ProPublica

by Sharon Lerner

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This spring, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency completed a report on the toxicity of a “forever chemical” called PFNA, which is in the drinking water systems serving some 26 million people. The assessment found that PFNA interferes with human development by causing lower birth weights and, based on animal evidence, likely causes damage to the liver and to male reproductive systems, including reductions in testosterone levels, sperm production and the size of reproductive organs.

The report also calculated the amount of PFNA that people could be exposed to without being harmed — a critical measurement that can be used to set limits for cleaning up PFNA contamination in Superfund sites and for removing the chemical from drinking water.

For months, however, the report has sat in limbo, raising concerns among some scientists and environmentalists that the Trump administration might change it or not release it at all.

The EPA told ProPublica the report would be published when it was finalized, though the press office did not answer questions about what still needed to be done or when that would likely happen.

But the report’s final version was “completed and ready to post” in mid-April, according to an internal document reviewed by ProPublica. And two scientists familiar with the assessment confirmed the report has been finalized and ready for publication since April.

“Scientifically, it was done,” said one of the two scientists, who both worked in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the unreleased report.

“All that was left to do was to brief higher-ups about the report and post it,” the scientist said, adding that such a delay was unusual. “In recent years, the assessments tended to be finalized within a few weeks.”

A draft version of the assessment was made public last year and drew objections from an industry trade group. The final version, which retained the calculations published in the draft report, was completed shortly before the EPA announced its intention in May to rescind and reconsider limits on the amount of PFNA and several other forever chemicals allowed in drinking water. The limits had been set last year by President Joe Biden’s administration.

Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed to that pending change as a possible motivation for not publishing the PFNA assessment. “If you’re trying to roll back drinking water standards, you probably don’t want to release information that makes the case for why those standards are necessary,” said Minovi.

The nonprofit science advocacy group called attention to the unpublished report in a social media post last month that said, “Without this assessment, federal and state agencies are denied the best available science that they rely on to protect public health.”

PFNA is so hazardous that the EPA struck an agreement with eight companies to phase it out nearly two decades ago. The chemical was a component of firefighting foam and a processing aid to make a kind of plastic used in circuit boards, valves and pipes. PFNA has been found in water near sites where the foam was used and in the drinking water in 28 states, according to an analysis of EPA and state data by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

Local governments around the country have been trying to get companies that used and made forever chemicals such as PFNA to foot the bill for the expensive job of cleaning up contamination. In 2019, the state of New Jersey ordered the owner of an industrial plant in West Deptford to address chemical contamination at the site, where high levels of PFNA had been found in the nearby soil and water. The state took the company, Solvay Specialty Polymers, to court, accusing it of failing to fully comply. As part of a legal settlement, Solvay agreed to pay more than $393 million and to clean up contamination. The company, which has since become Syensqo Specialty Polymers, pointed out to ProPublica other sources of PFNA contamination in the area of the plant and noted that it settled the suit without admission of liability.

Solvay tried to influence the EPA over the drinking water limit the agency set for PFNA and other chemicals in the class, according to lobbying records. The company also lobbied Congress over legislation that would prevent chemical assessments conducted by the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System program from being used in regulation. IRIS, as the program is known, analyzes the harm chemicals can cause and put together the PFNA report. Syensqo and Solvay did not respond to questions about lobbying and whether they asked the EPA either to change or not release the IRIS report on PFNA.

Scientists in the EPA’s IRIS program began work on the assessment because PFNA, short for perfluorononanoic acid, appeared particularly dangerous. Like other compounds in its class, PFNA doesn’t break down in nature. Scientists had already found it in soil and water around the country. It was also measured in food, air, indoor dust and fish — as well as in breastmilk, fetal tissues and human blood. Perhaps most worrisome, studies had already suggested that the chemical caused serious harm to people and lab animals.

A draft of the report, which reflected five years of collecting and reviewing studies, found that, in addition to developmental, liver and reproductive harms, PFNA “may cause” immune problems, thyroid effects, harm to the developing brain and a cluster of other disorders, including Type 2 diabetes. The American Chemistry Council took issue with the report’s findings on low birth weight and liver issues, arguing that the evidence wasn’t as robust as the report claimed. The industry trade group did not address the reproductive threats posed by PFNA, which have been documented by other regulatory agencies and are part of a larger body of evidence linking “forever chemicals” with male reproductive harms, such as smaller testes and a reduction in the number and mobility of sperm. Forever chemicals, also known as PFAS, are also associated with female reproductive problems, such as endometriosis, ovarian dysfunction and tumors and dramatic decreases in fertility

Questions about the fate of the PFNA report extend to the fate of the IRIS program that conducted it and to the EPA’s handling of toxic chemicals more broadly.

IRIS was created during Ronald Reagan’s presidency to provide an independent and reliable source of information about pollutants that can harm the public. Dozens of EPA scientists contribute to a typical assessment, which takes years to complete and is subject to extensive peer review. The level of scientific scrutiny and expertise means these documents are trusted by environmental experts around the world.

Many hoped that, because it was separate from regulatory arms of the agency, IRIS would be insulated from political pressures. But almost from its start, industry has targeted the program, whose assessments can trigger toxic waste cleanups and expensive regulatory changes.

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has set the direction for President Donald Trump’s second administration, called for IRIS to be eliminated. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress introduced legislation called the “No IRIS Act.” Their proposal would prohibit the EPA from using the program’s assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water, and from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. That legislation has been referred to committee in both the House and the Senate but not yet passed in either branch.

Since Trump took office, the IRIS program has been decimated. The program was housed in the Office of Research and Development, which has been dramatically reduced under Trump as part of a major reorganization of the agency. Of 55 scientists ProPublica identified as having worked on recent IRIS assessments, only eight remain in the office, according to a source familiar with the program. The rest have either been assigned to jobs elsewhere in the agency or have left the EPA.

“Through the movement of bodies, they have disassembled IRIS,” said one scientist who worked with the program for decades and recently left the EPA. “It feels like the efforts of a couple of generations of scientists who have worked extremely diligently to produce the world’s most highly vetted assessments has been set aside with no path forward.”

Meanwhile, the IRIS program stopped issuing the reports it has regularly posted for years about its progress. The most recent, published in February, noted that the PFNA assessment was scheduled to be released in the second quarter of the financial year, which ended in June.

Asked about the status of the program, an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica that “it is inaccurate to say that IRIS no longer exists.” The press office did not respond to follow-up questions about whether it’s accurate to say that IRIS does exist, how many people still work there, whether the agency plans to allow continued access to its database of chemical assessments and how it plans to use those assessments in the future. The EPA has not made clear how it plans to continue gauging the toxicity of chemicals.

In its May press release, the EPA said it was “committed to addressing” forever chemicals in drinking water. At the same time, it was rolling back drinking water limits on some of the compounds. The agency is also reconsidering bans on solvents called TCE and PCE, which are linked to Parkinson’s disease. It is offering exemptions from pollution restrictions for up to two years to companies that email the agency and is in the process of reversing rules designed to protect the public from toxic air pollution. The agency recently announced a plan to ease regulations on climate pollutants known as hydrofluorocarbons.

Under Trump, the EPA, which was created to protect public health, has celebrated its efforts to reverse regulations and champion industry. But people concerned about the health effects of chemicals see the agency’s retreat from environmental protections as a betrayal. Laurene Allen, an environmental advocate who lives in Merrimack, New Hampshire, where PFNA was one of several forever chemicals discovered in drinking water in 2016, was awaiting the report and is frustrated and enraged by its delay.

“This is the suppression of information,” said Allen, who co-founded the National PFAS Contamination Coalition. “We have the science, and it shouldn’t be obstructed.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has ordered state agencies to take “any and all steps necessary” to fast-track solar and wind permits that must break ground by next year or likely miss out on a federal tax credit Congress is ending.

The move follows reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica about the role that the state’s lengthy permitting process plays, according to renewables advocates, in Oregon having one of the slowest growth rates in the country for green energy. At the time, Kotek’s office said that she was “carefully considering opportunities to streamline Oregon’s energy siting processes.”

The Democratic governor’s order does not change existing state law, and at least one leading green energy advocate voiced skepticism about its impact because it fails to address another obstacle to construction: the federal government’s sluggish pace of adding transmission capacity to handle new wind and solar.

Kotek’s office, when announcing the order on Monday, couched it as the state’s attempt to reduce the risk “shovel-ready” projects lose out on federal tax benefits that make them more affordable.

“With the elimination of promised incentives by the Trump Administration, states must step up as the last line of defense against climate catastrophe. We have to get renewable energy infrastructure built, and quickly,” Kotek said in a statement. “We cannot afford to lose this critical window.”

Oregon needs to build more renewable energy projects like wind and solar to meet its renewable energy goals. In addition, the state has experienced rising electricity costs amid soaring demand. Yet as OPB and ProPublica have reported, Oregon lawmakers have paid little heed to the region’s inadequate transmission system. In addition, they have rejected or watered down legislation designed to make it easier for developers to get their wind, solar and transmission projects through the state’s approval process.

Then, this year, President Donald Trump signed legislation dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It set a schedule for ending the federal investment tax credit and the production tax credit, which can fund 30% to 50% of most solar and wind projects. The credits were modified and extended during the administration of President Joe Biden as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The legislation signed by Trump says projects can still qualify for the credits if they meet a July 4, 2026, deadline for breaking ground and are completed by 2030. But projects that don’t start construction by July 4 must be up and running by Dec. 31, 2027, to qualify. That’s considered a tough time frame to meet.

One analysis estimated the loss of credits could cost Oregon about 4 gigawatts of planned wind and solar energy, which is roughly enough electricity to power 1 million homes. According to Atlas Public Policy, a data and policy firm based in Washington, D.C., Oregon has 11 wind and solar projects now at risk of not qualifying for the tax credit.

Nicole Hughes, executive director of the advocacy group Renewable Northwest, said Oregon may not get all of those projects or even a handful of them done in time to get the tax credits, in spite of Kotek’s order.

Hughes said that’s because “even projects that already have made it through the permitting process are being held back by massive transmission queue backlogs and some of the transmission upgrades that these projects were waiting for.”

Separate from state permitting, energy developers have to wait for the federal Bonneville Power Administration to allow projects to connect to its transmission lines. Bonneville owns about 75% of the Northwest’s transmission lines, and its lines are largely full with no capacity for new sources of electricity. It can take years before Bonneville determines whether a proposed project can plug into its grid.

“I don’t think it’s right to be just looking at this July 2026 deadline,” Hughes said. “Our energy issues are going to extend far beyond that date, and we need to be thinking more long-term about how we move projects quicker through both the permitting and transmission process.”

She nonetheless described Kotek’s order as a good first step, saying it put state agencies on notice that moving renewable projects forward is a priority.

Kotek’s office declined to comment on concerns raised about the executive order’s limitations.

A spokesperson for Bonneville stated that it has modified the interconnection process to move on a “first-ready, first-served” process that the agency says will improve current backlogs. The spokesperson said the federal agency expects to add about 2 gigawatts of new energy projects by the end of 2028 and complete the first phase of an interconnection study in January that could add more.

The executive order directs the Oregon Department of Energy and the state Energy Facility Siting Council to identify and prioritize siting approval for projects that must begin construction by July 4. The highest priority would be given to projects with secured contracts between a developer and a utility and that can demonstrate anticipated benefits to Oregon ratepayers.

The governor’s order also says the Oregon Public Utility Commission should consider using an outside contractor to study how solar and wind power projects connect to the electrical grid in the future.

“Congress and the Trump administration have launched an all-out assault on affordable clean energy and our safe climate future,” Climate Solutions Oregon Director Nora Apter said in the statement issued by the governor’s office. “By moving swiftly to get as many wind and solar projects across the finish line as possible before the loss of federal tax credits, Governor Kotek is defending Oregon families, family-wage jobs, and energy resilience.”

Oregon joins a handful of states that have already moved to more rapidly approve qualifying projects, like Colorado, Maine and California, due to the expiring federal tax credits.

by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door.

She calls it “the final mission.”

But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.

Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students.

McMahon has described her agency moving “at lightning rocket speed,” and the department’s actions in just one week in September reflect that urgency.

The agency publicly blasted four school districts it views as insubordinate for refusing to adopt anti-trans policies and for not eliminating special programs for Black students. It created a pot of funding dedicated to what it calls “patriotic education,” which has been criticized for downplaying some of the country’s most troubling episodes, including slavery. And it formed a coalition with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, PragerU and dozens of other conservative groups to disseminate patriotic programming.

Officials at the Education Department declined to comment or answer questions from ProPublica for this story.

At times, McMahon has voiced support for public schools. But more often and more emphatically she has portrayed public schools as unsuccessful and unsafe — and has said she is determined to give parents other options.

To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years.

Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.

In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.

More than 8 in 10 elementary and secondary students in the U.S. go to a traditional public school. But Burke expects that public schools will see dramatic enrollment declines fueled by both demographic and policy changes.

Addressing an interviewer in an April podcast, she noted: “We’re going to have a lot of empty school buildings.”

In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools, which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as teaching fourth graders about systemic racism.

“And so the work that I do is trying to come up with creative policy ideas to stop that, to turn back the tide, to figure out ways that conservatives can protect these institutions or build new institutions,” said Pollak, who has been an adviser to conservative groups.

As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation.”

President Donald Trump himself said in July that the federal government needs only to provide “a little tiny bit of supervision but very little, almost nothing,” over the nation’s education system except to make sure students speak English.

Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution.

Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students.

Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.”

Allison Rose Socol, a policy expert at EdTrust, an organization focusing on civil rights in schools, decried what she called the “demo crew” in McMahon’s office. Socol described McMahon’s push to help grow private school enrollment through taxpayer-funded vouchers and other means as a “great American heist” that will funnel money away from the public system.

“It’s a strategic theft of the future of our country, our kids and our democracy,” she said.

“Lead as Christians”

Attention on McMahon often focuses on her former role as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. It was no different on the day of her Senate confirmation hearing, when journalists and social media delighted in noting that seated behind her was her son-in-law, the retired wrestler known as Triple H.

Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration.

Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department.

AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.”

The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity.”

The first AFPI leader pictured in that report is McMahon.

Linda McMahon testifies at her Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of education. Seated behind her are, from left to right, son Shane McMahon, Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, the former wrestler Paul Levesque (also known as Triple H), daughter Stephanie McMahon, Erika Donalds of the America First Policy Institute, and Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.

Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.

Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools.

Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals.

The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.

These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views.

When the department created an “End DEI” portal to collect tips about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in schools, it quoted Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice in the press release. She encouraged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.” Moms for Liberty referred to the portal as the “culmination” of Justice’s work. (Federal judges ruled against some of the administration’s anti-DEI actions and the department took the controversial portal down in May.)

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.”

She and others say most public schools don’t teach students to read, are dividing children over race and are secretly helping students to change genders — familiar claims that have been widely challenged by educators.

When Trump signed an executive order in March to dismantle the Education Department, Justice sat in the first row, as she had at McMahon’s confirmation hearing. The president praised her, along with various governors and lawmakers. “She’s been a hard worker,” he said.

Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, who was also at McMahon’s confirmation, stood next to McMahon when the secretary announced an investigation into the Maine Department of Education for keeping records from parents about student gender identity plans. Defending Education has filed civil rights complaints against colleges and school districts and has been successful in having its causes taken up by the Trump administration.

In an email, Neily told ProPublica she is proud of the work that Defending Education has done to challenge schools that have supported DEI in their curricula and have allowed students to hide their gender identity from parents. She singled out teacher unions and “radical education activists” while blaming drops in student achievement on “the education-industrial complex.”

“The sooner this stranglehold is broken, the better,” she wrote.

McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office.

Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools.

Reached by phone, Kilgannon told ProPublica, “I have no comment,” and hung up.

Overhauling “Government Schools”

Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire who was education secretary in Trump’s first term, cheered on July 4 this year when Congress instituted America’s first federal voucher program. It came in the form of a generous tax credit program to encourage voucher expansion at the state level. Families can start accessing the aid beginning Jan. 1, 2027.

DeVos once said she wanted “to advance God’s kingdom” through vouchers for religious schools and has funneled vast amounts of her family fortune into advocating for school choice. She called the passage of the federal measure “the turning point in ending the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly.”

An article in The Federalist, a conservative publication, boiled down the implications into one headline: “How Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Will Help Kids Escape Failing Government Schools.”

But school choice isn’t the only tool that Trump’s education leaders are using to target public schools. McMahon has gutted the Education Department’s civil rights division, where lawyers and other federal employees work to ensure all students can access public school, free from discrimination.

The administration rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ students and students of color, prioritized investigating discrimination against white and Jewish students, and launched aggressive investigations of states and districts that it says refused to stop accommodating transgender students.

It has rescinded official guidance that said schools had to provide language help and other services for students who are learning English, contradicting long-established federal law.

And Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous even as the agency canceled about $1 billion in training grants for more school mental health professionals — money that had been authorized by Congress to help prevent school shootings. The administration now says it plans to resume paying out a fraction of that funding, which would be used for school psychologists.

Over and over, the department has used the threat of pulling federal funding to force compliance with new directives and rapid shifts in policy. The department, for instance, threatened to withhold money from schools that did not verify they were ending diversity initiatives, which were designed to address inequitable treatment of Black, Native and Latino students.

In August, the department announced it was withholding millions of dollars in grants from five northern Virginia school districts that had refused the department’s demands to bar transgender students from using restrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity. The districts argued that complying would mean defying Virginia law and a 2020 federal appeals court ruling.

Nevertheless, the Education Department told the districts that until they acquiesced to the agency’s bathroom rules they would have to pay expenses up front and request reimbursement. McMahon wrote to districts that “Lindsey Burke is available to answer any questions.”

The Fairfax County Public Schools sued and in a legal filing said it faced losing $167 million this school year, money that it was relying on to provide meals to students, support programs for children with disabilities, help English-language learners and enhance teacher training. The federal department has argued that it has discretion to withhold funding and admonished the district for taking the agency to court.

In this atmosphere, public school advocates are particularly concerned about what will happen to funding for Title I grants, which is the federal government’s largest program for schools and is aimed at helping students from low-income families. In early September, House Republicans proposed slashing more than $5 billion from the $18.4 billion earmarked for Title I, putting at risk reading and math teachers, tutors and classroom technology.

At the same time, under McMahon, the Education Department is trying to redefine how states and districts can spend the money.

In three guidance letters so far this year, the agency encouraged states to divert some Title I money away from public school districts. One suggested paying for outside services, such as privatized tutoring. Another urged states to use Title I money to benefit low-achieving students who live within the boundaries of a high-poverty public school but attend private schools.

McMahon is prepared to loosen even more rules on the money. The federal dollars currently are distributed to districts using a formula. Project 2025 calls for Title I to be delivered to states as block grants, or chunks of money with few restrictions. McMahon has encouraged states to ask her to waive rules on spending the money.

Critics of this approach fear that Title I money could eventually be used in ways that undermine public schools — on private school vouchers, for example.

Public school advocates like William Phillis, a former official at the Ohio Department of Education, fear the change would devastate public schools.

“I just know any block grant or any funding that would be left up to state officials on Title I money would be misappropriated in terms of the intent,” Phillis said. “Block grants to Ohio would go to the private sector.”

A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce did not respond to requests for comment.

Rainey Briggs, chief of operations for Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, said he supports parental choice but worries that public schools will suffer financially and will not have the resources to stay up to date.

And he fears that right-wing narratives around public schools, the distrust and lack of support for highly trained district leaders — whether from some parents or politicians — could lead accomplished educators to walk away.

“Public education is irreplaceable,” he said, citing its commitment to serve every child regardless of their background or circumstance.

Those influencing Trump’s education agenda disagree.

“If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place,” Justice told ProPublica.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Illustrations by Pete Gamlen. Visual editing by Cengiz Yar. Design and development by Anna Donlan. Mollie Simon contributed research, and Brandon Roberts contributed reporting.

by Duaa Eldeib

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

When a health insurance company refuses to pay for treatment, most people begrudgingly accept the decision.

Few patients appeal; some don’t trust the insurer to reverse its own decision.

But a little-known process that requires insurers and plans to seek an independent opinion outside their walls can force insurers to pay for what can be lifesaving treatment. External reviews are one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, and only a tiny fraction of those eligible actually use them.

ProPublica recently reported the story of a North Carolina couple, Teressa Sutton-Schulman and her husband, who we identified in the story by his middle initial, L, to protect his privacy. Last year, L suffered escalating mental health issues and needed intensive psychiatric care. Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield issued the couple multiple denials in their case, even after Sutton-Schulman’s husband attempted suicide twice in the span of 11 days.

The instructions for an external review were buried on page seven of one of the denial letters.

“You can now request that your case be reviewed by a health care provider who is totally independent of your health plan or insurance carrier,” read the letter from the state insurance department in Texas, where the treatment occurred.

Skeptical but hopeful, Sutton-Schulman submitted the request for the external review. Their case was assigned to Dr. Neal Goldenberg, an Ohio doctor who works for a third-party review company as a side job. After reading the extensive appeal, Goldenberg overturned Highmark’s denial to cover treatment that had cost Sutton-Schulman and L more than $70,000.

Highmark previously said in a statement that the company was “passionate about providing appropriate and timely care” to its members. It acknowledged that “small errors made by physicians and/or members can lead to delays and initial denials” but said that those are corrected on appeals.

The lesson is simple, explained Kaye Pestaina, a vice president at the nonprofit health policy think tank KFF, who has studied external appeals.

“Appeal, appeal, appeal, appeal,” she said. “That’s all you have.”

External appeals have been around for decades at the state level, but in 2010, the Affordable Care Act expanded access to the reviews for the majority of people who get their health insurance through work. The details around the external review process vary depending on whether an insurance plan is regulated by state or federal laws.

Karen Pollitz helped draft the federal regulations around external reviews during the Obama administration, but she said an extensive lobbying effort on behalf of insurance companies and employers weakened the initial protections. Now, only a fraction of denials are eligible for an external review, and the health insurance plan gets to hire the reviewers.

Transparency requirements that called for insurers to report data around denials and other metrics, she said, also were largely not implemented.

“There are all kinds of ways they could strengthen the laws and the regulations to hold health plans more accountable,” said Pollitz, who left the administration after the rollbacks and worked at KFF before retiring.

But for now, Pollitz said, filing external appeals is sometimes the only recourse patients have. An advantage of the Affordable Care Act, she added, was that it established state consumer assistance programs to help people get the coverage they were promised.

Federal funding for those programs dried up a couple of years later, but about 30 states decided to find other ways to pay for the programs. (Want to find out if your state has one? Here’s a list from federal officials.) If the remaining 20 or so states — including Wisconsin and Ohio — established programs, families would reap the benefits, according to Cheryl Fish-Parcham, director of private coverage at the consumer health care advocacy organization Families USA.

“Every state needs one of these programs,” she said. “Health care is so complicated, and people really need experts to turn to.”

Fish-Parcham meets with representatives from consumer assistance programs across the country every month. The models differ from state to state. Programs are housed in state attorney general offices, in nonprofits and even as independent agencies. Helping patients or their providers with external appeals is a key part of the programs’ role. The first step often is simply letting them know that appeals — both internal and external — are options.

“The numbers are low because some people just give up. They’re frustrated. They’re tired. They’re battling cancer,” said Kimberly Cammarata, director of Maryland’s Health Education and Advocacy Unit, the state’s consumer assistance program. “And sometimes the information about why the claim was denied or about how to appeal is terribly unclear. A lot of these outcome letters will say you have a right to an external appeal, but they don’t exactly tell you where to go.”

Some states have enacted legislation to combat that confusion. For example, insurers in Maryland are no longer able to bury information on appeals deep in their denial letters. Beginning this month, a new state law requires insurers to include information at the top of all denial letters in “prominent bold print” that states the member has the right to appeal or file a complaint to the insurance commissioner. That declaration advises consumers that the letter contains information on how to file an appeal and reach the Health Education and Advocacy Unit. The unit’s address, phone number, fax and email must also be included in the body of the notice.

Connecticut added similar information at the top of denial letters in a box on the front page in 2023. The office saw an almost immediate effect. In the two years that followed, more than 40% of referrals to the state’s Office of the Healthcare Advocate came from people who received denial letters with the new language.

The office isn’t funded through taxpayer money. It’s paid for entirely by state assessments on insurance companies.

“We want to help people,” said Kathleen Holt, who was nominated in 2024 by Connecticut’s governor to lead the office as the state health care advocate. “The insurance companies know that people don’t appeal, and in some ways I think they can be more aggressive with their denials. They don’t expect people to come back, and when they do that very small percentage of the time, it’s the cost of doing business for them.”

Connecticut’s data shows that the health care advocate office has been able to resolve or overturn denials in the patient’s favor about 80% of the time, Holt said. Some plans may charge up to $25 per external appeal, but Connecticut did away with that fee several years ago. Some states, including New York, have been tracking the outcomes of their external appeals online, which the public can review.

“We can help people write their appeals,” Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society, said of New York residents. “We write appeals for them, sometimes going through thousands of pages of medical records and writing 15- to 20-page appeals.”

Experts say these six things can help patients and providers after a denial. Since we are journalists and not lawyers, we are unable to provide any legal advice about this process.

1. Gather your information: Experts suggest not throwing out any letters or notices from your insurer, including denial notices, explanation of benefits, correspondence and plan documents. If you’ve misplaced them, they said you can contact your insurer for additional copies. They also recommend downloading or requesting your medical records. You can request your claim file, which most people have a right to under federal regulations.
2. Does your state have a consumer assistance program? Not all states have consumer assistance programs. Here’s a list of those that do. Advocates recommend reaching out and asking them to explain the denial. It might be as simple as a missing or incorrect code. Their job is to use their time, experience and resources to explain the process. Their services are free. Other programs and nonprofits also offer assistance.
3. Why were you denied, and what are your timelines to appeal? Are you being denied because the insurer determined the treatment was not medically necessary or because your plan didn’t cover it? Does your plan follow federal or state regulations? Experts say these distinctions may determine if and how you appeal your denial. Most plans give you about 180 days from the date of the denial notice to appeal internally, but experts say not to wait. If you’re not sure about the answers to any of these questions, you can call your insurer and ask. They are required to provide you the reason for denial.
4. Can your health care provider help? Experts suggest reaching out to your doctor or therapist. They said some providers will file the appeal on your behalf. Others will write a letter of support. At the very least, advocates agree, most should help you understand why your treatment was denied and what additional steps you can take.
5. Filing an internal appeal: Before you can file an external appeal, you typically have to attempt to resolve the dispute internally with the insurance company. This step may involve one or two levels of internal appeals.
6. How to request an external appeal: This is your last shot before considering a lawsuit. After you’ve exhausted your internal appeals, you can contact your insurer to request an external appeal. When you file a request for a federal external review, your plan usually has five days to consider your request.

If the insurer agrees that your denial is eligible, it will provide directions on where to file the appeal. Experts say to make sure to read the notice all the way through.

Remember that only certain denials are eligible for external appeals. These denials typically involve medical judgment, surprise medical bills, or an insurer deciding to retroactively cancel coverage or determining that a treatment was experimental. Denials based on the terms of the plan or because the service was out of network generally are not eligible.

Under federal rules, third-party review companies typically have between 45 and 60 days to decide the outcome of an external review. You may ask for an expedited appeal if the situation is urgent. In those situations, you may also be eligible to request an external review without exhausting your internal appeals or even file both internal and external appeals at the same time. Federal requirements typically call for expedited external appeals to occur as quickly as your condition requires but not take longer than 72 hours.

If the external reviewer decides to overturn your denial, the determination is binding. Your insurer is required by law to accept the decision and pay for treatment. If the reviewer rules against you, you may be able to file a lawsuit.

by Ashley Hiruko, KUOW

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KUOW public radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When Brenna Poppe moved into the Civic Hotel off the damp streets of Seattle in late 2022, she cried with joy. During her next year at the city-sponsored homeless shelter, she’d meet other guests who felt the same way — overwhelmed by the sudden realization that tonight, they would not sleep outside.

The Civic got quieter last year, however. Rooms around her, their doors still painted bright yellow from when the hotel was a boutique property, started to empty out. A “deafening silence” crept in, she recalled.

The 53-room hotel was converted to a shelter in the early days of the pandemic, and the city of Seattle kept it going. After Poppe’s first year there, the city in February 2024 signed a $2.7 million lease extension to continue using rooms at the Civic and other buildings as shelter space through the end of the year. And yet, despite committing to pay the rent, the city stopped sending people there.

Existing residents moved on to permanent housing or elsewhere and no one took their place. Dozens of rooms went unfilled.

By December, Seattle taxpayers were paying a hefty $4,200 a month per empty room — at a time when thousands of Seattleites were without a roof over their heads.

City officials described their decision to leave the rooms vacant as simply a “pause” while they evaluated what to do about an anticipated budget deficit.

One-time federal funding was going away and, if the city eventually succeeded in securing long-term funding, officials wanted to find a cheaper location than the Civic. They said the uncertainty forced them to both hold onto the Civic and stop placing people there, to avoid later sending clients back to the street.

But internal records reveal more complicated motives. At the same time as the city was halting placements, it rejected a move to a cheaper shelter location, which the main advocate of the plan said would keep the program running without interruption. A top official in the office of Mayor Bruce Harrell, explaining the decision in private, voiced animosity toward the nonprofit leader who pitched the new location and signaled an end to city support for the leader’s program.

Regardless of the rationale, the outcome of the city’s decision was that for nearly a year, Seattle paid for just as many rooms as before yet helped fewer and fewer people off the street with them.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, whose plan to address homelessness promised to “better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.” (Megan Farmer/KUOW)

Placements resumed this year, in a new location, after a 16-month gap.

Many West Coast cities are struggling, as Seattle has, with a rise in homelessness in recent years. Before referrals were halted, the effort that placed people at the Civic had already moved hard-to-reach homeless people from the street to a shelter space and, in many cases, then on to long-term housing and stability.

Seattle’s decision to keep dollars flowing to an effort it had suspended comes as cities such as Los Angeles are facing criticism for failing to accurately track outcomes of their massive outlays on homelessness.

Allowing vacancies to grow at city-leased shelter space also seems to be at odds with a commitment by Harrell, whose 2022 plan to address homelessness promised efforts to “better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.”

(A spokesperson for Harrell responded that it’s important to note city-funded shelters had 2,850 units in all last year, 87% of which were full on any given night. The city declined a request to interview Harrell.)

Poppe, who lived at the Civic through 2024, viewed its empty rooms as a squandered opportunity, and she told the shelter staff as much.

“Multiple times,” Poppe said, “I spoke to staff about this egregious amount of open rooms.”

After Initial Ramp-Up, Occupancy in City-Funded Rooms Plummets Notes: Data unavailable for June 2024. “City-funded rooms” are defined as rooms reserved for the city of Seattle. Each bar represents a count taken on one day of the month. (Source: CoLEAD, a nonprofit-led program that partnered with Seattle to fill city-funded rooms as shelter space) The Blade

On any given day in a section of Third Avenue between Pike and Pine streets known as The Blade, disorder is commonplace. Some people are screaming at the air, their pants falling off their frail frames. Others are sleeping, huddled in doorways to keep warm and safe. This human suffering stands in contrast with neighboring symbols of Seattle’s affluence: Pike Place Market, Benaroya Hall and the downtown shopping district are within a five-minute stroll.

A walk-up-only McDonald’s on the corner has been dubbed “McStabby’s,” referencing violent crimes that have taken place nearby over the years.

In 2022, nonprofits and downtown businesses came up with a plan that would ultimately involve the Civic Hotel.

The Third Avenue Project was designed to reduce the violence and open drug use through extensive outreach and the deescalation of conflicts between people on the street. But housing was also on the minds of the organizers.

Many believed in a modified version of the “housing-first” approach, which is predicated on the idea that any issues people struggle with on the streets are best addressed if they first find shelter, with no requirements for sobriety. Despite Seattle’s shortage of shelter beds and affordable permanent housing, the nonprofit leaders involved with Third Avenue hoped to help at least some clients move indoors.

The concept seemed to line up with the priorities of Harrell, who on his campaign website the year before had promised “an accountable, ambitious plan with transparency and benchmarks to expand and provide housing and services on demand to every unsheltered neighbor.”

Third Avenue Project organizers got to work after Harrell took office, with significant funding from the city.

“Safety ambassadors” were the first step. They would reverse overdoses and intervene when scuffles broke out, but also develop relationships with people in the street and then connect them with shelter and services.

“The hardest thing that we do is seeing people in the dire straits that they live in daily,” said Stephenie Wheeler-Smith, CEO of the company that hires the ambassadors, We Deliver Care. “This is not easy work. People don’t want to come out and touch these people or look at them or see their wounds or help them get health care.”

Safety ambassadors Trey Kendall, left, and Dee Stokes hand out water and snacks in July in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. (Megan Farmer/KUOW)

Importantly, safety ambassadors wouldn’t just move people along. They also could be a first point of contact on a path to permanent housing.

As one element of their $2.1 million contract with the city, the safety ambassadors referred homeless people on Third Avenue to housing and emergency shelter providers. The main one they’d use was a nonprofit-led program called CoLEAD, which had a $4.6 million contract with the city in 2023 that included placing people in temporary lodging and providing support services they needed.

The next step was the Civic Hotel. City officials signed a $1.1 million six-month lease with the Civic’s owners for its 53 guest rooms. CoLEAD would also let Third Avenue clients use rooms in any of the other shelters it managed, and at the same time the program would send clients from other referral sources to the Civic.

Unlike with some other shelters, these clients did not have to stop using drugs or alcohol, and they had access to their own space, which was ideal for people who may have struggled at traditional shelters.

The plan got results.

By November 2023, city-funded rooms at the Civic and other buildings were packed.

Marco Brydolf-Horwitz, who studied CoLEAD for nearly two years as part of a doctoral program, said he saw people transformed by the stability of temporary lodging.

“You can’t do much when people are on the street,” he said. “Once people are inside, then you can figure out what level of housing resources are needed.”

People shelter themselves along Third Avenue. (Megan Farmer/KUOW) The Halt

For all the success stories, the problem with the Civic was cost. The county had snapped it up as a temporary measure during the frenzy of the pandemic, and the city inherited it. After the initial lease, rent had risen to the equivalent of $2.6 million a year in 2023.

On Jan. 2, 2024, Lisa Daugaard, one of the nonprofit leaders managing the Third Avenue Project, pitched the city on a cheaper alternative: an apartment building in North Seattle with 11 more rooms the city could use for $1 million less.

The city’s obligations with the Civic had ended when its lease expired the month before. Daugaard could get the city’s clients moved by February. Daugaard simply needed some assurance the city would keep backing the project because she was considering a three-year lease on the new location.

Internal chat messages between Chief Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and other staff in the mayor’s office. “DM Burgess” is Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, who did not respond to a request for comment from KUOW and ProPublica. (Obtained by KUOW)

A few weeks later, Daugaard had her answer: Stop placing Third Avenue clients in city-funded beds, cycle existing ones into permanent housing and “ramp down” the Civic Hotel shelter. It was couched as a “pause” in placements through CoLEAD, records show.

In emails to Daugaard — and, in at least one case, internally — city officials cited uncertainty created by a looming budget deficit as one of the main reasons for the new marching orders. They reiterated this explanation, along with an expected loss in one-time funding, in interviews and emails with KUOW and ProPublica.

The mayor’s press secretary, Callie Craighead, said the city was “committed to maintaining shelter investments” but had “no way to provide such confirmation” to Daugaard until the city developed its next budget. She said the North Seattle apartment building was also not move-in ready at the time. Extending the lease at the Civic was a stopgap to avoid sending clients back to homelessness.

Chief Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington described the halt in referrals as a way of “winding down” operations at the Civic in anticipation of a move to a new spot, a “best practice” among social services managers.

But a chat message from Washington to a colleague, released to KUOW and ProPublica last week through a public records request, spells out additional reasons for turning down Daugaard’s proposal. It says, in part: “because I want her out of the homelessness business. She is not good at it.”

Washington stated in the message, incorrectly, that the proposed North Seattle location was another hotel, “which is not cheap” and concluded, “This means we would be leasing hotels forever.”

She also asserted that CoLEAD had a high rate of returns to homelessness and a low rate of placements in permanent housing.

Data provided by the mayor’s office and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority shows otherwise. The year before, CoLEAD moved a far bigger share of its clients from its city-funded beds into permanent housing than emergency shelter operators as a whole: 65%, compared with 26%.

Contacted by KUOW and ProPublica last week, Washington said she’d known Daugaard for 10 years and that “I have nothing but respect for her work.” She said of her chat message about ending CoLEAD’s role in the city’s response to homelessness: “Discussions are different than decisions.” She noted that the city’s relationship with CoLEAD continues today.

Daugaard declined to comment on Washington’s private message naming her. The nonprofit that employs Daugaard and oversees CoLEAD issued a statement defending the program’s track record at placing people in permanent housing as “exceptional.”

The mayor’s proposed budget for next year supports programs that follow CoLEAD’s approach, the statement said, “and we greatly appreciate that, in the end, the City has backed this model which has proven to serve the interests of Seattle neighborhoods and chronically unsheltered individuals alike.”

As of February 2024, the North Seattle plan was formally off the table. The city extended its lease with the Civic.

Officials committed to spending $225,000 a month for 53 rooms through year’s end — despite having just told nonprofit shelter managers to ensure those rooms emptied out.

The Fallout

The disruption to the flow of clients off Third Avenue and into the city-funded rooms gradually became noticeable.

The kind of shelter that the Civic Hotel provided — individual rooms that came with services such as help in accessing health care — is a valuable resource, especially when it comes to people who may be struggling with mental illness or addiction, like many of those on Third Avenue. Traditional shelters lack privacy and personal space.

A typical guest room in the Civic Hotel, first image, and the building’s lobby area, pictured in 2019. (Civic Hotel via TripAdvisor)

With the ending of placements at the Civic and city-funded rooms in other CoLEAD shelters, safety ambassadors who were paid to quell the violence on Third Avenue turned to other shelter organizations. But it wasn’t enough to fully offset the loss of CoLEAD’s buildings.

KUOW and ProPublica examined data from We Deliver Care for placements to organizations that provide shelter or housing, including the nonprofit that operates CoLEAD. The number went from 47 in 2023 to 30 in 2024.

Meanwhile, 35 rooms at the Civic and other shelters that CoLEAD managed sat empty as of December 2024.

Among the people who would have said yes to one of the rooms the city had left unused was Tiffany Fields, who at the time was struggling to stay safe outdoors.

“It ain’t no joke,” Fields said of life on the street. “It’s not fun. It’s not for play.”

Fields slept at downtown bus stops, often gathering with groups or pretending to have a firearm in her coat to stay safe. She spoke to herself out loud when she felt at risk in the hopes that feigning mental illness would ward others off.

“I’ve seen a lot of weird things,” Fields said. “They tend to prey on women by themselves, but I know how to hold my own.”

A 2023 University of Washington study of the Third Avenue Project found that of the 980 people contacted by We Deliver Care’s safety ambassadors through October 2023, 90% were unhoused.

“From a human perspective, people want to be inside and they want to be sheltered,” said Wheeler-Smith, leader of the outreach efforts to connect people on Third Avenue with services. “And unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of places to send people to be sheltered, period.”

Daugaard, whose group works alongside Wheeler-Smith’s safety ambassadors, said it was demoralizing for the outreach workers to keep talking to people on Third Avenue about their struggles with limited chances to fundamentally change the path they’re on.

Losing the rooms that the Civic provided meant that “all they’re doing is kind of keeping a lid on the level of disorder and its impact on other people,” Daugaard said.

(The University of Washington report, based on time spent on the street with the safety ambassadors, described reversed overdoses and defused conflicts.)

The kind of shelter that the Civic Hotel provided — individual rooms with supportive services such as help with healthcare and job training — is a hot commodity, especially when it comes to people who may be struggling with mental illness or addiction, like many of those on Third Avenue. (Megan Farmer/KUOW)

Of the estimated 5,000 shelter beds available in Seattle’s city limits and on nearby Vashon Island during early 2024, only 3% were free, according to an annual point-in-time count. Another 4,600 people lived without shelter at the time.

Rachel Fyall, associate professor at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, said the cost of not housing people includes emergency room care, jail cells and police on the street.

“Philosophically,” Fyall said, “any room that is unused is too many rooms.”

But when organizers know a shelter is likely to close soon, does it then make sense to leave rooms unused so newcomers won’t have to relocate shortly after they arrive?

Noah Fay, senior director of housing programs at another nonprofit that runs homeless shelters, said the desire to avoid disruptions for residents has to be balanced against the desire to keep beds full when unmet demand in Seattle is enormous.

He said his organization recently prepared for a shelter shutdown by halting referrals two months ahead of time. The city did so 11 months before its lease ended.

A crowd of people gathers in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood in March. (Megan Farmer/KUOW) “Pause” Lifted

In July, Fields was strolling through the Third Avenue area.

A safety ambassador called out to her and said Fields’ caseworker had been looking for her. The caseworker had good news. She was getting shelter.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding?’” Fields recalled. “‘Please tell me it’s not a sick joke.’”

The city had recently ended the “pause” on placing CoLEAD clients in temporary shelters.

The new venue was the North Seattle apartment building Daugaard had proposed more than a year earlier. The nonprofit running CoLEAD named it the Turina James.

Washington told KUOW and ProPublica CoLEAD had “significantly improved” its record of moving people to permanent housing since the pause, proving it was a good decision. (Data show CoLEAD’s success rate with city-funded clients declined from 65% in 2023 to 56% last year, while its success for all clients improved marginally, from 69% in 2023 to 71% last year. The city did not address the apparent discrepancy.)

Tiffany Fields (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source image: courtesy of Tiffany Fields.)

Fields’ intake was done over the phone, and an Uber was sent to pick her up and take her to her new temporary home. When she arrived, she said, she was welcomed with open arms. She was given gifts and a key.

“God, he works in mysterious ways,” Fields said. “Sometimes when you call on him, he may not come right then and there, but when he does come, when he does show up, he shows out.”

Fields said she’s felt much more stable since making it indoors.

“I’m happy. I’m in a very, very, very good place,” Fields said. “So I can, you know, get my life back on track, get my life back in order.”

Others on Third Avenue are still waiting for housing. But the paths available to them look much different now, even with referrals resuming, than they did in 2022 and 2023. When making placements at the Turina James, unlike at the Civic and other CoLEAD shelters, the city is no longer emphasizing Third Avenue clients but instead people from Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

Brenna Poppe, the woman who lived in the Civic as it emptied out, was still sleeping indoors as of July. She was staying at the North Seattle property, still thankful to have a roof over her head.

Around her, the rooms were starting to fill up.

by Tony Schick and Conrad Wilson, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When the Portland Trail Blazers went up for sale this year for the first time in three decades, local leaders were so determined to keep the team in Portland that they penned a widely publicized letter promising the National Basketball Association they’d work with whoever the new owner was to secure an overhaul of the team’s arena.

Fans cheered as a group of investors led by Texan Tom Dundon went all-in with a $4 billion bid for the team, which has now been accepted. Many speculated about what Dundon’s ownership of a newly successful National Hockey League team in Raleigh, North Carolina, would portend for Oregon’s oldest and biggest sports franchise.

There was no public discussion locally about the fact that Dundon created a company Oregon accused in 2020 of preying on residents through high-interest car loans they couldn’t afford. The state’s then-attorney general said that the business practices of Santander Consumer USA were “predatory and harmful and will not be tolerated in Oregon” as she announced Oregon’s piece of a $550 million multistate lawsuit settlement with the company.

In addition, Oregon is part of an ongoing multistate investigation into another national subprime lender for which Dundon has served in a leadership role, Exeter Finance. The Oregon Department of Justice confirmed to Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica the state’s role in the investigation, the existence of which Exeter has disclosed in securities filings.

It’s unclear how these issues might affect the commitment of Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson to a partnership, which could include tens or hundreds of millions in public money based on past arena projects in other cities. Spokespeople for both Wilson and Kotek declined to answer when asked if the elected leaders knew about Dundon’s history with regulators.

Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve regulator who teaches finance at Boston University, said Dundon’s record is an important consideration.

“The money used to buy the Portland Trail Blazers is money that was built on predatory lending,” Williams said of Dundon. “He had an opportunity. He seized it. He made lots of profit. And how did he make that profit? He made it on the backs of low- and poor-credit individuals.”

Dundon’s purchase of the Blazers awaits approval from the NBA’s board of governors, which often takes months, before it can close.

OPB and ProPublica received no response after sending a summary of their reporting and a list of questions to Dundon, his investment firm, the public relations staff of his hockey team and the attorneys representing him in a bankruptcy dispute.

Dundon later answered to a text message seeking comment: “Unfortunately at this point in the process I am not available. Happy to speak with you after closing. Thx.”

Dundon left Santander Consumer in 2015. In biographical posts online and previous news media interviews, Dundon has described his approach to subprime lending as providing opportunities for people with bad credit to own cars and making sure borrowers receive a fair deal.

“Just because someone has bad credit doesn’t mean they are a bad person,” he told The Dallas Morning News shortly after leaving the company.

Santander Consumer declined to comment on Dundon. In a statement, the company said: “Operating in a highly regulated industry, we have robust processes in place that are designed to protect customers and adhere to all regulatory requirements and industry best practices.”

A spokesperson for Exeter Finance declined to comment. The company has said in filings that it is cooperating with the current investigation by states’ attorneys general.

The case that Santander Consumer settled with attorneys general in 2020 concerned more than 265,000 borrowers across the country, including 2,000 in Oregon. The settlement agreement said it did not constitute evidence of, or admission to, any of the state’s allegations against the company.

As for Exeter Finance, Oregon consumers have filed 23 complaints against it with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which the agency listed as “closed with explanation” from the company.

One of those complaints was from AshLe’ Penn.

Penn, a single mother of three working as a staffing company account manager in 2021, needed a car. Her credit was bad. But a dealership was able to get her a loan on a 2014 Chrysler 300 through Exeter Finance.

Penn would have to make $511 monthly payments over 72 months, reflecting an interest rate of 28%.

“The interest rate was pretty insane,” she said in an interview. “But I needed a car so bad.”

Two years later, Penn found herself three payments behind and had been evicted from her apartment, she said. According to her consumer complaint, she was living in the sedan when Exeter sent a company to repossess it in January 2023. It was late at night, and she was parked outside her ex’s house. Her daughters watched from inside. She wrote that she spent the next 10-plus hours locked in her car, in a standoff with the repo agent, before enlisting a bankruptcy attorney who halted the repossession.

She recorded much of it on video, which she shared with Exeter.

“It was horrific. I mean, I cried. I cried for God,” Penn told OPB and ProPublica. “I was afraid to leave my car. I couldn’t get out of my car after that. I was just so afraid somebody was going to take it.”

Penn complained, arguing the law prohibits repossessing a car with someone inside, and demanded $150,000 in compensation. Exeter told her that it had done a thorough review, which concluded that she had failed to pay and that she was warned ahead of time her car would be taken away.

Penn’s version of events, Exeter wrote, could not be corroborated.

AshLe’ Penn at her home. Her consumer complaint said she was living in her car in 2023 when Exeter Finance tried to repossess the vehicle. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB) Building an Auto Loan Giant

Allegations of predatory lending would hardly stand out among NBA owners.

It is a billionaires’ club whose past and current members or their companies have been accused of housing discrimination, knowingly underwriting improper mortgages, exploiting prison inmates, making racist comments and engaging in sexual misconduct. The Blazers’ current owner, Jody Allen, settled lawsuits in which her company’s security guards accused her of sexual harassment and attempting to smuggle penguin skulls and giraffe bones out of Antarctica and Africa. All the owners, including Allen, have denied the allegations against them in court filings or in statements to the news media.

Dundon’s path to NBA ownership began at used car dealerships, where he worked in finance. In the mid-1990s, he and other former dealership workers co-founded the company Drive Financial Services. Dundon became its president and chief operating officer.

The company billed itself as “setting a new standard in the sub-prime lending industry.” Dealers appreciated that Drive Financial would loan money to people other companies wouldn’t, according to its website at the time, because it was able to “overlook negative credit histories such as charge offs, bankruptcies and repossessions.”

Finance experts who’ve studied the subprime lending industry say it offers a last resort for some people to own a car. Lenders set high interest rates in part to absorb the losses from those who can’t make payments. Even when lenders follow consumer laws, defaults are common.

“The alternative is, ‘Let’s just not issue loans to people that are very risky, and then they’ll never default,’” said University of Utah professor Mark Jansen, who has authored several papers on subprime loans. “But in a lot of places without public transport, no car means no job.”

In 2006, the Spanish company Banco Santander acquired Drive Financial and transformed it into Santander Consumer USA. Dundon kept a 10% ownership stake and a seat on its board of directors. He stayed on as CEO of the newly formed company.

Dundon emerged as a key figure in the growth of the subprime auto loan industry, said Williams, the Boston University finance professor.

Williams, who made car loans as a bank officer before working in financial regulation and risk analysis, now teaches classes about subprime car loans and other lending risks. He started studying car financing companies like Santander when he was researching a 2010 book about systemic risk in the finance industry. In 2015, he was one of the experts the New York Senate tapped for help with a report on the risks of the subprime auto loans industry.

Williams said Dundon “was one of the individuals that really grew the industry. Many would argue that he took it to a new level.”

Under Dundon, the value of Santander Consumer jumped from just over $600 million at the time of the acquisition to nearly $9 billion in 2014, according to Bloomberg.

That growth was built almost entirely with subprime borrowers. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Santander Consumer’s early years show the average credit score on its loans was below 540. Roughly two-thirds of its loans had interest rates over 20%.

A speaker bio for Dundon, posted by the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, said he was “able to impact lives by increasing access to reliable transportation for individuals with limited credit history” during his time at Santander Consumer.

But the company was also drawing consumer complaints.

Kenneth Dost was living in Scappoose, Oregon, when the housing market crashed and the architecture firm he worked with went under in 2007.

He was still struggling financially in 2010 when Santander Consumer took over the 15.85% Citi Financial loan that he’d used to buy his yellow Ford F-150 pickup. He said in his complaint with the Oregon Department of Justice that Santander Consumer agreed over the phone to lower his payments from $399 a month to $281. Dost said he then spent weeks going back and forth with the company trying to provide requested documents.

In November that year, Dost said, his daughter saw the yellow truck being hauled away shortly after she stepped off her school bus. After repossessing the Ford, Santander Consumer said in a letter to Oregon officials that the loan modifications Dost thought he received were actually subject to management’s approval and that Dost’s loan “did not meet the guidelines.”

In another letter, Santander Consumer told Oregon officials the documentation necessary to modify Dost’s loan was “not received in its entirety.” The letter also said Dost was 59 days delinquent by the time he sought the modification.

After selling the truck at auction, Dost said, Santander Consumer informed him he still owed more than $2,000. That included a fee for repossessing his truck.

“This ends up being a further windfall for Santander and more money they can bleed from us,” Dost told state investigators. “This is wrong.”

Dost became one of 24 borrowers Oregon’s Department of Justice named in an April 2012 “investigative demand” letter addressed to Dundon. The state ordered the Santander Consumer CEO to give testimony in person or else turn over the borrowers’ documents.

Santander chose the latter, and Oregon’s attorney general reached an “assurance of voluntary compliance” with the company in 2013 that required it to take steps to protect consumers and pay the state $25,000. The agreement said it was not an admission by the company that it violated the law.

There was more to come.

Leaving Santander

Dundon knew pressure on his company from regulators was mounting.

In financial reports between late 2014 and early 2015, Dundon disclosed that in addition to a state attorneys general investigation, Santander Consumer also had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice and a notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission that the agency planned to investigate its lending practices.

In early 2015, the company reached a $9 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over allegations the company illegally repossessed military service members’ cars. The company neither admitted nor denied the allegations under the settlement. It was quoted as saying it fully cooperated with the government and had taken steps to improve its compliance with the law.

Around that time, a front-page story in The New York Times detailed how Dundon and others had amassed wealth by packaging risky auto loans made to low-income people and selling those loans as securities for hundreds of millions of dollars. Regulators said it resembled the way banks sold bundles of shoddy home loans before the housing bubble burst in the mid-2000s.

Dundon reassured stock analysts in April 2015 that “we’re too good to have a bust.”

But on the same earnings call, Dundon acknowledged problems, saying the company had “a lot of work to do” to meet regulatory expectations.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was one regulatory agency looking into Santander Consumer. It found numerous deficiencies with the company. In late June 2015, Santander Consumer’s board of directors voted to accept a Fed enforcement action that required the company to submit written plans to improve its risk management and company structure.

Dundon was out as CEO the same day the enforcement agreement took effect, July 2, 2015. In his interview with The Dallas Morning News at the time, Dundon said that the Federal Reserve issues didn’t involve him and that he and Santander Consumer’s parent company “had different ideas about how to run a business.”

He netted more than $700 million in his separation agreement, which included cashing out his stock, SEC filings show.

A slew of multimillion-dollar legal settlements followed for Santander Consumer in the wake of Dundon’s departure: $26 million for allegations of “unfair, high-rate loans” in Massachusetts and Delaware; $12 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found it engaged in “deceptive acts” and violated consumer protection laws; and $550 million — the largest payout — with 34 attorneys general, including Oregon’s. The company did not admit wrongdoing in any of these cases.

After settling with state attorneys general, the company stated at the time it had “strengthened our risk management across the board” and called the lending that regulators had scrutinized a “legacy” issue.

After Santander Consumer

Dundon used the money he made through Santander Consumer to make a wide range of investments, and he soon became known less for his tenure as an auto lender and instead as a prominent figure in recreational and professional sports.

Through a new firm, Dundon Capital Partners, he invested in Topgolf, an entertainment and restaurant chain built around golf driving ranges that was rapidly growing at the time. Along with forays into real estate and health care companies, he became the sole owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes in 2021.

Yet Dundon remained a player among subprime auto lenders.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Dundon Capital Partners invested $100 million in Carvana in 2017, and sold much of the stock a year later. Almost half of the loans that Carvana issues are subprime, according to a report from the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research.

In 2023, Dundon Capital invested in subprime car lender Exeter Finance, according to the research firm Pitchbook.

Exeter Finance was founded in 2006 in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, the city where Dundon and others founded the company that became Santander Consumer. Exeter’s website shows that several former Santander executives took leadership roles at Exeter starting in 2015, while Santander Consumer was under state and federal scrutiny. Exeter is currently listed on Dundon Capital’s website as part of its portfolio, and a 2022 news release from Exeter identified Dundon as chairman of the board.

A 2024 investigation by ProPublica found that because of the way Exeter Finance handled loans, it sometimes made more money when borrowers defaulted than when they paid on time.

Exeter has settled allegations of unfair lending practices, paying more than $6 million combined to Massachusetts and Delaware. (The company did not admit wrongdoing in either case.) Meanwhile, it is under investigation by the attorneys general in 42 states, it said in a corporate filing this year. These include Oregon, a spokesperson for Attorney General Dan Rayfield confirmed.

Exeter has described the current multistate inquiry as an extension of demands for information that started in 2015. The company wrote that the initial investigation concerned its “origination, servicing and collection practices” and that it cooperated with state requests for documents.

For JT Cotter of Bend, Oregon, Exeter Finance was the only lender available when he bought a used Honda Pilot at Carmax in 2022 for $28,000.

Cotter, who works privately with families of children with special needs, said he had previously defaulted on a 2018 high-interest car loan from Santander Consumer.

“It demolished me,” he said.

When Cotter needed a new car and Exeter offered him a rate of 19%, he thought, “‘Oh, it’s just another Santander.’ But I didn’t know there was actually a connection.”

Exeter let him skip payments and extend his loan, a practice that ProPublica’s 2024 investigation found was fundamental to the company’s business model. (The company said at the time that it communicates with customers to ensure they know the costs involved with extensions.)

Cotter said what he didn’t know was that the payments Exeter let him skip were moved to the end of the loan, increasing the interest and fees he had to pay. By 2024, his $731 monthly payment went entirely toward interest, according to an Exeter billing statement reviewed by OPB and ProPublica. Exeter repossessed the Pilot eight months ago.

He never filed a complaint with the state Department of Justice because, he said, he didn’t know it was something he could do.

Cotter now drives a Subaru. He said he saved up and paid cash for it.

A New Arena

Portland’s Moda Center arena in 2025. Memorial Coliseum, behind it, was the Blazers’ home until the 1990s. (Brooke Herbert/OPB)

Portland’s city-owned Moda Center arena has been the home of the Trail Blazers since it opened in 1995 under the name the Rose Garden, replacing the city’s aging Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

The team’s future in the Rose City wasn’t a prominent debate in Portland until Allen, the owner, put it on the market in May. Asked to comment on the team’s future in light of a potential sale, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver declared to reporters that Portland “likely needs a new arena.”

“That will be part of the challenge for any new ownership group coming in,” Silver said at the time.

Others echoed Silver’s sentiment. Marshall Glickman, whose father founded the Trail Blazers in 1970, said during an August interview on OPB’s “Think Out Loud” that any new owner would have “extraordinary leverage” over the city and the state to pay for a new or renovated arena. “And that leverage comes from the threat, which may be spoken or it may not be spoken, but the portability of the team that it could leave.”

Glickman started an organization, Rip City Forever, to build public support for keeping the Blazers in Portland. He declined to comment further but said his statements during the “Think Out Loud” interview were not directed specifically at Dundon, whose name had not yet surfaced.

Cities rarely come out ahead when they put tax dollars into these stadium projects, a group of researchers concluded in 2022 after examining more than 130 economic studies of publicly financed stadiums. Any public benefits from increased foot traffic, new visits to nearby businesses or heightened civic stature were too small to justify the amount the public spent, the review found.

Wilson and Kotek, the Portland mayor and Oregon governor, stepped up in a big way nonetheless. In their letter to Silver, they said they’d heard his concerns about the Blazers arena “loud and clear” and “fully support renovating the Moda Center to become a point of pride for the Blazers and for our city.”

“We are prepared to explore the public-private partnerships needed to make it happen,” they concluded.

Then, on Sept. 12, the current Blazers owner announced that the franchise had accepted Dundon’s purchase offer.

Dundon has not commented on the Blazers acquisition since, but U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said he’d spoken with him just before the bid became public. “He sounded very excited about the team’s future being here in beautiful Portland,” Wyden told reporters.

As in Portland, there were concerns the NHL’s Hurricanes would leave Raleigh for a bigger market when Dundon bought the team. In 2023, the Hurricanes signed a long-term lease in the city, announcing the development of a billion-dollar arena and surrounding entertainment district. The deal included $300 million in public money.

Oregonians who borrowed money from companies linked to Dundon voiced emotions ranging from dismay to disgust when they learned their tax dollars might go toward supporting Dundon’s latest investment.

“Great,” Dost said. “Making a partnership with the devil, essentially is what that is.”

Penn, who was homeless when Exeter sent a repo company to take her car away, said she considers herself a Blazers fan. She’s never made it to a game in person, but her kids went on a school-sponsored trip to the Moda Center this year.

She fended off repossession back in 2023, but the car broke down a few months later. She couldn’t afford to fix it and stopped trying to make payments. She eventually found Section 8 housing, but without a vehicle, she said her kids had to stop playing soccer and basketball because she had no way to get them to practices and games.

Penn said she wonders if the people who run Exeter know what’s happened to borrowers like her.

“I’ve seen their executive team, and they’re definitely eating and feeding their families,” she said, having looked the company up online, “and I think it’s definitely at the expense of others not being able to.”

Without a car, Penn says her kids had to stop playing soccer and basketball because she had no way to get them to practices and games. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)

Doris Burke and Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research.

Correction

Oct. 14, 2025: The highlight box summarizing this story originally misspelled the name of Oregon’s governor. It is Tina Kotek, not Koteek.

by Ruth Talbot and Nicole Santa Cruz, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling for ProPublica

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On a sweltering morning in Vidalia, Louisiana, Shannan Cornwell and Freddie Green got in a long line to wait for food.

The couple has struggled to pay for groceries amid soaring prices and health setbacks, they said. She had back surgery. He had undergone cancer treatment.

They turned to a local food bank to supplement their diets. Although they’re grateful for the food, lately they’ve noticed changes in what they receive. For months in the spring and summer their pickups did not include any meat, Cornwell said.

“You have to learn how to adapt to what you have,” Green said. “Which is hard,” Cornwell added.

Shannan Cornwell, 50, and Freddie Green, 58, with their dog Stormy and a bag of groceries they received from a food bank.

In the spring, the Trump administration abruptly cut $500 million in deliveries from a program that sends U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks and other organizations across the country — about a quarter of the funding the program received in 2024. The items that were delivered through The Emergency Food Assistance Program were some of the healthiest, most expensive items that organizations distribute.

The cancellation of these deliveries comes at a critical time for food banks. Food insecurity is higher than at any time since the aftermath of the Great Recession, according to federal data, and many food banks are reporting higher need than they saw at the peak of the pandemic. Demand is only expected to increase; this summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the largest cut to food stamps in the program’s history.

ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture of each planned delivery in 2025, detailing the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached hungry people because of the administration’s cut.

The cancellations began in mid-May, when over 100 orders of 2% milk bound for 31 states were halted.

The records show 4,304 canceled deliveries between May and September across the 50 states, Puerto Rico and D.C. (Experience this as an interactive story on ProPublica’s website.)

All told, the deliveries accounted for nearly 94 million pounds of food. The true loss is likely greater, food banks said, because not all of the year’s deliveries had been scheduled.

Most food banks rely on a combination of federal or state dollars, private giving and partnerships with businesses that donate leftover food. While the cancellations were disruptive to all food banks, according to their representatives, those that receive state funding or have strong community support said that they have weathered the cuts better than others.

The Food Bank of Central Louisiana, where Cornwell and Green’s groceries come from, gets more than half of its food from the federal government and receives very little state support. It serves rural areas of Louisiana, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation, according to U.S. census data.

The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.

The longtime director of The Food Bank of Central Louisiana told ProPublica the organization’s warehouses are emptier than usual.

“We’re not turning people away with no food. It’s not to that point,” said Jayne Wright-Velez, who has been the executive director at the food bank for 30 years. “But people are getting less food when they come to us.”

The organization has tried to fill the gap with produce donations, but transporting and distributing fruits and vegetables is challenging, and multiple patrons told ProPublica the produce had gone bad by the time they received it.

On a recent morning, Codie Dufrene, 23, came to collect food for her grandfather and his neighbors, who live 45 minutes from the closest grocery store.

Codie Dufrene holds a cantaloupe she received from The Food Bank of Central Louisiana.

Usually, the trunk of Dufrene’s car would be full. Not lately.

Dufrene received chicken for the first time “since way before the summer.” But the poultry came from a donation that hardly made up for the 74,000 pounds of chicken that never arrived in June.

She said that though her family is grateful and will use whatever they get, the quality of the food can be discouraging. Dufrene pointed out the condition of a cantaloupe she received. “You can tell — they’re frozen and they’re already super, super soft.” She said her mother would likely give them to her pigs, “because people can’t really eat those.”

Wright-Velez said the food bank trains its staff on food safety and does its best to check everything before it goes out, but it’s difficult to do at a large scale. “Especially in the heat of the summer, things just go bad so quickly,” she said. “The clock’s ticking as soon as we get the donation.”

Jayne Wright-Velez, executive director of The Food Bank of Central Louisiana

The Emergency Food Assistance Program was created in 1983 to purchase farmers’ surplus food and distribute it to low-income people. The program’s budget is typically authorized every five years as part of the Farm Bill, but in 2018, the first Trump administration added funds to help farmers struggling under retaliatory tariffs the U.S. faced amid trade disputes. The additional, discretionary federal funds helped food banks serve more people; last fiscal year, they got nearly twice as much money from the fund as they did from their congressional allocation.

Now characterizing the additional funding as a “Biden-era slush fund,” the second Trump administration cut $500 million that had already been allocated. The government is still distributing food through other parts of the program, but food banks were caught off guard by the canceled deliveries because it’s rare for funding to be cut mid-year. Food bank managers, some with decades of experience, couldn’t recall a disruption like it. With the Farm Bill slated for renewal this fall, officials who run food banks worry that any additional cuts would cause them to have to scale back the number of people they serve.

Already the need is greater than what food banks have on hand, said Shannon Oliver, the director of operations at the Oregon Food Bank.

“We’re having to kind of prepare for the fact that there’s just not going to be enough food, and having to be clear with setting the expectation that we’re doing everything we possibly can,” she said.

The USDA did not respond to questions or requests for comment. In a May letter responding to senators’ concerns about the funding cut, the agency said it had made additional food purchases through another program and that the emergency food program continues to operate “as originally intended by Congress.”

“While the pandemic is over, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has not and will not lose focus on its core mission of strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious foods,” the letter said.

The Need Continues to Grow

By 8 a.m., the line in the parking lot of a library in Albuquerque, New Mexico, snaked around a chain-link fence. People had been waiting for hours to pick up groceries from Roadrunner Food Bank, which lost about 850,000 pounds of food to the funding cut, according to USDA records. As a result, people are receiving less dairy, meat and other high-protein items.

New Mexico consistently ranks among the poorest states in the nation, and it has more food bank distribution sites than full-service grocery stores, according to data provided by the USDA and Roadrunner Food Bank. And in recent months, organizers have noticed more people showing up than usual.

“They’re having to run from place to place to place to try to stitch together enough coverage for their family,” said Katy Anderson, a vice president at the food bank.

Vivian Santiago relies on food banks in part because her federal food benefits aren’t enough to cover increased grocery prices.

Vivian Santiago, 54, pieces together what she can from food-distribution sites across Albuquerque. She also uses her benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed her daughter and 9-year-old granddaughter. Lately her electronic benefits card isn’t lasting even halfway through the month because of the increase in grocery prices, which have risen nearly 30% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It’s hard out there,” she said.

Patricia Parker says she’d go days without food if not for the supplies she got from a food bank.

Patricia Parker, 42, suffers from kidney failure and receives disability benefits.

Parker has been homeless for about six months, sometimes sleeping in her car or staying with friends. She’s looking for a job after a recent stint at a laundromat didn’t work out. As she carried Doritos, green grapes, potatoes and onions from the Albuquerque food bank, she said she appreciates the help.

“I won’t have to go days without food,” she said.

Workers at food banks and pantries said that the canceled deliveries add to the growing challenges they face. Many staff members said they had seen a decline in private contributions and volunteers. Grocery stores and food manufacturers, which started managing their inventories more efficiently during the pandemic, now have less leftover food to give. Other Trump cuts have disrupted AmeriCorps, which helps staff mobile food pantries and other services, and are ending the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided food from local farmers.

Food banks with more resources can be more creative. Several told ProPublica they’ve hired someone whose job is to find grocery stores in the area willing to donate food. But in areas where grocers are scarce, there are fewer options. In some cases, food banks are among the only places where people can get fresh fruits and vegetables.

“When we see federal cuts like this, that affects entire communities and villages and towns,” said Stephanie Sullivan, assistant director of marketing and communications at Food Bank for the Heartland, which serves 93 counties across Nebraska and western Iowa.

“There’s Not an Option B”

Cuts and changes to foundational federal programs for low-income people — namely, SNAP and Medicaid — are a looming concern. The increase in need even before these changes take effect could signal that food banks are a “canary in the coal mine” for what’s to come, said Christopher Bosso, a food policy expert at Northeastern University and the author of a book on SNAP.

Hunger will also be harder to measure now that the USDA has canceled an annual food insecurity survey, calling it “redundant” and “politicized.”

“It feels like the idea is to make it harder to identify the consequences of the policy changes that we’re seeing right now,” said Marlene Schwartz, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.

Food bank administrators emphasized that they could not fill the gap created by benefit cuts in the administration’s multitrillion-dollar spending bill. Feeding America, a national nonprofit association of food banks and other organizations, estimates that for every meal its food banks provide, SNAP provides nine. The majority of people who receive food assistance also receive Medicaid, so reductions in both programs could force people to choose between health care and groceries.

Food to be distributed at the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The legislation cuts SNAP by $187 billion, or 20%, through 2034, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The bill, which has expanded work requirements for some recipients and taken protections away from others, will also increase the amount of money that states must contribute to the program for the first time in decades. Experts say it’s unclear how cash-strapped states will be able to shoulder that cost.

Two experts on food insecurity told ProPublica that hunger is expected to rise with the new program rules as it has when SNAP spending has been reduced in the past. There could also be ripple effects: Research has shown that people enrolled in SNAP are less likely to be hospitalized. And grocery stores where the majority of customers use these benefits could close, said Gina Plata-Nino, the interim SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit that works to eradicate hunger.

The people who are harmed are “working incredibly hard,” Plata-Nino said.

“They are Americans who are falling on hard times and just need those resources to be able to have economic mobility and be able to escape poverty,” she said. “Without those resources, it just makes them even poorer and less equipped to be able to handle the tough economy that all of us are facing now.”

Michael Heaton’s federal food benefits shrank significantly and he uses food banks to help cover the gap.

Michael Heaton, 76, takes care of his 31-year-old son, who has autism; the two live off Heaton’s Social Security and his son’s disability payments. After the pandemic, Heaton, who is retired, said he saw his SNAP benefits shrink from $600 a month to just over $100. To supplement their diets, he goes to pantries and food-distribution centers around Albuquerque.

On a recent morning, he picked up two bags. “This fills that gap,” he said. “We only take what we need, we’re not trying to be gluttonous or anything.”

Even food banks that rely less on federal funding are worried about what comes next if the emergency food assistance program is reduced or altered in a significant way.

“There’s not an option B,” said Brian McManus, the chief operations officer of the Food Bank of Central New York.

Louisiana, one of the states most reliant on SNAP, stands to be among the places hardest hit by further cuts.

Elvin Ortiz, 67, says he has been using a food bank for around two years and has noticed changes in the quality of the food.

“It’s unfortunate that in a time where the social safety nets are being cut, that our resources are also being cut,” said Wright-Velez.

If people haven’t experienced food insecurity, or don’t know someone who has, they might forget something important, she said:

“Those are real people on the other end of those cuts.”

In all, the USDA records indicate that food banks were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived. Food banks had planned to schedule more deliveries in the coming months. Those orders are not reflected in this data.

Anna Donlan contributed design. Illustrations by Justin Metz for ProPublica. Art direction by Andrea Wise. Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis.

by Justin Elliott and Joshua Kaplan

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors.

The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the privately held company has been disclosed. While there is no prohibition on Chinese ownership in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated and the issue is treated by the U.S. government as a significant national security concern.

“They obviously have Chinese investors to be honest,” Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major SpaceX investor, said in a deposition last year, adding that some are “directly on the cap table.” “Cap table” refers to the company’s capitalization table, which lists its shareholders.

Kahlon’s testimony does not reveal the scope of Chinese investment in SpaceX or the identities of the investors. Kahlon has long been close with the company’s leadership and runs his own firm that acts as a middleman for wealthy investors looking to buy shares of SpaceX.

SpaceX keeps its full ownership structure secret. It was previously reported that some Chinese investors had bought indirect stakes in SpaceX, investing in middleman funds that in turn owned shares in the rocket company. The new testimony describes direct investments that suggest a closer relationship with SpaceX.

SpaceX has thrived as it snaps up sensitive U.S. government contracts, from building spy satellites for the Pentagon to launching spacecraft for NASA. U.S. embassies and the White House have connected to the company’s Starlink internet service too. Musk’s roughly 42% stake in the company is worth an estimated $168 billion. If he owned nothing else, he’d be one of the 10 richest people in the world.

National security law experts said federal officials would likely be deeply interested in understanding the direct Chinese investment in SpaceX. Whether there was cause for concern would depend on the details, they said, but the U.S. government has asserted that China has a systematic strategy of using investments in sensitive industries to conduct espionage.

If the investors got access to nonpublic information about the company — say, details on its contracts or supply chain — it could be useful to Chinese intelligence, said Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments. That “would create huge risks that, if realized, would have huge consequences for national security,” she said.

SpaceX did not respond to questions for this story. Kahlon declined to comment.

The new court records come from litigation in Delaware between Kahlon and another investor. The testimony was sealed until ProPublica, with the assistance of lawyers at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the law firm Shaw Keller, moved in the spring to make it public. SpaceX fought the effort, but a judge ruled that some of the records must be released. Kahlon’s testimony was publicly filed this week.

Buying shares in SpaceX is much more difficult than buying a piece of a publicly traded company like Tesla or Microsoft. SpaceX has control over who can buy stakes in it, and the company’s investors fall into different categories. The most rarefied group is the direct investors, who actually own SpaceX shares. This group includes funds led by Kahlon, Peter Thiel and a handful of other venture capitalists with personal ties to Musk. Then there are the indirect investors, who effectively buy stakes in SpaceX through a middleman like Kahlon. (The indirect investors are actually buying into a fund run by the middleman, typically paying a hefty fee.) All previously known Chinese investors in SpaceX fell into the latter category.

This year, ProPublica reported on an unusual feature of SpaceX’s approach to investment from China. According to testimony from the Delaware case, the company allows Chinese investors to buy stakes in SpaceX so long as the money is routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs. Companies only have to proactively report Chinese investments to the government in limited circumstances, and there aren’t hard and fast rules for how much is too much.

After ProPublica’s report, House Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raising alarms about the company’s “potential obfuscation.” “In light of the extreme sensitivity of SpaceX’s work for DoD and NASA, this lack of transparency raises serious questions,” they wrote. It’s unclear if any action was taken in response.

Kahlon has turned his access to SpaceX stock into a lucrative business. His investor list reads like an atlas of the world. The investors’ names are redacted in the recently unsealed document, but their addresses span from Chile to Malaysia. One is in Russia. At least two are in mainland China. One is in Qatar. (In one email to SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Kahlon said a Los Angeles-based fund had money from the Qatari royal family and was already invested in SpaceX.)

“You made a big fortune,” a China-based financier wrote to Kahlon four years ago. “Lol something like that. SpaceX has been the gift that keeps on giving,” Kahlon responded. “All thanks to you.”

Kahlon first met with SpaceX when it was a fledgling startup, according to court records. SpaceX’s CFO, Bret Johnsen, who’s been there for 14 years, testified that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.” Johnsen also testified that SpaceX has no formal policy about accepting investments from countries deemed adversaries by the U.S. government. But he said he asks fund managers to “stay away from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean ownership interest” because that could make it “more challenging to win government contracts.”

There are indications that by 2021, Kahlon was wary of raising funds from China. The U.S. government had grown increasingly concerned about Chinese investments in tech companies, and that June, Kahlon told an associate he was “being picky” with who he’d let buy into a new SpaceX opportunity. “Only people I want to have a relationship with long term. No one from mainland China,” Kahlon said.

But as he raced to assemble a pool of investors, those concerns appeared to fade away. By November 2021, Kahlon was personally raising money from China to buy SpaceX stakes. He told a Shanghai-based company that if it invested with him, it would get quarterly updates on SpaceX’s business development, “visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” court records show.

The Shanghai company ultimately sent Kahlon $50 million to invest in Musk’s business, according to court records. SpaceX had the deal canceled after the plan became public.

Do you have any information we should know about Elon Musk’s businesses? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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A former Chicago police officer facing trial for perjury and forgery has admitted he lied under oath dozens of times when he used an audacious alibi to get out of numerous speeding tickets and other traffic violations. Over more than a decade, he repeatedly blamed an ex-girlfriend for stealing his car and racking up the tickets — and each time, the story was bogus.

Jeffrey Kriv, one of Chicago’s most prolific drunk-driving enforcers during his more than 25 years as a cop, was sentenced to 18 months’ probation and ordered to pay $4,515 in restitution after pleading guilty last week to a lesser charge of felony theft. A plea agreement with prosecutors in Cook County, where Chicago is located, allowed Kriv to avoid jail time and ended the criminal case against him, but the implications of his actions go far beyond his own case.

A ProPublica analysis of court and police records has found that prosecutors have dropped at least 92 traffic and criminal cases that were based on arrests Kriv made and tickets he wrote. Most of the cases that were dismissed involved drunk and dangerous driving. Defense attorneys in those cases have cited Kriv’s perjury case and his credibility issue.

ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune previously detailed Kriv’s history of alleged misconduct as an officer, including that he’d been investigated at least 26 times over allegations of dishonesty for falsifying records, making false arrests and other matters. He was the subject of nearly 100 complaints from citizens and fellow officers in his career; most officers face far fewer.

Kriv denied the allegations in many of those cases and blamed others on how often he made stops and arrests. In the end, many of the investigations could not be pursued because his accusers did not sign formal complaints, and some complaints, including those that involved allegations of dishonesty, were not sustained by police oversight officials. In other cases, oversight officials found Kriv responsible for the misconduct.

He retired in 2023, just before prosecutors charged him.

Kriv’s plea deal was filed in Cook County court on Sept. 24, about a week before his case was scheduled to go to trial. Prosecutors for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office told ProPublica this week that Kriv had 56 of his own traffic tickets dismissed after providing false testimony to judges. That’s more than the 44 tickets that prosecutors had previously indicated in court records. The fines for those tickets would have been $4,515, the amount he was ordered to pay in restitution.

Addressing the fallout from Kriv’s perjury case on other court cases built on his policing, the state’s attorney’s office said it dropped pending cases against individuals who Kriv had arrested or ticketed because it could not proceed without his testimony.

“We could not call him as a witness due to the false statements he previously made in order to have his own personal tickets dismissed,” the office wrote in response to questions from ProPublica. One case was dismissed as recently as August, records show. Prosecutors said there are no pending cases in which Kriv’s testimony is needed.

The state’s attorney’s office said that, going forward, any claims from individuals who had been convicted in Kriv-involved cases will be “carefully reviewed.” There also are defendants who have not shown up in court and have warrants out for their arrests, so their cases could be called again.

“Our priority is to uphold our legal and ethical responsibilities while ensuring fairness,” the office said.

Under the plea agreement, Kriv admitted that he repeatedly blamed a girlfriend for stealing his BMW to get his tickets dismissed. “Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv told one judge. He repeated similar stories again and again to get out of tickets for speeding, parking and red light camera violations involving his personal vehicles. Kriv also provided fraudulent police reports of car thefts as evidence. The judges then dismissed the tickets.

Kriv had been charged with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all of them felonies. Each of those offenses would have been punishable by up to five years in prison.

Kriv’s attorney, Tim Grace, told ProPublica that he and Kriv would not comment.

The executive director of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago said the pension board will meet to decide if Kriv can continue to collect his pension benefits, given the felony conviction. Illinois law prohibits officers who are convicted of felonies related to their service from receiving pension benefits. Kriv’s pension payment is more than $6,000 a month.

In court last year, Kriv told a ProPublica reporter that he was innocent. “I am going to fight it,” he said at the time. “I don’t plan on taking any plea.” He complained that people accused of carjacking and gun offenses get probation, and he criticized prosecutors for treating him like a criminal. “I’m worse than a carjacker, allegedly,” he said.

He also said “it’s a shame” and “it’s terrible” that prosecutors have dropped cases against alleged drunken drivers and others because of concerns about his credibility. He said he wanted to testify in those cases and said prosecutors had sidelined him prematurely.

“You know how the system is: You are guilty until proven innocent,” he said.

by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg

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

The first time a Pennsylvania consultant named Charles Sowell connected with border czar Tom Homan was when Sowell reached out on LinkedIn in 2021, looking for advice about border contracting work. Homan had finished a stint as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, capping a three-decade career in federal government. He and Sowell built a rapport, based partly on their shared criticisms of then-President Joe Biden’s border policies.

By 2023, the men had gone into business together. Sowell was paying Homan as a consultant to his boutique firm, SE&M Solutions, which advised companies — in some cases for a fee of $20,000 a month — seeking contracts from the agencies where Homan had once worked. In 2024, Sowell became chair of the board of Homan’s foundation, Border911, which championed tougher border security.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that if he won reelection he would appoint Homan to oversee the sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration that he’d promised his supporters, which would likely involve billions of dollars in new contracts for private companies. At the Republican National Convention speech in which Trump accepted his party’s nomination in July, he said Homan would have a role in launching “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

“Put him in charge,” Trump said, “and just sit back and watch.”

After Trump won and formally announced Homan would be returning with him to the White House, Sowell kept Homan on his payroll until the end of the year. Once named as the border czar, Homan said he would recuse himself from contracting, saying he would have no “involvement, discussion, input, or decision of any future government contracts.”

But several industry executives who spoke with ProPublica said at least half a dozen companies vying for a slice of the $45 billion Congress has allocated for immigration detention work had hired Sowell because he had led them to believe his connections to Homan would help their chances of winning government work.

Homan's business relationships are under greater scrutiny after MSNBC reported an FBI sting that allegedly caught him on tape accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover agents posing as would-be government contractors before he took the border czar post.

His relationship with Sowell raises fresh questions about the integrity of the billion-dollar contracting process for immigration enforcement, ethics experts say.

In August, Sowell and Homan’s senior adviser Mark Hall visited one of Sowell’s clients seeking to cash in on an unprecedented plan by the Trump administration to build temporary immigrant detention camps on military bases, sources told ProPublica. As recently as February, Hall too had been paid by Sowell’s firm, records show. At the same time, the extent of Homan’s recusal has been called into question: Records of internal meetings obtained by ProPublica showed that over the summer Homan was in conversation with industry executives about the government’s contracting plans.

ProPublica gleaned more details than previously reported by examining federal disclosure forms, government documents and internal communications from firms in the Homeland Security industry, and from interviews with Sowell and several current and former government officials, as well as executives at companies seeking contracts in the burgeoning detention sector. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because of their ongoing work in the sector.

Government officials in Homan’s position are required to steer clear of any activity that could impact their former business associates for a year after entering government. Discussing immigration-related contracts with industry players would represent a “clear-cut violation” of federal ethics regulations, said Don Fox, the former general counsel for the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency in the executive branch.

“You shouldn’t be in those briefings,” Fox said. “You are either recused or you are not.”

It’s common for companies looking to land federal contracts to hire consultants and seek expertise of former government employees. Those relationships are subject to federal ethics rules designed to guard against conflicts of interest. The White House and DHS did not provide requested copies of Homan’s formal recusal documents, which might outline exactly what kinds of activities government lawyers told Homan should be off limits.

Homan and Hall did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview, Sowell said he and Homan no longer have a financial relationship. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Homan has “no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract.”

In his role as border czar, Homan “occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people,” she said.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in government ethics, said, however, “It’s not just about tainted awards. If the industry believes the system is corrupt, then the public is harmed. And the damage has already been done.”

Growing Wealth

Homan spent more than 30 years in public service, eventually rising to become a senior figure at ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, during the administration of President Barack Obama. He was acting ICE director during Trump’s first term until he left government seven years ago.

While out of public office, Homan was highly critical of Biden’s border policies and formed the nonprofit Border911 to “educate Americans on what it means to have a secure, well-managed border.”

Homan’s private-sector work before he returned to government transformed his finances. In 2017, he declared assets totaling a maximum of just $250,000 on his ethics disclosures following a career in federal service, a figure that excludes certain government retirement accounts.

By 2025, his net worth had grown to between $3 million to $9 million, the disclosure documents show. (The forms list assets in ranges, and a portion of his net worth may come from money he had saved in government retirement accounts.)

In his years out of government, Homan became a household name in conservative circles as a frequent contributor on Fox News. He started a consulting firm and was paid for public speaking engagements around the country, raising alarms about the record number of border crossings during the Biden administration. The dire situation at the border, he said, could require the intervention of the U.S. military and the hiring of private companies to carry out a mass deportation campaign. “We’re going to contract as much work out as we can, work that doesn’t require a badge and a gun,” Homan told Fox News in 2024.

After Trump made clear his intentions to tap Homan as border czar, Sowell reached out to government contracting experts, saying he was working with Homan’s Border911 Foundation to help streamline procurement for the incoming administration’s mass deportation policy, said two people who spoke with him.

Sowell, sources in the industry said, made it known he was bringing together a group of companies that could be in line for lucrative contracts building detention camps for the Trump administration.

In an interview with ProPublica in June, Sowell said when his clients wanted to understand DHS better, he would bring in Homan to get his perspective as a former senior ICE leader. Bloomberg recently reported about aspects of Homan’s business dealings with Sowell.

Hints of Homan’s financial relationship with Sowell can be found in Homan’s federally required financial disclosure forms, which contain limited information. The forms report that Sowell’s firm paid Homan some sum of money — more than $5,000 — sometime between 2023 and early 2025. They do not say how much or exactly when he was paid, but Sowell told ProPublica their financial relationship ended last November or December.

Separately, Hall disclosed he was paid $50,000 by Sowell for consulting in January and February before he entered government in February. Hall also was a part-time board member at the Border911 foundation from April 2024 to February, according to his LinkedIn page.

Sowell made public his affinity for Homan at an industry conference in April, where many major players were present: He spent $20,000 at a charity auction to purchase a commemorative quilt made from Border Patrol agent vests. It was signed by Homan.

Sowell did not name his clients, but ProPublica learned several are companies that build temporary shelters, staffing agencies that supply security guards and medical companies that provide health care services, though they did not have direct expertise in immigration detention. Sowell said he couldn’t comment on his conversations with Homan since Homan went back into government. “I don’t have a lot of opportunities to chat with him anymore, even as a friend,” he said.

“Tom is an exceptionally ethical person,” Sowell said in the June interview, adding that his and Homan’s work steered clear of any real or perceived conflicts of interest. “I’m exceptionally proud of this administration for not doing that type of ‘it’s who you know’ versus ‘what you can do’ type of contracting.”

Asked about additional details in this story before publication, Sowell declined to comment.

Sowell appears to still be in contact — at least to some extent — with the border czar’s office. In mid-August, he and Hall flew to visit the Houston offices of Industrial Tent Systems, a family-owned company that specializes in quickly building temporary structures. ProPublica learned that Industrial Tent Systems is one of Sowell’s clients. Hall was there that day to hear the company’s leaders pitch their plan to use their tents and services for immigration detention, even sampling some of the tacos they were hoping to serve detainees, according to two sources with knowledge of the meeting.

Industrial Tent Systems did not respond to a request for comment.

The White House said Hall has never been authorized by Homan to represent him.

“It is unusual,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who served as drug czar for Obama, when asked about the meeting. “As an adviser this would be totally inappropriate to meet with potential contractors.” Generally, he said, a top decision-maker would not meet with a potential contractor, who would typically have to go through “numerous hoops” to even request a meeting that may well be denied.

Another one of the companies seeking expertise from Sowell and Homan was USA Up Star, an Indiana-based company that specializes in building temporary facilities.

Homan and Sowell were both on the payroll of USA Up Star before Homan was named border czar, according to several industry sources with direct knowledge of the relationship and government documents.

Homan’s disclosures show only that USA Up Star paid him as a consultant sometime between 2023 and early 2025, but do not detail how much or when. During this time, a picture of Homan and the company’s owner and founder, Klay South, standing in front of a private jet was posted on social media. South said he had no comment.

Military Contracting

Sowell’s clients have been trying to navigate a byzantine but highly lucrative contracting landscape, as the Trump administration has pledged to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day and is seeking to double the number of detention beds.

Early this year, the Trump administration drew up plans to build a series of massive detention camps on military bases to hold immigrants as part of a deportation effort, the first of which was planned for Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

An ICE detention facility under construction in August at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas (Paul Ratje/Reuters)

The administration came up with a novel way to fund that camp, drawing on a contracting process run by the U.S. military known as the WEXMAC (which stands for Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract). Homan spoke to companies in the industry about those plans.

Records obtained by ProPublica show a contracting officer at the Department of Defense, which the administration now calls the Department of War, saying in a meeting that Homan had been talking to companies about the WEXMAC. “Border czar has been briefed by industry,” the official informed his colleagues. ”Border czar is most likely going to say something to SECDEF,” the official continued, referring to Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth. Bloomberg also reported on the June meeting.

Inquiries into Homan’s previous work in the private sector and his business relationships are likely to ramp up following the reports of the $50,000 undercover sting. That federal investigation into Homan was launched after the subject of another inquiry — not Sowell — claimed the border czar was soliciting payments in exchange for the promise of future contracts should Trump return to power, a person familiar with the closed investigation said.

“This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors,” FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a joint statement. “They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing. The Department’s resources must remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless investigations. As a result, the investigation has been closed.”

The White House press secretary denied that Homan received the money, and Homan has said he has done nothing illegal. He has not been charged with any offense, and neither Hall nor Sowell has been accused of wrongdoing.

Democratic lawmakers are seeking audio and video evidence from the closed FBI case and have also raised questions about Homan’s financial ties to The Geo Group, a private prison firm he previously consulted for that has won lucrative contracts in recent months. The Geo Group did not reply to a request for comment.

Tens of billions of dollars of additional funding for immigration enforcement have yet to be spent. The detention camp contract at Fort Bliss, which could eventually hold 5,000 people, was awarded to a consortium of firms led by a company on the military contracting list for over $1 billion. It is the first of several such facilities planned in coming years.

A number of Sowell’s clients — including Industrial Tent Systems and USA Up Star — were among the close to 60 companies recently added to the WEXMAC. That makes them eligible to bid on those future immigration detention camp contracts.

Kirsten Berg and Al Shaw contributed research. Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis.

Correction

Oct. 6, 2025: This story originally misstated when Mark Hall visited one of Charles Sowell's clients and when Sowell and Hall flew to visit the Houston offices of Industrial Tent Systems. It was in August, not last month.

by Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica, with additional reporting by Nick Reynolds and Anna Wilder, The Post and Courier; Yasmeen Khan, The Maine Monitor; Lauren Dake, Oregon Public Broadcasting; Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth; Louis Hansen, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO; Mary Steurer and Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor; Kate McGee, The Texas Tribune; Alyse Pfeil, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune; and Shauna Sowersby, The Seattle Times

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

In Virginia this year, a legislative committee killed a bill that would have required lawmakers to disclose any crypto holdings. In New Mexico, the Democratic governor vetoed legislation that would have required lobbyists to be more transparent about what bills they were trying to kill or pass. And in North Dakota, where voters who were galvanized by a group called BadAss Grandmas for Democracy established a state ethics commission nearly seven years ago, lawmakers continued a pattern of limiting the panel’s power.

At a time when the bounds of government ethics are being stretched in Washington, D.C., hundreds of ethics-related bills were introduced this year in state legislatures, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures’ ethics legislation database. While legislation strengthening ethics oversight did pass in some places, a ProPublica analysis found lawmakers across multiple states targeted or thwarted reforms designed to keep the public and elected officials accountable to the people they serve.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers tried to push through bills to tighten gift limits, toughen conflict-of-interest provisions or expand financial disclosure reporting requirements. Time and again, the bills were derailed.

With the help of local newsrooms, many of which have been part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, we reviewed a range of legislation that sought to weaken or stymie ethics regulations in 2025. We also spoke to experts for an overview of trends nationwide. Their take: The threats to ethics standards and their enforcement have been growing.

“Donald Trump has been ushering a new cultural standard, in which ethics is no longer significant,” said Craig Holman, a veteran government ethics specialist with the progressive watchdog nonprofit Public Citizen. He pointed to Trump’s private dinner with top buyers of his cryptocurrency and the administration’s tariff deal with Vietnam after it greenlit the Trump Organization’s $1.5 billion golf resort complex; and he said in an email it was “most revealing” that the White House “for the first time in over 16 years has no ethics policy. Trump 2.0 simply repealed Biden’s ethics Executive Order and replaced it with nothing.”

The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that pushes for ethics enforcement, documented the risks and challenges that specifically confront state ethics commissions across the country. Such commissions have a range of mandates, but they often enforce lobbying, campaign finance and conflicts of interest laws. In the center’s 2024 Threat Assessment report, it warned that “those who want to weaken ethics commissions are becoming more creative with how they approach their attacks, and all commissions should be battle ready.”

Delaney Marsco, the center’s director of ethics and the report’s lead author, told ProPublica, “Any attempts to chip away at ethics commission authority is actually just chipping away at the public’s right to know what’s actually going on in their government.”

Louisiana passed a law significantly weakening ethics standards by making it harder for the state Board of Ethics to launch and conduct investigations. The law raised the bar on when the 15-member board could launch its own investigation from “reason to believe” to “probable cause.” And where the board had been required to investigate any sworn complaint it received, now two-thirds of its members must agree probable cause exists before opening an inquiry.

The law, which had overwhelming bipartisan support, targets the processes that resulted in ethics charges against then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now the governor; the private lawyer defending him against those charges helped craft the legislation. The ethics commission dropped the charges last month as part of a settlement deal.

Sponsoring Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican, said that checks on the board’s power were needed in response to overzealous enforcement actions.

But more often, legislators stood in the way of ethics reforms.

In South Carolina, a sweeping Statehouse corruption probe during the 2010s led to the convictions of several legislative leaders and to the passage of a number of ethics reforms. “It’s been radio silent ever since,” Sen. Sean Bennett, a Summerville Republican who chairs the chamber’s Ethics Committee, told The Post and Courier. “There’s been attempts to do things, but they just have not gotten a lot of traction.”

And this year, legislators there moved in the other direction, introducing a bill that would have exempted government appointees from having to file statements of economic interest. These statements, required for all elected officials, most candidates for elected office and certain high-profile public figures like commission members or school district employees, include the disclosure of everything from an individual’s income sources and gifts received from special interests to any property or business interests in their name.

Sponsoring Rep. Mike Burns, a conservative Republican from the college town of Tigerville, argued the bill would help protect nonpaid appointees, who he said end up with fines because they often don’t know how to correctly file.

But in an interview with The Post and Courier, Rep. Roger Kirby, a Democrat from Lake City, pushed back. “Transparency is what the goal is, right? Why would we try to back away from that?”

South Carolina has two-year sessions, and the bill remains stalled in committee.

And in another example of legislation that sought to weaken reform, the leader of Oregon’s Senate Republicans at the time, Daniel Bonham, made a Hail-Mary effort and introduced a measure to dissolve the state’s ethics commission and allow state agencies to police themselves. The measure didn’t get out of committee, which, Bonham acknowledged in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, was what he expected. Still, Bonham said he believes the ethics commission is “feckless” and its effectiveness and purpose merit “robust public debate.”

Across the country, even when some legislators did attempt to push forward ethics reforms, their efforts were largely blocked:

• Virginia: Office holders would have been required to disclose digital assets, specifically defined as cryptocurrency, on their state ethics submissions. The disclosure would have been mandatory for any employee or elected official required to file a statement of economic interests with the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council. Among those covered: the governor, cabinet members, General Assembly members, state officers and employees, judges and constitutional officers. The bill’s sponsor argued that without public disclosure, Virginia lawmakers, cabinet officials and judges who own digital currency could have potential conflicts of interest in creating new laws and regulating the industry. But the bill failed amid bipartisan opposition. Several lawmakers questioned whether it would open the door to further disclosure requirements.
• Texas: Multiple state lawmakers filed legislation to combat misinformation and disinformation in political ads and to make it clearer who was paying for ads that might contain altered images or audio. The legislation followed a bruising 2024 primary campaign in which former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, faced a barrage of false and misleading ads. One featured Phelan’s face superimposed over that of U.S. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who was shown hugging former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Related bills failed in both the House and Senate, where opponents dismissed arguments that voters were struggling to determine fact from misinformation. Conservative critics of the measure cited free speech concerns, among others.
• North Dakota: Legislators stopped efforts to give more power and resources to the state’s ethics commission, which a successful ballot initiative created nearly seven years ago. The commission sought more freedom over how and when it conducts investigations, including the ability to carry out investigations even when no formal complaint was filed. Commission staff said the requirement for formal complaints dissuades some people from coming forward. But opposing lawmakers, nearly all of them Republican, said the measure lacked sufficient checks and balances on the commission’s power, echoing strong opposition from the governor and attorney general.
• New Mexico: Democratic legislators made two runs at transparency. The first required lobbyists to disclose bills and their position on those bills within 48 hours of starting that lobbying or changing position. The legislation passed but was vetoed by the Democratic governor, who said the bill lacked clarity and the reporting window was too restrictive. Another ethics bill aimed to prevent nonprofits making independent political expenditures from exploiting a loophole in a 2019 campaign finance law requiring them to publicly disclose donor names, addresses and contribution amounts. That bill was ultimately killed under pressure from nonprofits that feared its effects.
• Connecticut: The Office of State Ethics sought to expand conflict-of-interest provisions to prevent state officials and employees from taking official actions, such as awarding contracts, that would benefit their private employers or the private employers of their spouses. The bill also would have required public officials to recuse themselves if they have “actual knowledge” that the companies for which they or their spouses work would benefit. The legislation stalled, as it has repeatedly over the last decade and a half. This time, the office’s executive director, Peter Lewandowski, said objections came from those who argued that requiring lawmakers to recuse themselves because a vote might benefit a spouse’s private employer was too punitive.
• Maine: A bill died in committee that would have required state legislators to disclose donations made to an organization by lobbyists or lobbyist associates on behalf of a legislator. Supporters, including sponsoring Sen. David Haggan, a Republican, said the bill would have increased transparency and also would have allowed the public to determine how prevalent the practice is. Critics called it impractical and questioned its necessity. The bill “adds a level of complexity that is not warranted by any behavior that anyone has been able to cite specifically,” said Sen. Jill Duson, a Democrat, who voted against it.

But ProPublica’s analysis did find some states, both red and blue, that had successfully enacted reforms. For example, in Maine, a bipartisan push for a waiting period of one year for legislative staff who want to become lobbyists won overwhelming support. Rhode Island’s Democratic legislative supermajority and its Democratic governor agreed on a prohibition against bid-rigging for state contracts. And in Oklahoma, lawmakers went so far as to overturn the governor’s veto to make self-dealing by government officials a felony offense, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison. The governor said in his veto message the legislation would “create excessive bureaucracy with little meaningful impact.”

In Washington, legislators put into law a preexisting state requirement that lawmakers report on their financial disclosure forms any interest greater than 10% in a company or property. Though the bill was framed as a cleanup measure, critics pointed out that local officials are held to a much stricter standard. Local officials must disclose any financial interest greater than 1% when voting on a public contract and must recuse themselves.

What if “a real estate company offers a legislator a 5% interest in property that might benefit from a state project such as a highway interchange?” Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat, asked in an example reported by The Seattle Times.

The 10% standard, he said, “undermines trust in the Legislature.”

by T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, Kirsten Berg and Brett Murphy

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In August 2020, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, went to the U.S. ambassador with an extraordinary request. Salvadoran authorities had intercepted a conversation between a journalist and a U.S. embassy contractor about corruption among high-level aides to the president.

The contractor, a U.S. citizen, was no ordinary source. He collaborated with U.S. and Salvadoran investigators who were targeting the president’s inner circle. Over the previous year, he had helped an FBI-led task force uncover a suspected alliance between the Bukele government and the MS-13 street gang, which was responsible for murders, rapes and kidnappings in the United States. He had worked to gather evidence that the president’s aides had secretly met with gang bosses in prison and agreed to give them money and protection in exchange for a reduction in violence. The information posed a threat to the Bukele government.

Bukele wanted the contractor out of the country — and in Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, he had a powerful American friend. Johnson was a former CIA officer and appointee of President Donald Trump serving in his first diplomatic post. He had cultivated a strikingly close relationship with the Salvadoran president. After Bukele provided Johnson with the recordings, the ambassador immediately ordered an investigation that resulted in the contractor’s dismissal.

It was not the only favor Johnson did for Bukele, according to a ProPublica investigation based on a previously undisclosed report by the State Department’s inspector general and interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran officials. The dismissal of the contractor was part of a pattern in which Johnson has been accused of shielding Bukele from U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement, ProPublica found. Johnson did little to pursue the extradition to the United States of an MS-13 boss who was a potential witness to the secret gang pact and a top target of the FBI-led task force, officials said.

After he stepped down as ambassador, Johnson continued his support for the Salvadoran president despite the Biden administration’s efforts to curb Bukele’s increasing authoritarianism. He also played a prominent role in making Bukele Trump’s favorite Latin American leader, according to interviews and public records.

Johnson’s tight friendship with Bukele troubled top State Department officials in the Biden administration, who asked his successor, Jean Manes, to look into the firing of the contractor. She reached a blunt conclusion, according to the inspector general’s report: “Bukele requested Johnson remove [the contractor] and that was what happened.”

“Manes explained that [the contractor] was working on anti-corruption cases against individuals close to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Manes believed removing [him] was a way to ensure the investigations stopped,” the report said.

ProPublica has also learned that Manes’ review led to an extreme measure: She forced the ouster of the CIA station chief, a longtime friend of Johnson, because she felt he was “too close” to Bukele, according to the inspector general report. Senior State Department and White House officials said they suspected that Johnson’s continuing relationships with the station chief and Bukele fomented resistance within the embassy to the new U.S. policy confronting the Salvadoran president over corruption and democracy issues, according to interviews.

“Manes would go see Bukele to convey U.S. concerns about some of his policies. Then the station chief would go see him and say the opposite,” said Juan Sebastian Gonzalez, who received regular briefings about the embassy as the former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

ProPublica is not identifying the former station chief or the contractor to protect their safety.

After battling Bukele in public and her own embassy in private, Manes announced a pause in diplomatic relations and left El Salvador in late 2021. Days later, Johnson posted a photo on LinkedIn that sent a defiant message to the Biden administration: It showed him and Bukele smiling with their families in front of a Christmas tree at the Johnson home in Miami.

“It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele,” Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, left, wrote in a Nov. 30, 2021, post on LinkedIn. (Ronald Johnson via LinkedIn)

The bond between the two men was at the center of a fierce political conflict that spread in Washington, San Salvador and Miami. Today, Johnson and Bukele — once minor players in U.S. foreign affairs — have emerged from the fray triumphant. On April 9, the Senate confirmed Johnson as ambassador to Mexico, arguably the most important U.S. embassy in Latin America. On April 14, Trump met with Bukele in the White House to celebrate an agreement that would allow the U.S. to deport hundreds of immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison, elevating the global stature of the leader of one of the hemisphere’s smallest and poorest countries.

Johnson’s detractors accuse him of championing Bukele despite his increasing abuses of power.

“We didn’t have a credible or effective U.S. representative in that country. We had a mouthpiece for the government of El Salvador,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime foreign policy aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

Johnson’s defenders argue that his strong ties to the Salvadoran president benefited U.S. policy objectives. Upon arriving in El Salvador, Johnson told his staff that he wanted Bukele’s support in reducing U.S.-bound immigration, the Trump administration’s top priority with the country.

“During Trump and Johnson’s time, the thinking was let El Salvador be El Salvador,” said Carlos Ortiz, the former attache for the Department of Homeland Security at the embassy, who describes himself as a friend and admirer of Johnson. “Let them deal with their own corruption. The U.S. focus was migration.”

A State Department spokesperson said it was “false” that Johnson had blocked or impeded any law enforcement efforts in order to protect Bukele or his allies and that the allegations made by Manes in the inspector general report were untrue.

In addition, Tommy Pigott, the department’s principal deputy spokesperson, praised Johnson for having “always prioritized our national interests and the safety of the American people above all else.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s and President Bukele’s strong leadership, we are ensuring our region is safer from the menace of vicious criminal gangs,” Pigott said. “Secretary Rubio looks forward to continuing to work with regional allies, including the Salvadoran government, in our joint efforts to counter illegal immigration and to advance mutual interests.”

The department provided a written statement from Johnson highlighting the Salvadoran president’s achievements.

“Our cordial relationship was based on honest and frank dialogue to advance issues of mutual benefit for both of our nations,” Johnson said. “President Bukele has continued to maintain widespread popularity and high approval ratings in his homeland. He transformed El Salvador from the murder capital of the world to one of the safest countries worldwide.”

Spokespeople for the CIA and Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to the State Department. The Salvadoran government did not respond to requests for comment.

Johnson arrives as the new U.S. ambassador to El Salvador in September 2019 and presents Bukele with his credentials during a visit to the Casa Presidencial. (Camilo Freedman/APHOTOGRAFIA/Getty Images) The Gang Pact

Manes had the unusual distinction of serving as the top U.S. diplomat in El Salvador twice — once before Johnson and once after.

She first arrived in El Salvador in 2016, as an appointee of President Barack Obama. It was her first ambassadorship. Manes earned a degree in foreign policy from Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell, the television preacher and activist, and a master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C. She joined the State Department in 1992 and served in cultural, educational and public affairs posts in several Latin American countries as well as in Afghanistan and Syria. Although more politically conservative than many of her diplomatic colleagues, she developed a reputation as a nonpartisan, hard-edged professional. Manes declined to comment for this article.

When Manes arrived, Bukele, the son of a wealthy executive of Palestinian descent, was mayor of San Salvador. Manes and Bukele got along well. In 2019, the 37-year-old Bukele ran for president as a populist outsider promising to defeat crime and corruption in a nation with one of the world’s worst homicide rates and a history of former presidents being charged with crimes. His political coalition defeated the traditional power blocs of left and right. The most dangerous national security threat that the new president faced was the MS-13 street gang, which the U.S. government had designated as a transnational criminal organization and the Salvadoran government as a terrorist group.

Manes admired Bukele’s reformist zeal, former colleagues said. During conversations after his election victory, Bukele assured her that he was devoted to rooting out lawlessness, even in his own party, and asked for the embassy’s support.

“Go after my people first, crack down on anyone who is corrupt, and on MS-13,” he said, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the conversations.

Bukele, though, had already been publicly accused of cutting deals with MS-13 and another gang while he was mayor. U.S. and Salvadoran investigators soon learned that the new president’s senior aides had entered into secret negotiations with the leaders of MS-13 who were imprisoned in El Salvador, according to U.S. court records, Treasury Department sanctions, interviews and news accounts.

Osiris Luna, Bukele’s prison director, and Carlos Marroquin, a presidential ally in charge of social welfare programs, reached an agreement with the gang’s ruling council, known as the Ranfla, according to U.S. court documents and interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement officials. It was a more expansive deal than those struck by previous Salvadoran governments, which had offered the gang jailhouse perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions. Marroquin and Luna have not responded to requests for comment.

The council, which controlled tens of thousands of MS-13 members across the U.S., Mexico and Central America from prison, agreed to decrease killings and provide votes for Bukele’s party in exchange for financial incentives and political influence. According to court documents, the gang chiefs also asked the president’s men for an important guarantee: protection from extradition to the United States.

Homicide rates soon plummeted. Today, El Salvador is one of the safest countries in the Americas, and Bukele is one of the region’s most popular politicians. But the secret truce with the gangs made his government a target of the FBI-led multi-agency team, which was known as Joint Task Force Vulcan.

Trump had vowed to defeat MS-13 during his campaign and, in August 2019, created Vulcan to dismantle the gang. Its strategy was similar to the fight against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerillas. Led by a Justice Department prosecutor in New York, the team combined agents from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and other agencies based around the United States and operating in El Salvador and neighboring countries.

The initial focus was to build cases against gang bosses on racketeering, terrorism and drug charges and extradite them to the United States. Soon, though, leads from informants and wiretaps spurred federal agents to expand their investigation to examine the deals between the gang and top Bukele officials, according to interviews and U.S. court records. As ProPublica has previously reported, Vulcan agents even filed a request with the Treasury Department to canvass U.S. banks for any signs that Bukele and other Salvadoran political figures close to him had laundered U.S. Agency for International Development funds as part of the deal with MS-13. The result of that request is unclear.

Vulcan also cooperated with a team of Salvadoran prosecutors who were accumulating their own evidence about the gang pact and a network of suspected graft that allegedly included the president’s inner circle.

The potential revelation of a secret deal posed a threat to Bukele because it could undermine his reputation as a crimefighter and expose him to possible criminal charges in the U.S. and El Salvador.

The Friendship

A month after the launch of the task force, Johnson succeeded Manes as ambassador.

He knew El Salvador, having led combat operations there as an Army Green Beret — one of 55 U.S. military advisers to the Salvadoran armed forces in the bloody civil war against leftist rebels in the 1980s, according to former U.S. officials and an online biography of Johnson.

“One of my specific tasks was to teach the soldiers respect for human rights,” Johnson said in his written response to ProPublica.

After rising to the rank of colonel, Johnson left the Army in 1998 and joined the CIA for a second career that included assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and at U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Special Operations Command in Florida.

Johnson and Bukele came from different worlds. Johnson, now 73, grew up in Alabama. He was a devout Christian, favored suits and ties, and spoke with a Southern drawl. “I was raised in a small town and I was honored to work in the military as well as the CIA,” Johnson said in his statement to ProPublica.

Photos from early in his career show Johnson posing with weapons and fellow commandos in Latin America and other locales. As ambassador, he once parachuted out of a plane at a Salvadoran airshow.

Bukele was more than 20 years younger. He cultivated a hip image, wearing jeans, colorful socks and an assortment of sunglasses. He was adept at communicating on social media and posted frequently on X. He talked about reinventing his strife-torn nation as a mecca for bitcoin, surfing and tourism.

Almost immediately, though, it became clear the two had buena onda — a good vibe. Soon after his arrival, Johnson posted an X message quoting Bukele.

“I believe that with the United States, we have an alliance,” it read. “But I believe that with Ambassador Johnson and his wife, Alina, we will have a personal friendship.” Johnson shared the sentiment. In a recent interview, he recalled that he had “developed a very close personal relationship” with the president.

About three weeks after Johnson became ambassador, Bukele visited Trump in New York — the first Latin American leader to hold an official one-on-one meeting with the president in his first term. Trump lauded Bukele for being an enthusiastic ally in fighting MS-13 and in containing illegal immigration flows in Central America. In a post on X, Johnson declared, “If this isn’t a demonstration of the strength of our bilateral relationship, I don’t know what is.”

“Johnson was very successful in El Salvador, in developing a relationship with Bukele, in convincing Trump that El Salvador mattered,” said Thomas Shannon Jr., a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat who has worked in Washington as a lobbyist for the Bukele government.

Johnson and Bukele documented their growing friendship on social media. One post showed Johnson and his wife boating with Bukele and his family on an estuary in El Salvador. Another showed the ambassador and president eating cracked stone crab claws at a restaurant. They held joint press conferences and often dined together, according to interviews. Johnson’s embrace of the president struck some of his critics in El Salvador and Washington as excessive for a diplomat.

“Johnson insinuated himself into Bukele’s family and circle in a way that made some people in the U.S. government at the time uncomfortable,” Shannon said.

Others, however, believed that Johnson used his access as leverage in dealing with Bukele.

“He was trying to use his relationship in order to advance U.S. policy and U.S. objectives,” said a former embassy employee who served during Johnson’s ambassadorship. “He did so in a much more personal way.”

Johnson’s approach reflected his experience cultivating sources as a former intelligence officer, but that did not mean he was always in control, said a former Trump administration official familiar with the matter.

“Johnson wasn’t just recruiting Bukele. What’s remarkable is that Bukele was recruiting him,” the official said. “They were recruiting each other. It was a relationship in which Bukele had power.”

Bukele speaks during the opening ceremony in El Salvador for the 2021 International Surfing Association World Surfing Games. (Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images) The Dismissal

As the friendship blossomed, U.S. embassy officers kept Johnson informed about the increasing evidence of the gang pact and high-level corruption, according to former U.S. officials. Officers in law enforcement and intelligence briefed the ambassador regularly, the officials said.

In mid-2020, investigators had a major breakthrough.

Luna, the president’s national director of prisons, made contact with U.S. embassy law enforcement officials, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the case. During a meeting at a discreet site, he admitted that he was part of talks with the gang but said that he was following Bukele’s orders, the officials said. He discussed the possibility of giving testimony as a protected witness in exchange for him and his family being brought to the United States.

Luna’s reluctance to testify against Bukele in a U.S. court caused the deal to fall through, but Vulcan investigators now had an insider account implicating the president, officials said.

“It was huge,” said a former official familiar with the case. “One of the strongest keys was when Osiris tells us, ‘I want you to know this isn’t me negotiating with gangs. This is Bukele’ — and other top aides — ‘and I don’t want to be the fall guy for them.’”

Bukele has publicly denied such allegations and has not been charged.

That August, a reporter for El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, was chasing an exclusive story to expose the gang pact. The story would feature voluminous evidence, including Salvadoran intelligence reports, government documents and even prison logs recording the visits of Luna and other Bukele aides to MS-13 leaders.

Bukele had been waging a harassment campaign against El Faro, which had aggressively covered corruption in his government. His security forces had installed Pegasus, the Israeli spyware, on the phones of some reporters, according to interviews and an investigation by researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

One of the intercepted conversations was between the journalist and the U.S. embassy contractor. Well respected at the embassy and among Salvadoran officials, the contractor oversaw U.S.-funded cooperation programs for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The American was working closely with the Vulcan investigators in the U.S. and El Salvador as well as the Salvadoran prosecutors collaborating with the task force. The intercepts indicated that he was providing information to the reporter, according to the inspector general report and interviews. ProPublica has learned that the contractor relayed information including handwritten Salvadoran documents about the gang negotiations.

After Bukele asked for the contractor’s removal, Johnson ordered an investigation by embassy security officials. They determined that the contractor had unauthorized contact with the El Faro reporter and that he had misled them about the contact, according to the inspector general’s report.

But there was something else: The U.S. security officials also worried about possible retaliation against the contractor. It was a remarkable acknowledgement that the Bukele government might resort to harming an American working for the embassy, especially given the president’s friendship with Johnson, according to the report and interviews.

The embassy security office’s “biggest concern, though, was [the contractor’s] safety because” his “statements to the press upset the El Salvadoran government and there was concern that [he] became a target of the El Salvadoran government,” the report said.

As a result of the investigation, embassy officials decided not to renew the employee’s contract, effectively dismissing him. He left the country at the direction of his supervisors in Washington within weeks of Bukele’s conversation with Johnson. The contractor retained a good reputation in Washington and has continued to work for the State Department on overseas assignments.

News of the case ricocheted among Latin America experts working in the White House, Capitol Hill and think tanks.

“It is highly, highly abnormal for an ambassador to dismiss an embassy staffer at the request of a foreign president,” said a former Hill staffer.

Senior U.S. officials questioned Johnson’s handling of the incident.

“Johnson’s reaction should have been, why are you spying on my staff? That’s the right answer for any U.S. ambassador,” said a former State Department official familiar with embassy operations in El Salvador.

In response to questions about the incident, the State Department said the “surveillance of U.S. personnel is not tolerated.”

In her review of the case, Manes would later express concern about “the issue of a foreign president requesting the removal of an embassy employee,” according to the inspector general report. She said the employee spoke regularly with the press as part of his job, “so that was not a deal-breaker,” according to the report. She was “not convinced [he] provided false statements” during the inquiry ordered by Johnson.

Manes wondered whether the contractor “had been let go appropriately, or had been unjustifiably removed at the request of Bukele.” She said she was unable to answer that question “with the information provided to her,” according to the report.

Johnson commented about the matter this year during his Senate confirmation hearing. Questioned by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he defended himself but made no mention of Bukele’s role in the contractor’s departure.

“I was a little surprised when I heard that he had had an unauthorized meeting with a member of the press,” Johnson testified, “and I did what I think any manager would do at that point. I called in his department heads and I called in security and I said, ‘We need to investigate this and determine whether or not these accusations are true. And if they are true, I think we need to determine what kind of information might have been passed.’ And I deferred to his boss, really, as to what the final disposition should be in that case.”

The contractor’s removal led to a decline in U.S. embassy cooperation with Salvadoran anti-corruption prosecutors who were funded, trained and assisted by the State Department and other agencies, a former Salvadoran official told ProPublica.

“Nobody really replaced him,” the former law enforcement official said. “He was the most active of the Americans working with us.”

“El Salvador’s Battles”

Other events deepened concerns about whether Johnson was shielding Bukele and his allies from U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement.

Johnson made clear to embassy staff that the Trump administration’s top issue in El Salvador was cooperation on immigration. In 2018, Trump had accused the Salvadoran government of letting MS-13 “killers” return to the United States after their deportation.

“El Salvador just takes our money,” Trump had declared in a post on X.

After Bukele became president, the governments signed an agreement allowing the U.S. to send refugees seeking asylum to El Salvador to await the outcome of their cases there. The Bukele government also deployed more than 1,000 officers to the border with Guatemala to prevent the smuggling of U.S.-bound migrants. And Salvadoran authorities permitted the continued arrival of U.S. deportation flights during the pandemic.

As a result, Bukele’s standing at the White House increased. During the early days of COVID-19, Trump told Bukele in a phone call that the U.S. would donate hundreds of ventilators to El Salvador. Trump said on X, “They have worked well with us on immigration at the Southern Border!”

Bukele posted this photo with Johnson speaking to President Donald Trump in April 2020 about El Salvador’s request for help with ventilators during the pandemic. (Nayib Bukele via X)

Johnson seemed to show less interest in the Vulcan investigation, former U.S. officials said. “We are not here to fight El Salvador’s battles,” Johnson would tell embassy employees.

“His general demeanor was do not push things that upset Bukele — he is our No. 1 ally on migration,” a former U.S. official said.

One of Vulcan’s early accomplishments was the first use of terrorism charges against an MS-13 leader. The allegations against Armando Melgar Díaz, alias Blue, included kidnapping, drug trafficking and approving the murder of U.S. citizens. Trump even had a press conference to announce the indictment. Prosecutors sent the Bukele government an extradition request for Melgar, who was jailed in El Salvador at the time, according to Salvadoran court records.

In a post on X from his official embassy account, Johnson promised that Melgar was going to “face justice thanks to cooperation between authorities.”

Despite that pledge, months passed without progress. U.S. and Salvadoran officials worried that Johnson was not applying pressure on Bukele about a request that Vulcan investigators expected to be an “easy win.”

“Ron Johnson didn’t do much to extradite Blue,” said a former State Department official with knowledge of the embassy. The Bukele government eventually denied the request. U.S. law enforcement officials suspected that Melgar knew inside details about the secret gang pact. He is believed to remain in a Salvadoran prison.

Johnson was also not entirely forthcoming in communications back to Washington, D.C., according to the former official, who said embassy staff told him that the ambassador blocked information in diplomatic cables about the pact between Bukele and MS-13.

“It was pretty clear that Ronald Johnson was so close that he absolutely did protect Bukele from allegations that Bukele was negotiating with the gangs,” the former official said.

Ortiz, the former DHS attache, defended Johnson. “Ambassador Johnson wouldn’t shelter Bukele,” he said. As “a former CIA officer, he knew how to navigate where he was close to someone but not cover for them. His interest was the interest of the United States, and the U.S. had a great relationship with El Salvador.”

Critics said Johnson’s hands-off approach was evident in his response to the biggest political crisis of his tenure. In February 2020, the Salvadoran legislature resisted Bukele’s proposal to seek a $109 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration for new vehicles and equipment for the police and military. The president responded by calling a special session and flooding the assembly with armed troops.

Following orders from Bukele, Salvadoran army soldiers occupy the Legislative Assembly in February 2020. (Salvador Melendez/AP Images)

Many Salvadorans and human rights advocates were aghast at the sight of soldiers trying to pressure the lawmakers. It evoked Latin America’s bleak history of dictatorial rule. At the time, the U.S. Embassy denied any role.

“Neither Ambassador Johnson nor any Embassy official had prior knowledge of what was to happen,” the embassy said in a statement to El Faro after the incident.

During his Senate hearing this year, though, Johnson admitted that he had talked with Bukele just before he sent in the troops. Johnson testified that he privately urged the president to refrain from the military show of force.

“Something that few people know is that I was in contact with him moments before he made the decision, and I was telling him not to go. ‘Do not do this,’” he told lawmakers. He also testified that he had criticized Bukele in public.

For human rights advocates, Johnson’s reluctance to forcefully criticize Bukele at the time was a sign of his undue deference to the Salvadoran leader.

“Johnson was an ally of the president and not civil society, not the democratic forces in the country,” said Noah Bullock, the executive director of Cristosal, a leading human rights organization. “There was no distance between him and Bukele.”

Johnson’s term ended after only 17 months, when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. Before Johnson left, Bukele created El Salvador’s highest honor and made the ambassador the first recipient of the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán.

“A great friend is leaving,” Bukele declared at the ambassador’s farewell ceremony.

Johnson receives the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán from Bukele before departing El Salvador in 2021. (Gobierno de El Salvador via YouTube) Manes Returns

A little more than three months after Johnson’s departure, Bukele unleashed an assault on the judiciary. The Salvadoran legislature, dominated by the president’s ruling coalition, removed five Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. At least eight Salvadoran officials who had been investigating MS-13 and corruption, including some who had worked with Vulcan agents, fled the country after threats, harassment, and searches of their homes and offices.

Critics in El Salvador declared that the president had engineered a “self-coup.” Bukele began calling himself the “world’s coolest dictator.”

Newly installed Biden administration officials watched the crisis with alarm. Concerned that Bukele was turning El Salvador into an autocracy, they broke with Trump’s policy.

Soon after the purge of the judiciary, State Department officials announced they were sending Manes back to El Salvador as the interim chargé d’affaires, the term for a temporary ambassador. They directed her to stand up to Bukele, according to the inspector general’s report and interviews. Her superiors saw her as a natural choice because of her constructive relationship with Bukele during her term as ambassador.

“She was brought back as a message that we won’t have business as had been conducted,” said a former high-ranking State Department official.

Jean Manes, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, in her office in San Salvador on April 23, 2019. (Daniele Volpe/The New York Times)

A top State Department official asked her to conduct an “assessment” of the embassy, including the contractor’s dismissal, according to the inspector general report and interviews. The official told her he had concerns “about the dynamics” at the embassy, the report said. Gonzalez, the former National Security Council official, said senior policymakers thought that embassy staff were showing favoritism to Bukele, sending reports that minimized the growing crisis of democracy in El Salvador.

Upon arriving at the embassy, Manes ran up against a group of senior staff, mostly law enforcement and intelligence officials who were not members of the Vulcan task force. She accused them of undercutting her leadership because of their loyalty to Johnson and rapport with Bukele, according to the report and interviews.

Manes laid out her findings about Johnson “loyalists” in a memo and other written communications, former officials said. To regain control, she issued a drastic order: Embassy personnel “were not to have communications with Bukele government officials,” the inspector general report said. In practice, that meant the staff stopped meeting with senior Salvadoran officials and had to get approval from Manes and her top deputies to engage with others, according to former senior embassy officials.

A former senior embassy official criticized Manes’ handling of the feud. “It got pretty ugly,” the official said in an interview. “She wanted to micromanage everything.”

One opponent was especially nettlesome: the CIA station chief. Early in his tenure as ambassador, Johnson had helped secure his appointment to head the CIA station, former officials said. Like Johnson, he had served as a military adviser in El Salvador years earlier. Also, like Johnson, the station chief had an unusually friendly relationship with Bukele. Manes learned that he was meeting with Bukele on a regular basis, often having breakfast with him. Bukele would also visit the station chief’s home, according to a former U.S. official.

“Former Ambassador Johnson and the section chief were close friends and were close to Bukele and members of Bukele’s government,” an embassy employee later told an investigator, according to the inspector general report.

Rather than support the new mission to confront Bukele over backsliding on human rights and democracy, the CIA officer defended the president, former U.S. officials said.

“He tried very hard to undermine the notion that Bukele was consolidating and centralizing power or acting to dismantle Salvadoran institutions,” said the former State Department official familiar with the embassy.

The interlocking friendships among Johnson, the station chief and Bukele led Biden administration officials to believe the former ambassador was influencing opposition to the new U.S. policy — though they did not have concrete proof, former officials said.

“We knew that Johnson and Bukele continued to talk,” Gonzalez said. “The suspicion was that Johnson played a role in the dissidence at the embassy opposing Manes and favoring Bukele.”

After he stepped down as ambassador to El Salvador, Johnson made numerous posts praising Bukele, including this one from August 2024. (Ronald Johnson on Linkedin)

Manes decided to demand that the CIA remove the station chief — an unusual move, but it was within her power to withdraw approval for anyone assigned to the embassy. A senior CIA official questioned the decision, but Manes’ superiors held firm. The station chief was transferred to another country and has since retired, former officials said.

The station chief filed a complaint with the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General, charging that Manes had unfairly dismissed him, among other allegations.

The resulting report cleared Manes of wrongdoing. The former station chief did not respond to a list of questions sent by ProPublica.

As the fight escalated within the embassy, Manes engaged in an increasingly open clash with Bukele. She criticized the replacement of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. She warned that the government was weakening democracy and human rights. And she called for the extraditions of Melgar and other MS-13 senior leaders indicted by the Vulcan task force.

“Extradition is something very important for the United States,” she told the press.

As ProPublica has previously reported, the Bukele administration systematically interfered with extradition efforts and has not sent to the U.S. any of the 27 MS-13 gang chiefs charged by Vulcan prosecutors in indictments in 2021 and 2023.

Top State Department officials traveled to El Salvador to urge Bukele to reverse course. USAID cut funding. Luna, Marroquin and other high-level Salvadoran officials were hit with State Department sanctions that blocked their travel to the U.S.

Bukele did not budge. On X, he blasted Manes for interfering with his country’s internal politics. He published a string of personal WhatsApp messages between them, accusing Manes of asking him to free a politician jailed on corruption charges.

In November 2021, Manes declared a “pause” in Washington’s relations with the Bukele administration and announced that she was leaving her post.

El Salvador and the U.S. had reached a diplomatic nadir. More than a year would pass before a new ambassador was named.

“It’s impossible to think that someone has an interest in our relationship when they’re using their paid media machine to attack the United States every day,” Manes told the press.

The Rehabilitation

A week after Manes’ departure, Johnson posted the image of himself posing with Bukele and their families in front of a Christmas tree.

“It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele,” Johnson wrote on a photo he posted to his LinkedIn account.

On Christmas Eve, Johnson posted holiday wishes to Bukele and his family. The Salvadoran president responded with a jab at Manes and the Biden administration: “Those were the times when ambassadors were sent to strengthen relations between nations.”

The exchange was an early salvo in a campaign not just to rehabilitate Bukele’s reputation in the United States but to make him a MAGA icon. Johnson helped lead this effort, which involved legislators and lobbyists working in Washington, Florida and El Salvador.

It occurred as the Biden administration stepped up its confrontation with the Salvadoran president. In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued more sanctions against Luna and Marroquin, alleging that the Bukele aides negotiated the secret agreement with the MS-13 gang. They also accused Luna and the president’s chief of staff of corruption. Neither responded to requests for comment.

In a criminal indictment, Vulcan prosecutors detailed alleged wrongdoing by senior Bukele officials and the gang’s promise to turn out support for the president’s party in exchange for financial benefits and protection.

In March 2022, for reasons that still remain unclear, the truce between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 fell apart. During a three-day rampage of gang violence, some 80 people died — the deadliest days in El Salvador since its civil war. Bukele struck back with a policy of mano dura — an iron fist. He suspended constitutional protections and rounded up accused gang members without due process. The security forces arrested 70,000 people over the next several years, locking up many of them in CECOT, the maximum-security prison.

The crackdown made Bukele enormously popular in El Salvador. But senior Biden administration officials saw it as a further step toward the dismantling of the nation’s constitutional democracy. Even some in the GOP had misgivings. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who was influential on Latin American issues, expressed ambivalence about Bukele’s actions.

“I’m not a big fan of everything that’s been done out there,” he said during a Senate hearing in 2022. “I’m hoping that we can still have a relationship in El Salvador that’s pragmatic. We don't have to clap or celebrate all the stuff people do that we don’t necessarily think is good. But I also think we have a national interest concern there that needs to be balanced.”

By then, Johnson and others were already deeply engaged in promoting Bukele. Johnson praised the president’s campaign advising Salvadorans on how to stay healthy during COVID-19. At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, he met with El Salvador’s ambassador to the U.S., former beauty queen Milena Mayorga. He continued posting about his visits with Bukele and his family.

Damian Merlo, a lobbyist for Bukele, posted this photo of himself and Johnson at Mar-a-Lago in November 2024. (Damian Merlo on X)

Bukele enlisted Damian Merlo, a well-known lobbyist for Latin American countries and leaders, eventually paying his firm more than $2 million, according to lobbying records. Merlo set up meetings with Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, contacted State Department officials, and spoke to reporters at The New York Times, Fox News and other outlets, lobbying records show. Bukele appeared on “Tucker Carlson Today.” Time magazine featured him on its cover, calling him “the world’s most popular authoritarian.” He spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of the country’s most influential conservative politicians. Johnson attended, posting afterwards that Bukele had delivered “an incredible speech.”

“Johnson’s credibility and Merlo’s instincts helped Bukele connect with MAGA world,” said Shannon, the former diplomat and lobbyist. Merlo did not respond to a detailed set of questions from ProPublica.

First image: Johnson at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2024 with his wife and Bukele. Second image: Johnson posted that it was a “wonderful surprise to spend some time with President Nayib Bukele and the 1st family of El Salvador,” in August 2024. (Ronald Johnson on LinkedIn)

A turning point came in March 2023, when Rubio paid an official visit to El Salvador. Whatever uncertainty he may have had about the Salvadoran leader vanished after his return. Rubio lauded Bukele and mocked the Biden administration’s attempts to pressure him.

“All of a sudden, the crime rate has plummeted. All of sudden, the murder rate has plummeted. All of a sudden, for the first time in decades, people can go out at night,” Rubio said in a video posted online. “So how has the Biden administration reacted to this? By badmouthing the guy, by sanctioning people in the government, by going after them because they’re being too tough and too harsh.”

Johnson hailed Rubio’s newfound admiration.

“I want to thank my friend, Senator Marco Rubio, for going there to visit and for recognizing the progress made by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

In September 2022, Bukele announced his candidacy for reelection. The Salvadoran constitution had limited presidents to a single five-year term, but the Supreme Court, packed with Bukele allies, had allowed him to run again. The decision set off a new round of protests.

Johnson defended the reelection bid during a fireside chat at a conference at Florida International University, where he applauded El Salvador’s progress on security.

“In some recent discussions that I had with people in Washington, D.C., we talked about a second term for President Bukele,” Johnson said. “I said, ‘I think we’re focused on the wrong things. If he runs for a second term in a free and fair election and the people of El Salvador select him for a second term, then isn’t that we do here?’”

Bukele won with 85% of the vote.

The guest list for Bukele’s inauguration on June 1, 2024, illustrated his growing popularity with Republicans. Conservative luminaries including Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Carlson showed up. So did Democratic Reps. Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Lou Correa of California. Also in attendance were Johnson and the former CIA station chief.

Johnson posted these photos of him with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle at events related to Bukele’s second inauguration in June 2024. (Ronald Johnson on LinkedIn)

Afterward, Johnson and Merlo helped arrange a private meeting with Bukele for Sara A. Carter, a former Fox news contributor whom Trump has since nominated to serve as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In a video podcast, Carter recounted a late-night meal of sushi with the Salvadoran president.

“We had the opportunity to meet with Bukele privately, our group, and I want to thank Ambassador Ron Johnson for that and Damian Merlo for that, for making that happen,” she said.

Epilogue

This April, Trump and Bukele met to celebrate a partnership.

“It’s an honor to be here in the Oval Office with the president and leader of the free world,” the Salvadoran president said as they shook hands. “We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with, and we’re a small country, but if we can help, we will do it.”

Bukele meets with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials at the White House in April. (American Photo Archive/Alamy)

Rubio, now secretary of state, and Bukele had reached an agreement in which the Trump administration would send more than 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants to be detained in CECOT. (The Venezuelans were returned to their country in July.)

Bukele’s administration asked for the return to El Salvador of some of the MS-13 gang leaders who had been arrested in Mexico and imprisoned in the United States. The federal prosecutors who had worked to bring the bosses to justice asked a judge to release two of them. Former Vulcan investigators said they believe both have information tying Bukele aides to the gang pact.

A few days before Bukele’s Oval Office meeting with Trump, the Senate approved Johnson on a party-line 49-46 vote as the ambassador to Mexico. He stepped into the job at a time when the Trump administration’s hardline policies — notably the prospect of unleashing U.S. military might against drug cartels — have strained the always complex relationship with Mexico.

“I’m eager to meet Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and ready to work with her administration on issues that are mutually beneficial to both our nations,” Johnson wrote on social media.

Manes’ career has not fared as well. In 2023, the Biden administration nominated her as ambassador to Colombia, one of the top diplomatic posts in Latin America. She seemed a strong candidate until Rubio and other Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced their opposition. Sen. James E. Risch of Idaho cited the inspector general investigation of Manes’ conflict with the station chief as a reason.

“Staff on our side has received complaints about Ms. Manes’ leadership ability, interagency management style and judgment while serving as ambassador in charge in El Salvador,” Risch said at a hearing.

Manes’ defenders pointed out she had been cleared by the internal inquiry and was implementing a policy dictated from Washington.

“She was following a policy that was clearly the guidance of the administration,” a former senior State Department official said in an interview. “It has become very difficult for career officers when their loyal service is seen in the political arena as unacceptable. It’s ironic, given her political views.”

Instead, Manes was named the U.S. representative to UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization in Paris that promotes science and the arts.

This July, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw its participation in the organization.

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Jesse Coburn

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Some 4 million people could lose federal housing assistance under new plans from the Trump administration, according to experts who reviewed drafts of two unpublished rules obtained by ProPublica. The rules would pave the way for a host of restrictions long sought by conservatives, including time limits on living in public housing, work requirements for many people receiving federal housing assistance and the stripping of aid from entire families if one member of the household is in the country illegally.

The first Trump administration tried and failed to implement similar policies, and renewed efforts have been in the works since early in the president’s second term. Now, the documents obtained by ProPublica lay out how the administration intends to overhaul major housing programs that serve some of the nation’s poorest residents, with sweeping reforms that experts and advocates warn will weaken the social safety net amid historically high rents, home prices and homelessness.

“These are rules that are going to cause an enormous amount of hardship for millions of people in communities across the country,” said Will Fischer, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s going to cause people to become homeless, kids to be pulled out of their schools, people to lose their jobs.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which drafted the rules, declined to comment.

The two rules obtained by ProPublica are labeled as drafts and could change before they are officially proposed. At a meeting at HUD headquarters this month, Ben Hobbs, who heads the agency’s public housing office, said the rules were under review at the Office of Management and Budget, according to a HUD official in attendance. (OMB typically reviews proposed rules for compliance with federal standards and consistency with the president’s policies.)

The push to adopt the rules is part of a broad effort to roll back federal housing programs under the current administration. Trump’s budget proposal called for cutting funding for public housing, housing vouchers and other rental assistance by 43%. In March, HUD and the Department of Homeland Security announced a data-sharing agreement targeting so-called mixed-status families, in which some family members are eligible for housing assistance and others are not because they are in the country illegally or have another immigration status that makes them ineligible. More recently, HUD reportedly planned to require all local public housing authorities to identify such families to the federal agency.

Work requirements impart a “renewed sense of purpose for millions of Americans,” in the view of HUD Secretary Scott Turner. Calling welfare a “lifelong trap of dependency” for many, Turner and other senior Trump officials wrote in a joint op-ed, “for able-bodied adults, welfare should be a short-term hand-up, not a lifetime handout.”

Federal housing assistance programs support more than 8 million people by providing units in public housing or subsidies that help cover the cost of rentals on the private market. Under these programs, participants pay a percentage of the rent — generally 30% of their adjusted income — and the government covers the rest. Most of those assisted are elderly, disabled or children. The average family that lives in public housing or receives housing vouchers makes less than $20,000 annually and receives benefits for 10 to 12 years, although non-elderly, non-disabled families typically stay far shorter, according to HUD data.

The first rule would not mandate work requirements and time limits; instead, it permits local housing authorities and landlords to implement them. Hobbs originally wanted the rule to require those policies, but career staffers at HUD persuaded him to make them voluntary, according to a HUD official familiar with the matter. The rule would allow local housing authorities and private landlords to impose work requirements and time limits in four major federal housing programs: public housing, Housing Choice Vouchers, Project-Based Vouchers and Project-Based Rental Assistance (the latter three are part of what is commonly called Section 8). Residents, including both parents in two-parent households, could be required to work up to 40 hours a week. The time limits could be as short as two years, after which residents would lose assistance.

The time limits would apply to any family in which the household heads are not elderly or disabled, with few exceptions. Similarly, the work requirements would apply to residents ages 18 to 61 who are not disabled, pregnant, primary caretakers of young children, college students or in other exempted categories. Housing providers may allow them to perform job training or community service instead of traditional work. Housing providers implementing work requirements would have to offer support services to residents, but what those services are would be up to the providers. HUD expects 750 public housing authorities and 3,500 landlords to implement work requirements or term limits in response to the new rule. Such provisions will likely be adopted first in more conservative parts of the country, Fischer said.

The new regulation asserts that it will promote economic self-sufficiency and free up subsidized housing for millions of people who qualify for assistance but cannot receive it because of the limited amount of housing aid that the government provides.

Housing advocates and researchers expressed a different view. “It’s disguised as work requirements and term limits, but in reality it’s a way to strip families of their benefits,” said Deborah Thrope, deputy director of the National Housing Law Project, an advocacy group. “This is a huge departure from how the HUD programs have been run since their inception.”

Some 4 million people could lose housing assistance, estimated Fischer, Thrope and Katherine O’Regan, a former HUD official and now a professor at New York University. Many of those people could become homeless as a result.

Fischer noted that most non-elderly, non-disabled households receiving assistance already include one or more people who work. But their jobs often come with limited hours and pay, so even working families could lose their assistance as a result of the rule.

There is little evidence that work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency among recipients of housing assistance, according to researchers at NYU. Studies of other welfare policies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have largely found that work requirements do not notably increase employment but do cause people to lose assistance.

The second proposed rule targets mixed-status households. Under long-standing HUD regulations, such families are permitted to live in public housing or receive vouchers, but their benefits are prorated so that the ineligible members receive no assistance and the family pays a greater share of the rent. The proposed rule would change that by making mixed-status families ineligible for assistance, with few exceptions. It would also require U.S. citizens applying for or currently receiving housing assistance to provide documents proving their citizenship, such as birth or naturalization certificates. The authors of the rule argue that it would bring HUD regulations into “greater alignment” with federal law.

The rule could affect 20,000 mixed-status families that receive housing assistance, according to a HUD analysis of the rule obtained by ProPublica; 16,000 of those families include children. They live mainly in California, Texas and New York; the average income of a mixed family of four is below the federal poverty line of $32,000.

The rule would allow the families to keep their assistance if the ineligible member moves out. But, as most of them are families with children, HUD expects virtually all of them to give up assistance out of “fear of the family being separated,” the analysis reads.

HUD’s analysis anticipates that public housing units may initially be left vacant as a result of the proposed rule. Because the regulations would kick out households receiving prorated assistance and replace them with fully eligible households, it will increase the government’s rental assistance costs by up to $370 million each year, according to the analysis. But HUD will not initially increase funding to the local public housing authorities that distribute assistance, so those authorities may have to offer fewer vouchers or leave units unoccupied, HUD expects.

The requirement that residents and applicants prove their citizenship — and that housing providers verify it — could create $100 million in new costs, HUD expects. This new obligation will be especially difficult for homeless and low-income people to fulfill even if they are eligible for assistance, said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It is very likely that people who need assistance the most are not going to be able to receive it because of these additional documentation barriers,” she said.

The first Trump administration proposed a similar rule in 2019 but then received more than 30,000 comments in response, the vast majority in opposition. HUD ultimately did not complete the adoption process before Trump left office. The administration of President Joe Biden withdrew that rule proposal in 2021.

When, or if, HUD publishes the proposed rules, they would then be subject to public comments, which the agency must consider before adopting them — a process that can take months or years. The HUD spokesperson did not respond to questions about when the agency expects to publish and adopt the rules.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica, and Ren Larson, The Assembly

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Slogging through a thick slop of mud and rock, Brian Hill passed the roof that Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters had just ripped off someone’s barn and dumped into his yard. Then he peered into the unrecognizable chaos inside what had been his family’s dream home.

The century-old white farmhouse, surrounded by the rugged peaks of western North Carolina, sat less than 15 yards from the normally tranquil Cattail Creek. As Helene’s rainfall barrelled down the Black Mountains last September, the creek swelled into a raging river that encircled the house. Its waves pounded the walls, tore off doors, smashed windows and devoured the front and back porches.

Brian and his wife, Susie, had just bought the house a year earlier. They had a 30-year mortgage — and, now, no house to live in. Because their home didn’t sit in the 100-year floodplain, they had not purchased flood insurance.

Across Helene’s devastating path through the Southeast, people like the Hills turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA doles out financial help after a major disaster for everything from home repairs to rental assistance. Once she could get a cell signal, Susie applied.

It took months of persistence, but eventually the Hills were among the lucky ones. They received close to $40,000, just shy of the maximum amount FEMA provides for rebuilding and repairs.

But farther up Cattail Creek, a man whose wife was killed in floodwaters said he checked his FEMA application one day and noticed it was marked “withdrawn,” a surprise since he’d received no explanation. Elsewhere in Yancey, another man said he realized FEMA had denied him aid because his birthdate was a year off on his application. A third man said his application — which he filled out just days after hiking down a mountain severely injured — seemingly vanished from the system.

FEMA’s application process can be onerous, particularly for people who’ve lost their homes. And it can be especially daunting for those with lower incomes who may have fewer resources.

An analysis by ProPublica and The Assembly found that among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, the households that got the most housing assistance tended to have the highest incomes. The income disparity is especially stark in Yancey County, where the Hills live.

In North Carolina’s Hardest-Hit Rural Counties, the Highest-Income Homeowners Typically Received the Most FEMA Housing Assistance Notes: Applicant income is self-reported to FEMA. Charts depict the median amount of assistance. The hardest-hit counties are the 10 counties with the highest per-capita rates of homeowners receiving housing assistance. The more rural counties are Ashe, Avery, Haywood, Henderson, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Watauga and Yancey. The chart does not include Buncombe County, which is classified as urban, is the area’s most densely populated county, and is home to many regional and local nonprofits that assisted with FEMA applications and appeals. (Chart: Ren Larson, The Assembly. Sources: Federal Emergency Management Agency Individuals and Households Program, U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Classifications.)

A ProPublica investigation earlier this year found that despite dire warnings from the National Weather Service, many people in Yancey were unaware of the enormity of danger Helene posed. The storm killed 11 people there, the highest per-capita loss of life for any county in North Carolina.

The Hills, who are both public school teachers, do not fall in the highest-income brackets FEMA identified. Households in the middle range tended to get about as much FEMA housing assistance money as the lower-income ones, or even a little less. But experts say the Hills did have something in common with the highest-income households: They had the luxury of time to pursue every dollar of federal aid that they were qualified to receive. That’s because they received full pay for seven weeks while schools were closed. That allowed them to navigate FEMA’s bureaucracy during a crucial time when, for many others, pursuing the aid felt insurmountable.

Our analysis looked at counties with the highest per-capita rate of households receiving FEMA aid for housing assistance, an indicator of where Helene hit people the hardest. Housing assistance includes separate buckets of money that cover both rental assistance and home repairs and rebuilding. Apart from Buncombe County — home to Asheville and by far the most urban county in the region — lower- and middle-income households overall got lower amounts of this aid compared to the highest-income earners.

In some counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much housing assistance as those with lower incomes.

Yet income isn’t supposed to play a role. FEMA aid for home repairs and rebuilding is intended to help begin replacing a primary home or make it safe and habitable again, not restore one to its prior state. In theory, a couple living in a million-dollar home and another in a starter house should be eligible for the same level of assistance. For instance, couples who live alone generally would qualify for aid to cover one bedroom, one bathroom and one refrigerator, even if they had three of each.

FEMA did not respond to ProPublica and The Assembly’s requests for comment. The agency previously told the Government Accountability Office, according to a 2020 report, that it encourages all survivors with property damage to apply, and those with minimal damage are “driving down the average award amount.”

Disparities in who receives FEMA aid have long been known to researchers, including Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies and writes about disasters and publishes the Disaster Dollar Database.

“Disasters pull back the curtain on inequity,” Labowitz said. “It’s a vicious combination of things that make it so much harder for people without a lot of money to get what they need from FEMA.” She pointed to FEMA inspectors who undervalue damage to more modest homes, FEMA’s onerous documentation requirements and a “brutal and discouraging” appeals process.

The agency itself has also known about the problems. Several years ago, NPR obtained an internal FEMA analysis showing that the poorest homeowners received about half as much to rebuild their homes compared with higher-income homeowners. The 2020 GAO report noted that homeowners in communities with the most socioeconomic vulnerabilities, like being below the poverty line and not having a high school diploma, received significantly less assistance than those in less vulnerable communities.

The Hills’ home was destroyed outside, first image, and inside, second image. (Courtesy of the Hills)

The disparity we found in Yancey was equally striking in Haywood County, where water flows down 13 peaks towering above 6,000 feet. Households there making more than $175,000 typically received $11,000 in housing assistance; households below that threshold received about $5,000.

Michelle and Jeff Parker, who live about 70 miles southwest of the Hills, in Haywood, had evacuated during the storm. Like the Hills, they returned to find their house had been filled with water. They too had lost virtually everything, down to their wedding photographs.

Michelle Parker has struggled to get FEMA to cover her rent after her home was flooded by Helene. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)

But the Parkers had been here before. In 2023, they finished repairing their 936-square-foot home after Tropical Storm Fred’s floodwaters filled it with 4 feet of water in 2021. That time, their house had been rebuilt by a state-run program. They received $50,000 from their flood insurance and just $1,644 from FEMA for rental assistance.

When Helene hit just a year after they got back into their home, they decided the risk of rebuilding was too great. Jeff, a former wastewater treatment plant operator, was on disability. Michelle was working as a medical assistant and could take only a couple of weeks off after Helene. They applied for a hazard mitigation buyout, another program offered through FEMA, instead. It would pay them the property’s appraised value before the storm and turn it into green space.

But that process could take years, and their home was unlivable. They figured they would at least get rental assistance from FEMA in the meantime.

The couples’ situations diverged in important ways, and they applied for different pots of FEMA housing assistance. But their journeys underscore how disaster survivors with varying resources are able to navigate FEMA’s application process.

Susie and Michelle spent hours plodding through FEMA’s online system, uploading documents, deciphering bureaucratic letters and making myriad phone calls to the agency.

After weeks of pestering FEMA, the Hills received just under the maximum $42,500 for home repair and rebuild assistance for damage to things like the home’s walls, windows and doors, plus about $9,000 from other FEMA aid programs. The money played a critical role in helping them start rebuilding.

The Parkers received $2,210 for the first two months of rental assistance to help pay for temporary housing. Michelle continued to nag FEMA for months seeking longer-term help; the agency will pay rental assistance for up to 18 months, which could translate to an additional $7,500.

Then Jeff died from cardiac arrest in June at age 56. Michelle felt like she was operating in a fog. She couldn’t handle another stressor.

So when FEMA’s call wait times soared to two to three hours after the deadly Texas floods on July 4, she gave up on pursuing additional rental assistance from FEMA.

“I got tired of calling,” she said.

First image: Michelle’s husband, Jeff, with their Chihuahuas, Cloey and Sweet Pea. Second image: Inside Michelle’s camper. (First image: Courtesy of Michelle Parker. Second image: Jesse Barber for ProPublica.) Michelle’s memorial to her husband and their Chihuahua, Sweet Pea, includes a stuffed animal that plays a recording of Jeff’s voice, a box with the Corvette emblem containing Jeff’s ashes and a box with Sweet Pea’s ashes. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica) The Daunting Process

After disasters strike, households with lower incomes can face major challenges, beginning with the early steps of the rebuilding process, which include finding temporary housing and transportation. Some residents lack reliable internet access or cell service. They have less money to pay professionals for estimates or attorneys for advice. Throw in the added hurdles of rugged topography, and western North Carolina posed particular challenges to those faced with rebuilding after Helene.

Alicia Edwards, who directs the Disaster Relief Project for Legal Aid of North Carolina, said she wasn’t surprised by our analysis, which found that in six of the 10 counties most impacted by Helene, the lowest-income households got less in FEMA’s housing assistance than those at the highest income level.

“People with lower incomes are at a huge disadvantage,” Edwards said.

The application process can be onerous and overwhelming, particularly for people who just survived raging floodwaters and the destruction of their homes and communities. And it can feel downright impossible to navigate for those with less money or other resources.

In Buncombe County, our analysis found the opposite trend. The lowest-income families there typically received more housing assistance than those with higher incomes. It’s also where residents tend to have better access to resources, as many regional nonprofits are based there. Pisgah Legal Services has had an office in Asheville for decades.

Several of the counties with pronounced income disparities are among the most rural counties heavily impacted by Helene. Yancey, Mitchell and Polk all have populations under 21,000.

The region also is home to both higher-income retirees, who can have more free time and more experience navigating complicated finances, and lower-income multigenerational families. In more rural areas, many of the latter tend to distrust the federal government and are reluctant to pursue assistance, said Morgan Monshaugen, disaster recovery program director with the Housing Assistance Corp., a nonprofit that serves Henderson, Polk and Transylvania counties.

A vacant apartment complex, first image, and a mobile home park, second image, in Haywood County, North Carolina, that were damaged by Helene. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)

The month before Helene struck, Tulane University researchers released a literature review of 25 years of research on barriers to equitable disaster recovery. They noted common themes, including the confusing aid process and challenges navigating bureaucracies. They also pointed to research that shows inspectors’ biases and time pressures can play a role.

Before 2020, inspectors would go through a long checklist of items that could qualify for repair or replacement money. Someone with more things could therefore get more aid.

After FEMA changed that system, inspectors now record notes about standardized factors such as roof damage and the height of flood marks inside. The amount of damage puts a household into one of several levels, each of which determines how much and what type of repair and rebuild assistance it can get. Some households get additional money for things like heating, venting and air conditioning or septic systems.

“It shouldn’t have to do with anything other than what was damaged and what was repaired,” Edwards said. But she worries biases can still creep in. “If they feel you are a credible person, they could give you a little more assistance, even subconsciously,” she said.

The agency’s decisions come in the form of mailed letters, each regarding a different pot of money. Some letters might have a dollar amount granted. Others might announce denials. It isn’t always obvious that survivors can appeal — an even more arduous process for many.

“It makes it impossibly hard for people to navigate,” Edwards said.

Four months after Helene hit western North Carolina, debris still remained in Yancey County. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) Hills of Challenge

Susie Hill knew her family would need every dollar they could get to rebuild. So she filled out a FEMA application online and talked to someone at the agency by phone.

Slowly, aid from FEMA started arriving in their bank account — $3,514 first, a set amount for people displaced, then an initial $13,687 for home repair. In October, it reached about $22,000, roughly half of the $42,500 maximum in 2024 for home repair and replacement.

Then the money stopped.

As hope for more aid began to fizzle, Susie pestered FEMA. “I was anxious about getting lost in the mix of so many people across the region in need,” she said. The Hills’ application was one of nearly 1.5 million that FEMA received across the six-state region devastated by Helene.

The Hills got more estimates, uploaded more documents. They set up a GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $53,000. And finally, in late November, they came close to reaching the maximum $42,500 payout from FEMA for home repairs, along with smaller amounts from the agency’s other aid buckets.

“Unfortunately,” Susie said, “I think it is a bit of a socioeconomic situation where we have jobs, where we know people that know people, that maybe have money or that are able to help us, or that have the skills to help us, where other people are just trying to make it day to day.”

Susie Hill (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Yancey is home to the most families per capita — about 175, or roughly 1 in 36 homeowners — who got the top amount of FEMA home rebuild and repair assistance. Our analysis of more than 75,000 North Carolina homeowners who applied for the assistance in the counties hardest hit by Helene found roughly 1,300 homeowners, or just 1.7%, received the maximum payout.

The Hills had decided to relocate their historic house to a spot on their property farther back from the creek. The FEMA money would cover most of that cost, a critical first step toward gutting it and rebuilding.

On an icy cold day in mid-January, house movers put I-beams underneath the water-damaged structure and used hydraulic lifts to raise it. Then, they hauled it to safer ground.

A family in Tennessee donated a camper for the Hills to live in. After three months of bouncing around, they parked it near the shell of their house. Standing at the front door, to the right, they could see the vast destruction along Cattail Creek. To the left, they could watch their home slowly come back to life.

Susie had to wash their clothes at the elementary school where she works. For other things, they used water carried from a neighbor’s well. Brian had to haul the contents of the toilet to the septic tank. But it was a home.

Cattail Creek, now calm, flooded during Helene and destroyed the Hills’ home. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

An hour’s drive away, the Parkers had sought refuge during the storm at Michelle’s mother’s house. Jeff had fractured his ankle two months before the storm and used a wheelchair. They weren’t taking chances after fleeing their home under darkness — Michelle carrying their two Chihuahuas, one under each arm — when Tropical Storm Fred hit three years earlier.

When they returned home after Helene, their shed was gone. Instead, other people’s structures lay in their yard. Inside, the contents looked like everything had been spun around. Their refrigerator lay on its side. The washing machine sat wedged on top of the dryer.

“It ruined everything — everything,” Michelle said. “I was ready to just die right there. I was like, I can’t go through this again.”

First and second images: Michelle’s home shows signs of destruction from Helene almost a year later. Third image: A vacant house near Michelle’s home. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)

A friend set up a GoFundMe, which raised $1,875. The Parkers’ flood insurance paid out $80,000, far below the $209,000 the home had been appraised for a year before. Michelle remembers FEMA offering a free hotel, more than 60 miles away in Tennessee, a distance made farther as Helene’s waters took out parts of Interstate 40. Michelle and Jeff were grateful to receive a donated camper to live in. But their property still had no water or electricity, and they had to rent a place to park it.

The rent for that gravel parking space is $900 a month. Donors paid half, but Michelle has to come up with the rest.

Michelle turned to FEMA. She requested more rental assistance and uploaded an employer letter, a rental agreement, utility bills and a rent receipt. She called FEMA repeatedly.

Michelle and her friend Krista Shalda outside Michelle’s camper. Michelle has struggled to pay the rent for the lot where the camper is parked. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica) “They Are All Gone”

FEMA has faced years of criticism from people applying for assistance. Chief among their complaints: inconsistent payouts, the onerous application process, incomprehensible communication and confusing rules.

Jeremiah Isom lost his home and work tools in the Yancey County floodwaters and has since been living here and there. He’s struggled to find a job and has grappled with a FEMA application, complicated by deaths in his family and property ownership issues. It doesn’t help that he’s reluctant to ask for help, much less aggressively seek it from the federal government. Just plowing through each day is hard enough.

“Everyone is so eaten up with PTSD,” Isom said. “It’s got your head so scrambled.”

FEMA has been working on improving its application process. From 2021 to 2024, it announced changes aimed at improving access and equity, including making home repair money available to underinsured households. Another change cut an onerous rule requiring applicants to first apply for a U.S. Small Business Administration loan, which approved less than 4% of all applicants from 2016 to 2018.

Before President Donald Trump took office in January, FEMA also had spent more than a year hiring a team of engineers, designers and product managers to help modernize the online application process. They faced a key challenge: The back-end system that runs much of the process at disasterassistance.gov is 27 years old.

A key problem is that when survivors check their application status, they often see simply that it’s pending. They get no indication of where the application is in the process or why. The FEMA team was working to change that.

Michael Coen, the agency’s chief of staff when the team was formed, noted that people are used to going on Amazon and getting updates about when their order is out for delivery and when it’s about to arrive. Coen said survivors wonder, “Why can’t FEMA do that?”

Volunteers cut firewood in Swannanoa, North Carolina, four months after Helene hit the region. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Yet since the Trump administration began slashing the agency’s workforce, the team focusing on improvements to the online application process has disintegrated. In January, the team had at least 10 people. Now, it’s down to two. The rest took the deferred resignation offer or were pushed from their posts, current and former FEMA employees told ProPublica and The Assembly.

“They all are gone,” said Alexandra Ferčak, who until May was chief of service delivery enhancement, part of a relatively new office at FEMA. Her team worked closely with the digital team. “We had so much knowledge and expertise, it was unprecedented,” she said.

Without that in-house expertise, major changes are “not going to be effective,” said a FEMA employee who worked with the team but asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.

FEMA did not respond to questions about the team. But in late August, more than 180 current and former FEMA employees signed a public letter to Congress warning that cuts to the agency’s full-time staff risk kneecapping its disaster response capabilities.

In response, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, said she is working hard to “streamline this bloated organization into a tool that actually benefits Americans in crisis.” The agency then suspended most who had signed their names to the letter.

One Year Later

The Hills had their house moved back from Cattail Creek and temporarily propped up until they could get a new foundation laid. But the foundation work depended on the weather, which was varying degrees of terrible all winter.

Heavy rain triggered flashbacks to Helene, and in February it poured. But one Sunday morning, the Hills turned on the gas fireplace in their camper as the temperatures plummeted and the gray rain turned to snowflakes. Despite the gloom outside, they were gleeful.

A retired contractor from Texas volunteering his skills had become the guiding force in their rebuilding. Volunteers from other states also showed up to help. A group from a church in Georgia who work in construction had just visited. They asked what the Hills wanted in their house.

The Hills mostly wanted to add a bathroom so that their daughter, Lucy, who was 9 at the time, would have her own. The men would try to add one. When they left, the Hills went out to dinner using a gift card and declared it the best day ever, or at least something that had been hard to come by since the storm: a great day.

A few months later, a feeling of hope spread across western North Carolina as the dogwoods and redbuds bloomed in puffs of purple and white. Dandelions dotted patches of grass amid the persistent brown muck of mud and fallen trees. Friends and volunteers became fixtures at the Hills’ house. They depended on so much kindness from people. Brian spent every spare minute working on repairs as well.

With help from FEMA and their community, the Hills are rebuilding their home. Signs of normalcy have slowly returned, including a neighbor’s horses coming by to graze. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Without that initial FEMA money, the Hills’ wrecked house might still be sitting in the moonscape of mud and destruction that persists along Cattail Creek. Instead, as summer waned, the house had electricity, siding, floors, insulation, drywall — and a bathroom for Lucy.

On this one-year anniversary of Helene’s destruction, the Hills expect to move back in any day. Thousands of others aren’t even close.

Michelle now lives alone in the camper. For the past year, donors have been paying half the rent for the lot where she parks the camper. In November, that assistance will come to an end. Michelle has a job working with autistic children but cannot afford the $900 a month on her own.

“It’s just a gravel spot,” she said.

Like the Hills, Michelle credits friends and nonprofits for getting her through the last year. “They just swarmed in and started helping — and lots of them,” she said.

In the spring, Mountain Projects, a local nonprofit that provided the camper, offered her a discounted modular home and a plot of land. Other nonprofits like United Way and Salvation Army have offered to help cover some of the home’s expenses, but Michelle still must come up with $81,000 not yet covered by her insurance or donations.

The buyout program she applied for would pay her the fair market value of her home before the storm, minus her insurance payout. But if she is approved, it could be years before she sees that money. “I’m worried,” she said.

She and Jeff were preapproved for a mortgage loan, but without his income, she isn’t sure she will still qualify. Michelle is thankful for so much help. But a year after Helene, moving into a permanent home feels more unreachable than ever.

The home offered to Michelle by Mountain Projects (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)

ProPublica and The Assembly know recovery in western North Carolina is far from over, and so is our reporting. If you have applied or thought about applying to the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, fill out this form. You can reach us with questions or other stories at helenetips@propublica.org.

Mollie Simon contributed research, and Nadia Sussman and Cassandra Garibay contributed reporting.

Correction

Sept. 27, 2025: A video with this story originally misidentified the subject Brian Hill teaches. Hill teaches high school math, not history.

by Nadia Sussman

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.

When Brian and Susie Hill bought a historic house on Cattail Creek in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2023, they planned to stay forever. Their daughter, Lucy, would chase fireflies in the evenings across their wide expanse of grass.

“It’s that feeling that you always wanted of going home,” Susie said. “Your little family and your little dog and your big yard and the chickens.”

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene upended their lives. After days of rain that saturated the mountains, Helene arrived, turning little streams into raging rivers hundreds of miles inland. The swollen Cattail Creek churned through the Hills’ home, leaving logs in place of furniture and taking porches, doors, windows, appliances and parts of the floor with it.

The Hills watched it all, huddled in their truck parked up a gentle slope. When the water receded, they found the house was uninhabitable.

Suddenly displaced, the Hills began the arduous process of seeking disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The almost $40,000 in federal aid they received allowed them to take critical first steps toward rebuilding. It wasn’t nearly enough money to complete the enormous project. The rest would have to come from their own efforts and an outpouring of community support. Yet it was more than most others in their community managed to muster from the federal disaster aid system.

ProPublica and The Assembly examined federal data, looking at the 10 counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene. We found income disparities in the way the agency had distributed housing assistance, even though that aid is supposed to be independent of income. Among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, households that got the most FEMA aid tended to be the highest-income ones. In some counties, including Yancey, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money to repair and rebuild their homes as those with lower incomes.

In rural areas, residents can face barriers to seeking assistance ranging from poor access to cellphone and internet service to rugged topography to a lack of money to pay for services.

The reverse was true in urban Buncombe County, home of Asheville, where lower-income homeowners typically received higher FEMA awards for housing assistance. Buncombe is also home to many of the region’s nonprofits that helped low-income residents navigate the FEMA application and appeals process.

For the Hills, it’s been an exhausting year. They’ve been camped in a trailer since January with a view of their former home, working on the house until dark after days of teaching public school. They long for simple comforts of their former life — just sitting in their living room as a family and watching a movie. As the Hills prepare to move back in, we learn in their journey why so many other families may never be able to do so.

Watch the short documentary “Rebuilding After Helene” here.

Correction

Sept. 27, 2025: A video with this story originally misidentified the subject Brian Hill teaches. Hill teaches high school math, not history.

by Ren Larson, The Assembly, and Cassandra Garibay, ProPublica

ProPublica and The Assembly have been reporting on the impact of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, and we know recovery is far from over.

We want to hear from North Carolinians whose homes were damaged or destroyed to better understand how well the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, is working for those who need it. If you’ve applied for funding to repair or rebuild your home, let us know what the process has been like, the challenges you’ve experienced and the impact that’s had on your life. We'd also like to hear from you if your home was damaged but you haven’t applied to understand why.

Filling out the form below is the easiest way to share information with us. If you have anything else you would like to share, let us know at helenetips@propublica.org. After you submit your response, Assembly reporter Ren Larson or ProPublica reporter Cassandra Garibay may follow up for more details.

by Till Eckert

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

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has taken one of its agents off the streets after he was caught on video throwing a distraught mother to the floor of a New York City courthouse in front of her two children on Thursday.

It wasn’t the first time videos have captured scenes of immigration agents using violent force to carry out the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. But the videos of this incident — one of which I filmed for ProPublica — seemed to stir something different. In a rare move, the government publicly reprimanded an officer for such conduct.

“The officer’s conduct in this video is unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE,” an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said. “Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation.”

A video filmed by Till Eckert shows the officer throwing Moreta-Galarza to the ground inside the courthouse. (Till Eckert/ProPublica. Edited for privacy by ProPublica.)

Watch video ➜

I’ve only been in the U.S. as a reporter for eight weeks — so I just barely arrived. I come from Germany and am on the staff at Correctiv, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. I’d been alarmed by videos of masked ICE agents sweeping immigrants off the street, scenes I never thought I’d see in the United States, and I came with the goal of witnessing what was going on for myself. I wanted to report on how the administration’s immigration crackdown was playing out from the front lines.

Since arriving, I’ve spent time reporting in immigrant neighborhoods, emergency rooms, churches, ICE field offices and, most recently, in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. I’ve gone there most every morning for the past two weeks.

During that time, I’d seen ICE drag several immigrants away from their families, all of them sobbing and pleading with the officers not to separate them from their loved ones.

But what happened Thursday was a shocking escalation.

When I emerged from the elevator on the 14th floor, I heard a woman’s pleas. She sounded terrified. I walked around the corner to see what was happening. At the end of the hallway, I saw the woman, Monica Moreta-Galarza, standing in front of an agent. She was crying because her husband had been detained. She told the agent she was afraid her husband would be hurt. She wanted to go with him.

I began recording and captured the agent barking back at the woman. “Adios,” he said, over and over, pressing toward her as if warning her to back away. When she didn’t, he grabbed her. The rest — including her children’s screams — has been memorialized online.

The federal agent yells and waves his finger at Moreta-Galarza after throwing her to the ground. (Graham Macindoe)

I followed Moreta-Galarza to the hospital. She is an immigrant from Ecuador and has been living in Coney Island since last year. Speaking in Spanish, she said the government routinely beat people in her home country. “I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me.”

This morning, I went back to the courthouse with the goal of speaking to the agent who’d tackled Moreta-Galarza. I’d heard the other ICE agents call him Victor, though I can’t be sure that’s his real name. By the time I got there, however, he was gone.

ProPublica’s mission is impact. I don’t think any of us expected we’d help bring it about with my video. The question now is what will the government do the next time something like this happens.

I asked DHS how many agents have been disciplined this year for misusing force. They did not answer that question.

If you have tips about new ICE enforcement tactics in courts, we want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal (tilleckert.90) or propublica.org/tips.

by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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

For months, the complaints have rolled in from parts of the country hit by natural disasters: The Federal Emergency Management Agency was moving far too slowly in sending aid to communities ravaged by floods and hurricanes, including in central Texas and North Carolina. Many officials were blaming Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, whose agency oversees FEMA.

“I can’t get phone calls back,” Ted Budd, the Republican senator from North Carolina, told a newspaper this month, describing his attempts to reach Noem’s office. “I can’t get them to initiate the money. It’s just a quagmire.” The delays were caused in part by a new policy announced by DHS that requires Noem’s personal sign-off on expenses over $100,000, several news outlets reported.

But records obtained by ProPublica show how one locality found a way to get FEMA aid more quickly: It asked one of Noem’s political donors for help.

The records show that Noem quickly expedited more than $11 million of federal money to rebuild a historic pier in Naples, Florida, after she was contacted by a major financial supporter last month. The pier is a tourist attraction in the wealthy Gulf Coast enclave and was badly damaged by Hurricane Ian in 2022.

Frustrated city officials had been laboring for months, without success, to get disaster assistance. But just two weeks after the donor stepped in, they were celebrating their sudden change of fortune. “We are now at warp speed with FEMA,” one city official wrote in an email. A FEMA representative wrote: “Per leadership instruction, pushing project immediately.”

Along with fast-tracking the money, Noem flew to Naples on a government plane to tour the pier herself. She then stayed for the weekend and got dinner with the donor, local cardiologist Sinan Gursoy, at the French restaurant Bleu Provence, according to records and an interview with the Naples mayor. This account is based on text messages and emails ProPublica obtained through public records requests.

Noem’s actions in Naples suggest the injection of political favoritism into an agency tasked with saving lives and rebuilding communities wiped out by disaster. It also heightens concerns about the discretion Noem has given herself by personally handling all six-figure expenses at the agency, consolidating her power over who wins and loses in the pursuit of federal relief dollars, experts said.

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, said that politics has long been a factor in federal disaster relief — one study found that swing states are more likely to get federal help, for example. But “I’ve not heard of anything this egregious — a donor calling up and saying I need help and getting it,” he said, “while others may be getting denied assistance or otherwise waiting in line for help that may or may not come.”

In a statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “This has nothing to do with politics: Secretary Noem also visited Ruidoso, NM” — where floods killed three people in July — “at the request of a Democrat governor and has been integral in supporting and speeding up their recovery efforts.”

“Your criticizing the Secretary’s visit to the Pier is bizarre as she works to fix this issue for more than 1 million visitors that used to visit the pier,” McLaughlin added. She did not answer questions about the donor’s role in expediting the funding or Noem’s relationship with him. Reached by phone, Gursoy said “get lost” and hung up. He did not respond to detailed follow up questions.

Noem has been criticized for creating a bottleneck at FEMA. When the floods hit Texas this summer — ultimately killing over 100 people — it took days to deploy critical search-and-rescue teams because Noem hadn’t signed off on them, according to CNN. Budd, the Republican senator, said this month: “Pretty much everything Helene-related is over $100,000. So they’re stacking up on her desk waiting for her signature.”

Noem has denied there were delays in the Texas flood response and has defended her expense policy, saying it has saved billions of dollars. “Every day I get up and I think, the American people are paying for this, should they?” she recently said. “And are these dollars doing what the law says they should be doing? I’m going to make sure that they go there.”

Once a sleepy fishing town, Naples is now home to CEOs and billionaires (a property listed for $295 million recently made headlines as the most expensive home in the U.S.). The city is known as an important stop for Republican politicians raising money, and Noem has held multiple fundraisers in the area. State credit card records suggest she visited Naples at least 10 times during her last four years as South Dakota governor.

Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, also appears to own a home in Naples near the city’s pier, according to property tax records. Lewandowski is an unpaid staffer at DHS serving as Noem’s de facto chief of staff. (Media reports have alleged the two are romantically involved, which they have both denied.) Lewandowski told ProPublica that he was not involved in the pier decision and that he was not in Naples during Noem’s visit.

For the first seven months of the Trump administration, the pier reconstruction was in bureaucratic purgatory. The city had long been struggling to secure the regulatory approvals it needed to start building, and emails suggest Trump’s wave of federal layoffs had made the process even slower. “These agencies are undergoing significant reorganizations and staff reductions,” a city official told a frustrated constituent in early August. That “sometimes means starting over with new reviewers — something we’ve faced more than once.”

McLaughlin said “both past FEMA and the City bear responsibility” for the delays. She listed “several failures” since the process started in 2023, including “FEMA staff changing up” and indecision by the city government.

By this summer, Naples officials were getting desperate. In June, one tried to enlist Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to press FEMA to move ahead. “We were told yesterday that Secretary Noem would have to ‘personally’ approve the Pier project before FEMA funding would be obligated,” the city official wrote to the senator’s staff. The Naples mayor, Teresa Heitmann, also personally wrote to FEMA. Heitmann said she was “perplexed” by the delays and begged the agency for guidance.

Heitmann had long been paying expensive Washington consultants to help her city navigate the process. But she was “feeling increasingly helpless,” she later said, until she had the idea that would finally put her project on the fast track. On July 18, the mayor emailed a Google search to herself: “Who is the head of Homeland security?” She was going to go straight to Noem.

Heitmann determined that her best bet for getting Noem’s attention was Gursoy. A Naples cardiologist, Gursoy has no obvious experience working with the federal government; much of his online footprint centers on his enthusiasm for pinball. But Gursoy gave Noem at least $25,000 to support her campaign for governor in 2022. That was enough to put him near the top of Noem’s disclosed donor list. (In South Dakota, campaign contributions remain relatively small.)

On planning documents for the 2024 Republican National Convention obtained by ProPublica, the Florida doctor is listed as an attendee affiliated with the delegation from South Dakota, a state he has no apparent connection to besides his support for Noem. Heitmann told ProPublica that Gursoy introduced her to Noem at a political event at a private home in Naples while Noem was governor.

“Hello it’s Teresa,” the mayor texted Gursoy in early August. “I really need your help.” She explained the tangle of bureaucracy she’d been contending with. “FEMA is holding us up,” Heitmann wrote. “Kristi Noem could put some fire under the FEMA employees slacking.”

Gursoy responded: “Okay. I will get on it.”

The next week, on Aug. 11, the doctor gave Heitmann an update. “Kristi was off for a few days for the first time in a long time, so I left her alone,” he said. “I just txted her now.” Within 24 hours, he had exciting news. He told the mayor to expect a call from Noem’s “FEMA fixer” shortly.

The identity of the “fixer” is not clear, but by Aug. 27, Naples officials were seeing a “flurry of activity” from Noem’s agency. That day, a FEMA staffer told the city that “FEMA is intending to expedite the funding” for the pier. “Secretary Noem took immediate action when I reached out to ask for help,” the mayor soon posted on Facebook.

Two days later, Noem flew to Naples. Her schedule listed a 30-minute walk-through at the pier with the mayor, followed by a nail salon appointment and dinner at Bleu Provence, which serves wagyu short ribs and seared foie gras. Noem then stayed through the weekend at the four-star Naples Bay Resort & Marina. Heitmann told ProPublica she wasn’t at the French dinner but Gursoy was. “I didn’t ask her to come, but she showed up,” the mayor told the local news. “I was very impressed.”

Before she left town, Noem posted about the Naples pier on Instagram. She was finally getting the project back on track, she said. “Americans deserve better than years of red tape and failed disaster responses,” Noem wrote. “Under @POTUS Trump, this incompetency ends.”

DHS did not answer questions about whether the government paid for Noem’s weekend in Naples.

Do you have any information we should know about Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski or DHS? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

The patients kept coming to the Utah oral surgeon’s office — one after another, year after year — with dental work that the surgeon said had gone wrong. He later recounted in a letter to state licensors that he had seen dental implants that had been the wrong size, patients with chronic sinus infections and one person whose implant had become lost inside their sinus cavity. These patients, he said, had all been worked on by the same dentist: Dr. Nicholas LaFeber.

The surgeon, a 30-year veteran, wrote the letter in November 2022 after Utah’s licensing division asked for his opinion of work done by LaFeber, whose license was on probation after the agency determined he had provided substandard care to more than a dozen patients. His warning was blunt: He believed LaFeber wouldn’t improve as a dentist and should not be performing dental implant procedures. He had seen LaFeber make the same mistakes in patients for years, he wrote, causing “severe” and sometimes life-changing complications.

“I believe that he is not competent to place implants,” the oral surgeon, Dr. Creed Haymond, concluded. “I give this opinion with soberness and sadness, but I feel I have a duty to aid the board in protecting the public from what appears to be an incompetent practitioner.”

His assessment of LaFeber’s skills in restorative dentistry was also mentioned in a February 2023 order regarding agency action on LaFeber’s license. Haymond did not respond to interview requests.

This was the second letter that Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing had received recommending that LaFeber be stopped or limited from practicing after more than a decade of dentistry in Utah, according to records obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica. The agency licenses Utah dentists and other professionals and investigates allegations of misconduct.

Two years prior, another dentist who had considered buying one of LaFeber’s practices recommended LaFeber’s license be revoked after looking through patient files: “As I started going through charts, as well as seeing the previous work, I began to realize how poor he treated these individuals,” wrote Dr. Brandon McKee. “Patients with failed implants are put on antibiotics and told to wait while the implant is continuing to heal. Some of these are for nine months.”

This letter was discussed in a September 2020 public dentistry board meeting. McKee did not respond to interview requests.

The licensing division’s dentistry board — whose members are mostly dentists and hygienists — recommended to Utah licensing director Mark Steinagel in December 2022 that LaFeber’s license be revoked after reviewing additional evidence suggesting his skills had not improved.

But despite this recommendation and the letters of warning from his colleagues, Steinagel reinstated LaFeber’s license in May 2023 after the dentist completed three years of probation, which included taking remedial classes.

Mark Steinagel, director of the state agency that licenses Utah professionals, reinstated Nicholas LaFeber’s license even though the agency’s dentistry board recommended that it be revoked. (Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Since LaFeber’s license was reinstated, new patients say they’ve been hurt. The Tribune and ProPublica spoke with two patients who say they saw the dentist within the last year for what they believed would be routine cavity fillings. Instead, they say they left in pain that became prolonged and ultimately required the procedures to be redone by other dentists. Neither knew when they sought dental care that LaFeber had nearly lost his license after regulators determined his work fell below the standard of care.

“I had never had this done before, so I didn’t know what’s normal,” said one patient, Michelle Lipsey. “I was just like, ‘He’s an adult, male dentist. He probably knows what he’s doing.’”

Lipsey filed a complaint against LaFeber with licensors in July detailing her experience, but the agency closed the case a month later and took no disciplinary action.

LaFeber said he would not discuss individual patients because they did not grant him permission to do so. He told The Tribune and ProPublica that he has always tried to keep his patients’ best interests in mind. “I had a few outcomes from dental work that had complications and needed further treatment,” he wrote in an email in response to questions.

“I assume every dentist encounters some percentage of negative patient outcomes and I have no reason to believe that my practice had a higher percentage than others.”

Melanie Hall, a spokesperson for Steinagel and the Division of Professional Licensing, said in response to questions that the division only revokes someone’s license when their conduct has been “especially egregious” because doing so “ends a career.”

The agency’s top priority, she said, is keeping Utahns safe — but she added that it also wants to ensure that licensees have a chance at “professional rehabilitation” and, when appropriate, can continue to work and earn money.

The state has revoked two dental licenses since June 2015, according to a Tribune and ProPublica examination of a decade’s worth of publicly available licensing division records.

Hall said that LaFeber’s license was reinstated despite the dental board’s recommendation because the dentist had finished the remedial courses that the board required him to take and his probationary period was ending. She noted that no other patients filed a complaint during that three-year period and that the dental board’s role was to only make recommendations to Steinagel and his staff.

That decision bothered some of those who served on the dental board during that time. Two former board members told The Tribune and ProPublica that they were frustrated state licensing division leaders did not listen to them and that they felt LaFeber should not practice dentistry given his record. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because of potential professional repercussions.

“You hate to take somebody’s livelihood away from them when they’ve gone through years of dental school and had a practice,” one of the former board members said. “But the board’s job is to protect the public.”

In LaFeber’s case, the former board member said, “the public was not well-served.”

LaFeber, without knowing the identities of the board members, suggested that some might have been biased against him.

“Every One of These Cases Was Alarming”

LaFeber said in public dentistry board meetings that he came to the attention of the licensing division in late 2019 after one of his former employees filed a complaint. He said the employee, who he said he had previously fired, directed licensors to more than a dozen cases in which he admitted during a board meeting that he had provided “poor patient care.”

State licensing officials could have suspended or revoked LaFeber’s license, but instead, in early 2020, they struck an agreement with LaFeber — a common outcome in license discipline cases. According to the agreement, investigators found that some of the patients in those cases had had root canals that resulted in infections or needed to be redone. Licensors also determined that LaFeber had improperly placed permanent replacement teeth in other patients, including one whose implant extended into the sinus cavity, the document said.

LaFeber agreed to spend three years on professional probation, during which he would be under the supervision of another dentist whose time he was required to pay for. He was still allowed to perform dental work during that period, according to the stipulation, but agreed not to do implant procedures or root canals.

He was not required to tell his current or future patients about this discipline. Like most other states, Utah has no law requiring patient disclosure when a licensed professional is disciplined, and a review of more than 3,200 filings from the licensing division’s website shows the state has rarely required disclosure of unprofessional conduct to patients.

The Utah regulators who discipline licensed professionals act only when someone files a complaint, like what happened in LaFeber’s case. “We don’t have manpower or staffing for proactive investigations,” Larry Marx, the state’s health care licensing bureau manager, explained to the dental board in a 2020 public meeting.

Once LaFeber was on probation, oversight of his progress moved to the dental board, an advisory group whose role it is to interview probationers in quarterly public meetings and make recommendations to Steinagel about whether the professionals completed their probation and if they should have their licenses reinstated.

In these interviews with the dental board, LaFeber admitted his mistakes. He blamed bad outcomes on being burned out from owning four dental clinics, and he said he had done procedures on friends and acquaintances who actually needed more specialized care but didn’t have the money.

“Some of it I will just admit was a poor, poor choice on my part,” he told the board, according to a recording of the meeting. “And I can also say for some of them, they are very dear friends of mine, that I have either coached their kids or helped them in Scouts or something else, single moms, and trying to help them out.”

Dr. Nicholas LaFeber’s profile on the website of his practice, Sandy Center Dental (Screenshot by ProPublica)

In addition to the problems that the former employee initially reported to the state licensing division, one dental board member, Dr. Ruedi Tillmann, looked at more than a dozen other files of LaFeber’s during the first few months of his probation and found other cases in which Tillmann saw indications that patients had poor outcomes, according to a December 2020 board meeting.

Tillmann, a dentist, said during the online meeting that he saw “a number of cases” where LaFeber did four or five implants on a single patient and none of them properly integrated into the patient’s jawbone. “Poor margins, open margins, implant crowns not sitting on implants correctly,” he said about patient files he reviewed. “I’m sorry to be harsh. It’s just that every one of these cases was alarming to me.”

Dr. Daniel Poulson, another dentist on the board, questioned why LaFeber would do substandard work on his patients, including people he said he knew and cared about.

“With 30 cases, what that communicates to me is you didn’t learn. You just kept doing it,” Poulson said during the same meeting. “And to blame that on being stressed or overworked — we’re all stressed. Dentistry is an incredibly stressful profession. But that shouldn’t, in my mind, make an excuse for ill-treating a patient. Using a lot of antibiotics to cover infections that last years is just out of bounds.”

LaFeber told the board during this meeting that he was confident he could improve his dentistry by taking continuing education courses and by being more selective about patients and referring them more often to specialists instead of trying to do the work himself.

He also downsized to just one clinic, Sandy Center Dental, a wood-trimmed office suite in a large, tan stucco building located in a Salt Lake City suburb at the base of the Wasatch Mountains.

“They Were So Disgusted With All the Problems”

LaFeber met with the dental board 11 times during his probation in public meetings that were often conducted on video calls because of the coronavirus pandemic. He was cheerful and agreeable during meetings, even at times when board members asked him pointed, critical questions about his work.

His polite nature was noted several times in records reviewed by The Tribune and ProPublica. For example, McKee, the dentist who had considered buying LaFeber’s practice, wrote in his letter to the board that LaFeber came across as a “humble,” “very nice guy” who patients trusted. A dentist who leads a dental examination agency wrote in his summary of an exam that LaFeber took that he was “overly pleasant to the extreme.”

Members of the dental board remarked during public meetings about how “unique” LaFeber’s case was, and they questioned what the right metric would be to determine whether his dentistry had improved and he was safe to work with patients.

Utah licensors rarely discipline dentists over whether they are competent to do their jobs, an analysis by The Tribune and ProPublica found. A review of disciplinary records from the last decade shows dentists most often getting in trouble for drug or alcohol use or for overprescribing or diverting prescriptions.

Hall, the licensing division spokesperson, said the agency does not track how many standard-of-care complaints it receives, but acknowledged that proving those types of cases tends to be difficult.

“As a result, they are less likely to lead to disciplinary actions compared to cases involving drug use, unlawful behavior, or practicing outside one’s scope of practice,” she said.

But tension was growing between LaFeber and the dental board: While LaFeber had taken a few online, self-paced courses, board members felt he needed more intensive, hands-on classes to improve.

A breaking point between LaFeber and the board occurred near the end of LaFeber’s probation. At the December 2022 dental board meeting, LaFeber peppered members with questions about the board’s role governing probationers and implied that a board member had acted improperly by soliciting complaints about him.

The board seemed equally frustrated; LaFeber still hadn’t enrolled in the hands-on courses they had required him to take, programs that could have cost up to $50,000. LaFeber had instead taken a licensure exam and failed several sections, according to a copy of the exam results obtained by The Tribune and ProPublica, which was also referenced in the 2023 agency order.

LaFeber did not respond on the record to questions about these test results.

Given the test results, Poulson, who had become board chair, said in the public meeting that he worried whether LaFeber would be able to practice dentistry safely by the following February, when his probation period would end.

“I have two doctors that once tried to buy your practice. They gave it back because they were so disgusted with all the problems they were having with patients,” Tillmann, one of the board members, said in that same meeting, recalling previous conversations he had.

LaFeber’s practice, Sandy Center Dental. LeFeber was not required to tell his current or future patients about his probation. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Poulson suggested that the group make a motion recommending that the state licensing division either revoke or suspend LaFeber’s license, saying that the action would be “protecting the public from inferior care.” The board unanimously voted to recommend revocation.

A few months later, Marx issued the agency order stating that LaFeber’s license should be suspended until he could demonstrate he could practice dentistry “with reasonable skill and safety.”

LaFeber, though, had one more chance to respond before the suspension would take effect. Soon after the agency order, LaFeber enrolled in and completed his remedial training. He also hired an attorney who signaled his intent to fight the agency’s action, according to public records.

In response, Marx requested that the agency’s move to suspend LaFeber’s license be dismissed, noting that LaFeber said he had delayed complying with the dental board’s requirement that he complete further training because of “financial limitations.” Then, Steinagel reinstated LaFeber’s license.

By this point, Steinagel’s agency knew not only about the reports of patients with improper tooth implants and the failed root canals that led to LaFeber’s probation, it also knew the state dental board had recommended that LaFeber’s license be revoked.

In addition, the agency was aware LaFeber had been sued three times for medical malpractice — including by a patient who alleged he had implants placed in his sinuses, which caused sepsis, and another patient who said in her lawsuit that, after months of painful infections, she went to another dentist who found a broken dental instrument lodged in her gums. (LaFeber told The Tribune and ProPublica these lawsuits were settled by his medical malpractice insurance carrier and there was never any determination made that his treatment fell below the standard of care.)

LaFeber said in response to questions that he was not aware of any recommendation from the board to revoke his license — though according to recordings and minutes of the public dentistry board meetings, he was present when the dentistry board took its vote. The board’s revocation recommendation is also referenced in the agency order he received, which The Tribune and ProPublica obtained through a public records request.

The dentist said he felt he was treated fairly by licensors and most members of the dentistry board, but added that he felt one board member did not disclose a conflict of interest and had a “personal vendetta” against him. LaFeber did not respond on the record to follow-up questions asking for further details. He said he complied with every request by licensors and its dentistry board and “even went above and beyond” by taking additional continuing education. He noted that he passed the remediation courses and related tests that the board had requested.

“I also worked with a supervising dentist, at significant expense, who reviewed my work and provided mentoring for 3 years between 2020 and 2023,” LaFeber wrote.

After taking these courses, he said, he has been able to incorporate new technology in his practices that has improved patient outcomes. “Dentistry is an area that is constantly evolving with so much new technology,” he said, “and I welcome all information sources that can help me improve my practice.”

The Tribune and ProPublica asked the two former board members who spoke to the news organizations whether their vote to recommend LaFeber’s license be revoked would have changed if they had the opportunity to weigh in again after he had completed his remedial training.

One former board member said they didn’t think the training completed to satisfy the state was enough to overcome years of poor dentistry. Another said that nothing seems to have changed given new patient complaints. Three board members who were involved in LaFeber’s case declined to comment for this story, and four others could not be reached.

New Patients Say They Were Harmed

With his license restored, LaFeber started to once again grow his business. Public records show he still owns Sandy Center Dental, and in July 2024 he got a business license for a second clinic about 10 miles to the west. (An online ad this summer indicated LaFeber was trying to sell his second practice.)

LaFeber is referenced as the sole dentist on websites for both of these businesses. In his response to The Tribune and ProPublica, he said he owns and operates a single office, Sandy Center Dental, where he works four days a week. A Sept. 23 search of public business records show he is still listed as the registered agent and principal for both practices. LaFeber said he helped start the second office, Parkway Smile Center, but said it is now “entirely owned and managed by another dentist.” The new owner could not be reached for comment.

In the nearly two years since LaFeber’s full return to practice, at least two more patients have publicly complained they were harmed under his care, both of whom The Tribune and ProPublica contacted after they left negative online reviews.

Michelle Lipsey had been a patient at Sandy Center Dental for nearly eight years, but she said in an interview that she hadn’t been to the dentist for a couple years after her second child was born. She said LaFeber told her during an October 2024 appointment that she needed five cavities filled. She returned a week later for the procedures.

For weeks after, Lipsey was in pain, and she returned to Sandy Center Dental later that month, complaining that she couldn’t sleep and was only able to eat soft food, according to her medical records. LaFeber redid some of the fillings, medical records show, but Lipsey said the pain persisted. She said a second dentist told her that LaFeber hadn’t properly sealed the fillings and had drilled far deeper than he needed to.

LaFeber noted in her medical records that he tried to call and text Lipsey after she left a negative review online. “Remember patient was very nervous,” her patient file reads. “We tried our best to help calm but at no point had the appointment gone as she described in the post.”

Haley Stafford described a similar experience earlier this year. She said that, based on what LeFeber told her, she was expecting to have two cavities filled during a March appointment; instead, he put fillings in seven teeth. She recalled in an interview that his hands shook when he gave her numbing shots. (The testing exam results reviewed by The Tribune and ProPublica also noted LaFeber’s unsteady hands.)

“That was the first time he actually did work on me,” she said. “And it was completely botched.”

She’s been in near-daily pain since, she said, and has needed more dental work on her affected teeth, including two root canals. Stafford found a new dentist, but the repair work has cost her thousands of dollars.

Both Stafford and Lipsey said LaFeber contacted them about refunding their money.

LaFeber said he doesn’t recall refunding money to any patients after a complaint. He said he could not comment on specific cases to protect patient privacy, but said that sensitivity and pain can happen after a treatment.

“We try to do all we can to minimize it,” he said. “The presence of pain does not demonstrate treatment that fell below the standard of care.”

Lipsey filed a complaint with licensors in late July and said she was interviewed by an investigator and shared X-rays from before and after LaFeber filled her cavities.

Licensors sent Lipsey an email in late August saying that they were closing the case and that “appropriate action was taken,” according to a screenshot of the email Lipsey shared with The Tribune and ProPublica. They would not tell her what that action was, saying the investigative record was considered private under Utah law. Licensing officials declined to comment on the outcome of Lipsey’s complaint.

If licensors had disciplined LaFeber, it would be considered a public record. The agency has the option to address a complaint informally by giving a verbal warning to a licensed professional or writing a letter of concern. Those measures typically are not disclosed to the public.

LaFeber told The Tribune and ProPublica that Lipsey’s complaint was dismissed and he did not receive any warnings or a letter of concern. Licensors “investigated it thoroughly and found it to be meritless,” he said.

LaFeber’s license remains in good standing, according to the state’s licensing database in September.

Stafford hasn’t filed a complaint with the state and said she had no idea LaFeber had nearly lost his license until a reporter reached out to her.

How does a dentist nearly “lose their license and get it back,” she asked, “and patients are not aware of that?”

by Duaa Eldeib

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The National Institutes of Health has launched a five-year, $37 million stillbirth consortium in a pivotal effort to reduce what it has called the country’s “unacceptably high” stillbirth rate.

The announcement last week thrilled doctors, researchers and families and represented a commitment by the agency to prioritize stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more.

“What we’re really excited about is not only the investment in trying to prevent stillbirth, but also continuing that work with the community to guide the research,” Alison Cernich, acting director of the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in an interview.

Four clinical sites and one data coordinating center spanning the country — California, Oregon, Utah, New York and North Carolina — will come together to form the consortium, each bringing its own expertise. Most will focus on ways to predict and prevent stillbirths, though they also plan to address bereavement and mental health after a loss. Research shows that of the more than 20,000 stillbirths in the U.S. each year, as many as 25% may be prevented. For deliveries at 37 weeks or more, that figure jumps to nearly half.

The teams plan to meet for the first time on Friday to discuss possible research targets. Those include: understanding why some placentas fail and fetuses don’t grow properly; assessing decreased fetal movement; considering the best times for delivery and using advanced technology to explore how blood tests, biomarkers and ultrasounds may help predict a stillbirth. They also may evaluate how electronic medical records and artificial intelligence could help doctors and nurses identify early signs of stillbirth risk. While the announcement did not mention racial disparities, a representative said the consortium hopes to identify factors that determine who is at a higher risk of having a stillbirth.

For many families, the devastation of a stillbirth is followed by a lack of answers, including how and why the loss occurred. The teams will collaborate with the stillbirth community through advisory groups. The North Carolina team will oversee data collection and standardization. Incomplete, delayed and sometimes inaccurate stillbirth data has been an impediment to prevention efforts.

“If we could see the signs and deliver the baby earlier, so that the mom has a live baby, that’s I think what we’re all hoping for,” said Dr. Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, the chair and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California San Diego, who will co-lead the effort there.

The consortium follows a national shift in the conversation around stillbirth, which has long been a neglected public health concern. ProPublica began reporting on stillbirths in 2022 and, in 2025, the news organization released a documentary following the lives of three women trying to make pregnancy safer in America following their stillbirths.

Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya, who was featured in the documentary, has spent years asking Congress to support stillbirth legislation and urging lawmakers to pass the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, named after her stillborn daughter Autumn Joy. Two days after that the NIH announced the consortium, Republican and Democratic members of Congress reintroduced the bill.

“I feel like our moment has finally arrived, and we are being included in all this tremendously important lifesaving work that’s being done,” she said.

Congress had previously mandated a stillbirth working group, which the NICHD formed in 2022, and heard directly from stillbirth families. The working group released a federal report calling the country’s stillbirth rate “unacceptably high.” The U.S. lags far behind other wealthy countries in reducing its stillbirth rate.

Dr. Bob Silver, a leading stillbirth expert at the University of Utah Health, has spent decades working on stillbirth prevention. He is the co-director of the University of Utah Stillbirth Center of Excellence, which focuses on both prevention and compassionate care after a loss, and will lead the consortium’s efforts in the state.

“There’s no question that the ProPublica reporting was intimately tied to this,” Silver said. “You can’t always draw a straight line between those things. But in this case, you can draw a very straight line.”

While some studies, including the NIH’s Human Placenta Project, have indirectly contributed to stillbirth research, the consortium is the first stillbirth-specific initiative of this scale since the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network more than a decade ago. Both Silver and Dr. Uma Reddy, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University, worked together on the research network and will again on the consortium.

“We need to be able to get our rates down to similar high-income countries,” Reddy said. “This initiative to really look at reducing the stillbirth rate and to look at preventing them is so important, and it’s really about time.”

Dr. Karen Gibbins, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University, had just finished her morning clinic when she received the email a few days before the official announcement informing her that both she and OHSU had been selected as part of the consortium.

Gibbins, whom ProPublica wrote about for advocating for more autopsies following the stillbirth of her son Sebastian, almost couldn’t believe it. She logged on to a federal grant website to confirm, then she stepped outside her office and gave her division director a hug.

“Stillbirth is such a huge public health issue, and one that historically has not had as much attention,” Gibbins said. “The fact that we have this investment of centers that are going to be taking these different approaches to fight stillbirth and to prevent stillbirth, and also to provide better care to families who do experience stillbirth, it’s a piece of hope that I think we all needed.”

Gibbins and her team specialize in studying the role of chronic stress, nutrition and heart health.

The NIH has distributed the first year of funding, about $7.3 million, which includes $750,000 provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. Despite the cuts at NIH, officials said they are optimistic that they will be able to fund the project for the remaining four years.

“The reason that we are doing this is because stillbirth affects 1 in 160 deliveries in the United States a year, and it is really traumatic for families, and it is not talked about,” Cernich said. “We are in a great place to really try to tackle this preventable tragedy.”