ProPublica

by Maya Miller and Jeremy Kohler

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During his first term, President Donald Trump frequently turned to the issue of mental health, framing it as a national crisis that demanded action. He linked it to opioid addiction, mass shootings and a surge in veteran suicides — and he later used it to argue against COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures.

At times, he backed up his rhetoric with action. His administration issued tens of millions of dollars in grants to expand community mental health services and continued funding contracts to help federal regulators enforce the parity law, which requires insurers to treat mental and physical health care equally.

But just months after Trump returned to the presidency this year, his administration paused new rules issued in President Joe Biden’s final months that were designed to strengthen mental health protections and hold insurance companies accountable when they unlawfully denied coverage. That pause came after an industry group that advocates for large employers on issues related to employee benefits filed a lawsuit seeking to block the new rules.

What’s more, Congress has curtailed funding for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, or EBSA, a small agency in the Department of Labor that enforces mental health parity in most employer-sponsored health insurance plans. The squeeze is largely due to the expiration of temporary supplemental funding Congress approved just weeks after Biden was elected president but before he took office.

While the impact of these changes is hard to measure, federal employees, policy experts and front-line workers warn that suspending the rules and cutting enforcement funding could have serious consequences. They say it could mean longer waits for help when patients challenge insurance decisions, fewer investigations of insurers and employer health plans over possible violations of federal mental health protections, and more people going without care they’re legally entitled to.

Their long-term predictions include more untreated mental illness and growing anger at insurers.

“Imagine if you are a parent calling about lifesaving care your kid needs,” said Ali Khawar, who was second in command at EBSA before stepping down at the end of the Biden administration. With less money and fewer employees, he said, the agency isn’t equipped to open new investigations quickly.

The suspended rules were meant to strengthen enforcement of the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. The failure to provide the same level of access to mental health care as physical care has been well documented by researchers as well as by a recent ProPublica investigation. We found that insurers often block care, underpay mental health providers and make it hard for patients to find help — sometimes with deadly consequences.

The rules, released in September 2024, required health plans to gather and report detailed data on how they restrict or deny mental health claims. If the plans found disparities when compared with medical care, insurers had to explain what they were doing to close those gaps, a requirement the Trump administration put on hold.

In his first term, Trump positioned himself as an advocate for expanding mental health services and strengthening parity enforcement. His commission on opioid abuse even recommended giving EBSA more authority to penalize insurers that violate the parity rules, though Congress never approved the proposal.

But after returning to office, his administration has moved to roll back several Biden-era initiatives, from solar energy grants to student loan relief. The new parity rules were no exception.

Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the ERISA Industry Committee, or ERIC, a trade group representing large employers on employee benefits policy, sued to block the regulations. After that, the Trump administration went to court to ask to have the lawsuit paused while it considered whether to rescind or modify the rules.

A federal judge granted the request, and the Trump administration promised not to enforce them during the litigation or for 18 months afterward.

ERIC says that the new rules went beyond what Congress intended when it created the mental health parity law and were too vague and burdensome. But advocates for the new rules said the action effectively gutted the parity law’s strongest protections.

“The expectation was that these rules would be incredibly significant in driving better compliance,” Khawar said. “So now that it is on hold, it is a significant benefit that will never be realized.”

James Gelfand, ERIC’s president and CEO, said he believed the Biden administration went too far.

“While we do support mental health parity generally, we don’t support this rule,” he said. “We don’t think that the Biden administration had any authority to write it.” He added that it created “an impossible standard that we can’t meet,” and that rules were “purposely vague so they could choose to enforce against whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted.”

EBSA, which safeguards workplace benefits for 150 million Americans, has always had to make do with a small staff, and it was struggling even under the Biden administration, which backed its mission. In a 2023 report to Congress, the agency acknowledged that with one investigator for every 7,700 health plans, its resources “are limited compared to the vast universe that it regulates.”

Those limits showed in the results: Between February 2021 and July 2024, EBSA conducted 150 investigations and issued just 70 letters finding violations of the parity law — though in many other cases, the agency worked with insurers and employers to resolve problems without a formal violation finding.

And now it is pressing ahead with far fewer employees. The Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed holding EBSA’s base funding at the same level as last year but without the temporary boost Congress provided under the December 2020 No Surprises Act. That law, designed to protect patients from surprise medical bills, included extra funding to help EBSA handle a surge in complaints and new responsibilities.

That funding expired a few months after Biden left office. With that support now gone, EBSA’s workforce is set to drop by nearly one-fifth from two years ago, from 831 workers in 2024 to 687 or fewer employees in 2026.

The Senate Appropriations Committee signaled that mental health parity enforcement was still a priority, including a note in its bill report saying it “supports additional efforts directed toward systemic and targeted audits of health care coverage” provided by employee-sponsored plans and to “ensure parity between mental and physical health care coverage as required by current law.”

Gelfand said his group wanted EBSA to be “robustly funded” so it could work to help employers comply with the law. But he said that until EBSA’s mission changes, his organization supports not adding funding.

Although many of the positions were lost through attrition in the months leading up to the expiration of No Surprises Act funding and the start of Trump’s second term, other staffers left soon after Trump took office through voluntary separation packages.

Neither the White House nor representatives for EBSA responded to questions about the paused rules or the reduced funding.

A front-line worker said with so many departures, key institutional knowledge was lost. The losses have hit hardest in two key areas: The benefit advisers, who field calls from people around the country facing insurance denials they believe are wrong, are down by about 30%. The investigative staff, which leads the in-depth probes into insurance practices, has shrunk by nearly 40%, according to current and former employees. As a result, investigators are juggling higher caseloads and people seeking help are facing longer delays.

EBSA oversees a wide range of employee benefits, including retirement plans, health coverage and protections under federal labor law. In recent years, enforcement of mental health parity laws has grown to make up about 25% of its investigative work, according to current and former officials.

The agency has the power to help millions of patients who have health insurance through their workplace. When investigators reveal systemic violations, they can require what’s known as a global correction, forcing insurers or plan administrators to fix a problem across multitudes of plans and patients. For example, after an investigation by EBSA’s Kansas City office, a major claims administrator agreed to stop denying drug testing tied to substance use treatment, reprocess more than 3,000 claims and return nearly $2 million to patients and providers.

For some families, it can be a matter of life or death.

During the darkest months of the pandemic, a Massachusetts woman, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her teenage daughter’s privacy, watched her child unravel. Isolated at home, the girl started following social media videos of people cutting themselves and soon began doing the same. She became severely anorexic and started talking about suicide.

The parents got their daughter admitted to a residential treatment center, believing it was her best chance of improvement. But their insurer denied coverage, leaving them with more than $80,000 in bills. What followed was a two-year battle for reimbursement. So she turned to the Department of Labor for help. An EBSA investigator took the case, helping her navigate the complex claims process and advocating for her in negotiations with the insurer.

Last year, the insurer agreed the claim had been “inadvertently denied in error” and agreed to repay most of what the family had paid.

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced that Ryan Little and Kevin Uhrmacher have been hired as deputy editors on our data and news applications teams. Little will serve as one of two deputy data editors, and Uhrmacher will work as deputy news applications editor. Together, they will strengthen ProPublica’s editing capacity and streamline collaboration between our data, interactive and reporting teams.

“We’re so happy to have Ryan and Kevin joining us at ProPublica,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “They are excellent managers and journalists, and we’re excited to bring them on to make the already-excellent journalism coming from these teams even better.”

Little joins ProPublica from The Baltimore Banner, where he served as data editor and worked on stories that won a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, among other honors. Those stories included a series revealing the city’s overdose crisis, an investigation of the transit nightmare Baltimore students face to get to school, and how listless container ships like the one that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge are more common than previously known. Prior to his time at the Banner, Little worked at Mother Jones as a Roy W. Howard fellow.

Little previously collaborated with ProPublica in 2022 on a rent pricing investigation that led to a Department of Justice inquiry and a settlement with Greystar, the nation’s largest landlord, who agreed to stop using anti-competitive rent algorithms.

He holds a master’s degree from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he also teaches data journalism.

“ProPublica has set the standard for accountability data journalism, and I am delighted to join the team,” Little said. “I’m eager to pursue audacious, high-impact work together.”

Uhrmacher comes to ProPublica from The Washington Post, where he worked for more than 11 years, most recently as graphics assignment editor overseeing data visualization and interactive stories. Uhrmacher was a driving force behind some of the Post’s most impactful visual journalism, including doing graphics editing on work that was a part of three Pulitzer Prizes.

He launched numerous trackers, including those that followed state abortion laws and presidential appointees. He also served as a graphics editor and project manager for a database-driven story that detailed the history of enslavers in Congress, which won a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

“I’m thrilled to be joining ProPublica’s stellar news applications team, which has been an industry leader in interactive accountability journalism, including by making consequential data more accessible to the public,” Uhrmacher said. “ProPublica’s work exposing abuses of the public trust — at a global, national and local scale — makes it a top destination for any journalist, and I’m honored that the institution has entrusted me with this role.”

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

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

Millions of Americans own the rights to oil and gas underground. When they’re approached by an energy company to lease out those rights, they’re offered a cut of the revenue, called a royalty.

“Royalties saved our place,” said James Horob, a farmer in northwest North Dakota, who used oil royalties to rescue his family’s farm from bankruptcy in 2008 and replace equipment that had been auctioned off. “We’re lucky to have what we got.”

However, the royalty income that mineral owners like Horob get can depend in part on the state where they live. In North Dakota, estimates show that in recent years companies have been deducting hundreds of millions of dollars annually to help cover the costs incurred once oil and gas leave the ground on their way to being sold. North Dakota officials have not stepped in to help royalty owners, even though the state, in its own leases, has explicitly prohibited oil and gas companies from taking deductions from government royalty payments since 1979, as the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported this month.

“It’s tough to think that there isn’t some better solution out there than what we currently have,” said Aaron Weber, a Watford City-based attorney who represents mineral owners in North Dakota.

In contrast to North Dakota, at least seven oil-and-gas-producing states have taken either legislative or judicial action to restrict the costs that can be deducted from royalty owners’ checks. Here are the key ways North Dakota differs from these other states when it comes to protecting the interests of royalty owners:

The Debate in North Dakota

North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong has called the oil and gas industry the “No. 1 driver of our economy” in the state. The industry contributed $32 billion in oil and gas taxes to state and local governments between 2008 and 2024, according to the Western Dakota Energy Association, which advocates for energy-producing communities. That same study found that more than 50% of all local tax collections are tied to oil and gas.

Oil and gas companies owed the state’s private mineral owners, like Horob, an estimated $4.6 billion in 2023 before deductions, according to North Dakota State University research.

Deductions from that royalty income — which can vary greatly by company and mineral owner — are deeply contentious in the state: Companies say they’re withholding transportation and other expenses that should be shared with royalty owners; the owners say those “postproduction deductions,” as they are generally known, shouldn’t be permitted in most circumstances.

The energy industry says the postproduction deductions, which began surging about a decade ago, reflect changes in the oil business. Oil, discovered in the state in 1951, used to be sold primarily at the well site. Now, oil and gas are often sold farther away, and companies incur costs to process and transport the minerals. The companies say this enables them to fetch a better price, benefiting the royalty owner as well. The industry also attributes an increase in deductions to regulations added in 2014 to reduce natural gas flaring, requiring companies to make new investments.

A gas flare in Williams County, North Dakota, in June (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Owen Anderson previously worked for North Dakota’s regulatory agencies and helped draft language to prohibit companies from taking deductions from royalty payments owed to the state. Anderson, a law professor who studies the energy industry, called the issue “a big, big deal.”

Armstrong declined to comment.

How Courts Have Addressed Oil and Gas Royalties

Around the country: State supreme courts in Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and West Virginia have determined oil and gas companies are responsible for the costs that make the commodities “marketable.” That means there are limits on the expenses that companies can pass on to royalty owners after the minerals leave the ground. Those expenses may include removing impurities, gathering the products in central locations, and transporting the oil and gas to where it will be sold.

Still, the costs that companies can deduct from royalties vary by state, depending on how states define when a product is marketable.

West Virginia provides royalty owners the most protection from deductions, the result of state Supreme Court of Appeals decisions in 2001 and 2006. In those cases, the court found that companies cannot pass on costs to the owners unless a lease explicitly allows it. This matters because many leases across the country were written before shifts in the industry led to more extensive deductions, so most early leases don’t explicitly mention them.

“The default is, you cannot take deductions unless they’re specifically agreed to,” said Tom Huber, the leader of West Virginia’s royalty owner association. The 2006 court decision “basically says if there’s ambiguous language, you go on the side of the royalty owner because the company constructed the lease,” he said.

That decision also determined that deductions cannot be taken unless leases specify which costs can be shared and lay out how the deductions will be calculated. Rulings in 2024 and 2025 confirmed the court’s stance.

Courts in Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma also have placed limits on what costs can be deducted from royalty payments. Those courts have determined that companies must make the oil and gas “marketable” before costs can be deducted from royalties. Each state uses different criteria to determine at what point in the process the commodities become marketable.

Courts in other oil-and-gas-producing states have taken a legal approach that is more friendly to the industry. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and others have determined that companies can deduct costs incurred between the minerals’ extraction and when they are sold unless there is lease language to the contrary.

That is also true in Pennsylvania. But in 2015, the state’s attorney general cracked down on a company, Chesapeake Energy, alleged to be taking artificially excessive deductions. The attorney general’s lawsuit, prompted by complaints from landowners, was resolved with a $5.3 million settlement for royalty owners and an option to receive royalties moving forward without deductions. The company did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

In North Dakota: As is the case in Texas, Louisiana and some other states, the North Dakota Supreme Court has sided with companies. In 2009 and 2021, the court ruled that royalties, in most cases, should be based on the value of the oil and gas when the minerals are extracted from the ground. Costs incurred between when the minerals are extracted and when they are sold can be shared proportionately between the oil company and the royalty owner, the court found. Companies can deduct these costs unless a lease clearly specifies otherwise.

I hope that the people in North Dakota wake up and realize how much money should be in their pockets instead of industry’s pockets.

—Tom Huber, the leader of West Virginia’s royalty owner association

Josh Swanson, a Fargo-based oil and gas attorney who is involved in multiple pending lawsuits contesting deductions, said he’s concerned companies will impose even more “excessive” deductions unless courts place limits on what the companies can do.

“Operators are going to continue to be very aggressive in the amounts they’re taking for postproduction costs until a court tells them they’ve overstepped and gone over the line,” he said.

In responses to questions from the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, officials from three energy companies that operate in North Dakota said they follow the language in the leases when determining what costs they can deduct from royalty payments. Older leases often don’t mention deductions, however.

How Lawmakers Have Addressed Oil and Gas Royalties

Around the country: Some state legislatures have passed laws that limit postproduction deductions. Laws in Wyoming and Nevada, passed in 1989 and 1991, respectively, prohibit companies from taking deductions for specific expenses incurred soon after extraction, such as gathering the commodities from well sites to get them to central hubs.

In Michigan, a law passed in 1999 allows companies to deduct from royalty income only two types of expenses — transportation and some gas treatment costs — unless a lease explicitly allows for other reasons.

The West Virginia Legislature, meanwhile, has helped royalty owners with what it called “oppressive” leases. Many West Virginia mineral owners receive royalties from “flat rate” leases signed as long as a century ago that provide owners a few hundred dollars a year instead of a percentage of the revenue. Calling those leases “unjust,” West Virginia lawmakers passed a measure in 1982 that guarantees owners at least 12.5% of the revenue, effectively overriding the original leases. A 2018 amendment requires that postproduction deductions not be taken from this royalty.

West Virginia’s law ensuring a minimum royalty for those leases is enforced by state regulators, who will grant new drilling permits only if the company files an affidavit promising to adhere to the law.

Huber said his state’s legislative and judicial branches have historically tried to protect landowner and royalty owner rights while encouraging the growing natural gas industry.

“It sounds like North Dakota doesn’t have that, and that’s a shame,” Huber said. “I hope that the people in North Dakota wake up and realize how much money should be in their pockets instead of industry’s pockets.”

In North Dakota: Legislators and state officials have argued that disputes should be settled in the courts. They rejected a measure in 2021 that would have prevented companies from taking deductions unless explicitly allowed in a lease, and another bill in 2023 that would have required oil companies to provide mineral owners with more information about how royalties are calculated.

State Sen. Dale Patten, a Republican from Watford City, said the Legislature is ill suited to address concerns related to private contracts and royalty owners should seek relief from the courts. Legal action would be prohibitively expensive for most families, however.

North Dakota Sen. Dale Patten, a Republican from Watford City, served as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the legislative session that ended in May. (Kyle Martin for the North Dakota Monitor)

“We’re getting into really complicated issues. And actually in my mind the proper venue to solve that would be in the courts,” said Patten, who has served as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “And you deal with it on a company-by-company basis.”

Public officials have argued that royalty owners should have negotiated language into their leases to prohibit deductions. But leases in many cases were signed decades ago, before this was an issue, and don’t mention who should pay for postproduction costs. The leases don’t expire unless production stops. And in new lease negotiations, mineral owners are at a disadvantage against companies unless they own a large percentage of the mineral rights in the area.

“It’s really difficult for a private landowner to negotiate a no-deductions lease in North Dakota,” Anderson said.

Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents the oil industry, warned that regulating or limiting the expenses that companies pass on to owners would discourage oil and gas investment in the state and drive business away.

“It’s one of the most foolish things the state of North Dakota could ever do, is to try and essentially financially punish operators from getting a better price for their commodities by not allowing postproduction costs on some of those things,” Ness said in an interview.

But Weber, the attorney who represents mineral owners, said it’s time for the Legislature to get involved and address the concerns.

“Given that the court has already selected what it is going to do,” he said, “the only way to fix it is to get it to the Legislature.”

by Abe Streep

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

The top Democrat on a House committee is demanding that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins account for discrepancies between her public statements about wildland firefighter staffing and a ProPublica report showing there were thousands of vacancies in the Forest Service’s firefighting workforce as peak wildfire season approached.

In June, the Forest Service claimed it had reached 99% of its hiring goal for its wildland firefighting workforce. But ProPublica’s reporting indicated that the agency was selectively counting firefighters, presenting an optimistic assessment to the public. As many as 27% of jobs were vacant as of July 17, according to data obtained by ProPublica.

Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California and the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, made the request to Rollins in a letter sent Thursday morning. “The Trump Administration’s staffing decisions are exacerbating an already dire situation: The Forest Service’s firefighting capacity has been dangerously hampered by Department of Government Efficiency and Trump Administration layoffs, deferred resignations, and other early retirements and resignations just as climate change is extending the fire season,” he wrote.

The Forest Service’s assertions about its readiness are contradicted not only by its own staff — a wildland firefighter in California quoted in the ProPublica report called the 99% figure “grossly inaccurate” — but by its own statistics. In July, ProPublica reported that, according to agency data, its fire and aviation management program contained more than 4,500 active vacancies, including for such crucial primary firefighting positions as hotshots, dispatchers and engine captains. At the time, a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department disputed that the Forest Service had that many vacancies within its fire and aviation management program but did not provide data showing otherwise. A spokesperson for the Forest Service later claimed that ProPublica’s figures were inaccurate, telling the High Country News, “Their numbers likely come from outdated org charts and unfunded positions.” However, ProPublica excluded all unfunded positions from its analysis, and its data came from active agency organizational charts.

When asked to support its claims that the agency’s fire service is fully staffed, a spokesperson wrote: “The Forest Service is fully prepared and operational to protect individuals and communities from wildfires. The Forest Service has over 19,000 workers, both in and out of the Fire and Aviation Management group, who hold incident response qualifications.”

According to experts, the agency has long resisted providing a comprehensive and transparent breakdown of its wildland firefighting force. “Unless Congress tells them to, they’re not going to do a report of that magnitude,” said Robert Kuhn, a former Forest Service official who between 2009 and 2011 co-authored such an assessment. Kuhn cited the cost and effort involved in analyzing a sprawling and complex agency. Earlier this year, Grassroots Wildland Firefighting, a labor advocacy organization, wrote, “None of the federal agencies have developed a modern formula for determining how many wildland firefighters and support personnel are truly needed to address 21st century issues.” Most federal wildland firefighters work for the Forest Service, within the Department of Agriculture. In addition, the federal government employs thousands of wildland firefighters at four agencies in the Department of the Interior. President Donald Trump has ordered all of them to consolidate their wildland fire programs. Details about that unification have not been released.

Every year, the Forest Service reports that it has filled its ranks with what are known as primary firefighters. But according to current and former Forest Service employees, that assessment — the basis of the claim that the agency reached 99% of its hiring goal — is misleading on a number of levels. The Forest Service simply counts “operational firefighters” working within a specified pay range. That figure includes both temporary seasonal firefighters who have just joined the agency and experienced year-round veterans — but it does not distinguish between the two and therefore elides a great loss of institutional knowledge. In recent years, the agency has suffered an exodus of experienced firefighters. The agency’s assessment also excludes both senior-level fire managers and crucial support staff. The public associates wildland firefighting with its most iconic figures: smokejumpers, hotshots and members of engine crews, who often are supported by aircraft dropping retardant. But the nation’s wildland fire apparatus also includes, for example, human-resource specialists, ecologists, wilderness rangers, meteorologists, trails workers and other employees who possess qualifications allowing them to work on a fire line. Those qualifications are listed in what’s known as a “red card.” An archaeologist could have a red card allowing them to, say, oversee the distribution of food at a fire camp.

A recently departed staffer received this email of Forest Service wildland firefighting job openings in August. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)

According to internal data reviewed in July by ProPublica, approximately 1,600 red-carded staff left the government this winter and spring. The Forest Service has claimed that the actual figure is 1,400. Garcia asked for a full accounting of DOGE’s impact on the Forest Service, demanding “all documents and communications regarding staffing, hiring, reductions in force, the Deferred Resignation Program, or the ‘Fork in the Road,’ and firefighting resources and capacity at the Forest Service.”

The agency’s rosy public assessments of its own force have also been belied by its efforts to rehire the workers it forced out. In a July memo, the Forest Service’s chief, Tom Schultz, allowed that the agency did not have enough resources and was now recruiting red-carded staff who had separated from the agency. More recently, emails reviewed by ProPublica show that, since July 22, the Forest Service has sent multiple recruiting notices to departed staff. The emails advertise dozens of openings for essential firefighting positions — such as dispatcher, engine captain and hotshot superintendent — in at least seven states. When asked about the emails, an agency spokesperson wrote, “We do have active recruitments out for FY26.”

In his letter, Garcia requested that Rollins provide the oversight committee with “a detailed and comprehensive accounting of current staffing and staffing changes at the Forest Service, including firefighting jobs” since Jan. 20.

by Tony Schick, 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.

During the outcry against nuclear power in the 1970s, liberal Oregon lawmakers hatched a plan to slow an industry that was just getting started. They created a burdensome process that gave the public increased say over where power plants could be built, and the leading anti-nuclear activists of the day used appeal after appeal to delay proposed nuclear plants to death. It had a huge impact: Oregon’s first commercial nuclear plant, the one that spurred lawmakers into action, was also the state’s last.

What those lawmakers didn’t plan for was that 50 years later, an Oregon citizen activist would use that same bureaucracy to hinder some of the very energy projects that today’s liberals want: wind farms and the new high-voltage lines needed to support them.

They didn’t plan for Irene Gilbert.

The 76-year-old retired state employee, former gun store owner and avid elk hunter from La Grande, Oregon, is on a mission to keep turbines and transmission towers from blighting the rural landscape. She has filed more challenges to energy projects — 15 in all, including lawsuits — than anyone in the state, according to Oregon’s Department of Energy.

“I kind of have a reputation,” Gilbert said.

Renewable energy advocates treat activists like Gilbert as relentless gadflies who need to be stopped for the good of the planet.

They say Oregon’s slow process for approving energy projects, with its endless appeals, is one reason the state ranks near last in the country for green energy growth despite setting a deadline to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2040.

Democratic leaders up and down the West Coast are reckoning with liberal policies of the past that they say clash with today’s progressive agenda. In California, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a rollback of environmental review laws to expedite the construction of affordable housing. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has been pushing to roll back her state’s vaunted land-use restrictions for the same reason.

But Oregon leaders have been far less aggressive in confronting the historical artifacts that critics say hold green energy back. One, the Depression-vintage federal agency that runs most of the Northwest power grid, which has set a sluggish pace for upgrades; the other, the energy siting system Oregon created long ago for nuclear power. (The federal agency says it makes financially prudent decisions about construction.)

In the past five years, the Oregon Legislature has repeatedly rejected or watered down bills to streamline permitting of energy projects. The efforts included legislation supported by renewables advocates as well as farming and land conservation groups, both of which share Gilbert’s concerns about development in rural spaces.

In response to questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, the governor’s office acknowledged “existing significant impediments” to renewable energy growth in Oregon.

Kotek is “carefully considering opportunities to streamline Oregon’s energy siting processes,” spokesperson Anca Matica said in an email, “while maintaining opportunities for community input and preventing detrimental impacts.”

In the meantime, Kotek and lawmakers let another effort to modernize the system fall through the cracks this year. A proposal to limit public appeals and speed up permitting decisions resulted in only minor changes to the process. The status quo means developers remain locked in battles with Gilbert and others for years on end.

“I figure I can lose a thousand cases,” Gilbert said. “Even if it doesn’t look like it, I have made a difference.”

An Old Lady With a Laptop

Gilbert was retired from a career in state government and was running the Oregon Trail Trader gun shop with her partner in La Grande when she first heard about the Antelope Ridge wind farm. It was 2009, and only a handful of wind farms existed in the state. But an energy company suddenly wanted to erect 180 turbines across the scenic Grande Ronde River valley just outside town.

Energy infrastructure was a sore spot for Gilbert. Decades ago, she’d married into a ranching and timber family, and a chunk of the forest she owned was bulldozed for a transmission line. She blamed the line when she couldn’t get the timber to grow as she wanted.

She also had a stark memory of how quickly a business can erase a beloved part of rural Oregon. The company that owned Kinzua, the timber town where she grew up, razed it without a trace after shutting down operations in 1978.

Now that she was older, she said, she wanted to give back, and she was motivated by the idea of helping farmers and others protect their land from the government and electric companies.

“I feel like my reason for participating now is to do what I can to help these poor folks,” she said.

Gilbert became the legal research analyst for an opposition group known as Friends of the Grande Ronde Valley.

The tangle of rules governing energy siting was no problem. She’d worked as a trainer for the Oregon Department of Human Services and later Oregon Occupational Safety and Health, where she taught people how to understand the statutes that guided their work.

“So I know how to read government regulations,” she said.

She also enjoys it.

“It keeps my brain working,” she said with a laugh.

Gilbert spoke against the wind farm at public hearings. During one meeting in which she tried to add to her previous comments, she was cut off because the time for public testimony had passed.

She argued against the wind farm before the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council, which has ultimate authority over whether major pieces of infrastructure like wind farms, solar projects, power plants and transmission lines get built. She sent a letter to the governor’s office stating she would sue and make all of the state’s dealings with the energy company public along the way.

That wind farm never materialized. The company backed out in 2013, citing poor market conditions.

“We were successful in stopping that,” she said. “The company would say that it was a financial decision. I think it was more than that.” (The company told OPB and ProPublica in a statement that it was “the lack of strong commercial prospects.”)

Proposals for new wind farms kept cropping up, and she contested as many as she could, even ones three hours from her home. She’s missed only a handful of the energy siting council’s monthly meetings in the past decade, driving all around the state before video conferencing became common. Developers have approached her after meetings, she said, and asked her what it would take to make her happy.

“I’ve been called ‘an old lady who has access to a computer,’” she said. “That’s kind of, I guess, how I’m viewed, and OK … I guess that’s OK.”

She sometimes works at the antique desk in her home office, sometimes from the couch in a living room filled with her grandchildren’s artwork. She’s filed multiple challenges to five wind farms plus one big transmission line since the demise of Antelope Ridge. The transmission line is moving forward. Two of the wind projects were scuttled by developers, while three others got built.

Landowners and lawyers from around the region eventually began seeking her input for filing their own objections to energy projects.

“And my advice is free,” she said.

A committed Republican, Gilbert said she doesn’t do all this because she opposes the idea of clean energy. She owns a cabin powered by rooftop solar panels. She said she doesn’t believe in the need for large-scale solar, but said she did support a solar farm in the scenic Columbia River Gorge after developers listened to public input and took steps to reduce the project’s impact.

But she finds herself quite often at odds with the work of major wind, solar and transmission players, “Just because it’s taking so much land.”

Fuji Kreider, a self-described liberal Democrat who relocated from New York, started a friendship with Gilbert while both campaigned against a major transmission project.

“She calls herself a redneck environmentalist,” Kreider said during a visit at Gilbert’s home.

Kreider’s husband, Jim, chimed in: “A redneck, gun-toting environmentalist.”

“Something like that,” Kreider said.

The Boardman to Hemingway Line

In late summer 2023, Adam Richins, the chief operating officer of the electric utility Idaho Power, sat down in a black leather wingback chair at Paddy’s Bar & Grill in downtown Portland to swap horror stories with other Northwest leaders in the industry on a niche podcast called the Public Power Underground.

One of Richins’ doozies involved Irene Gilbert.

Richins at the time was in year 16 of trying to build a 300-mile transmission line through eastern Oregon, known as the Boardman to Hemingway line, or B2H for short. It is the crucible of Oregon’s energy growth, the single piece of infrastructure that utilities and renewable advocates are most eager to see built. It would connect Idaho green energy suppliers with Oregon data centers that demand loads of electricity.

“Anybody want to guess?” Richins asked his fellow power execs at one point during the show. “State process application. How many pages?”

“10,000,” one offered.

He shook his head, raised his thumb upward. Higher. And higher still.

“It was close to 20,000 pages,” Richins told them.

By the time the executive finished his tale of environmental reviews and land use certificates, he joked that he had tears running from his eyes.

“But then, guess what happens?” Richins said. “We got sued.”

By Gilbert.

Gilbert’s fight against B2H has been her biggest yet. Slicing through 300 miles of land Gilbert desperately wants to keep undisturbed, the line illustrates the stakes she and other rural Oregonians see in ridding grasslands and forests of massive new energy projects.

One of Gilbert’s “Stop B2H” allies, John Williams, owns the last remaining swath of what was once a sprawling family ranch and timber estate, just a few minutes’ drive from Gilbert’s home. Bushwhacking through wildflowers along his property line on a recent day, Williams, Gilbert and the Kreiders looked out on Twin Lake, its surface carpeted in yellow pond lilies and dotted with nesting birds. The activists worry the line will harm birds and that construction and maintenance crews driving through the transmission line corridor will carry in noxious weeds and invasive species.

Williams said Idaho Power’s proposed path, which runs through his property, has evolved over time — for the worse. “It’s lipstick on a pig,” he said, “but the original route I think made a lot less damage. It was lower in elevation. It took less timber.”

Idaho Power spokesperson Sven Berg told OPB and ProPublica the company has altered the transmission line’s path numerous times in response to public feedback and that the project is better for it.

John Williams points to a section of a map showing the planned route of the Boardman to Hemingway power transmission line. Williams, along with Gilbert and other Stop B2H allies, believe the project will ruin rural ecologies in Oregon. (Steve Lenz for ProPublica)

About an hour west of Twin Lake the next day, Gilbert sat with Sam Myers, who runs a fourth-generation wheat farm that the B2H line would transect. Myers said he worries the high-voltage lines could spark wildfires or electrocute people operating farm machinery nearby. (Idaho Power says planting and harvesting crops near the B2H will still be safe but cautions farmers against using machinery taller than 15 feet underneath. The company says its equipment meets or exceeds industry standards, that this equipment is closely monitored, and that the tall, metallic structures used for lines like B2H pose less fire risk than with smaller ones.)

Myers said he’s turned down developers offering “huge amounts of money” to put solar panels on his property.

“I don’t want to change farm ground to solar,” he said he’s told them. “Is there a way we can have a coexistence?”

Gilbert’s Stop B2H coalition, with 1,000 members, raised more than $350,000 against the project. (Kreider, the group’s treasurer, said the vast majority of donations — aside from larger checks from a few landowners and two historic preservation organizations — were less than $1,000 and came from individuals in Oregon and Eastern Idaho. She said the money went mainly to legal fees.)

B2H opponents filed a total of 117 challenges to the power line project, keeping the appeals process going long after the state approved construction in 2019.

In late March, though, the opponents lost their final appeal in court. Idaho Power began construction last month.

If Richins, the utility’s COO, feels exasperated by the two decades it took to overcome complaints from Gilbert and others, Gilbert thinks mainly about the outcome for her side.

For all its delays, the state’s energy council, in practice, does not reject proposed projects. And despite the claims that she’s gumming up the state’s process with her appeals, Gilbert has never actually reversed a council decision.

“My perception is that I’m ignored,” she said.

Oregon’s Energy Law

It might seem paradoxical that Gilbert considers herself an environmentalist while standing in the way of what most environmentalists today see as progress. But her right to do so has its roots in Oregon’s storied conservation movement of the 1970s.

Portland General Electric, a leading utility, prompted a fierce public backlash when it announced construction in 1967 on the Trojan Nuclear Plant about an hour outside of Portland. To address concerns about the safety of nuclear power and radioactive waste, Oregon lawmakers created the Nuclear and Thermal Energy Council.

PGE would eventually shutter Trojan after decades of regulatory violations, forced shutdowns, construction flaws, costly repairs and constant harrying from antinuclear activist Lloyd Marbet through the state council. Marbet’s tactics also delayed PGE’s efforts to build two more plants on the Columbia River until voters passed a ballot measure in 1980, creating strict rules for nuclear power that effectively killed the industry in Oregon.

The council lived on, rebranded as the Energy Facility Siting Council to cover more than just nuclear power.

Oregon is one of only 10 states with statewide energy standards, and renewable energy developers consider its approval process one of the country’s most rigorous. Covering everything from environmental safety and wildfire risk to sites of archaeological significance , Oregon’s law requires developers to follow many of the same steps federal regulators require.

The process is supposed to take no more than a year. But the energy siting council will suspend the deadline anytime someone formally objects to a project’s approval. A protest triggers a hearing, after which an administrative judge can ask the council to reverse itself, after which the council can agree or disagree, after which anyone can file a lawsuit, after which years of litigation may begin.

Oregon’s assistant director for energy siting, Todd Cornett, said public involvement can slow projects down, but that’s what the Legislature intended. While most of the power gets consumed on the more populous west side of the state that includes Portland, he noted, the new windmills and solar arrays are generally destined for dry, windy and rural eastern Oregon.

“We want to make sure that we’re taking into consideration all of the issues and concerns that people who are going to have to live with these facilities raise in the process,” he said.

Cornett denies this process has held back renewables, noting that projects have stalled even after the council’s approval. But he also acknowledged such holdups arise because new wind and solar farms will need more transmission lines to carry their output. There aren’t enough, in part, because it’s so difficult to get new ones through Cornett’s agency.

Some Oregon progressives give a nod to the bureaucracy that once mired nuclear reactors and say it’s time to give windmills and solar panels a faster pass.

“The process back in the early ’70s was meant to be a little bit more plodding,” said Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Democrat from the Portland suburbs, during a House floor speech in April. “Now that we are many, many decades past that time, we’re finding that the procedures EFSC operates under are really too slow for the relatively low-risk renewable energy that we’re seeking.”

The Boardman to Hemingway transmission line is projected to cut through Williams’ property. Some Oregon progressives say it’s time to give windmills, solar panels and transmission upgrades a faster pass to approval and construction. (Steve Lenz for ProPublica)

Yet lawmakers have balked at meaningful changes.

Two years ago they rejected a bill to create committees of farmers, developers, tribes and conservationists to identify places in each county for transmission lines and energy production. The bill also would have directed state agencies to streamline the renewable energy approval process.

This year, lawmakers rejected a bill to promote solar farms that coexist with cropland. Research at Oregon State University has found that the shade from solar panels increased crop yields and that, in turn, the crops can make solar panels work more efficiently by keeping the air around them cool.

With Gilbert’s long battle against B2H dragging on earlier this year, some lawmakers became galvanized. The 20 years it had taken to get the project on track was “ridiculous,” said Rep. Mark Gamba, a Portland-area Democrat who is vice chair of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment.

In February, Gamba introduced legislation to overhaul the state’s approach to siting and permitting energy facilities. Among the proposed changes: a tight restriction on appeals from members of the public. The provision would require that any lawsuit challenging the state’s approval of a project be fast-tracked to the state Supreme Court.

“So the NIMBYs will only get one bite at the apple,” Gamba said, using the acronym for “not in my backyard” that refers to people considered reflexively opposed to development near them.

The Legislature was coming after the gadflies like Gilbert.

An Overachiever for the Underdog

When members of the Stop B2H coalition gather in Gilbert’s living room, a computerized display of properties in the path of the project sits on a chair just beneath a portrait of a Native American man in a headdress of fur and bison horns. One of Gilbert’s brothers made the canvas from the hide of an elk he shot, and another painted it.

Both brothers died of Hungtington’s disease, a genetic disorder that began to severely debilitate them during their 30s. Gilbert, who had the same likelihood of inheriting the disease but did not, said losing them turned her into an overachiever who always wanted to fight for the underdog.

“I think I kind of try to compensate for what they weren’t able to do,” she said.

Fights against energy and transmission projects have been her mainstay for more than a decade. She said she sometimes awakens in the middle of the night, struck by an idea about a rule or statute that might be of use.

“Most of the people in Stop B2H believe that we need more energy. And I agree, we need more energy. But we cannot provide the energy needs of this country or this state by taking all of the farmland,” Gilbert said. “There’s a point where we aren’t going to have the land needed to produce food.”

When Gilbert heard about Gamba’s bill to upend her main means of objecting, she did not panic. She did what she has always done. She spoke up.

On a recent May afternoon in Salem, Gilbert sat on a window bench outside a Capitol hearing room where she’d testified against Gamba’s bill.

“I remember you!” exclaimed Gilbert’s state representative, Republican Bobby Levy. “You’re one of the smartest people. You do your research.”

Levy said she was working to oppose the bill.

Gamba in the end was disappointed with what the Legislature was able to pass. After setting out to overhaul Oregon’s energy siting bureaucracy, he said the scaled-back legislation only “dabbled around the edges.” It might shave 10% off approval times for green energy, he said.

What did survive was Gamba’s effort to move lawsuits filed by people like Gilbert directly to the Oregon Supreme Court. Gilbert was dismayed to lose the chance to build a case over time. But it won’t stop her.

Now that the Boardman to Hemingway line is actually getting built, Gilbert said, it will bring a rash of new applications from people seeking to build wind and solar farms along the power line’s route. Gilbert will be standing by to file challenges.

“I figure I’m going to be really busy,” she said.

Land where the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line is expected to be built (Steve Lenz for ProPublica)

by Lexi Churchill and Jasmine Aguilera, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Ellis Simani, ProPublica

Texas’ education landscape is changing. Our reporters at ProPublica and The Texas Tribune know that education policy today will shape the state’s future for generations to come. That is why we need your help covering this issue. Whether you’re a teacher; parent; school leader; student who has been affected by decisions made at the local, state or national level; or one of the government employees shaping them, we want to hear from you. Tell us what issues you believe require greater oversight, whether they are the impact of vouchers, misuse of public funds, disproportionate disciplinary policies, budget deficits or anything else that is affecting how students learn.

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

Our team may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but we will read everything you submit. A reporter from ProPublica or the Tribune may reach out to learn more.

You can also contact reporter Lexi Churchill on Signal at 816-898-5462 if you have sensitive information to share.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Ellis Simani, ProPublica

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

For about eight years, a Houston private school has followed a unique pattern when appointing members to its governing board: It has selected only married couples.

Over 200 miles away, two private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members.

And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view.

Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars. Now, as the state moves to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on private education, lawmakers have imposed almost none of the accountability measures required of the public school system.

If held to the same standards, 27 private schools identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through tax filings likely would have violated state law. The news organizations found, and three education law experts confirmed, more than 60 business transactions, board appointments and hiring decisions by those schools that would have run afoul of the state rules meant to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest if they were public.

“It’s frankly astonishing to me that anyone would propose the massive sort of spending that we’re talking about in these school voucher programs with, at best, minimal accountability,” said Mark Weber, a public school finance lecturer at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who opposes vouchers. “If I were a taxpayer in Texas, I’d be asking, who’s going to be looking out for me?”

Texas has long stood as a holdout in the national push for voucher programs, even as other conservative states embraced them. Gov. Greg Abbott gave school voucher proponents a major win this year, signing into law one of the largest and costliest programs in the country. In doing so, Abbott’s office has argued that the state has “strict financial requirements,” saying that “Texas taxpayers expect their money to be spent efficiently and effectively on their behalf, both in private and traditional public schools.”

The law, however, imposes no restrictions to prevent the kinds of entanglements that the newsrooms found.

The contrast is sharp. Public or charter school officials who violate these rules could be subject to removal from office, fines or even state jail felony charges.

Private schools face none of those consequences.

Supporters of the voucher program argue that oversight of private schools should come not from the state, but from their boards and the marketplace.

“If you transform the private schools into public schools by applying the same rules and regulations and procedural requirements on them, then you take the private out of the private school,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas. Wolf, who supports vouchers, said that if parents are unhappy with the schools, they will hold them accountable by leaving and taking their tuition dollars with them.

Typically, neither parents nor the state’s taxpayers have access to information that shows precisely how private schools spend money. Only those that are organized as nonprofits are required to file public tax forms that offer limited information. Of the state’s more than 1,000 accredited private schools, many are exempt from submitting such filings because they are religious or for-profit institutions, leaving their business conduct opaque. It is unclear if private schools that participate in Texas’ voucher-like program will have to detail publicly how they use taxpayer dollars.

“The public system is not always perfect, but when it’s not perfect, we see it,” said Joy Baskin, associate executive director for policy and legal services at the Texas Association of School Boards, which represents public districts across the state. “That kind of transparency doesn’t exist in private schools.”

The Chinese Baptist Church in Houston, where Trinity Classical School has a campus (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) “Just Isn’t Right”

Conflicts of interest in education were on the minds of legislators this spring. At an education committee hearing in March, Texas state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Republican from Rio Grande City, along the southern border with Mexico, introduced a bill that would bar businesses with close ties to board members from applying for school district contracts. Such deals were previously permitted as long as school leaders publicly disclosed conflicts and abstained from voting.

But Guillen, who did not respond to requests for comment, argued those rules were abused, pointing to recent scandals in two districts that led to state investigations and, in one case, resulted in federal charges.

He described his bill as a “commonsense” proposal that would ensure “no one in a position of power can exploit the system for financial benefit.” The Legislature passed the bill, which was signed into law by Abbott.

Notably, the measure excluded private schools. In public testimony, no one brought them up, and there was no debate about them even as lawmakers advanced a proposal that would direct state money to them.

The newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.

Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep, a Catholic high school serving primarily low-income students of color, awarded more than $5 million to a construction firm owned by one of its board members for “interior finish” work between 2017 and 2021, tax filings show. The school did not respond to questions about the payments. Raul Estrada, who was on the school board when his firm received the payments, said he recused himself from any votes or decisions related to the contract. He added that the company’s work provided “substantial savings” to the school but did not provide specific figures.

Just 30 miles north, board members at the Shelton School, which specializes in teaching students with learning differences such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments over the last decade. Tax records show one trustee was awarded over $465,000 for landscaping, and another collected more than $1.2 million for “printed education material.” The board members whose firms received the contracts did not respond to requests for comment. Suzanne Stell, the school’s executive director, said the board members who received contracts were not involved in the decisions. Stell also said that the contract for printed material included training for educators.

Our investigation also found dozens of instances of nepotism or relatives serving on boards together at private schools, some of which were started and are led by families.

Trinity Classical School in Houston, for example, has long maintained a family-led chain of governance on its school board exclusive to married couples, appointing a new pair each time one cycled off. The board deviated from that pattern only once, when it selected Neil Anderson, the school’s leader, according to tax filings. None of the current board members responded to interview requests, nor did Anderson or the school.

Such arrangements have been prohibited since 2012 in charter schools, which are restricted from appointing more than one family member to serve as a trustee at the same time. Anderson’s appointment would also not be allowed in traditional public schools, where employees are barred from serving on their school’s governing board.

At the elite Greenhill School in the Dallas area, where tuition can exceed $40,000 a year, the previous leader, Scott Griggs, hired his son to coach the boys’ volleyball team and teach middle school math. While allowed in private schools, state nepotism laws prevent public and charter schools from hiring close relatives of superintendents and trustees, with few exceptions. Griggs told the newsrooms that he’d already announced his retirement when he asked the board in 2017 to approve hiring his son, who did not respond to requests for comment.

The following year, the college prep academy provided a personal loan of nearly $100,000 to its current head of school, Lee Hark, for a down payment on a home. The school did not disclose the terms of the agreement in its tax filings, including whether it charged interest or what would happen should Hark default. Hark declined to comment.

Private schools are generally free to use money as they choose, but a 150-year-old provision of the Texas Constitution bars public schools from lending taxpayer dollars. The state does not require private schools to publicly disclose whether taxpayer money would be used for such arrangements under the voucher program.

In a written statement, a Greenhill spokesperson said the school operates with “sound financial principles” that meet or exceed “all standards of accountability for independent schools.” She said the school charged interest on the loan and it has since been paid off, but did not provide records.

Many of the private schools examined by the news organizations, including Greenhill, said that they are still deciding whether to participate in the voluntary voucher program.

The lack of accountability for private schools has sparked concern from public school parents like Sarah Powell, a mother of two near Dallas. She was among thousands who urged lawmakers to reject voucher legislation earlier this year.

“You’re either part of the system or you’re not,” Powell later told the newsrooms. “You can’t have the resources and not any of the regulations. It just isn’t right.”

The Greenhill School, where tuition can surpass $40,000 per student, in Addison, just outside of Dallas (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Repeating History

State funds flowing to public and charter schools are monitored by the Texas Education Agency, which requires annual independent audits and assigns ratings that gauge each school’s fiscal health. Districts that repeatedly underperform risk sanctions, including forced closure.

The state, however, will not directly regulate private schools under the new voucher program, which will begin next year. Instead, supervision will largely fall to one of 20 private organizations, which schools must pay to obtain and maintain the accreditation required to receive public funds.

A review by the newsrooms of these organizations’ standards found they are generally far less rigorous than the state’s. Most do not require annual financial audits, which some accreditation organizations say can be too costly and time-consuming, and many do not mandate policies to prevent nepotism and conflicts of interest.

If a private school loses accreditation from one group, it can simply apply to another.

Texas lawmakers laid the groundwork for publicly funded schools with limited state oversight when they authorized charter schools in the 1990s as an alternative to traditional public education. At the time, they exempted charter schools from many regulations, betting that greater flexibility would lead to innovation and stronger academic performance.

But over the past three decades, the state has steadily increased restrictions on charter schools in response to concerns about financial mismanagement and academic performance. Charter schools, for example, were initially exempt from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws, but lawmakers gradually changed that after reports exposed leaders enriching themselves and their families. The state implemented another round of stricter rules after newspapers uncovered lavish spending on perks such as Spurs tickets and lucrative land deals.

Even as oversight of charter schools has been strengthened, gaps remain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and Tribune investigation found that a charter network with 1,000 students was paying its superintendent nearly $900,000 annually, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the nation. Yet the school did not disclose the superintendent’s full compensation to the state and later rebuffed calls to lower his salary from lawmakers and the advocacy group representing charters. The school board defended Cavazos’ salary, saying it was merited because of his duties and experience.

“Looking back on it today, I think it was necessary,” Bob Schulman, a longtime education attorney, said about many of the reforms.

Schulman, who has represented Texas charter schools for decades, said that some leaders abused the limited state oversight for years, making it more concerning that lawmakers launched a voucher program with even fewer regulations.

“I’m very disturbed,” Schulman said. “But I’m hopeful that it will be a quicker turnaround than it was for the charters.”

How We Reported This Story

For this story, reporters reviewed nonprofit tax filings for 90 of the 200 highest-enrollment private schools listed in the Texas Private Schools Accreditation Commission database. Those filings were not available for the other 110 schools, as for-profit schools or those tied to houses of worship are not typically required to make tax documents public. For the schools that filed these records, reporters reviewed available annual reports dating back to at least 2015.

Reporters identified more than 60 instances involving conflicts of interest, nepotism and financial transactions with related parties at 27 schools. Three education lawyers confirmed our findings.

That total, however, is likely an undercount even within the sample of schools the newsrooms reviewed. Reporters identified dozens more conflicts listed in tax forms, for example, but the schools provided sparse information about what they were. Because of that, there is no way to determine if the conduct would have violated state laws if it had occurred at a public or charter school. The newsrooms reached out to each school about the missing information, but none answered questions.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on Education

by Jake Pearson

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A task force appointed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is recommending that the state spend at least $15 million per year and create state-level oversight to bolster its troubled guardianship system, in which judges assign individuals or organizations to care for some 30,000 residents deemed incapable of looking after their own affairs.

If adopted, the plan would represent a major change in how the state government cares for some of its most vulnerable residents. New York currently budgets just $1 million to fund a guardianship hotline, and the legal arrangements receive little official oversight, with responsibility for people’s wellbeing spread among the courts, nonprofit organizations, private lawyers and companies.

The policy proposal, contained in the state’s Master Plan for Aging, comes three years after Hochul, a Democrat, issued an executive order creating a panel to map out the needs of New York’s aging population and suggest how best to serve older adults.

The plan concludes that improving the guardianship system would offer outsize benefits and would not be overly difficult to achieve.

The recommendations mark the first time Hochul’s administration has addressed problems with the state’s guardianship system since ProPublica investigated it extensively in a series of stories last year. Those stories revealed how some guardians neglected the vulnerable clients entrusted to their care. They also highlighted how few guardians the state has to serve the New Yorkers who require assistance — and how little oversight exists to ensure proper care. The problem is particularly acute for poor people who have no family able or willing to look after them, ProPublica found, a population known in industry circles as the “unbefriended.”

To fill the provider void, New York has long relied on a network of loosely regulated nonprofits and private companies, some of which have racked up hundreds of clients each but provided little or no services. That dynamic, ProPublica found, has resulted in claims of spectacular abuse and neglect, prompting the courts to appoint a special counsel to oversee guardianship reforms and Attorney General Letitia James to launch an investigation into some providers.

Advocates and judicial leaders have been calling for the guardianship system to be overhauled for years, but such an effort has remained elusive. It’s unclear whether Hochul’s task force will change that, even as the group’s report keeps guardianship in the political conversation in Albany.

The Legislature has barely funded guardianship services, allotting just enough in its budget the past two years to maintain a statewide hotline. And even the governor won’t say whether she plans to implement the reforms suggested by her own panel.

“The Governor appreciates the dedicated time and effort that many stakeholders put into producing the proposals included in the Master Plan for Aging and looks forward to working with these stakeholders and the legislature to collectively evaluate how best to utilize them to ensure New York remains a place where older New Yorkers can thrive,” a spokesperson for the governor said in a statement.

The spokesperson, Nicolette Simmonds, didn’t respond to an email and call asking for more specifics, including what Hochul’s position is on guardianship reform.

But Guardianship Access New York, a statewide coalition of nonprofit guardians and elder and disability justice advocates, said that it was encouraged by the governor’s plan since it acknowledged “a long-standing crisis.”

“New York’s guardianship system is past the point of crisis, and the Governor and Legislature must act now before it collapses,” Arthur Diamond, a former supervising judge of guardianship matters in Nassau County and a member of GANY, said in a statement. “We must stop ignoring the most vulnerable of the elder population and protect them now.”

But how, exactly, that will happen remains unclear. GANY has proposed the state fund a network of nonprofits with experience in government contracting and providing guardianship services.

Within the court system, a guardianship advisory committee recommended earlier this year that the state create a taxpayer-funded statewide organization to care for the unbefriended, records obtained by ProPublica show.

And some lawmakers have proposed changes, though none of them seek comprehensive reform.

One bill would require someone petitioning for a guardianship to identify all possible people who could manage the incapacitated person’s affairs, for example, while another would make it harder for a guardian to deny family members the right to visit a loved one under their care and control.

Assemblyman Charles Lavine, who chairs his chamber’s judiciary committee, said he supports a series of public roundtables to be hosted this fall by the courts and advocates “to gather local input and firsthand perspectives on guardianship access challenges” as a means of formulating a more comprehensive solution.

“These discussions will help inform statewide efforts to expand and improve guardianship services, including the creation of a comprehensive public guardianship system,” he said.

Still, any significant reform effort will require buy-in from the Legislature’s top leaders. Neither Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins nor Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie responded to requests for comment on Hochul’s Master Plan for Aging.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Alex Nguyen and Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune

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

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

Records released this week provide more details about campus safety concerns raised before the deadly 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and include some surviving teachers’ accounts that school leaders didn’t check on them after they were injured and traumatized.

The documents from Uvalde County and the school district also indicate that the 18-year-old shooter had behavioral and attendance issues before he dropped out of high school, and that his mother had told sheriff’s deputies that she was scared of him.

The county and Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District released the materials — nearly 12 gigabytes — as part of a settlement agreement in a yearslong lawsuit that news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, brought against state and local governments.

The records reinforce the failure of law enforcement agencies to more quickly confront the gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. ProPublica and the Tribune previously found that officers wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and waited 77 minutes to confront him. No officer took control of the response, which prevented coordination and communication between agencies.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which dispatched more than 90 officers to the school, has appealed a separate judge’s order to release hundreds of videos and investigative files to the news organizations that sued for access. The agency’s effort to slow the release of information continues to draw criticism from families of the victims, teachers and the former mayor, who is now a Republican state lawmaker.

“It’s important so that the families can begin to heal, so that the families can begin to trust, so they begin to have some sort of closure,” said Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece, Jackie Cazares, was killed during the May 24, 2022, massacre.

Rizo, now a school board member who voted to release the agency’s records, added, “It will never be complete closure, but some sort of closure, and rebuilding that trust in law enforcement.”

The news organizations will continue to fight for release of the DPS records, said Laura Prather, a media law chair for Haynes Boone who is representing the outlets.

Law enforcement experts largely regard the Uvalde shooting response as among the worst in American history. A U.S. Justice Department report in January 2024 affirmed many of the newsrooms’ initial findings and recommended that all officers in the country undergo at least eight hours of active shooter training annually.

“Three years is already too long to wait for truth and transparency that could prevent future tragedies,” Prather said.

Two former Uvalde schools police officers were indicted on child endangerment charges last summer over how they responded to the shooting. That includes Pete Arredondo, who was the district’s police chief during the shooting and has been widely faulted for the delay in confronting the gunman. Adrian Gonzales, a school police officer who responded to the shooting, also faces charges related to child endangerment. Both men have pleaded not guilty and did not respond to requests for comment this week.

This week, Gonzales’ attorney filed a request seeking a trial outside of Uvalde, saying “it would be impossible to gather a jury that would not view evidence through their own pain and grief.” In a text, the attorney, Nico LaHood, maintained that Gonzales is innocent and wrote that there is no evidence for why he should be held to account for collective failures of law enforcement agents from nearly two dozen agencies.

“It begs to question why he is accused of these charges out of nearly 400 officers present,” LaHood wrote.

Arredondo has also previously asserted that he did nothing wrong on the day of the shooting.

Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is leading the criminal investigation, did not return requests for comment. Spokespeople for the school district and county also did not immediately respond. DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen wrote in an email that the agency followed “its standard protocol in which it does not release records that will impact pending prosecutions.”

Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, now a GOP member of the state House, called it “ludicrous” that the news organizations had to launch a legal fight to obtain records. He added that DPS should also release its information so that the victims’ families could get much-needed answers.

“Maybe there’s something in there that we can keep this from happening again,” he said. “This was a costly mistake, and so I believe everybody should just release their records and give these families not closure, but at least another piece of what went on that day.”

ProPublica and the Tribune previously published 911 calls that showed the increasing desperation of children and teachers pleading to be saved and revealed how officers’ fear of the shooter’s AR-15 prevented them from acting more quickly. In a collaboration with FRONTLINE that included a documentary, the newsrooms showed that while the children in Uvalde were prepared, following what they had learned in their active shooter drills, many of the nearly 400 officers who responded were not.

The county documents include emails to and from Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, but they reveal little about his office’s response. Nolasco’s inbox was inundated with media requests, offers of assistance from other law enforcement agencies and emails from the public criticizing law enforcement’s 77-minute delay in confronting the shooter, according to the documents released Tuesday.

Nolasco has faced criticism for his actions on the day of the shooting. He was the first officer to respond to the house of the shooter's grandmother, whom the gunman shot in the face before going to Robb Elementary. Law enforcement experts have questioned why Nolasco did not do more to identify the shooter immediately. Shortly after that, the sheriff arrived at the school but did not appear to take charge of the escalating situation. Several officers later told state investigators that they regarded the sheriff as the incident commander.

Nolasco could not be reached for comment on Tuesday and has declined multiple interview requests from the news organizations over the course of more than two years. In an interview Nolasco gave to DPS days after the shooting that was later obtained by the news organizations, he offered few details while defending his role that day.

A DOJ investigation into the flawed response last year mentioned Nolasco by name 37 times and noted that he specifically “should also have assisted with coordinating the law enforcement personnel present and establishing a command post and unified command.” Despite the controversy, Nolasco was easily reelected last year.

None of the school district police officers were wearing body cameras that day because the district had not issued them the equipment, so no new video or audio was released. The body cameras the county released had already been obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

“I Tried to Stay Calm for My Students”

Still, the records released this week showed further glimpses into the disarray that day.

In one school email sent three weeks after the shooting, a fourth grade teacher at Robb Elementary wrote to the district superintendent about how terrified she was during the shooting, as she tried to keep her students safe while bullets ricocheted around her.

According to a state House committee’s investigation into the shooting, the teacher was in a classroom across the hall from the adjoining classrooms where the gunaman killed all of his victims and was barricaded.

“I fell on the floor and began knocking desks over onto my legs so I wouldn’t make noise, but I couldn’t block the students from bullets,” she emailed the former district superintendent, who retired after the shooting. “I told my students I loved them. I told them to stay quiet, and I told them to pray.”

ProPublica and the Tribune could not immediately reach the teacher. In her email, she told the superintendent she was convinced she was going to die.

“I physically sat almost laying myself on my students and in front of them to be sure I could block them from bullets,” she wrote in an email. “I knew I would die that day. I had shrapnel in my back from when he shot in my window. I had blood all over the back of me, but I tried to stay calm for my students.”

The teacher wrote about how much she loved her students and working for the district. But she also noted that no school officials ever reached out to her immediately after the shooting. She wrote that she and other staff were asked not to talk to the media.

A month after the massacre, another fourth grade teacher who survived being shot finally felt ready to ask about what was happening to her classroom.

“Is it being packed up, if so what will happen with my personal belongings?” Elsa Avila wrote in an email to the school’s principal. “The students had piñatas they were working on, were those salvaged or did they get thrown away?”

Avila said in the email that it was hard to accept that she may never get answers to many of her questions about the shooting.

“So I guess I can start with answers about my classroom,” she said.

In a brief interview this week, Avila said school leaders did not reach out to her directly while she was in the hospital. She also said the district should have released records sooner and that she hopes other agencies will follow.

Still, she said, the government’s actions are lacking “any follow up.”

“There were hundreds of officers there, so, to me, it still does not make sense that they only charged two officers,” she said. “Will there ever be any true accountability from other agencies? Because more people would need to be held accountable, more agencies need to be held accountable than just the two officers that they charged.”

The new records also show that school administrators had been aware of long-standing issues with locks on campus doors. Multiple witnesses told the legislative panel that employees often left doors unlocked, while teachers would use rocks, wedges and magnets to prop open interior and exterior doors. The shooter was able to enter the school through an unlocked exterior door, according to the legislative investigation.

According to emails released this week, administrators had met with the owner of a lock company to discuss purchasing automatic locks for the district’s exterior doors a little less than a month before the shooting. Emails sent after the shooting showed cost estimates in the millions for installing new exterior doors, hardened windows, fencing and other security infrastructure.

Students have not returned to Robb Elementary since the 2022 attack. Local officials announced plans to demolish the school in the months following the shooting. A new campus, Legacy Elementary School, is expected to open this fall, and the site of the abandoned school has been turned into a living memorial.

Troubled History

The school district documents also include previously withheld information about the shooter, Salvador Ramos. They show district officials raising alarms about him hitting another student, using sexual language and drawing inappropriate pictures.

In an email, former Superintendent Hal Harrell noted that Ramos was routinely failing classes and barely attending school.

Academic intervention plans recommended one-on-one tutoring and parent conferences, however it is unclear what actions district officials or Ramos’ guardians ever took. Intervention plans from the 2016-17 school year largely list “behavior” as the reason for intervention. Ramos eventually dropped out.

Then, around three months before the shooting, a sheriff’s deputy visited the teenager’s home two days in a row following reports of physical and verbal disturbance between him and his family.

His mother, Adriana Reyes, could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday. But, according to the records, she told the deputy that Ramos became angry and kicked the Wi-Fi modem after she turned off the internet connection. The deputy wrote in a report that the mother said she was “scared of Salvador and wanted help.”

by Heather Vogell

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

What Happened: Greystar, the nation’s largest landlord, has agreed to stop using algorithmic rent-setting software that federal prosecutors say could violate laws against price-fixing.

The agreement is part of a proposed settlement with the Justice Department to resolve claims by federal authorities that the company had colluded with other landlords to raise rents in cities across the country.

The deal was announced by the DOJ on Friday but still must be approved by a judge. If it is, it will bar Greystar, which is based in South Carolina and manages nearly 950,000 apartments nationwide, from using any “anti-competitive” algorithm that relies on rivals’ sensitive data to suggest rents, the department said in a statement.

Greystar was using rent-setting algorithms from RealPage, a Texas-based software-maker who was the subject of a ProPublica investigation in 2022 that showed the firm was helping landlords decide prices in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior. The DOJ has also sued RealPage.

What They Said: The settlement drew praise from both Republicans and Democrats.

The lawsuit began under the Biden administration, but Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi touted the agreement with Greystar last week, saying “nowhere is competition more important than in making housing affordable again.”

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater, head of DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said that “whether in a smoke-filled room or through an algorithm, competitors cannot share competitively sensitive information or align prices to the detriment of American consumers.”

The settlement was praised by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who urged the DOJ to investigate anticompetitive practices in the apartment market after ProPublica’s story in 2022.

“This settlement is good news for renters across the country,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “It’s critical the Justice Department continues to prosecute the case against RealPage and other major landlords to provide relief for all renters.”

Response: Greystar did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement and said in a statement that it “firmly believes that its use of RealPage’s revenue management software complies with all applicable laws.” The company said it will continue to defend itself against claims brought by regulators and cited what it called “unclear regulatory guidance around the use of revenue management tools.”

“We entered into these settlements to make clear the government’s interpretation of the law and to ensure we continue to do things the right way,” Greystar said.

Greystar also announced it had reached “an agreement in principle” to settle litigation brought by a nationwide group of renters making similar allegations.

A Greystar spokesperson declined to comment further.

RealPage declined to comment.

In January, a RealPage executive called the federal case “flawed” and said the company was committed to “vigorously defending ourselves.” RealPage had already changed its software to remove nonpublic data, she said, despite its view that its technology was legal and “pro-competitive,” adding the company was being made a scapegoat for housing affordability problems stemming from an undersupply of housing stock.

Background: The proposed settlement is the latest development to follow ProPublica’s 2022 investigation, which also mentioned Greystar. Dozens of tenants sued RealPage after the initial story. The Justice Department filed an antitrust complaint against RealPage in August 2024, and in January, it sued six of the nation’s landlords, including Greystar, accusing them of improperly working together to raise rents. In their complaint, prosecutors said one landlord told RealPage that it started increasing rents within a week of adopting the software and, within 11 months, had raised them more than 25%.

The suit was joined by at least 10 attorneys general, including the one for California, the country’s most populous state — home to roughly 17 million renters. One other landlord, Atlanta-based Cortland, has agreed to a settlement, as well.

Senators have also held hearings and introduced legislation seeking to ban the use of rent algorithms similar to RealPage’s. Cities around the country, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, moved to bar landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.

Under the terms of the proposed settlement, Greystar has agreed to stop sharing its own “competitively sensitive” information with rival companies. And it won’t attend meetings of competitors hosted by RealPage.

Why It Matters: The DOJ’s moves against RealPage — and its landlord customers — for using shared data and technology were seen as an indication that authorities were willing to wade into a fraught corner of federal antitrust law. In the past, collusion happened with “a formal handshake in a clandestine meeting,” federal prosecutors wrote in one filing. “Algorithms are the new frontier.”

The proposed settlement is also significant as businesses watch to see how aggressively the Trump administration will pursue antitrust cases. Bondi said the agreement aligned with the president’s “pro-consumer agenda.”

Now, as part of the deal, Greystar has agreed to cooperate with the DOJ’s monopolization claims against RealPage. The case is ongoing. RealPage has sought to dismiss the suit, saying “it fails to plead anticompetitive effects in a relevant market,” among other things.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose, ProPublica, and Katherine Dailey, Medill Investigative Lab

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

For more than a dozen years, the Food and Drug Administration quietly allowed substandard foreign factories to continue shipping medications to the United States even after the agency officially banned them from doing so because of dangerous manufacturing failures.

ProPublica exposed the little-known practice in June. The FDA said the decisions to exempt certain medications from import bans were made to fend off drug shortages and that guardrails were in place to ensure the products were safe, such as requiring the banned factories to do extra testing on the drugs before they were sent to Americans.

But the agency itself didn’t regularly test the drugs or proactively monitor reports filed by doctors and others that described drugs with a foul odor, abnormal taste or residue, or consumers who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems. The FDA cautions the outcomes described in the complaints may have no connection to the drugs or could be unexpected side effects. But drug safety experts say that without further study, it’s impossible to know whether people were harmed or how many.

The FDA kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and has never released a comprehensive list of the drugs allowed into the United States from banned factories. ProPublica is publishing that list today.

The list provides the names of the drugs or ingredients that ProPublica has identified as having been exempted from an import ban since 2013 and the names of the manufacturers that made them. The product names are written as they appeared on the FDA’s import alert list. Most of the factories on this list are no longer banned, so their drugs are coming into the country through normal channels. The FDA lifts bans after facilities make all the necessary fixes.

Some of the factories are still banned — and are still allowed to send exempted drugs to the U.S. Those are highlighted in yellow.

Exempted Drugs Since 2013

See the full list and search for a drug here.

All told, ProPublica identified more than 150 exempted products, mostly from factories in India. One factory in China and one factory in Hungary also received exemptions. Several of the factories make ingredients for drugs, which are then sent to the manufacturers that produce pills, capsules, tablets or injectables.

To compile the list of exempted drugs and ingredients, reporters pulled historical records from the internet and used Redica Systems, a quality and regulatory intelligence company with a vast collection of agency documents.

In finalizing its analysis, ProPublica counted all the drugs and ingredients that were exempted from each banned factory. Sometimes, the same product was exempted from multiple factories and was added to each factory’s total. In a handful of cases, the FDA exempted several formulations — such as a tablet, capsule or injectable — of the same drug. ProPublica counted those different forms as distinct drugs.

For this list, ProPublica only included each drug once for each manufacturer.

Generic drugs can have many manufacturers, and it can be difficult to know based on information provided on medicine bottles where drugs were made or by whom. Sometimes bottles list the names of repackagers or distributors rather than the drugmaker itself. Pharmacists and possibly health care providers can provide additional information about the source of prescribed medications.

This list is current as of Aug. 4. The FDA can add or remove exempted drugs at any time.

Company Responses

ProPublica reached out to all the drugmakers listed here. Most did not respond.

Apotex did not respond to requests for comment. After the inspections that led to the import bans, the company told the FDA that it would launch corrective actions and bring on a third-party consultant, among other things. The factories are no longer banned.

Divi’s Laboratories did not respond to requests for comment. In its response to the FDA at the time, the company said it hired third-party consultants and other experts to resolve the FDA’s concerns. The company also said it had taken corrective actions at the facility. The factory is no longer banned.

Emcure Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. In its response to the FDA at the time, the company said it would revise procedures, provide training and engage consultants, among other things. The factory is still banned but no longer has exemptions.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. At the time of the ban, the company said it would engage with the FDA to resolve the concerns. The factory is still banned but is no longer receiving any exemptions.

GPT Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. In its response to the FDA, the company defended the quality of its products and said it had brought on a consultant to audit the operation. The factory is no longer banned.

In a statement to ProPublica, Pfizer, which owns Hospira, said it submitted a comprehensive response to the FDA, paused production at the site and then sold the facility to another company in 2019. “We are committed to operating our manufacturing sites at the highest quality standards,” Pfizer said. The factory is no longer banned.

Intas Pharmaceuticals, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that the company has invested millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires and launched a companywide program focused on quality. Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States because the FDA found other suppliers. The company would not provide details. “Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said. The two Intas factories are still banned and still receiving exemptions.

Ipca Laboratories did not respond to requests for comment. At the time, Ipca said it was working to resolve the issues at several factories. “The company is committed to its philosophy of highest quality in manufacturing, operations, systems, integrity and cGMP culture,” Ipca said, referring to “current good manufacturing practices,” a common phrase in the industry. The factories are no longer banned.

Jubilant Generics did not respond to requests for comment. At the time, the company said it would “engage with the agency to resolve the import alert at the earliest and ensure cGMP compliance.” The factory is no longer banned.

Shilpa Medicare did not respond to requests for comment. In a media statement at the time, the company said it planned to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “We uphold quality and compliance with utmost importance and are committed to maintaining cGMP and quality standards across all Shilpa facilities.” The factory is still banned and one of its medications is still exempt.

Sri Krishna Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. The company at the time told the FDA that it was using a consultant to audit operations and assist in meeting manufacturing requirements. The factory is still banned but is no longer receiving exemptions.

In a statement to ProPublica, Sun Pharma said that adherence to quality standards “is a top priority for Sun, and we maintain a relentless focus on quality and compliance to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines to our customers and patients worldwide. We continue to work proactively with the US FDA and remain committed to achieve full resolution of any FDA regulatory issues at our facilities.” The factory is still banned and still receiving exemptions.

Teva Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. The company said in a statement at the time that it was working to avoid drug shortages “while we focus on resolving regulatory concerns, as patients are always highest priority.” The factory is still banned but no longer receiving exemptions.

Wockhardt did not respond to requests for comment. In a conference call with reporters at the time of the import ban, according to Reuters, the Wockhardt chairman said the company was “making all kinds of effort to satisfy” FDA good manufacturing standards at the factory. The factories are still banned, but in July, Wockhardt announced that it would no longer make generics for the U.S. market.

Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical did not respond to requests for comment. According to a report in Bloomberg, Hisun said at the time that it takes quality seriously and has complied with requirements. The factory is no longer banned.

Mylan/Viatris said in a statement to ProPublica that it immediately worked to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “Patient safety remains our primary and unwavering focus,” the company said. The factory is still banned and still receiving exemptions.

A lawyer for Madhu Instruments told ProPublica in an email that the company has fixed all the problems identified by the FDA and is cooperating fully. The factory is still banned but no longer has an exemption.

Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang contributed data reporting.

by Megan Rose and Debbie Cenziper

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

The dispatches from one of India’s most troubled generic drug makers were contrite, filled with far-reaching promises to clean up its factory, stop contamination and send safe medication to Americans counting on the company’s drugs.

“We have started addressing FDA concerns very aggressively and comprehensively,” an executive from Sun Pharma wrote to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2015.

“Sun is ensuring the presence of a strong, independent quality unit,” the company repeatedly pledged.

An FDA inspection in 2014 had turned up dangerous violations at Sun’s factory in the Indian city of Halol, and the details were grim: Managers weren’t following basic rules to prevent the contamination of injectable drugs. They had failed to determine whether “unknown impurities” found in medication were toxic. The factory itself was in disrepair. The ceiling leaked and investigators observed dripping water, another dangerous contamination risk, collecting in buckets in a sterile manufacturing area.

Sun vowed bold reform at the factory, its flagship for the U.S. market. In a series of letters to the FDA after the inspection, executives described a long list of “enhancements” in facilities, in staffing, in quality standards, in training.

But for eight years, as inspectors returned and discovered again and again that Sun’s efforts were grossly inadequate, the FDA did little to warn the public or stop the drugs from coming to the United States.

The trove of Sun correspondence obtained by ProPublica provides a rare glimpse into private discussions between the global drugmaker and the U.S. regulator singularly responsible for protecting consumers from unsafe medication. The documents show how often the FDA tolerated Sun’s broken promises and substandard manufacturing, allowing an uninterrupted flow of generics to an American public clamoring for cheaper medication.

As Sun’s fixes fell short, the agency in 2015 even declared the factory’s products “adulterated” which, according to federal law, means they were produced in a way that could have compromised their strength, quality and purity.

A 2015 warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration to Sun Pharma stated that the agency “identified significant violations of current good manufacturing practice” and that “these violations cause your drugs products to be adulterated.” (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Not until the final weeks of 2022 would the agency bar the factory from shipping its drugs to the U.S. Even then, regulators immediately excluded more than a dozen medications from the ban. The exemptions allowed Sun to continue sending those drugs — with few restrictions and no regular testing by the FDA.

In June, 11 years after that first alarming inspection, the agency went back to the factory and chronicled practically identical deficiencies. Equipment was still dirty. Injectable medications still had impurities. One worker wasn’t wearing clean gloves.

The failings convinced the FDA to keep the import ban in place, but the agency continued to allow Sun to send exempted drugs to the United States.

“Would you trust somebody who repeatedly lies to you?” said Dinesh Thakur, an industry whistleblower and drug-safety advocate. “I don’t know how you can justify your decision to try to give them a pass every time. … You are basically putting people at risk.”

More than 20 foreign factories banned from the U.S. market have received similar exemptions from the FDA since 2013 through a little-known practice used by the agency to prevent drug shortages. ProPublica reported in June that antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs and chemotherapy treatments were shipped from those plants even after inspectors identified critical violations in the way drugs were made. In all, more than 150 drugs or their ingredients received exemptions.

And, just like with Sun, the FDA never shared the details with the doctors prescribing the medications or the patients taking them. (ProPublica compiled a list of exempted drugs and ingredients since 2013.)

The agency did not respond to questions about the Sun factory, the decision to wait eight years to impose the ban or the exemptions that followed, saying only it could not discuss potential or ongoing compliance matters. The FDA referred further inquiries to Sun.

The FDA also did not answer directly whether it believed that drugs exempted from Sun’s Halol plant and the other factories were safe. To “help assure consumer safety,” the agency said, companies are required to subject exempted drugs to extra testing with third-party oversight before the medications are sent to the United States.

ProPublica’s review of the FDA’s own records, however, shows the potential weakness of such a system. Some of the companies were caught providing unreliable testing records to the FDA before they received exemptions. FDA inspectors have found managers at Sun’s Halol factory repeatedly disregarded the results of tests showing drugs were tainted with impurities. In 2019, inspectors also discovered that Sun employees could access computer systems without oversight and edit microbiological test results to potentially minimize troubling findings.

“All of the inspectors I know who do inspections in India were aware of the problems” at Sun, said one veteran FDA investigator who did not want to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “You just worry about the patients.”

A 2022 FDA inspection report on the Sun factory observed “increased unknown impurities” identified as “extraneous matter” in batches of medication. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Since the 2014 inspection, FDA records show, the agency has received thousands of reports from doctors and others noting concerns about the drugs that Sun makes at the Halol factory and at other plants. The complaints described potential contamination and other quality issues, or patients who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems. The FDA cautions that the outcomes in the reports may have no connection to the drugs or could be unexpected side effects. Drug safety experts say there is no way to know for sure without further study.

Sun did not respond to detailed questions about its regulatory history. In an email, the company said it has upgraded the Halol facility and collaborated with manufacturing consultants and is testing to verify that drugs made there are safe and effective. Adherence to quality standards, the company said, “is a top priority for Sun, and we maintain a relentless focus on quality and compliance to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines to our customers and patients worldwide. We continue to work proactively with the US FDA and remain committed to achieve full resolution of any FDA regulatory issues at our facilities.”

Sun has been making that same promise for years.

Promises Made and Broken

Sun, one of the leading exporters of medications to the United States, began its campaign to win back the trust of the FDA shortly after three inspectors in September 2014 traveled to the Halol factory in western India and found the worrisome violations.

At the plant, the investigators zeroed in on the production of injectable medications. Delivered directly into the body, the drugs can be particularly dangerous, even lethal, when contaminated. But the factory, inspectors found, had no procedures to prevent the contamination of sterile drugs, according to the report.

One month later, Sun wrote to the FDA, saying it had brought on consultants to address quality issues, develop training programs and conduct audits of the factory.

“We take very seriously each of the issues that FDA has raised,” the company wrote. “Sun understands the concerns … and fully appreciates the need for a complete and comprehensive response and a robust compliance enhancement plan to address these matters.”

The letter was sent by two Sun vice presidents — one the head of quality, the other in charge of global manufacturing. They committed to sending a written update every other month, beginning in December that year, about changes for “long-term compliance.”

By February 2015, in its second update to the FDA, Sun touted more than 120 fixes at the factory. But based on its previous inspection, the FDA still issued a warning letter, which called the factory’s drugs “adulterated.”

“It is essential that executive management systematically improve their oversight of manufacturing quality,” the agency admonished in the December 2015 letter.

The company quickly responded, dispatching executives to FDA headquarters in Maryland to deliver personal assurances that the factory was falling in line. “We appreciated the opportunity to discuss Sun’s substantial progress,” two of the company’s quality managers wrote after the January 2016 visit. “Sun remains focused to deliver substantial improvements.”

Sun pledged to spend $218 million on facility improvements, according to one of its letters to the FDA. But inspectors in 2016 turned up more problems. Once again, Sun promised reform and detailed the steps it would take to fix violations.

This time, Sun sought to reassure the FDA about the production of a generic drug, carbidopa and levodopa, used to treat tremors and other effects of Parkinson’s disease. Some of the factory’s tablets were not dissolving properly when ingested, according to a Sun letter that year. That could have left patients with too little of the key ingredient needed to control the disease, or too much of it.

Sun told the FDA that an internal review was underway and the company would assess any other drugs with similar quality issues. Sun soon recalled 8,500 bottles of the drug in the United States.

More letters from Sun followed in 2017, some addressed directly to Carmelo Rosa, a longtime director of quality at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which oversees drug safety. The agency did not respond to a request for comment from Rosa, and Rosa did not respond to an email or LinkedIn message.

Inspectors went back to the factory in February and August 2018, unearthing more problems. In December that year, inspectors visited again — this time because Sun wanted to introduce three new injectable medications into the U.S. market. The inspectors noted that earlier problems had been corrected, records show.

But just one month later, Sun recalled 135,000 vials of vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, saying glass particles had been found and could cause life-threatening blood clots. The company at the time said it had not received any reports of harm.

Inspectors went back to the factory two more times in 2019, once in June and again in December, and found more problems with the way injectable medications were made. The December inspection was so alarming that the FDA held an urgent teleconference with the company, according to records obtained by ProPublica, which last year sued the agency in federal court to gain access to the information.

Despite the concerns, another FDA group — tasked with preventing drug shortages — reached out to Sun after the inspection to make sure that the factory would continue to produce the cancer drug doxorubicin. Sun promised it would.

The records show that for a series of important discussions with Sun, the FDA excluded the team that oversaw the inspections at the factory and were best informed about what was happening there.

“It would have been very helpful” to have the inspection division “plugged in from the beginning,” one team member emailed colleagues and his management in the months after the inspection.

Around that time, the company temporarily shut down the factory’s sterile manufacturing line, according to an email that Sun sent to Rosa. The plant was making 16 injectable drugs for the U.S. market.

Early the next year, Sun assured Rosa that it had done extensive reviews and submitted a strategy to again ship injectables to the United States.

That included testosterone, which is used to treat everything from low libido to bone health. But when patients got their bottles, some took to social media to describe the appearance of unusual crystals.

“They won’t go away, is it okay to use?” one person posted on Reddit in 2021. “I need to do my shot today.”

In 2021, a Reddit user posted a photo that appears to show crystals in a bottle of injectable testosterone manufactured by Sun Pharma at the Halol, India, factory. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Crystals in testosterone vials are not unusual, and Sun and other manufacturers include instructions on the label to get rid of them by warming the product. FDA inspectors, however, went back to the factory in Halol in 2022 and found that Sun had received hundreds of complaints about the crystals, including two that noted it took more than five hours to dissolve them when it should normally only take minutes.

A 2022 FDA inspection report on the Sun factory in Halol, India, notes that “From Jan 2020 thru April 2022, your firm has received a total of 811 complaints for crystallization of” injectable vials of a medication whose name was redacted. The report says sample testing was performed by a sister company for which Sun “lacked documentation of their training and qualifications to perform these inspections.” (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Sun said it had investigated the concerns and concluded the testosterone was acceptable. But the company couldn’t provide documentation that showed workers were properly trained or qualified to run the tests and ultimately could not produce data confirming the crystals properly dissolved, the FDA found.

Inspectors issued another damning report. Six months later, in December 2022, the FDA assessed its toughest penalty: banning the Halol factory from shipping drugs to the United States. The move came eight years after Sun started pledging reforms. And the FDA then undercut its sanction by quickly exempting more than a dozen drugs from the ban.

In the latest inspection in June of this year, inspectors found the factory failed to investigate bacteria found in test vials, disinfect manufacturing areas and equipment or properly handle vials and stoppers meant for sterile medications, according to the report.

Though the FDA published on its website warning letters sent to the factory, it has never alerted the public about the problems in a comprehensive way or provided a list of the drugs made there. The names of Halol’s products are blacked out on inspection reports so consumers can’t check their medications and make informed decisions about whether to take them.

A portion of the FDA’s June 2025 inspection report redacted the names of potentially compromised drugs manufactured by Sun that continue to be released to the U.S. market. (Obtained by ProPublica)

“Your family members are taking these drugs, and are they safe? Well, maybe, well maybe not,” said former FDA inspector Patrick Stone, who now advises pharmaceutical companies. “The FDA turns a blind eye. If your market [share] is big enough, then you get leeway.”

Blind Faith

In 2023, Sun’s billionaire founder said the introduction of new products and gains in market share made the company well positioned to “exploit the growth opportunity in the U.S. market.”

Despite the long list of critical inspection reports, five drugs made at Sun’s Halol factory are still allowed into the U.S. 2 1/2 years after the FDA issued the import ban. The exempted medications are vecuronium bromide and doxorubicin, as well as: divalproex delayed release tablets, which are used to treat seizures and migraines; leuprolide injections, which are used by people with prostate cancer, endometriosis and other conditions; and temozolomide capsules, which treat brain cancer.

Current and former FDA inspectors and others said the agency should have acted faster, responding to the problems its inspectors uncovered rather than buying into Sun’s assurances.

One senior FDA employee familiar with the inspections said they feared the company didn’t have the know-how to make safe drugs.

“Is it that they’re trying to hide stuff? Is it that they’re trying to protect? Or is it that they have no clue how to be doing these things?” said the staffer, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “Why would you get on the phone with FDA and brag that you have all these systems in place and you didn’t?”

The adverse event reports about the company’s drugs submitted to the FDA over the years describe choking, vomiting and blistering, or say that the drugs potentially caused or contributed to “toxicity,” cardiac arrest and renal failure, among other reactions, government records show. Hundreds of the complaints describe medications with possible contaminants, drugs that didn’t dissolve properly and other quality and safety concerns.

Sun’s testosterone alone was the subject of more than 500 reports, including ones describing swelling, increased heart rate, burning sensations or pain, among other symptoms, records show.

Today, years after investigators first identified problems, the senior FDA employee said the threat of harm lingers.

“The people on the other end have faith that the products they are taking are safe and effective,” said the staffer. “I think of the faces. I think of my parents. … I think of the consumers who are basically taking these drugs on blind faith.”

Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor, photography by Sarahbeth Maney, ProPublica

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

One morning in February 2023, a small group of mineral owners arrived at the North Dakota Capitol on a mission. They had traveled from across the state and other parts of the country to explain to lawmakers how the powerful oil and gas companies had been chipping away at their income.

It’s not easy to recruit people to testify during the winter months of the legislative session. Ranchers are busy with the calving season. Snowbirds have relocated to warmer climates. It’s a more than three-hour drive for those living in the Bakken oil field.

But those who made it to Bismarck lined up at a podium to share details of their own experiences and the broader concerns affecting the estimated 300,000 people who receive money from the industry in exchange for the right to their underground minerals. For nearly a decade, they had grappled with companies withholding significant portions of their royalty payments without explaining how they determined how much to deduct, as the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported last week.

Now they were at the Capitol for a specific reason: They wanted legislators to require companies to provide more information so owners could discern if they were being paid correctly, and to impose penalties if companies failed to comply.

Shane Leverenz, who manages income his extended family receives from numerous oil wells, read aloud email responses from companies to illustrate the lack of cooperation mineral owners face when they request information. “We are not obligated to mail each owner a calculation as to how their interest was calculated,” one company wrote.

“There is no transparency,” Leverenz told the legislators. Leverenz, whose great-grandfather homesteaded in North Dakota and had his property deed signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, has helped organize royalty owners on this issue in recent years. Leverenz grew up in Epping, a town of fewer than 100 people in the northwest part of the state, and traveled to North Dakota from Texas, where he now lives, to testify.

Shane Leverenz testifies at a bill hearing in the North Dakota Capitol in 2023. (Jeremy Turley/Forum News Service)

After input from Leverenz and others, lawmakers decided to create a new state program that they hoped would address conflicts between royalty owners and companies. In particular, mineral owners had mounting concerns over postproduction deductions, the money companies withhold to cover the costs of processing and transporting minerals after they are extracted and before they are sold. Companies say they are allowed to pass on a share of those costs, while royalty owners say they shouldn’t bear that responsibility because in most cases lease agreements don’t mention those expenses.

The state’s “postproduction royalty oversight program” had the support of the industry, but it was far less than what Leverenz and other owners wanted. In the two years since its creation, the program has not lived up to its name and has not alleviated owners’ concerns over deductions or transparency, an investigation by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica found. The program has resolved 69 cases so far, and none have involved postproduction deductions, according to documents obtained under a public records request. A case can represent a complaint or question from a royalty owner.

“The legislative intent was supposed to be addressing the issue of the postproduction costs that they were hitting people with,” said Rep. Don Longmuir, a Republican from Stanley, in the northwest corner of the state.

The newsrooms’ investigation found that the program has focused on other issues. It has instead helped owners resolve complaints about companies withholding payments entirely and failing to pay interest on late royalty payments, records show. Some mineral owners said in interviews that they do not trust state officials to help them get information about the deductions and therefore have not tried to use the program.

Leverenz said the program, also referred to as the ombudsman program, has not accomplished what he and other royalty owners were told it would. He has taken six complaints to the ombudsman; three were resolved but three remain open, including two for more than a year. The unresolved complaints do not involve deductions, he said, and focus on other issues with his family’s royalty payments.

“The ombudsman is running into the same thing that I have, where there’s just no response from the oil companies or they stalled,” Leverenz said. “There’s been no forward momentum.”

Ron Webb, who coordinates the program within the state’s Department of Agriculture, said it has helped facilitate communication between mineral owners and companies. He said the program is voluntary and does not have authority to compel companies to change how they calculate payments or even to provide information. “Oil companies are not required to work with us,” Webb said.

The program no longer promotes itself as being able to oversee concerns about royalty deductions even though that was part of the legislative intent. On the department’s website and in a brochure, the word “postproduction” has been dropped from the program’s name even though it is in the title of the law that created it.

The department’s legal counsel, Dutch Bialke, said the name of the law is irrelevant to how the program operates.

“The title is entirely legally non-binding and has no legal effect,” he wrote in an email, citing North Dakota law.

A bill introduced in 2023 established what it called the postproduction royalty oversight program. The program has since dropped the word “postproduction” from its name. (Obtained by North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.) “Nothing Is Clear”

Ever since Neil Christensen and his sisters noticed in 2016 that Hess Corp. was withholding nearly 25% of their royalty income — up from less than 1% just two years earlier — his family has tried to get answers from the company.

He traveled to Minot, North Dakota, some years ago to meet with Hess representatives at their production offices. He also called the company’s accounting office and its royalty owner hotline, but he said their explanations didn’t make sense.

“It doesn’t seem as if the company has a large interest in explaining themselves,” Christensen said. Spreadsheets kept by his family show withholdings have been as much as 42% in recent years. “The transparency issue is a big problem with oil operators and mineral owners.”

Christensen manages land and oil and gas minerals in McKenzie County, North Dakota, for his family.

The royalty statements can be hundreds of pages long but provide only a general description of the reasons for the deductions, leaving owners unable to verify the companies’ costs and whether they are being paid a fair share. Christensen’s family and others said they have had payments reduced for expenses the companies incurred years earlier.

“Nothing is clear,” said his sister Naomi Staruch, who has spent most of her career working in finance for banks and churches in Minnesota. “I would get so frustrated really looking hard at the statements.”

Diana and Bob Skarphol, who have advocated for years on behalf of royalty owners, said confusing and overwhelming royalty statements are a common concern. The couple received one statement last year that included 39 pages of calculations for a single well — including reductions to past royalties going back nine years. The Skarphols received $1.15 that month from the production of the well.

Merrill Piepkorn, a Democratic former state senator from Fargo who was the prime sponsor of the transparency legislation, said oil companies’ tactics are “obfuscation through transparency.”

“You get so much information, there’s no way to find what you’re looking for,” said Piepkorn, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2024.

Todd Slawson, chair of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said royalty statements are complex in part because state regulators within the last decade began requiring companies to include additional categories of information. Hess said it maintains an online portal where royalty owners can access their royalty information and operates a call center that mineral owners can contact with questions.

North Dakota does not regulate the costs that companies can pass on to individual owners, though the state and federal governments regulate deductions on government-owned land. The state audits the royalties paid on state-owned minerals to ensure the amounts are correct and, since 1979, the state’s leases do not allow deductions. But private mineral owners don’t have that same access and often learn about deductions by comparing their statements with one another.

“It’s kind of all rigged against the individual royalty owner,” Leverenz said.

State officials have told mineral owners that they can’t get involved in private disputes and that litigation is the owners’ best recourse. But litigation isn’t financially feasible for most families, according to attorney Josh Swanson, who represents mineral owners.

“It easily exceeds six figures, and that’s cost-prohibitive for most folks,” Swanson said. “Part of the playbook for a lot of operators is making these things as cost-prohibitive as they can.”

Swanson was the attorney Janice Arnson and her family hired to try to get answers from Hess. Hess had been deducting between 15% and 36% of their royalty income each month since 2015, according to a spreadsheet maintained by Arnson. They had no luck getting an explanation from the company until they hired Swanson in 2017. When Hess responded, a company attorney said in a letter that the deductions were “proper and permissible” under the terms of the lease. While Swanson disagreed, the family declined to pursue litigation because “it was going to be an expensive suit.”

First image: Janice Arnson in her Williston, North Dakota, home. Second image: Arnson places her hand on land once owned by her family, where she still retains mineral ownership, near the northern shore of Lake Sakakawea in northwest North Dakota.

“We were one small, little family,” said Arnson. “We just didn’t have the resources against Hess to fight.”

(In response to questions about royalty deductions, Hess reiterated its comments published previously that the increased costs are due to infrastructure investments made in the past decade. Those changes were made to reduce natural gas flaring and meet state regulations.)

Some royalty owners have turned to the Northwest Landowners Association, a nonprofit advocacy group, for help. Troy Coons, the group’s chair, said he has fielded multiple calls a week from royalty owners who are angry that state leaders have not helped them with the deductions. “It’s a massive concern for people,” said Coons, whose group has sued the state on behalf of property owners on a different issue. “We’re not supposed to be bearing the burden of expenses.”

Troy Coons, chair of the nonprofit Northwest Landowners Association, on his property in Donnybrook, North Dakota. Mineral owners have reached out to the association for help with deductions.

Lawmakers initially had bipartisan support in 2023 for a bill that would have guaranteed mineral owners access to electronic spreadsheets detailing their payments and would have required companies to provide more information on how they calculate a royalty owner’s share of the income from each well. It also would have directed courts to require companies to reimburse royalty owners for attorneys’ fees if they successfully sued for the information.

But that bill was discarded in favor of legislation creating the royalty oversight program.

The Legislature “took our bill and they stripped it of everything, and they shoved the ombudsman program into it,” Leverenz said. They created the program “with the promises that, you know, this is going to be the answer to all the issues that have been brought up over the years with the royalty owners.”

Sen. Brad Bekkedahl, a Republican from Williston, initially backed both bills. The senator said he hoped the bill creating the ombudsman program would be amended in the legislative process to give it more authority to advocate on behalf of mineral owners. That didn’t happen.

“That would have been, I think, more beneficial to royalty owners,” said Bekkedahl, who ultimately voted against it.

North Dakota state Sen. Brad Bekkedahl, a Republican who is also Williston’s finance commissioner, outside Williston City Hall after a commission meeting in June “Barking Up a Tree”

In pitching the program to lawmakers in 2023, Doug Goehring, the state’s agriculture commissioner, said the goal was to “try to develop some resolution” for royalty owners with questions about their payments, including concerns over deductions.

The bill required a report to legislators. Goehring told lawmakers he would share with them “full and complete information concerning the cases” handled by the program and the issues faced by mineral owners in order to inform future legislation. “We’ll certainly provide you scenarios, situations, and some of the challenges and difficulties we’ve dealt with,” Goehring, a Republican, testified in 2023. “And even some suggestions about how you correct some of this moving forward.”

The result has fallen short of what Goehring pledged in testimony, the news organizations found. Goehring now says it is not the program’s job to find resolution for royalty owners who question the deductions. “We don’t have a leg to stand on to try and advocate or try to extort money out of the company,” Goehring said. He said an exception is if deductions are specifically prohibited in leases, but most agreements, especially those signed decades ago, are silent on the issue of deductions.

Instead of a detailed report, Goehring delivered a one-page summary to legislators in September that broadly categorized the issues handled through the program. Legislators accepted the report without discussion. Goehring said a more detailed report was not necessary. “They don’t want to know that,” he said. “We generally don’t write reports in that manner. We give them the basic information.”

North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring, a Republican, says the royalty oversight program has been successful, citing feedback from the oil industry. (Kyle Martin for the North Dakota Monitor)

Of the 147 cases filed with the program, about half remain unresolved, including more than two dozen that have been pending since 2023. Goehring said some of the cases remain open at the request of royalty owners.

Two of the pending cases involve postproduction deductions, including one that has been open since September 2023, according to Bialke, the Agriculture Department’s legal counsel.

The cases are assigned to two energy companies that serve as ombudsmen, Diamond Resources and Aurora Energy Solutions, which contact the companies on behalf of the mineral owners. Neither of the companies responded to questions from the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica.

The news organizations paid $425 to obtain records related to the cases that had been resolved as of late June. In those cases, the ombudsmen have answered royalty owners’ questions and obtained answers for them when companies had not been responsive. In some cases, they mediated solutions that resulted in royalty owners receiving payments they were owed, records show.

In one case, an ombudsman spent nearly 10 months going back and forth with a company until the royalty owner got paid. In other cases, ombudsmen helped royalty owners understand technical issues related to taxes and the probate process after inheriting minerals. The department redacted company names from the documents released, with Bialke citing state law.

“It has been extremely helpful for frustrated royalty owners who cannot get their questions answered,” said Slawson of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, who also owns an energy company. “Having deductions suddenly show up on revenue checks and questions not being answered or not explained well can lead to suspicions of wrongdoing.”

Kenneth Schmidt, who owns minerals near Ray in Williams County, contacted the program after struggling to convince a company that it owed interest on late royalty payments as mandated by state law. It took a few months, he said, but the company paid him.

“I was very satisfied with the program,” said Schmidt. “Instead of going to an attorney and I’ll pay $400 an hour, they did it for free, but through the state.”

Goehring said the program has been successful, citing feedback from the industry as well as the fact that no bills related to royalty deductions were introduced during this year’s legislative session, the first time in nearly a decade.

“If there’s no bills that are coming up, then isn't that an indication? It’s kind of like if you don’t have a cough, then maybe you don’t have a cold,” he said.

While the program has resolved disputes like Schmidt’s, which are more cut-and-dried, it isn’t well equipped to handle more complex disagreements, Goehring said. That isn’t a surprise to one of the lawmakers who worked on the bill.

“I don’t doubt that in some cases, facilitating that communication probably helped, but I don’t think it gives all the answers to the royalty owners that they’re looking for,” Bekkedahl said.

A number of royalty owners told the news organizations they simply don’t trust the program to help. “I didn’t feel the ombudsman program had any teeth in it whatsoever to do anything,” said Brian Anderson, who has not filed a complaint even though he wants companies to more fully explain their deductions. “They’ll placate you; they’re not going to do anything about it.”

Curtis Trulson, a royalty owner in Mountrail County, agreed: Going to the program, he said, is just “barking up a tree.”

Clarification, Aug. 12, 2025: This story has been updated to reiterate previous comments from Hess.

by David Armstrong, Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman

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Veterans hospitals are struggling to replace hundreds of doctors and nurses who have left the health care system this year as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to simultaneously slash Department of Veterans Affairs staff and improve care.

Many job applicants are turning down offers, worried that the positions are not stable and uneasy with the overall direction of the agency, according to internal documents examined by ProPublica. The records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January through March of this year turned them down. That is quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same time period last year.

The VA in March said it intended to cut its workforce by at least 70,000 people. The news sparked alarm that the cuts would hurt patient care, prompting public reassurances from VA Secretary Doug Collins that front-line health care staff would be immune from the proposed layoffs.

Last month, department officials updated their plans and said they would reduce the workforce by 30,000 by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. So many staffers had left voluntarily, the agency said in a press release, that mass layoffs would not be necessary.

“VA is headed in the right direction,” Collins said in a statement.

But a review of hundreds of internal staffing records, along with interviews with veterans and employees, reveal a far less rosy picture of how staffing is affecting veterans’ care.

After six years of adding medical staff, the VA this year is down more than 600 doctors and about 1,900 nurses. The number of doctors on staff has declined each month since President Donald Trump took office. The agency also lost twice as many nurses as it hired between January and June, records viewed by ProPublica show.

In response to questions, a VA spokesperson did not dispute numbers about staff losses at centers across the country but accused ProPublica of bias and of “cherry-picking issues that are mostly routine.”

Agency spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz said that the department is “working to address” the number of doctors declining job offers by speeding up the hiring process and that the agency “has several strategies to navigate shortages,” including referring veterans to private providers and telehealth appointments. A nationwide shortage of health care workers has made hiring and retention difficult, he said.

Kasperowicz said that the recent changes at the agency have not compromised care and that wait times are getting better after worsening under President Joe Biden.

While wait times for primary, mental health and specialty care for existing patients did increase during Biden’s presidency, the VA’s statistics show only slight reductions since Trump took office in January.

However, appointment wait times for new patients seeking primary and specialty care have slightly increased, according to a report obtained by ProPublica.

As of early July, the average wait time nationally to schedule outpatient surgery appointments for new patients was 41 days, which is 13 days higher than the goal set by the VA and nearly two days longer than a year ago.

In some locations, the waits for appointments are even longer.

At the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta, Maine, internal records show that there is a two-month wait for primary care appointments, which is triple the VA’s goal and 38 days longer than it was at this time last year. The wife of a disabled Marine veteran who receives care at the facility told ProPublica that it has become harder in recent months to schedule appointments and to get timely care.

Her husband, she said, served in Somalia and is completely disabled. He has not had a primary care doctor assigned to him for months after his previous doctor left over the winter, she said.

“He has no person who is in charge of his health care,” said the woman, who did not want to be named because of fears her comments might affect benefits for her husband. “It was never like this before. There’s a lack of staff, empty rooms, locked doors. It feels like something that’s not healthy.”

Kasperowicz said the VA is taking “aggressive action” to recruit primary care doctors in Maine and anticipates hiring two new doctors by the end of the year.

Nationwide, records reviewed by ProPublica show, the vacancy rate for doctors at the VA was 13.7% in May, up from 12% in May of 2024. Kasperowicz said those rates are in line with historical averages for the agency. But while the vacancy rate decreased over the first five months of 2024, it has risen in 2025.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who has been critical of Collins’ stewardship, has argued that the VA is heading in a dangerous new direction. He said that ProPublica’s findings reinforce his concerns about “damaging and dangerous impacts” from cuts and staffing reductions.

“Dedicated professionals are fleeing — and recruitment is flagging — because of toxic work conditions and draconian funding cuts and firings,” he told ProPublica. “We’ve warned repeatedly about these results — shocking, but not surprising.”

In the VA’s Texas region, which covers most of the state, officials reported in an internal presentation in June that approximately 90 people had turned down job offers “due to the uncertainty of reorganization” and noted that low morale was causing existing employees to not recommend working at the medical centers.

Anthony Martinez, a retired Army captain who did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he has witnessed a downgrade in care at the Temple, Texas, VA facility. He said that the hospital has lost records of his recent allergy shots, which he now has to repeat, and he has to wait longer for appointments.

“Problems have always existed but not to this degree,” Martinez said.

Martinez, who runs a local nonprofit for veterans, said he’s heard similar frustrations from many of them. “It’s not just me. Many vets are having bad experiences,” he said.

Kasperowicz said the agency couldn’t discuss Martinez’s case without a patient privacy waiver, which Martinez declined to sign. He said wait times for primary care appointments for existing patients at Temple are unchanged over the past fiscal year. But internal records show an increase in wait times for new patients in specialties such as cardiology, gastroenterology and oncology.

Administrators there have expressed concern about the impact of staff losses, warning in their June internal presentation about “institutional knowledge leaving the Agency due to the increase of supervisors departing.”

It is not just the loss of doctors and nurses impacting care. Shortages in support staff, who have not been protected from cuts, are also adding to delays.

In Dayton, Ohio, vacant positions for purchasing agents resulted in delays in acquiring hundreds of prosthetics, according to an internal VA report from May. Kasperowicz said the hospital has recently cut processing time for such orders by more than half.

Some facilities are experiencing trouble hiring and keeping mental health staff.

In February, a human resources official in the VA region covering much of Florida reported in an internal warning system that the area was having trouble hiring mental health professionals to treat patients in rural areas. The jobs had previously been entirely remote but now require providers to be on site at a clinic.

When the region offered jobs to three mental health providers, all of them declined. The expected impact, according to the warning document, was longer delays for appointments. Kasperowicz said the VA is working to address the shortages.

Yet even as the agency faces these challenges, the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back the use of a key tool designed to help the VA attract applicants and plug gaps in critical front-line care.

The VA in recent years has used incentive payments to help recruit and keep doctors and other health care workers. In fiscal 2024, the agency paid nearly 20,000 staffers retention bonuses and over 6,000 new hires got signing bonuses. In the first nine months of this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, only about 8,000 VA employees got retention bonuses and just over 1,000 received recruitment incentives. The VA has told lawmakers it has been able to fill jobs without using the incentive programs.

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., said during a congressional oversight hearing in July that the Trump administration is withholding the bonuses because it “wants them to leave” as part of a plan to privatize services.

“It’s not that VA employees are less meritorious than they were under Biden,” she said. “They want every employee to be pushed out so they can decimate the VA’s workforce.”

Do you have information about the VA that we should know about? Contact reporters David Armstrong on Signal, DavidArmstrong.55, or via email, david.armstrong@propublica.org; Eric Umansky on Signal, Ericumansky.04, or via email, eric.umansky@propublica.org; and Vernal Coleman on Signal, vcoleman91.99, or via email, vernal.coleman@propublica.org.

Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.

by Cassandra Jaramillo

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

Seven years ago, when President Donald Trump signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act into law, it was hailed as a crucial step toward addressing the nation’s maternal mortality crisis.

The law pumped tens of millions of dollars a year into a program to help fund state committees that review maternal deaths and identify their causes. The committees’ findings have led to new protocols to prevent hemorrhage, sepsis and suicide. Federal money has allowed some states to establish panels for the first time.

The committees’ work only became more urgent after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Last year, Georgia’s committee determined the state’s abortion ban contributed to the preventable death of 41-year-old Candi Miller.

But now the program that enabled this progress — known as Enhancing Reviews and Surveillance to Eliminate Maternal Mortality, or ERASE MM — is in danger, maternal health advocates say.

The program’s funding expires on Sept. 30, and efforts to renew it have thus far not succeeded. Congress included money to extend ERASE MM in a broader stopgap funding measure that almost passed in December 2024 before being scuttled by Republican opposition. The program isn’t paid for in the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026. Late last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee introduced a bill to fund the Department of Health and Human Services for the next fiscal year that includes money for ERASE MM, but the measure hasn’t moved forward yet.

Adrienne Griffen, executive director of the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance, said she fears how little attention the program’s fraught future has drawn amid waves of layoffs at federal health agencies and ferocious debate over impending Medicaid cuts.

“We were concerned when the president’s budget did not include these programs,” Griffen said. “While we are happy with the progress, there is still a lot that needs to happen.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is responsible for awarding ERASE MM grants and guiding the work of state maternal mortality committees, didn’t answer specific questions from ProPublica about the future of the program. Andrew Nixon, communications director for HHS, the CDC’s parent agency, said in a statement that HHS “is committed to improving maternal and infant health outcomes.”

“We are currently reviewing the maternal and infant health portfolio to identify the most effective ways to collect and analyze data and improve the health and safety of mothers and infants,” the statement said.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether advocates’ concerns are warranted.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal jettisons not only ERASE MM but a slate of programs known as the Safe Motherhood initiative, which aims to reduce risks such as premature births and infections that affect mothers and infants. All previously had bipartisan support. That’s left some members of Congress mystified about why their funding is in jeopardy.

At a June budget hearing, Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, pressed Kennedy on why the administration had proposed eliminating the programs, including ERASE MM.

“I genuinely believed this was zeroed out either accidentally or by some sort of oversight,” Landsman said, asking Kennedy to work with members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to restore funding.

After their exchange at the hearing, Landsman told ProPublica that Kennedy had agreed to meet to discuss restoring the funding.

“We want to save this investment,” he said. “It’s critical for expecting moms.”

ERASE MM came about in 2019 after reporting by ProPublica and others showed that hundreds of American women were dying each year from preventable causes related to pregnancy. U.S. maternal mortality rates had risen sharply over two decades as rates in other affluent nations had dropped.

Other countries, particularly the United Kingdom, had reliable national data on maternal mortality, as well as robust case-review systems designed to turn information into improvements in care. In the U.S., by contrast, only two-thirds of states had review processes at all and even those sometimes went years between reports or operated inconsistently.

ERASE MM was designed to plug these holes, ensuring that lessons from maternal deaths didn’t go unlearned.

Over the last five years, the CDC has distributed nearly $90 million to fund the work of state review committees. At least by federal standards, the program is relatively inexpensive; it divvied up a total of about $40 million last year between 46 states, an average of $870,000 apiece.

The members of maternal mortality review committees — usually a mix of physicians, nurses, mental health professionals and advocates — volunteer their time. ERASE MM grants typically pay to hire the staffers who gather records from hospitals, medical examiners, police and other agencies and abstractors who redact private information from case summaries.

Committees are advisory in nature, but their findings have made a difference, advocates say. In recent years, many states have developed mental health initiatives for pregnant people and new mothers based on maternal mortality reviews. Recommendations by New Hampshire’s committee, for example, led to a program in which OB-GYNs collaborate with psychiatrists on treatments for post-partum depression or substance use disorder.

In Indiana, which used ERASE MM funds to establish a maternal mortality review committee in 2018, the panel’s work spurred state officials to expand an initiative to have nurses make post-partum home visits to new mothers.

Indiana is one of at least five states that rely entirely on federal dollars to pay for their maternal mortality reviews (the others are South Carolina, Iowa, Missouri and Utah). Committee members in several states expressed alarm that this money may evaporate.

Before ERASE MM, Utah had a joint committee that reviewed both infant and maternal deaths, said Dr. Marcela Smid, a maternal-fetal health specialist. Utah set up a maternal mortality review committee for the first time in 2019 using funds from ERASE MM, which Smid chairs. It found increasing numbers of maternal deaths by suicide, leading to programs for better mental heath and substance use disorder screening and treatment. Since 2021, the committee has received about $1.7 million from the CDC.

“If we get defunded, I suspect it would be devastating,” Smid said.

As part of reviews, committee members consider the legal and socioeconomic context in which a woman dies. Those steps were critical in Georgia when the committee reviewed deaths that had occurred after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 and the state prohibited abortion. The CDC hasn’t directed committees to ask explicitly about such laws, but committee members say the process has provided a window that could be lost if ERASE MM ends.

Case reviews are typically confidential, but ProPublica reported last year that Georgia’s committee had concluded the abortion-related deaths of Miller and Amber Thurman, 28, had been preventable.

Reviewers found both women had taken abortion pills and suffered a rare complication when they failed to expel all the fetal tissue from their bodies. Miller decided not to go to the doctor when she began having symptoms of sepsis because she feared repercussions related to the state’s abortion ban, the review committee found. Thurman went to the hospital but died after doctors waited 20 hours to perform a dilation and curettage to clear her uterus; the procedure, also used to perform abortions, had become entangled in restrictions subjecting doctors to criminal penalties if they violated the law.

Even before the threat to ERASE MM’s funding emerged, four states, including Florida and Texas, had opted out of accepting money from the program. The Florida Department of Health didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about why it had done this. The Texas Department of Health said the state Legislature had instructed it not to take the funds and instead allocated funding to create its own system. Texas, which accounts for about 10% of U.S. maternal deaths, also stopped sharing data collected by its maternal mortality review committee with the CDC shortly after restricting abortion access.

Officials at the Texas Department of Health also have chosen not to have the state’s maternal mortality review committee examine cases from 2022 and 2023, a period that includes two preventable deaths ProPublica reported on last year. The panel was nearly four years behind on case reviews, and state officials said skipping two years would help it catch up. The state also forbids its panel from investigating deaths related to abortion.

Dr. Thomas Westover, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who also sits on the maternal mortality review committee in New Jersey, said he worries that if ERASE MM goes away, there will be no consistency from state to state in how maternal deaths are reviewed or what data is collected on them.

“You’ll have states that pick and choose what to review,” Westover said. He noted that some states likely would ignore accidental deaths to manage their caseloads, while others, like Texas, choose to exclude deaths related to abortions, making data less comparable nationally. “That’s a bad decision.”

As part of ERASE MM, the CDC gives state review committees detailed guidance on what contributing factors to consider when assessing maternal deaths, including obesity, mental health issues, substance abuse and homicide.

This information fuels analysis that goes well beyond what’s in death certificates, said Amy Raines-Milenkov, an associate professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center and longtime maternal health scholar-practitioner. Based on this information, Texas expanded nurse home visits to post-partum mothers that’s similar to Indiana’s initiative.

“What we choose to measure is what we value in society,” Raines-Milenkov said.

Maternal health advocates say they’re working together to bring national attention to the potential funding threat to ERASE MM. Griffen, the executive director of the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance, said she’s hopeful with more meetings on Capitol Hill that a solution can secure the program.

Women’s lives depend on it, she said.

Kavitha Surana contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Rob Davis

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.

This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact.

A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes.

Around the same time, insurance companies start dropping Oregon homeowners’ policies and raising premiums to limit future losses, much as they have done in other disaster-prone states. Insurers have their own sophisticated risk maps to guide them, but some brokers instead tell homeowners the blame lies with the map the state produced. The belief gets treated as fact both on social media and in mainstream news — even though insurers and regulators say it’s not true.

The anger quickly spreads. Not only is Oregon’s map seen as at fault for higher insurance premiums, one conservative talk radio host calls it an attempt to “depopulate rural areas.” People in an anti-map Facebook group start musing about “Agenda 21,” a conspiracy theory implicating the United Nations in an effort to force people into cities so they can be more easily controlled.

By the time the state pulls back the map and starts over, the myths about it have gained so much momentum there’s no stopping them. Oregon’s hotter, drier climate isn’t the problem; the map is.

Christine Drazan, the Oregon House Republican leader, joins more than a dozen other Republicans in February 2025 behind a sign that says “REPEAL THE WILDFIRE HAZARD MAP.” She calls the state’s map “faulty, defective, harmful” and says it, along with related fire-safe building and landscaping rules that are in the works, is “a heavy-handed bureaucratic takeover” that’s kept rural residents from insuring or selling homes.

“This map is destroying their property values,” she says.

In the end, what’s most remarkable about the campaign against Oregon’s wildfire map isn’t that misinformation found an audience.

It’s that it worked.

A melted sign hangs from a fence in Lyons, Oregon, in 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Chris Dunn, a wildfire risk scientist at Oregon State University and a former wildland firefighter, thought Oregon had a chance to be a national model for adapting to wildfire risks when he was asked to make the statewide map in 2021.

Oregon adopted a unique set of land use laws in the late 1960s and 1970s that helped curb urban sprawl. A coalition of farmers and conservationists formulated the legislation to preserve farmland and keep cities compact. To Dunn, protecting homes seemed within reach because the state had maintained agricultural buffers around cities, helping to serve as firebreaks.

At the time, Zillow hadn’t yet come out with risk ratings. By building its own map, Oregon could use local input and make adjustments as it went along.

The map results would help Oregon decide where to require a tool proven to save homes from wind-driven wildfires: “defensible space.” Owners would have to prune trees up and away from their houses; they would need to keep their roofs clear of leaves, needles and other dead vegetation. The idea was to deny wind-borne embers fuel that can burn down dwellings — a problem fresh on lawmakers’ minds after Oregon’s devastating 2020 fire season destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

Dunn knew public communication would be important. Before the map was released, a private property rights group had warned its members in a letter that the map and its rules were worrisome. Gov. Kate Brown’s wildfire council, advising state leaders about the map’s rollout, knew about the letter and the potential for pushback, according to emails Dunn provided to ProPublica.

Dunn said he was clear with Brown’s wildfire director, Doug Grafe, and others on the council that the map needed a significant, coordinated and effective communications campaign starting months before its release. Dunn said all the state developed was a one-page document on the roles of each government agency.

(Brown and Grafe did not respond to ProPublica’s questions. Grafe told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2022 that “we are committed to ensuring people understand what they can do to increase the likelihood their homes and properties will survive wildfires.”)

Without state outreach, many homeowners learned their homes were in “extreme risk” zones from a July 2022 letter in the mail. It gave them 60 days to appeal the designation or face complying with new building and defensible-space codes the state was developing.

The wildfire hazard map and online user interface, created by Chris Dunn, a wildfire scientist at Oregon State University, shows high hazard areas in orange and those with moderate hazards in purple. (Screenshot by ProPublica of the Oregon Statewide Wildfire Hazard Map)

Dunn could see that an uproar was building around his work. One community meeting where he was scheduled to present was canceled after state officials received threats of violence.

On Facebook, more than 6,000 people joined a private group, ODF Wildfire Risk Map Support, a base of opposition. ODF stands for the Oregon Department of Forestry, the state agency overseeing the map’s creation.

One member warned that state officials would snoop around their rural properties to tell owners what to do.

“Guys this is a agenda 21,” said the member, referencing the conspiracy theory promoted in part by former Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck.

Along with 31 thumbs-ups, eight angry faces and several other emojis, the post got 24 comments.

• This insane bill out of Salem is crazy! Every designation was decided by an algorithm by politicians in Salem who don't a clue about our property, our house, our lifestyles! If you think it’s not their agenda to destroy rural property owners, think again. (10 likes)
• The UN Sustainable Development Goals are driving this push to eliminate rural living. Look into ICLEI and see how the UN infiltrates state and local governments and influences policy and legislation. https://iclei.org (6 likes)
• I learned about this when I first became involved in conservative politics. Back when globalist-backed Agenda 21 and now Agenda 2030 were still thought of as conspiracy theories. (6 likes, 1 sad reaction)

These Facebook comments have been excerpted to preserve anonymity.

Oregon can’t stop firestorms with regulations, conservative talk show host Bill Meyer told listeners, “unless you just get people off the land, and people wonder if that’s what the intent of all of this is ultimately.” Invoking a phrase associated with the Agenda 21 conspiracy, Meyer said rural residents would wind up having to move into “stack-and-pack” housing in Oregon’s cities. (Meyer did not respond to ProPublica’s emails.)

State officials’ lack of communication with the public “led to really significant challenges,” Dunn told ProPublica. “We don’t know if we could have well-communicated and sort of avoided those conspiracy theories and misinformation. But it was just so propagated in the media that it just took over.”

Jeff Golden, the Democratic state senator who helped draft the bill creating the map, said rural residents were understandably upset. The impacts of climate change were abstract to many people, Golden said, until they started getting those letters — at the same time insurance companies were dumping them.

“It’s a really hard adjustment,” said Golden, chairperson of the Senate’s Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee. “This is a very big chicken coming home to roost.”

Misinformation stoked people’s anger. “It makes a conversation that would have been difficult at best almost impossible,” Golden said.

State officials withdrew the map just over a month after its 2022 release, saying that while they had met the legislative deadline for delivering it, “there wasn’t enough time to allow for the type of local outreach and engagement that people wanted, needed and deserved.”

Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden helped draft the bill creating the wildfire risk map. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)

After homeowners blamed the newly released risk map for insurance cancellations and premium increases, Oregon’s insurance regulator formally asked insurers: Did you use the state risk map?

Companies filed statements, required by law to be answered truthfully, saying they had not. Oregon’s then-insurance commissioner, Andrew Stolfi, announced the industry’s response publicly at the time.

“Insurance companies have been using their own risk maps and other robust risk management tools to assess wildfire risk for years in making rating and underwriting decisions,” Stolfi said in a news release.

Stolfi told consumers to submit any documentation they received from insurance companies showing that the state’s map had been used to influence underwriting or rating decisions. Jason Horton, a spokesperson for Oregon’s insurance regulator, told ProPublica the agency has not substantiated any complaints.

For good measure, lawmakers in 2023 passed a bill explicitly banning insurers from using the map to set rates.

But as Dunn reworked the map, the cloud of misinformation continued to swirl on social media.

After Zillow and other real estate sites began posting wildfire risk ratings on properties nationwide last year, participants in the anti-map Facebook group alleged the state was behind it.

“Who would decide to move out here after seeing that?” one asked.

Zillow uses data from the research firm First Street, a Zillow spokesperson told ProPublica. A First Street spokesperson also said the group doesn’t use Oregon’s map.

Andrew DeVigal, a University of Oregon journalism professor who has studied news ecosystems around the state, said places where news outlets have shrunk or closed down have grown particularly reliant on such Facebook groups. These community watercoolers help confirm participants’ biases. “You surround yourself with people who think like you, so you’re in your space,” he said.

A ProPublica reporter identified himself to the group’s participants, asking in June for evidence that they’d been harmed by the state’s map. None provided definitive proof. Some acknowledged that they couldn’t demonstrate that the map had affected them but said they suspected it lowered their homes’ values or their insurability.

Among the respondents was Chris Dalton, who lives in La Pine, south of Bend. Dalton described spending about $2,000 trimming trees and another $500 putting down gravel to create defensible space.

However, Dalton said, the house’s location had been designated as being at moderate risk. That means it was not subject to the state’s defensible-space requirements. And even if Dalton’s property had been designated as high enough risk to be governed by the new regulations, they had not been finalized at that point and were not being enforced.

“I guess you could say we used common sense to get ahead of future problems,” Dalton said.

The Darlene Fire burned more than 3,000 acres around La Pine, Oregon, in June 2024. (Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office)

Watch video ➜

Oregon officials decided to give the map another try last year.

They re-released it, this time doing more outreach. Following California’s lead and aiming to make the map less confusing, Oregon also changed its nomenclature. Properties weren’t in risk classes, they were in hazard zones. The highest rating was no longer “extreme,” it was “high.” Dunn, the Oregon State scientist, said he thought the map had survived the effort to kill it.

But the backlash continued. Of the 106,000 properties found to face the highest hazard, more than 6,000 landowners filed appeals. At least one county appealed the designation on behalf of every high-hazard property in its borders — more than 20,000 of them.

In January, a new Oregon legislative session kicked off and wildfire preparedness was once again a top priority for the body’s Democratic leadership. Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause on decisions about homeowners’ appeals until the session ended, giving lawmakers a chance to decide what to do with the map.

Drazan, the House minority leader, led fellow Republicans in opposition.

She told ProPublica she “can’t know for sure” that the map caused homeowners to lose insurance or have trouble selling, as she’d asserted at February’s news conference. “I am reflecting what we were told,” she said.

Regardless, she said, the mandates on protecting properties went too far. “We’re not looking for the state to be the president of our homeowner’s association and tell us what color our paint can be,” Drazan said.

Even Golden, who’d helped shepherd the original bill mandating a map, began to waver.

Golden described conversations with homeowners who struggled to understand why work they’d done to protect their properties from fires didn’t lower their state risk rating. He said the map couldn’t account for the specific characteristics of each property, ultimately making it clear to him that it couldn’t work.

“I got tired of trying to convince people that the model was smarter than they were,” Golden said.

Dunn told ProPublica that the map was not intended to reflect all the changing conditions at a particular property, only the hazards that the surrounding topography, climate, weather and vegetation create. It wasn’t about whether homeowners had cleared defensible space — just whether they should. The work they do makes their individual homes less vulnerable, he said, but it doesn’t eliminate the broader threats around them.

Neighbors walk through their destroyed neighborhood in Phoenix, Oregon, in 2020. Hundreds of homes in the area were destroyed. (Mason Trinca for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Fire retardant coats a playground in a neighborhood largely destroyed by a wildfire in Talent, Oregon, in 2020. Climate change has increased the risk of wildfires in the state. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

By April, the map was on its way out.

The state Senate voted unanimously, Golden included, to repeal the state’s defensible-space and home-hardening requirements as well as the map that showed where they would apply.

Ahead of a 50-1 vote in the House to kill the map, familiar claims got repeated — including from a legislative leader’s office.

Virgle Osborne, the House Republican whip, lamented in a May press release: “These wildfire maps have cost people property values, insurance increases, and many heartaches.”

Osborne told ProPublica he stood behind his comment even though he had no evidence for it. Osborne said he believed Oregon’s maps helped insurance companies justify rate increases and policy cancellations.

“I can’t give you, you know, here’s the perfect example of somebody that, you know, did it, but no insurance company is that foolish,” Osborne said. “They’re not going to write a statement that would put them in jeopardy. But common sense is going to tell you, when the state is on your side, the insurance companies are going to bail out. And they have.”

With or without a map, former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones said, Oregon lawmakers could require insurers to provide incentives for homeowners to protect their properties. Colorado, for instance, ordered insurers this year to account for risk-reduction efforts in models used to decide who can obtain insurance and at what price.

Jones nonetheless called Oregon’s decision to kill the wildfire map “very unfortunate.”

“One of the biggest public health and safety challenges states are facing are climate-driven, severe-weather-related events,” Jones said. “Not giving people useful information to make decisions on that, to me, is not a path to public health and safety.”

During the June vote in the Oregon House, the lone person who voted to preserve Oregon’s wildfire map and its associated mandates was Dacia Grayber, a Democrat from the Portland area who’s a longtime firefighter and worked a brush rig during the 2020 wildfires.

She told ProPublica that by training, the first things she looks for while defending homes in wildland fires are the types of hazards the state intended to target: firewood under the deck, cedar shake siding, flammable juniper bushes growing close to homes.

Grayber said she was disturbed by the sentiment in the Capitol as the repeal vote neared. The decision to kill the map and eliminate home-hardening requirements, she said, had become a “feel-good, bipartisan vote.”

“We are walking away from a very clear decision to build safer, more resilient communities,” Grayber said.

The tragedy of it, she said, is “that it was 100% based in misinformation.”

Kotek, Oregon’s Democratic governor, signed the repeal on July 24.

Oregon Rep. Dacia Grayber is the sole legislator who voted to keep the wildfire hazard map alive. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)

by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica

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

David Barnea, the director of the Mossad for some of the most remarkable successes in its storied history, never intended to be an intelligence officer. As a young man, he served as a team leader in the Israeli military’s most elite commando unit and then came to New York to study for a career in business.

After earning a master’s degree in finance at Pace University, he took jobs at an Israeli investment bank and then a brokerage firm, the first steps toward a career in which the biggest danger was an unexpected shift in the world’s financial markets.

Barnea’s world was jolted in November 1995 when an extremist right-wing Israeli assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally. Rabin had signed the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was pushing for a two-state solution to decades of conflict between Arabs and Jews.

“The Rabin assassination shocked him like many other Israelis,” recalled David Meidan, a retired senior Mossad operative considered Barnea’s mentor. He said the killing prompted Barnea, at age 30, to rethink everything and look for “some meaning in his life.” A friend suggested he apply to the Mossad, and after passing the required physical and psychological tests, he was accepted into the agency’s trainee program.

Barnea showed a knack for spotting, recruiting and running agents who would work for the Mossad inside countries hostile to Israel. A year after he joined the spy agency, he became a case officer in its Tzomet, or Junction, division.

Meidan said Barnea had the qualities essential for success in the role: “emotional intelligence and empathy.” His foreign postings included years in a European capital, where Mossad colleagues said he proved to be charming, focused and determined.

The latter qualities were evident from an early age. Barnea was born in Ashkelon, Israel, in 1965. His father, Yosef Brunner, left Hitler’s Germany in 1933 for British-ruled Palestine and eventually served as a lieutenant colonel in the early years of the Israel Defense Forces.

At age 14, Barnea’s parents enrolled him in a military boarding school. He became a fitness fanatic and still runs or cycles when he has the chance. When it came time to do his required military service, Barnea won a coveted spot in the Sayeret Matkal, an elite commando unit frequently dispatched across Israel’s borders to collect intelligence or carry out covert attacks or sabotage.

In the 1990s, when he began his career as a spy, the Mossad’s main focus was on Palestinian terrorism. Barnea, who speaks Arabic, proved adept at running agents in and around the PLO and other organizations.

He rose through the ranks and was part of the Mossad’s leadership when it decided to make gathering intelligence on Iran its top priority in 2002. The shift reflected growing concern about Iran’s secretive nuclear program and its ties with powerful regional proxies such as Hezbollah.

In 2019, Barnea was named deputy head of the Mossad and chief of its operations directorate. Within the agency, he stood out as an advocate of aggressive operations aimed at Iranian scientists, nuclear sites and Iran’s growing arsenal of missiles that could reach Israel.

In November 2020, Barnea oversaw the operation that assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a physicist and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general who was in charge of the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. After months of surveillance by non-Israeli agents, the Mossad was able to figure out Fakhrizadeh’s travel patterns. A plan was hatched to park a Nissan pickup truck by the side of the road and install a unique remote-controlled machine gun on its bed. The weapon had a sophisticated camera and artificial intelligence software that would identify Fakhrizadeh and shoot only at him.

The operation was controlled from Mossad headquarters, north of Tel Aviv, where Barnea was joined in the command center by his boss, agency director Yossi Cohen. They could see the nuclear physicist’s car approaching, and then the gun opened fire, hitting Fakhrizadeh several times while sparing his wife, who was sitting next to him.

Seven months later, Barnea was appointed head of the Mossad by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the 13th man to hold the job.

In the years that followed, Barnea built on the strengths of the Fakhrizadeh operation, recruiting scores of non-Israeli agents for operations inside Iran. Those agents played crucial roles in the June airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program, identifying the locations of nuclear scientists’ homes and knocking out Iran’s air defenses.

A colleague in the Mossad’s top ranks, Haim Tomer, said that Barnea may not be as “strategic, charismatic or flamboyant” as some of his predecessors, but he has proved himself to be a “top-tier operator.”

The Mossad’s successes under Barnea include the exploding pagers that decimated Hezbollah, the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and a Hamas political leader who was visiting Tehran, and the commando raids that destroyed Iran’s air defenses and allowed Israel to strike the nuclear facilities without losing a plane.

Those missions represent a remarkable turnaround for Israelis in the intelligence community, many of whom felt they had failed the nation after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251. That sense of shame was felt in every agency, even ones like the Mossad that were not chiefly responsible for monitoring Hamas.

The Mossad’s directors generally serve for five years, and so Barnea, or Dadi as he is known to his staff, may be replaced by the middle of 2026; but his term could be extended as recognition of his successes.

“These are historic days for the people of Israel,” Barnea told a gathering of operatives at Mossad headquarters after the brief war in June, where he referred to his close cooperation with the CIA. “The Iranian threat, which has endangered our security for decades, has been significantly thwarted thanks to extraordinary cooperation between the Israel Defense Forces, which led the campaign, and the Mossad, which operated alongside — together with the support of our ally, the United States.”

Yossi Melman is a commentator on Israeli intelligence and a documentary filmmaker. Dan Raviv is a former CBS correspondent and host of “The Mossad Files” podcast. They are the co-authors of “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.”

by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica

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

In the early morning hours of June 13, a commando team led by a young Iranian, S.T., settled into position on the outskirts of Tehran. The target was an anti-aircraft battery, part of the umbrella of radars and missiles set up to protect the capital and its military installations from aerial attack.

Across the country, teams of Israeli-trained commandos recruited from Iran and neighboring nations were preparing to attack Iranian defenses from within.

As described by their handlers, their motives were a mix of personal and political. Some were seeking revenge against a repressive, clerical regime that had imposed strict limits on political expression and daily life. Others were enticed by cash, the promise of medical care for family members or opportunities to attend college overseas.

The attack had been planned for more than a year by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Just nine months earlier, the spy agency had shocked the world with its technical prowess — executing a plot hatched in 2014 by its director at the time, Tamir Pardo, that crippled Hezbollah by detonating pagers booby-trapped with tiny but lethal amounts of explosives. According to Hezbollah, the blasts killed 30 fighters and 12 civilians, including two children, and injured more than 3,500.

At 3 a.m. on June 13, S.T. and a foreign legion of roughly 70 commandos opened fire with drones and missiles on a carefully chosen list of anti-aircraft batteries and ballistic missile launchers. (His handlers in the Mossad would only tell us his initials.) The next day, another group of Iranians and others recruited from the region launched a second wave of attacks inside Iran.

In detailed interviews, 10 present and former Israeli intelligence officials described the commando raids and a wealth of previously undisclosed details of the country’s decadeslong covert effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. They requested anonymity so they could speak freely.

The officials said the commando attacks were pivotal in June’s airstrikes, allowing Israel’s air force to carry out wave after wave of bombing runs without losing a single plane. Informed by intelligence gathered by the Mossad’s agents on the ground, Israeli warplanes pounded nuclear facilities, destroyed around half of Iran’s 3,000 ballistic missiles and 80% of its launchers, and fired missiles at the bedrooms of Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders.

As they had with the pagers, Israeli spies took advantage of their ability to penetrate their adversary’s communications systems. Early in the aerial attack, Israeli cyberwarriors sent a fake message to Iran’s top military leaders, luring them to a phantom meeting in an underground bunker that was then demolished in a precision strike. Twenty were killed, including three chiefs of staff.

The strategic map of the region has been dramatically redrawn since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Public attention, particularly in recent weeks, has focused on Israel’s retaliation against Gaza, which has caused scores of thousands of deaths and a deepening famine that has been globally condemned.

The secret war between Israel and Iran has attracted far less public attention but has also played a significant role in the region’s changing balance of power.

In 2018, Israeli-trained operatives broke into an unguarded Tehran warehouse and used high-temperature plasma cutters to crack safes containing drawings, data, computer disks and planning books. The material, weighing over 1,000 pounds, was loaded onto two trucks and driven into neighboring Azerbaijan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed the material at a press conference in Tel Aviv and said it proved Iran had been lying about its nuclear intentions.

Two years later, the Mossad killed one of Iran’s top physicists, using artificial intelligence-enhanced facial recognition to direct a remotely operated machine gun parked on a roadside near his weekend house.

In the lead-up to June’s air attacks, according to Israeli planners, they arranged for unwitting truck drivers to smuggle into Iran tons of “metallic equipment” — the parts for the weapons used by the commando teams.

Israeli officials said these operations reflect a fundamental shift in the Mossad’s approach that began about 15 years ago. The agents in Iran who broke into the safes, set up the machine guns, blasted the air defenses and watched the scientists’ apartments were not Israelis. All were either Iranians or citizens of third countries, according to senior Israeli officials with direct knowledge of the operations. For years, such missions in Iran had been the exclusive work of Israeli field operatives. But officials said the growing unpopularity of the Iranian regime has made it much easier to attract agents.

S.T. was one of them. Israeli officials said he grew up in a working-class family in a small town near Tehran. He enrolled in college and was living a seemingly ordinary student life, when he and several classmates were arrested by Iran’s feared Basij militia and taken to a detention center where they were tortured with electric shocks and brutally beaten.

S.T. and his friends were ultimately released, but the experience left him enraged and eager for revenge. Soon after, a relative living overseas provided his name to an Israeli spy whose job was to identify disaffected Iranians. Messages were exchanged via an encrypted phone app, and S.T. accepted a free trip to a neighboring country.

A case officer from the Mossad invited him to work as a covert operative against Iran. He agreed, asking only that Israel pledge to take care of his family if anything went wrong. (Iran summarily executes anyone caught spying for foreign countries, especially Israel.)

He was trained for months outside of Iran by Israeli weapons specialists. Just before the attack was to begin, he and his small team slipped back into the country to play their role in one of the biggest and most complex military operations in Israel’s history.

The Origins of a Secret War

The Mossad made Iran its top priority in 1993 after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, seemingly ending decades of conflict.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, center-right — flanked by, from left, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli negotiator Joel Singer, President Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization — signs the Oslo Accords in 1993. The agreement sought to end decades of conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. (J. David Ake/AFP via Getty Images)

Israel had long had a complicated relationship with Iran. For decades, it maintained a strategic alliance with the shah of Iran. But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Islamists who overthrew the monarch in 1979 described the Jewish state as a “cancerous tumor” that should be excised from the Middle East.

Israel’s strategy is, in effect, to protect its nuclear monopoly in the region. It does not publicly acknowledge its arsenal, estimated at more than 90 warheads. The Israeli air force destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor under construction in 2007.

After the Iraq airstrike, Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, declared that his country had a right to prevent neighbors from building their own bomb. “We cannot allow a second Holocaust,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, left, in 1981 with Ariel Sharon, who at the time was the defense minister and would become prime minister in 2001. Begin said that his country had a right to prevent its neighbors from building a nuclear bomb. (STF/AFP via Getty Images)

A few years later, Iran began researching nuclear weapons, drawing on the expertise of a Pakistani engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had once worked for a Dutch company that produced enriched uranium.

Shabtai Shavit, the Mossad director whose term ended in 1996, said Israel was aware of Khan’s travels in the region but did not initially detect his crucial role in Iran’s program. “We didn’t fully understand his intentions,” Shavit told us in an interview before his death in 2023. “If we had known, I would have ordered my combatants to kill him. I believe that could have reversed the course of history.”

According to United Nations nuclear inspectors, the Iranians used blueprints provided by Khan to begin building the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium they purchased from Pakistan, China and South Africa.

In 2000, Shavit’s successor drew up plans for the Mossad’s special missions unit known as Kidon — Hebrew for “bayonet” — to assassinate Khan while he was visiting what one official described as “a Southeast Asian country.” The mission was shelved when Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, told President Bill Clinton he would rein in Khan’s global activities.

Iran turned to Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani engineer who had worked for a Dutch company that produced enriched uranium, as Iran began researching nuclear weapons. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

That promise wasn’t kept.

That same year, the Mossad discovered that the Iranians were building a secret enrichment plant near Natanz, a city about 200 miles south of Tehran. The spy agency tipped off an Iranian dissident group, which went public with the revelation two years later.

Mossad veterans said that operatives — likely Israelis posing as Europeans installing or servicing equipment — walked around Natanz wearing shoes with double soles that collected dust and soil samples. Testing eventually revealed that the Iranian-made centrifuges were enriching uranium well beyond the 5% level needed for a nuclear power plant. (Medical isotopes use 20% enriched uranium; bombs need 90%.)

In 2001, Israel elected Gen. Ariel Sharon, famous for his belligerent toughness, as prime minister. The following year, Sharon named one of his favorite generals, Meir Dagan, as director of the Mossad. Both had a reputation for pushing boundaries and defying norms.

Dagan, who led the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, decided to make stopping Iran’s nuclear program the spy agency’s main goal.

Like Begin, who was born in Poland, Dagan was haunted by the Holocaust. Heads of foreign intelligence agencies recalled visiting his office and seeing a photograph of Nazi soldiers brutalizing Dagan’s grandfather on the wall. Explaining the photo’s meaning at an anti-Netanyahu rally in 2015, he said: “I swore that that would never happen again. I hope and believe that I have done everything in my power to keep that promise.”

Meir Dagan, who led the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, had this photograph of Nazi soldiers brutalizing his grandfather on the wall of his office. He explained its meaning in 2015: “I swore that that would never happen again. I hope and believe that I have done everything in my power to keep that promise.” (Yad Vashem)

Under Dagan’s leadership, the Mossad organized an array of covert operations to slow the Iranian program. Israeli agents began assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists, sending operatives on motorcycles to attach small bombs to cars in traffic.

The Art of Recruitment

Dagan took pride in the Mossad’s growing ability to recruit Iranians and others for covert operations inside Iran.

One key to the spy agency’s success is the ethnic composition of Iran. Israeli officials noted in interviews that roughly 40% of the country’s population of 90 million is made up of ethnic minorities: Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and others.

Shortly before he died in 2016, Dagan told us that “the best pool for recruiting agents inside Iran lies within the country’s ethnic and human mosaic. Many of them oppose the regime. Some even hate it.”

Present and former officials said Dagan championed the shift to relying on foreign-born agents. In the early years of the effort to penetrate Iran, the spy agency had relied mostly on Israelis, known to Mossad insiders as “blue and white” — a reference to the colors of Israel’s flag.

Under Dagan, the Mossad’s leadership came to believe they could find highly effective agents in Iran or among Iranian exiles and others living in one of the seven countries that border it.

Meir Dagan, seen in an undated photograph, was a proponent of using foreign-born agents for the Mossad’s missions against Iran. (Yaakov Saar/GPO/Getty Images)

Present and former officials said the recruits fell into two categories. Some gravitated to the realm of traditional espionage, gathering intelligence and passing it on to their handler. Others expressed a willingness to carry out violent operations, including attacks on nuclear scientists.

Not surprisingly, given the risk of summary execution, many had initial doubts.

“Convincing someone to betray their country is no small feat,” said a former senior Mossad officer who oversaw units handling foreign agents. “It’s a process of gradual erosion. You start with a minor request, an insignificant task. Then another. These are trial runs. If they perform well, you assign them something larger, more meaningful. And if they refuse — well, by then you have leverage: pressure, threats, even blackmail.”

Spymasters, he said, try to avoid threats or coercion. “It’s better to guide them to a place where they act willingly — where they take the first step themselves,” the former officer said.

The most critical element is trust. “Your agent must be loyal and emotionally tied to you. Like a soldier who charges forward despite the danger, trusting his comrades, so it is with agents. He goes on the mission because he trusts his handler and feels a deep sense of responsibility toward him.”

Most of the people who agreed to work for Israel expected payment for the risks they were taking. But the present and former officials said the driving force for people who agree to spy on their own country is often more primal.

“Financial reward is, of course, important,” the former Mossad officer said. “But people are also driven by emotion — hatred, love, dependence, revenge. Yet it always helps when the recruit’s motives are supported by some kind of tangible benefit: not necessarily a direct payment but some type of indirect help.”

This is how S.T. was recruited.

His handlers said he was consumed by hatred toward the regime and what had been done to him by the Basij militia. But what finally pushed him to cooperate was the Mossad’s offer to arrange medical treatment unavailable in Iran for a relative.

For decades, medical care has been one of the Mossad’s signature recruitment methods. Israeli intelligence has links with doctors and clinics in several countries, and arranging surgery and various therapies was also used to penetrate Palestinian extremist groups. It has featured even more in approaches to Iranians, in the hope of persuading them to help Israel.

The Mossad also uses the internet to attract agents, creating websites and publishing social media posts aimed at Iranians that offer to help people suffering from life-threatening illnesses such as cancer. These posts include phone numbers or encrypted contact options.

Israeli intelligence can mobilize its international network to find trusted doctors or clinics — places that won’t ask too many questions. The Mossad typically pays the bills directly and discreetly.

Another incentive used to entice potential spies is higher education in a foreign country. Based on years of research and experience, Mossad recruiters know that Iranians crave access to quality education. Even the fundamentalist religious regime of the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, encourages academic advancement. This makes offers of placement in Western universities, or boarding schools for teenagers, an especially compelling tool.

Once a candidate is identified, the Mossad sets up an initial meeting in an accessible location — often in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Armenia or Azerbaijan, which are relatively easy for Iranians to enter. Other options include destinations in Southeast Asia like Thailand and India that allow Iranian citizens to apply online for business, medical or tourist visas.

Candidates undergo a series of meetings and psychological evaluations. Psychologists observe their behavior, often from behind one-way mirrors. They fill out detailed questionnaires about their personal history, including intimate details about their family life, and are questioned by a polygraph examiner.

Agents are regularly retested after they begin working in the field. Every action, whether minor or major, is followed by another lie detector test to confirm continued loyalty.

They receive extensive training and supervision. To avoid arousing suspicion, they are told what to wear, where to buy their clothing, what cars to drive, and even how, when and where to deposit the money they receive.

The agent-handler relationship is critical, as a former Mossad operative who “ran” agents explained. In many cases, the handler is simultaneously confessor, babysitter, psychologist, spiritual mentor and surrogate family member.

The goal is to build a bond so strong that the agent feels safe and supported — comfortable enough to share even their deepest personal secrets, including their sexual relationships.

Any and all information about the agent can be valuable to the Mossad, either as a red flag marking a potential vulnerability to Iran’s secret police or another aspect of the agent’s life that the handlers can put to use. Among the key questions: Who’s in the person’s social circle? Can he or she use that relationship to the Mossad’s benefit?

The operatives who were assigned to assassinate nuclear scientists on the street received extensive training from Mossad case officers. They were taught to ride motorcycles and either shoot their targets at close range or plant explosives on their vehicles.

The intent was both to deprive the Iranian program of expertise and to discourage promising scientists from working on nuclear weapons. From 2010 to 2012 the Israelis killed at least four scientists and barely missed another.

The operations were managed by Israelis, down to the smallest details, often from nearby countries or directly from Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, and occasionally by Israeli intelligence officers who briefly entered Iran.

Operation Rising Lion

Over the years, the Mossad and Israel’s military repeatedly drew up plans to halt Iran’s nuclear program by bombing its key facilities. Israel’s political leaders always drew back under pressure from American presidents who feared an attack would trigger a regional war, destabilizing the Middle East. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, had stockpiled tens of thousands of missiles, enough to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and hit its largest cities.

Those calculations shifted dramatically in the past year.

In April and October of 2024, Iran fired missiles and drones directly at Israel. Nearly all were shot down with the help of the United States and allies. The Israeli air force responded with airstrikes that destroyed much of Iran’s air defenses.

The remains of an Iranian missile ended up near the Dead Sea in Israel on Oct. 2, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Getty Images)

The Israeli military had begun planning a bombing campaign against Iran in mid-2024 that it hoped would be ready within a year. With Donald Trump’s victory in the November election, and Hezbollah neutralized, Israeli officials saw a window of opportunity.

Israel’s American-trained pilots had been secretly flying over Iran since 2016 — learning the landscape and exploring various routes to minimize the chances of detection.

One nuclear target in Iran, however, was considered so formidable that the Israeli air force had no plan for destroying it. The Iranians had built a uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo and buried it inside a mountain — nearly 300 feet beneath the surface. Iran tried to keep Fordo a secret, but the Mossad and American and British intelligence were able to track movements in and out of the mountain. President Barack Obama disclosed its existence in 2009, and United Nations inspectors who visited the site soon after found that Iran was planning for up to 3,000 highly advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium.

A 2013 satellite image shows a uranium-enrichment facility in Fordo, Iran. (DigitalGlobe via Getty Images)

Only the United States had a bomb powerful enough to pierce a mountain: the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the world’s largest conventional bomb known as a “bunker buster.”

And so Israeli military planners drew up a plan for a highly risky ground operation, details of which are disclosed here for the first time. Under the plan, elite commandos were to be smuggled to the Fordo site without being detected. Then they would storm the building, taking advantage of the element of surprise. Once inside, their mission would be to blow up the centrifuges, grab Iran’s enriched uranium and escape.

The new head of the Mossad was skeptical. David Barnea, known as Dadi, had long pushed for aggressive actions against Iran. He had overseen the remote-machine gun attack in 2020 just before being promoted to the top job. Yet he thought the plans for a commando attack on Fordo were far too risky. Barnea worried that some of Israel’s best soldiers and spies would be killed or taken hostage, a nightmare for Israelis already deeply pained by the ordeal of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since the attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

Barnea and other Israeli officials came to believe that the Trump administration might join an Israeli attack on Iran, with U.S. warplanes dropping the massive “bunker busters” on Fordo. Trump had repeatedly and publicly declared that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb.

To prepare for what would be dubbed Operation Rising Lion, the Mossad and the military intelligence agency, Aman, stepped up their tracking of Iran’s military leaders and nuclear teams. Several of the operation’s planners said that Barnea significantly expanded the Mossad’s Tzomet, or Junction, division, which recruits and trains non-Israeli agents. The decision was made to entrust this foreign legion with Israel’s most sophisticated equipment for paramilitary operations and communications. The cover stories for each agent, known as their legends, were checked and rechecked for inconsistencies.

The Mossad’s espionage efforts were helped by a geographic fact. Iran is bordered by Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Smuggling is a way of life in the region, as thousands of people earn their living using donkeys, camels, cars and trucks to carry drugs, fuel and electronics across the borders.

The Mossad had developed contacts with smugglers — and often with the government intelligence agencies — in all seven nations.

“Bringing equipment in and out is relatively easy,” said an Israeli who has worked with Mossad on logistics, “and the Mossad also used front companies that legally shipped boxes and crates by sea and on trucks driven legitimately through border crossings.”

The material was delivered to “infrastructure agents,” Mossad operatives inside Iran who store the material until it’s needed. Mossad veterans said the gear can be hidden in safe houses for years, updated as technology evolves or maintenance is needed.

Officials said the Mossad trained the non-Israeli agents who would attack Iranian targets for about five months. Some were brought to Israel, where models had been built to enable practice runs. Others rehearsed their missions in third countries where they met Israeli experts.

There were two groups of commandos, each with 14 teams of four to six members. Some already lived in Iran. Others were anti-regime exiles who slipped into the country on the eve of the attack.

Each had their instructions, but they were also in touch with Israeli planners who could change or update the attack plan. Most of the teams were tasked with striking Iranian air defenses from a list of targets provided by the Israeli air force.

The Mossad had code names for each of the teams and their assignments, which were based on combinations of musical notes.

On the night of June 12, the teams arrived at their positions as orchestrated. The Israelis in charge of the covert operations directed the agents to leave little or no equipment behind. (Iranian media reports after the attack asserted that the infiltrators had missed their targets and fled without their gear; Israeli officials said what the Iranians found were insignificant components — the equivalent of gum wrappers.)

“One hundred percent of the anti-aircraft batteries marked for the Mossad by the air force were destroyed,” a senior Israeli intelligence official said. Most were near Tehran in areas where the Israeli air force had not previously operated.

In the first hours of the war, one of the commando teams struck an Iranian ballistic missile launcher. Israeli analysts believe this mission had a disproportionate impact, causing Iran to delay its retaliatory salvo against Israel out of fear that other missile launchers were vulnerable to attacks from inside Iran.

Officials emphasized that the military logistics of the plan were the work of Aman and the Israeli air force, which hit more than a thousand targets over the 11 days of airstrikes. But officials agree that the Mossad contributed key intelligence for one aspect of Rising Lion: the assassinations of senior Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists.

The Mossad compiled detailed information on the habits and whereabouts of 11 Iranian nuclear scientists. The dossiers even mapped the locations of the bedrooms in the men’s homes. On the morning of June 13, Israeli air force warplanes fired air-to-ground missiles at those coordinates, killing all 11.

After a delay, Iran retaliated with a barrage of missiles. Most were intercepted, but the ones that got through did considerable damage. Israel reported 30 civilian deaths and estimated its reconstruction costs at $12 billion. Iran’s state media put the death toll in their country at more than 600.

An aerial view of the destruction after an Iranian ballistic missile hit Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv, Israel, on June 14. (Yair Palti/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The question of how much Iran’s nuclear efforts were set back remains in dispute. Trump has insisted the American airstrikes on Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan “obliterated” Iran’s program. Analysts in Israeli and American intelligence have been more restrained.

“This war significantly set them back,” said a former head of Aman, Gen. Tamir Hayman. “Iran is no longer a nuclear threshold state, as it was on the eve of the war. It could be able to return to threshold status in one or two years at the earliest, assuming a decision by the Supreme Leader to break out toward a bomb.”

Hayman, who now heads the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, said it’s possible the assault might have the opposite of its intended effect, if Iran becomes even more eager to build a bomb that could deter future Israeli attacks.

Yossi Melman is a commentator on Israeli intelligence and a documentary filmmaker. Dan Raviv is a former CBS correspondent and host of “The Mossad Files” podcast. They are the co-authors of “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.”

by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica, and Alejandro Bonilla Suárez and Edwin Corona Ramos for ProPublica

Leer en español.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.

The Trump administration’s move four months ago to send more than 230 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT took a staggering toll, not only on the men themselves but also on their families. The men were released to Venezuela on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap without much explanation, and they and their relatives have begun sharing the details of their ordeal.

Juan José Ramos Ramos describes the physical torture he says he endured during his incarceration at CECOT as his mother, Lina Ramos, explains the emotional agony of not knowing whether she’d ever see her son again. Andry Blanco Bonilla and his mother, Carmen Bonilla, still struggle to make sense of how they could have been caught up in something like this when Blanco didn’t have a criminal record and, in fact, had a deportation order to be sent back to his home country. Wilmer Vega Sandia, who had migrated to the United States to find work that would help him pay for his mother’s cancer treatment, says he prayed every day of his incarceration that he’d make it home in time to hold her in his arms.

Without providing evidence, the U.S. government branded them all Tren de Aragua gang members, the “worst of the worst,” “sick animals” and “monsters.” Our reporting, a first-of-its-kind, case-by-case examination, shows how the government knew a majority of them had not been convicted of a crime in the U.S. — and only a few had serious convictions such as assault and gun possession. We found a dozen or so had criminal records abroad and included those in our comprehensive database, too.

Nearly half, 118 of the more than 230 men, including Ramos, came to the U.S. legally and were deported in the middle of their immigration cases. He entered the U.S. with a CBP One appointment, a program the Biden administration used to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country.

At least 166 of the more than 230 men had tattoos, including Blanco, Ramos and Vega. Our investigation found that the government relied heavily on tattoos to tie the men to the Venezuelan gang, even though Tren de Aragua experts say tattoos are not reliable indicators of gang affiliation.

A handful of the men, including Vega, had been granted voluntary departures by an immigration judge, which means they had agreed to pay their way home to Venezuela. Instead, they were deported to El Salvador.

Watch the video here.

Melissa Sanchez, Perla Trevizo, Mica Rosenberg and Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez of Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González of Cazadores de Fake News contributed reporting. Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Almudena Toral of ProPublica contributed production.

by Joel Jacobs

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

A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings.

These consumers — along with hundreds of others — reached out to their congressional representatives for help in the past 12 months.

“I have been unable to pay my rent, utilities, personal bills, student loans, or my credit card. I have been unable to buy groceries or put gas in my car,” wrote the New Yorker, who contacted Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ office.

Records show their representatives — all Republicans — referred them to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency formed in the wake of the Great Recession to shield Americans from unfair or abusive business practices. All three consumers got relief, according to agency data.

Then the lawmakers — along with nearly every other Republican in Congress — voted to slash the agency’s funding by nearly half as part of President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a step toward the administration’s goal of gutting the agency.

Republicans have long been critical of the CFPB, accusing it of imposing unreasonable burdens on businesses. Already, the CFPB under Trump has dropped a number of cases and frozen investigations into dozens of companies.

Yet the agency has historically benefited consumers across the political spectrum, securing around $20 billion in relief through its enforcement actions.

Data obtained by ProPublica through a public records request shows that many of the same Republican members of Congress who have targeted the CFPB for cuts have collectively routed thousands of constituent complaints to the agency.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, for example, voted to reduce the CFPB’s budget. Yet each of their offices has referred more than 100 constituents to the CFPB for help, among the most of any House members. The office of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who also voted for the CFPB cuts, has routed more than 800 constituent complaints to the agency, the most of any current lawmaker from either party, ProPublica found.

A spokesperson for Issa said in an email that most of his office’s referrals to the agency “occurred several years ago” and reflected “a conventional way” to handle constituents’ consumer issues.

Wittman and Cornyn didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the disconnect between their offices’ use of the CFPB’s services and their votes to cut it. Neither did New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, whose office fielded the defrauded service member’s complaint, or Malliotakis, who was approached by the New York business owner, or Rep. Rick Allen, whose office directed the Georgia chemotherapy patient to the agency.

Overall, members of Congress have steered nearly 24,000 complaints to the CFPB since it opened its doors in 2011. Roughly 10,000 of those were referred by the offices of current and former Republican lawmakers, ProPublica found.

“This is how members of Congress from both parties get help for the people who live in their districts,” said Erie Meyer, the CFPB’s former chief technologist, who left the agency in February. The agency has a particular mandate to help service members and seniors, she noted. “This is how, if a service member is getting screwed on an auto loan, this is the only place they can go.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has referred more than 200 constituents to CFPB since its creation. In a statement to ProPublica, he accused Republicans in Congress of “pursuing senseless cuts that will undermine their own ability to protect their constituents, who will be left in the lurch when they fall victim to scams or deceptive and unfair business practices.”

“Republicans have made clear that they stand on the side of big businesses — not consumers,” he added. “Their irresponsible pursuit of dismantling the CFPB will have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”

An Irreplaceable System

In recent years, the CFPB’s public database shows the number of complaints has exploded, from around 280,000 in 2019 to more than 2.7 million last year.

Complaints have grown across many categories, including credit cards and debt collection. Last year, most of the complaints filed, over 2.3 million, were about mistakes or other problems involving credit reporting agencies, and more than half of them resulted in relief, CFPB data shows.

“These credit score formulas govern so many factors of your life. It’s not just your ability to get a loan, it’s your ability to secure housing or qualify for a job,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “It’s important that you can resolve something, but it’s difficult to do it on your own.”

Once a complaint is submitted, it is routed to the company, which has 15 days to respond. Companies can request an additional 45 days to reach a final resolution.

Many consumers end up getting nonmonetary relief, such as fixes to erroneous credit reports or an end to harassment by debt collectors, but some get financial help as well. More than $300 million has been returned to Americans through the complaint system, including $90 million just last year.

Normally, staff at the CFPB monitor the complaints to identify systemic issues and escalate complaints involving consumers who are at immediate risk of foreclosure, although that didn’t happen for a few weeks this year when the agency’s acting director halted its work.

The CFPB also shares complaint information with other federal agencies, states and localities to help them protect consumers. No other government or private entity has the capacity to effectively handle the volume of complaints that the CFPB does, experts and current and former employees say.

States often have limited resources for consumer protection efforts. Many states — including some conservative ones that supported a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure — steer consumers to the agency on their websites, providing links to it.

In legal filings opposing the Trump administration’s steps to effectively shut down the CFPB, 23 Democratic attorneys general noted that their states collectively have referred thousands of complaints to the agency and that its services can’t be replaced by state-level operations.

“In the CFPB’s absence, consumers will be left without critical resources,” they wrote.

These Republican lawmakers have referred constituents to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau even while voting to slash the agency’s budget. Clockwise from top left: Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, Rep. Rick Allen of Georgia, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey. (House Creative Services via Wikimedia Commons)

The complaint system has also lessened the burden on congressional offices, which can route constituent problems to an agency dedicated to, and expert in, addressing consumer issues. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pursuing dramatic cuts to the agency.

The CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve instead of annual appropriations bills. The structure is meant to safeguard the agency’s independence, though critics say this makes the agency less accountable, giving elected officials less power over its operations.

Initially, Republicans pressed for extreme cuts to the CFPB as part of Trump’s legislative package. House members approved a 70% cut. The Senate Banking Committee attempted to go even further, zeroing out the agency’s funding entirely.

Ultimately, the final version of the bill signed into law by Trump on July 4 cut the CFPB’s budget by around 46%, reducing the agency’s funding cap — the maximum amount it can request from the Federal Reserve — from $823 million to $446 million for this fiscal year. The agency requested $729 million last fiscal year.

The offices of lawmakers who voted for the bill have referred about 3,400 complaints to the agency, running the gamut of consumer problems — from crushing debt to mortgage issues to financial scams, ProPublica’s data analysis shows. (In some of these cases, consumers also took complaints to the CFPB themselves in addition to reaching out to their representatives. Consumers’ names aren’t disclosed in the data.)

Their constituents are sometimes desperate: “I’m about to be homeless because of this,” wrote a Florida resident whose bank account was frozen.

Others have expressed frustration at getting the runaround from a company. “I’ve spent countless hours on hold trying to speak with a representative, only to be met with silence or outdated instructions to send letters,” wrote one Virginian in a complaint about their bank.

In a statement after the CFPB funding cut passed, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, R-S.C., applauded the measure for saving taxpayer money but insisted it would not affect the agency’s mandatory functions, which include handling complaints.

Consumer experts as well as current and former CFPB employees, however, said the cuts will likely hinder the agency’s effectiveness.

“I think the whole process is at risk,” said Ruth Susswein, director of consumer protection at the nonprofit advocacy group Consumer Action. “If you starve the system, it cannot provide the benefits that it now offers.”

Signs of Strain

The Trump administration’s initial efforts to unilaterally hobble the CFPB give a hint of what may lie ahead for the complaint system.

In February, acting Director Russell Vought issued a stop-work order to all CFPB employees and canceled a slew of contracts, including for antivirus software that scanned files attached to consumer complaints.

The actions largely froze the complaint system for about a week. More than 70,000 complaints were submitted, but most were not sent to companies for their response during that period, data shows.

Although some issues were later fixed, the work stoppage spawned a backlog of more than 16,000 complaints that required manual review, according to court records from a lawsuit filed by the union that represents CFPB employees. About 75 complaints from consumers at risk of imminent foreclosure, which would normally be escalated to CFPB staff, weren’t acted upon.

In late March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the CFPB to end the work stoppage, reverse contract terminations and reinstate probationary employees who were fired. However, an appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed, triggering a frenzied effort by the administration to cut about 90% of the CFPB’s staff.

The layoffs included the vast majority of the roughly 130-member team that manages the complaint system as well as nearly every staffer in legally mandated offices focused on service members and seniors.

The CFPB has fielded over 440,000 complaints from current and former service members and their families since 2011, according to CFPB data, more than 100,000 of which have resulted in relief.

The CFPB did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a court declaration, Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, said that the agency’s leadership had “been assessing how the agency can fulfill its statutory duties as a smaller, more efficient operation. In making this assessment, leadership discovered vast waste in the agency’s size.”

Paoletta also said the agency would have a “much more limited vision for enforcement and supervision activities, focused on protecting service members and veterans, and addressing actual tangible consumer harm and intentional discrimination.”

In April, Jackson issued an order blocking the firings made at the CFPB after the appeals court decision. The administration has appealed Jackson’s ruling.

Lawsuits won’t protect the CFPB or its complaint apparatus from the cuts included in the recently passed spending bill, current and former agency employees pointed out.

These changes are likely to hit home with consumers no matter which party they favor, said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in the union’s lawsuit.

“Republicans don’t want to be abused by big corporations that ignore them any more than Democrats do,” she said.

Have You Recently Sought Help From the CFPB? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.