ProPublica

by Jesse Coburn

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Four and a half years ago, a newly formed corporate entity purchased a low-income housing complex with 264 apartments in Phoenix. The property had received more than $4 million in federal tax credits and, in exchange, was supposed to remain affordable for decades.

The company then used a legal loophole that stripped the affordability protections from the apartments. The maneuver appears to have been lucrative for the company, which bought the property for under $20 million and flipped it two years later for $63 million. Today, advertised rents there have gone up by around 50%.

Similar stories have been playing out across the country for years, as developers and real estate investors take advantage of an obscure section of the tax code known as the “qualified contract” provision. It allows owners of low-income rental properties that have received generous tax credits to raise rents far sooner than the law typically requires.

Some 115,000 apartments in the United States have lost rent restrictions as a result, according to one estimate. Experts say these conversions are exacerbating the nation’s shortage of affordable housing, which has intensified in recent years. One report recently concluded that the country has nearly 5 million fewer housing units than it needs. The problem is most acute for those with low incomes.

The loophole has remained open for decades despite widespread agreement among regulators and advocates about its harm. Congressional efforts to repeal the provision have failed — most recently in 2023 — though state reforms have trimmed its effects. President Donald Trump has pledged to lower housing costs, but some advocates for reform are skeptical that his administration or a Republican-controlled Congress will strike a statute that can be lucrative to the real estate industry. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

“We have an affordable housing crisis just about everywhere in the country,” said Robert Rozen, a former Senate aide who helped draft the provision and now calls for its repeal. “We can’t afford to lose more affordable units, particularly as a result of a loophole in the law.”

The statute is part of the law defining the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which has become the primary catalyst for new affordable rental housing in the country. The program offers developers a tax subsidy worth potentially millions of dollars in exchange for keeping units affordable and renting them only to poor and working-class tenants. Typically that’s households making below 60% of the area median income. For a family of three to qualify in Phoenix last year, it would’ve had to make $55,560 or less.

Rent and income restrictions are supposed to last at least 30 years. But, after just 14 years, property owners may ask their states to find buyers. This opt-out clause was meant to offer wary investors an early exit from the program while retaining the affordability protections on the properties. But it included a critical unintended flaw: States can only sell at prices set by a formula that almost always overvalues the properties. As a result, buyers are rarely found. If states can’t find buyers within a year, owners are free to raise rents on vacant units and, a few years later, on existing tenants as well.

“It was obviously a mistake to include this in the law,” said Rozen, now an attorney specializing in affordable housing. “We didn’t know what we were doing when we constructed the buy-out formula.”

The beneficiaries of this maneuver are often shielded from public view. The Arizona property, previously called Sombra Apartments, was flipped by a Delaware limited liability company that incorporated under the name Sombra Apartments LLC shortly before the purchase and has a small online footprint. Through a public records request, ProPublica received the application that triggered the loss of affordability protections, which shows the LLC was controlled by a real estate investment firm in Scottsdale, Arizona, called ReNue Properties. ReNue’s website says the company specializes in “the acquisition and rejuvenation of underperforming multifamily properties” and has generated an average 81% return. Michael Christiansen, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as ReNue’s CEO at the time of the transactions, did not respond to requests for comment. (More than 5,700 low-income units in the state have lost affordability protections through the same opt-out method, according to a 2023 Arizona Republic report.)

Some companies exploiting the loophole appear to have done so with the indirect assistance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government-sponsored enterprises support the nation’s housing sector, typically by buying mortgages to inject cash into the mortgage market. Property records show that the enterprises were involved in loans to owners of low-income housing who then stripped the properties of affordability protections or are seeking to do so. The enterprises’ involvement appears at odds with their declared support for affordable housing. Spokespeople for Fannie and Freddie did not respond to requests for comment.

Two industry insiders defended the qualified contract process as a way to fight the shortage of middle-income housing. That’s the position of Charlie Moline, CEO of Moline Investment Management, who said he has used the mechanism to remove affordability protections from around 20 multifamily properties across the Midwest.

Typically, low-income housing tax credit properties are too old and worn to be converted into high-end market-rate units, he said. But, freed of the income and rent limits, the properties can become appealing to middle-income renters after some basic renovations. “No one’s displaced by what we’re doing,” said Moline, who contends that he keeps rent increases moderate. “Our goal is to expand affordable housing to the missing middle.”

That goal would be of little benefit to Lashunda Williams, a resident of a low-income apartment complex in Omaha, Nebraska, that Moline purchased last year and is taking through the opt-out process. Williams, 33, said she makes $17 an hour as a custodian at an Amazon warehouse and pays $899 for a one-bedroom apartment. “I can barely keep up with my rent half the time,” she said. If it increased, “I would have to move.”

Moline’s argument was similarly unpersuasive to Rozen, the former Senate aide. “The bottom line is the owner is increasing his rental income and tenants who the program was intended to serve are losing their affordable rents,” Rozen said. “And the federal government is being taken advantage of.”

Affordable housing proponents have long called for repealing the qualified contract provision. But congressional efforts to do so have fizzled, in part due to lobbying from developers and private equity firms with interests in low-income housing, according to a former congressional staffer involved in the repeal effort.

Advocates have had more success pushing for state-level reforms. A majority of states now incentivize or require applicants for low-income housing tax credits to waive their opt-out rights, according to Moha Thakur of the National Housing Trust. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service have also recently proposed or enacted policies to combat the problem. That includes a 2023 FHFA requirement that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac no longer invest in low-income housing eligible for early opt-outs. However, Fannie and Freddie can still back loans on such properties, which is more commonly how they are involved, according to Rozen. (Freddie has said it is studying the issue.) And given the Trump administration’s mass-scale attempts to demolish regulations, particularly those adopted under the Biden administration, it’s unclear whether the new policy initiatives will survive.

The state-level changes have had an impact, bringing the number of apartments lost annually through the opt-out from around 10,000 a year to between 6,000 and 7,000. Without congressional action, however, the loophole remains on the books and a threat to poor tenants. “That loophole shouldn’t exist,” said Joy Noll, a tenant of the Arizona property, who lives on modest housing and disability subsidies. If rents rise further, Noll fears she will have to move: “It made it impossible for those of us who are low income to stay.”

by Sergio Hernández

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

We updated our Supreme Connections database with new disclosures on Thursday, adding Justice Samuel Alito’s deferred 2023 filing and eight previously missing disclosures from Justice Clarence Thomas dating back to the 1990s.

Supreme Connections is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them.

This update includes Alito’s 2023 disclosure, which was released in August after he received an extension, as well as eight Thomas filings from the 1990s provided by Documented. Those filings were not previously available in our database. While federal ethics law requires judges to file these disclosures each year, the law requires most filings to be destroyed after six years, making many past disclosures hard to find.

Alito’s disclosure includes $900 in concert tickets from Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, which The New York Times reported were for her annual music festival in Regensburg, Germany. The Bavarian aristocrat once dubbed the “punk princess” has reinvented herself in recent decades, closely aligning with European conservative and Catholic circles.

The newly added Thomas filings, which cover 1992 to 1999, reveal more than 100 gifts or travel-related reimbursements, including more than a dozen private flights, cigars from the late conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, and a 1997 trip paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow to Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California. ProPublica previously reported how Crow has provided Thomas with extensive undisclosed luxury travel, including several other trips to Bohemian Grove. Thomas has argued he did not need to disclose such gifts.

Browse the database to learn more.

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

by Robin Fields

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

Vincent Gaynor remembers, almost to the minute, when he realized his part in birthing the breakthrough gene therapy Zolgensma had ended and the forces that turned it into the world’s most expensive drug had taken over.

It was May 2014. He and his wife were sitting in the cafeteria at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Elsewhere in the hospital, an infant — patient No. 1 in a landmark clinical trial — was receiving an IV infusion that, if it worked, would fix the genetic mutation that caused spinal muscular atrophy, a rare, incurable disease. At the time, children born with the most severe form of SMA swiftly lost their ability to move, to swallow, to breathe. Depending on the disease’s progression, most didn’t live to their second birthdays.

The Gaynors’ daughter Sophia had been diagnosed with SMA five years earlier. Since then, they’d raced to fund research to save her. Their charity, Sophia’s Cure, was covering a substantial portion of the costs of the trial.

They’d helped raise about $2 million for a program at Nationwide run by Brian Kaspar, a leading researcher. Gaynor, a New York City construction worker, had forged a tight bond with Kaspar, speaking frequently with him by phone, sometimes deep into the night.

But their relationship had started to fray when — with success in sight — Kaspar became part owner of AveXis, a biotech startup that had snapped up the rights to his SMA drug. Billions of dollars were at stake.

When Kaspar walked into the cafeteria that day, Gaynor said, the scientist didn’t acknowledge him or his wife before sitting down a short distance away. Neither did the man with him, the startup’s CEO.

“It was like they didn’t know us,” Gaynor recalled.

When Zolgensma hit the market five years later, it was hailed as a miracle drug. Some babies treated with it grew up able to run and play. It helped reduce U.S. death rates from SMA, long the leading genetic cause of infant mortality, by two-thirds.

That leap forward came at a sky-high price: more than $2 million per dose, making Zolgensma then the costliest one-time treatment ever.

How did a drug rooted, like many, in seed money from the U.S. government — that is, American taxpayers — and spurred by the grassroots fundraising of desperate parents, end up with such a price tag?

The story of Zolgensma lays bare a confounding reality about modern drug development, in which revolutionary new treatments are becoming available only to be priced out of reach for many. It’s a story that upends commonly held conceptions that high drug prices reflect huge industry investments in innovation. Most of all, it’s a story that prompts, again and again, an increasingly urgent question: Do medical advances really have to be this expensive?

ProPublica traced Zolgensma’s journey from lab to market, from the supporters there at the beginning to the hired guns brought in at the end to construct a rationale for its unprecedented price.

We found that taxpayers and private charities like Sophia’s Cure subsidized much of the science that yielded Zolgensma, providing research grants and opening the door to federal tax credits and other benefits that sped its path to approval.

Yet that support came with no conditions — financial or otherwise — for the for-profit companies that brought the drug over the finish line, particularly when it came to pricing.

Vincent Gaynor with his daughter Sophia (Photo courtesy of Vincent Gaynor)

Once Zolgensma’s potential was clear, early champions like the Gaynors were left behind as the private sector rushed in. AveXis’ top executives and venture-capital backers made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars apiece when the startup was swallowed by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG in 2018.

Wall Street analysts predicted Novartis’ new prize drug would be the first therapy to smash the million-dollar-a-dose mark. The Swiss colossus crafted a sophisticated campaign to justify more than double that amount, enlisting a team of respected academics, data-modelers and pricing strategists to help make its case.

“This was a case where the charities and the government did everything to get this thing commercialized, and then it just became an opportunity for a bunch of people to make transformative, generational wealth,” said James Love, director of the public advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International.

In a statement to ProPublica, Novartis said Zolgensma’s price reflects its benefits to children with SMA and to society more broadly.

“Zolgensma is consistently priced based on the value it provides to patients, caregivers and health systems,” the company said, adding that the drug may reduce the burden of SMA by replacing “repeat, lifelong therapies with a single treatment.”

Zolgensma’s price quickly became the standard for gene therapies. Nine of them cost more than $2 million. A tenth, approved in November, is predicted to run about $3.8 million, just shy of the most expensive, also approved last year, which costs $4.25 million a dose.

“Drug companies charge whatever they think they can get away with,” said David Mitchell, the founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs. “And every time the benchmark moves up, they think, ‘Well, we can get away with more.’”

Parents of children with SMA say their concerns about costs pale in comparison to the hope offered by such cutting-edge therapies. “I mean, it’s a child’s life,” said Hailey Weihs, who battled her health plan to get Zolgensma for her daughter. “Anybody would want that for their own child.”

The seven-figure costs of Zolgensma and other gene therapies add to the nation’s ballooning bill for prescription drugs, absorbed by all Americans in the form of rising insurance premiums and taxes for public programs like Medicaid.

Breakthroughs like Zolgensma are often framed as wins for all: Patients get life-saving new therapies. Drug companies and biotech investors make enough money to incentivize even more breakthroughs.

But not everyone’s a winner, Gaynor noted.

No one wanted Zolgensma to succeed more than he did, or understands better what it has meant for families like his. Yet his years behind the scenes of the drug’s development left him and his family disillusioned.

“I learned it’s all about money,” Gaynor said. “It’s not about saving people.”

When Vincent and Catherine Gaynor started their married life in 2006, they knew one thing for certain: They wanted children.

They learned well into Catherine’s 2008 pregnancy that they were both carriers for SMA, meaning there was a 25% chance their child would be born with the muscle-wasting disorder.

They were concerned but clung to the larger chance the baby would be born healthy.

When Sophia was born in late February 2009, at first they just marveled at her sweet disposition and bright, expressive eyes. How she loved being snuggled. How she sighed after she burped.

But it didn’t take long for Vincent, who’d grown up with younger siblings, to sense something was off. Sophia didn’t lift her legs. They flopped outward like a frog’s when he changed her diaper.

Their pediatrician assured them Sophia was fine. Then a different doctor suggested testing her for SMA. While they waited for the results, the family went to a nearby park, and Catherine pushed Sophia’s stroller around a pond. “I remember walking behind her with the video camera and knowing in my heart this was the last day we were all going to be happy,” Vincent recalled.

After Sophia’s diagnosis, Catherine quit her office job to care for the baby full time. Vincent started gulping down studies and going to conferences, desperate to find a way to save his daughter.

At the time, there were no treatments to slow or stop SMA. By the time Sophia was 4 months old, she needed a machine to help her breathe overnight. At 6 months, she could no longer take a bottle and needed a feeding tube. Each time she lost ground, their urgency to find a treatment grew.

The Gaynors didn’t have deep pockets or wealthy friends. He was a steamfitter with Local 638, from a family of steamfitters. They began raising small amounts of money by hosting golf tournaments and throwing Zumba parties. As the volume of donations grew, they founded Sophia’s Cure, emerging as serious players in the small world of SMA charities.

I learned it’s all about money. It’s not about saving people.

—Vincent Gaynor, who raised funds for medical research to help his daughter with spinal muscular atrophy

Vincent met Brian Kaspar at a cocktail hour for high-yield fundraisers. Kaspar was among the small group of top researchers working to find treatments for SMA, competing fiercely for recognition and funds. (Kaspar declined an interview request from ProPublica and didn’t respond to written questions.)

Because his drug was a gene therapy, public grant money and private philanthropy played an especially central role, with the National Institutes of Health alone putting over $450 million into science related to SMA. Drug companies at the time approached these treatments with more skepticism, waiting longer to invest and letting universities and academic hospitals do the heavy lifting, said Ameet Sarpatwari, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who studies the pharmaceutical industry.

Drug companies sponsored only 40% of the U.S. gene therapy trials active in January 2019, according to a study Sarpatwari co-authored.

“The narrative of industry is, ‘We’re doing the hard, expensive part of drug development,’ and, at least for cell and gene therapies, the most risky part is actually being done by public or federally supported labs,” Sarpatwari said, calling Zolgensma a “poster child” for the study’s findings.

By the time of the cocktail party, Kaspar had turned early research into a promising drug therapy that he was beginning to test on animals — the precursor to a human trial. Gaynor remembered him as humble and almost classically nerdy, happy to spend hours on the phone explaining how motor neurons work.

More established SMA charities tended to hedge their bets, spreading money around to multiple programs. But Sophia was already around 18 months old, and Gaynor had no time for that. In September 2010, when Sophia’s Cure won a $250,000 grant from the Pepsi Refresh Project by amassing votes online, he steered the money to Kaspar’s program. The following June, the charity signed an agreement promising Kaspar up to $1 million more, for which it had launched a drive to recruit 200 people to raise $5,000 apiece.

As the money flowed in, Gaynor and Kaspar became close friends. The Gaynors stayed overnight at Kaspar’s house on their drive to an annual charity event. Kaspar did a Q&A for the Sophia’s Cure YouTube channel from the Gaynors’ dining room and proofread posts Vincent wrote for the charity’s website.

Gaynor said they often talked about how getting the drug through the development process would require way more money and muscle than the various SMA charities could muster. Kaspar shared his conversations with venture capital firms and even asked Gaynor to talk to a potential investor.

Yet Gaynor said he was blindsided when Kaspar told him he’d formed a relationship with a Dallas startup called BioLife Cell Bank that had been focused on stem cell research.

The CEO, John Carbona, then 54, had run medical device and equipment companies, but he had no background in drug development. In an interview, Carbona told ProPublica that he took the reins at BioLife in the aftermath of his mother’s death, determined to do something “significant” to fulfill her hopes for him. After an associate’s twins were born with SMA, he said he became convinced that Kaspar’s gene therapy was the answer.

Carbona remade BioLife into AveXis: Av for adeno-associated virus serotype 9, the engine of Kaspar’s drug; ve for vector; X for the DNA helix; and Is for Isis, the goddess of children, nature and magic.

Still, for much of the next year and a half, money from charities and more than $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health remained Kaspar’s bread and butter. In late 2012, Sophia’s Cure agreed to provide another $550,000 for a Phase 1 clinical trial. The Nationwide Children’s Hospital Foundation, an affiliate of the hospital, agreed to match it.

Kaspar singled out Sophia’s Cure for the extent of its support in a Nationwide press release.

“Sophia’s Cure Foundation has been the lead funder of this program and their incredible investment in this lab has accelerated our program by many years,” he said.

The trial protocol called for Kaspar’s therapy to be tested on infants up to 9 months old. It was a pragmatic decision: The company had limited funds and capacity to produce the test doses, which would be smaller for children who weighed less. Plus, the youngest children were likely to show the most dramatic results since they’d be treated before SMA inflicted its worst damage.

That left out Sophia, as well as most of the kids whose parents made up Gaynor’s fundraising network.

Gaynor’s dream of saving his daughter had tapered into determination to stop the disease’s progression and preserve the strength she had left. Sophia could no longer move her whole hand, but she could still tap with her right pointer finger. She could use an eye-gaze computer to click open screens and attend school remotely. She could communicate a bit, blinking once for yes and twice for no.

Early on, Gaynor said, Kaspar had promised a trial for older kids. But Gaynor felt Kaspar’s commitment wavered as his ties to AveXis grew and his reliance on funding from Sophia’s Cure diminished.

Carbona struck a deal with Nationwide Children’s in late 2013, getting AveXis the exclusive right to develop an SMA treatment using the hospital’s inventions, including Kaspar’s, in exchange for stock. A few months later, Kaspar signed a contract that granted him an even larger stake in the company. The company also landed its first major investor, Paul Manning of PBM Capital.

Over this period, Gaynor said, the phone calls and updates from Kaspar slowed. The Gaynors were invited to Nationwide Children’s for the start of the clinical trial by the family of the child receiving the first dose.

After the initial awkwardness in the cafeteria, the Gaynors said, Kaspar and Carbona eventually came over and sat with them. Carbona remembers it differently, saying that he recalled seeing the Gaynors that day and the mood was friendly, even celebratory.

Tension surfaced two months later when they all converged in Lancaster, Wisconsin, for Avery’s Race, an annual SMA fundraiser benefiting Sophia’s Cure.

The event brought together dozens of families from across the country for an awareness walk, an auction and a rubber ducky race in a nearby creek. In the finale, parents posed questions to Kaspar, Gaynor and Carbona, almost all of them about the clinical trial.

In video footage captured by a documentary filmmaker, Catherine Gaynor asked bluntly whether testing the drug only on infants meant the FDA would approve the treatment only for the youngest patients while “everyone else is left hanging out to dry.”

Kaspar acknowledged this was possible. He described expanding the treatment to older children as “step two” but made clear that funds for testing would have to come from Sophia’s Cure.

That’s what the money raised at Avery’s Race would support, Vincent Gaynor said, adding pointedly that his nonprofit would focus on the work others would avoid “because it’s not going to push stock prices up.”

Neither Kaspar nor Carbona responded directly to the dig. Carbona, noting the company had other funding needs, said they would expand testing when they had proof the drug worked.

I mean, they all have their hearts in the right place, but they’re being run by people who are looking for a return on investment.

—John Carbona, former CEO of AveXis

By early 2015, AveXis had raised millions from deep-pocketed biotech investors, adding members of several venture-capital funds to its board. Their participation would be critical in bringing the drug to market, paying for licenses to patented technology needed to make and administer it, for example. It also meant that Zolgensma had to do more than save lives — its promise had to make AveXis’ investors a profit.

Almost immediately, Carbona said, the board pushed to take the company public.

“I mean, they all have their hearts in the right place, but they’re being run by people who are looking for a return on investment,” he said.

As AveXis moved toward an initial public offering, some on the board questioned whether Carbona should continue running it, he said. He’d been accused years earlier of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty by a former employer, who won a $2.2 million court judgment against him. Carbona had denied any wrongdoing and the judgment was reversed in part and reduced on appeal, but the case left lasting damage. “It hurt me immensely,” he said.

Later that year, the board replaced Carbona with a new chief executive, Sean P. Nolan, who had a decadeslong record at pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

In September, a company representative offered the Gaynors a meeting with Nolan, saying Kaspar had stressed how instrumental Sophia’s Cure had been to the work on the drug. The Gaynors traveled into Manhattan for the meeting at a hotel bar. They told Nolan about their concerns, including that older kids wouldn’t have access to Kaspar’s drug since it hadn’t been tested on them. They said Nolan was cordial but never followed up. (Nolan didn’t respond to emailed questions from ProPublica.)

Nasdaq posted a video to Facebook with the caption, “Getting ready to ring the #Nasdaq opening bell with AveXis, Inc!” (Excerpt from archived live video clip obtained from Nasdaq/Facebook)

Watch video ➜

Early the following year, AveXis went public. Nolan celebrated by ringing the NASDAQ opening bell as Kaspar, other company executives and members of the board whooped and clapped.

The IPO and subsequent stock sales raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but little of the money went toward additional trials on Zolgensma, an analysis by KEI, the public advocacy group, concluded.

The drug’s trials were small, often involving two dozen patients or fewer. AveXis, and later Novartis, spent less than $12 million up to the point of the drug’s approval — surprisingly little — to prove the therapy was safe and effective, the group estimated, based on information obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, from studies and in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. (Novartis did not respond to questions from ProPublica about trial costs.)

The companies spent more than 10 times that amount to license intellectual property from others, KEI found. It’s not the clinical trials, Love, the director, said, that “makes developing gene therapies more expensive than it has to be.”

By the time of AveXis’ IPO, the Gaynors had decided to wind down Sophia’s Cure and step back from the SMA community. In 2015, Sophia began having seizures that became more frequent over time. She was 6 years old and growing weaker. Her SMA had progressed too far for Kaspar’s drug to help her.

Vincent’s sense of failure was crushing. In September 2016, after years of pent-up anger, he took a last stab at getting Kaspar and AveXis to acknowledge that the charity and its donors had essentially been a partner in developing Zolgensma.

Sophia’s Cure sued Kaspar, Carbona, Nolan, AveXis, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and its affiliated research institute and foundation for breach of contract. They’d relied on the charity’s money to advance the treatment, the lawsuit alleged, then violated the terms of donation agreements by cutting it out of credit and ownership rights once the drug was headed for success. The suit sought damages of $500 million.

Many larger disease foundations have launched venture philanthropy programs that invest in biotech companies and projects, getting royalties and other financial considerations if their gifts help fund new treatments. In court filings, Nationwide Children’s called the notion that the tiny Sophia’s Cure had any right to the drug “simply not true, or even plausible,” and AveXis called it “wholly unsupported.”

Carbona said he was “disappointed and surprised” by the lawsuit. Nationwide didn’t respond to questions about the matter.

In November 2017, as the litigation went on, the results of the clinical trial that the charity helped fund were published.

They were remarkable. At 20 months, all 15 children who’d been treated remained alive, and none relied on a ventilator to breathe. Eleven of 12 infants who received a higher dose of the therapy were able to sit unassisted, speak and be fed orally. Two could walk on their own.

Based on preliminary trial data, the FDA had designated Zolgensma a breakthrough therapy, one of three special designations that helped it race from human trials to regulatory approval in five years. Once the full trial results came out, AveXis became a red-hot acquisition target.

In April 2018, Novartis beat out another bidder, agreeing to buy the company for $8.7 billion.

The sale delivered massive windfalls to those with the biggest stakes in AveXis.

Kaspar alone took in more than $400 million. He swapped his longtime family home in New Albany, Ohio, for a 9-acre estate in San Diego County, California, that had been listed for just over $8 million. It featured a dine-in stone wine cellar, a horse ring and stables.

Nolan, who’d led AveXis for less than three years, walked away with over $190 million; according to a financial filing, his payout included a golden parachute worth almost $65 million. Manning, the startup’s first big investor, made more than $315 million, multiplying his original investment by about 60. (Manning didn’t respond to calls or emailed questions from ProPublica.)

Carbona, too, made a bundle — he declined to say how much. Since he’d already left the company, his payout wasn’t disclosed in SEC filings. “It didn’t matter,” he said of the money. The 20-hour days he’d put into AveXis had helped advance a lifesaving drug. “This was a significant impact on humanity.”

After watching AveXis’ executives and investors cash in, the Gaynors were dealt another painful setback. In early 2019, a U.S. district court judge in Ohio dismissed Sophia’s Cure’s lawsuit against all parties, concluding there had been no breach of contract.

Their last hope for recognition of the charity’s role in bringing Zolgensma to the world was extinguished.

Once Novartis acquired AveXis, it turned to setting a price for its much-anticipated gene therapy.

Unlike other nations, the United States allows companies to charge whatever they want for new drugs. This often means Americans pay the world’s highest prices, particularly during the period when only the original manufacturer can market a drug. Research by PhRMA, the trade group for drug companies, suggests unfettered pricing buys Americans faster access, as long as insurers will pay: New medicines most often launch first in the U.S.

Novartis’ deliberations took place at the end of a decade in which launch prices of new drugs had risen exponentially, drawing ire from patient advocacy groups and Congress. The median annual launch price for a new drug jumped from about $2,000 in 2008 to about $180,000 in 2021, one study found.

In part, the increase reflected that a growing proportion of new drugs treated rare diseases. Drug companies have argued these therapies should cost more because their markets are smaller, making it harder to recoup expenses.

Cell and gene therapies also drove prices higher. The first three such treatments were approved in 2017, launching at prices of $370,000 or more. Luxturna, a gene therapy for a rare disorder that causes vision loss, costs $425,000 per eye.

Industry insiders assumed Zolgensma would cost more than Luxturna. But how much?

There was what I would call pressure from Wall Street. This was going to set a precedent. Investors wanted to see a high price here.

—Dr. Steven D. Pearson, founder of a nonprofit that assesses drug prices

How drug companies pick prices for their products is among their most closely held secrets.

Beyond its statement, Novartis didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about how it set or justified Zolgensma’s price. We reached out to more than three dozen people who were at the company or consulted for it at the time; most didn’t respond or declined to comment. A couple said they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

The most visible portion of Novartis’ work was an effort to put a dollar value on how much Zolgensma would extend and improve SMA patients’ lives and offset the costs of caring for them.

This approach, known as value-based pricing, was originally championed by insurers and consumer watchdogs hoping to rein in drug prices. Other nations use economic assessments to decide whether to cover drugs and at what price, often paying far less than the U.S. for the same treatments.

But pharmaceutical companies have learned to use these techniques to their advantage.

Novartis brought together experts from academia and top consulting firms to work with its internal health economics team to publish research framing Zolgensma as a good value even at a high price.

One of the academics was Daniel Malone, then a professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Pharmacy. The target audience was mainly insurers, he said in an interview.

“We’re trying to influence the thousands of pharmacy and therapeutics committees around the country that are going to be looking at this therapy and whether they are going to provide it,” he said.

At the company’s direction, Malone said, their model mainly compared Zolgensma to the only other SMA treatment then on the market, a chronic treatment called Spinraza. It, too, was pricey, costing $750,000 in the first year and $375,000 every year after; over a decade, the tally would come to more than $4 million. (This was hypothetical; the FDA had approved Spinraza in December 2016, so no one had ever taken it for that long.)

A paper Malone co-authored concluded that Zolgensma, at prices up to $5 million, was a better buy than its rival, delivering more therapeutic benefit at a similar cost.

Company executives publicly floated multimillion-dollar prices for Zolgensma using data points from Malone and others.

“Four million dollars is a significant amount of money,” Dave Lennon, then president of Novartis’ AveXis unit, told Wall Street analysts on a call in November 2018. But “we’ve shown through other studies that we are cost-effective in the range of $4 million to $5 million.”

Such talk normalized “prices that would’ve been inconceivable a generation ago,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of access to medicines at the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “It has a desensitizing effect.”

Novartis’ team of experts also helped the company prepare for Zolgensma’s evaluation by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit that assesses whether drugs are priced fairly.

Unlike agencies in Europe that do similar evaluations to set drug prices for national health systems, ICER’s recommendations aren’t binding, but they’ve become increasingly influential among public and private payers when it comes to coverage decisions.

Dr. Steven D. Pearson, the nonprofit’s founder, said that as ICER began its review, he was aware that investors were pushing for a big number.

“There was what I would call pressure from Wall Street,” he said. “This was going to set a precedent. Investors wanted to see a high price here.”

At first, it looked like ICER would resist. Its December 2018 draft report said Zolgensma would be overpriced at $2 million.

Novartis pushed back. Another consultant, University of Washington professor emeritus Louis Garrison, submitted public comments echoing a forthcoming AveXis-sponsored journal article he’d co-authored. It argued that drugs like Zolgensma, which treat rare, catastrophic conditions, deserved higher prices, in part to “incentivize appropriate risk taking and investments” by their developers.

Garrison said AveXis reviewed the article prior to publication, but he had the final say on its content. “I thought I could make a value-based argument that they would welcome and that I believe in,” he said. He said he was not directly involved in the company’s pricing decision.

Nonetheless, ICER’s final report in April 2019 concluded Zolgensma would need to be priced under $900,000 to be cost-effective, though it acknowledged the drug was still being tested on infants who hadn’t yet shown symptoms of SMA. If they also benefited, the report suggested the drug’s value might increase.

On May 24, the FDA approved Zolgensma to treat children under 2 with all forms of SMA.

Novartis finally revealed the treatment’s U.S. launch price, $2.125 million, framing this as a 50% discount on Spinraza and what the company’s research showed the gene therapy was worth.

It also pocketed yet another taxpayer-funded benefit: a voucher from the Food and Drug Administration redeemable for accelerated review of another drug. Such vouchers — designed to encourage companies to invest in pediatric rare-disease treatments — can be sold, typically bringing prices of around $100 million apiece.

That same day, ICER released an update. New data showing Zolgensma’s substantial benefits for presymptomatic children made the drug cost-effective at prices up to $1.9 million by one benchmark and up to $2.1 million by another, it said.

Pearson acknowledged the scale and timing of the switch were unusual, but said it was driven by the data, not outside pressure. “We weren’t trying to fit into somebody’s preexpectation of where the number would be, believe me,” he said.

He immediately caught flak from insurers.

“I got a lot of phone calls saying, ‘Why on earth did you say $2.1 million was a fair price? How could that possibly be the case? We’re going to get swamped with this,’” he recalled.

The Gaynors, linking to news coverage on Zolgensma’s launch, wrote on the Sophia’s Cure Facebook page that they were “ecstatic” for children newly born with SMA, but that helping create the world’s most expensive drug “is certainly not what we had in mind.”

Malone said he thought it was mostly the potential for blowback that had prevented Novartis from demanding even more for Zolgensma. He’d recommended charging the full $5 million.

“Obviously it didn’t stick,” he said. “They decided not to price the product there, I think, because of the political backlash they would’ve gotten being the first out of the gate at that price point.”

In the months after Zolgensma hit the market in the U.S., parents of children with SMA frequently ran into resistance from health insurers that refused to pay for it.

Between late 2019 and mid-2022, Chicago attorney Eamon Kelly represented at least seven parents battling health plans across the country, helping them appeal denied claims or representing them at state Medicaid hearings.

Hailey Weihs came to Kelly when her insurer, a Medicaid-managed care plan in Texas, wouldn’t pay for Zolgensma for her infant daughter Aniya. As the coverage dispute dragged on, Aniya developed tongue tremors and lost the ability to bear weight on her legs.

Kelly won the case, as he had all the others, but Aniya’s five-month wait to get the drug was terrifying. “Every day kids with this disease lose motor neurons,” Weihs said. “When you lose them, you cannot get them back.”

Now state Medicaid programs and most employer health plans cover Zolgensma, but they often limit which patients get access. Some require doctors to get approval in advance before providing the treatment or impose restrictions on who’s eligible that go beyond what’s on the drug’s label, such as requiring an SMA specialist to prescribe it.

Though fewer than 300 American children are born each year with SMA, treatments for the disease annually rank among the top 20 drug classes for Medicaid spending. From 2019 through 2022, Medicaid spent $309 million on 208 Zolgensma claims, an average of almost $1.5 million per claim. (Under federal law, Medicaid doesn’t pay list price for drugs, getting substantial rebates; other payers also negotiate discounts.)

Globally, more than 4,000 children have been treated with Zolgensma, Novartis said. The drug topped $1 billion in annual sales in its second full year on the market. Through 2024, the company had reported over $6.4 billion in revenue from Zolgensma sales.

Novartis is working to expand use of the drug in older children, in part by seeking approval for a second version of the drug, administered by spinal injection, for children with less severe SMA.

“We are unwavering in our commitment to the SMA community and will continue to advance efforts to ensure access to Zolgensma for SMA patients who may benefit from this transformative, one-time gene therapy,” the company said in its statement.

Still, more than five years after Zolgensma’s approval in the U.S., the drug remains out of reach for children in many low- and middle-income countries.

Love, KEI’s director, said he’s heard from families in countries like India and South Africa, where it’s a struggle to obtain not only Zolgensma, but also other SMA treatments available in the U.S.

“It’s maddening to me,” he said.

After setting aside their charity work, the Gaynors refocused their energy on Sophia and her two younger siblings, who don’t have SMA.

The Gaynor family (Photo courtesy Vincent Gaynor)

They’ve taken the clan to Disney World and to the Bahamas to swim with dolphins. Their youngest, who’s 8, lies beside Sophia on her bed and watches movies with her.

Now 15, Sophia had her longest-ever hospitalization in early 2024 when a virus caused her blood sugar to plummet and triggered frequent seizures. She didn’t wake up for two weeks. Since then, she’s been weaker, her affect flatter.

Her parents say they don’t think about the future. “Our focus is that she’s happy, that there’s love all around her,” Catherine said. “It’s just day to day.”

The Gaynors have taken solace in the idea that, through Sophia’s Cure, their daughter has made a difference for all the children with SMA who came after her. “That was kind of our consolation prize,” Catherine said.

One of those kids turned out to be her cousin, Vincent’s sister’s son, who was diagnosed with SMA in 2023 and then treated with Zolgensma. He walked at 10 months and now races around. “That helped me, in part, feel better about what we did,” Vincent said.

He still bristles at the drug’s price, which he blames on the payouts hauled in by those at AveXis and now Novartis.

“All those people, they all came in at the 12th hour once the trial was funded and you had the breakthrough,” he said. “Once it was taken from us, it was all about greed.”

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Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Bryant Furlow, New Mexico In Depth

This article was produced by New Mexico In Depth, which has twice been a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A New Mexico school district that was disproportionately issuing harsh punishments to Indigenous students says it has dramatically reduced its long-term suspensions.

Two years ago, New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reported that Indigenous children in New Mexico were facing higher rates of harsh school punishment, triggering a state Department of Justice civil rights inquiry into the discipline practices of the school district largely responsible for the disparity.

According to a January email from Gallup-McKinley County Schools Superintendent Mike Hyatt, the number of students kicked out of the district for 90 days or longer dropped from 21 children during the 2021-22 school year to six the following year and just one last year. Of those 28 long-term removals, 86%, or 24 cases, involved Native students.

But the state refused to provide New Mexico In Depth with complete, unredacted discipline data for the years in question, citing federal public records law governing educational records, making it impossible to independently verify those claims.

The district now appears to be more judicious in imposing long-term removals, reserving them for serious, potentially dangerous infractions.

As an example: From 2016-17 to 2019-20, before the changes, Gallup-McKinley reported that long-term removals were being used as punishment for disruptive behavior (“disorderly conduct”). But in all the cases Hyatt listed for 2021-22 to 2023-24, long-term removals were used only for more serious infractions, including repeated drug possession, drug distribution, assault, armed battery, theft and weapons possession, including firearms cases, he wrote.

In addition to the data, Hyatt said the district has made policy changes to better engage with students and prevent behavioral problems. It has replaced the district administrator in charge of student discipline, who has since retired, he said.

In 2022, the news organizations undertook a detailed analysis of statewide school discipline rates that showed Indigenous students disproportionately experience the harshest forms of punishment: exclusions from school for 90 days or more and referrals to law enforcement.

Using district discipline reports obtained from the state Public Education Department, the news organizations found that Gallup-McKinley, which boasts the largest Native student body in the nation, was the epicenter of a statewide trend toward Indigenous children being pushed out of classrooms at higher rates than other students between 2016 and 2020. At the time, the district’s superintendent called the findings “completely false,” but the district’s own data contradicted that claim.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who heads the state’s Department of Justice and its new Civil Rights Division, initiated a review of the matter in late 2023. His investigators were also unable to obtain complete, unredacted data from the education department, according to emails between the agencies that New Mexico In Depth reviewed.

The state’s Department of Justice inquiry also faced delays as it tried to obtain student discipline data from Gallup-McKinley, emails show. In two, from Aug. 21, 2024, and Oct. 17, 2024, investigators took the school district to task for violating a statutory deadline in responding to their Inspection of Public Records Act requests.

Other emails in 2023 and 2024 reflected investigators’ frustration over repeated efforts to get meetings with state education officials who could provide more detailed data and answer questions.

In early June 2024, state Department of Justice Special Counsel Sean Sullivan urgently requested an in-person meeting with education department officials to discuss student discipline data. The meeting occurred June 20. But by July 1, Sullivan noted investigators still needed more detailed data. And in August, Sullivan repeatedly sought answers about missing data from the education department’s data manager.

State Department of Justice spokesperson Lauren Rodriguez told New Mexico In Depth in late January that the agency’s civil rights investigation is ongoing. Hyatt said he believed his office had fulfilled the department’s requests.

In a January email exchange with a reporter, Hyatt pushed back on New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica’s reporting, asserting discipline practices at Gallup-McKinley were not as harsh as the district’s past reports to the state suggested.

He said that after news headlines in 2022, an internal review identified extensive data entry errors in the district’s quarterly student discipline reports to the state. Specifically, he said punishments reported to the state as expulsions should instead have been logged as suspensions. (The district also changed its definition of expulsion in a way that would reduce the count of the harshest penalty: At the time of the newsrooms’ analyses, the district defined expulsions as removals of 90 days or longer; expulsion is now defined as permanent removals.)

But New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica found that student removals from school for 90 days or longer — regardless of what those removals are called — remained far higher for Gallup-McKinley than the rest of the state.

After meeting with Torrez about the state Department of Justice’s inquiry in September 2023, Hyatt contracted with a Kentucky-based financial consulting contractor, Unbridled Advisory. The contractor’s report showed that Native students’ discipline rates were modestly higher than other students, but not high enough in their view to be significant.

However, the company’s assessment did not include expulsions and did not conduct a specific analysis of the harshest forms of punishment, like the one carried out by the news organizations.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

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

Two Republican state lawmakers in Tennessee have filed legislation that aims to protect domestic violence victims by requiring more transparency from people who’ve been ordered by a court to give up their guns.

The bill’s introduction follows WPLN and ProPublica reporting that found the state’s lax gun laws and enforcement allow firearms to remain in the hands of abusers who’ve been barred from keeping them, including some who have gone on to kill their victims. In Tennessee, when someone is convicted of a domestic violence charge or is subject to an order of protection, they are not allowed to possess a gun.

Tennessee is one of about a dozen states that allows someone who is ordered to surrender their guns to give them to a third party, such as a friend or relative. And it’s one of the only states that doesn’t require that person to be identified in court, leaving the legal system no way to check up on them. Someone could say they gave up their guns but still have access to them, advocates for domestic violence victims say.

WPLN and ProPublica’s most recent reporting on guns highlighted the work of rural Scott County, which has revolutionized its approach to reducing domestic violence, in part by requiring gun-dispossession forms to include the names of the people who are receiving the firearms.

State Rep. Kelly Keisling, a Republican who represents Scott County, and state Sen. Becky Massey, R-Knoxville, now want to take that change statewide. Massey pointed to WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting on Scott County as inspiration for the bill. But she said it’s unclear what its chances are with the state’s Republican supermajority.

“The kiss of death to a bill is to say it would be easy,” Massey said. “Time will tell. You don’t know whether you can accomplish something unless you try. But I mean, it’s not changing the law. They are supposed to dispossess. So it’s just a matter of what the form is like.”

While amending the public form is a simple step, it could have a massive payoff, said Christy Harness, who has worked in domestic violence in Scott County for decades and manages the county’s family justice center, which helps victims.

“You are kidding me!” a jubilant Harness said when she heard the news about the bill. “My gosh. How awesome for victims across the state.”

Tennessee consistently has one of the highest rates of women killed by men, and most of those homicides are committed with guns. WPLN and ProPublica’s analysis of homicide data and court records in Nashville showed that from 2007 to 2024, nearly 40% of those who died in domestic violence shootings were killed by someone who should not have had access to a firearm at the time of the crime.

“Had they not been able to maintain possession of that firearm or it was given to somebody who we could check with, then maybe we’ve done that extra step to save somebody’s life,” Harness said.

Research has shown that domestic violence incidents are highly likely to become lethal when a firearm is involved. And the dangers extend outside the home, too — one study showed domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous for law enforcement to respond to, and researchers found that mass shooters often have a history of domestic violence.

Requiring the name and address of third-party holders in gun-dispossession cases “really is an added protection for the peace of mind of victims,” said Judge Scarlett Ellis, who oversees Scott County’s domestic violence court. “There’s a little bit more accountability.”

Ellis said she has not had anyone refuse to fill out, sign or return the amended form — even in a rural, conservative, Second Amendment-friendly county like hers. Scott has voted for Donald Trump by the highest percentage of any county in Tennessee for the past two presidential elections.

“This is just a clear example of when a community gets behind enforcing the law, it doesn't matter how big you are, how small you are — changes can be made,” Ellis said.

by ProPublica

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

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

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

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

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

by Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

This story describes explicit details of a sexual assault.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many School Buildings Rated Fair, Poor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superintendents Worry About Losing Maintenance Funds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Heather Vogell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get in Touch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jake Pearson and Anjeanette Damon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon Lerner, Topher Sanders and Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.

by Hannah Allam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extremists Reconnect, Rejoice on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Marocco (U.S. Department of Defense)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Elliott, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Andy Kroll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsten Berg, Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.

by Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Tried It Before

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

1. Declare a national emergency at the border

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

2. Halt refugee admissions

Temporarily suspends refugee admissions into the United States.

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

3. End “catch and release”

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

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

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

5. Promotes third-country asylum agreements

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

6. DNA testing of some immigrants

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

7. Expanding who is targeted for deportation

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

8. Focus Homeland Security Investigations on immigration enforcement

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

9. Expansion of expedited removal

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

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

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

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

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

12. Limit Temporary Protected Status

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

13. Increasing scrutiny of work permits

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

14. Target sanctuary jurisdictions

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

15. Information sharing

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

16. Denying public benefits to unauthorized immigrants

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

17. Travel bans

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

18. Denaturalizing U.S. citizens

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

19. Expulsion based on public health concerns

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

20. Deploy military troops to the border

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

21. Build border barriers

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

22. Land acquisition for border barriers

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

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

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

24. Expanding detention

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

25. Local cooperation for immigration enforcement

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

26. Increase immigration agent hiring

Increases the number of ICE and border agents.

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

27. Enhanced vetting

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

HISTORY

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

SOURCE

Policies He Hasn’t Tried Before

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

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

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

2. Make the border a military priority

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

SOURCE

3. Seeks to end birthright citizenship

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

4. End Biden-era humanitarian programs at the border

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

5. Immigrant registration

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

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

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

HISTORY

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

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE

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

SOURCE

7. Designating international drug cartels, gangs as terrorists

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

SOURCE

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob Altik, 32

Lawyer

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Anthony Armstrong, 57

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Worked on Musk’s purchase of Twitter

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

Jennifer Balajadia, 36

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

Musk link: Worked at The Boring Company

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

Alexandra T. Beynon, 36

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Riccardo Biasini, 39

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

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

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

Brian Bjelde, 44

Senior Adviser

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Vice president of people operations at SpaceX

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

Akash Bobba, 21

Senior Adviser to the Director

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

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

James Burnham, 41

General Counsel

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Nate Cavanaugh, 28

Connected to: General Services Administration

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

Edward Coristine, 19

Expert

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Interned at Neuralink

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

Steve Davis, 45

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

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

Marko Elez, 25

Connected to: Treasury Department

Musk link: Worked as an engineer at X and SpaceX

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

Luke Farritor, 23

Executive Engineer in the Office of the Secretary

Connected to: Department of Health and Human Services

Musk link: Former SpaceX intern

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

Nicole Hollander, 42

Connected to: General Services Administration

Musk link: Worked at X

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

Stephanie Holmes, 43

Human Resources

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Gautier “Cole” Killian, 24

Federal Detailee

Connected to: Environmental Protection Agency

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

Gavin Kliger, 25

Senior Adviser to the Director

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

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

Keenan D. Kmiec, 45

Lawyer

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Tom Krause, 47

Expert

Connected to: Treasury Department

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

Kendall M. Lindemann, 24

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Katie Miller, 33

Spokesperson

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Justin Monroe, 36

Adviser

Connected to: FBI

Musk link: Senior director for security at SpaceX

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

Nikhil Rajpal, 30

Expert

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Former Twitter employee

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

Adam Ramada, 35

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

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

Ryan Riedel, 37

Chief Information Officer

Connected to: Department of Energy

Musk link: Worked as SpaceX network security engineer

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

Rachel Riley, 33

Senior Adviser in the Office of the Secretary

Connected to: Department of Health and Human Services

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

Michael Russo, 67

Chief Information Officer

Connected to: Social Security Administration

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

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

Amanda Scales, 34

Chief of Staff

Connected to: Office of Personnel Management

Musk link: Previous employee of xAI

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

Kyle Schutt, 37

Connected to: General Services Administration

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

Ethan Shaotran, 22

Connected to: General Services Administration

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

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

Thomas Shedd, 28

Federal Acquisition Service Deputy Commissioner and Director of Technology Transformation Services

Connected to: General Services Administration

Musk link: Software engineer at Tesla

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

Brad Smith, 42

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

Christopher Stanley, 33

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

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

Jordan M. Wick, 28

Connected to: Executive Office of the President

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

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