ProPublica

by Jesse Coburn

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering taking a first step to using cryptocurrency, according to a meeting recording and other materials reviewed by ProPublica and three officials familiar with the matter. Two officials told ProPublica they believe the initiative may be a trial run for the use of crypto across the federal government.

The discussions have sparked concern among some at the department, especially about the prospect of paying recipients of major federal grants in cryptocurrency, an uninsured digital asset associated with financial speculation, dramatic swings in value and transnational crime.

The focus of the discussions so far has been experimenting with using the underlying technology that makes crypto possible — the blockchain — to monitor HUD grants. Blockchain advocates argue that the technology is valuable on its own for such purposes. But the primary use of blockchain, according to experts, is for crypto transactions.

“It’s just introducing another unregulated security into the housing market as though 2008, 2009 didn’t happen,” one HUD staffer said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis. “I don’t see any way this will help anything. I see a lot of ways this could hurt,” said the official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The HUD discussions have covered the potential use of a stablecoin, a form of crypto that is pegged to another asset to avoid wild swings in value, although such swings have happened in the past.

The blockchain idea is being pushed, a HUD official told colleagues, by Irving Dennis. Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, is a former partner at the global consulting giant EY, also commonly known by its original name, Ernst & Young. EY itself is involved in the proposal as well: An executive of the firm discussed the idea with HUD officials last month.

The crypto industry has found an ally in President Donald Trump, whose administration has tapped industry boosters to lead federal agencies, backed off investigations into crypto firms and created a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.” (Bitcoin plunged $5,000 within an hour of the news of the reserve’s opening on Thursday.) Trump himself has significant financial interests in crypto. On Friday, the White House is scheduled to host a “crypto summit” with leading figures from the industry.

The proposal at HUD indicates a new way that the administration may seek to bolster the industry: by incorporating blockchain and possibly cryptocurrency into the routine spending and accounting practices of federal agencies. It’s a move that would align with the apparent desire of Trump adviser Elon Musk to use the blockchain to monitor federal spending.

Dennis and HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett both denied the accounts of their colleagues. “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin,” Lovett said. “Education is not implementation.”

Robert Judson, the EY executive involved in the conversations, confirmed that they took place. “We as a firm were having discussions with select individuals at that agency,” he said when reached by phone. Judson told ProPublica he would seek EY’s approval for a full interview, then didn’t call back.

The White House, EY and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

HUD officials held at least two meetings about the blockchain proposal last month. A list of attendees to the first meeting included staffers from the offices of the CFO and Community Planning and Development. CPD administers billions of dollars in grants that support low- and moderate-income people, including funding to develop affordable housing, run homeless shelters, support disaster recovery, relocate domestic violence survivors and build parks, sewers and community centers. It was the CFO’s office that called for the meeting, one person told ProPublica.

Also listed as a meeting attendee was Judson from EY. For years Judson has advocated for the blockchain, a digital ledger of sorts that creates an immutable record of transactions saved across multiple computers. Boosters of the technology cast it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks and credit card companies out of financial transactions and make those transactions more transparent and secure. Judson has written that the blockchain can help organizations prevent money from being siphoned off for unintended purposes. “As digital assets such as stable coins or digital currencies take hold, more powerful applications will emerge for integrated value exchange,” he wrote. Dennis, who served as HUD CFO in the first Trump administration, also wrote, in a 2021 book, that the agency should use technology such as “blockchain, robotics, and next-generation financial management systems.”

Stablecoins are backed by reserves including traditional currency, commodities and Treasury securities. That is supposed to ensure that their value — unlike that of, say, Bitcoin — doesn’t fluctuate. However, on several high-profile occasions, the value of stablecoins has done just that.

At the HUD meeting, attendees discussed a “proof of concept” project in which CPD would begin to track the funding going to a single CPD grant recipient and possibly subrecipients on the blockchain. The need for the project was “not well articulated,” one attendee later wrote in meeting notes.

Following the meeting, a HUD official wrote and circulated a memo within the agency panning the idea. “Without exaggeration, every imaginable implementation of this at HUD appears dangerous and inefficient,” the memo reads.

HUD has no difficulty tracking grant spending, the memo contended, making the new technology unnecessary. Incorporating it would be time-consuming, complicated and require extensive training. And, if the project involved paying grantees in cryptocurrency instead of dollars, it would inject volatility and unpredictability into the funding stream, even if the currency was a stablecoin.

In subsequent discussions with HUD staffers, the memo’s author described the proposal as a “beachhead” at HUD for the introduction of cryptocurrency, which the author compared to “monopoly money.”

CPD officials continued to raise concerns in a follow-up meeting, a recording of which was reviewed by ProPublica. (Judson did not attend this one.) Some attendees saw merit in the blockchain idea, suggesting it could reduce inaccurate data from grant recipients and enable real-time reporting and monitoring of their spending.

“Maybe there is something that we could learn from it,” one said, “especially if we feel like the broader federal government is moving towards some sort of stablecoin option in the future.”

One official asked why the agency was considering the project. “Because it’s sexy,” someone replied. Another said, “Irv has asked us to pursue blockchain, so that’s why we are looking at it,” referring to Dennis.

Many details were left unexplained at the meeting, including, crucially, whether the proposal would involve paying grantees in cryptocurrency. But some signaled that it would.

“You can do it with what would be attached to a stable currency. That would be up to Treasury, and I think they’re already going that way, for what it’s worth,” one official said. “It would simulate the dollar.”

Another added, “It would basically be a cryptocurrency that is linked to the U.S. dollar on a one-for-one basis.”

A finance official suggested the idea could be applied more broadly across HUD. “We are looking at this for the entire enterprise. We just wanted to start in CPD,” he said. The agency is also considering the idea for the Office of Public and Indian Housing, he said, for “tenant eligibility and stuff like that.” That office serves the millions of people who live in public and federally subsidized housing.

This is not the first time that federal officials have considered incorporating the blockchain into the work of the government. Agencies including the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce and even HUD have been involved in a study, a prototype and a working group in recent years. But those who monitor the crypto industry were not aware of as broad an application of the technology in the federal government as what HUD officials have recently discussed.

Some crypto experts were dubious. “It’s a terrible idea,” said Corey Frayer, a former official at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where he focused on the crypto markets and financial stability. “It is absolutely wild that anyone with any sense would consider this.”

Frayer, now at the Consumer Federation of America, warned that HUD grants paid in stablecoin could fall in value. He expressed greatest concern about the notion that the proposal could expand to other parts of the agency. If that included, for example, introducing stablecoin into the $1.3 trillion in mortgage insurance provided by the Federal Housing Administration, a fluctuation in the value of the stablecoin could have a major economic impact, he said.

“Imagine a world in which all of the government involvement in the housing industry, all of the funds circulating in that environment, dropped in value by 13%,” he said, citing a 2023 episode in which a stablecoin briefly fell 13 cents below the dollar. “It’s hard to imagine that wouldn’t be catastrophic.”

Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who researches financial regulation and technology, noted that some high-profile attempts to use the blockchain for purposes unrelated to cryptocurrency have failed. She expressed skepticism that the technology would fare better in the context of government grants, where bad outcomes could harm those who depend on HUD funding to survive.

“Blockchain technology has been around for 15 years. No one wants to use it. And so now we have an attempt to force the government to use it,” she said, with “the most vulnerable people” serving “as guinea pigs.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror

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

The silver Jeep Wrangler that showed up at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles inspection station was missing all four of its wheels. Gone, too, were its doors.

“Vehicle is absolutely stripped,” the Connecticut towing company wrote to the state DMV. That was why it was only worth $1,000, the company said on an official form that took advantage of a state law allowing it to sell vehicles it had towed.

Photos submitted by the tow truck company showed the Jeep covered in fresh snow, but strangely, despite it having no doors, there was no snow inside the vehicle, suggesting the doors had recently been removed. The company also failed to mention that when it towed the stolen Jeep after a police stop three weeks earlier, it had stylish rims on its still-attached wheels and an LED light bar above the windshield, and the police wrote that the vehicle had “no visible damage.”

The DMV approved the request to sell the vehicle, and a few months later, the Jeep was posted for sale — not by the tow truck company but on the Facebook page of a longtime DMV employee. The Jeep now had rims, wheels and a light bar like it had when police stopped it.

The DMV employee sold the Jeep to a used car dealer for $13,500. After passing through several more hands, another dealership ultimately sold it to a customer for $28,781.44.

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica in January exposed how Connecticut’s laws favor towing companies at the expense of drivers. The state allows tow companies to seek the DMV’s permission to sell some vehicles after 15 days — one of the shortest such windows in the country. The system has resulted in a wide range of abuses with little oversight from the DMV.

The case of the Jeep with the missing wheels, laid out in internal DMV records, is an extreme example of how the DMV has failed to monitor a process that has had severe consequences for some car owners with low incomes. CT Mirror and ProPublica have spoken to dozens of people who had their cars towed and never saw them again. Many said they were never notified that their car would be sold.

Without strong oversight from the agency, someone who works for the DMV found a way to profit off that system without facing any consequences.

The towing company’s sales to the DMV employee went on for several years. It was finally discovered when a document the employee had submitted to obtain the title for one of the vehicles two years earlier came to the attention of the DMV’s investigations unit.

In total, DMV investigators found that from 2015 to at least 2019, the towing company, D&L Auto Body & Towing, in Berlin, Connecticut, sold 15 vehicles to an investment firm owned by a man named Dominik Stefanski, a document examiner then in the DMV’s main office in Wethersfield, outside Hartford.

According to the DMV case report, whenever D&L employees went to the DMV office, they would make eye contact with Stefanski, who would then allow them to cut the habitually long, slow-moving lines. In exchange for this favor, the report said, Stefanski would spend his days off walking the company’s lot selecting vehicles that had belonged to other people only weeks or months prior. D&L would then undervalue the cars on DMV forms, investigators said, allowing Stefanski to buy them cheaply and resell them for a profit.

D&L Auto Body & Towing (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera declined to answer specific questions about the investigation. But Guerrera, who was deputy commissioner during the investigation and became commissioner in 2023, said after reporters raised questions about the incident, “This issue has been escalated to the Office of Labor Relations for further review and to ensure a thorough assessment.”

In an interview in the doorway of his home, Stefanski denied the investigators’ findings. He said he never let D&L cut the line, and when he was informed that D&L employees told investigators he purchased at least 15 cars from them, he scoffed, “Jesus Christ, probably not.”

The investigators “tried, but nothing came up because they knew they had nothing,” Stefanski said.

D&L issued a statement saying owner Kevin Harrison wasn’t aware of the scheme until DMV investigators asked about it. “The company’s manager at the time acted on his own and thought he was doing the right thing by selling in-operable cars,” the statement said. According to investigators, many of the cars were in good condition. The manager was fired, D&L said.

“D & L Auto Body & Towing, LLC works with the Department of Motor Vehicle to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again,” the statement said.

Ultimately, the DMV didn’t take any action against D&L or Stefanski, and Stefanski still works at the DMV.

The Jeep With the Missing Wheels

D&L first came into possession of the silver Wrangler in January 2018, when the Meriden Police Department called D&L to tow a Jeep that had been stolen from a car dealership in Pennsylvania and located during a traffic stop.

Hector Luis Gonzalez, who was driving the Jeep, said in an interview that he was shocked when officers told him it was stolen. His uncle had bought the Jeep from a car dealer in the Bronx, and he had a title. Gonzalez said he had put a lot of money into the Jeep, purchasing new tires and rims that cost nearly $5,000 and buying a light bar in the front that cost more than $500.

“I bought it from a dealer, so I didn’t expect that the car was stolen,” Gonzalez said.

Once a car is towed, the towing company is supposed to notify the car’s owner within 48 hours. As days pass, storage fees add up, making it expensive for drivers to retrieve their cars. After 15 days, the tower can ask the DMV for permission to sell a car if they deem it to be worth less than $1,500. This gives companies an incentive to place a lower value on vehicles, as they would otherwise have to wait 45 days to sell.

Gonzalez said he called D&L after the car was towed and staff told him that the dealer it had been stolen from had picked it up.

But when investigators reached the dealership, Koch 33 Automotive, two years later, its management said it had no idea the car had been recovered and told DMV officials that the dealer still had an interest in it.

“I have been under the assumption that the vehicle was still considered stolen,” a dealership employee told investigators. The company did not respond to calls seeking comment. The DMV is responsible for verifying the facts on the forms towers submit that state they tried to contact the owner. A vehicle search also should have shown the vehicle was stolen, which would have flagged the potential sale.

Twenty-five days after the tow, D&L submitted a form to the DMV saying that it wanted to sell the Jeep and that it was only worth $1,000.

In theory, the DMV had a way to catch tow truck companies that undervalued cars. Before approving a sale, DMV employees are supposed to check the book value and, if the declared value is lower, request more information as to why the tower believes the car is worth less. In this case, the National Automobile Dealers Association value for the Wrangler was $15,100, according to DMV records.

But D&L was able to get around that by providing photos of the car without doors or wheels. It then brought the Jeep on a flatbed to the DMV, where an inspector noted the missing parts and stamped a form declaring it not legal for road use.

The Jeep Wrangler was shown intact in a photo from a police stop in January 2018, first photo, and with the doors and wheels removed weeks later, second photo. (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

Less than four months later, D&L sold the Jeep for $1,400 to JDM Investments, a company that Connecticut secretary of state business filings show was owned by Stefanski.

Under state law, the profits from sales of towed cars are supposed to belong to the vehicle owners. Towing companies have to hold onto the proceeds for a year and turn over any remaining money, after subtracting their fees, to the state.

But towing companies can get around that rule by selling cars for small amounts so there aren’t any profits left once towing and storage fees are deducted.

In the case of the Jeep sold to Stefanski, investigators calculated that there should have been $390 left over, but D&L never paid that to the owner or the state. If it had sold the vehicle for the book value, there would have been about $14,000 in profits.

Dominik Stefanski’s Facebook post advertising the Jeep Wrangler. (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica. Redacted by the Connecticut DMV.)

After the sale, Stefanski, who has worked at the DMV since 1999 and earns $72,000 annually, applied for the vehicle’s title but said he wasn’t ready to register the car. That limited the paper trail: The DMV has no way to track unregistered cars.

Curiously, records uncovered by investigators showed that five days before purchasing the Jeep from D&L, Stefanski had already sold it to a used car dealer, Toria Truck Rental & Leasing of Hartford, which also does business as South Green Automotive, for $13,500.

After selling it to the dealer, Stefanski appeared to help Toria resell the vehicle by listing it on Facebook: “Selling my jeep 2010 only 73k miles clean title asking 23k$.” Two weeks later, the Jeep was sold at a public auto auction for $18,130 to a Groton dealership, which 10 days later sold it to a customer for $28,781, records show.

According to investigators, Toria then sent Stefanski a commission check for over $2,000 for the sales of two cars, including the Jeep.

Toria’s co-owner Edward Michaels said he and another employee, who no longer works for him, met with DMV investigators and they “were cleared.” The DMV did not pursue charges against Toria.

The Abandoned Cadillac

When cars are sold, towing companies have to submit a form called an H-110 that tells the DMV who the new owner of the vehicle is and how much it sold for. But the DMV says it doesn’t have an efficient way to track those. If it did, it might notice trends like a large number of towed vehicles being purchased by the same company.

Four months ago, CT Mirror and ProPublica requested six months’ worth of H-110s under the state public records law. The DMV said it could only search sales by specific vehicle identification numbers.

CT Mirror and ProPublica requested forms on 18 vehicles that tow companies sought to sell. The DMV said it only had that information on two of them: the 2010 Jeep and a 2010 Cadillac Escalade that Stefanski bought from D&L about a year later.

D&L towed the Cadillac from the Econo Lodge in Southington in November 2018. When the tower asked the DMV to sell the car, it wrote that the Cadillac was worth $750 because it had no key and had front end damage. According to the DMV report, the book value of the car was $17,500.

The company sold the Cadillac to JDM Investments five months later for $1,000. Stefanski flipped the car to Toria for $17,500, which sold it at a public auction for $18,300 to a Putnam auto dealer that then sold it to a customer in October 2019 for $23,250.

When it was initially towed, the Cadillac had belonged to Southington resident Daniel Rodriguez, who had left the car in the Econo Lodge parking lot after striking a guardrail on the highway. Rodriguez said in an interview that he had been battling an addiction at the time and “left it there.”

Stefanski posted on Facebook to advertise Daniel Rodriguez’s towed Cadillac. (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica. Redacted by the Connecticut DMV.)

“I was not in the right state of mind, and I just never went back,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said he never heard from any tow company or got any notice that his car was being sold until a DMV investigator contacted him in early 2020 after he’d moved to Texas. He wrote back “requesting any funds that may have been generated as a result of the sale of the vehicle.”

But Rodriguez said he was told by DMV officials it was too late: “Somebody got back to me stating that so much time went by, and I wasn’t allowed any compensation.”

That was incorrect. Because only eight months had passed since the sale, Rodriguez should have been able to claim any proceeds from the towing company. But in this case, there wasn’t any money to claim because of the way the transactions were handled.

Until CT Mirror and ProPublica contacted Rodriguez, he said, no one had told him that his car had been purchased by a DMV employee and that it eventually sold for more than $23,000.

“It’s like a thorn in the rear end,” Rodriguez said.

“They Can’t Do Nothing”

The DMV spent more than a year, starting in February 2020, investigating connections between Stefanski and D&L.

D&L eventually turned over records to investigators that showed it had sold JDM Investments 15 cars. The investigators’ report also showed they interviewed the owner of an auto body shop who admitted that a receipt for $1,071 worth of work on the Jeep was fabricated at Stefanski’s behest.

Stefanski said he didn’t understand the allegation because the DMV would have reviewed the receipt when it issued him the title to the Jeep.

During the investigation, one D&L employee described a conversation the employee had with Stefanski as investigators began to look into the case.

“You’re fucked,” the employee said he told Stefanski.

According to the employee, Stefanski replied that the investigators had questioned him about the Jeep.

“Like an hour after I sold you the Jeep you had it for sale on Facebook,” the D&L employee responded. “You told me you needed all the vehicles for your family but that was bullshit.”

Stefanski just told him not to worry. “I got receipts for everything,” he told the employee, according to the investigators’ records. “Don’t say anything to the officers. I got everything covered. I have representation in the union and they can’t do nothing.”

During Stefanski’s interview with investigators, he denied doing any favors for D&L and told them he needed the cars for a real estate business.

“I told you I don’t flip cars. I realized my business wasn’t working out so I sold it,” Stefanski said.

In an interview with CT Mirror and ProPublica, Stefanski said fixing up cars is his hobby.

The investigators questioned why Stefanski bought multiple vehicles, never registered them and then sold them. Did he realize his business wasn’t working out multiple times? “This makes absolutely no sense,” one investigator said, according to the DMV report.

In January 2021, DMV investigators applied for arrest warrants seeking to charge Stefanski and at least two D&L employees, including its then-manager, with larceny and title fraud.

But then-Assistant State Attorney Evelyn Rojas declined to file charges, citing “prosecutorial discretion” and “insufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“The Department of Motor Vehicles is free to pursue whatever civil remedies it deems appropriate against the defendant and any other involved party,” Rojas wrote in a 2021 memo.

Rojas, who now works at the state attorney general’s office, did not respond to questions about her decision.

The DMV could have issued fines against D&L or even revoked the towing company’s license. The agency could have suspended or tried to fire Stefanski. But the agency did nothing to either of them.

In an interview with reporters, Stefanski maintained that he hadn’t done anything wrong in the transactions when shown a copy of the unsigned arrest warrant investigators had drafted.

“If it was something illegal, then why didn’t they sign it?” Stefanski asked.

CT Mirror and ProPublica obtained Stefanski’s personnel records from 2018-23, and he received glowing reviews from his bosses. No mention was made of the investigation or his role in it.

Stefanski still works as a document examiner, although he’s transferred to the DMV’s New Britain office.

Since the investigation, Stefanski has tried to sell several cars and auto parts on Facebook, including posting an engine from a 2014 Audi for $2,500 in November.

“I don’t understand why I can’t” make these sales, Stefanski said in an interview.

The engine, he said, he got from a buddy.

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

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

For a project explicitly designed to influence Congress, Steve Berger’s operation has left a scant paper trail. The archconservative evangelical pastor, who started a D.C. nonprofit a few years ago to shape national policy, does not file lobbying reports. His group does not show up in campaign finance records.

There is a simple way to glimpse his effort’s expanding reach in Washington, however: Pay attention to who is walking out the front door of his Capitol Hill townhouse. New evidence suggests Berger may be running what amounts to a group house for conservative lawmakers, with multiple members of Congress living with him at his organization’s headquarters.

The six-bedroom, $3.7 million home is owned by a multimillion-dollar Republican donor.

Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican who is among President Donald Trump’s most aggressive allies in Congress, has been at the house on multiple days over the past two weeks, according to people who live in the area. Video reviewed by ProPublica showed Ogles leaving the townhouse with bags on Feb. 27. As he left, he locked up the front door and pocketed the keys to the house.

As ProPublica reported last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson is living in the townhouse. And Dan Bishop, a former congressman from North Carolina now nominated for a powerful post in Trump’s White House, appears to have lived there until recently as well.

Berger has said his goal is to “disciple” members of Congress so what “they learn is then translated into policy.” He has claimed to have personally spurred legislation, saying a senator privately credited him with inspiring a bill.

Berger, Bishop and Ogles did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Johnson previously said the speaker pays fair-market rent for the part of the townhouse he occupies but didn’t answer questions about the specific rate. He said Johnson has not spoken to the pastor about “any matter of public policy.”

Ogles is in only his third year in Congress, but he’s drawn attention for his bombastic displays of fealty to Trump. He recently introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution so that Trump could serve a third term as president. He’s filed articles of impeachment against multiple judges who’ve ruled against the new administration. (Last week, Elon Musk posted a video of Ogles touting his impeachment efforts, set to the beat from the rap song “Shook Ones, Pt. II.”)

Ogles’ short tenure is also notable for the pace of scandal that’s followed it. He has faced allegations that he inflated his resume, claiming alternatively to have been an economist, a member of law enforcement and an expert on international sex trafficking, NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reported. (Ogles has acknowledged at least one mistake on his resume but said that “my body of work speaks for itself.”)

Last year, the FBI seized his phone during an investigation and obtained a search warrant to review records associated with his personal email address. Federal investigators were seeking evidence related to potential campaign finance violations, according to a court filing. The scope of the FBI investigation remains unclear.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for Ogles’ rise in politics than Lee Beaman, the Tennessee businessman who owns the Capitol Hill townhouse. When Ogles announced a short-lived Senate bid in 2017, Beaman said he planned to raise $4 million to support the run. Beaman, whose wealth derives from a large car dealership chain, then served as campaign treasurer in Ogles’ successful 2022 run for the House.

Rep. Andy Ogles appeared on stage at Steve Berger’s 60th-birthday party last year. (via Facebook)

Beaman and Berger have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, in areas including foreign affairs, fuel efficiency standards and removing barriers to firing federal employees. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results. (Beaman did not respond to requests for comment. ProPublica could not determine whether he and the pastor have discussed policy issues with Ogles during his time in Congress.)

In sermons, Berger has devoted long stretches to attacking the separation of church and state, as well as COVID-19 vaccines. The pastor used violent language to describe his disdain for “LGBTQ+ Pride” parades and “drag queen story hour” during an interview for a podcast in 2022, according to unpublished footage obtained by ProPublica.

“If I was left to myself, I’d take a baseball bat and beat the hell out of every single one of them. And not feel bad about it,” Berger said. “I have to go, ‘You know what? That’s probably not the will of God, is it?’ And obviously it’s not.”

Beyond his ownership of the townhouse, Beaman’s role in the pastor’s influence project is unclear. After Beaman purchased the house in 2021, a lawyer sought to change it from a single-family dwelling to a “boarding house/rooming house,” according to Washington, D.C., property records. Around that time, Berger’s nonprofit group, Ambassador Services International, registered the home as its address.

Members of Congress are allowed to live anywhere, as long as they pay fair-market rent, experts said. Discounts on rent are generally seen as improper gifts and prohibited by House ethics rules.

Beaman has said he got to know Ogles when Ogles was the Tennessee director of Americans for Prosperity, part of the Koch brothers’ political network. Beaman and Ogles joined forces to fight a mass transit project in Nashville and reportedly worked together on a successful effort to repeal the estate tax in their home state. After leaving the Koch network, Ogles served four years as the mayor of a Middle Tennessee county with a population of roughly 100,000. He held that role until 2022, when he was elected to Congress.

Ogles’ 2022 campaign was the subject of a blistering House ethics report released this year. The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics concluded that there is “substantial reason to believe” that Ogles’ campaign had accepted illegally large donations and then falsely reported that the funds had come from Ogles himself. Ogles has said he is “confident that any reporting problem was at worst an honest mistake.” (Beaman was not named in the report and has not been accused of wrongdoing.)

The report said that Ogles refused to cooperate with the investigation. It recommended that the House Ethics Committee issue a subpoena to the congressman.

Do you have any information we should know about Steve Berger, Rep. Andy Ogles or Speaker Mike Johnson? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.

by Ellis Simani, ProPublica, and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and 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.

Over the last three years, the head of a small charter school network that serves fewer than 1,000 students has taken home up to $870,000 annually, a startling amount that appears to be the highest for any public school superintendent in the state and among the top in the nation.

Valere Public Schools Superintendent Salvador Cavazos’ compensation to run three campuses in Austin, Corpus Christi and Brownsville exceeds the less than $450,000 that New York City’s chancellor makes to run the largest school system in the country.

But Cavazos’ salary looks far more modest in publicly posted records that are supposed to provide transparency to taxpayers. That’s because Valere excludes most of his bonuses from its reports to the state and on its own website, instead only sharing his base pay of about $300,000.

The fact that the superintendent of a small district could pull in a big-time salary shocked experts and previewed larger transparency and accountability challenges that could follow as Texas moves to approve a voucher-like program that would allow the use of public funds for private schools.

Cavazos’ total pay is alarming, said Duncan Klussmann, an associate professor at the University of Houston Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies.

“I just can’t imagine that there’d be any citizen in the state of Texas that would feel like that’s OK,” Klussmann said.

Details concerning Cavazos’ compensation, and that of two other superintendents identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, drew a sharp rebuke from the association that advocates for charter schools across the state.

“It’s not acceptable for any public school to prioritize someone’s personal enrichment ahead of students’ best interests,” Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said in a statement. He added that any payment decisions made at the expense of students should be reversed immediately.

“The public charter school community has long embraced strong accountability and transparency. That’s what Texans deserve, both for academic outcomes and taxpayer dollars,” he said. “To that end, the full picture of superintendent compensation at all public schools should be made clearer.”

Texas lawmakers have filed legislation that would cap public school superintendents’ annual salaries, but most bills would not restrict bonuses. Those bills also don’t apply to private schools that stand to receive an influx of taxpayer dollars if lawmakers pass legislation this session approving education savings accounts, a type of voucher program. Private schools wouldn’t be subject to the same level of state oversight as public schools.

Lawmakers who advocate for vouchers won’t be able to gauge whether the investments were worthwhile if they don’t mandate that private schools follow the same financial and academic reporting requirements as public schools, said Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami Department of Teaching and Learning.

Cavazos’ compensation proves that even those reporting standards are “woefully inadequate,” Baker said.

Texas school districts must post all compensation and benefits provided to their superintendent online or in public annual reports, according to rules set by the Texas Education Agency. They must also report superintendents’ salaries and any supplemental pay for extra duties to the state. But Valere excluded more than a dozen bonuses and additional payments it awarded Cavazos, some of which its board granted to him in perpetuity.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune uncovered the total amount the district paid Cavazos by combing through federal tax records that the charter network must file annually with the Internal Revenue Service to maintain its nonprofit status. The news organizations then gathered additional details through public records requests to the district and the state.

Cavazos’ July 2022 employment letter states that his base annual pay would be $285,887, but Valere Public Schools reported in its tax filings that he was paid $870,714 that year. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Cavazos, who has overseen the charter district since 2014 and previously served as superintendent in two other public school systems, declined an interview and did not answer written questions for this story.

Board members provided written responses to questions through attorney Ryan Lione, who serves as outside counsel for the district. In defending Cavazos’ compensation, they likened his role to that of a corporate CEO, which they said comes with “many more day-to-day duties,” including fundraising, overseeing expansion and guiding the charter through a 2020 split from its parent organization.

“We believe that the benefits that Dr. Cavazos brings to Valere through his vast experience and knowledge justify the compensation that the Board has and continues to award him,” the Valere board’s statement read.

Board members said that they did not believe the district had run afoul of any state reporting requirements because no one from the state had told them that they had.

But Jake Kobersky, a spokesperson for the state’s education agency, said it does not monitor whether districts post their compensation information online and that it only follows up if it receives tips about violations. He declined to comment on whether the district’s omission of bonuses paid to Cavazos in its reporting to the state or on the district’s website was a violation, but after questions from the news organizations, Kobersky said the agency is now reviewing the district’s reporting to “determine what next steps, if any, are necessary.”

Bonus After Bonus

At least two other Texas charter school districts have also paid their superintendents hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of what they publicly reported in recent years, our analysis found.

Dallas-based Gateway Charter Academy, which serves about 600 students, paid its superintendent Robbie Moore $426,620 in 2023, nearly double his base salary of $215,100, the latest available federal tax filings show. Pay for Mollie Purcell Mozley of Faith Family Academy, another Dallas-area charter school superintendent, hit a high of $560,000 in 2021, despite a contracted salary of $306,000. She continued to receive more than $400,000 during each of the two subsequent years, according to tax filings.

The districts didn’t publicly post the additional payments on their websites, and only Faith Family Academy has reported any extra pay to the state. Moore, Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Gateway Charter Academy did not address questions related to the superintendent’s compensation. Without providing any details, the statement said the district has made mistakes but is implementing “corrective measures.” Since it was contacted by the newsrooms, the district has updated its website with a new document that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore. The Texas Education Agency did not answer questions about either school district.

Valere, however, stands out among the charter school districts identified by the news organizations.

Board members have voted to increase Cavazos’ pay or other financial benefits in 14 of their 24 meetings since 2021.

In one instance, the board granted Cavazos a bonus of $20,000 after taxes for every month that he continued to work for the district. The increase, described as a “retention incentive,” bolstered his take-home pay by an additional $240,000 annually.

“It’s almost like they’re just convening just to keep giving away their school’s money to this individual,” said David DeMatthews, a professor at the University of Texas Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. “I don’t think teachers that work in that school would feel so great that rather than make those investments into their children, they’re making it into this gentleman’s bank account.”

Board members defended their decision to dole out repeated bonuses to Cavazos, including payments totaling roughly half a million dollars to fully reimburse a withdrawal he made from his retirement fund in 2018 for a “personal emergency.”

They declined to discuss the nature of the personal emergency but said the payments were “the right thing to do” to ensure that Cavazos could retire one day. Board members claimed that a “significant” portion of Cavazos’ compensation came from private donations but would not say how much or provide documents to support their assertion.

The board also said that it rewarded Cavazos for his work leading the district through a “difficult” 2020 separation from its former parent organization, Southwest Key Programs, the Texas-based nonprofit that provides housing for unaccompanied minors who arrive at the southern border.

The split came after The New York Times revealed that Southwest Key’s leaders, including then-CEO Juan Sanchez, had used money from the charter district and its for-profit companies to bolster their pay well beyond the $187,000 federal cap for migrant shelter grants. Sanchez, who also served on Valere’s school board at the time, received $1.5 million in 2017 as the charter struggled with debt and students contended with deteriorating buildings, the Times found. In response to the reporting, a Southwest Key spokesperson disputed that the nonprofit had unfairly taken money from the schools. Sanchez, who resigned in 2019, denied wrongdoing, saying in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that his salary did not come from the charter’s coffers.

State records show that the state education agency closed an investigation in 2022 into “conflict of interest, nepotism, and misuse of funds” at Valere. The agency would not provide details on what prompted the probe or share information about its findings.

To piece together Cavazos’ compensation, the newsrooms filed public records requests for payment records and meeting minutes, which the district had not posted online for years. On at least two occasions, Cavazos received payments that initially appeared to have no record of board approval.

Minutes from a January 2024 meeting showed that the board did not vote on a $73,000 payment he later received. When the newsrooms asked about the discrepancy, the board said it provided the reporters with the wrong copy of the minutes and pointed to a different version the district had later posted online that included approval of both the payment, for a life insurance plan, and a car lease.

Another bonus came after a November board meeting attended by a reporter from the news organizations who heard no discussion of the payment. Questioned about when the board approved the bonus, members said they had done so during a closed-door portion of the meeting. After the reporter pointed out that such an action was against state law, board members said they voted after ending the closed session but before allowing the public, including the reporter, back into the meeting room.

Student Performance Lags

Three academics who study school performance and compensation data said they have never seen a school board fully reimburse any employee’s retirement account or approve so many hefty bonuses in such a short period.

Experts, including Klussmann, a former superintendent of the Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston, said that the money should be put toward students’ education. The vast majority of Valere’s students qualify for free and reduced meals and more than a third are English-language learners, which education experts say are often clear indicators that students are at a learning disadvantage.

Valere’s student performance on state exams also lags behind statewide averages, data shows.

Last year, Valere teachers left at a higher rate than in most schools across the state. The turnover has been difficult for Marisol Gauna’s son, who has autism and ADHD. Gauna says he no longer has a special education teacher who works with him one on one to help overcome learning hurdles. As a result, she worries he could fail the eighth grade.

A parent of three children in the district, Gauna was flabbergasted when she learned about Cavazos’ pay from ProPublica and the Tribune. Those funds, she said, could be used to retain teachers, improve sports facilities and provide healthier cafeteria food.

“It should go to the school or even to the teachers so that way there can be good, responsible teachers that want to stay there,” Gauna said.

Andrea Suozzo contributed reporting.

Correction

March 6, 2025: This story originally incorrectly referred to the school district where Duncan Klussmann had been a superintendent. He worked for the Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston, not a district in Spring Branch, Texas.

by Sharon Lerner

For decades, Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists have tried to chip away at the small program in the Environmental Protection Agency that measures the threat of toxic chemicals.

Most people don’t know IRIS, as the program is called, but it is the scientific engine of the agency that protects human health and the environment. Its scientists assess the toxicity of chemicals, estimating the amount of each that triggers cancer and other health effects. And these values serve as the independent, nonpartisan basis for the rules, regulations and permits that limit our exposure to toxic chemicals.

Now IRIS faces the gravest threat to its existence since it was created under President Ronald Reagan four decades ago.

Legislation introduced in Congress would prohibit the EPA from using any of IRIS’ hundreds of chemical assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water. The EPA would also be forbidden from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. The bills, filed in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year, are championed by companies that make and use chemicals, along with industry groups that have long opposed environmental rules. If it becomes law, the “No IRIS Act,” as it’s called, would essentially bar the agency from carrying out its mission, experts told ProPublica.

“They’re trying to undermine the foundations for doing any kind of regulation,” said William Boyd, a professor at UCLA School of Law who specializes in environmental law. Boyd noted that IRIS reports on chemicals’ toxicity are the first step in the long process of creating legal protections from toxic pollutants in air and water.

“If you get rid of step one, you’re totally in the dark,” he said.

If the act passes, companies could even use the law to fight the enforcement of environmental rules that have long been on the books or permits that limit their toxic emissions, environmental lawyers told ProPublica.

The attack on IRIS has a good chance of succeeding at a time when Republicans are eager to support President Donald Trump’s agenda, according to environmental advocates who monitor Congress. The bills dovetail with the anti-regulatory efforts that have marked the second Trump administration, which has begun to dismantle climate protections, nominated industry insiders to top positions in the EPA and announced plans for unprecedented cuts that could slash the agency’s budget by 65%.

Project 2025, the ultraconservative playbook that has guided much of Trump’s second presidency, calls for the elimination of IRIS on the grounds that it “often sets ‘safe levels’ based on questionable science” and that its reviews result in “billions in economic costs.” The policy blueprint echoes industry claims that IRIS does not adequately reflect all of the research on chemicals; there are sometimes significant differences between the program’s conclusions and those of corporate-funded scientists.

IRIS has long been a target of industry and has at times been criticized by independent scientific bodies. More than a decade ago, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took issue with the organization, length and clarity of IRIS reviews; a more recent report from the same group found that IRIS had made “significant progress” in addressing the problems.

IRIS’ work stands out in a world where much of the science on toxic chemicals is funded by corporations with a vested stake in them. Studies have shown that industry-funded science tends to be biased in favor of the sponsor’s products. But IRIS’ several dozen scientists do not have a financial interest in their findings. Their work has had a tangible impact on real people. The program’s calculations are the hard science that allow the agency to identify heightened disease risk due to chemicals in the air, water and land. And these revelations have, in some cases, led to stricter chemical regulations and grassroots efforts to curtail pollution.

“Bitter Battles”

IRIS, which stands for Integrated Risk Information System, was created in 1985. Until that point, different parts of the EPA had often assessed chemicals in isolation, and their methods and values were not always consistent.

At first, IRIS just collected assessments completed by various divisions of the EPA. Then, in 1996, it began conducting its own, independent reviews of chemicals. Its scientists analyze studies of a chemical and use them to calculate the amount of the substance that people can be exposed to without being harmed. IRIS sends drafts of its reports to multiple reviewers, who critique its methods and findings.

As the tranche of assessments grew, so did its value to the world. States began relying on IRIS’ numbers to set limits in air and water permits. Some also use them to prioritize their environmental efforts, acting first on the chemicals IRIS deems most harmful. Countries that don’t have the expertise to assess chemicals themselves often adopt IRIS values to guide their own regulations.

Today, IRIS’ collection of more than 500 assessments of chemicals, groups of related chemicals, and mixtures of chemicals is the largest database of authoritative toxicity values in the world, according to Vincent Cogliano, a recently retired scientist who worked on IRIS assessments for more than 25 years.

From the beginning, industry scientists challenged IRIS with calculations that showed their chemicals to be less dangerous.

“There were a lot of pretty bitter battles,” said Cogliano, who remembers particularly intense opposition to the assessments of diesel engine exhaust and formaldehyde during the 1990s. Critiques of IRIS assessments intensified over the years and began to slow the program’s work. “It took so long to get through that there were fewer and fewer assessments,” said Cogliano.

In 2017, opposition to IRIS escalated further. Trump’s budget proposal would have slashed funding for the program. Although Congress funded IRIS and the program survived, some of its work was halted during his first presidency. Trump appointed a chemical engineer named David Dunlap to head the division of the EPA that includes IRIS. Dunlap had challenged the EPA’s science on formaldehyde when he was working as the director of environmental regulatory affairs for Koch Industries. Koch’s subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. (Georgia-Pacific has since sold its chemicals business to Bakelite Synthetics.) While Dunlap was at the EPA, work on several IRIS assessments was suspended, including the report on formaldehyde. IRIS completed that report last year.

That assessment proved controversial, as ProPublica documented in its investigation of the chemical late last year. In calculating the risks that formaldehyde can cause cancer, IRIS decided not to include the chance that the chemical can cause myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. The EPA said IRIS made this decision because it lacked confidence in its calculation; the agency admitted that the omission drastically underestimated formaldehyde’s cancer risk.

“The Depth of the Poisoning”

Still, some of IRIS’ assessments have made a huge difference in parts of the country.

In 2016, IRIS updated its assessment of a colorless gas called ethylene oxide. The evaluation changed the chemical’s status from a probable human carcinogen to plainly “carcinogenic to humans.” And IRIS calculated the uppermost amount of the chemical before it starts to cause cancer, finding that it was 30 times lower than previously believed.

The EPA used that information to create a map, which showed that people living near a sterilizing plant in Willowbrook, Illinois, had an elevated cancer risk because the facility was releasing ethylene oxide into the air. Once locals learned of their risk, they kicked into action.

“That knowledge led us to be able to really activate the groundswell of community members,” said Lauren Kaeseberg, who was part of a group that held protests outside the plant, met with state and local officials, and testified at hearings. Not long after the protests, Illinois passed legislation limiting the release of the pollutant, the local plant shut down and the cancer-causing pollution was gone from the air.

Around the country, the pattern has been repeated. After IRIS issues its estimate of the amount of a chemical that people can safely be exposed to without developing cancer and other diseases, the EPA uses that information to map the threats from chemicals in air. IRIS’ evidence showing that people have an elevated risk of cancer has sparked some hard-hit communities to fight back, suing polluters, shuttering plants and demanding the offending chemical be removed from their environment.

In St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, residents had long felt as if they had more than their share of sickness. The small rectangle of land near the Mississippi River abuts a chemical plant that emits foul-smelling gases. For decades, as they breathed in the fumes, residents suffered from respiratory problems, autoimmune diseases, cancers and other ailments. In 2016, after IRIS assessed the toxicity of chloroprene, one of the chemicals coming out of the plant’s smokestacks, the people of St. John discovered the main source of their problems. The IRIS assessment showed that chloroprene was a likely carcinogen and caused damage to the immune system. With this information, the EPA concluded that St. John had the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the country.

“I didn’t realize the depth of the poisoning that was taking place until EPA came to our community in 2016 and brought us that IRIS report,” said Robert Taylor, who has lived his entire life in St. John. When the agency representatives arrived, Taylor’s wife had cancer and his daughter was bedridden with a rare autoimmune condition. A lifelong musician who was then 75, Taylor began organizing his neighbors to demand a stop to the deadly pollution. (His wife died in December.)

Robert Taylor and his late wife, Zenobia (Courtesy of Taylor family)

The assessments of chloroprene and ethylene oxide — and the activism they sparked around the country — eventually led the EPA to crack down. Last year, the agency announced several rules that aimed to reduce toxic emissions. The rules call for changes in how companies produce and release chemicals — the type of reforms that can be expensive to undertake.

The Biden administration sued Denka, the company that owns the chloroprene-releasing plant in St. John, in an effort to force it to curb the amount of the chemical it released. But the Trump administration intends to drop that suit, according to The New York Times.

For its part, Denka sued the EPA over one of the rules in July, asking the court for more time to implement the changes. The company argued that the agency was on a “politically motivated, unscientific crusade” to shut down the plant.

Critics of IRIS have used similarly barbed language in their recent attacks. In his press release introducing what he calls the “No Industrial Restrictions in Secret Act” in the House, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., wrote that “Unelected bureaucrats in the Biden Administration have disrupted the work of Wisconsin’s chemical manufacturers and inhibited upon the success of the industry through the abuse of the EPA’s IRIS program.” The press release said the bill is supported by Hexion, which has a plant in his district. Hexion makes formaldehyde, a chemical that increases the cancer risk nationwide.

Neither Grothman nor Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who introduced the Senate version of the bill, responded to questions from ProPublica, including how they think the EPA could regulate chemicals if the bill passes. The EPA did not answer questions for this story.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 companies, sent a letter to Lee Zeldin in late January calling on the EPA administrator to disband IRIS and prohibit the use of its assessments in rules and regulations. IRIS “has been increasingly used to develop overly burdensome regulations on critical chemistries,” the letter states, going on to argue that the program lacks transparency and “has often fallen short of scientific standards.” (The letter was first reported by Inside EPA.) The American Petroleum Institute, the Extruded Polystyrene Foam Association, the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association, the Fertilizer Institute and the Plastics Industry Association were among the dozens of organizations representing industries financially impacted by IRIS’ chemical assessments that signed the letter.

“Off the Deep End”

Industry groups have also criticized IRIS for being slow and overstepping its authority. And they have noted that outside organizations have found fault with it.

In addition to the National Academies criticism in 2011 about the clarity and transparency of its reports, IRIS has responded to recommendations from the Government Accounting Office, according to a report the congressional watchdog issued last week. The GAO, which monitors how taxpayer dollars are spent, placed IRIS on its “high risk list” in 2009. But the GAO did so not because it was vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse — the reasons some programs land on the list — but because the watchdog decided IRIS wasn’t doing enough assessments of dangerous chemicals. Since 2009, the GAO made 22 recommendations to IRIS, all of which have been implemented, according to the agency’s website. The new report acknowledged improvements but noted that the program’s current pace of finalizing assessments “likely cannot increase without more resources.” According to the GAO report, in 2023 and 2024, IRIS had reported needing 26 additional staff members to meet the demand for chemical assessments.

Defenders of the program say the criticisms mask a simple motive: protecting industry profits rather than public health.

“It’s blatant self-interest,” said Robert Sussman, a veteran attorney who worked at the EPA as well as for environmental groups and chemical companies. “What they’re really trying to do here is prevent the EPA from doing assessments of their chemicals.”

While he has witnessed many attempts to scale back the EPA’s power in his 40-year career, Sussman described the current effort to eliminate its use of IRIS’ chemical assessments as “completely off the deep end.”

Weaker bills targeting IRIS were introduced into both the House and Senate in February of last year but did not have the political support to advance. Now, after the election, the possibility of success is entirely different, according to Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that if it does pass Congress — and it now could — the president will sign it,” said Rosenberg. But Rosenberg added that he believes that if the public understood the consequences of doing away with the science at the core of the EPA’s work, people could potentially sway their lawmakers to stand up to the attack on IRIS.

“The current political alignment is clearly very favorable to the chemical lobby, but their actual agenda has never been popular,” said Rosenberg. “There’s never been a case where people are in favor of more carcinogens in their environment.”

by Audrey Dutton

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.

Idaho lawmakers are moving forward with modest efforts to improve the state’s system for investigating deaths, following reports by ProPublica and others that identified major problems. At the same time, counties are moving to shield from public view records that ProPublica relied on in its coverage.

“Before you today is a bill that is a long time coming, and I say that because over the course of decades, since the 1950s, there have been attempts to reform our coroner system,” state Sen. Melissa Wintrow told lawmakers on Feb. 26, in a nod to ProPublica reporting last year.

The Democrat’s bill would spell out new parameters that clarify a coroner’s role. Where current law says “suspicious” deaths should be investigated, the bill lists circumstances such as a suspected drug overdose or a death on the job. It also makes clear that a law enforcement investigation doesn’t take the place of a coroner’s investigation and that the two should happen in parallel. It requires autopsies to be done by a forensic pathologist, not another kind of doctor.

The legislation crossed its first hurdle last week when it passed in the Republican-controlled Idaho Senate with broad support.

Wintrow said coroners’ investigations must be done right.

“If you’ve seen some of the news reports lately, there are families that are upset because we have not consistently been doing this across our state,” she told lawmakers, “and it is imperative that we do that.”

Last year, a report commissioned by Idaho lawmakers highlighted faults in a system of elected coroners — a system dating to the 19th century — that is marked by limited training, almost no state funding and an absence of statewide standards. The report noted that Idaho ranks last among states for conducting autopsies in suspicious, unexpected and unnatural child deaths.

ProPublica later reported on two grieving parents’ experience with a coroner who did little investigation to identify what caused their baby’s death. ProPublica also used legislative and newspaper archives to pinpoint numerous warnings about Idaho’s coroner system and failed attempts to reform it going back more than 70 years.

What’s different this time is that coroners, a group that has opposed past efforts, drafted the legislation that Wintrow introduced. It’s been in the works since the February 2024 state report, by the Idaho Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations, that took aim at the coroner system.

But the proposed legislation does not address some of the key problems identified by the state watchdog agency or ProPublica’s investigation.

ProPublica’s review of hundreds of Idaho coroner reports found little consistency in what coroners did to investigate each death. Some coroners followed national standards; others didn’t. Some ordered autopsies in sudden infant deaths and unexpected child deaths; others didn’t. Other states spell out types of deaths for which an autopsy is required every time.

Idaho requires only 24 hours of training every two years, but ProPublica found that 1 in 4 coroners repeatedly fell short. Other states impose consequences for skipping required training.

Wintrow has tempered expectations about a rapid overhaul, saying her bill is not meant to be comprehensive. She called it a starting point that has the support of the Idaho coroners association.

“Is this the end-all, be-all bill? No, but it is the best start we have had, and will increase consistency in our state,” she said on the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, hearings on Wintrow’s proposal triggered an attempt by counties to wall off coroners’ records from public view in Idaho.

One man testified that his teenage daughter, who had epilepsy, died while taking a bath and that his grief was compounded by knowing investigators possessed photographs taken in her death investigation. In response, Wintrow said she asked the Idaho coroners and sheriffs associations for a way to keep such materials private.

(Although courts have ruled that the dead aren’t entitled to the same personal privacy protections as the living, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that the privacy interests of survivors justified withholding autopsy images from the public.)

It turned out that the Idaho Association of Counties had a bill ready to go. But rather than simply protecting photographs of bodies, the proposal would make the entirety of a coroner’s investigation exempt from open records law. All the public could see would be a name, age, gender, hometown and cause of death — not the underlying steps coroners take to reach conclusions.

Diamond and Alexis Cooley’s son Onyxx died in his sleep in February 2024 in eastern Idaho. Records from the coroner’s investigation revealed how little work was done before the coroner concluded Onyxx fell victim to sudden infant death syndrome. (Natalie Behring for ProPublica)

According to the association, the idea came from the coroner of Ada County, home to Boise. Rich Riffle, the Ada County coroner, told ProPublica that a county attorney drafted the proposal based on Riffle’s goal to have Idaho treat coroner records more like law enforcement records.

Police records are available for public inspection in Idaho, with exceptions, such as when police are still actively investigating a crime and releasing their records could imperil the case.

“Although we are separate and independent from law enforcement, that doesn't mean we want to jeopardize a criminal case, and that’s essentially the bottom line,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

Last year’s state watchdog report also recommended lawmakers consider ensuring disclosure of coroners’ records doesn’t impede a criminal case or violate a family’s privacy. It did not specify creating a broad ban.

Ada County initially denied ProPublica’s request last year for coroner investigative records on the deaths of children, for whom Idaho conducts autopsies at a particularly low rate. Similar record requests went to nine other Idaho counties.

After months of negotiation, Ada County began providing heavily redacted records once ProPublica agreed to pay more than $880 for them.

In Bonneville County, which also resisted disclosure, such records revealed the coroner’s failure to follow national standards. The death of 2-month-old Onyxx Cooley, for example, was determined to be a sudden infant death — one with no explanation — after a terse, one-page report and no autopsy. The since-retired coroner, Rick Taylor, noted that state law didn’t set standards for investigations and said that he relied on an emergency doctor’s opinion.

Most coroners approached by ProPublica released their records after attorneys redacted information they said was protected by state law. Photos weren’t included.

In lending its support to exempting coroner records from disclosure last fall, the association of counties wrote: “While a person may be deceased, their reputation is still subject to harm. Next of kin may also be subject to harm by the release of their loved one’s private medical information, and sensitive information surrounding the circumstances of their death. Given these rights, there is limited public value in the release of detailed information in someone’s death.”

Wintrow saw the draft bill during this year’s legislative session and agreed to sponsor it. But the bill’s future is uncertain.

After fielding questions from ProPublica about the bill last week, Wintrow and a lobbyist for the counties said they want to revisit the legislation before they move forward.

Wintrow said she wants coroners to be treated like law enforcement when it comes to open records laws.

“My intention always as a lawmaker is to make sure there’s good balance with everything, so that privacy is maintained and the interest of the public is maintained as well,” Wintrow told ProPublica last week.

Kelli Brassfield, a lobbyist for the counties association, said, “After some discussion, it looks like the language may need to be amended. We are currently working on this.”

by Andy Kroll

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

Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysis published on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

by Jeremy Kohler

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.

In an unprecedented move to funnel more public tax dollars toward groups that oppose abortion, Republican lawmakers in Missouri are advancing a plan to allow residents to donate to pregnancy resource centers instead of paying any state income taxes.

The proposal would establish a 100% tax credit, up from 70%, and a $50,000 annual cap per taxpayer. The result: Nearly all Missouri households — except those with the highest incomes — could fully satisfy their state tax bill by redirecting their payment from the state to pregnancy centers.

The move comes four months after Missouri voters reversed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, and just as clinics have begun performing the procedure again after overcoming Republican obstacles.

Supporters of the bill, which last month cleared a key legislative hurdle in the state House, say it gives taxpayers more control over where their tax dollars go and allows them to support organizations that help pregnant women and provide alternatives to abortion. Alissa Gross, CEO of Resource Health Services, which runs four pregnancy resource centers in the Kansas City area, told the committee in written testimony that tax credits have led to a surge in donations to her organization and that a 100% tax credit could bring in even more.

“Our ability to impact more men and women for life as well as build healthy families has been substantial,” she said.

Critics argue the state’s support for pregnancy resource centers, also known as crisis pregnancy centers, diverts tax revenue away from essential services such as health care and public education and becomes a funding stream for anti-abortion advocacy. They say many centers do little to actually help women; instead, they say they merely discourage women from getting abortions.

“A 70 percent tax credit with no cap was excessive. A 100 percent tax credit is absurd,” Katie Baylie, a lawyer and reproductive rights advocate based in the Kansas City area, wrote in testimony submitted to the committee. “It is an insult to Missourians that our lawmakers are spending time even considering this bill.”

Experts in tax policy and philanthropy said a dollar-for-dollar tax credit — for any purpose — is rare and could be much costlier for the state than intended, especially if pregnancy centers actively promote it.

There is a big psychological difference for donors between a 100% tax credit and a 70% credit, the experts said. At 70%, donors still have to pay some taxes, but at 100%, there is no reason to make a donation less than their tax liability.

“I could imagine a possibility where there’s a big publicity campaign by these centers, or a viral campaign, and massive numbers of conservative Missourians decide to effectively defund state government in favor of these pregnancy resource centers,” said David Gamage, a professor of tax law and policy at the University of Missouri law school.

However, expansion of tax credits clashes with another Republican push to eliminate Missouri’s income tax altogether. Two proposals to replace it with a higher sales tax recently advanced in the state Senate, although it was unclear whether they could pass. If Missouri were to abolish state income taxes, tax credits would become meaningless.

The bill represents one more expansion of a measure Missouri lawmakers have been growing for several years. Until 2021, Missouri taxpayers who donated to pregnancy resource centers were able to claim a 50% tax credit for their donations, meaning for every $1,000 in donations, a taxpayer’s bill dropped by $500. That’s when an expansion approved by the legislature in 2019 took effect and raised the rate to 70%. That shifted more of the cost of those contributions to the state, since tax credits work by directly reducing the amount of money a taxpayer owes to the state. Unlike deductions, which lower taxable income, tax credits are a dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax liability. When these credits are redeemed, they prevent the state from collecting that revenue, effectively reducing the total income available for public services.

The legislature also removed a $3.5 million-per-year cap on the program and removed its expiration date.

At the time, the change drew little attention because it was tucked into the same legislation that created Missouri’s trigger law to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned — a move that dominated headlines. And there were few warnings about how much it could cost.

The bill’s official cost estimate, prepared by nonpartisan legislative oversight staff, projected only a modest increase in taxpayer expense. Raising the tax credit to 70% was expected to increase annual tax credits from $3.5 million to $4.9 million. That estimate assumed donations would remain steady.

But they didn’t. The program has grown significantly, with $11.8 million in tax credits authorized in the past year alone. Still, it remains a small fraction of Missouri’s overall budget; Gov. Mike Kehoe has proposed a $54 billion spending plan for next year.

Once again, legislative research is downplaying the potential impact on Missouri’s budget. The fiscal note for the bill accounts only for the jump from a 70% to a 100% tax credit, without considering the likely surge in donations that such an incentive would trigger — even though increasing giving is the entire point of the policy.

The note says that it was “unclear” whether the enhanced tax credit would encourage more people to contribute and claim the credit, which would lead to more foregone tax revenue for the state.

The legislative research staffer who authored the impact statement declined to comment, and the bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Christopher Warwick, did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Warwick, a Republican from Bolivar, in southwest Missouri, told the tax reform committee that his proposal empowers taxpayers to support important work without the state “trying to verify what programs work.” He said, too, that he would oppose requirements for pregnancy resource centers to report how they spend the money, saying he wanted to “limit the bureaucracy.”

Warwick’s bill would also increase the tax credit for donations to maternity homes from 70% to 100% and for diaper banks from 50% to 100%. The state has not yet studied the impact of those changes.

A matching bill has been introduced in the Senate but has not yet advanced.

Rep. Steve Butz, a Democrat from St. Louis, argued the tax credit would effectively shift charitable giving from individuals to the state.

“This will be the fourth bill I’ve heard that will reduce revenue, which I guess is clearly your goal here — to reduce the revenue to the state,” Butz told Warwick during a legislative hearing on the bill. He argued that if donors receive a full tax credit for their contributions, they aren’t really giving their own money — rather, the state is effectively making the donation for them. “So I don’t know that I’d consider that much charitable giving.”

In an interview, Butz said he considers himself pro-life and has donated to pregnancy resource centers, receiving the 70% tax credit. However, he said he does not believe the program should take priority over others that receive less or no tax incentives for giving.

Missouri’s approach to crisis pregnancy centers reflects a growing divide between red and blue states. While Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas and Tennessee have ramped up funding for pregnancy resource centers, states led by Democrats, including Massachusetts and California, have warned residents the centers mislead patients by posing as medical clinics while steering them away from abortion.

Missouri is among the national leaders in per capita spending on pregnancy resource centers even before tax credits are factored in, according to data from states that fund them. Kehoe has proposed increasing direct state funding by almost 50% to more than $12 million in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

In a statement, Gabby Picard, communications director in Kehoe’s office, said the governor “is committed to supporting services that help women choose to carry their unborn child to term, which is why his budget recommends increased funding” for abortion alternatives, including pregnancy resource centers.

Missouri was the first state to use tax credits to fund pregnancy centers, becoming a model for other states looking to support the anti-abortion movement. One public health expert who has tracked the impact of pregnancy centers said Missouri has been a leader and innovator in this effort. “What Missouri is proposing really makes them an outlier at the top of the game,” said Andrea Swartzendruber, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Georgia.

Warwick’s initiative follows sweeping changes to Missouri’s abortion laws.

In November, voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion and other reproductive health decisions, effectively nullifying a near-total ban that had been in place since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The first abortion performed under the new amendment took place in Kansas City on Feb. 15, after a judge struck down restrictive licensing rules that had prevented providers like Planned Parenthood from resuming services in the state.

In response, Republican lawmakers have introduced a wave of bills aimed at limiting the amendment’s impact. Among the measures is another proposed constitutional amendment that would restrict abortion and ban gender-affirming care for minors — an effort to combine something that voters support with something they don’t in the hopes it’ll turn off abortion-rights supporters.

Some abortion-rights advocates in the legislature see the expanded tax credit as part of a broader push by anti-abortion lawmakers stung by the repeal of the abortion ban. After the amendment passed, those legislators “needed some wins,” said Rep. Kemp Strickler, a Democrat from the Kansas City suburbs.

“But even if the amendment had lost,” Strickler said, “they probably would have been coming forward with these kinds of things.”

by Robert Faturechi

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Earlier this year, the Air Force revealed that the general who oversaw its lobbying before Congress had inappropriate romantic relationships with five women, including three who worked on Capitol Hill.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty’s colleagues told investigators the relationships were “highly inappropriate” as they could give the Air Force undue influence in Congress. “I honestly felt sick to my stomach,” one said, according to a report about the investigation, “because it just felt so sleazy.”

The Air Force inspector general’s report redacted the names of the women who worked on the Hill.

But one of the women whose relationship with Finerty was scrutinized by the inspector general was Sen. Joni Ernst, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The Iowa Republican and combat veteran is one of the most influential voices on the Hill about the military, and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon and plays a crucial role in setting its annual budget.

Three other sources told ProPublica that around 2019 Ernst had a previous romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for a different branch of the military, the Navy.

Ernst and the officials were not married at the time and Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates. But ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest, and other lawmakers have been criticized for such behavior in the past.

A former legislative affairs official for the military told ProPublica that people in that role aren’t officially “lobbyists but for all intent and purposes that’s their job. ... From an ethics standpoint, it’s severely problematic.” A former Air Force officer who worked for Finerty said the perception in the office was that his relationship with Ernst “absolutely gave the Air Force undue influence.”

Retired Air Force Gen. Christopher Finerty (Department of Defense)

Six sources who worked for the Air Force or in Congress told ProPublica that they had heard about a relationship between Ernst and Finerty and there had been concerns about it for years. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly or feared for their jobs. One source said that they were told about the relationship by one of the two participants. Two sources said they heard from witnesses interviewed by the inspector general that Ernst was a focus of the investigation.

A spokesperson for Ernst would not address whether the senator had any relationships with military legislative liaisons but said the lawmaker maintained her independence: “The fake news media is clearly too busy gossiping to report the real news that Senator Ernst is focused on cutting waste at the Pentagon. Her votes and work in the Senate are guided by the voices of Iowans who elected her and her constitutional duty alone. Any insinuation otherwise by tabloid ‘journalism’ is a slanderous lie — full stop.”

Finerty’s lawyer also declined to say whether the general had a romantic relationship with Ernst while he was advocating for the Air Force in Congress. “The IG report found no evidence suggesting anything remotely approaching either conflict of interest or undue influence involving General Finerty and anyone on Capitol Hill. Further, the IG report found no law, rule, policy or guidance prohibited any of General Finerty’s relationships. Any suggestion to the contrary would be defamatory.” (The inspector general report said Finerty “wrongfully engaged in inappropriate relationships with multiple individuals” in violation of the code of military justice.) In his interview with the inspector general, according to the report, Finerty defended relationships between people in his office and “members on the Hill” — a term used to describe members of Congress.

The 41-page report documenting the inspector general’s investigation of Finerty was completed in September 2023 but was shared with Congress, and then the public, earlier this year in response to records requests. (The investigation summary, posted on the Air Force’s website, was reported first by Politico, without any mention of Ernst’s involvement.)

At the time of the report’s release to Congress in early January, Ernst’s influence over the Pentagon was on full display, as she sat at the center of one of the Trump administration’s most contentious confirmation battles. Ernst had made statements suggesting she had reservations about President Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and though she had later made encouraging statements, she had refused to formally back him.

Serving in the Iowa Army National Guard during the Iraq War, Ernst is the Senate’s first female combat veteran and has pushed to reform the military’s handling of sexual assault cases. Hegseth faced scrutiny over past allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he denied, as well as criticism for comments he made against allowing women in combat. Then in mid-January, Ernst reversed course under pressure from Trump allies and formally endorsed Hegseth. Her backing was considered pivotal in reviving what had appeared to be a flailing nomination.

The report about Finerty is heavily redacted but provided the following details about the inspector general’s findings. Two of the five women worked for the Pentagon. They include a civilian employee who was married to another officer and an Air Force enlisted member significantly lower down the chain of command than Finerty. Finerty interacted with the three other women on Capitol Hill as part of his legislative affairs work, “mixing his professional and personal roles, thus creating the perception of a conflict of interest.” Finerty sexted two of those women in 2021. He sexted and had an “intimate relationship” with the third, though the report does not say exactly when.

The nature of his relationship with the women varied, from suggestive messages to graphic sexting and photos to physical sex, according to the report. Sources told ProPublica that the inspector general asked witnesses about Ernst, but because of the redactions in the report, it’s unclear which sections, if any, refer to the senator.

The report includes a stark example of Finerty’s legislative advocacy overlapping with his romantic relationship with one of the women on Capitol Hill.

In June 2021, Finerty texted the woman “I was distracted by you being distracted.” Then he sent her a list of “top 5 things to protect if possible,” including a particular fighter jet, radar technology and a system to improve interoperability across the military’s branches.

“What distraction?” the woman texted back. “If I was [redacted] would it be distracting?” She followed up with a series of what the inspector general report described as pornographic pictures.

Finerty told investigators that his romantic relationships with the women on Capitol Hill were proper because all participants were unmarried.

“Those weren’t Chris Finerty’s personal interest items. Those were the five things that were in the President’s Budget that we’re charged to go up there and ensure that we get across the finish line,” he said, according to the report. “I wasn’t saying hey, do me a personal favor and protect these five things. It was, these are the five things that the Air Force has in the President’s Budget that we’re trying to do that we need your help with.”

Many of Finerty’s colleagues who were also working in military legislative affairs took a more negative view. In interviews with investigators, they expressed concerns about the relationships leading to undue influence, other military branches perceiving the Air Force as getting preferential treatment, and other congressional offices worrying they were less likely to receive sensitive information.

The inspector general’s investigation found “several exchanges between Maj Gen Finerty and the women regarding legislative matters” but “no evidence of favors or exchanging of sensitive information by either party.”

Regarding one of the Hill relationships, a colleague of Finerty’s told investigators, “Was there a perception in my office that it was unethical? Yes.” The colleague reported it affected morale and people were “talking about it all the time.”

Another military legislative affairs official was more blunt, calling the relationships “totally unprofessional” because “I think it compromises the integrity of the entire Department of the Air Force.”

The inspector general concluded Finerty had violated the code of military justice, including “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” for his “inappropriate relationships” with all five women. As a result, Finerty was demoted to brigadier general. He retired from the Air Force in November.

Around the time Finerty was heading the legislative affairs office, from April 2019 to March 2023, Ernst publicly pushed for more money and championed projects for the Air Force on multiple occasions, including in at least one instance on a specific matter that Finerty was advocating for on the Hill.

In June 2021, she pushed for more Air Force funding from the Senate floor: “While the Biden budget promises a bureaucratic buildup at the IRS, his proposal is far less generous to our armed forces. The Air Force would suffer a substantial cut in its number of aircraft.”

In April 2022, she attacked then-President Joe Biden for a proposed budget that “shrinks the size of our Air Force.”

“With Putin and his cronies invading Ukraine, China testing hypersonic missiles and threatening Taiwan, Iran enriching uranium, and the Taliban back in control of Afghanistan, it’s as critical as ever that we provide for a strong national defense,” Ernst said in a statement.

Two months later, she pushed legislation to improve the Pentagon’s access to critical minerals, warning “the Air Force’s premier fighter jet, the F-22, is made with layers of titanium alloy, much of which is sourced from Russia and China.”

In November 2023, several months after Finerty left his post, she introduced a bill to allow the Pentagon to connect weapons and technology across the various branches of the government, a concept known as Joint All Domain Command and Control — which was on the list of top priorities he texted to one of the women on the Hill he was romantically involved with.

According to three sources, Ernst had an earlier romantic relationship around 2019 with an official from the Navy’s legislative affairs office. Ernst was on the armed services committee then as well. One source with knowledge of the situation said the relationship’s end created tension between Ernst’s office and the Navy legislative affairs office. Two sources said the Navy liaison was moved out of his post early. One of them said he was forced to depart his post earlier than expected because he had another romantic relationship with a Hill staffer and that Ernst was not cited by his boss when he was transferred. But the second source said senior officials were aware of the relationship with Ernst and that it played a role.

A Navy spokesperson declined to comment.

Ernst has once before been accused of being involved in a relationship that may have violated military rules. In a highly contentious divorce in 2019, her ex-husband alleged she admitted to an affair with one of her soldiers when she served as a company commander during the Iraq War. Ernst denied having an affair.

Other elected officials have drawn scrutiny for their relationships with lobbyists and others who advocate for their employers before Congress.

Former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt married a lobbyist for tobacco giant Altria Group, but he pledged to recuse himself from any matters affecting the company. Former Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Shuster was criticized for dating an airline lobbyist while he chaired the House’s transportation committee, a relationship he said was proper because she was not lobbying his office. In 2018, the married state Senate majority leader in Iowa, which Ernst represents, resigned abruptly after video surfaced of him kissing a lobbyist for the Iowa League of Cities.

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said of the relationships with officials advocating before Ernst’s committee: “It kind of takes your breath away.”

The relationships, Canter said, make Ernst vulnerable to being extorted if people learned of them and could give someone undue influence over her.

“It draws into question every position she’s taken that would affect his office,” Canter said. “You’re expecting her to represent her constituents’ interests every time she supports a policy or votes. Once she has engaged in that kind of relationship, you have to call into question her impartiality.”

The military is particularly strict about romantic relationships, with rules against adultery, liaisons between employees of different rank, and various other types of relationships that could create ethical pitfalls.

One former high-ranking Pentagon official said he thought some of the rules may be antiquated and overly strict, but that a relationship between an officer handling legislative affairs and a senator created too severe a conflict.

“That seems way beyond inappropriate to me, somebody who’s there representing the U.S. military within the military chain of command with a U.S. senator on Armed Services, that makes it really bad.”

Justin Elliott and Andy Kroll contributed reporting. Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Amy Yurkanin

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.

Georgia recently relaunched its maternal mortality review committee after dismissing all 32 of its members last year. But state officials won’t say who the current members are.

The dismissals were in response to ProPublica obtaining internal reports in which the committee detailed the “preventable” deaths of two women who were unable to obtain legal abortions or timely care after Georgia banned abortion.

In September, ProPublica published stories on the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller. They were the first reported cases of women who died without access to care restricted by a state abortion ban. Before those stories, the state Department of Public Health had released the names of committee members to ProPublica. Now it’s saying that releasing the names would be a violation of state law.

The law states that the work of the committee is confidential and that some records and reports obtained and created by the committee are not covered by public records laws. The law does not state that committee members’ identities are confidential. However, Department of Public Health spokesperson Nancy Nydam said the department’s review of the law “determined that the broad confidentiality protections directed toward the committee should be extended to the identities of the committee members.” She did not respond to questions about why the department could share committee members’ names in August but not now.

The newly appointed committee, which reviews maternal deaths and makes recommendations to improve care for pregnant women, held its first meeting Feb. 21.

If the public doesn’t know who is on a committee, it could create mistrust of its findings, said Elizabeth Dawes, director of maternal and reproductive health at the Century Foundation, a public-policy nonprofit. She has been an advocate for Black mothers, who die from causes related to pregnancy or birth at higher rates than other groups.

“If everything is confidential, there’s no way to really be able to trust what comes out of it,” Dawes said. “They could completely ignore abortion. They could completely ignore race, racism, discrimination, and say what they want to say.”

Dawes said those questions are particularly important in Georgia. The state has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal death, especially among Black women, who die at twice the rate of white women.

The stories of Thurman and Miller sparked widespread outrage about the effects of abortion bans; Georgia law bans the procedure after six weeks.

Thurman, who traveled to North Carolina and obtained abortion pills, died from sepsis after doctors in Georgia delayed the removal of infected tissue that remained in her uterus. Her case, and others identified in Georgia and Texas, show the dangers women face in states that force hospitals and doctors to weigh criminal laws against abortion before providing care.

Less than two months after ProPublica published the stories, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, sent a Nov. 8 letter to all members of the committee stating that information had been inappropriately shared with an outside source.

“Even though this disclosure was investigated, the investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information,” Toomey wrote. “Therefore, effective immediately the current MMRC is disbanded, and all member seats will be filled through a new application process.”

That application process ended earlier this year. The Department of Public Health denied ProPublica’s Open Records Act request for the names of new members on Feb. 27, three weeks after the request was made. In a response, a staff member said 30 people had been appointed to the board and attached language from a letter inviting new members to the committee’s first meeting on Feb. 21.

All 50 states, as well as other localities, have maternal mortality review committees. They examine the deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to identify gaps in care and provide recommendations to improve treatment. ProPublica recently found that the names of committee members in 18 states with abortion restrictions were publicly available, or accessible through a public records request.

Recently, some states have come under fire for allegedly politicizing the work of these committees.

The maternal mortality review committee in Idaho was allowed to go dormant in 2023 after conservative groups attacked its recommendation to expand Medicaid for postpartum women. The state has since revived the committee as an advisory body to the State Board of Medicine.

Also in 2023, Texas lawmakers changed the composition of the state’s committee more than a year after a member spoke out about a delay in releasing a report. She lost her seat. Officials later appointed an anti-abortion obstetrician, Dr. Ingrid Skop, to the group. The Texas MMRC is also not reviewing deaths from 2022 or 2023, a period covering the first year and a half after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

In the letter last year dismissing the members of Georgia’s committee, Toomey wrote that the shake-up of the board would not delay its work. Nydam said in February that Department of Public Health staff members have continued their work while the committee has been inactive.

“The work of the MMRC has not stopped,” Nydam wrote in an email. “It has continued with our staff doing case abstractions, which they do regardless, before the cases go to the MMRC.”

However, a person familiar with the committee’s work, who because of her continuing work with the Department of Public Health asked not to be named, said the full committee usually met every other month. Subcommittees met even more frequently to review cases.

“There’s no way there’s not going to be a delay unless they are going to meet every week,” she said.

The Georgia MMRC was beginning to identify deaths from 2023 when all members were dismissed.

Kavitha Surana and Cassandra Jamarillo contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Emily Schwing, KYUK

This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR's Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Nearly two dozen children in the tiny village of Sleetmute, Alaska, arrive for school each morning to a small brown building that is on the verge of collapse.

Every year for the past 19 years, the local school district has asked the state for money to help repair a leaky roof. But again and again, the state said no. Over time, water ran down into the building, causing the supporting beams to rot. A windowpane cracked under pressure as heavy snow and ice built up on the roof each winter. Eventually, an entire wall started to buckle, leaving a gaping hole in the exterior siding.

In 2021, an architect concluded that the school, which primarily serves Alaska Native students, “should be condemned as it is unsafe for occupancy.”

The following year, Taylor Hayden, a resident who helps with school maintenance, opened a hatch in the floor to fix a heating problem and discovered a pool of water under the building, where years of rain and snowmelt had reduced several concrete footings to rubble.

“Just like someone took a jackhammer to it,” Hayden said.

The Sleetmute school, nestled on the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River, amid the spruce and birch forest of Alaska’s Interior, has few options. Like many schools in Alaska, it’s owned by the state, which is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance projects.

Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, according to an investigation by KYUK and ProPublica.

In a tight crawl space under the Sleetmute school, Taylor Hayden discovered that the building’s foundation has deteriorated. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Local school districts are generally responsible for building and maintaining public schools in the United States and largely pay for those projects with property taxes. But in Alaska, the state owns just under half of the 128 schools in its rural districts, a KYUK and ProPublica review of deeds and other documents found. These sparsely populated areas rely almost entirely on the state to finance school facilities because they serve unincorporated communities that have no tax base.

To get help for repairs, school districts are required to apply for funding each year, and then the state compiles a priority list. Since 1998, at least 135 rural school projects have waited for state funding for five years or more, an analysis of data from Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development shows. Thirty-three of those projects have languished on the state’s funding list for more than a decade.

The state’s Indigenous children suffer the greatest consequences because most rural school districts are predominantly Alaska Native — a population that was long forced to attend separate and unequal schools.

A small atrium is one of the few spaces Sleetmute students can use. They eat breakfast and lunch here, surrounded by portraits of the village’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders. (Michael Grabell/ProPublica) Sleetmute students play soccer during recess last spring. In the coldest months, when temperatures fall well below zero, the kids can’t have recess because the gym is closed. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

State education Commissioner Deena Bishop acknowledged that the state’s capital improvement program isn’t working. But she said her department is limited by state lawmakers’ funding decisions.

Rep. Bryce Edgmon, an Alaska Native and speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, also said the program isn’t working.

“I think the evidence speaks for itself,” he said after touring the Sleetmute school in October. “These bright young children show up every morning to go to school in a building that’s not fit for even anything but being ready to be demolished.”

Edgmon, who co-chaired the House Finance Committee for the past two years, conceded he and other lawmakers could have done more and promised to “raise some Cain” in the state Capitol. This year’s legislative session has seen a lot of debate about education funding. Alaska has no statewide income or sales tax and instead relies on oil revenue, which has declined in recent years.

As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. Over the past year, KYUK and ProPublica crawled under buildings and climbed into attics in schools across the state and found black mold, bat guano and a pool of raw sewage — health hazards that can cause respiratory problems, headaches and fatigue. The conditions exacerbate the risks for Alaska Natives, who already face some of the highest rates of chronic illness in the nation.

In Venetie, a village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, exposed electrical wiring hangs close to flammable insulation. Thorne Bay, on an island in Southeast Alaska, has requested money to replace the fire sprinklers 17 times, without success. And in the Bering Sea coastal village of Newtok, the school’s pipes froze and broke, so for most of the last school year, kids rode a four-wheeler, known as the “bathroom bus,” twice a day to relieve themselves at home.

Students in Newtok, near the Bering Sea, ride home to use the bathroom last spring after the school’s water pipes froze and broke, leaving the school without running water. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

After Hayden’s discovery in Sleetmute, the portion of the building that posed the most serious safety risk, which includes the wood shop, the boys’ bathroom and the gym, was closed. Now, kids ranging in age from 4 to 17 are confined to three classrooms and an atrium lined with portraits of the community’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders.

“There’s not much we can do anymore,” said Neal Sanford, 17, who misses playing basketball and learning carpentry and woodworking. He left the village of fewer than 100 people after his sophomore year last spring to attend a state-run boarding school more than 800 miles away.

In October, it was quiet outside the Jack Egnaty Sr. School in Sleetmute, save for a dog that barked now and then and the distant revving of a four-wheeler. The air smelled of wood smoke and two-stroke engine exhaust. Without a gym to play in, the kids bundled up for recess as temperatures dipped below freezing.

“Cold hands,” said fourth grader Loretta Sakar, as she shook out her fingers after crossing the monkey bars. Her squeals and giggles echoed across the playground while other kids played soccer or spun on a tire swing.

Kids including Loretta Sakar (left) take advantage of the old playground equipment during recess outside. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

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Andrea John, a single mom whose three kids, including Loretta, go to the Sleetmute school, said the state wouldn’t treat Alaska’s urban kids this way.

“They should have helped us when we needed help in the beginning, not wait 20 years,” she said. “They are choosing to look the other way and say the hell with us.”

“Arbitrary, Inadequate and Racially Discriminatory”

When Alaska became a state in 1959, its constitution promised a public school system “open to all children of the State.” But for decades, it was far from that. Many Indigenous children attended schools owned and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Alaska’s plan was to eventually take over those schools, but the state repeatedly argued it didn’t have enough money to pay for them. The development of Alaska’s oil industry, starting in the 1960s, brought in revenue for education, but state officials noted that BIA schools were in bad shape and insisted the federal government fix them before the state assumed responsibility.

Many Alaska children “go to school in buildings that should be condemned as fire traps or unsafe dwellings,” then-U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel said during a 1971 congressional hearing. It wasn’t until well into the 1980s that all BIA schools were transferred to the state.

At a 1971 congressional hearing, Sen. Mike Gravel described conditions in public schools operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Obtained by KYUK and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Yet even as the state began to take over, education remained inequitable for Alaska Natives. Many small villages didn’t have high schools, so students had to attend boarding schools or receive and submit assignments by mail. A group of those students sued the state in the 1970s to change that. Known as the Molly Hootch case, the suit resulted in a consent decree that forced the state to build 126 new schools in rural communities.

Teenagers board a plane in Shungnak, Alaska, on their way to Oregon to attend boarding school. The people were identified as, from left, George Cleveland Sr., Lena Commack Coffee, Angeline Douglas, Genevieve Douglas Norris, Wynita Woods Lee, Virginia Douglas Commack and Harold Barry. (Kay J. Kennedy Aviation Photograph Collection, archives of the University of Alaska Fairbanks)

In the early 1990s, the Alaska Legislature started a program to fund school construction and major maintenance projects. Schools districts would apply for grants, and the state education department would rank projects based on need. But the Legislature provided little money for the need-based program. Instead, a small group of powerful lawmakers allocated funding to projects in their own districts, favoring urban areas.

In 1997, a group of Alaska Native parents sued the state, arguing that the funding system violated Alaska’s constitution and the federal Civil Rights Act. State Superior Court Judge John Reese agreed.

“Because of the funding system, rural schools are not getting the money they need to maintain their schools,” he wrote in a 1999 order. “Deficiencies include roofs falling in, no drinkable water, sewage backing up, and enrollment up to 187% of capacity. Some rural schools have been at the top of the priority list for a number of years, yet have received no funding.”

In another order, he called the state’s system “arbitrary, inadequate and racially discriminatory,” and said the state had a responsibility to provide education to Alaska Native children “even if it costs more in the rural areas.”

A 2001 order from Alaska Superior Court Judge John Reese (Obtained by KYUK and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

A 2011 consent decree and settlement required the state to build five new rural schools, and the Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to more equitably allocate funds to rural districts.

Yet more than a decade later, the problems pointed out by Reese persist. Every year, rural school districts make more than 100 requests, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Legislature funds only a tiny fraction of those projects. In five of the last 11 years, it has approved fewer than five requests.

An analysis by KYUK and ProPublica shows that Alaska’s education department has received 1,789 funding proposals from rural school districts since 1998. But only 14% of them have received funding. This year, requests from rural school districts to the state’s construction and maintenance program stand at $478 million.

Edgmon acknowledged that the Legislature’s funding decisions don’t come close to meeting the needs of Alaska’s rural public schools. “We have not upheld our constitutional duty to provide that quality of education that the courts have said time and again we’re bound to be providing,” he said.

When pressed on why funding is so hard to secure, state education commissioner Bishop told KYUK last year that rural schools were good for the community. “But, at the same token, it’s unsustainable to have $50 million go to 10 students,” she said. “I mean, think about the unsustainability of that in the long run.”

Allowing projects to sit on a waitlist for years also means they can become more expensive over time. The Kuspuk School District’s first request to repair Sleetmute’s school was for just over $411,000 in 2007. By 2024, the request had climbed to $1.6 million — more than twice the original cost, even after adjusting for inflation.

“To me that’s neglectful,” Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said. “Our cries for help haven’t been heard.”

“Just seeing the conditions that the districts and the state were expecting students to thrive in,” said Madeline Aguillard, the superintendent of the Kuspuk School District, “they’re not conducive for academic achievement.” (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Roughly 200 miles southwest, the coastal village of Quinhagak waited 15 years for a renovation and addition to its Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat School that would allow it to meet the state’s space requirements. The school serves 200 students, more than twice the number it was designed for.

In addition to its fire sprinklers, Thorne Bay in the Southeast Island School District has asked the state 18 times to replace a pair of aging underground heating-fuel tanks that the district worries could start to leak. Superintendent Rod Morrison, whose district spans an area of Alaska’s southern archipelago that’s roughly the size of Connecticut, said his district’s list of maintenance needs is seemingly endless.

“Education is supposed to be the big equalizer,” said Morrison. “It is not equal in the state of Alaska.”

Rural school district officials say, given their scarce resources, the state’s construction and maintenance program creates burdens. The application for funding comes with a 37-page guidance document, loaded with references to state statute and administrative code. It also requires districts to include a six-year capital improvement plan. Meeting these requirements can be challenging in rural school districts, where administrative turnover is high and staffing is limited.

To increase the likelihood that a project gets funded, some rural superintendents say they feel pressure to provide engineering inspections or site condition surveys with their applications.

“There’s only a few needles that you can move,” said David Landis of the Southeast Regional Resource Center, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps school districts compile their applications for a fee.

Landis said inspections and surveys are likely to increase the ranking for a project proposal, but “those documents are really foundational and expensive. They might very well be over $100,000.”

The Kuspuk School District has spent more than $200,000 since 2021 to beef up its applications for the Sleetmute school, Aguillard said. It’s also paid tens of thousands of dollars to a lobbyist to persuade legislators to increase maintenance funding for schools the state itself owns.

Some school districts said they simply can’t afford such costs. “We don’t have that ability,” said Morrison of the Southeast Island School District. “We’d have to cut a teacher or two to make that happen.”

“Too Little, Too Late”

Last summer, Sleetmute got some good news. After ignoring 19 requests, the state had finally approved its roof repair after Alaska legislators passed a bill that boosted school maintenance and construction funding to its highest level in more than a decade.

But it’s “too little, too late,” Aguillard said. The building’s condition has deteriorated so much that Sleetmute now needs a new school.

As a result, the district has asked if it could use the roof repair money to shore up the school to prevent a collapse, to bring in modular classrooms or to have school in another community building. But, Aguillard said, Alaska’s education department has been reluctant to approve any of those options. Instead, she said, the department made a baffling request: It asked for proof that the state had never paid to repair Sleetmute’s leaking roof — something clearly outlined in state records — and that the neglect had caused the additional damage.

In an email, the education department wrote, “This step was taken to ensure proper use of funds and to understand the full scope of work required.”

Sleetmute residents especially worry in the winter when snow and ice build up on the school’s roof. The back end of the building is buckling under the weight. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

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A KYUK and ProPublica analysis found that in at least 20 cases, funding requests waited for so long that cheaper repairs morphed into proposals to tear down and replace schools. Those schools that were rebuilt cost the state tens of millions of dollars more than the initial estimates.

The Auntie Mary Nicoli Elementary School project in Aniak, about 100 miles downriver from Sleetmute, started as a $9.5 million renovation in 2007. But after waiting 11 years, the state spent $18.6 million to replace it in 2018.

A few districts are still waiting for schools they say need to be replaced. The first request for the Johnnie John Sr. School project in Crooked Creek, 40 miles downriver from Sleetmute, in 1998 was for a $4.8 million addition. But by 2009, the district was asking for a $19 million replacement. The Legislature failed to fund the project even after the district pared down its request. Unable to secure funding for a new school, the district is now trying to stretch $1.9 million it received from the state last year to make the most necessary repairs: upgrades to heating and electrical systems and the removal of hazardous materials.

In most of Alaska’s rural communities, life often requires making do with what’s available: People keep piles of old machinery in their yards to mine for parts. In villages that aren’t on the road system, almost everything is either shipped in by barge or delivered by air. In Sleetmute, a 24-pack of soda costs $54 — about four times the price in the Lower 48.

Sleetmute, home to fewer than 100 residents, is nestled alongside the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River in Alaska’s Interior. (Emily Schwing/KYUK) There are no roads to and from Sleetmute, so residents rely mostly on airplanes to travel and receive goods. When the Kuskokwim River thaws, a barge makes summer deliveries. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

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This is also why construction projects are extremely expensive: Skilled workers have to be flown in, housed and fed. Heavy equipment has to zigzag up the Kuskokwim River, which is frozen for half the year. The school district was hoping to reduce costs by sharing machinery with a project to upgrade the community’s runway. But when that project wrapped up this fall, the state transportation department shipped its equipment out of Sleetmute.

So the school is left to make do. Everyone has to share one bathroom. A manila folder hangs from a pink thread on the door. It reads “Boys” on one side and “Girls” on the other to indicate whose turn it is.

After an architect said Sleetmute’s school “should be condemned,” half the building was closed. Now students, staff and teachers all share one bathroom, and a sign lets students know whose turn it is to go. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Sleetmute’s school is also full of black mold that covers the buckling wall in the wood shop, a gear closet in the gym and a huge section of drywall in the ceiling just above the door to the kitchen.

Water from a leaky roof has seeped into the walls and floor of the Sleetmute school’s wood shop. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

This fall the community discovered another problem. Sheree Smith, who has taught in Sleetmute for 12 years, found herself swinging a tennis racket at a bat that swooped through her classroom as her middle and high school students sat reading quietly. The bats live above the gym bleachers in a small utility closet, where the floor is covered in guano.

Black mold had spread through the Sleetmute school, including in a utility closet, a hallway ceiling and the back wall of a gear closet in the gym. (Emily Schwing/KYUK) Playtime in the Sleetmute school gym is rare. The space, which also served as an emergency shelter and a place for social functions, has been closed for two years. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

Without a gym, students miss out on events that connect the school to both the community and the outside world. Every year, the Sleetmute school would host basketball tournaments and movie nights to raise money for field trips to places like Anchorage and Washington, D.C. — a luxury for many families in Sleetmute and other rural communities in Alaska. The students “feel the pain of that, like just not having the extra opportunities,” said Angela Hayden, Sleetmute’s lead teacher.

Over the holiday break, the school district reinforced the back end of the building with floor-to-ceiling supports to keep the woodshop from collapsing.

But it’s only a temporary fix. The roof has been leaking since Hayden started teaching there 17 years ago.

“When I come in the building, especially after a lot of rain or a lot of snow,” she said, “I just think, ‘OK, what am I going to have to deal with before I can deal with my classroom?’”

Students start their day with the Pledge of Allegiance in Sleetmute, where the school’s roof has been leaking for longer than they’ve been alive. (Emily Schwing/KYUK)

If you have information about school conditions in Alaska, contact Emily Schwing at emily@kyuk.org.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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

For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.

Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.

The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.

The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.

Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.

Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.

Following a series of lawsuits challenging their constitutional authority to lay off or place on leave thousands of employees and freeze nearly all foreign aid, Rubio and Marocco have defended their actions by arguing that the president has the right to cancel programs, and that they were conducting a careful review of the government’s foreign aid programs to make sure they aligned with Trump’s agenda. The administration says it is rooting out waste and fraud, while Musk has publicly vowed to destroy USAID altogether.

However, as ProPublica reported Saturday, officials throughout the government say the process was actually cursory and haphazard, so much so that the programs’ contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts, had no idea what had been canceled or why.

Enrich’s memos offer additional evidence calling into question the administration’s claims in court while projecting the dire consequences that will play out for both the U.S. and vulnerable people around the world.

One of the documents said that the sweeping cuts to foreign aid promise to reignite outbreaks of preventable, deadly illnesses; fuel instability in war-torn areas; and put the U.S. at risk for outbreaks of infectious disease. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” it says.

Take tuberculosis, which kills more than 1.25 million people a year and is already the deadliest infectious disease on the planet. New infections are expected to surge by 30% more as a result of the terminations, and disruptions to treatment will cause people to develop drug resistance, making any future treatment options far more difficult and costly, the memo said.

That global surge will inevitably lead to more cases in the U.S. USAID staff forecast there would be around 80 additional cases of multi-drug-resistant TB here each year because of the cuts across USAID, the memo added. Even a few dozen cases would cost the U.S. millions in tax dollars; it takes nearly $500,000 on average to treat someone with the most drug-resistant forms of the illness, the memo notes.

Enrich’s bureau also warned that the foreign aid cuts will destabilize entire regions around the globe. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.S. withdrawal of aid has led health services to collapse as an ongoing conflict flares, the memos noted. They said more than 400 mpox patients were left stranded and that more than a million people face critical shortages of food and water, supplies the U.S. has promised to provide. Malnutrition, cholera and measles are all projected to increase as well.

Across the Sahel, the transition zone between Africa’s northern deserts and southern savannahs, malaria season is fast approaching. The U.S. has already purchased mosquito nets, diagnostic tests and treatments that cannot be delivered, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the programs. Canceled programs there and elsewhere are expected to cause between 12 million and 18 million additional malaria infections over the next year, the document estimates.

And those infections are likely to be more deadly. Spread via mosquito, malaria is particularly lethal for children under 5. The U.S. was paying to help roll out drugs that are highly effective at preventing children from getting sick or dying. Those programs have been canceled.

The potential for death and the spread of disease is not new to Rubio or his top aides who ordered the mass termination of nearly all foreign aid programs, according to the documents and interviews.

USAID staff repeatedly lobbied to keep the most critical programs running, sharing specifics about patients served for individual programs and the likely harm of cutting them with political appointees, sometimes on multiple occasions. In response, political leadership “wholly prevented” staff from implementing Rubio’s promise to continue lifesaving aid, according to Enrich’s memo.

In public statements and court filings, Rubio and Marocco have said there was a waiver exemption process in place for lifesaving programs to remain funded and online.

But behind the scenes, the few employees remaining at USAID struggled to get basic information, like how to submit waivers to Marocco for approval. And when organizations did get an approved waiver, they couldn’t restart work because the administration still hadn’t paid them. (The Trump administration has refused to reimburse almost $2 billion to foreign aid contractors for work they’ve already completed.)

Agency staff had no way to send payments to organizations because their access to the financial systems had been severed, one memo said.

On Feb. 8, global health staff learned that Rubio planned to cancel many programs the bureau had identified as lifesaving. Those in the bureau appealed to Borkert and Mark Lloyd, an assistant administrator at the agency, to keep those operations alive. (Borkert and Lloyd did not respond to questions about this story.)

Lloyd asked for more information. But that same day, staffers in the bureau also received a response from DOGE. “I am hearing that Global Health is conducting supplemental reviews of awards slated for termination by Secretary Rubio and Acting Deputy Administrator Marocco,” DOGE adviser Jeremy Lewin emailed Enrich, according to one of Enrich’s memos. “This is delaying the timely processing of these termination notices and is unacceptable. … Bureaus should not be conducting their own policy and program reviews before acting on these termination instructions.” (Lewin did not respond to questions for this story.)

Enrich also said he received written instructions to pause approving waivers for lifesaving humanitarian assistance, a directive he passed along to the rest of his bureau, which had been working to identify the programs that needed money the most.

In a subsequent exchange spelled out in one memo that illustrates the frequently conflicting guidance, Enrich said that two political appointees, Tim Meisburger and Laken Rapier, along with Bokert, shouted at him during a Feb. 13 meeting that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to draft another memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause” on the bureau’s waivers for lifesaving programs. (Meisburger and Rapier did not respond to questions about this story.)

During a meeting on Feb. 24, Meisburger and Lloyd told those in the bureau to not bother trying to submit waivers for programs involving infectious diseases like mpox, polio and Ebola because they wouldn’t be approved, according to Enrich.

Then, two days later, the administration suddenly terminated about 10,000 programs across the State Department and USAID. Agency staff responsible for maintaining those contracts say they were not consulted before the move. Enrich immediately reached out to Borkert and others to warn them of the “grave impacts on lifesaving activities,” he said in the memo.

Borkert responded, indicating that many of the programs were terminated by mistake. “There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind,” Borkert wrote to Enrich. “We need to identify what those are.”

In recent days, government officials and aid groups have told ProPublica that the administration appears to be trying to reverse-engineer its most sweeping actions to figure out which lifesaving operations were canceled. Staff have been told to report information about terminated contracts to agency leaders. It’s not clear what programs, if any, will be restored.

“It is an incompetent mess,” one official said.

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

by Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois

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

A new Illinois bill aims to add some oversight of families who homeschool their children, a response to concerns that the state does little to ensure these students receive an education and are protected from harm.

The measure, known as the Homeschool Act, comes after an investigation by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica last year found that Illinois is among a small number of states that place virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children. Parents don’t have to register with any state agency or school district, and authorities cannot compel them to track attendance, demonstrate their teaching methods or show student progress.

Under the new bill, families would be required to tell their school districts when they decide to homeschool their children, and the parents or guardians would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent. If education authorities have concerns that children are receiving inadequate schooling, they could require parents to share evidence of teaching materials and student work.

Illinois Rep. Terra Costa Howard, a Democrat from a Chicago suburb who is sponsoring the legislation, said she began meeting with education and child welfare officials in response to the news organizations’ investigation, which detailed how some parents claimed to be removing their children from school to homeschool but then failed to educate them.

The investigation documented the case of L.J., a 9-year-old whose parents decided to homeschool him after he missed so much school that he faced the prospect of repeating third grade. He told child welfare authorities that he was beaten and denied food for several years while out of public school and that he received almost no education. In December 2022, on L.J.’s 11th birthday, the state took custody of him and his younger siblings; soon after, he was enrolled in public school.

“We need to know that children exist,” said Costa Howard, vice chair of the Illinois House’s child welfare committee. The legislation is more urgent because the number of homeschooled children has grown since the pandemic began, she said. “Illinois has zero regulations regarding homeschooling — we are not the norm at all.”

The most recent numbers available at the time of the news organizations’ investigation showed nearly 4,500 children were recorded as withdrawn from public school for homeschooling in 2022 — a number that had doubled over a decade. But there is no way to determine the precise number of students who are homeschooled in Illinois, because the state doesn’t require parents to register.

The bill would require the state to collect data on homeschooling families. Regional Offices of Education would gather the information, and the state board would compile an annual report with details on the number, grade level and gender of homeschooled students within each region.

Homeschool families and advocates said they will fight the measure, which they argue would infringe on parental rights. Past proposals to increase oversight also have met swift resistance. The sponsor of a 2011 bill that would have required homeschool registration withdrew it after hundreds of people protested at the Illinois State Capitol. In 2019, a different lawmaker abandoned her bill after similar opposition to rules that would have required curriculum reviews and inspections by child welfare officials.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which describes itself as a Christian organization that advocates for homeschool freedom, said it plans to host virtual meetings to educate families on the bill and ways they can lobby against it.

Kathy Wentz of the Illinois Homeschool Association, which is against homeschool regulations, said she is concerned about the provision that would allow the state to review education materials, called a “portfolio review” in the legislation. She said visits from education officials could be disruptive to teaching.

“There is nothing in this bill to protect a family’s time so they can actually homeschool without interruptions,” Wentz said. She pointed to a 1950 Illinois Supreme Court ruling establishing that homeschooling qualified as a form of private education and that the schools were not required to register students with the state.

The bill would require all private schools to register with the state.

The Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica investigation found that it’s all but impossible for education officials to intervene when parents claim they are homeschooling. The state’s child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services, doesn’t investigate schooling matters.

Under the proposed law, if the department has concerns about a family that says it is homeschooling, the agency could request that education officials conduct a more thorough investigation of the child’s schooling. The new law would then allow education officials to check whether the family notified its district about its decision to homeschool and compel parents to turn over homeschool materials for review.

The increased oversight also aims to help reduce truancy and protect homeschooled students who lose daily contact with teachers and others who are mandated to report abuse and neglect, Costa Howard said. Some truancy officials said that under existing law they have no recourse to compel attendance or review what students are learning at home when a family says they are homeschooling.

Jonah Stewart, research director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a national organization of homeschool alumni that advocates for homeschooling regulation, said the lack of oversight in Illinois puts children at risk. “This bill is a commonsense measure and is critical not only to address educational neglect but also child safety,” Stewart said.

by Heather Vogell

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A high-ranking NASA official warned his employees Friday to “use discretion” in public when displaying badges or emblems that identify them as federal workers — part of an effort, the agency says, to protect its employees amid “stories of possible harassment” outside of work.

“We are all very proud to work for the space program,” wrote Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer. “But in the current environment, with a lot of negative rhetoric coming in our direction, I want you all to please use caution.”

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration and allies have used strong language to disparage federal workers, whom they have been firing en masse. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job,” the president said on Feb. 26 during his first Cabinet meeting.

Polk’s warning to employees came two days later, after receiving a report about an employee who was “assaulted” at a Starbucks. “This is probably one of the saddest emails I have had to write of late,” he said in the email, which was obtained by ProPublica.

Polk wrote that Nicola Fox, an associate administrator at NASA, said at a meeting that an employee was confronted at a Starbucks by someone “because she was a federal employee.” The worker was working on her computer and was identified by her badge and a logo, he wrote.

Reached Saturday, Polk said the email was not intended for anyone outside NASA. He said he did not have additional details about the incident and declined to comment on it or on his email to staff, which did not name the employee. Fox declined to comment.

NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said the agency was “hearing stories of possible harassment toward employees, but not assault,” the term used in the email.

“Our managers are hearing information thirdhand and using this as an opportunity to remind our teams to be mindful of their surroundings and to report any incidences to the Office of Protective Services,” she said.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

It was not clear where the incident took place.

The email was circulating among NASA employees, some of whom said they are concerned by the Trump administration’s rhetoric regarding government workers. The president, his advisers and his congressional allies have all sharpened their attacks on federal employees over the past week as the administration undertakes expansive efforts to reduce the size of the federal government

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who Trump named the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has been leading the way.

A week ago, he demanded federal employees respond to an email asking them to list five things they’d accomplished in the previous week — or be fired. “What he’s doing is saying ‘Are you actually working’?” Trump said.

On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said during a committee meeting that “federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.”

And senior Trump officials on Wednesday sent out a memo on reducing the federal workforce that said, “The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024, by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

NASA sidestepped expected layoffs in February, but it is still losing personnel due to a buyout plan.

Polk urged his staff to stay vigilant.

“Be aware of your surroundings and keep good situational awareness and operational security,” he wrote. “Use caution when on the phone in public places, and ensure you are aware of those around you.”

If you’re a federal worker and you think you were harassed outside work as a result of your status as a government employee, ProPublica wants to hear from you. Contact our tips number on Signal at ‪917-512-0201‬. Here’s more detail on how to send us information securely.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy

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After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that lifesaving operations would continue. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters in early February.

Aid organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives, seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to continue operating.

The administration conceded that many programs prevent immediate death and should remain online: field hospitals in Gaza, an HIV drug supplier for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syrian refugee food programs, health clinics that combat Ebola in Uganda and most of the landmark President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR.

In late January, Rubio and one of his top aides, Peter Marocco, said those programs and dozens of others could continue, granting them temporary waivers while the officials conducted what they have called a “targeted, case-by-case review” of all foreign aid programs managed by the State Department and USAID. That review, they said, would take three months.

Four weeks later, on Wednesday, Rubio and Marocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Now, as the administration faces multiple lawsuits challenging its actions, the court fights largely hinge on whether government officials deliberated responsibly before cutting off funding. The U.S. has also refused to pay almost $2 billion that the government owes aid organizations for work they’ve already completed.

Rubio and Marocco appear to have taken their dramatic steps without the careful review they’ve described to the courts, according to internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen officials from the State Department and USAID, which raises fresh questions about the legality of President Donald Trump’s evisceration of the American foreign aid system.

Current and former officials say that Marocco and Rubio cut critical programs without consulting contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts. “None of us believe that they’re conducting a careful, individualized review,” one official said.

In an episode that highlights how cursory and haphazard their efforts appear to have been, Marocco and Rubio ordered the cancellation of contracts, including for cellphone service, at an office they do not control. The move stranded people in war zones without phones, according to multiple officials and internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica. On Wednesday, AT&T received a termination notice for a $430,000 contract with USAID’s Office of Inspector General. That office is meant to be independent from USAID so that it can effectively audit the agency.

For more than 24 hours, OIG staff, including people in Ukraine and Haiti, did not have access to their government phones. No one at the OIG, including contract officers, knew it was coming, according to the officials. “This is an urgent issue for us, as we have OIG staff in warzones with no ability to receive security alerts,” a senior official in the agency wrote in an email to the company.

Eventually USAID reversed the termination.

Current and former officials throughout USAID and the State Department said the breakneck pace, lack of input from key officials, mistaken cancellations and boilerplate language in Wednesday’s termination notices undermine Marocco’s claims of a deliberative process.

“It’s a pretext,” one USAID official told ProPublica. “The review was supposed to take 90 days. An actual review based on substance requires laying out a process with guidelines, identifying info on each project, and selecting working groups to review. Any review they did was fake.”

If that turns out to be the case, legal experts and government officials say, the administration will have defied a federal judge’s order in a brazen gambit to continue dismantling USAID.

The morning after the mass termination notices went out, a senior USAID official sent an email saying Marocco and Rubio had canceled awards for essential services that the agency now wanted reinstated, telling staff, “We need your immediate input on any awards that may have been terminated that contain essential services related to the safety, security, and operations of USAID staff,” according to a court filing.

Since the initial decision to suspend foreign aid, humanitarian organizations and labor groups have taken the government to court, arguing that only Congress can dismantle USAID and that Trump’s blanket actions are unconstitutional. The government has told the courts that it has the right to cancel contracts, dismiss staff and reorganize USAID to align with Trump’s agenda.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting USAID and the State Department from following Trump’s executive orders to stop all foreign aid and to force the agency to pay its bills. When it didn’t comply, the judge issued another order, giving the government until midnight Wednesday to pay what it owes to aid groups.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the last order over unpaid bills to conduct further legal review. That same day, aid organizations around the world began receiving termination notices.

More than 90% of USAID’s global aid operations and half of those managed by the State Department received termination notices. The move is already putting children and refugees in gravely dangerous situations. The administration canceled almost 50 United Nations Population Fund projects worth more than $370 million, including programs to address maternal deaths and gender-based violence in Egypt, Nigeria and several other member nations around the world.

In early February, the nonprofit Alight received waivers for its programs supporting refugees in war-torn Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. On Wednesday, they were all terminated.

Alight runs six centers for extremely malnourished children in Sudan, where the organization treats babies and infants so sick that they will die within hours without ongoing care. The centers cost about $120,000 a month to operate. Alight is trying to fundraise to keep them open, knowing that the day they close their doors, children will die, CEO Jocelyn Wyatt told ProPublica.

In the meantime, they have been forced to close other lifesaving programs. In Somalia, around 700 malnourished children visited Alight clinics every day for weight check-ins and to pick up special food. Thirteen health clinics and a mobile unit served around 1,200 patients a day. On Thursday, all of those clinics closed, Wyatt said.

Alight also shuttered 33 primary health clinics in Sudan and stopped providing water to three refugee camps that house people displaced by decades of war. Alight had kept all those programs running these past five weeks, even though the organization hasn’t received any payments since Trump took office.

“We believed when Rubio said that there was no intention of cutting emergency lifesaving services that would basically cause immediate death,” said Wyatt. “We trusted that those would be protected.”

One of the State Department’s highest-ranking humanitarian aid officials, Jennifer Davis, stepped down this week, according to her resignation letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. During a meeting earlier this week, Davis, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s refugees bureau, told staff she believed she was bound by the judge’s order to restore programs and their funding, according to an attendee. “She was in tears about it,” the attendee said. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department, USAID and the White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. The State Department did not make Rubio available for an interview. Marocco also did not respond to questions.

By Thursday, hundreds of workers had returned to USAID’s former headquarters, where the name has been removed from the building facade, to collect their personal items. They left with boxes and suitcases. Some were crying. Dozens of people cheered and rang bells each time someone exited the building; many of them had recently lost humanitarian aid jobs as well.

“This is more than lost jobs. We’re losing the sector,” a former USAID employee said through tears as she waited for her allotted 15-minute time window to pick up her belongings. “The U.S. government is losing its influence. We’re now more unsafe as a country.”

In the early hours of Feb. 13 at a refugee camp in northern Syria, two armed men wearing masks and police uniforms broke into offices and a warehouse for the aid group Blumont, stealing more than $12,000 worth of laptops and other supplies the U.S. government had already paid for. Because the organization hadn’t received any funds since Trump took office, it no longer had personnel at the camp full time and had paused all its U.S.-funded work except a daily bread delivery.

The armed theft was the result of the U.S. not paying its bills, the group told USAID officials, according to an internal agency email obtained by ProPublica.

Shortly after the incident, the government started paying Blumont’s invoices and the aid group brought back staff and food services that had received a waiver. It is one of the few programs still online and receiving money.

Prior to Jan. 20, the U.S. spent about $60 billion on nonmilitary humanitarian and developmental aid each year — far more than any other country in total dollars, but less than 1% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that money is managed by USAID and the State Department. A network of aid organizations carry out the work, which is funded by Congress.

Since Trump took office, Marocco and Rubio have not only halted foreign aid, laid off thousands of workers and put many more on administrative leave, they have also stopped paying bills for work that has already been done. In one of several lawsuits related to the administration’s dismantling of USAID, aid groups are suing the federal government over the mass program closures and unpaid bills. It was that case that led federal district court Judge Amir Ali to order the administration to settle those bills, which by Feb. 13 totaled nearly $2 billion, according to figures Marocco gave the court. Almost none of it has been paid, the court filings show.

U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for interest and damages from the unpaid bills and broken contracts, legal experts told ProPublica.

Organizations have struggled to get through the opaque waiver process, and programs that succeeded were often so strapped for cash because the government hadn’t reimbursed them that they remained inoperative. Medicines that were already purchased by U.S. taxpayers are languishing in warehouses instead of being delivered to the people who need them, several contractors told ProPublica.

On Wednesday, as Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the district court’s order to the federal government to pay its bills, the administration told the court it had terminated 5,800 of the 6,300 foreign aid programs that USAID administered. The government also shuttered 4,100 programs managed by the State Department, about 60% of the total.

In Marocco’s own testimony to the court on Feb. 18 about the process, he said that senior staff and political appointees choose “specific awards” to be evaluated for termination or suspension. He said he personally examines the program and any potential consequences of terminating it before making final recommendations to Rubio.

But USAID staff say that subject-area experts and key personnel who are responsible for the programs were not involved in many terminations, while most others had already lost their jobs.

In the case of the phone contract for the OIG office, for example, the contract officers had no idea the termination notices were coming, officials said. Those officers are specially trained in contract law and regulations to manage these agreements and make sure the government is in compliance. But they were cut out of the process and only learned about it from AT&T, according to the officials and internal emails obtained by ProPublica. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.)

The one-page notice to the telecom giant said that Rubio and Marocco had “determined your award is not aligned with Agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest.” The notice added: “Immediately cease all activities.”

The notice came as an emailed PDF and not through the normal file management and correspondence system, which led multiple OIG officials to question whether anyone even looked at the contract’s basic information, like its statement of work, much less conducted a careful review.

David Black, an attorney specializing in government contracts, said that the law requires contract officers to approve termination notices and that the episode with the OIG raises questions about Marocco’s claims in court about careful reviews. “It suggests the process was done very hastily,” he said.

On the ground, in the places where the aid kept starvation at bay and deadly viruses in check, program directors say there will now be little to stop those threats.

“What really bothers me is that we’re just looking at numbers, we’re not thinking about real people who are actually going to suffer the consequences of these terminations,” said Dr. Anja Giphart, the acting president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which had HIV programs terminated in Eswatini, Lesotho and Tanzania.

Pulling treatment away from pregnant women means children will be infected with HIV in the weeks ahead, Giphart said. And doing it so suddenly means other governments and donors don’t have the opportunity to step in. Half of children who are undiagnosed and untreated for HIV die before their first birthday. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting months and months to get this back on track again,” she said.

In Uganda, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, which is funded by USAID, treats tens of thousands of patients for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition, it has for years been one of the only organizations in the country that helps contain Ebola outbreaks — including the current one, which has so far killed two people and infected at least eight others. Earlier this month, the U.S. government issued the foundation a waiver and said it could continue its lifesaving work.

So those who run the foundation were shocked to receive a termination notice hours later. The foundation’s executive director, Dr. Dithan Kiragga, told ProPublica his staff had just begun contact tracing patients with Ebola. He said they will likely now have to halt all U.S.-funded operations and hope that the Uganda health ministry can step in.

“The patients will be told that we are closing,” Kiragga said. “They’ve relied on our systems and support for quite a few years. We saved lives.”

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

Maryam Jameel and Ashley Clarke contributed reporting.

by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica, Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica

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Less than a week after deporting Venezuelans detained at Guantanamo Bay, the Trump administration has again flown about two dozen migrants to the U.S. naval base in Cuba. This time, however, the migrants are from countries across the world, including from places that are willing to take them back, which has raised additional questions about whom the government is choosing to send there and why.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune interviewed Angela Sequera, the mother of one of the first migrants sent to Guantanamo. She described her fear and desperation upon learning that her son, Yoiker Sequera, had been transferred to the facility, which she knew only as a place where terrorists were held and tortured after the 9/11 attacks.

On Feb. 9, Sequera was waiting for her daily phone call from Yoiker, who had been in an El Paso immigration detention facility since he was charged with entering the U.S. illegally late last year. When the phone finally rang, it wasn’t her son but another detainee who told her that Yoiker had been taken to Guantanamo.

“It hit me like a bucket of cold water. I asked the man: ‘Why? Why? Why?’” Sequera recalled. She said the detainee told her that the federal government was trying to link Yoiker to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for migrant smuggling and other crimes in Latin America.

She panicked. She couldn't understand why this was happening. She and some of the relatives of 178 Venezuelans who were among the first migrants transferred to Guantanamo by the U.S. government scrambled to try to establish contact with their loved ones, scoured the internet and exchanged messages on an impromptu WhatsApp group.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained records about Yoiker and two other Venezuelans taken to Guantanamo. A search of U.S. federal court records found that Yoiker and another man had no crimes except for illegal entry, while a third had been convicted for assaulting a federal officer during a riot while in detention. “My son is not a criminal. He has no record. He has nothing to do with gangs. He does not belong to any Tren de Aragua,” said Sequera, who shared documentation from Venezuelan authorities that stated he did not have a criminal history.

On Feb. 21, after 13 days without hearing from her son, Sequera got a call from Yoiker. He had been released and was back in Venezuela, but he refused to discuss the time he spent detained at the naval base. “I think he does it to not make me worry,” said Sequera, who is among the plaintiffs named in a lawsuit filed by immigrants’ rights advocates seeking legal access to the migrants in Guantanamo.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said this week that nearly half of the Venezuelans originally detained at Guantanamo were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and that many had serious criminal records. DHS did not provide evidence to support that assertion.

DHS also said in court filings this month that Guantanamo will continue to “temporarily house” migrants before they are “removed to their home country or a safe third country.”

Migrants on recent flights to Guantanamo have come from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Guinea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Senegal, according to government data shared with ProPublica and the Tribune. DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the most recent transfers.

“We continue to know very little about the conditions there, who the government is sending there and why this is happening,” said Zoe Bowman, an attorney with the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Watch the video: Mother Speaks Out Against Trump’s Detention of Her Son at Guantanamo

Mauricio Rodríguez Pons contributed to the production.

by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica.

The house is owned by a major Republican donor and Tennessee car magnate who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress.

Pastor Steve Berger, left, with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Johnson’s wife, Kelly, in what appears to be the Capitol Hill home the two men have been sharing (via Facebook)

Over the past four years, Berger and his wife, Sarah Berger, have dedicated themselves to what they call their D.C. “ministry center.” In addition to Johnson, who is an evangelical conservative, the pastor has built close relationships with several other influential conservative politicians. Dan Bishop, now nominated for a powerful post in the Trump White House, seems to have also lived in the home last year while he was still a congressman, according to three people.

A spokesperson for Johnson said that the speaker “pays fair market value in monthly rent for the portion of the Washington, D.C. townhome that he occupies.” He did not answer a question about how much Johnson is paying. House ethics rules allow members of Congress to live anywhere, as long as they are paying fair-market rent.

The spokesperson added that Johnson “has never once spoken to Mr. Berger about any piece of legislation or any matter of public policy.” Berger and Bishop did not respond to requests for comment.

The Bergers have described their mission as galvanizing political allies to take action. “It’s just iron sharpening iron,” Sarah Berger said on a podcast last summer, explaining the couple’s approach to political influence. “Like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I’m standing firm on this policy.’”

Steve Berger claims to have personally spurred legislation. “It’s a humbling thing,” he said in a sermon in late 2022. “You get a text message from a senator that says: ‘Thank you for your inspiration. Because it has caused me now to create a bill that is going to further righteousness in this country.’”

Berger’s interests extend beyond his staunch social conservatism. He and the donor who owns the house, Lee Beaman, have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, including a bill that would make it easier to fire federal employees and a regulation that would reduce fuel efficiency standards for the automotive industry. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that President Donald Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results.

Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, did not respond to questions about how he ended up staying at the home. Beaman did not respond to requests for comment.

The earliest date ProPublica was able to confirm Johnson being at the Berger house was in mid-December. A video reviewed by ProPublica shows Johnson visiting the home on Dec. 15 with two women who appear to be his wife and daughter. They lingered outside before entering, while Johnson pointed around the building and down to the basement entrance as if he was giving a tour. Two days later, Berger sent a note to his supporters on social media: “I so wish I could tell you all the massive doors that broke open this week.”

Since the beginning of the year, videos and interviews show, Johnson has regularly left the house in the morning and returned in the evening. One day that Johnson was there recently, Berger was also at the home, opening the front door barefoot in pajama bottoms. (It appears Johnson may primarily be staying in the home’s two-bedroom basement.)

Washington pieds-à-terre can prove a significant expense for members of Congress as they split time between the capital and their home districts. Johnson is less wealthy than many other lawmakers. He worked at conservative nonprofits before he entered public service, and on his most recent financial disclosure form he did not declare a single asset. When Johnson was elevated to the speakership in 2023, news reports indicated that rather than renting an apartment, he might be sleeping in his office. (Lawmakers must report debts, income and many financial holdings on disclosure forms but aren’t required to list living expenses like rent.)

The Berger home is in an upscale D.C. neighborhood full of lobbyists and corporate attorneys. Though it’s not clear what the home’s basement would fetch on the open market, it’s not unusual for two-bedrooms in the area to rent for as much as $7,000 a month. Discounts on rent are generally prohibited by House ethics rules as improper gifts, experts said.

In sermons and on social media, Berger has mentioned some of the topics he’s discussed with Johnson and other members of Congress. Last year, Berger, a passionate supporter of the Israeli right-wing, said he’d had “a great conversation” with the speaker about Israel.

An Instagram post from Pastor Steve Berger (via Instagram)

Recently, Johnson has described his conversations with Trump to the pastor, according to Berger. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Berger said in a sermon that he’d advised “some congressmen” to see the conflict through the lens of Ezekiel 38 and 39, parts of the Bible some see as prophesying a great war before the Second Coming. He did not specify what that meant from a policy perspective.

An energetic 60-year-old with a white goatee and penchant for preaching in sneakers and jeans, Berger has strong views on a wide range of issues, including economic policy and public health. He is vehemently opposed to the World Health Organization, which Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from last month, and recently predicted that COVID-19 vaccines will result in “young people dropping dead all over the place.” He attacked the World Economic Forum at length in a recent sermon, accusing it of “taking advantage” of COVID-19 “to implement their satanic plot.”

Berger is also against same-sex marriage, saying “it opens the door to all manner of sexual depravity and wickedness” — though he has said he has “friends who are practicing homosexuals, people I care about.” He opposes homosexuality and “heterosexual sin” in equal measures, he’s said, referring to acts like watching pornography and sex between unmarried adults.

Berger’s operation is organized as a nonprofit called Ambassador Services International, which runs on a budget of around $1 million per year, according to tax filings. The home where it is registered in Washington — and where Johnson has been staying — was purchased in early 2021. Once the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and later housing the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, it was advertised at the time as a “four-level Second Empire-style townhouse of impeccable elegance and exceptional scale,” offering “bespoke tranquility in a coveted location.”

The buyer was Crockett Ventures LLC. Corporate filings show its sole owner is Beaman, the donor and businessman, who built a fortune on a chain of car dealerships started by his father. He has given millions to Republican political groups, including large donations to the Trump campaign and political committees for the Heritage Foundation and the House Freedom Caucus. He’s also served as the treasurer of a congressional campaign.

Beaman was once so fed up with the restrictions that came with owning a home on a “government-controlled lake” that he bought a sprawling property with a 50-acre private lake of its own, according to a profile in an architecture book. He became a fixture of Nashville media in recent years because of sordid allegations made by his fourth wife during their divorce, including that he made her watch what he called “training films” of him having sex with a prostitute. Beaman’s lawyers wrote at the time that his wife’s filing contained “impertinent and scandalous matter only meant to harass Mr. Beaman.”

Beaman has attended a Tennessee church that Berger founded, but it’s not clear what role, if any, he plays in the pastor’s influence project in Washington. It’s also unclear whether the pastor’s nonprofit pays for the use of the Capitol Hill townhouse.

Berger came to prominence in his home state as the longtime pastor of Grace Chapel, a large church outside Nashville whose members have included the current governor of the state. In 2021, Berger left the church and he and his wife launched their project in Washington.

He soon began Bible study sessions with senators, representatives and congressional aides, according to the Bergers. Meanwhile, Sarah Berger spent her time “in relationship with and pouring into the lives of congressional wives,” tax filings say.

“Iron Sharpening Iron”

Pastor Steve Berger and his wife spoke about their project to influence politicians in a podcast last year.

(via Youtube)

Watch video ➜

Steve Berger quickly made connections at the highest levels of the Republican Party.

“Listen, I have confessed things to Steve that I wouldn't normally confess to anyone else,” Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff in the first Trump administration who remains an important ally of the president, said at a 2023 event with Berger. “We have been praying together, having a Bible study each and every week. Not just me, but several members of Congress.”

A group of congressmen gathered on stage together to speak at the pastor’s 60th-birthday party in October, including Bishop, Rep. Barry Moore, Rep. Andy Ogles and Rep. Warren Davidson. All four are current or former members of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus. (None of the four responded to requests for comment.)

Evidence suggests that Bishop also recently lived at the Capitol Hill townhouse. Three neighbors told ProPublica that the FBI visited them this month asking about Bishop, seemingly as part of the background check for his White House job. “They said that address,” said one neighbor, adding that the agent showed a photo of Bishop. “They said: ‘He lived there up to a couple months ago. Do you know him?’”

Trump has nominated Bishop to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, the powerful White House office that recently moved to freeze funding streams across the federal government. Berger celebrated the nomination on Instagram: “I want to congratulate my dear friend and brother, Congressman Dan Bishop, for accepting this incredible opportunity.”

Do you have any information we should know about Steve Berger or Speaker Mike Johnson? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Jeff Frankl contributed research.

Correction

Feb. 28, 2025: This story originally incorrectly said Steve Berger and Dan Bishop did respond to requests for comment. They did not respond.

by Agnel Philip and Lisa Song

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A few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he had uncovered $2 billion of science grants funded by former President Joe Biden’s administration that prioritized “radical political perspectives” or “neo-Marxist theories.’’ His aides on a congressional committee assembled the list by searching the project descriptions for 699 key terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture.”

When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.

We found that Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.

Among them, for example, was a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best we can tell, the project ran into trouble with Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.

Other projects our AI assistant led us to included:

• Developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It seems to have caught the committee’s attention for using the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”
• Creating biosensors to detect infectious diseases. The grant appears to have been tagged for the repeated use of “POC,” an acronym often used for “people of color” but in this context meaning “point of care” — that is, the place where people receive medical treatment — and “barrier,” referring to a part of the biosensor itself.
• Designing eye-tracking technology for diagnosing and treating concussions. It appears to have gotten flagged for referencing “traumatic” brain injuries and the “status,” meaning the condition, of patients.

It’s “very frightening,” said Charlotte Lindqvist, a biology professor at the University at Buffalo who is conducting the research on mint plants.

Lindqvist spends hours a day grinding up plant samples and analyzing their DNA to identify genetic differences between species. Studying plant diversity, she said, could help secure more resilient food systems. “We are really trying very, very hard ... to move our world forward, understanding it better through our sort of foundational, sometimes groundbreaking research,” she said, “and then you get flagged and blacklisted because there is a word like ‘female’ in your project.”

Staff for the Republicans on the Senate committee assembled their report by examining all NSF grants awarded to projects that began between January 2021 and April 2024. Using their list of keywords, they flagged those earmarked for research that they said was “often based on neo-Marxist theories that identified merit by physical or ethnic attributes, not one’s talent, work ethic, or intellectual curiosity.”

Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people.

Cruz released the full database just as the Trump administration’s NSF said it was examining research grants to make sure they complied with the president’s executive orders terminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cruz said he requested “significant scrutiny” of the grants in his database. At the time, the NSF was using a similar list of keywords for its review.

Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the committee responded to requests for comment.

It’s not clear if approved projects that are still waiting for payments will get their money. A federal judge ruled last Friday that the administration can’t cancel or freeze grants for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When asked how it would respond to the judge’s preliminary injunction, an NSF spokesperson directed ProPublica to an agency webpage, which had not been updated with information about the court ruling at the time of publication.

“NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a spokesperson told ProPublica in response to questions about its review process.

The Senate committee’s list includes words like “diversify” and “biases,” which have technical meanings unrelated to social issues. Although the report’s authors worked to remove grants flagged for those reasons, some, like Lindqvist’s, slipped through.

The lack of precision in the committee’s methodology is “obviously laughable,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional governments. But she also worries about what might happen if lawmakers take a more serious approach, such as trying to ban research on racial inequality, similar to how Congress severely limited studies on gun violence.

The NSF evaluates grant proposals based on two factors. The first is intellectual merit. Every application is reviewed by a panel of experts — often other academics — who specialize in the same topic. They pore over detailed applications that include data, references and researchers’ qualifications, far more information than the brief summaries evaluated by the Senate committee.

The other factor is “broader impacts,” which could include how the research might benefit societal well-being or make science more inclusive.

Currently, federal laws require the NSF to support research at historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions that serve groups who are underrepresented in science. Congress also ordered the NSF to fund efforts “designed to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement” of members of these groups in scientific careers.

“All of that is hard-wired into federal funding,” Scheppele said. “If anyone was ‘woke,’ it was Congress.”

Laws passed by Congress have more legal weight than executive orders, so the NSF shouldn’t prioritize Trump’s order over its mandate to support underrepresented people in science, Scheppele said. The White House, she said in an email, is “literally asking the NSF to violate the law!”

The committee report singled out some projects for simply acknowledging that people from certain demographics face unique challenges. That includes a University of Houston study of maternal mortality that examines why Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the U.S. are nearly three times as likely as white women to die during pregnancy or within the first year after childbirth. Another project, which involved using drones to deliver defibrillators to people suffering cardiac arrest, appeared to be flagged because it noted that emergency response times are slower in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

In other cases, the keywords that caught the committee’s attention may have come from outreach efforts meant to broaden the impact of the research. A $6 million nuclear astrophysics project to study the origins of the universe includes a reference to attracting a “diverse group” of students interested in the subject and a summer school program for increasing interest in nuclear-science careers, “especially among women and minorities.”

That’s in line with a 1998 law that ordered the NSF to develop “intellectual capital, both people and ideas, with particular emphasis on groups and regions that traditionally have not participated fully in science, mathematics, and engineering.”

Congress recognized “you’re going to get better science” that way, said Melissa Finucane, vice president of science and innovation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. When you get different perspectives interacting and thinking about complex problems, she said, you’ll get different and new ways of solving a problem.

The report’s “sledgehammer” methodology ignores the substantial scientific merit of these projects, many of which address “critical national needs in areas such as aerospace, agriculture, and computing infrastructure — as well as the need to broaden the talent pool,” a spokesperson for Democrats on the Senate committee said in an email. The email said that ranking Democrat Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington “understands that there is no way the United States can compete” with the rest of the world on innovation “without ensuring that NSF funding emphasizes the participation of women and minorities in STEM,” a reference to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Rice University professor Vicky Yao has seen firsthand how efforts to broaden participation can increase excitement and interest in science.

When Yao applied for a research grant in 2022, she included outreach to community college students, many of whom are from underrepresented populations and don’t have access to research opportunities.

When ProPublica informed Yao her $610,000 project was on the Senate committee’s list, she found it bizarre that such technical work on DNA methylation — a process that can affect cancer and neurological diseases — could be labeled as “woke.”

The committee’s choice of keywords is so sweeping that shutting down the research that uses those terms would end not just diversity programs but also vast fields of research on social science (“Black communities,” “racial inequality,” “LGBT”), climate change (“net zero,” “climate research,” “clean energy”) and medicine (“white women,” “victims,” “trauma”).

If any research related to women or minority populations is under fire, then “we’re talking about maybe 65% of the American population. So at that point, what’s left?” said Dominic Boyer, an anthropology professor at Rice University whose project on reducing flood risk was flagged by the committee. “Under what authority, or according to what philosophy, can a government invalidate or discredit research that’s focusing on two-thirds of the population?”

Boyer received an award of $750,000 to use nature-based solutions like rain gardens to reduce flooding in Houston, where Hurricane Harvey displaced tens of thousands of people in 2017. His team has begun collaborating closely with residents from three neighborhoods: two lower-income communities where the residents are mostly Hispanic, Black or Asian, and a middle-income neighborhood with mostly Hispanic and white residents.

He initially assumed that’s why his research was flagged. But it turned out that the triggering keywords may have come from boilerplate language that describes the specific NSF program that funded Boyer’s work: Strengthening American Infrastructure. The portions of the grant’s program description containing those keywords were written by the NSF during Trump’s first term. It used the words “socioeconomic” and “equal opportunity” to explain why infrastructure is important to society. The same description is found in more than two dozen other grants on the committee’s list.

Boyer said it speaks to a kind of “Orwellian absurdity” that “these words can only have one meaning, and it’s the meaning that they would like to politicize.”

Sharon Lerner contributed reporting and Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.

by Jeremy Kohler

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The last time Missouri took control of St. Louis’ police force was just before the start of the Civil War, when the state’s secessionist-leaning leaders were trying to prevent police officers from taking up arms against the Confederacy.

The law that put the police department under state control was in effect for the next 152 years. In November 2012, nearly two-thirds of voters approved a statewide ballot measure, pushed by police reform activists and elected officials, that restored local authority and placed the department under the mayor’s jurisdiction.

Now, the state’s Republican governor and GOP-led legislature are again pushing to take over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. They argue that the Democratic-run city government is responsible for a drop in officer morale and that statistics that show a decline in crime are inaccurate.

The Missouri House voted 106-47 last week to transfer control from the city to a state-appointed board this summer. The five-member board would be made up of the mayor and four commissioners appointed by the governor, essentially leaving the governor with the votes to control the police department.

The state Senate is debating the measure, but a vote has not yet been scheduled.

The attempt to reverse a measure overwhelmingly approved by state voters, albeit more than a decade ago, is part of a broader pattern of Missouri’s conservative-led government trying to override the will of the electorate, from repealing voter-approved redistricting reform to trying to reinstate an abortion ban even though voters approved a constitutional amendment last year legalizing the procedure.

State takeovers of metropolitan police departments are rare; Kansas City, Missouri, remains the only major U.S. city with its police force under state control. Its arrangement dates to Reconstruction, when Missouri lawmakers, aiming to limit Black political influence, stripped the city of its oversight role.

After a brief return to local control in the 1930s, the state reasserted authority over Kansas City police to weaken political boss Tom Pendergast, who had used the department for patronage and election fraud.

Baltimore recently regained control of its police department after 160 years of state control.

Republican-led states have taken away control of other aspects of government from local leaders in other cities with majority-Black populations. In Mississippi, officials have expanded the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police beyond government buildings into residential and commercial areas in Jackson, the state capital. They’ve also created a state-run court with appointed judges and increased police funding while the Black-led Jackson Police Department struggles to respond to calls.

Texas and Missouri have intervened in local schools and city governments, leading to disputes about local control — though these takeovers have generally been temporary, with a path to restoring local authority. In Tennessee, the state comptroller backed down from taking over the majority-Black city of Mason after local officials agreed that a certified public accounting or law firm would help the town complete audits, balance its budget and train officials on proper use of tax revenue. It happens in states led by Democrats, too, but less frequently.

“It really is removing this political power from residents, allowing them to have less authority, oversight and voice in how their system of public safety and policing operates,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a senior researcher at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute.

Some St. Louis leaders see the current effort there as echoing 19th-century efforts to limit Black political power. They argue that a majority-white, conservative government is again moving to strip authority from local officials and diminish Black influence over policing.

State Sen. Karla May, a Black Democrat from St. Louis who has testified against the push for state control, said it’s no coincidence that the plan became an urgent matter for legislators, and is advancing, during the tenure of Mayor Tishaura Jones, who also is Black.

May said the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the collective bargaining unit for city police officers, “does not want to be controlled by an African American mayor.” Representatives from the union did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Jones did not make her available for an interview. But the mayor said in an emailed statement that “I don’t think Republican legislators want to give a Black woman who is also a Democrat credit for dramatically reducing crime, increasing officer pay and building out successful public safety programs.” She said advocates for state control have never explained how it would improve public safety.

The push to take control of the St. Louis police is a top priority for Gov. Mike Kehoe, a newly elected Republican whose State of the State address framed the issue in economic terms. He said what mattered was whether businesses felt “safe enough to invest in our cities.” Kehoe, who is white, frequently invokes his upbringing in St. Louis to push for state control.

The House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Brad Christ, a white Republican from the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis, argues that calling his proposal “state control” is misleading because the governor’s appointees would be required to have lived in the city for at least three years.

He noted that the effort to return the police to the state predates Jones’ term as mayor. A Black Democrat from St. Louis filed a similar bill that stalled in the House in 2019 during the tenure of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is white. Christ said in a text that this was “clear evidence that the wild assertion that this effort has been race motivated is completely false.”

The Ethical Society of Police, a group that represents Black police officers in St. Louis, also supports a state takeover. Its president, Donnell Walters, wrote an opinion piece in 2023 with then-Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, calling for state control and alleging mismanagement and low morale under city control.

Walters did not return messages seeking comment.

Heather Taylor, a retired sergeant who led ESOP from 2015 to 2020 — and who later worked in the Jones administration before resigning in 2023 after criticizing the mayor and the department on social media — said she worries the department will suffer under state control. But, she said, ESOP members believe that the city lacks urgency in providing basic support for officers and that the state might do a better job addressing those needs.

Jones has repeatedly pointed to city crime data showing a decline since she hired Robert Tracy as police chief two years ago. Notably, the city’s murder totals have plummeted.

But many argue that the city’s statistics on other types of crimes don’t reflect the sense of lawlessness in St. Louis. Ness Sandoval, a professor of sociology and demography at Saint Louis University who studies crime trends, said he believes the city underreports crime and lacks transparency. “Most people who rely on the data believe there probably should be an asterisk,” he said. Jones has stood behind the crime numbers, saying they are accurate.

Still, the mayor and her police chief maintain that state control does not necessarily reduce crime. In 2012, while the police were still under state oversight, Forbes magazine ranked St. Louis as the second-most-dangerous city in the nation.

Kansas City, which is still under state control, continues to struggle with violent crime. Efforts to restore local oversight have never gained much traction there. Despite past studies and proposals — including a 1968 report listing local control as the top recommendation after police killed six Black residents during riots, and a 2013 mayoral committee vote for local control that failed by a single vote — no serious push has materialized.

by Corey G. Johnson, design by Anna Donlan

For years, some of America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on customers — without their knowledge or consent — to the gun industry’s main lobbying group. Political operatives then employed those details to rally firearms owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House.

The strategy remained a secret for more than two decades.

In a series of stories in recent months, ProPublica revealed the inner workings of the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s project, using a trove of gun industry documents and insider interviews.

We also showed how the NSSF teamed up with the controversial political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge its outreach to gun owners and others in the 2016 election.

Additional internal Cambridge reports obtained by ProPublica now detail the full scope and depth of the persuasion campaign’s sophistication and intrusiveness.

The political consultancy analyzed thousands of details about the lives of people in the NSSF’s enormous database. Were they shopaholics? Did they gamble? Did women buy plus-size or petite underwear?

This story contains interactive graphics that are not displayed here. Read the full story on our website.

The alchemy had three phases.

Phase One: Amassing the Data

Some of the data, excerpted here, was basic information you might find on a census, like marital status or ethnic group.

But the data also contained much more specific information about a person’s aesthetic preferences, purchasing habits and hobbies.

Other data highlighted consumers’ personal opinions, histories and even vices.

How Cambridge converted those tiny bits of data into massive political wins has never before been made public. Its methods raise disturbing questions about how our personal data can be used to manipulate us.

“There is a natural desire to stay anonymous and keep your own information, and this is such a violation of that,” said Calli Schroeder, privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The NSSF has said its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.” Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, said the trade group’s 2016 voter outreach campaign involved only commercially available data.

But Cambridge emails and a report on the NSSF campaign said the data included 20 years of information about gun buyers harvested from manufacturer warranty cards given to the NSSF. A contractor for the trade group also handed Cambridge a database of shoppers at Cabela’s, a popular sporting goods retailer. (The general counsel for Bass Pro, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said the company had been unable to find evidence of Cabela’s “sharing customer information that was not compliant with their privacy policies at or prior to the time of acquisition.”)

Cambridge documents show the firm compared names and addresses in the NSSF and Cabela’s data against the same names and addresses found in a vast array of consumer purchase and lifestyle information, supplied by data broker companies.

Phase Two: Creating the Profiles

Next, analysts used an algorithm to profile and score each person’s behavioral traits based on the data and a psychological assessment tool called OCEAN that measures a human being’s openness to new and different experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. From those scores, Cambridge organized people into five groups it called risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Members of each group received Facebook ads tailored to their group’s psychological profiles.

Below are political ads and descriptions of those personality groups pulled from Cambridge documents for the NSSF project. The ads include hypothetical messages along with the actual versions the firm sent for the NSSF’s election campaign, called GunVote.

The Risk-Taker

Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring high on the scale for neuroticism, risk-takers are “easily frustrated, disorganized, often late and more prone to addiction than others.” They are “attracted to risky situations,” known for “overreacting to various situations,” act “without thinking” and are “often perceived to be outsiders.” Keywords include “security,” “enemies” and “take action.”

Persuasion Tactics: Messaging “could be constructed by first introducing negative scenarios, before providing a reassuring and authoritative solution.”

Sample Ad

Among examples Cambridge gave of ads targeting risk-takers is one that depicts a masked person breaking into a home with the message, “What would you do? Protect the Second Amendment.” The sample ad creates a negative scenario that spotlights the concept of enemies and taking action.

Actual Ad

The ad Cambridge sent to risk-takers conjures the specter of the Supreme Court turning into “an enemy to your gun rights.”

The Go-Getter

Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring low on the neuroticism scale, go-getters are “efficient, productive, and focused on their goals,” often perceived as “self-assured, direct, welcoming and friendly,” as well as being “upbeat about the future.” They are self-aware, in control of their emotions and “like to keep busy and enjoy shared adventures with friends and family.” Keywords include “future” and “hope.”

Persuasion Tactics: Go-getters are best persuaded with messaging that “clearly aligns with the goals to which they are already committed,” according to Cambridge documents. “Imagery should show people collectively taking actions to solve problems in a positive environment.”

Sample Ad

Cambridge’s example of an ad targeting go-getters focuses on shared adventures and a positive future by depicting young men hunting together with the message, “Help the next generation enjoy the hunt.”

Actual Ad

The ad Cambridge sent shows what appears to be a father and son on a hunt, wearing matching camouflage jackets with rifles slung over their left shoulders. The image urges the go-getters to “protect your future.”

The Supporter

Cambridge Analytica Description: Primarily conscientious on the OCEAN scale, supporters are “relaxed and down to earth” and care about their communities, but “prefer not to be the center of attention.” They act judiciously and “react calmly in a crisis.” They are “rule followers” who “uphold traditional values” and “like their own space, which they share with a select few.” Keywords include “community,” “responsibility,” “reality” and “facts.”

Persuasion Tactics: Because supporters value consistency and commitment, they will respond to messages that include “the concept of reciprocity.” Ads should focus on the idea that “helping is a question of responsibility” between the individual and the people they care about.

Sample Ad

The sample ad presents the phrase, “Protect your right to safe firearms use,” over the image of what appears to be a father and son standing in front of a picturesque, well-preserved landscape dotted by mountains.

Actual Ad

The image Cambridge sent features a couple who appear to be on a hunt, looking directly at the camera. Hoping to spur supporters’ leanings toward reciprocity, the message says, “Senator Burr is working hard to protect your gun rights.”

The Carer

Cambridge Analytica Description: Found primarily in the late 50s to early 70s age range, carers are “often led by their emotions but are reluctant to express them, directing their anger inwards against themselves.” They gain control in life through caring for others and focusing on their jobs. They “enjoy voluntary and hands-on activities.” Keywords include “family,” “community,” “cooperation” and “values.”

Persuasion Tactics: Messaging should “appeal to their altruistic side” and should put forward concepts that “will enhance their family life or their lifestyle.” The carer is motivated by altruism, so messages should “appeal to their sensitivity and emotionality, directly leading to a ‘call to action.’”

Sample Ad

The sample ad shows multiple generations of a family spending time together, with a message that appeals to the carer’s focus on family values and emotionality: “You take care of your family. Now take care of your country.”

Actual Ad

The image Cambridge sent to carers depicts a happy family on a sunny day holding hands and surrounded by nature. The message refers to U.S. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina “protecting your family’s way of life.”

The Individualist

Cambridge Analytica Description: Scoring low in openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism, individualists are “stubborn,” “introverted homebodies” who “view others as potential enemies.” They “prefer the simple things in life and like to pursue activities alone.” Individualists tend to “lack empathy” and have “strong and unchanging beliefs about social norms and morality.” Individualists approach issues with “strict discipline and a ‘get-tough’ attitude.” Keywords include “traditions” and “concrete actions.”

Persuasion Tactics: Messaging to individualists should be “direct and straightforward.” They respond with appeals to “their traditional side and their independent approach to life.”

Sample Ad

The sample ad shows a man holding a gun behind his back with the message, “If you can’t protect yourself, who will?” This approach focuses on the isolation and “get-tough attitude” that speaks to individualists.

Actual Ad

The ad Cambridge sent to individualists depicts rows of U.S. flags in a field, an image widely associated with military sacrifice and remembrances of war. The message emphasizes the Supreme Court’s role as “the last line of defense for your rights.”

Phase Three: Delivering the Ads

Cambridge found the targeted people on Facebook and delivered ads through the platform aimed at voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Each pop-up ad said it came from the NSSF’s GunVote page, but they were crafted by Cambridge. The ads sent to potential voters in key states from June 21, 2016, through July 1, 2016, promoted Republican Sens. Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Ron Johnson.

Nearly 817,000 people saw the messages, according to Cambridge’s internal metric reports.

For the next three months, Cambridge included voters in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada in the multistate blast of ads and videos on social media. Altogether, they garnered nearly 378 million views and drove 60,140,280 visitors to the NSSF’s website.

Cambridge also mapped out the locations of people in the five personality groups in the key states and gave NSSF contractors lists containing their names and addresses. The contractors examined the numbers and locations of each persona on a county-by-county basis. Then they mailed to the potential voters’ homes messages designed to persuade them to cast ballots for the gun industry’s preferred candidates.

Targeting Voters at the County Level

Cambridge Analytica's maps show voters broken down by psychological groups.

Ohio

Wisconsin

Missouri

(Persona maps from Cambridge Analytica documents)

See a detailed view of voters grouped by persona in each of the states targeted by Cambridge.