheriffs don’t want people that are sick in the jail,” said Will Allen, the attorney for the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association. “They certainly don’t want people who have not committed a crime in the jail.”

But implementing the law has proved challenging for areas of the state with limited resources, particularly those without nearby crisis stabilization units, which provide short-term treatment to people in psychiatric crises.

And even in well-resourced areas, limited crisis beds can force counties to transport patients or house them in a nearby private treatment facility at the counties’ expense.

The restrictions on housing people in jail have proved to be a “nightmare” for Calhoun County, which is more than 30 miles away from the nearest crisis stabilization unit, Chancery Clerk Kathy Poynor said.

“We don’t have anywhere else to put them,” she said. “We can’t afford a psychiatric cell. Rural counties just can’t meet the financial obligations.”

Some advocates say the law’s stipulations should be more stringently supervised by the state.

Greta Martin, the litigation director for Disability Rights Mississippi, said the lack of oversight in the law is concerning.

“If you are enacting legislation with a 48-hour cap on people being held in county jail and you do not provide any oversight ensuring that county jails are adhering to that, what’s the point of the legislation?” she said.

by Gwen Dilworth, Mississippi Today

Donald Trump’s No. 2 Pick for the EPA Represented Companies Accused of Pollution Harm

5 months 1 week ago

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The man tapped by President Donald Trump to be second-in-command of the federal agency that protects the public from environmental dangers is a lawyer who has represented companies accused of harming people and the environment through pollution.

David Fotouhi, a partner in the global law firm Gibson Dunn, played a key part in rolling back climate regulations and water protections while serving as a lawyer in the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first administration.

Most recently, Fotouhi challenged the EPA’s recent ban of asbestos, which causes a deadly cancer called mesothelioma. In a brief filed in October on behalf of a group of car companies called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, he argued that, for the specific uses that were banned, the “EPA failed to demonstrate that chrysotile asbestos presents an unreasonable risk of injury.”

The EPA banned the carcinogen in March, long after its dangers first became widely known. More than 50 other countries have outlawed use of the mineral. The agency had worked toward the ban for decades, and workers died while lobbyists pushed to delay action, as a 2022 ProPublica investigation showed.

Less than a day after Trump’s inauguration this week, the White House webpage that celebrated the historic ban was gone.

Fotouhi’s nomination to be the EPA deputy administrator must yet be approved by the Senate.

The asbestos rule is just one of several environmental issues at the heart of the EPA’s regulatory mission on which Fotouhi has represented companies accused of polluting. The 39-year-old lawyer, who is expected to play a critical role running the agency, represented International Paper in lawsuits accusing the firm of contamination from PFAS, or “forever chemicals”; a tire company that allegedly released a chemical known to kill endangered salmon (the firm disputed the claim and is fighting the lawsuit); and a coalition of businesses in Washington state that sued the EPA over its water quality standards for legacy pollutants known as PCBs.

Environmentalists are calling on Fotouhi to recuse himself from decisions regarding asbestos and other issues he’s recently worked on at Gibson Dunn. “Here’s a guy who wrote a very biased and one-sided attack on the EPA rule on asbestos. I would not want him to come anywhere near EPA decision-making on the asbestos rule,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who represents the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and served as EPA deputy administrator during the Clinton administration.

“I recused myself from everything involving former clients,” said Sussman.

Fotouhi declined to comment for this story. An EPA spokesperson said in a statement, “Every person President Trump nominates for the US EPA will work with the career employees in the EPA Ethics Office to ensure that all applicable ethics obligations are addressed.”

Government ethics law calls for attorneys to recuse themselves for a year from matters on which they provided services in the previous year.

The issue may be a mere formality in an administration that in its first day took steps to roll back environmental and health protections put in place by the previous administration. Within hours of his inauguration on Monday, Trump ordered the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, halted the approval of leases for new offshore wind projects in federal waters and revoked several executive orders relating to climate change.

It is not unusual for political appointees to the EPA to have ties to industry, especially in Republican administrations. Among the people returning to the agency from Trump’s first term are Nancy Beck, a former lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, the influential industry trade group; Aaron Szabo, a lobbyist who represented the American Petroleum Institute and contributed to the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA; and Lynn Dekleva, who also worked for the American Chemistry Council and DuPont.

In announcing his nomination of Fotouhi on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump wrote that “David will work with our incredible EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, to advance pro Growth policies, unleash America’s Energy Dominance, and prioritize Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Soil for ALL Americans.” His expertise could be essential for Zeldin, the former U.S. representative from Long Island whom Trump nominated to run the agency and who has little experience with environmental issues.

While working at the EPA in the first Trump administration, Fotouhi served as deputy general counsel and acting general counsel. He played a central role in a revision of the Waters of the U.S. rule that removed federal protections from wetlands and streams. He later described it as some of his most important work. His Gibson Dunn online biography says he also “played a critical role in developing the litigation strategy to defend” the agency’s decision not to impose financial requirements on companies that extract minerals and ore from rock. Environmentalists had pushed for the requirements to protect taxpayers from being held responsible for costly environmental cleanups.

Fotouhi also advocated for landfills and ponds that contain coal ash to be deemed “clean” even though they didn’t meet the agency’s usual standards — a position favorable to the coal industry, according to one waste expert who worked with him during the Trump administration. “Dave was adamant about that issue,” said the former colleague, who asked not to be named to avoid public involvement in political discussions. The former colleague described Fotouhi as a brilliant lawyer who knows the environmental statutes but “doesn’t hesitate to get creative” to find a way to use them to take industry-friendly positions.

A Harvard-educated attorney, Fotouhi led an office of hundreds of lawyers at Gibson Dunn and has defended clients and provided legal counsel under every major environmental law, according to his bio on the firm’s website. He represented International Paper in two suits over PFAS, persistent industrial chemicals that cause cancer and other diseases. The chemicals were at the heart of two cases in which the company was accused of spreading PFAS-containing biosolids in Maine. The biosolids, or sludge, have been found to contribute to PFAS contamination of food and water throughout the state. (Gibson Dunn is representing ProPublica pro bono in a case against the U.S. Navy.)

Nathan Saunders, a plaintiff in one of the suits, learned in 2021 that his well water in Fairfield, Maine, had extremely high levels of the chemicals. After he learned that PFAS were linked to kidney damage, the discovery made sense to the lifelong Maine resident, whose wife had developed kidney failure more than a decade earlier.

Fotouhi succeeded in getting his client dismissed from the Saunders suit by arguing that there wasn’t information to tie the company’s conduct to the water contamination. Saunders’ attorney, Elizabeth Bailey, described the legal strategy as common among companies facing PFAS contamination suits and difficult for plaintiffs to overcome without access to internal company information. “They say, ‘Yes, there’s contamination, but there’s no way for you to show whose contamination it was and — oh, by the way, if you can’t specifically identify how our contamination got from our location to your client’s location at the very beginning of the lawsuit, we shouldn’t be in this case at all,’” said Bailey.

Fotouhi also attempted to overturn EPA’s water quality standards for toxic chemicals known as PCBs, which have been linked to cancer. In December 2023, he filed a suit against the agency on behalf of Washington state business groups that claimed that the standards are impossible to meet.

If the EPA chooses not to continue fighting the case, those standards could be overturned. The loss would be devastating to waterways, according to Katelyn Scott, water protector at Spokane Riverkeeper, an advocacy organization devoted to protecting the river and its watershed. “Without the EPA at the helm fighting to protect them, our river would be vulnerable to higher levels of pollution that would really put our fish and our people at risk of harm,” she said.

Phillip Landrigan, a physician who has spent decades working to protect public health from environmental threats, said the potential consequences would be similarly dire should the EPA choose to overturn the asbestos ban.

“President Trump came into office saying that he was going to make life better for working Americans,” said Landrigan. Reversing the decades-in-the-making asbestos ban, he said, “would expose working American women and men to a known human carcinogen and fly in the face of that promise.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

Update, Jan. 22, 2025: This story was updated to include a statement that an EPA spokesperson provided after publication.

by Sharon Lerner

Women Made Electoral Gains in Statehouses Across the Country in 2024. The Southeast Is a Different Story.

5 months 1 week ago

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A few weeks ago, the clerk of the South Carolina Senate called out each of the 46 members’ names, then directed them all to stand and raise their right hands. He needed to swear them in for the new session. Among the supermajority of Republicans, zero women stood.

Voters hadn’t elected a single one to the chamber in November.

Now, after more than a decade, the Senate’s Republican caucus is once again an all-men’s club, one that will make decisions about issues that directly affect women: abortion, in vitro fertilization and Medicaid coverage of lactation specialists, to name a few. November’s election ushered in only two women to serve in the entire chamber, and both are Democrats. Given Republicans control what legislation moves forward, neither will wield much power.

Women aren’t represented much more on the other side of the Statehouse. Female lawmakers make up just 10% of South Carolina House Republicans.

Similar postelection stories are playing out across the Southeast, a region long defined by traditional culture and conservative politics. All but one state that held legislative elections last fall in this region saw losses of Republican women, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and South Carolina. Tennessee was the lone exception — its voters added a single net Republican woman to their legislature.

Most of the region’s legislatures were woefully short of women’s representation even before the election, as ProPublica reported at this time last year. Women constitute fewer than 1 in 5 state legislators across much of the Southeast, where most states consistently rank at the bottom of virtually all measures of women’s health and well-being.

Across the country, 2024 again saw gains for female lawmakers. One-third of state legislators nationwide are women, the most in history. In all of the country’s statehouses — 7,386 legislative seats — women gained 43 seats in November’s elections. Only four were Democrats, although Democratic women still hold almost twice as many seats overall.

But the gains of Republican women weren’t mirrored in the Southeast. The losses weren’t huge, 1 to 3 Republican women per legislature. But with small numbers to begin with, losing just one can make a big difference.

“It has a much more significant effect on the potential for particular voices and lived experiences to be raised in debate and conversation,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, a key group tracking women’s political participation.

Dittmar didn’t see this trend in other regions. “There’s not one story,” she said, “but rather a lot of unique state-based stories.”

As of the counts the center had finished in mid-December, South Dakota and New Hampshire elected far more new women. Wisconsin lost 6 Republican women and added 11 Democratic women. Connecticut lost 5 Republican women while Democrats held steady. Maine lost 5 Democrats but gained 4 Republicans. In California, women from both parties gained seats.

“We saw a lot of gains around the country for women in legislatures, but the Southeast continues to be a real struggle,” said Sabrina Shulman, chief political officer at Vote Run Lead, which trains women to run for office. Entrenched gender roles still influence voting decisions, she said, and more tradition-minded Republicans — men and women — tend to see men as stronger, more qualified and able to lead.

Dittmar added that President Donald Trump’s campaign emphasized masculinity, which had a trickle-down effect. Republican voters seemed to prefer candidates, including female ones, who were perceived as more masculine or at least not “anti-male,” she said.

Some Republican women who might have considered running also balked at campaigning in the hypermasculine politics of the moment. The Center for American Women and Politics found the number of female candidates for state legislative seats was down across the board — but the largest drop was among Republican women.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans “have largely rejected any attempts at targeted support, recruitment, training and funding of women candidates,” Dittmar said. “Conservatives are still dominantly white and male. The party is made up of people who don’t think it’s a problem” that so few lawmakers are women.

All three Republican incumbent women in South Carolina’s Senate lost their races after they joined with the two other women — one Democrat and one Independent — in the chamber to fight a strict abortion ban. National headlines spotlighted the bipartisan group dubbed the Sister Senators.

Sen. Katrina Shealy was the most senior of the three and the Senate’s only female chair of a standing committee. When she won her first Senate election in 2012, she arrived in Columbia, the state capital, to an all-male Senate. More than a decade later, she leaves it as such again.

Yet, when she was first elected, female leaders had ascended across state politics. Then-Gov. Nikki Haley was a key ally. The state Supreme Court’s chief justice was a woman. Now, the governor is, once again, a man. So is the Senate president. And the House speaker. And the chief justice. The state Supreme Court had no men when it upheld the current abortion law in 2023; it recently added a single female justice.

“I think if men could take the right to vote away from women, they would,” Shealy said. “Just look at South Carolina and what we’ve done. We don’t want women to have a say in anything. That’s obvious.”

At the South Carolina Statehouse, Shealy was widely known as the top legislative champion for children. She blames her loss in the primary on the paltry runoff turnout — but also the fact that Republican women in her home state still often adhere to traditional gender roles.

“Women in the Republican Party always put themselves in the position that we need to support our men,” Shealy said. “They let themselves be subservient to men, especially in the South.”

She wonders how much they realize that men are now exclusively making decisions about issues that specifically affect women, notably reproductive healthcare. South Carolina currently has a six-week abortion ban, but a conservative flank of House members have prefiled a bill that would ban abortions from conception, or basically what Shealy and the other female senators opposed. The bill is sponsored by three women — and 29 men. If it moves to the Senate, not a single Republican debating the restrictions — or voting on them — will be a woman.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

Five Big Obstacles to Opening Child Care Facilities in Rural Illinois

5 months 1 week ago

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

Sixty percent of rural Americans live in child care deserts — regions with too few licensed slots for children. In rural Illinois, that number rises to nearly 70%.

Over the past decade, Illinois has experienced a 33% decline in licensed child care providers, losing nearly 4,300 facilities and about 38,000 licensed slots for children. This loss, driven by years of budget cuts, has outpaced the shrinking child population and hit rural areas the hardest. In 2019, during his first year in office, Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledged that rural providers were closing at an “alarming rate” and vowed to make Illinois the “best state in the nation for families raising young children.”

While the state has increased payments to providers in recent years, it hasn’t been enough to reverse the damage caused by years of budget cuts. The COVID-19 pandemic further destabilized the already fragile system. Despite additional state and federal funding, Illinois has lost about 1,300 providers since Pritzker took office.

But opening new facilities is hard, and the government itself makes things harder. Here are five reasons it’s difficult to open and operate new child care centers in Illinois:

1. Politics Delayed Federal Relief

Experts say that launching a child care center can cost upwards of $1 million, even in rural areas, where people tend to assume that it’s cheaper to start a small business. It’s true that properties may be less expensive than in urban areas, but they are often harder to find in regions with little new construction and many old buildings requiring costly repairs.

The largest source of child care funding in America comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But most of it goes to offset child care payments for low-income parents; only a few exceptions allow spending federal funds on the buildings themselves.

Federal efforts to ease these startup costs for rural regions include a proposed expansion of loans and grants through the Department of Agriculture, but this measure remains tied up in Congress as part of the long-delayed new farm bill.

The Casners purchased and renovated a 1950s motel in order to open their child care center. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica) 2. State Efforts to Help Didn’t Go Very Far

Rebuild Illinois is a $45 billion, multiyear capital improvement plan that was passed in 2019, the state’s first such plan in nearly a decade. Through it, the state allocated $100 million for early childhood facilities. But in the first round of funding, only eight programs out of 238 applicants received a combined $55 million in January 2023, with most grants awarded in Chicago and suburban areas. No providers in the southern half of the state received funding. A second $45 million round is planned, but no timeline has been announced.

3. Licensing Delays and Staffing Shortages

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which oversees child care licensing, is grappling with a staffing crisis. The agency has a 20% vacancy rate for licensing staff and 45% for supervisors, who must review and approve all applications for child care providers.

Navigating Illinois’ complex licensing rules can be hard, and providers say they can’t always get the information they need in a timely manner. Some say their applications have been caught in limbo for months or weeks without explanation. According to DCFS’ own report to the General Assembly, the agency misses its 90-day deadline to approve applications about a third of the time — and in regions with severe staffing shortages, that rate can rise above 50%. Although licensing will soon transfer to the newly created Department of Early Childhood, most changes won’t begin until mid-2026, and what impact they will have on providers is not yet clear.

While DCFS acknowledges the staffing shortages, the agency also attributes delays to provider paperwork errors and holdups from other agencies, like the state fire marshal or local officials.

Mary Pender, a teacher at OWL, pushes snow off an awning. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica) 4. Outdated and Contradictory Regulations

Illinois’ child care regulations, though intended to protect children, include outdated and contradictory rules that frustrate providers. For instance, one regulation requires blankets in every crib, even though the state prohibits blanket use for sleeping infants to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Another rule requires that providers carry coins on walks to use a payphone in emergencies — a relic from a pre-cellphone era.

Providers say that inconsistencies in the rules further complicate an already difficult process for opening and operating child care centers. A DCFS spokesperson told Capitol News Illinois that the agency is working to update some regulations.

5. Low Reimbursement Rates for Providers

The federal Child Care and Development Block Grant is the largest source of child care funding in the U.S. It is administered by states and helps eligible low-income families offset the high cost of child care. The money is paid directly to providers, and the federal government mandates that states reimburse providers at least 50% of market rates and recommends a higher benchmark of 75%. However, Illinois falls short of both targets. As of April 2023, the state reimbursed less than 45% of market rates for child care centers, one of the largest gaps nationwide. This underfunding violated federal equal access provisions, though state officials said that recent subsidy increases have brought Illinois into compliance in most categories.

Rural providers face additional hurdles beyond inadequate reimbursement rates. High startup costs and lower population density make it harder to fill classrooms quickly, prolonging financial strain. Even providers offering unsubsidized care struggle to set fees that reflect the true cost of operations, as many families who barely earn too much to receive a subsidy cannot afford to pay higher rates.

This persistent funding gap leaves providers, particularly those in rural areas, in a difficult financial position.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

North Carolina Supreme Court Candidate Wants Military Absentee Votes Tossed. Years Earlier, That’s How He Voted.

5 months 1 week ago

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As a member of the Army National Guard in 2019 and 2020, Jefferson Griffin voted in North Carolina elections using military absentee ballots.

Now, as he seeks to overturn the results of a state Supreme Court election that went against him, Griffin is asking that same court to disqualify the votes of around 5,500 people who voted in the same manner as he had.

Since Democrat Allison Riggs won reelection to the state’s highest court last year by 734 votes, Griffin, now a Republican judge on the state’s Court of Appeals, has repeatedly tried to nullify her victory. Last week, the Republican majority on the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked the certification of Riggs’ win after Griffin filed a legal petition arguing that the election should be awarded to him.

In a briefing, Griffin’s lawyers argued that ballots cast by overseas and military voters should not be counted if they did not also provide photo identification, such as a photocopy of a driver’s license. His position contradicts that of the state election board, which had issued a rule before the election stating that such voters did not have to provide an ID.

Griffin’s use of these military ballots, which ProPublica confirmed using publicly available voting data and documents obtained via an open records request, has not been previously reported.

Two of Griffin’s absentee ballot requests came while he was deployed as a captain and a judge advocate general in the North Carolina Army National Guard. They were covered by a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, more commonly known as UOCAVA.

In August 2019, for a municipal election, Griffin requested an absentee ballot, checking a box attesting that he was a “Member of the Uniformed Services or Merchant Marine on active duty and currently absent from county of residence.” Griffin listed his address as Fort Bliss, Texas, and the North Carolina Army National Guard’s 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team.

In January 2020, Griffin made a similar absentee ballot request for the March 2020 primary election, again checking a box that he was “on active duty in the Uniformed Services.”

At that time, North Carolina did not have a law in force requiring photo ID to be provided for in-person or absentee voters. (Though passed in 2018, the law did not take effect until late 2023.)

ProPublica sent Griffin a list of detailed questions, to which he replied: “I am not allowed to comment on pending litigation. It would be a violation of our NC Code of Judicial Conduct for me to do so.”

Embry Owen, the campaign manager for Riggs, criticized Griffin’s stance in the litigation. “Active-duty members of the military who are serving our country overseas count on their rights under UOCAVA to vote and make their voice heard. The same is true for members of the foreign service and missionaries in the field,” Owen said. “Any attempt to silence these voters is a shame on North Carolina’s democracy.”

As part of his legal fight, Griffin is challenging several categories of ballots, including over 60,000 that are missing driver’s license or Social Security data. But his theory that such information is necessary to legally vote has been repeatedly dismissed by the state election board, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump and even a right-wing activist who originally pushed it. In a virtual meeting, the activist called it “voter suppression” and said he was “100%” certain it would fail in court, as ProPublica has reported.

However, the issue of the 5,500 UOCAVA ballots has become increasingly important because Griffin has prioritized them in his latest legal briefing, asking the state Supreme Court to consider them first and, if nullifying those votes proves determinative, hand the election to him.

“In the Supreme Court contest, 5,509 such ballots were unlawfully cast,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote in their brief. “Judge Griffin anticipates that, if these unlawful ballots are excluded, he will win the election.”

Griffin is only trying to disqualify UOCAVA ballots in heavily Democratic counties, ignoring ballots from Republican areas, a ProPublica review of the contested ballots found. A data analysis by independent journalist Bryan Anderson found that Democratic ballots were disproportionately targeted, with Democrats being almost five times as likely as Republicans to have their ballots questioned by Griffin, though there are roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans in North Carolina.

“Judge Griffin’s targeting of military and overseas voters from four heavily Democratic counties lays plain his goal: toss votes to retroactively win an election he already lost,” Owen said.

Griffin’s lawyers have argued to the state Supreme Court that since North Carolina law requires in-person voters to show a photo ID, UOCAVA voters should have to as well, such as by providing a picture of their driver’s license.

However, the state board of elections has repeatedly ruled that UOCAVA voters are not required to do so. When striking down Griffin’s challenges to the election results in December, the bipartisan panel unanimously rejected Griffin’s assertion that UOCAVA ballots submitted without photo IDs were unlawful, though it split along partisan lines for other challenges he made.

“We are not at liberty to change the election rules as they are established,” said Stacy Eggers IV, a Republican member of the board, when voting to reject Griffin’s challenges. “We have previously adopted a rule that says military and overseas voters are not required to show a voter ID” and “unless a court says otherwise, I’d find that we’re bound by that rule.”

Griffin has gone to extraordinary lengths to have this matter heard by the state Supreme Court, which has a Republican majority, filing his petition directly to the high court instead of working through lower courts first, as is the standard process laid out in state law. ProPublica has reported that the court’s Republican chief justice, Paul Newby, has been described by Griffin as a “good friend and mentor,” and most of the spouses of the Republican justices have donated to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns.

UOCAVA ballots are the primary method of voting for American service members stationed away from home and for other Americans living overseas. Voters request an absentee ballot by submitting the Federal Post Card Application to their election office, after which it checks their eligibility and provides them the ballot, which the voter then mails in either electronically or physically. Around 2.8 million Americans eligible to vote live overseas, and tens of thousands of them vote using this method, including thousands of North Carolinians.

Whether these ballots will count in the Griffin-Riggs race is currently being considered in parallel legal proceedings at the North Carolina Supreme Court and 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The state board and Riggs’ campaign have argued that the matter should be decided in federal court, as the issue pertains to federal law. Briefings and oral arguments are scheduled in both through the remainder of the month. Until the election is decided in court, Riggs will continue to hold her seat. It is the last unresolved election in the nation from 2024.

Claude Murray, a member of Common Defense, a veterans group that has had the ballots of some of its North Carolina members challenged, criticized Griffin’s actions. “The right to vote is something Americans often take for granted, but as veterans we know how precious it truly is. Judge Griffin knows this too and is choosing a different path,” Murray said. “It is shameful that he is now seeking to invalidate thousands of votes — including military members and their families — simply because he lost an election.”

A voting rights advocate has compiled a list of challenged ballots in this race; you can check whether your vote is among them here. If it is, reporter Doug Bock Clark is interested in hearing your story. Email him at doug.clark@propublica.org and briefly describe your experience and why you believe you were challenged. Also, please reach out if you have any information about the North Carolina Supreme Court or state court system that you think we should know. Clark can be reached securely via phone or on Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

by Doug Bock Clark

How Segregated Are Your Local Private Schools? We Made a Tool to Help You Find Out.

5 months 1 week ago

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In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns often remain largely divided by race, especially those with larger Black communities. You’ll often hear people describe railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks, Black people on the other. That’s true. But I’ve often seen a different dividing line, a more impenetrable one. This one runs between schools: private and public ones.

While reporting in many of these small towns, I saw that Black children typically attend the local public schools while white kids head to private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregation academies” because they opened for white children while the federal courts were forcing districts across the South to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies still operate, and they continue to divide their communities.

When children don’t go to school together, they don’t interact much with peers of another race. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop or at PTA meetings or on the sidelines of football games. Communities can remain almost as divided as they were before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional — 70 years ago.

I spent much of 2024 digging into “segregation academies” with my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon. Early on, we set out to compile a master list of segregation academies that are still operating, which we planned to use as a foundation for our reporting.

It’s difficult, impossible even, to identify these academies or even to understand local school segregation more broadly without knowing the racial makeup of each private school’s enrollment over time. And private schools aren’t always willing to hand over that information. Nor do they have to. But while putting together our list of segregation academies, we came across something incredibly useful — a 30-year trove of data kept by the U.S. Department of Education that lays out the story of racial segregation, school by school, across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of most private schools’ enrollments every other year since the early 1990s.

Outside of a handful of education researchers, the average person doesn’t know this data exists. Nor is most of it kept in an accessible format. Parents would need a high level of data literacy to use it to better understand education trends or to make their own school decisions.

ProPublica decided to create a Private School Demographics database, which we launched this week, that anyone, anywhere can use to look up a school and view the years of data we were relying on for our reporting.

The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregation academies still operate — and where. We wanted to focus only on those that continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not the ones whose student bodies had come to reflect their local areas.

We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has demographic data about the students at most private schools in the country on its website. (Schools voluntarily reported their information to the center.) This was helpful, but it provided the racial breakdown of kids at each school only from the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available.

We wanted to go back in time to see how the demographics of these schools have — or have not — changed over the years.

It turned out that this NCES data comes from something called the Private School Universe Survey, the dataset we came to rely on. It was practically hiding in plain sight.

While the most recent survey results are easily available on the NCES website, the rest are in formats that require experts to clean and organize into something usable. Luckily, we have those experts on our staff. Our colleagues Sergio Hernández and Nat Lash began digging into the older datasets, turning them into a searchable format. Then they compared each private school’s demographics to those of the public school district in which it is located.

This pointed us to illuminating stories about the effects of segregation academies in communities that weren’t on anyone’s radar, certainly not mine. In fact, the data could tell stories about myriad places all over the country where private schools educate millions of the nation’s children.

I used the database to point me to the segregation academies having the most dividing effects on their local communities. That led me first to a county in the rural shadow of Selma, Alabama, one of the most pivotal points on the Civil Rights movement’s map.

That community was 45 minutes to the south in Wilcox County, where I found people starkly divided by race, as they had been since the days when plantation operators hauled enslaved workers to the region to grow cotton. While Wilcox Academy was 98% white, the local county public schools were 98% Black. Local residents were dividing their scarce resources to operate two shrinking school systems, one private and one public — to the detriment of pretty much everyone there.

Wilcox Academy’s demographic breakdown as shown through ProPublica’s Private School Demographics database

The story of Wilcox County formed the backbone of the first story in our segregation academy series.

Our database also steered me toward the last story in our series, this one based in Mississippi’s Amite County, where we found segregation academies that had some of the most profoundly dividing effects yet. One of them had never reported enrolling more than a single Black student at a time. The other had just hit an all-time high — 3.5% Black enrollment in a county where almost 40% of residents are Black.

Perhaps the most telling detail didn’t come from the data or our master list. I found it at a Friday night football game. One night while I was in Amite, the public high school played a home game — and so did the nearby academy. While the public high school played, its stands full of Black families, I interviewed a Black man who had graduated from the public high school and coached its football team.

As halftime neared, he and I decided to head over to the private school, a segregation academy just over the tree line. Over all his years living and working in this community, he had never stepped foot on the campus. Almost everyone there — people from this very small community — was white. But he recognized only a few of them.

As we walked toward the stands, he described feeling a million eyes on him. Nobody was unfriendly. But this threshold felt far more impenetrable than any railroad tracks I had ever encountered.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

Following a Series of Government Hacks, Biden Closes Out His Administration With New Cybersecurity Order

5 months 1 week ago

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On Thursday, in his final week in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order intended to strengthen the nation’s cyber defenses, in part by requiring software providers like Microsoft to provide proof that they meet certain security standards before they can sell their products to the federal government.

The action follows an onslaught of cyberattacks in recent years in which hackers linked to Russia, China and other adversaries have exploited software vulnerabilities to steal sensitive documents from federal agencies.

In demanding more accountability from software makers, Biden pointed to instances in which contractors “commit to following cybersecurity practices, yet do not fix well-known exploitable vulnerabilities in their software, which puts the Government at risk of compromise.”

In June, ProPublica reported on such a case involving Microsoft, the largest IT vendor to the federal government. In the so-called SolarWinds attack, which was discovered shortly before Biden took office, Russian state-sponsored hackers exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and other agencies. ProPublica found that, for years, Microsoft leaders ignored warnings about the flaw from one of their own engineers because they feared that publicly acknowledging it would alienate the federal government and cause the company to lose ground to competitors.

That profit-over-security culture was driven in large part by the rush to gain ground in the multibillion-dollar cloud computing market, the news organization reported. One former Microsoft supervisor described the attitude as, “Do whatever it frickin’ takes to win because you have to win.”

Microsoft has defended its decision not to address the flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the company’s assessment at the time involved “multiple reviews” and that it considers several factors when making security decisions, including “potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations.” But in the months and years following the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft’s security lapses contributed to other attacks on the government, including one in 2023 in which hackers connected to the Chinese government gained access to top U.S. officials’ emails. The federal Cyber Safety Review Board later found that the company had deprioritized security investments and risk management, resulting in a “cascade of … avoidable errors.”

Microsoft has pledged to put security “above all else.”

To be sure, Microsoft is not the only company whose products have provided hackers entree to government networks. Russian hackers in the SolarWinds attack gained access to victim networks through tainted software updates provided by the Texas-based SolarWinds company before exploiting the flawed Microsoft product.

To help prevent future hacks, the government wants IT companies to provide proof that they use “secure software development practices to reduce the number and severity of vulnerabilities” in their products, according to the order. In addition, the government “needs to adopt more rigorous third-party risk management practices” to verify the use of such practices, Biden said. He asked for changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the rules for government contracting, to implement his recommendations. If fully enacted, violators of the new requirements could be referred to the attorney general for legal action.

Biden also said that strengthening the security of federal “identity management systems” was “especially critical” to improving the nation’s cybersecurity. Indeed, the Microsoft product that was the focus of ProPublica’s June article was a so-called “identity” product that allowed users to access nearly every program used at work with a single logon. By exploiting the weakness in the identity product during the SolarWinds attack, the Russian hackers were able to swiftly vacuum up emails from victim networks.

In November, ProPublica reported that Microsoft capitalized on SolarWinds in the wake of the attack, offering federal agencies free trials of its cybersecurity products. The move effectively locked those agencies in to more expensive software licenses and vastly expanded Microsoft’s footprint across the federal government. The company told ProPublica that its offer was a direct response to “an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies.” In his executive order, Biden addressed the fallout of that 2021 request, directing the federal government to mitigate the risks presented by the “concentration of IT vendors and services,” a veiled reference to Washington’s increased dependence on Microsoft, which some lawmakers have referred to as a “cybersecurity monoculture.”

Though the order marks a firmer stance with the technology companies supplying the government, enforcement will fall to the Trump administration. It’s unclear whether the incoming president will see the changes in the executive order through. President-elect Donald Trump has emphasized deregulation even as he has indicated that his administration will take a tough stance on China, one of the nation’s top cyber adversaries.

Neither Microsoft nor the Trump transition team responded to requests for comment on the order.

Thursday’s executive order was the latest in a series of regulatory efforts impacting Microsoft in the waning days of the Biden administration. Last month, ProPublica reported that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company in a probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws. FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors, and one key area of interest is how the company packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services.

This so-called bundling was the subject of ProPublica’s November investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to box competitors out of lucrative federal contracts. The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told ProPublica.

Microsoft has declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation but told the news organization last month that the FTC’s recent demand for information is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.”

The commission’s new leadership, chosen by Trump, will decide the future of that investigation.

by Renee Dudley