ProPublica

by Duaa Eldeib, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica

This story contains graphic descriptions of suicide attempts.

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The email took Dr. Neal Goldenberg by surprise in a way that few things still do.

As a psychiatrist, he had grown accustomed to seeing patients in their darkest moments. As someone who reviewed insurance denials, he was also well-versed in the arguments that hospitals make to try to overturn an insurer’s decision not to pay for treatment.

But as soon as he opened the review last October, he knew something was different. It was personal and forceful and meticulous — and it would lead him to do something he had never done before.

“Based on the indisputable medical facts, we are unsure why anyone would assert that any part of the insured’s inpatient behavioral health treatment was ‘not medically necessary,’” the appeal letter argued.

The battle playing out on the pages before him began in March of 2024. Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield had refused to pay for a North Carolina man’s monthlong treatment at a psychiatric hospital. The man had been suffering escalating mental health issues, culminating in back-to-back suicide attempts. But using a designation insurers commonly employ when denying coverage, doctors working for Highmark determined the care was not “medically necessary.”

Insurance companies deny hundreds of millions of claims a year, and only a tiny percentage of people appeal them. Even fewer take the process to the very end, appealing to a third-party, or external, reviewer like Goldenberg. A recent report found that, on average, less than 1 out of every 10,000 people eligible for an external review actually requested one.

Goldenberg, who is based in Cleveland, had initially picked up the extra job a few years ago to help pay down the massive student debt he and his wife, a family doctor, had accumulated during medical school.

External reviewers like Dr. Neal Goldenberg have the power to overrule an insurer’s decision to deny coverage for patient care and to force insurance companies to pay for treatment.

In that role, he has the power to overrule an insurer’s decision to deny a patient coverage and force the company to pay for treatment. Few things anger him as much as patients being denied the care they needed, which compelled him to continue doing the reviews even after the student loans were paid off.

Attached to the appeal letter were nearly 200 pages of records organized by headings and numbers. There was even a glossary of diagnosis codes that are used for billing.

Goldenberg’s first thought was that a lawyer had put together the appeal. But the name on the bottom of the letter didn’t belong to a law firm.

He spent the next hour and a half reading the file: records from eight separate medical providers; research on suicidal ideation; letters from two psychiatrists supporting the appeal, including one that described the patient’s depression and stress as causing “psychological suffering and functional impact.”

Then he did something he hadn’t done in the six years he’s been reviewing cases. He called the name at the bottom of the letter: Teressa Sutton-Schulman.

The line rang several times before going to voicemail.

“Hello. My name is Neal Goldenberg. I am reviewing an insurance claim for your husband,” he began.

Teressa Sutton-Schulman and her husband on their wedding day

Sutton-Schulman’s husband, who ProPublica is identifying by his middle initial “L,” had always been anxious and more than a little obsessive. As an adult, financial matters, especially, threw him into a panic and eventually sent him to therapy.

By January of last year, after deciding that the therapy wasn’t working, he made an appointment with his primary care doctor, who prescribed him an antidepressant and antianxiety medication. After a few days, L called the doctor to say he felt worse. A panic attack landed him in the emergency room about a week later.

Right before Valentine’s Day, he met with a psychiatrist.

The way his mind had begun to shuffle through worst-case scenarios was something Sutton-Schulman hadn’t witnessed before.

They met at Georgia Tech. L had noticed her at a party. When he walked up to her, she told him she was waiting for someone.

“I could be someone,” he responded without missing a beat.

She was drawn to his humor and charm. As an introvert, Sutton-Schulman marveled at the way his presence filled a room, floating between people and the things they talked about with ease. He considered her his rock, his best friend, the person he loved most in this world.

They shared a mutual admiration for each other’s intellect and drive. He skewed nerdy, playing Dungeons & Dragons in his downtime. Not that he had much. As a rising star in the world of software engineering, work consumed him. He craved success the same way he pushed the boundaries of technology — relentlessly.

They decided not to have kids; they had each other and their work. In the early 2000s, they built a software consulting company together. Although Sutton-Schulman trained as a chemist, she went back to school to become a paralegal and the company’s in-house legal expert.

More than 20 years into their marriage, they still held hands like it was their first date. When they entered their 50s and faced the prospect of growing old in their three-story house, they decided to buy a ranch home in the same small North Carolina town outside of Raleigh that they had lived in for more than two decades.

That decision would forever alter their lives.

After more than 20 years of marriage, Sutton-Schulman and L bought a ranch home outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.

The pandemic’s housing market, with its skyrocketing prices and houses that sold before they even went on the market, exacerbated his stress. The couple put offers on half a dozen houses. They lost $25,000 in earnest money after backing out of the only two offers that were accepted. The hit hurt, but thanks to L’s job, they had more than enough in the bank.

Finally, in the summer of 2023, they found their house, though it needed some work. They decided to rent out their old house, but that, too, required some fixing up before they could put it on the market. L was determined to get a renter in quickly, and they poured money into both houses simultaneously.

L’s anxiety grew with every expense. They argued about money, about his insistence on undertaking everything at once, about his unwillingness to get treatment, about their five cats. She begged him to get help. He assured her he had it all under control.

After two months, they moved into the new house.

L grew more irrational each day. All he could do was fixate on the finances. On top of it all, they weren’t sleeping. To help with the cats’ transition to the new house, Sutton-Schulman had talked to L about getting them an enclosed space on their patio. But L, who was overseeing the remodeling, didn’t prioritize it. The cats kept them up each night with their incessant whining and scratching at their doors.

She knew that all of his concerns were symptoms of a larger problem, but neglecting to take care of the cats was the final straw. As hard as it was for her to leave him, she felt like she had no other choice. Two weeks after moving in, she packed her bags and her SUV and moved back into their old house.

It took her leaving for him to see a therapist and agree to couple’s counseling.

Buying the house, he told his wife, was a mistake.

If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988

• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

“I started catastrophizing every day,” L said at his appointment with his psychiatrist right before Valentine’s Day, medical records show.

L told him that he regularly woke up at 2:30 a.m. in the throes of a nightmare. His heart raced. His legs felt weak. He contemplated ending his life.

The psychiatrist tried to determine how serious his suicidal thoughts were. L admitted he felt anxious and hopeless, but he said he was afraid to die.

“I’m a fucking coward and I can’t do it,” L told the psychiatrist, according to his medical records. “I don’t know how to kill myself.”

Two days later, he swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and chased them down with bourbon. He slid into the driver’s seat of his Mercedes parked in the garage, turned on the ignition and closed his eyes.

L finally agreed to go to counseling after Sutton-Schulman moved out, but his condition continued to deteriorate.

Goldenberg’s path to medicine began at a young age. He excelled in science in school. He grew up with a dad who was a dentist and a belief that doctors could heal.

But 2003, his first year of medical school, was difficult. He didn’t fit in with some of his classmates who were focused on which speciality would yield the biggest salary.

Stumbling upon a book by Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams, the doctor who devoted himself to infusing humor and compassion in medicine, provided the inspiration he needed. Adams’ name became the title of a movie starring Robin Williams, which made the red clown nose he popped on when visiting sick children famous.

Goldenberg reached out to Adams’ nonprofit Gesundheit Institute, which allowed him to volunteer. He soon embarked on a 300-mile bike ride from Ohio to West Virginia to spend the summer after his first year of medical school surrounded by people who, like him, were frustrated by the health care system. They yearned for an approach that focused not just on the illness of one patient, but on the health of a community.

When he got back, he volunteered at a free clinic in Columbus. The experience deepened his appreciation for caring for the sick as well as his disillusionment with a health care system he viewed as farming out the medical treatment of certain patients to trainees.

The next turning point came when he attended a conference of the American Medical Student Association, which encourages doctors to advocate for affordable health care. Seeing so many of his fellow medical students with the same values energized him.

“Vast swaths of our population were uninsured,” he recalled. “I just couldn’t get over how unfair that was and wanted to be part of the good guys fighting to change that.”

“Vast swaths of our population were uninsured,” recalled Goldenberg. “I just couldn’t get over how unfair that was and wanted to be part of the good guys fighting to change that.”

Goldenberg met his wife at the conference; together they pledged to improve how medicine is practiced. They both pursued family medicine. But during his residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he fell in love with psychiatry. He found satisfaction in building relationships with patients struggling with mental illness and helping them through it.

Madison had pioneered a team-based model in the 1970s that treated patients with severe mental illness in their homes and communities, rather than at institutions and hospitals. He was so struck by this approach that he specialized in community psychiatry. Later, he became medical director of a nonprofit organization that treated the homeless.

The job reviewing health insurance denials came about after he spotted an online job posting.

With more than 15 years’ experience treating patients at clinics and in hospitals, he was flush with knowledge and a desire to make a greater impact. He told himself that he could walk away at any point if he felt he wasn’t living up to the ethical standards he set for himself. He was determined not to be a rubber stamp for anyone — not for the insurance companies and not for the hospitals.

Perhaps surprisingly, he estimates that he sided with insurance companies about half the time. Some hospitals, he said, admitted patients when they didn’t need to, and some doctors wrote that they had ordered treatments that made little sense given the patient’s diagnosis.

The bulk of his cases are reviews involving the major Medicaid plans in Ohio. The third-party company he worked for approached him in 2023 with another opportunity: to do more in-depth external reviews for commercial insurers. He agreed, but his priority remained his main psychiatry job and the patients he treated there.

The third-party review company that Goldenberg works for declined to comment.

State and federal regulations designed external reviews as an attempt to level the playing field between behemoth insurance companies and individual patients. The idea is to provide an added measure that prevents insurers from having the final say in deciding whether they will pay for a claim they had already denied. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 expanded access to the reviews, but barriers regularly get in the way of the process serving as a true check on insurers.

Most people haven’t heard of external reviews, and most denials are not eligible for one. Those that are eligible typically involve medical judgment, surprise medical bills, or an insurer deciding to retroactively cancel or discontinue coverage or determining that a treatment was experimental. Even then, insurers can argue that a denial is ineligible for an external review.

Only after the internal appeals with the insurer are exhausted is an external review an option for some denials. Requests have to be filed within a certain time frame, depending on whether they’re filed under state or federal laws. That distinction can also determine if insurance plans get to pick the company that does the external review.

In addition, it’s nearly impossible to know how effective they are. Insurance companies almost never release data around denials in general. That’s especially true about external reviews.

A recent KFF report looking at federal insurance marketplace plans found that fewer than 1% of of the system’s tens of millions of denials were appealed internally. Of that 1%, about 3% of all upheld internal appeals — only about 5,000 enrollees — went on to file external reviews, though there wasn’t enough data to calculate the rate at which external appeals were upheld.

After L’s suicide attempt last February, a judge ordered him to be committed to a mental health center about 40 minutes south of Raleigh. There, staff took away his phone, shoes and anything that could be a safety hazard. Doctors increased the dosage of his new antidepressant and, while they waited for the medicine to take effect, L spent his days coloring, making bracelets and watching a documentary about meditation.

The court rescinded the involuntary commitment order about a week later, but did so under two conditions: that L be released to his wife’s care and that he see a therapist and a psychiatrist. Sutton-Schulman heeded the judge’s orders and agreed to have him move back in with her.

When she picked him up, they both cried.

“I never want to do anything ever to go back to a place like that again,” he said as he climbed into her car.

At the house, she didn’t let her emotions show through the reassuring facade she maintained for him. Secretly, she was terrified he would try to kill himself again.

Four days later, she woke up to a quiet house. She assumed he’d gone for a walk, as he usually did.

After L’s first suicide attempt, he moved back in with Sutton-Schulman, who agreed to help care for him as a condition of his release from a mental health facility.

She heard the front door open and went to greet him. Her eyes immediately found him leaning over the kitchen sink. As she got closer, she glimpsed a knife in the sink covered in blood. Then she saw blood pouring out of his neck, spilling from his wrists, soaking his sweater.

She grabbed a towel to put pressure on the gash on his neck.

“Did you do this to yourself?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

For the second time in 11 days, she called 911.

“Just let me die,” he said over and over.

Paramedics rushed him to the hospital. This time, police taped off the house and questioned Sutton-Schulman for two hours until a detective got a call from the hospital confirming that L had attempted suicide in the woods behind the house.

By the time she arrived at the hospital, the bleeding was under control. After the doctor stitched up L’s neck and bandaged his wrists, he agreed to accept treatment. Police drove him to Triangle Springs, a residential treatment facility in nearby Raleigh.

But instead of improving, L’s mental health deteriorated. He began displaying signs of psychosis. He told the doctors that “the coke machine was fuzzy and he could hear just random voices,” his medical records show. During a call with Sutton-Schulman, he told her that he believed the other patients had been planted at the facility by the FBI and authorities were trying to frame him for murder.

“Patient is not considered safe to be discharged,” his doctors wrote in his medical notes on four separate occasions.

Desperate, Sutton-Schulman called a friend who is a social worker in psychiatric hospitals. He’s getting worse, she told her. Where else can I take him?

Of the three facilities her friend recommended, The Menninger Clinic in Houston was the only one that returned her call.

She wasn’t sure she could get him there in his condition, but she knew she had to try. She booked an early-morning flight for the two of them. At one point, he dropped to the airport floor. “I can’t do it anymore,” he told her.

“You have to,” she told him.

She was relieved when they arrived at Menninger. The staff did genetic testing that revealed he could have an adverse reaction to the antidepressant his doctor had put him on. Learning that, she said, felt like the missing piece of a puzzle.

Sutton-Schulman got L settled in, met with his doctors and, for the first time in months, felt some hope.

Goldenberg approached his side job with caution.

When he’d started, a part of him feared he would be pressured to side with insurers regardless of the medical evidence. But that didn’t happen. He soon embraced the job as a way to hold everyone accountable because it wasn’t just insurance companies that tried to game the system.

“Doing these chart reviews has also opened my eyes to the way doctors and hospitals cheat the system, even Medicaid,” he said. “And I don’t like that either.”

Over the years, he said, he’s done hundreds of Medicaid reviews and about a dozen external reviews. He knows more than most that no one is immune to having a mental health episode.

“We all have vulnerabilities, and we all have genetic predispositions, sensitivities to certain kinds of stress,” he said. “Someone who’s been able to handle stuff all their life, if they have just too many things going on, it can push you past your breaking point.”

It’s a bit like how a healthy person can be diagnosed with cancer or get into a car accident. People pay for insurance, he said, so it’s not financially disastrous when that happens.

“I’m working within a system that I know is broken, but doing my best to change it from the inside,” he said.

A part of him wonders if Patch Adams would consider him a sellout for not living up to the radical ideologies of his youth. But his goals haven’t changed. They’re evident in the practice philosophy he spotlights at the top of his CV: “Increase quality of life for those suffering from mental illness in an atmosphere of respect, understanding, and collaboration.”

The spirit of his work, which earned him a humanism in medicine scholarship in medical school, is what prompted him to call Sutton-Schulman.

“I see how opaque the system can be,” Goldenberg said, “how frustrating it is when you feel like no one hears you.”

Sutton-Schulman with the records she kept from her husband’s case

On March 19, just a week after her husband was admitted to Menninger, Sutton-Schulman received the first denial from Highmark.

Highmark had sent her a letter in late February confirming pre-authorization for his treatment at Triangle Springs, where L was first treated after his initial suicide attempt. “This approval means that we confirm that the requested services or supplies are medically necessary and appropriate.”

And again a few days later, it sent her another: “We approved the request to extend an inpatient admission for the patient.”

But on that day in mid-March, Highmark showed a balance of $30,599.69.

The reason? The Triangle Springs treatment was not being covered after all; it had been deemed not medically necessary.

The pre-authorization letters included a line saying payment was not guaranteed, but Sutton-Schulman didn’t think much of it. And with good reason. At the top of the letter, in bold, were the words: “We approved your inpatient admission request.” She felt like Highmark was reversing itself.

Sutton-Schulman watched as her husband — one of the smartest men she knew — continued to unravel. When a person is gravely ill, they’re often forced to fight two battles, one against their sickness and the other against the insurance company. As L focused on his health, Sutton-Schulman mobilized against Highmark.

She was no stranger to taking on powerful companies. She was part of the army of women who took on the pharmaceutical giant Bayer after they blamed the company’s permanently implanted birth control device for serious health complications. They filed reports with the Food and Drug Administration over adverse reactions, they organized protests, and many of them sued Bayer, though Sutton-Schulman did not.

At the end of 2018, Bayer stopped selling the device, despite insisting it was safe.

In her fight with Highmark, Sutton-Schulman leaned on her paralegal skills, beginning with reading the company’s coverage booklet from start to finish. That’s where she learned of the possibility of the external review. Then she began tracking and documenting everything — the calls with Highmark, its promises, denial letters, bills and appeal requests — and developing her own filing system of labeled manila folders and document boxes. She even started recording her phone calls with the company.

Just as she started to get going, a call from Menninger stopped her in her tracks.

Her husband had passed out in the bathroom and hit his head. Menninger took him to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for a severe colon infection, likely brought on by his long-term use of antibiotics to treat the neck wound.

Once doctors cleared out the infection, an ambulance took him back to Menninger to complete his treatment.

Meanwhile, Highmark sent Sutton-Schulman a succession of denials.

Sutton-Schulman continued to fight Highmark to cover her husband’s care, even as he was hospitalized.

Highmark refused to pay for the emergency medical treatment for the colon infection. In a bizarre twist, that denial letter listed her husband as the patient but made reference to the care of a newborn, not that of a 52-year-old man having a mental health crisis.

“It was determined,” the letter said, “that your newborn does not meet the criteria for coverage of an inpatient hospital admission.”

“This is when I really start to think they’re just denying,” she recalled. “They’re not even looking. They’re just ‘deny, deny, deny.’”

A denial letter from Highmark relating to L’s stay in a Texas hospital with a colon infection described the 52-year-old man as a newborn, stating “it was determined that your newborn does not meet the criteria for coverage of an inpatient hospital admission.” (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Before she could appeal it, she was hit with another denial. The company denied her husband’s first week of care at Menninger.

Then the fourth denial arrived, this one for the rest of the treatment at Menninger.

Doctors at the hospital where her husband was treated for the colon infection had persuaded Highmark to pay for the medical care, but she was responsible for the remainder of the appeals. She soon found herself raging at what she came to believe was “weaponized incompetence.”

Fax numbers were wrong. Key records that included the billing codes and denial reasons that she needed for her appeals were no longer available online. The insurer wouldn’t even give her access to her husband’s medical records, though he had signed a release granting her permission.

“At this time,” she wrote to the insurer, “I can only interpret Highmark’s refusal to respond to appeal requests in a timely manner or provide information as an ongoing, purposeful effort to erect insurmountable obstacles to this process.”

On her 18th call to Highmark, she bristled at the notion that a critical letter from the insurer was lost in the mail.

“I never got a letter,” Sutton-Schulman shot back from her kitchen table.

Listen to One of Sutton-Schulman’s Calls With Highmark

Sutton-Schulman: So it’s up to me to do the appeal, to handle the appeal. Which it’s very hard for me to do when there are roadblocks being purposefully erected for me, such as not being notified that I have a case number and that I’m supposed to send stuff in and I’m on a deadline. Because I absolutely would have sent that stuff in. I have it.

Highmark representative: Mm-hmm.

Sutton-Schulman: I am very curious under what scenario exactly a person who has tried to kill himself twice within the span of a week is denied an inpatient behavioral health treatment when every doctor that saw him said he needs to be in a residential treatment program. I am infinitely curious what credentialed individual made that decision that that is not medically necessary.

Highmark representative: Yeah, I definitely understand. That’s very frustrating.

Appalled, she filed two complaints with the state insurance department in Pennsylvania, where Highmark is based. The first, in June 2024, explained the multiple roadblocks she experienced and wrote that Highmark denied claims as medically unnecessary and impeded her ability to appeal them. The department wrote back and incorrectly stated that the denial was not eligible for an external review because it did not involve medical judgment or rescission of coverage.

Six months later, Sutton-Schulman filed a second complaint with the agency highlighting a litany of additional problems and asking for an investigation into Highmark. After both complaints were closed, Sutton-Schulman wrote the agency again, reasserting the “weaponized incompetence” claim and adding that she believed the company’s goal “seems to be not paying claims or to delay payments as long as possible.”

“Frankly,” she concluded, “I don’t even know why they are allowed to continue operating like this without sanctions or fines.”

A spokesperson for the insurance department did not answer ProPublica’s questions, saying that state law prohibits the department from disclosing details of individual consumer complaints or ongoing investigations.

In a statement, the department said every complaint is “carefully reviewed and informs our broader oversight. When we find systemic issues, we have not hesitated to act, including imposing fines, ordering corrective actions, and requiring restitution to Pennsylvanians.”

The Pennsylvania agency and the Delaware Department of Insurance have fined Highmark and its health insurance subsidiaries at least four times in the past 10 years, including as recently as 2024 and 2023. The fines were levied for denying and failing to pay claims on time, including those for mental-health-related treatment. Just last year, Delaware fined Highmark $329,000 for violating mental health parity laws, which aim to ensure that mental health and physical health insurance claims are treated equally. Highmark said in response that it evaluated its practices and ensured that the same standards are used for mental health as physical health. In addition, it said at the time that it would review and revise its procedures where necessary to ensure compliance with state and federal requirements.

L provided Highmark two signed releases authorizing the company to respond to ProPublica, which the company said were necessary for it to answer questions. He also called the company to ask it to respond. Still, Highmark would not discuss L’s case in any detail, citing patient privacy.

Instead, the company provided a statement acknowledging “small errors made by physicians and/or members can lead to delays and initial denials,” but said those are corrected on appeals. The statement said company officials “recognize and sincerely regret” when prior authorization and claims processing are “challenging and frustrating,” and added that the issues raised by L’s case were “resolved at least a year ago.”

The statement said prior authorization requests are reviewed by licensed physicians and completed based on widely accepted national guidelines. The decision to deny or uphold an appeal, the statement said, is based on the same national guidelines. Highmark said it is working to improve its prior authorization process, including reducing “denials when errors are made, regardless of who or how the errors are made because we are passionate about providing appropriate and timely care to our members.”

“Highmark is dedicated to full compliance with all applicable state and federal Mental Health Parity laws regarding coverage for behavioral health services for our members,” the statement said.

In the end, Sutton-Schulman won the Triangle Springs appeal, but Highmark classified L’s treatment at Menninger as two separate admissions. She eventually was able to get Highmark to pay for the first week at Menninger — more than $20,000 — but the company wouldn’t budge on the $70,000-plus for the other four weeks of treatment.

Her final shot was an external review, but getting Highmark to agree to one wasn’t easy — though Sutton-Schulman believed they were eligible. When she finally convinced the company, it gave her less than two hours to file a request before a 5 p.m. deadline. She pressed send on the email at 4:34 p.m.

By the time Sutton-Schulman’s letter landed in Goldenberg’s inbox, he had done enough reviews to know what to expect. But the details of L’s case were striking.

“This is the high-risk case that psychiatrists have nightmares about,” he recalls thinking.

It was also the first time he had received an appeal from a family member, not a hospital. He wondered if he should call Sutton-Schulman. He decided that for a doctor who believes so adamantly in humanism in medicine, this was a chance to be human.

She wasn’t sure what to make of his voicemail. A part of her was relieved, but a bigger part didn’t trust it. After all the denials and broken promises, she couldn’t believe that it could all be resolved in a single phone call.

A little while later, Goldenberg called her again. This time she answered.

He asked how her husband was doing. Did he survive?

He’s back home, she said, seeing a local psychiatrist. “I think they finally have his medication correct and stabilized.”

“I just want you to know that there was a human in this whole process that actually took a look at all this stuff, that actually read it,” he told her. “It probably just felt like that has not been the case for most of it.”

“We all have vulnerabilities, and we all have genetic predispositions, sensitivities to certain kinds of stress,” said Goldenberg. “Someone who’s been able to handle stuff all their life, if they have just too many things going on, it can push you past your breaking point.”

He acknowledged that he probably shouldn’t be talking to her.

“Part of the reason I do this job is to make sure that people get what they need,” he said, “and bad doctors get punished, and shitty insurance companies don’t get to do this kind of stuff to people.”

In response to Highmark’s denial, Goldenberg wrote that the insurer did not understand L’s “complex psychiatric and medical situation.” His treatment was interrupted by a medical emergency — he didn’t leave the facility because he had completed treatment, as the company suggested. After doctors tended to the infection, his “psychosis and depression were still severe.” The resumed treatment, he wrote, was “denied unfairly.”

In total, L’s treatment cost more than $220,000, which includes claims that Highmark approved when they were initially filed. But Sutton-Schulman and L had to pay more than $95,000 out of pocket, burning through their savings in hopes that Highmark would reconsider their denials. Many people don’t have the money to pay for care if their insurance won’t cover it. Highmark ended up reimbursing them more than $70,000. Considering out-of-network and other charges, Sutton-Schulman was content with that amount.

With their struggles against Highmark behind them, Sutton-Schulman and L are still putting their lives back together. In July, they returned to couple’s counseling; the therapist told Sutton-Schulman she needed to process the trauma of what happened.

“I’m just now starting to do that,” she said, “because I finally feel like I don’t have any insurance to fight.”

She’s also dealing with her own guilt, wondering if moving out pushed her husband over the edge.

L turned to look at her. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“I know,” she said, her voice breaking. “But the reality of knowing that intellectually to be true, and then emotionally, those are two very different things.”

He has tried to assure his wife that he’s better. He’s returned to work, though colleagues don’t know what happened, other than that a medical emergency kept him away. He logs onto meetings from his laptop and travels for business trips. His voice is exuberant, especially when cracking jokes.

“When your mind shatters like this, it’s hard to explain,” he said. “Nothing makes sense, and you just want it to be over.“

Things feel normal until he catches sight of the scar on his neck. It’s small and could pass as a nick from a razor. But every time he looks in the mirror, he is transported back to that moment in the woods. He’s not sure he can handle the world knowing what happened.

The couple still live in separate houses but eat dinner together most nights. On a recent evening, they sat at the round kitchen table where Sutton-Schulman had done so much of the work fighting with Highmark. He chatted about work. She talked about needing to take one of the cats to the vet. As he got up to leave, she walked him to the door and wrapped her arms around him before saying goodbye.

They recognize how lucky they were that their case was assigned to Goldenberg.

The praise makes Goldenberg uncomfortable.

“It shouldn’t even be a big deal,” he said. “It should have happened multiple steps before it got to me.”

Since the review, Goldenberg has gone back to the residents he teaches. As doctors, he tells them, they have the power to make patients feel seen, to spend an extra few minutes filling out paperwork to help someone with a request for time off work, to support an appeal if they believe an insurer wrongly denied coverage.

“Sometimes,” he said, “there’s an opportunity to reach out and connect in a way that adds a little bit of humanity to the world.”

L has recovered and he and Sutton-Schulman continue to process the trauma of his experience.

How We Did This:

Last September, Teressa Sutton-Schulman reached out to ProPublica to share this story. She was frustrated by Highmark’s denials and unsure if her last resort, the external appeal, would yield results. Reporter Duaa Eldeib interviewed Sutton-Schulman and L multiple times and traveled to North Carolina for additional reporting. To verify the details of their story, Eldeib examined thousands of pages of medical records, billing statements, state agency reports and insurance documents. She also reviewed 911 records, text messages and audio from dozens of recordings Sutton-Schulman made of calls with Highmark and of a voicemail from and a conversation with Dr. Neal Goldenberg. Eldeib made multiple trips to Ohio to interview Goldenberg. She sent Highmark a detailed list of questions, which the company did not answer. In a statement, Highmark said it is “dedicated to full compliance with all applicable state and federal Mental Health Parity laws regarding coverage for behavioral health services for our members.”

Mariam Elba contributed research. Photo editing by Andrea Wise

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

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Three charter school superintendents who are among the highest paid in Texas are overseeing some of the lowest-performing districts in the state, newly released records show. One of them is at risk of closure by school year’s end.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune previously revealed that board members at Valere Public Schools had paid Superintendent Salvador Cavazos up to $870,000 annually in recent years, roughly triple what it reported publicly to the state and on its website. Two other districts the newsrooms covered, Faith Family Academy and Gateway Charter Academy, also substantially underreported the compensation paid to their top leaders.

The state determined that all three of those districts have had failing or near-failing levels of performance in recent years. The ratings, released last month by the Texas Education Agency, also show that charter schools make up the majority of the districts that have repeatedly had “unacceptable” performance, though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas. The agency published two years’ worth of accountability ratings for the state’s public and charter schools that were previously undisclosed due to litigation.

Faith Family Academy, a Dallas-area district with two campuses, was one of eight charter school districts that are now on track to be shut down at the end of the school year after receiving a third consecutive “F” rating. Board members paid superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run the district, which has about 3,000 students.

Education experts said they were troubled that the underperforming charter networks the newsrooms identified would invest so heavily in superintendent compensation instead of areas with a more direct impact on student achievement.

“I don’t know what metrics the board’s reviewing to say that this is performance that would warrant this amount of pay,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston. “What we know from academic literature is when you put resources closest to the students, the students benefit the most. And the superintendent’s position is important, but it’s pretty far from the kids.”

The state’s “three strikes” law mandates that the state education agency automatically shut down a charter school district that has repeatedly failed to meet performance standards.

School leaders have a 30-day window to contest the ratings with the state education agency if they believe there were errors. The state will then release final scores in December that will determine whether failing campuses will be forced to close.

Keri Bickerstaff has sent four of her five children to school at Faith Family Academy but pulled most of them out after prekindergarten. She said she was shocked and saddened when she learned about the district’s payments to Purcell Mozley from ProPublica and the Tribune. At her children’s school in Waxahachie, south of Dallas, Bickerstaff observed crowded classrooms and felt that the teachers lacked experience and left the school at high rates. She was surprised that the superintendent had been paid so highly.

“I was under the impression that funding was an issue,” Bickerstaff said in an interview.

Purcell Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but in an Aug. 14 letter to parents and staff posted on the school’s website, she stated that the district planned to appeal the state’s rating. “While this rating is disappointing on its face,” Purcell Mozley wrote, “we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating.”

Another small charter district in Dallas, Gateway Charter Academy, has two strikes against it after receiving a combination of “F” and “D” ratings over the last three school years. If the district receives another low score next year, it too will be forced to shutter its two campuses that serve around 600 students.

State education records show Gateway has been plagued by teacher turnover, with as many as 62% of its instructors leaving the district in recent years. The district has paid teachers about $10,000 less than the statewide average while paying superintendent Robbie Moore more than $426,000 in 2023, according to tax records — nearly double his base salary of $215,000.

Gateway and Moore did not respond to requests for comment. After it was originally contacted by the newsrooms about the previously undisclosed compensation, the district posted a new document on its website that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore.

While there are no state regulations limiting how much school districts can pay their superintendents, state lawmakers have tried to change that for years. Lawmakers filed at least eight proposals during the most recent regular legislative session that would have constrained administrators’ pay and severance packages at public and charter schools, but none passed. That included a bill authored by Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, that would have capped a superintendent’s income to twice that of the highest-paid teacher in the district.

Hinojosa filed another bill during a special session that began in July that would have allowed superintendents to earn up to three times as much as the top-paid teachers when their district scored an “A” rating. But if a district earned a “D” or “F” rating, a superintendent’s income could not exceed that of the top-paid instructors. The measure failed to reach a committee for discussion.

“If teachers are held accountable for student performance, administrators should be too,” Hinojosa said in a statement.

Although Valere received a “D” rating for the past two years, its board has compensated Cavazos hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on top of his base salary, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the country, the ProPublica and Tribune investigation found.

In the weeks after the newsrooms published their findings, state lawmakers and an advocacy group that represents charter schools strongly criticized Cavazos’ compensation, calling on the district to lower his pay and tie it to specific metrics. The state education agency opened investigations into each of the three charter schools mentioned in the story, which are “open and ongoing,” an agency spokesperson said.

In a written response to questions for this story, Valere Public Schools said that it did not intend to appeal the district’s latest rating and continued to defend Cavazos’ high pay, stating it was justified by his “experience, performance, and involvement in fundraising.”

The board said it didn’t feel that Cavazos’ compensation was interfering with other district priorities and disagreed that Valere was among the lowest-performing districts in the state. Its response cited graduation rates, which are slightly higher than the state average, but did not address the low test scores that drove the district’s “D” ratings.

The board members did not say whether Cavazos’ pay would remain at the same level in the future but pointed to his employment contract for the current school year that lists a base salary of $285,887, plus a “retention stipend” of $20,000 per month, after taxes, which likely doubles his base salary. The stipend, which the newsrooms revealed earlier this year, had not previously appeared in Cavazos’ annual employment letters.

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

Texas’ A-F rating system was established in 2017 and uses metrics such as standardized test scores to grade each district and campus on student achievement, school progress and success with closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The new ratings come after a lengthy legal battle between Texas public school districts and the TEA over changes to the education agency’s ratings system. Districts twice sued Mike Morath, the TEA commissioner, to stop the release of the scores after the agency announced plans to revamp the system in 2023. The lawsuits successfully kept the scores from public view until this spring, when a state appeals court overturned a ruling in favor of the districts, setting the stage for the release of performance ratings for the 2022-23 school year in April, and ratings for the two most recent school years in August after a separate decision by the same appeals court.

The ratings affect charter schools and traditional public schools in different ways. A traditional public school district can potentially face state intervention after one of its campuses receives five years of failing ratings. The new TEA records show that there are five such districts at risk. By comparison, the state is required to automatically shut down an entire charter district that receives three years of failing scores.

Supporters often point to the “three strikes” law as evidence that charter schools are held to a higher level of performance standards than public schools.

The regulation, which was introduced in 2013, is one of many guardrails that has been put in place since charter schools were authorized in the 1990s with far less state oversight than public schools. Charter schools, for example, were originally shielded from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws until reports of leaders engaging in self-dealing and profiteering gradually prompted lawmakers to act.

Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said that Texas holds charter schools “more accountable, more quickly” when they don’t meet performance expectations, including through automatic closures.

Private schools are set to receive a similar level of protection from the laws that govern how traditional public schools spend their money: Under a landmark school voucher bill the Legislature passed this spring, the state plans to direct at least $1 billion public dollars to private education in the coming years. Earlier this month, an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune revealed more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest at Texas private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.

These sorts of conflicts of interest and familial business entanglements have been common among at least two of the three charter districts that have made outsize payments to their leaders.

Records show that Gateway Charter Academy has hired employees related to administrators, including Moore. According to Gateway’s 2017 financial audit, Moore also married an “instructional coach” in the district that year. Records show that the coach’s compensation increased from $75,000 to $221,000 during the 2022-23 school year, after she was promoted to director of curriculum development. She did not respond to requests for comment.

At Faith Family Academy, Gene Lewis, one of the founding board members who hired Purcell Mozley and reviews her performance, is also her uncle, according to bond documents. Lewis’ wife also sits on the board of a separate entity that oversees the district, according to Faith Family Academy’s tax filings.

Lewis and his wife did not respond to requests for comment.

Whitley told the newsrooms that his group had supported a range of legislation to implement greater accountability for charters.

“We strongly believe that all public schools, including public charter schools, must be transparent and good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” he said in a statement.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on Education

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 our stories in your inbox every week.

A Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles working group will examine portions of the state’s towing law, potentially leading to more extensive reforms than those passed by the legislature last session.

The 10-member committee, which met for the first time Monday, must report its recommendations to lawmakers by February. It was originally tasked with examining a more narrow piece of the Connecticut law that requires proceeds from sales of towed cars to be remitted to the state, but members said they also want to study the way vehicles are valued by towing companies and other aspects of the sales process.

The move comes after a yearlong investigation by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica found that the state’s laws favored towing companies at the expense of low-income residents.

The committee, which is chaired by DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera, includes three towing company owners, two consumer advocates and other DMV officials. The group discussed several issues still plaguing the towing industry and vehicle owners after the legislature overhauled the state’s more than 100-year-old law in May.

That legislation, which passed with bipartisan support and takes effect Oct. 1, makes it harder to tow vehicles from private property and easier for drivers to retrieve their vehicles after a tow. The law also constrains practices that had allowed towing companies to start the sales process for some vehicles after 15 days.

The bill also created the DMV working group to study how towers handle profits from sales of towed cars. Under the law, towing companies can sell a vehicle if the owner doesn’t reclaim it, but they are required to hold onto the proceeds for a year so the vehicle owner can claim the money. If the owner never comes forward, companies are required to turn over the proceeds to the state after subtracting their fees.

This year, Guerrera told lawmakers the DMV never set up a system for this process and wasn’t aware of any money being remitted to the state by towers. He said that the DMV has been reviewing the issue and that the committee would be prepared to address it in the report.

Guerrera said Monday that the working group should expand its mission to study broader changes that make it easier for low-income residents to get their cars back.

“There’s got to be a way, too, to make sure that people know what’s going on when their car gets towed,” Guerrera said. “That’s important because that $1,000 vehicle is a lifeline for them, and they need to get it back. So how can we get it back in a way that doesn’t keep accumulating more fees?”

Committee members discussed creating a new way to monitor who owns a vehicle by having the DMV require the owner to submit a record of sale. Currently, towers try to reach the last registered owner of the vehicle, but several people told CT Mirror and ProPublica that they were never informed their car would be sold because they had just bought it and weren’t required to register it yet. The new legislation does allow the vehicle owner to submit a title or bill of sale instead of registration documents to get their car back.

“A huge part of the problem is the fact that we can’t get ahold of the owner of the vehicle,” said Sal Sena, owner of Sena Brothers and Cross Country Automotive in Hartford. “People are buying a car, they don’t register them, it gets towed, and everything’s going back to the last person that owned it a few years ago.”

The committee also tackled several other issues, such as developing a standardized process to determine the value of a car that has been towed. If a towing company deems a vehicle worth $1,500 or less, it can sell it more quickly.

Guerrera questioned how towers come up with their estimated values. “If you’ve got a car that’s three grand or four grand, next thing you know, it’s valued under $1,500, how did that happen?” he asked.

Connecticut Legal Services attorney Rafie Podolsky said how towers value cars has long been an issue for consumers.

“I’m hopeful that either the department or the industry will have data that will allow us to kind of make some comparisons between the presumed value of the car and the dollar amount that comes in on a resale,” he said.

Towing industry representatives said another priority should be modernizing the DMV’s process for getting permission to sell someone’s vehicle. Eileen Colonese of Farmington Motor Sports said towers spend weeks sending paperwork back and forth through the mail to the DMV and vehicle owners.

“There’s portals out there for all kinds of things. Why is there not a portal for this?” Colonese said. “Everyone can submit everything electronically and have access to a more standardized and modernized system.”

The working group must submit a report to the legislature’s Transportation Committee by February, and Guerrera said it’s important to produce something that all members support.

“If we go to the legislature with a piece of information that says we have met with the industry on both sides, and this is what we’ve come up with, we’re in good shape,” Guerrera said. “If we bog down now again, you know, now it’s in the hands of the legislature and we don’t know what could happen.”

by Hannah Allam

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

In the weeks leading up to July 9, Ayman Soliman told friends he was terrified of losing the sanctuary he’d found after fleeing Egypt in 2014 and building a new life as a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

Soliman, 51, was to show up at 9 a.m. on that date for his first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since losing his asylum status. He’d been granted the protections in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the Biden presidency, immigration authorities moved to revoke them based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once President Donald Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination June 3.

By the time of Soliman’s ICE appointment, friends said, he was distraught over the prospect of being returned to the regime that had jailed him for documenting protests as a journalist. He arrived at the agency’s field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, accompanied by fellow clergy and a couple of Democratic state lawmakers.

“I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. I was escaping death,” he said in a video filmed just before he entered.

Inside, Soliman’s attorneys said, he was shocked to find FBI agents waiting for him. They interrogated him for three hours about his charity work more than a decade ago in Egypt, the basis for the Department of Homeland Security accusations of illegal aid, or “material support,” to Islamist militants.

His lawyer eventually emerged from the ICE office holding a belt and a wallet. Soliman had been swept into custody, joining a record 61,000 people now in ICE detention. As he awaits an immigration court trial Sept. 25, he is being held in a county jail run by a sheriff who posted a sign outside reading, “Illegal Aliens Here.”

Legal observers are watching the chaplain’s case as a bellwether of the Trump administration’s ability to merge the vast federal powers of immigration and counterterrorism. The case is also a reminder, they say, of sweeping post-9/11 statutes that both Republican and Democratic administrations have been accused of abusing, especially in cases involving Muslims.

Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups, extending far beyond the basics of weapons, personnel and money. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach.

Over the years, successive administrations have faced legal challenges over how they wield the power; a milestone Supreme Court decision during the Obama administration upheld the laws as constitutional. Now, however, there are particular fears about the material support “sledgehammer,” as one legal scholar put it, in the hands of Trump, who has been openly hostile toward Muslims and determined to deport a million people who are in the United States without permission.

“These statutes are written extraordinarily broadly with the unstated premise that discretion will be exercised responsibly. And one thing this administration has shown is that it doesn’t understand what it means to exercise discretion responsibly,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who argued high-profile material support cases and served as national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

At issue are DHS allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided material support to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups.

The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and his claims of persecution in Egypt.

Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist. In addition to the Egypt-related concerns, DHS filings about Soliman had noted warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq — a country Soliman says he’s never visited.

By elevating the national security argument, Soliman’s lawyers said, DHS was able to bypass an immigration judge and order the chaplain held without bond as “potentially dangerous.” An established terrorism nexus means less transparency for immigrants — and more power for the authorities.

“DHS is judge, jury and executioner,” said Robert Ratliff, one of Soliman’s attorneys.

The idea of Soliman as a secret militant has outraged residents who know him locally as “the interfaith imam” and the first Muslim on the pastoral care team at Cincinnati Children’s, a top-ranked pediatric hospital. Colleagues described a popular chaplain with nicknames for the tiny patients and soothing words for their bleary-eyed parents.

Judy Ragsdale, the former pastoral care director who hired Soliman in 2021 shortly before retiring, said she wrote a letter to hospital leaders imploring them to speak out against the allegations that could return him to certain persecution in Egypt. He lost authorization to work in June, when his asylum was terminated.

“This is a ‘Schindler’s List’ moment,” Ragsdale said she told hospital leaders. “And if you don’t stand up for Ayman, you’re complicit in what’s happening to him.”

Ayman Soliman, center, talking to children at a Cincinnati mosque. Soliman is in ICE detention and facing deportation to Egypt. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica. Faces blurred by ProPublica.)

Some fear DHS is parlaying the scope and secrecy of counterterrorism laws into a weapon to boost the president’s mass-deportation mission.

Immigrant rights groups say a sped-up campaign with fewer guardrails for due process is already leading to removals based on evidence that hasn’t been fully vetted. If DHS is successful in test cases like Soliman’s, they say, material support claims could be more easily applied to immigration cases with even tenuous links to militant factions, including newly designated cartels.

The White House referred questions to Homeland Security, which routed a request for comment to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; a spokesperson there said in a statement that the agency generally “does not discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.”

“An alien — even with a pending application or lawful status — is not shielded from immigration enforcement action,” the statement said. The FBI declined to comment.

Jeffrey Breinholt, an architect of the material support statutes who spent three decades as a federal terrorism prosecutor, defends the laws as crucial to closing loopholes that were exploited by foreign militant groups and their domestic sympathizers.

Breinholt, who retired in 2024, said he has no concerns about the widening scope as it converges with Trump’s deportation push. The designation of cartels, he said, “is a natural outgrowth of the success we have had with ‘material support’ crime.”

To Cole and other critics, however, the Soliman case could be “the canary in the coal mine.”

More Than a Chaplain

Within a few hours of Soliman’s detention, dozens showed up for an impromptu rally and news conference in the ICE center parking lot. That backup has since grown into a hundreds-strong campaign to refute the DHS allegations, which supporters call a resurgence of anti-Muslim fearmongering that has persisted across party lines since the 9/11 attacks 24 years ago this month.

“Any time you have a brown man or a Muslim man and you use the words ‘FBI’ and ‘red flag,’ you don’t have to say any more,” said Tala Ali, a friend of Soliman’s who heads the board of a Cincinnati mosque where he sometimes led prayers.

Tala Ali, a close friend of Soliman and board chair of the Clifton Mosque where he sometimes led prayers (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

Voices calling for Soliman’s release include parents who met him in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. The families are in disbelief that the chaplain they’d grown close to is now jailed in a high-stakes international case. They knew he’d fled Egypt but said they were learning details of his ordeal through the campaign to free him.

“It would be very easy to be resentful and be angry with the world when you have to live through that kind of trauma, and he’s not like that at all. He’s taking on other peoples’ trauma,” said Heather Barrow, whose infant daughter, Mya, died in the NICU last year.

She said Soliman stepped in to spare her grieving family the heartache of making funeral arrangements for a 5-month-old. He attended Mya’s celebration of life and, later, a butterfly release on June 7, which would’ve been her first birthday. A month later, he was in an ICE cell.

“I was like, how is this happening? He was just at our house,” Barrow said.

Another couple, Taylor and Bryan McClain, also came to rely on Soliman when their newborn, Violette, arrived at Cincinnati Children’s last year with life-threatening complications. The chaplain steadied them during their 271 days in the NICU, which Taylor said felt like “a roller coaster in a tornado and it’s on fire.” The McClains call him “family.”

“I say with full confidence: Violette is alive because of the advocacy that Ayman gave us,” Taylor said one recent afternoon as she held her daughter, now just over a year old.

Bryan and Taylor McClain with their daughter, Violette. Soliman was their chaplain in the neonatal intensive care unit at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica) Letters to Soliman from children at Clifton Mosque (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

Clergy members make up another bloc of support — so many that they built a spreadsheet to divide visiting hours among imams, rabbis and pastors. Immigration advocates and Ohio civil rights leaders have added their names to petitions. So have University of Cincinnati student groups including the Ornithology Club and the Harry Potter Appreciation Club.

More than a dozen people faced criminal charges stemming from a melee after a rally in Soliman’s support; demonstrators and police blame each other for the violence July 17.

Two of Soliman’s fellow chaplains at Cincinnati Children’s, Adam Allen and Elizabeth Diop, said they lost their jobs for refusing to keep quiet about their jailed colleague. Meanwhile, the hospital, a cherished local institution, is taking heat for its silence. Soliman’s supporters launched a letter-writing campaign demanding a response from the hospital, which has said it does not discuss personnel issues.

Signs appeared outside the hospital. “Missing Chaplain,” they said. “Abducted By ICE.”

Adam Allen, a former chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s, says he lost his job for refusing to keep quiet about Soliman. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital did not return messages seeking comment. In an internal memo published by The Cincinnati Enquirer, hospital CEO Dr. Steve Davis told employees that the lack of response “should not be mistaken for a lack of caring or action.” As a nonprofit, Davis stressed, the hospital has strict rules about “activities that could be characterized as political.”

Soliman’s supporters press on. One recent Sunday evening, about 200 filled a Cincinnati church where preachers from several faith backgrounds urged them to demand his freedom.

“The trial that Imam Ayman is going through is our trial,” Abdulhakim Mohamed, head of the North American Imams Fellowship, told the crowd. “His justice is ours to own. The injustice is also ours to bear.”

Scenes from an interfaith service in support of Soliman (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica) Escape From Egypt

Soliman’s entanglement with the Egyptian security apparatus began in 2000 when he joined fellow college students to protest repressive laws, he said in asylum papers.

He was periodically locked up and intimidated after that, he said. The persecution worsened more than a decade ago during uprisings that remade the Middle East by toppling dictators — including Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak — but in some places spiraled into civil war.

Soliman worked as a freelance journalist covering pro-democracy revolts in Egypt and neighboring Libya. Friends say he was also studying to become an imam and served on the board of a local chapter of the Islamic charity Al-Gameya al-Shareya, which is known for its network of hospitals and orphan programs throughout Egypt.

The charity, whose name has multiple English spellings, launched in 1912 and is often described as “one of the most established national Islamic organizations.” Scholars have written that early leaders came from the Muslim Brotherhood, archenemy of Egypt’s current military leadership, but that ties ended around 1990 under government pressure.

In the years since, researchers found, the group maintained smooth relations with the government as its more than 1,000 chapters nationwide encompass Egyptians of all political leanings. That delicate balance faltered briefly in 2013 when a military-led counterrevolution quashed the nascent democratic movement and deposed elected leaders who were part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt’s military rulers declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and shuttered any organization it suspected of ties. Al-Gameya Al-Shareya was among more than 1,000 civil society groups blacklisted in the crackdown, court filings say, and chapters suspected of helping the Brotherhood during elections were dissolved. The group resumed operations the next year, when an Egyptian court lifted the ban, ruling that the charity “has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to news reports.

Egypt’s return to zero tolerance for dissidents made Soliman’s activism dangerous, he said in court papers. As a journalist and Islamic scholar, he represented two fields the Egyptian government views as existential threats: a free press and religious organizing.

Soliman fled to the United States in 2014 on a visitor visa and later filed a petition for asylum, describing how security forces over the years had locked him up on false charges and tortured him with electrical shocks. In one incident, his attorney said, Egyptian forces with machine guns stormed into an apartment where Soliman was asleep with his wife and young child. (Through attorneys, Soliman asked to withhold details about his family because they remain in Egypt.)

“For me, it’s life or death,” Soliman later told a U.S. immigration officer of his need to escape.

Officials in Cairo referred questions to the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The asylum application asked whether Soliman had belonged to political parties or other associations in his home country. Ratliff, the attorney, said Soliman marked “yes” and attached a statement that mentioned Al-Gameya Al-Shareya and his role in fundraising for the local chapter.

Friends said Soliman rejoiced when he was granted asylum in 2018, under the first Trump administration, and sought permanent residency as the next step toward reuniting with his family. But the process stalled. “Bureaucratic hurdle after bureaucratic hurdle,” Ratliff said.

Then came a more serious snag. In 2021, Soliman learned he was on a federal watchlist when a background check for a chaplain job at an Oregon prison showed that the FBI had flagged him, court papers show.

His attorneys said they have no idea why. It could’ve been about a specific piece of intelligence. It could’ve been a misspelling or mistaken identity, simple errors that have landed ordinary Muslims on opaque “war on terror” watchlists that are nearly impossible to get off.

Soliman, friends say, insisted on trying to clear his name. With the help of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, he sued government agencies including the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration. That route led to open-ended legal battles that yielded no clear answers and no green card.

Instead, his place in the country became more vulnerable. In December, the final stretch of the Biden administration, Soliman received notice that the government intended to terminate his asylum based on “inconsistencies” in his claims of persecution and concern that his charity work made him inadmissible based on “possible membership in a terrorist organization.”

Some of his friends are convinced it was payback for the lawsuits, but attorneys say there’s no telling what triggered a review.

“What Ayman has experienced is something that, post-9/11, has been the reality of Muslims in this country,” said Ali, his friend and advocate. “All he did was try to get answers and accountability for what he’d been put through.”

ICE parking spots outside of the Butler County Jail (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica) Big Claims, Little Transparency

Contested asylum cases like Soliman’s were prime targets when Trump took office the next month and supercharged deportations, a top campaign pledge. Since his return to office, ICE arrests have doubled.

Soliman was called to an asylum hearing in February, a month into the new administration, for a last shot at defending his eligibility. A DHS officer asked about claims in the Biden-era notice alleging “discrepancies in date and number of times he suffered harm” and raising doubts about a handwritten Egyptian police report and letters authenticating his journalistic work.

A transcript shows Soliman explaining that he sometimes got confused when describing traumatic incidents from years ago in English, his second language. He said the police report was a rough translation included by mistake and submitted statements verifying his journalism.

Then the DHS officer’s questioning took a turn: “When did you start supporting Al-Jameya Al-Shareya?”

For the rest of the meeting, the transcript shows, the officer drilled down on Soliman’s knowledge of the charity: fundraising, chapter size, support for violence and whether he had been aware of a Brotherhood link.

Another of Soliman’s attorneys interrupted when the immigration officer said the Brotherhood had been a Tier III group since 2012. That’s not how it works, the attorney countered — only top-tier terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or the Islamic State are given dates of designation. Tier III, she said, is for undesignated groups and is determined on a case-by-case basis, with the burden of proof on the government.

“Counsel, I’ll give you an opportunity at the end to make a closing,” the DHS officer said.

“I understand,” the attorney replied, “but we’re talking about something factual.”

The next time Soliman heard from DHS was the official termination of his asylum, effective June 3. This time, there was no hedging in language that declared he was ineligible based on “evidence that indicated you provided material support to a Tier III terrorist organization.” A few weeks later, he was taken into custody and notified of his pending removal.

Soliman’s legal team sued, arguing that he was stripped of asylum on illegal grounds because the designations had been made “without proper findings” and based on no new evidence.

Court filings show DHS attorneys introducing, then withdrawing or amending, materials to build a case linking Soliman to the Brotherhood through the charity.

“It looked like, ‘What can we put here to get to there?’” said Ratliff, a former immigration judge.

Among the supporting evidence filed by the government are three academic reports by scholars with deep knowledge of Islamic charities in Egypt. Soliman’s legal team filed statements from all three balking at how DHS had cherry-picked their research.

Steven Brooke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailed “important mistakes of fact and interpretation.” Neil Russell, an academic in Scotland, called the U.S. conclusions “a mischaracterization of my findings.” Marie Vannetzel, a French scholar who has conducted field research with Al-Gameya Al-Shareya, rebutted what she called “a dishonest manipulation of my text and my work.”

Vannetzel wrote that she rejects the idea that Soliman, “simply by virtue of his activity in the association, could be accused of providing material support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Observers of Cairo’s unsparing campaign to uproot Islamist opposition say the matter is clear-cut: If the charity survived the scrutiny of Egyptian intelligence, then it’s not Muslim Brotherhood. “It’s really striking that this group is not proscribed,” said Michael Hanna, an Egypt specialist and U.S. program director of the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

Soliman’s attorneys also criticized the government’s assertion in court filings that he, as a board member of one local branch, would’ve been aware of any Brotherhood affiliation of chapters nationwide. “If a Rotarian in Seattle commits murder, we don’t go charging Rotarians in Des Moines with conspiracy,” Ratliff said.

Separate from U.S. attempts to tie Soliman to the Brotherhood was a puzzling footnote about Iraq that appeared in a later filing. Without detail, DHS attorneys alluded to warrants for “murder and terrorism activities.” Ratliff said a DHS attorney later confirmed to him in a phone call that it wasn’t about Soliman, but didn’t explain why it was there.

The error remained uncorrected in filings until Sept. 3, when DHS attorney Cheryl Gutridge acknowledged in court that it was an “inadvertent” reference to another case, Ohio news outlets reported. The original wording suggesting that Soliman faced murder charges in Iraq had been included in the government’s successful argument for keeping him in custody.

DHS did not address questions about the Iraq reference.

A close friend, Ahmed Elkady, said Soliman told him on a jail visit he was stunned to be linked to Iraq, a place he’s never been: “He said, ‘How can I become a virtual terrorist?”

Ahmed Elkady said Soliman told him on a jail visit he was stunned to be linked to Iraq, a place he’s never been. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica) A Sheriff’s ICE Fiefdom

As he awaits trial in immigration court, Soliman is in custody at the Butler County Jail, about 30 miles outside of Cincinnati, past cornfields and a German social club and the Town and Country Mobile Home Park.

For more than 20 years, this outpost has been the domain of Sheriff Richard Jones, a cowboy hat-wearing firebrand who keeps a framed photo of Trump in his office. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Jones mused that a Trump victory might put him “back in the deportation business.”

From 2003 to 2021, the jail had been contracted to house immigration detainees until the arrangement dissolved in the Biden era. As predicted, the county entered into a new agreement with ICE in February, after Trump returned to power, to hold around 400 detainees: $68 a day per person, plus $36 an hour for the sheriff’s office toward transportation.

Jones celebrated the restored partnership by posting a fake image showing inflatable gators outside the jail, a nod to ICE’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida. A Black Lives Matter group in Dayton issued a statement calling the sheriff’s post an “egregious act of cruelty and historical mockery.”

As it returns to deportation work, the jail still faces a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2020 by two ICE prisoners who said they endured beatings and discrimination. One plaintiff, a Muslim, said a jailer called him a “fucking terrorist” and threatened to throw his prayer rug in the toilet. Jones has disputed the claims.

Imams Mutazz Alabd and Ihab Alsaghier visit the Butler County Jail in hopes of seeing Soliman. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

The sheriff is in the news again because of Soliman. In court filings, the Muslim chaplain says he was denied access to a space where he could lead communal prayers and then placed in “isolation” for nearly a week with only an hour of phone access between midnight and 1 a.m.

Soliman’s attorneys say in court papers that the episode was related to “targeted harassment” over his religion. The sheriff’s office told local outlets that it respects religious freedom and said Soliman was placed in isolation because he was “argumentative” and “threatening.”

After agreeing to an interview with ProPublica, Jones later decided he was “no longer interested,” the sheriff’s spokesperson, Deputy Kim Peters, wrote in a text message.

As he languishes in jail, Soliman’s empty apartment in Cincinnati has become a way station for an inner circle of supporters, who said they felt like “intruders” when they first gathered there. Soliman is known as an elegant dresser, but his apartment was in bachelor-pad disarray, a reflection of his long hours at the hospital and the abruptness of his detention, said his friends, also clerics. The imams laughed when one confessed that he first thought the FBI had ransacked the place.

Soliman’s apartment has become a way station for supporters. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

Over water bottles and energy drinks scavenged from Soliman’s fridge, they talked about the deportation threat. In Egypt, pro-government news outlets already have trumpeted the case as proof that Soliman was leading a secret Brotherhood cell in America.

Despite Soliman’s predicament, they said, being in limbo here is preferable to the alternative.

“You think I’m afraid of being here in jail?” Soliman told fellow imam Ihab Alsaghier during a recent visit. “Every moment I’m alone, I imagine I’m on a flight back to Egypt.”

by Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat, and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

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This summer, worried parents called the principal at Chalmers Elementary on Chicago’s West Side to ask if the district had shuttered the school. They had noticed second-floor windows boarded up.

But despite years of declining enrollment, the school wasn’t closing. It was undergoing major renovations.

Students returning to Chalmers last month found an expansive new engineering space, computer lab and arts studio. The teachers who greeted them had received special training. A cache of new technology — 3D printers, computers and bee-shaped robots to teach students basic coding — offered fresh possibilities.

The influx of dollars and attention has lifted hopes at Chalmers, with officials at Chicago Public Schools and City Hall testing the idea that investing in high-poverty schools can reverse enrollment losses.

But it could take years and millions of dollars to see if it works.

Chalmers, in the historic North Lawndale neighborhood, served about 210 students last year in a building with capacity for 600. Just around the corner, about 210 students populated Johnson Elementary on a campus meant for 480. The local high school, Collins Academy, was down to 200 students. The schools serve mostly Black and low-income students.

The enrollment slide at the three schools and others in the area was partly the result of decisions by previous mayors and public school administrations who labeled North Lawndale’s schools as failing and opened new ones — many run by private entities — that drew families away. About a decade ago, the district closed and overhauled Collins and fired educators at Chalmers and Johnson who had built relationships with families and temporarily handed the schools over to a private operator to try to turn them around academically.

All the while, families have been leaving the neighborhood or having fewer babies, creating demographic challenges outside school officials’ control. Across the district, overall enrollment dropped by 70,000 in the past decade. That decline meant some schools in North Lawndale and elsewhere became tiny, costly to run and unable to offer a rich student experience.

Three of every 10 Chicago schools sit at least half-empty, and closing or merging them remains a political third rail. Chicago officials, faced with pressure from the teachers union and community groups, have not confronted this challenge. And, as Chalkbeat and ProPublica reported in June, for years the district has largely left chronically underenrolled schools to struggle.

Now, CPS and the city — under new leadership — are backing a different, community-led approach: spending at least $40 million to transform Chalmers, Johnson and Collins into science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM, academies. The money is covering building upgrades, professional development, new educator positions and technology in the initiative’s first two years.

After years spent promoting better-resourced selective and magnet schools and opening up charters en masse, CPS is hoping to draw families back to the neighborhood schools that many of them abandoned.

The district has held up the North Lawndale initiative as an example of working closely with local communities to find solutions to under-enrollment — and as a model for other Chicago neighborhoods that have experienced disinvestment and student losses.

“When we are successful in having high-quality programs, what we know from history is that more children will want to come,” former CEO Pedro Martinez said at a press event at Collins last school year.

Education experts say the North Lawndale experiment is promising, and locally, the project has drawn a lot of cheerleaders, roughly $1 million in philanthropic backing and no vocal opposition. But solving the city’s enrollment challenge by trying to attract families to neighborhood schools is a daunting and uncertain task. New science and technology programs the district launched in other neighborhoods in recent years have not always brought a surge of students.

Chicago still maintains a robust system of school choice, and the school-age population continues to shrink. Without an influx of new students from outside of North Lawndale, growing the three schools could mean siphoning students from other schools with their own enrollment woes.

Preliminary data a few weeks into the school year shows flat enrollment, but the project’s supporters say word about it is just getting out. A key challenge is ensuring the cash-strapped district keeps funding the new positions, staff training and facility upgrades after money for the first two years runs out.

Ralph Martire, the executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, which has criticized the district’s spending in the past, says it’s tough to argue against programs that could boost student outcomes in high-poverty schools.

“There’s never a good reason not to invest in the education of kids who’ve been traditionally underserved,” he said. “The impact on enrollment — that’s really hard to predict. I don’t know that we have the data to give a definitive answer.”

In any case, given that the initiative took seven years to launch and that it came with a high price tag, it’s likely not a solution the Chicago school district can readily replicate in other neighborhoods grappling with underenrollment.

“The question is how the district is supporting innovative models at scale, not how they’re supporting one-off alternatives alone,” said Carrie Hahnel, a school finance researcher with the nonprofit Bellwether.

“Districts are trying all kinds of things — work-based learning, dual enrollment, themed academies, small schools within schools — and yet we still see these declines,” Hahnel said. “The education sector is really struggling right now to figure out what it takes to attract families.”

Chalmers is one of three Chicago Public Schools in North Lawndale shifting to STEAM programming, which adds the arts and social studies to the traditional STEM focus of science, technology, engineering and math. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica) How Past Policies Drove Students Away

In the name of school reform in the 2000s, Chicago officials under Mayor Richard M. Daley and later Mayor Rahm Emanuel enacted a series of policies that contributed to the shrinking of neighborhood schools, like those in North Lawndale.

After the federal No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001 and schools in some high-poverty areas did not perform well on annual standardized tests, many were labeled failing and in need of drastic reforms. Chicago’s schools CEO at the time, Arne Duncan — who under President Barack Obama led the U.S. Department of Education — embraced opening independently operated, publicly funded charter schools.

His administration maintained that was the fastest way to give vulnerable students a better experience and spur traditional public campuses to improve. In North Lawndale, families eager for higher-performing, better-resourced options have embraced the new schools — or sent their children to CPS magnet or selective enrollment schools farther from home.

In the 2005-06 school year, there were about 5,000 students living within the boundaries of North Lawndale’s 12 schools, and about 70% went to their assigned neighborhood school, according to a ProPublica-Chalkbeat analysis of district data. There were three charter schools open in the neighborhood.

The most recent data, from last school year, shows there are roughly 4,000 students living within the boundaries of the 10 remaining neighborhood schools in North Lawndale, but only about 30% attend their assigned school. Meanwhile, the neighborhood is now home to seven charter schools — among the highest concentration of them in Chicago — and they enroll 2,800 students.

Duncan declined to speak with ProPublica and Chalkbeat about Chicago’s enrollment troubles.

Betty Allen-Green, a retired Chicago principal, watched all of this happening and said she grew alarmed by the emptying out of the neighborhood’s public schools and outraged by the dearth of specialized programs they offered.

By 2018, Allen-Green and a small group of other longtime North Lawndale residents and former educators had tackled an ambitious goal: give local families a high-quality neighborhood school they’d be eager to choose. Among these advocates was Areulia Davis, whose kindergarten class had met on the auditorium stage in an overcrowded Pope elementary in the 1960s. In 2013, she’d seen a diminished Pope become one of 50 campuses shuttered in the country’s largest mass school closures.

The group felt their mission was key to a broader Quality of Life Plan that North Lawndale leaders unveiled in 2018, which also included goals to increase affordable housing, improve safety and create more jobs.

“We wanted to bring the children of North Lawndale back to the schools of North Lawndale,” Allen-Green said.

Betty Allen-Green, a retired Chicago principal, has worked to revitalize schools in North Lawndale and pushed for the STEAM program. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

Allen-Green and the other former educators pitched a plan to build a new state-of-the-art STEAM school. They say district officials urged them to include the consolidation of three underenrolled schools alongside the proposed $65 million construction project. The idea echoed what the district had just done in Englewood on the South Side at the time: closing several small high schools and replacing them with a state-of-the-art high school focused on science and technology.

The North Lawndale group lined up almost two dozen high-profile partners, from the city’s science museum to universities, to help with teacher training, field trips and other services.

But their plan met with intense opposition from the Chicago Teachers Union and families at the three schools that would be targeted for closure. Shuttering schools would be especially disruptive to families amid the pandemic, and especially painful in a neighborhood still reeling from earlier closures, the union said.

Allen-Green countered that she and other project backers had been on the front lines of opposing school closures in 2013. But, she argued, with unabated enrollment losses in the following years, it made sense to combine the resources of several tiny schools.

Still, Allen-Green’s group backed off and began formulating other plans without any closures. One finally stuck: give three existing schools — Johnson, Chalmers and Collins — a STEAM makeover.

Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union employee and staunch opponent of closures who has promised to improve housing and draw families to places like North Lawndale, became a proponent once he took office. (Johnson’s office did not respond to requests for comment about Chicago’s efforts to address small schools.)

By 2024, City Hall pitched in $10 million toward the $41 million project from a city pool of tax dollars for economic development.

And when Johnson selected where he’d ring the bell to mark the first day of school, the mayor chose Chalmers in North Lawndale.

Chalmers Principal Romian Crockett said families are excited about the STEAM revamp. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica) Doing “Right by the Kids We’ve Already Got”

Like other parents dropping off their children at Chalmers on the first day of school in August, Angela Dixon said she knew little about the school’s transformation into a STEAM campus. She likes the school because of its proximity to her home and the supportive small school feel, which has helped her third grade son thrive.

School leaders on the STEAM campuses say the overhaul, including a more student-led approach to teaching, is already generating positive buzz. Chalmers Principal Romian Crockett says he’d like to see more students enroll, especially in the early grades. Still, Crockett, who gives himself two days at the start of the year to learn each student’s name, thinks the project will help even if it doesn’t significantly boost enrollment.

“I don’t quantify achievement by the number of bodies,” he said. “I want to do right by the kids we’ve already got.”

But for Allen-Green and other community members supporting the project, a major preoccupation this year remains selling the three schools to more families in the neighborhood. They are pushing the district to hang new banners promoting the campuses, polish their websites and pay for new school marquees.

They hope Johnson and Chalmers will draw some students from outside the neighborhood. District officials say they’ll be leaning on the three schools’ principals to drive these marketing efforts.

But across the city, efforts to bolster neighborhood schools have run headlong into trends and attitudes unleashed by the district itself when it endorsed magnets, selectives and charters as stronger options.

First image: A view of the skyline from a classroom at Johnson Elementary. Second image: Students wait in line to enter a classroom at Johnson. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)

In December 2023, the school board passed a resolution vowing to rethink school choice and prioritize neighborhood schools, nodding to their role as vital community hubs. It drew pushback and alarm, including from Black and Latino families on the district’s South and West sides wary of CPS limiting their options. The district backed off from any moves that might be seen as undermining its magnet or selective enrollment programs. Still, the district’s new five-year strategic plan includes a goal to “increase the percentage of students attending schools within their neighborhood or community area.”

Some areas with underenrolled schools still have robust numbers of CPS students living in them. Martinez has held up the neighborhood of Austin as an example of an area that has enough students to fill bustling campuses, but many families instead choose schools elsewhere.

“If every student went to school in Austin that lives there, we’d be overcrowded,” he said at a City Club Chicago speech in June. (Martinez was fired after a clash with the mayor over the district’s budget.)

More than 1,500 potential students live within the boundaries of Austin’s local high school, but only 114 enrolled last year.

An experiment in Englewood on the city’s South Side, where population was dropping, sought to create an attractive new neighborhood high school while closing four small ones. The district built an $85 million modern STEM high school, and enrollment grew initially. But last year it slipped to about 630 from its peak of about 830 three years earlier. It had an attendance rate of roughly 65% and a graduation rate of about 62% for the 2023-24 school year, both significantly below the district average.

Mistrust of neighborhood schools can run deep, said Blaire Flowers, a West Side mother of five. Families remain wary of high educator turnover, few engaging programs and lackluster graduation and other student metrics — or they simply want the rich course offerings and extracurricular activities of schools elsewhere. After her own negative experiences as a student in the neighborhood, she has largely chosen North Lawndale charter schools for her children over the years.

She thinks the STEAM initiative could be a game changer for local schools: “Right now there are no programs in these high schools and elementaries that make students want to go there.”

But Flowers said she and other parents will wait for solid evidence that the makeovers are paying off in stronger student outcomes before considering these schools.

Corey Morrison, executive director of the district’s STEM Department, said CPS has brought coveted programs to dozens of its neighborhood schools in recent years. Some, like Peck Elementary on the city’s Southwest Side, have earned recognition as exemplary STEM schools. But they haven’t shifted the demographic trajectories of their neighborhoods.

Still, Morrison is hopeful about the prospects in North Lawndale.

“I just don’t see how this doesn’t draw the community because it came from the community,” he said. “They’re telling us what they need and want, and we’re designing the very best version of that we can provide.”

by Jake Pearson

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Last month, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order “guaranteeing fair banking for all Americans,” he served notice of a coming federal crackdown.

Banks who have denied customers access to accounts, loans or credit cards “on the basis of political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities,” he said, would now feel the full force of government regulators. Violators could find themselves facing fines, consent decrees or “other disciplinary measures” in an effort to stamp out “politicized or unlawful debanking.”

The cause hits close to home for the president, whose family business sued Capital One earlier this year, alleging, without providing evidence, that hundreds of its accounts were closed in the summer of 2021 “as a result of political discrimination.”

Even so, the administration may find it difficult to enforce the president’s order for one simple reason: Seven months of aggressive cost-cutting and government downsizing has left the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the primary regulators that Trump tasked with carrying out his banking directive, a shell of an agency.

In fact, CFPB leaders appointed by the president are awaiting final court approval to fire the majority of the bureau’s remaining staffers, a move that would leave just a skeleton crew in place and likely end dozens of investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance. Since February, most staffers have been under a stop-work order that has effectively stalled the bulk of its probes — including ones into debanking.

Among them are investigations into why JPMorgan Chase and Citibank freeze and close bank accounts, respectively, according to people familiar with the matters. Work was also suspended on inquiries into whether two little-known companies that banks use to screen prospective customers have wrongly flagged some as too risky to serve, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive matters.

Court records show that one of those firms, Regulatory DataCorp, provides reports on customers to Capital One — the very financial institution that Trump’s family business has accused of debanking. (A Capital One spokesperson declined to comment, but the bank has disputed the Trump business’s claims of political discrimination and moved to dismiss its lawsuit, writing in court papers that it was “false” that the bank closed Trump accounts because it disagreed with the president’s views.)

In dismantling the CFPB, the Trump administration has portrayed the agency as an industry antagonist and an example of government overreach. But Luke Herrine, a consumer law expert at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that Trump officials, in their haste to shrink the federal bureaucracy, “didn’t really consider whether there were some aspects of the CFPB that might be useful for their projects and what they might have to do to preserve them.”

In fact, days before he was sacked by the Trump administration, then-CFPB head Rohit Chopra told a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society that the government needed to do more on debanking and advocated for due process rights for customers as well as more “real, clear, bright-line prohibitions” on what information banks can use in deciding to freeze or close accounts.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

To be sure, Trump’s executive order directs a host of regulatory agencies to take action, and some of them, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, have already begun making changes to their bank examination processes to address the president’s concerns. But the CFPB is the only one that is specifically charged with protecting consumers, hundreds of whom file complaints each month alleging they’ve been denied access to the financial system.

A spokesperson for the CFPB didn’t respond to an email and call seeking comment. But a recent decision by the agency sheds some light on how bureau officials may be interpreting Trump’s order.

Last month, the CFPB cited the order as it dropped a Biden-era probe into a company that provided loans for customers to buy firearms and pets, saying the investigation was politically motivated; the services were marketed to conservatives and Donald Trump Jr. was a board member of the firm’s parent company. Though the company had previously reached deals with regulators in California and Massachusetts over its lending practices, the CFPB’s chief legal officer wrote in a recent letter that the case “represents precisely the kind of unconstitutional targeting” barred by Trump’s debanking directive.

Banks make decisions about who to serve based on a number of factors, including the financial and reputational risks of doing business. They also must follow laws and rules requiring them to know their customers and prevent money laundering.

But leaders in both political parties agree that Americans are sometimes unfairly denied credit or accounts by big financial institutions. The issue became something of a cause celebre in Republican circles after former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice launched a crackdown on unscrupulous payday lenders and other high-risk businesses, in part by urging the payment processors and banks that provide those enterprises access to the financial system to be more diligent in looking for signs of fraud.

The former president of the American Bankers Association asserted that the program was “compelling banks to deny service to unpopular but perfectly legal industries by threatening penalties,” a message that Republicans amplified as an example of Obama-era government overreach. Their argument gained steam when the firearms industry discovered its retailers had been listed as a high-risk merchant in an obscure FDIC newsletter, according to Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who has written that the whole affair has taken on “symbolic and mythic proportions in partisan discourse about regulation.”

Many conservative activists and party leaders now claim that some Republicans are being rejected as customers because of their politics — and even at the behest of government regulators. No evidence has emerged to support the claim and indeed, as Reuters recently reported, just 35 of the 8,361 detailed complaints filed with the CFPB about closed bank accounts since 2012 included terms such as “politics,” “conservative” or “Christian.”

Complaints of discrimination are also increasingly leveled by cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, many of whom backed Trump’s presidential campaign. Their narrative gained traction in 2023 when regulators warned banks about the risks associated with digital assets, an act some in the crypto industry billed as a revival of the Obama-era crackdown.

Getting a sense of the scope of debanking was in part what the CFPB was exploring in its inquiries when Trump took office in January, the people familiar with them said. At JPMorgan, for example, about a million customers’ accounts are frozen each year, they said, though the justification for doing so varies and in many cases it’s done in response to fraud.

The CFPB investigations into Regulatory DataCorp and another screening company, LSEG World-Check, were looking in part into whether customers had been denied accounts or had seen their accounts closed after the companies wrongly flagged them as problematic, generating false positives or outright mistakes in dossiers compiled by analyzing vast news and public records databases, the people said.

The CFPB had issued subpoenas in its inquiries, which were still in the early stages, said the people familiar with the probes.

A company spokesperson for World-Check said “we have not understood World Check to be under review by any agency for potential denial of credit.” A spokesperson for Moody’s, which acquired Regulatory DataCorp in 2020, didn’t return a call and email.

A JPMorgan spokesperson said the bank wasn’t aware “of the CFPB investigating so-called politicized debanking, as it is discussed in the recent Executive Order” and Citibank declined to comment. In a statement released after Trump issued his executive order, a coalition of bank industry groups said the directive would “ensure all consumers and businesses are treated fairly, a goal the nation’s banks share with the Administration” but one that hasn’t been met because “regulatory overreach, supervisory discretion and a maze of obscure rules have stood in the way.”

Part of the problem is that the whole debanking process is cloaked in secrecy, since financial institutions are subject to a constellation of regulations and laws — including one called the Bank Secrecy Act — that require them to refer potentially suspicious activity to the Treasury Department in confidential reports they can’t talk about. That can be frustrating for customers who are not told why they’re being cut off — and it provides an opportunity for outsiders to offer their own conclusions, experts said.

What’s more, international best practices counsel financial institutions to give people in high-profile positions, who are called “politically exposed persons,” along with their immediate family members and associates, an extra due-diligence scrub since they are deemed more susceptible to bribery or corruption.

A 2023 New York Times series exploring debanking documented various instances in which banks flagged what turned out to be benign transactions as unusual, freezing accounts for fear of not complying with various rules that bar financial institutions from facilitating money laundering, terrorism or fraud.

Banks have expressed a desire for more clarity from their regulators on when they should boot customers and whether they can provide more information about the reasoning behind their decision.

As it stands, banks tell affected customers little to nothing. In that vacuum, Republicans have often ascribed political bias as the motivation without providing concrete evidence to back it up, said Stevenson, the debanking expert.

Ironically, the Trump administration quashed an effort that could have shed more light on debanking when it abandoned a legal case earlier this year.

Under former President Joe Biden, the CFPB had sought to amend its exam manual to give its bank examiners more leeway to scrutinize financial institutions for potentially discriminatory practices, court records show. The Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups sued and a district court blocked the agency from doing so, arguing the bureau had exceeded its authority. The Biden-era CFPB appealed that ruling, but the Trump administration dropped the case before it was decided.

by Eli Hager

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On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”

Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.

It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.

DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.

The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”

In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”

For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.

The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.

They did none of these things.

Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.

Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.

Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.

By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.

Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely made front-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.

Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.

To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.

Leland Dudek, former acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, at home this summer after leaving the government. “I’m growing out my hair and dropping weight,” he said. “It helps when you live in a federal community where you’re hated.” (Rosen Morton for ProPublica)

Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)

At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”

Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.

In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.

After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.

In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.

But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)

Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.

In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.

Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)

Dudek, whose bookshelves are pictured, has long immersed himself in everything from the decline of the British Empire to the long-running bureaucratic inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”

Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”

DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.

Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.

In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.

Akash Bobba (via Gitlab profile)

Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”

Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.

Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedly said that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)

Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”

Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.

Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.

Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.

Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.

Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Cole Killian (via McGill Artificial Intelligence Society 2021-2022 Team Page)

Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.

“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.

Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”

Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.

The Social Security Administration building where DOGE initially operated. As hostility mounted toward the outsiders, Dudek — who was receiving death threats himself — moved the DOGE team to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned armed security to protect them. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)

Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”

But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)

This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.

But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.

“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”

“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scott Coulter (via LinkedIn profile)

One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.

But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”

Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.

Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.

In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.

DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.

When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.

Panicked Social Security beneficiaries flocked to Social Security field offices, like this one in Baltimore, as the agency’s policies on making claims by phone repeatedly zigzagged this spring. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)

Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.

Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.

Dudek said Katie Miller, who was DOGE’s spokesperson early on, would call to chastise him about anything the press reported that had caught the administration off guard. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.

“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”

“How dare you,” Miller said.

Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”

But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.

Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.

On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”

Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.

It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.

“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)

As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”

Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.

“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”

Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.

Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.

And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.

Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.

Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”

Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”

Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”

As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”

The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”

Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”

Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.

Frank Bisignano, in the oval office with President Donald Trump, was confirmed as commissioner of the Social Security Administration in May. He has presented a calmer public face than Dudek while embracing DOGE’s philosophy. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.

Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.

In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”

Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.

The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Colleen DeGuzman, The Texas Tribune

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After the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, school leaders in Uvalde, Texas, initially planned to publicly defend district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, but officials instead chose to remain silent as investigations into police actions unfolded, newly released records show. Arredondo is now facing criminal charges over law enforcement’s delayed confrontation with the gunman.

The previously unreported details were revealed in over 25,000 pages of records the district has disclosed over the course of a week since Aug. 26 after a yearslong legal fight with news outlets, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which filed over 70 public information requests for the records in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The documents should have been published in early August when school leaders and Uvalde County originally released requested records following a settlement with the news organizations. Rob Decker, an attorney representing the school district, admitted at a board meeting Aug. 25 that his office made “an error on our side” by only releasing a fraction of the files. Board members, including Jesse Rizo, who lost his 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares in the shooting, grilled Decker about the firm’s oversight.

“When we use the word ‘error,’ that’s putting it really lightly,” Rizo said. “The word ‘negligent’ comes to mind.”

However, the district’s law firm may have again failed to disclose all of the requested information, according to Laura Prather, one of the attorneys representing the newsrooms in the records litigation. Prather sent a letter Friday demanding the district publish the remaining files, which could include details about the school maintenance issues with doors that failed to lock, Arredondo’s severance and additional communications among officials. Decker, the district’s lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

The school district’s repeated disclosure problems mirror the mistakes made by the city of Uvalde last year, when officials there did not include at least 50 body- and dashcam videos in their first records release. They scrambled to disclose all of them months later.

As the district’s law firm began trickling out records last week, another shooting made national headlines when two children were killed and another 21 kids and adults injured at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. The timing only further underscores the importance of releasing the Uvalde records as quickly as possible, said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

“A lot of times, governments will think that by stalling or trying to avoid the release of records, they can shirk responsibility and avoid the tough questions,” said Shannon. Doing so only makes it harder to stop similar tragedies from happening and hinders families’ ability to heal.

“Getting information sooner rather than later is the way to go,” she said, “and that’s not what we’ve seen surrounding the Uvalde shooting.”

Though news organizations had previously obtained from sources many of the records government agencies withheld, the newly released documents include undisclosed internal communications that offer deeper insight into the inner workings of the school district. Its leaders have rarely commented on the shooting publicly in the three years since it left 19 elementary students and two teachers dead.

Among the new revelations, the documents show the unraveling of the district’s support for Arredondo as details of the delayed law enforcement response were made public in the weeks after the shooting.

School leaders have long attributed their silence and refusal to release these records to the multiple local, state and federal investigations into the law enforcement response to the massacre. That included a criminal probe by the Uvalde district attorney that eventually led to child endangerment charges being filed against Arredondo and another school officer last year. Both have maintained their innocence ahead of the trial, scheduled for later this year.

Arredondo initially received the bulk of the blame for the response, though an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune later found that officers across state and local agencies wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and failed to take control of the response.

Three days after the tragedy, Steve McCraw, then head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, announced at a press conference that Arredondo was responsible for law enforcement’s failure to confront the gunman until 77 minutes after he’d entered the school.

Hours later, district spokesperson Anne Marie Espinoza emailed then-Superintendent Hal Harrell a press release that defended Arredondo, stating, in part, that his action isolating the shooter helped students and staff escape the building. The statement cautioned that the district could only provide limited information due to the ongoing investigations but said it was “appropriate timing to share these clarifying details.”

The school district, however, never published that version of the press release, allowing McCraw’s narrative to continue circulating undisputed. The internal communications released so far don’t explain why. None of the district’s leaders involved responded to the newsrooms’ questions in recent days.

The district instead published a press release the following Wednesday that made no mention of Arredondo but said the school would not comment on the shooting until all state and federal agencies completed their review.

Emails also show that during the week after McCraw’s press conference, the district’s law firm drafted paperwork to place Arredondo on administrative leave.

Harrell waited several more weeks before taking that action.

The documents reveal Arredondo was increasingly anxious to discuss his side of the story. In an email exchange with a reporter from The New York Times shortly after McCraw’s press conference, Arredondo wrote that he wished he could speak publicly: “It’s extremely difficult not to be able to respond right now.”

The police chief said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation at that point.

About two weeks later, as the investigations continued, Arredondo gave the Tribune an exclusive interview sharing his experience of the shooting response and maintaining that he was not the incident commander.

He told Harrell, the superintendent, the article was coming about two hours before publication.

The superintendent’s emails indicate he met with the district’s law firm the next day to discuss drafting an agreement for Arredondo that barred him from making any more public statements unless he received written permission from Harrell. The instructions emphasize that the district will remain silent about the shooting to “ensure the integrity of the pending investigations,” indicating public comments could be considered interference.

“Any failure to comply with these directives may result in adverse job action, up to and including termination of your employment,” stated the agreement.

On June 15, the police chief informed the superintendent that he needed time off to attend a hearing at the Texas Capitol the following Tuesday and to prep with his counsel the day before.

Arredondo testified behind closed doors for five hours in front of the state House committee tasked with investigating the shooting on June 21. The same day, McCraw provided a searing condemnation of the law enforcement response in a separate state Senate hearing that was open to the public. He claimed police could have stopped the shooter within three minutes had it not been for Arredondo’s indecisiveness.

The next day, Harrell placed Arredondo on administrative leave.

In a draft of the press release announcing Arredondo’s leave, then-Assistant Superintendent Beth Reavis suggested saying that district leaders had not received any information about the response ahead of the hearing.

“Yesterday, like you, I saw the released information for the first time,” she suggested to Harrell and the district’s attorney, then said they should add, “Something like ‘Pete’s on leave, blah blah blah’” in an email.

The district ultimately published a press release stating Harrell initially did not intend to make personnel decisions until after the investigations into the shooting were concluded, but due to the uncertainty of when they would be done, he decided to place Arredondo on leave.

Arredondo’s attorney, Paul Looney, said he wasn’t surprised when the district walked back its support for their police chief or when he found out from the news organizations that the district had drafted a letter requesting Arredondo’s leave weeks before giving it to him.

“It’s obvious that their initial reaction was the truth and then they decided to shelve the truth and join DPS on cover-your-ass politics and Pete was expendable,” Looney said. “The truth is that Pete did a good job that day.”

The majority of the documents disclosed in the latest batch were pulled from Harrell’s email inbox. In the hours and days after the tragedy, leaders and survivors of other school shootings offered support. But many parents, educators and law enforcement across the country called for him and the police force to resign.

Harrell often emailed himself to-do lists that included reminders like “funerals,” “security we can get done” and people he needed to call. The former superintendent received backlash during a June 9 press conference where he declined to answer questions about law enforcement investigations. The next day, he included “retirement plan” and “transition plan” on his emailed to-do list. Harrell, who did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests, retired later that year.

The latest batch of emails also raised additional questions. The release, for example, included a chart that showed 13 threats made to schools in the district that year, including one to Robb Elementary, but did not provide details on how leaders handled them or exactly when they occurred.

Once the school district completes its release of records, DPS will be the last agency sued by the newsrooms that continues to shield materials related to the shooting from disclosure. Prather, the newsrooms’ counsel, said the state law enforcement organization’s documents are especially important because the agency led the investigation into the shooting and maintains a 2-terabyte file with the most extensive accounting of the event.

The newsrooms won an initial ruling in 2023 and the judge ordered DPS to publish its records, but the agency appealed the decision. The appellate court has yet to make a ruling after oral arguments last October.

The state agency did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but it has long argued that publishing documentation of the shooting could interfere with ongoing investigations and eventual prosecutions.

“You’re talking about a situation where people have experienced the most horrible tragedy and loss they could possibly imagine and they already distrust those who are supposed to protect their children,” Prather said. “Then to further fight for three years to get answers about what happened that day and to have that information trickle out, only after you’ve been told by a court over and over to produce it … it’s like a death by a thousand cuts.”

Jessica Priest and Alex Nguyen of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

by Julia Rendleman for ProPublica, Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, and Lylee Gibbs, Saluki Local Reporting Lab

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

On a late July morning, Blake Gerard zips across his Southern Illinois rice farm on a four-wheeler, wearing his usual USA Rice shirt and shorts that hit above the knee. It’s the only rice farm in Illinois, a place where rice never grew before.

He carries rubber hip boots in his truck for when he needs to wade into the water to check or change its depth. The young rice has entered a crucial stage; it has taken root but is still tender and needs a shallow, steady blanket of water, which Gerard maintains with a system of cascading fields surrounded by levees and pumps. Two to 4 inches of water is ideal.

First image: Gerard races across a rice field with an electrical extension cord to run a conveyor belt that will put rice in a storage bin. Second image: Young rice requires between 2 and 4 inches of water to grow. Third image: Gerard holds soil from the thick, muddy ground that he calls “gumbo.” (First and second images: Julia Rendleman for ProPublica. Third image: Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica.)

For the parts of the fields he can’t reach in his truck, a drone does the seeing. This morning, it catches a patch where the water pools too deep, and he turns on a pump, moving water into a drainage ditch that flows into the nearby Mississippi River. “That whole corner would’ve gone under if I hadn’t seen it,” Gerard says.

This daily scramble across 2,500 acres of flat, muddy bottomlands is now routine for one of America’s northernmost commercial rice farmers. But it wasn’t always. Gerard’s story is both proof that change and innovation in farming are possible and evidence of how hard they are — and why so few have tried. The transition took decades. It was also expensive and largely unsupported by federal farm policy, which is heavily focused on corn and soybeans.

Corn, soy and wheat were the crops Gerard, now 55, was growing in the early 1990s when he took over his family farm near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. By then, the floods were already coming more often. Gerard’s grandfather remembered them in 1943 and 1973, but as Gerard began farming, they came every two years — in ’93, ’95 and ’97.

Gerard plants rice near the Mississippi River in spring 2024. The land is prone to flooding, which Gerard uses to his advantage to grow rice. He refers to rain as “free water.” (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

According to the latest National Climate Assessment, annual precipitation in the Midwest increased in some places by as much as 15% between 1992 and 2001. Importantly for farmers, the amount of precipitation on the days with the most rain has increased by 45% over the past 50 years.

“The most extreme heavy precipitation is increasing at a far faster rate than overall total seasonal or annual precipitation,” explained Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist. That increased intensity “has been a faster and larger change, and that has caused more impacts due to flooding and erosion.”

For Gerard, a fourth-generation crop farmer, only in his 20s, working the fields of the Mississippi River bottomlands in Alexander County, Illinois, there was no sense in fighting the water anymore.

“I could grow something that would grow in water,” he said. Or quit.

Climate change is shifting where rice can grow. Long considered a southern crop, it has crept north through the Missouri Bootheel, and with Gerard’s expanded operation, now has a foothold in Southern Illinois. It’s a crop that can thrive where others can’t, like along the riverbanks of flood-prone Alexander County.

But for many farmers, making the transition to a new crop is nearly impossible, as ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois reported this week. Although rice is a commodity crop and Gerard receives insurance subsidies and commodity supports, corn and soybeans dominate U.S. agriculture, especially in the Midwest, and that’s what federal subsidies are set up to support.

Federally backed insurance for those crops cushions the risk of climate change for growers, even in floodplains; ethanol policy props up demand; and the entire infrastructure — from grain bins to rail lines to river barges — helps move corn and soy from fields to market to overseas. Illinois is the second-largest corn exporter in the nation.

There’s also culture: Farmers tend to grow what their parents and grandparents did. Even the local experts — the folks at the nearby Farm Bureau offices and university extension programs — are largely trained in what’s always been done.

“Everything’s stacked against it,” said Jonathan Coppess, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture official and current farm policy expert at the University of Illinois. “Nobody says no, but the system doesn’t know how to say yes.”

And federal policy is moving deeper in that direction. President Donald Trump has scrubbed climate language from farm programs. Although the “Big, Beautiful Bill” signed in July provides additional funding for programs that could help with crop diversification, it largely reinforces the idea that crops should stay where they’ve always been.

ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois sought comment from the USDA on Aug. 20 about how it is responding to climate change and crop diversification. An agency spokesperson said the USDA was working on a response but did not provide it in time for publication or specify a day when it would respond.

This stretch of the country where Gerard did the seemingly impossible is an important testing ground. But it wasn’t easy. There were no mills to process what he grew, no market to sell it into, no roadmap to follow. Ultimately, it took 25 years and millions of dollars to make it work. Gerard shows what is possible, but also how improbable it is for the Corn Belt to diversify without the sustained effort of federal policy.

Gerard climbs up a grain bin as he prepares to use it for the first time after harvesting in 2024. Grain bins are one of the many investments Gerard has made to his rice farm during the past 25 years. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

In 1943, when the Mississippi tore away from its banks and charted a fierce and muddy course across America’s central farmlands, Gerard’s grandfather, Harold Gerard, had already fled the waters once.

He had been living on a tiny island in the middle of the river just north of Cairo, Illinois. Seeking dry land that would be amenable to the wheat, alfalfa, corn and cotton he was accustomed to growing, he moved his family about 30 miles north.

But even there, the water kept rising. Blake’s father took over the farm and put in a pump on his lowest field to take water away from the corn, but the water kept coming up.

“The water comes from under the ground here,” Blake Gerard said.

He was studying at Mississippi State when his father died in August 1990. Overwhelmed, he left school, came home and harvested the final crop his father had planted. But with floods coming more frequently, he worried that the government would get out of the crop insurance business, which helped keep him afloat. He briefly considered fish farming but worried about floods there too. Ultimately, Gerard realized he needed a crop that loved the thick, muddy ground he calls “gumbo.”

First image: A young Gerard stands in a field with his dad, Harold Lynn, during a time when his family farmed corn and soybeans. The photo was taken more than 40 years ago. Second image: Gerard stands at the top of the first relift pump installed by his dad to move water off their corn fields in 1988. (Courtesy of Blake Gerard)

Around that time, farm policy was changing: In 1996, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act — known as the “Freedom to Farm Act” — gave farmers flexibility in crop choice.

He looked south, to Arkansas and Missouri, for guidance, driving around, knocking on doors and asking farmers about a crop that wasn’t afraid of the water.

At one farm in the Missouri Bootheel, an older man listened to Gerard’s questions for an hour, then said, “You know what? I met your dad. You’re a lot like your dad. He came down here in the ’70s asking me the same questions.”

Gerard hadn’t known about his father’s early interest. But it led them both to the same place, where he found his answer: “I’ve got rice ground.”

In 1999, Gerard planted his first 40 acres of rice. The next season, he tripled his acreage. After that, Gerard started converting his fields “like crazy.” There were no government programs to help pay for the transition, and it was expensive.

The big effort was grading the land: flattening it and building embankments so water would cascade from one field into the next. At $1,000 per acre, Gerard would invest millions into turning his ground from soy to rice.

Gerard realizes the investment was one he could only have made when he was still young and unafraid of debt. “I had time to get it all paid for, but if you’re my age now, mid-50s, why do I want to borrow a quarter of a million dollars to do this and make all these changes and create more work for myself? It’s more work. Rice farming is way more work. Double, triple the work that corn and beans are.”

Gerard also had to invest heavily in farm equipment. He rattles off a list: power units, fuel tanks, turbines, pipes, the water control structures, and on and on. Gerard scratches his head when asked about his total investment — it’s too much to remember and too hard to keep track of, he said. What he knew for certain was that he was going to commit to rice.

Gerard, left, and his son Wyatt drive across their farm to collect gasoline for their combine. Wyatt, like his father, left college in his early 20s, before graduating, to return to farm the land. (Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica) From left: Gerard with his children, Wyatt and Dixie, and his wife, Shelly, in their kitchen after dinner (Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica)

This year, Gerard’s farm finally got some help: a Climate-Smart Commodities grant that would allow him to invest in things like soil moisture meters, pump automation and water monitors. Then in April, he received more news: The funding, considered a “climate” program, had been canceled by the Trump administration. Then in May, he was told the funding was back — under a different name.

But around the state, conditions for farming this year have continued to deteriorate. In May, the National Weather Service issued a dust storm warning for the first time ever for the city of Chicago. High winds brought loose topsoil across the state and into the city, limiting visibility and shocking meteorologists who had not documented a weather event of this kind in the city since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Researchers believe that the corn and soybean rotation that dominates Midwestern farming is at least partially to blame — replacing the grasses that gave the Prairie State its nickname with crop rotations that don’t hold the soil in place, and a steady stream of fertilizers and pesticides doesn’t help.

The dominance of soy and corn, with little variation, could have “possible long-term impacts” on “economic returns, communities, and the environment,” according to the website for Diverse Corn Belt, a USDA-funded project of researchers and scientists who collaborate with government agencies, farmers and conservation groups. They want to find ways to give farmers more crop options.

That’s especially pressing in places like Alexander County, a corner of the country that bridges different farming regions. “It’s one of the most difficult places to understand in U.S. agriculture,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor at the University of Iowa, who studies farm policy and is an investigator with Diverse Corn Belt. “But the system isn’t built for a place like this. The system is built for: you’re in Nebraska, you raise cattle; you’re in Iowa, you grow corn. All these places that are kind of funky at the margin — we don’t make policy for them.”

Diversifying crop rotations would help in the Midwest, but also in places with other climate-related woes, like increasingly dry Texas and storm-wracked Louisiana. Making such changes is not impossible, said Louisiana State University researcher Herry Utomo, who developed the rice strain grown by Gerard. Climate change is “coming anyway, so we have to be positive and respond to it appropriately,” he said. “With good planning, anticipation and understanding of the rate of change, we can respond.”

Louisiana State University researcher Herry Utomo, who developed the variety of rice grown by Gerard, jumps over a ditch after checking out a research field of rice in November 2024 in Louisiana. He believes farmers can respond to climate change with good planning. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

But Coppess, a former USDA official, said farm policy has never been great at planning for climate change.

“There’s nothing in farm policy that takes into account climate change. In fact, most arguments would be that it’s at best neutral and at worst counterproductive for climate change,” Coppess said.

And under Trump, research universities are losing funding and climate initiatives are being decimated.

For Gerard, his willingness to risk everything paid off. He had a banner year in 2024 — his most successful rice-farming year to date. He no longer wonders whether the “big river” or a deluge will take out his crop. While a range of factors — from weather to international markets — affect whether he makes money, his shift to rice has taken production volatility out of the equation and he rests easier.

First image: Gerard tracks Hurricane Francine as it makes landfall in Louisiana in September 2024. A hurricane, with heavy winds and lots of water, can be problematic close to harvest. Gerard’s farm escaped the heavy rain expected with that storm. Second image: Rice stalks bend under the weight of the grain before they are harvested in McClure, Illinois. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

He remembers one of his first harvests, late in the growing season, when the mature stalks of rice had begun to bend toward the ground under the weight of their own grain.

One farmer, he recalled, pulled over and laughed at the drooping stalks. To him, the field looked ruined — nothing like the stiff, proud stalks of wheat growing nearby.

“People said you can’t grow rice here,” Gerard said. “I had the crop growing in the field and they’re like, ‘You can’t grow rice, we’re in Illinois, they grow rice in Louisiana.’”

That was a quarter-century ago.

Gerard looks out over the horizon at the setting sun behind a cloud of smoke from a controlled burn of a harvested field in October 2024. Gerard burns the fields to get rid of plant debris in preparation for the next planting. (Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica)

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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

The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.

President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S. senator and a state attorney general.

Real estate experts say claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.

But if administration officials continue the campaign, mortgage records show there’s another place they could look: Trump’s own Cabinet.

Underscoring how common the practice is, ProPublica found that at least three of Trump’s Cabinet members call multiple homes their primary residences on mortgages. We discovered the loans while examining financial disclosure forms, county real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records.

In a flurry of interviews and rapid-fire posts on X, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has led the charge in accusing Trump opponents of mortgage fraud. “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” Pulte said last month.

A political donor to the president and heir to a housing company fortune, Pulte’s posts online tease big developments and criminal referrals, drawing reposts from Trump himself and promises of swift consequences. “Fraud will not be tolerated in President Trump’s housing market,” Pulte has warned.

Real estate experts told ProPublica that, in its bid to wrest control of the historically independent Fed and go after political enemies, the Trump administration has mischaracterized mortgage rules. Its justification for launching criminal investigations, they said, could also apply to the Trump Cabinet members.

All three Cabinet members denied wrongdoing. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said: “This is just another hit piece from a left-wing dark money group that constantly attempts to smear President Trump’s incredible Cabinet members. Unlike [Fed Gov.] Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who blatantly and intentionally committed mortgage fraud, Secretary DeRemer, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Zeldin own multiple residences, and they have followed the law and they are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”

“If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” said Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director. (Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms than for a second home or an investment property. That includes better interest rates and the ability to borrow more money.

The idea is that borrowers are more likely to pay back — and less likely to default on — a loan attached to the home they actually live in. That makes those loans less risky for lenders. Interest rates are typically a quarter- to a half-point lower for primary mortgages, according to Pulte. On the low end, that could save around $75 each month over the life of a 30-year, 5% interest, half-million-dollar loan — or a total of around $25,000.

Standard mortgage documents commonly include an occupancy clause that requires the borrower to use the property as their principal residence for at least a year. They also include a section where borrowers can check a box when the mortgage is for a second home.

Misrepresenting occupancy status is not rare, according to a widely cited 2023 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. In interviews, real estate lawyers said that mortgage lenders are typically well aware of their clients’ other loans and sometimes even encourage the primary-residence language for second homes.

They also pointed to a mundane reason that innocent mistakes are common: Homebuyers simply sign stacks of forms without reading them.

“Few consumers understand this issue, and if there is someone at fault here, it is likely the loan officer who likely advised them to sign up for this loan that obviously wasn’t for their primary residence,” said real estate lawyer Doug Miller. “Loan officers who are competing for business will often quote lower rates in order to get a customer’s business.”

Mortgage fraud is rarely prosecuted, according to real estate lawyers and federal sentencing data. Pulte has pointed to a case from 2016 in which a California woman was found guilty of obtaining multiple loans for condos that she falsely stated would be her primary residence. But that case had an added layer of fraud: The woman never intended to live in the homes. She was secretly being paid because she had good credit to act as a front for the true buyer of the properties, to whom they were later transferred. She later defaulted on the loans, causing more than half a million dollars in losses for the lenders.

Lawyers told ProPublica that determining ill intent would be key to prosecute. “Fraud requires the borrower to be aware that the borrower was making a false representation,” said Jon Goodman, an attorney focused on real estate at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein.

But Pulte has framed the issue in black-and-white terms: “Your second home is not your primary home,” he warned in one recent post on X.

By that standard, Trump’s labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer, could be in the wrong.

In her financial disclosure form, she listed two mortgages on personal residences, both obtained in 2021. Mortgage records show her home is in Happy Valley, a city near Portland where Chavez-DeRemer served as mayor before being elected to represent the area in the U.S. House.

She and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, who leads an anesthesia company in Portland, refinanced their longtime Oregon home in January 2021. Two months later, the couple bought a newly built house near a golf course in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

The pair had previously enjoyed vacationing in Arizona, according to news reports and social media posts. (In one incident that made the news, Chavez-DeRemer was briefly hospitalized after a golf cart accident on her way back from watching a Sonoran Desert sunset.)

The mortgage agreement for the Arizona property required them to occupy the home as their “principal residence” for at least a year, barring “extenuating circumstances” or the lender allowing them to violate the stipulation.

A spokesperson for Chavez-DeRemer said that the couple bought the Arizona home with the intent to retire there, but then Chavez-DeRemer decided to run for Congress representing her Oregon district and did not move.

“This is nothing more than a left-wing rag inventing a story just to attack the Trump Administration. It’s common for families to refinance then buy a home with future plans in mind — trying to spin that as some type of scandal is pure nonsense,” said spokesperson Courtney Parella.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a White House official said that although DeRemer opted to stay in Oregon, her husband “continued to move forward with the process of becoming” an Arizona resident. Political donation records list his home in Oregon as recently as late 2023.

Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, and his wife also have two primary-residence mortgages, obtained a few years apart.

In August 2021, the Duffys, who have nine children, purchased a large $2 million home in Far Hills, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Rachel Campos-Duffy works as a Fox News host.

They got a $1.6 million mortgage to purchase the property, and documents show it was a “principal residence” loan.

In February, after Duffy took the job in Trump’s cabinet, the couple bought another home, in Washington, D.C. Again, they got a principal-residence mortgage, this time for $1.76 million. Both Duffy and his wife are listed as borrowers on both mortgages, which came from the same bank.

It’s not clear where Sean Duffy lives most of the time, and a Department of Transportation spokesperson declined to answer questions about where Duffy and his wife each make their primary home. In late May, several months after they purchased the Washington home, “Fox & Friends Weekend” ran a segment in which Rachel Campos-Duffy cooked a “Make America Healthy Again” breakfast for host Steve Doocy. Sean Duffy and some of the couple’s children were also in the segment, and it was filmed in the New Jersey home.

From left: “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Steve Doocy with Rachel Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy in their home in Far Hills, New Jersey (Fox News)

Duffy’s spokesperson said in a statement that after being confirmed, “Sean purchased a home in Washington D.C. where he works full-time. The home in DC is not a rental, investment or vacation property. The same bank holds both mortgages and was fully informed of Secretary Duffy’s new employment location and need for a DC residence.”

A White House spokesperson said, “The bank, not the Secretary, determined and classified both mortgages as primary residences.”

Like the Duffys, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, and his wife also have two concurrent primary-residence mortgages.

One, obtained in 2007, is on a home in Shirley, New York, on Long Island, which Zeldin represented in Congress for several years. Last year, Zeldin and his wife obtained a second mortgage, for $712,500, on a property in Washington, D.C., a short walk from the EPA’s headquarters. Both are primary-residence mortgages.

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that Zeldin’s primary residence was previously on Long Island but is now in Washington. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about where his wife lives. “Administrator Zeldin followed ALL steps to complete the move in accordance with all laws, rules, and contracts, notifying his mortgage company, insurance company, and local government,” the spokesperson said. “EVERY ‘I’ was dotted and ‘t’ was crossed 1000% by the book without exception.”

The dual mortgages identified by ProPublica among Trump’s cabinet secretaries resemble the loans obtained by U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, whom Trump accused of mortgage fraud.

In May, Pulte referred Schiff to the Justice Department for taking out a primary-residence mortgage in Maryland, for a home he purchased in 2003 after being elected to the House, while also claiming his primary home was in Burbank, California, in the district he represented. Schiff and his wife refinanced the Maryland home several times as a primary residence, Pulte noted, until a 2020 refinance in which they reclassified it as a secondary home.

“Schiff appears to have falsified records in order to receive favorable loan terms,” Pulte concluded in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Representatives for Schiff called the allegations “transparently false” and said his lenders had “full knowledge of the senator’s year-round bicoastal work obligations” and “his use of two homes for that reason.” Schiff, according to his office, navigated the two mortgages in consultation with a House lawyer.

Pulte made similar allegations in a criminal referral about New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging she may have committed fraud by getting a primary-residence mortgage for a home in Virginia, even though her position required her to live in New York. Her lawyer has said James helped a family member buy the property and notified the mortgage broker at the time that it would not be her primary residence. James became one of Trump’s top political enemies after she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022. Representatives for James have called the fraud claims made against her politically motivated and false. (Pulte did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Pulte’s most consequential allegations thus far were made against Cook, a Federal Reserve governor. Trump has been going after Fed Chair Jerome Powell for months for not lowering interest rates, even raising the specter that he would take the unprecedented step of attempting to fire the chair. Pulte’s criminal referral against Cook presented Trump with another avenue for bending the traditionally independent Fed to his will, securing a majority of the Fed’s board by firing Cook, a move that Cook has sued to block.

Pulte pointed to mortgage records that show that within just a couple of weeks, Cook signed primary-residence mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia. Legal experts said the close proximity was a red flag but that much was still unknown, including Cook’s intent and what her lenders were told. Pulte also flagged a third property, in Massachusetts, that Cook represented as a second home in mortgage documents but as an investment property in subsequent financial disclosures. Investment properties can be hit with higher mortgage rates than second homes.

“3 strikes and you’re out,” he posted on X.

Cook’s lawyers have denied that she committed mortgage fraud but have not provided a detailed explanation of the context for the various mortgages. They argued in court this week that her loans cannot be legally used as grounds to terminate her.

The Justice Department has begun investigating all three Trump foes singled out in Pulte’s referrals, according to news reports. The department has issued subpoenas in Cook’s case, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

ProPublica’s review of mortgage agreements by Trump cabinet officials shows that some made clear to lenders they were purchasing second homes.

When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, got a mortgage for his home near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the agreement included a rider making it clear he would be using it as a second home.

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

Brandon Roberts and Steve Suo of ProPublica and Matthew Termine of Hunterbrook Media contributed research.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, Julia Rendleman for ProPublica and Lylee Gibbs, Saluki Local Reporting Lab

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

The seed tractor sank again, no surprise to Steve Williams. Everything sank out here on Dogtooth Bend in Southern Illinois since the floodwaters ran through five years earlier and dumped millions of tons of sand. The ground looked firm, but deep pockets of sticky mud lurked under the sun-cracked surface, pulling him under without warning.

He hit the gas. His wheels spun in place; sand flew. A few cuss words, too.

He called his daughter, Brandy Renshaw, working a nearby stretch of field in a giant green rig. She turned his way to pull him out; then she sank, too. Williams, in a faded plaid shirt, gray hair sprouting from under a John Deere hat, paced. Renshaw slammed the gearshift, rocked back and forth, and eventually clawed her way out.

It was June 2024, and both father and daughter knew the land they were trying to farm wasn’t going to yield much, even if they got the seeds in the ground. But this had become their routine: farming futile land just to keep from going under. For years now, they’d had one foot stuck in the mud, the other in government bureaucracy. They’d get angry — then laugh.

“What else could you do?” said Williams, 70. “We were left holding the bag.”

In these Mississippi River bottoms, federal farm policy became a trap. Farming is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in America. Each year, Congress allocates billions to keep crops in the ground, cushioning the blow from droughts, floods, fires and market swings — a safety net that dates to the 1930s, when the Depression and Dust Bowl put the nation’s food supply at risk.

But today, in some of the most flood- and drought-prone parts of the country, those programs can also keep people hanging on, even when it makes more sense to walk away. That’s increasingly clear along parts of the Mississippi River Valley and especially here in Alexander County, at the rural tip of Illinois. As the climate changes and as aging levees fail, the risk is becoming more predictable, the losses so frequent it is clear some land will no longer yield what it used to.

But the federal programs that support those changes — enacted first by President George H.W. Bush, then expanded by President Bill Clinton — have been small, slow and ineffective. After the 2019 flood — when the Mississippi River submerged the southernmost corner of Illinois for months, part of a widespread disaster across the Midwest — Congress allocated only about $217 million spread across 11 states to pay farmers to voluntarily retire their flood-ravaged fields.

Federal workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which ran the program, specifically urged farmers at Dogtooth Bend to sign up. The floods had come here repeatedly and had worsened since they busted through the 17-mile levee that protected Williams’ farmland three years earlier. So Williams signed up, along with about 30 others on Dogtooth Bend, finally ready to call mercy to the river. He offered up roughly 1,200 acres; the federal government offered to pay him about $3,200 an acre to put permanent easements on his land, which he could use for recreational purposes but never farm again.

Renshaw, left, and her father, Steve Williams, finish a day of planting soybeans this spring. (Julia Rendleman) An aerial image from November shows the damage to the Len Small Levee in Alexander County, Illinois. Without the levee intact, water flows onto the farms it was meant to protect. (Julia Rendleman)

At the time Williams applied, the program had been offered only one other time in the past decade to farmers along the Upper Mississippi River, despite billions in lost crops. And this time around, the pot — just 1% of the $19 billion disaster aid package — wasn’t big enough to help everyone who applied, especially along this corn- and soy-growing region. And even for those who were accepted, the agency in charge couldn’t keep up with the paperwork, making the process stretch on for years.

The process dragged through the rest of President Donald Trump’s first term and through most of President Joe Biden’s. And now these programs look even less certain as Trump and Republicans in Congress double down on the status quo: expanding crop insurance and farm income supports through the budget bill signed into law on July 4 while — in an effort to trim the federal workforce — gutting the staff responsible for responding to climate disasters, including those who manage permanent easements that pull troubled farmland out of production.

While farmers have struggled to access funds to help them get off flood-prone land, federal programs to keep their crops in the ground have long been the safer bet. Over the past three decades, Illinois has received $35 billion in farm support — more than any state but Texas and Iowa — mostly through insurance subsidies and price supports for growing corn and soybeans. Some of that bounty is grown on flood-prone ground along the Mississippi and other river bottoms.

“At some point in time, don’t you ask yourself: Is this really economically the best way to spend our taxpayer dollars,” said Dave Hiatt, an easement coordinator and biologist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, “or would it serve us better in the long run if we spent money to take that ground out of production?”

Hiatt is among the USDA employees on paid leave through September as part of the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the federal workforce.

ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois reached out to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service on Aug. 15 with a detailed list of questions about how it handled the Dogtooth Bend easements across multiple administrations as well as its priorities going forward. The agency said it was working on a response but did not provide it in time for publication or specify a day when it would respond.

While Williams waited for the buyout to go through, his bills didn’t stop. He still owed a mortgage to the bank, taxes to the county. That left him and Renshaw with a choice: Either do nothing and watch their farm operation go under, or do what they’d always done. Even when it didn’t make sense anymore, they had planted their fields to maintain their federally backed crop insurance. Keeping that crop insurance allowed them to access other agriculture subsidies and disaster aid.

So they mounted their tractors and rolled out to their nearly barren fields.

“You can’t afford to leave it,” Renshaw said. “So we planted what we could and insured everything we could. It was a nightmare.”

Renshaw posted on Instagram when her tractor was stuck in the mud in June 2024. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

It hadn’t always been like this. For decades, this Delta-like sliver of bottomland jutting into the Mississippi River at Illinois’ southern edge was “the garden spot of the county,” as Williams put it. He grew up farming alongside his dad and bought his first property on the peninsula in 1987.

At that point, the land on the flood-prone bend was still protected by the Len Small Levee, built in 1943 and named for an Illinois governor. The water broke through the first time in 1993, then again in 2011. But everyone recognized its days were numbered, and the state and federal government started paying people for their homes and businesses so they could move from harm’s way. That mitigated the risk, but it also meant that after floodwaters cut a nearly mile-wide hole in 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to cover the $16 million repair cost: With fewer people living there, the cost-benefit formula showed it wasn’t worth saving anymore.

Williams and the other farmers were devastated: When the levee was in place, Dogtooth Bend stayed relatively dry even when the Mississippi climbed well past flood stage — 33 feet at the nearby Thebes gauge. Since the breach, water spills into the peninsula every time the river nears that mark, and that happens often now, sometimes for weeks at a time.

As hopes of a levee repair fizzled, farmers were stranded. The federal easement program receives only sporadic funding, and typically only after a presidential disaster declaration, which Illinois didn’t get in 2016, despite widespread damage in Alexander County.

Predictably, Dogtooth Bend flooded again in 2017 and 2018.

Both years, from his office three hours away near Champaign, Hiatt and a small team of federal officials with the Natural Resources Conservation Service scrambled to come up with easement funds, even outside of a disaster declaration.

“We begged, we pleaded with headquarters,” Hiatt said. “We said, ‘We need these funds right now. These people have been this poorly impacted.’”

Flooding in Alexander County in 1993. The Len Small Levee breached for the first time that year, and again in 2011 and 2016. (Courtesy of The Southern)

Federal records show that after floods in both years, Hiatt and his colleagues in Illinois proposed buying out up to 11,500 acres owned by 40 or so landowners on Dogtooth Bend over time, starting with the most severely damaged. The first phase would cost $20 million and was projected to prevent $60 million in near-term damages. The proposal laid out a strong case: Roads were threatened; habitat was disappearing; land was becoming more and more degraded. Thousands of acres had already become unfarmable — and while the reports also weighed the option of restoring the land, they noted that the farmland would never be fully productive, and the costs to keep bailing out farmers would only grow.

By this point, Trump had taken office for the first time, bringing in new USDA leadership. In both 2017 and 2018, Hiatt said, agency leadership in Washington rejected the requests by him and his colleagues in Illinois to help move farmers off the land. This wasn’t unusual: According to one nonprofit’s report, over 25 years, 90% of landowners in the Upper Mississippi states who applied for funding were turned down.

Environmental groups support paying farmers to leave flood-prone land because floodwater that spreads across farm fields washes fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals into rivers, causing a range of down-river harms. But there’s an economic argument, too: A 2019 study in the science journal Nature Sustainability found that every $1 spent restoring floodplains by clearing them of development and farms can save at least $5 in future damages.

Despite this, the single largest agriculture program in the farm bill is intended to keep people on the land. That comes in the form of crop insurance premiums, an average of 60% of which are paid by the federal government.

In Alexander County, that is closer to 70%. More broadly, the costs of keeping people on their land there were spiraling upward: In addition to subsidies, there were millions more to clean up flood debris, shore up the levees, and fix roads and drainage systems. And still the floods kept coming.

Yet farmers were still planting. “They do the math,” said Silvia Secchi, a farm policy expert at the University of Iowa, about why farmers might keep investing in troubled land. “You and I would do the same math. If you want to stay in business, you do what makes you stay in business.”

For the father-daughter team of Williams and Renshaw, it was barely enough. “All the insurance did was keep people from going broke,” Williams said.

“You aren’t winning,” Renshaw added, “by any means.”

By the time the historic flood hit in 2019, the need to rescue the farmers at Dogtooth Bend was undeniable.

A house in Tamms that belonged to Brandy Renshaw’s uncle takes on floodwater in 2019. (Courtesy of Brandy Renshaw)

When the river finally pulled back, Williams no longer recognized the land he’d spent his life working. The levee breach had let the full force of the Mississippi pour through Dogtooth Bend for five months. It carved new channels, dumped dunes of sand and even sucked six barges off the main river and left two stranded in a field. People compared the scene to Mars. To the windswept dunes of “Lawrence of Arabia.” To Williams, it was “just a sickening feeling.”

Farmers in Alexander County claimed more than $7 million in crop insurance payouts that year — the highest on record. Roads were so mangled they had to be fully rebuilt. Trash and driftwood littered the peninsula. The damage made the case for a buyout harder to ignore.

If that case weren’t strong enough, the flood also put on display the benefits of letting the levee go. Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision not to fix it had hurt the nearby farmers, allowing the water to spread out in Dogtooth Bend may have helped relieve pressure on the levee system across the river in Missouri and downriver.

Williams and Renshaw had come to terms with what that meant. Their land had been sacrificed so others’ could be spared. When Williams signed up for the floodplain easement program in August 2019, he figured he’d never farm Dogtooth Bend again. By that point, only about 200 of their 1,200 acres could still grow a crop. “But do it right,” Renshaw said. Instead, they fell into a broken system that left them farming nearly useless land while they waited five years for the federal government to complete their easement paperwork.

Williams takes a call from Renshaw while he plants soybeans on his farm. (Julia Rendleman) A historic flood in 2019 broke through the Len Small Levee that protected Dogtooth Bend, sending six barges floating onto the land. Two remain in a field, seen here in November 2024. (Julia Rendleman) Piles of sand several feet deep remain on former farmland at Dogtooth Bend in May. (Julia Rendleman)

Williams knew the government moved slowly, but his first year’s wait seemed absurd. By year two, he’d nearly given up. By the summer of 2024, he was just plain disgusted. He checked in regularly with federal workers, calling the local officials he knew by name on their cellphones or popping into the local office in nearby Tamms. But the federal workers on the ground couldn’t tell him much other than his paperwork was still in process, under review with a federal official somewhere in another state thousands of miles from Dogtooth Bend. They were frustrated, too.

Danette Cross, who worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Alexander County until her retirement late last year, said most of the farmers knew her by name and often called her directly, expecting she’d have answers. But to get anything resolved, Cross had to run questions up a chain through a half-dozen people. “I’m not going to say the whole thing was a disaster — they closed on a lot of easements,” she said, “but nothing was timely.”

Hiatt, who had failed twice before to bring in funds for these farmers, tried again in 2019, this time banking their hopes on the emergency aid Congress had earmarked for the program. Hiatt said the Illinois team requested $24 million to buy out everyone who signed up at Dogtooth Bend. The payments are not full market value but allow farmers to invest in drier fields that would be less costly to the federal government in the long run.

But headquarters authorized just under $6 million, which it applied to the very worst fields. Williams’ land was hit hard, but it didn’t make the cut. That meant crop insurance and the other safety net farm bill programs would have to sustain him while he waited.

This wasn’t the only holdup. In 2018, Hiatt said, the agency had created a national team to handle land deals in an effort to improve efficiency. But he said it backfired.

“We were acquiring easements in 500 days” when the Illinois office handled the process on its own, he said. “Now we’ve got this specialized team — they’re taking 800. The math is not working there.”

The head of USDA’s Risk Management Agency, which oversees the crop insurance program, made a personal visit to the wreckage after the floodwaters receded in 2019. Martin Barbre, who led the agency for most of Trump’s first term, knew the area well. He grew up visiting his relatives nearby and himself farms just 100 miles away. In a recent interview, Barbre said he empathized with the farmers and wanted to ensure they got everything they were legally owed through crop insurance.

“I mean, you’ve farmed that ground your whole life. Your family’s owned it for, you know, probably for generations, and here it’s just gone,” Barbre said. He didn’t fault the farmers who kept planting while they waited for a federal buyout. “As long as they’re insured, they have the legal right to do that,” he said. “When I was administrator, I had a saying: ‘I want a producer to get every dime he’s got coming from the program — but not a penny more.’”

In 2020, the USDA leadership released additional funding to purchase easements on Dogtooth Bend. Williams bounced between the two programs. Each required new paperwork — and more time.

In 2021, at a meeting in Olive Branch, Hiatt faced frustrated farmers. “I took a beating,” he said. “And I was glad to take it, because it was poorly administered.”

Three more years passed, and no check had arrived for Williams. But the bills still did.

Although it could barely grow a thing, the county still taxed Williams’ land on Dogtooth Bend like it was prime ground — nearly $40,000 a year, according to Williams, calculated in part on farm productivity from across the state. That number would rise in each subsequent year, including on fields buried under 20 feet of sand. That’s because the rate wouldn’t change until the buyout went through and it was officially classified as conservation land.

Deer dart across a field at Dogtooth Bend in May as a storm approaches. As farms are returned to wetlands, local wildlife may benefit. (Julia Rendleman)

As one of the poorest and fastest-shrinking places in America, Alexander County — population 4,600 — leans on farmers like Williams to fund basic government services and keep teachers employed in a school district with just over 300 kids. Farming in Alexander County accounts for $1 in every $7 in the local economy. And as more people move out of the county, there are fewer left to shoulder the tax burden.

Sean Pecord, who farmed on Dogtooth Bend not far from Williams, was one of the first to sign up for the buyout program in 2019; his land was the worst hit. “There was nothing left of it to farm,” he said.

“They work at their own pace,” said Pecord, who along with his wife also runs the nearby Horseshoe Bar and Grill. “If they were operating on normal business terms, they’d be bankrupt in a year.”

Pecord received his payment in late 2023, about four years after he signed up. Williams was finally paid last September. “It’s not what they did,” Williams said of the federal government. “It’s how long they took to do it.”

G. Pang, who lives in nearby Missouri and owns land on Dogtooth Bend with her six siblings, said they’re still waiting to get paid — and for answers. She used to call Hiatt’s personal cellphone when she wanted a status update. But today, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has been hollowed out, with some 2,400 conservation staffers at home on paid leave through September under the terms of the federal buyout, according to a May report by Politico. Hiatt and his two federal colleagues who oversaw easement purchases in Illinois are among them, as are nearly half the staff of 30 who had been tasked with handling back-end easement paperwork as part of the agency’s national land team.

“Just going in there, taking a chainsaw, removing people and not knowing who you’re going to replace them with, you’re just creating a mess,” Pang said of staff cuts under Trump that have left her family in the dark.

Without the experienced staff, closing on these deals will take even longer, if it happens at all, Hiatt said.

“What’s happening now will never be reversed,” Hiatt said. “Once this is broken, which I don’t know if the break is complete yet, but it’s pretty fractured, I don’t think you can reset that bone.”

Several who joined the buyout were in their 70s and 80s. “They were devastated,” Renshaw recalled.

Williams’ health has deteriorated in the last few years. Macular degeneration has claimed much of his eyesight. Although he’s nearing retirement, he didn’t expect to go out like this.

Williams takes a lunch break with his family at his mother’s house on the farm in June. (Julia Rendleman)

One of the advertised benefits of the buyout program was that he could take the money and use it to buy farmland elsewhere. But by the time he had his check in hand and was ready to close on new land this year in Alexander County, prices had soared. That means the amount of money he agreed to when he signed on can no longer buy what he’d planned to use it for.

Williams is locked in to the 2020 rate, which is 50% lower than the maximum the government is paying today. If Williams had entered the program today, his land would be worth roughly $2 million more than he agreed to take.

“We could take two acres of that money and buy us an acre up here,” he said. “Now,” he said, “it takes at least three acres of that money to buy an acre up here.”

Part of him regrets signing the papers. The other part knows he didn’t have a choice.

“That monster is still down there,” he said of the river. “It will be back.”

In May, Williams looks across the land he farmed until late last year at Dogtooth Bend. (Julia Rendleman)

by Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News, and Mark Olalde, ProPublica

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.

Hakim Dermish moved to the small South Texas town of Catarina in 2002 in search of a rural lifestyle on a budget. The property where he lived with his wife didn’t have electricity or sewer lines at first, but that didn’t bother him.

“Even if we lived in a cardboard box, no one could kick us out,” Dermish said.

Back then, Catarina was a sleepy place. A decade later, oil and gas drilling picked up, and he welcomed the financial opportunities it brought. Dermish launched businesses to support the industry, offering everything from guards for drill sites to housing for oil field workers.

The growth also brought flares — flames burning off excess natural gas — that blazed day and night at wells in the surrounding countryside. Initially enamored of the industry’s potential, Dermish now worried that its pollution endangered the health of the town’s 75 residents. He began lodging complaints with the state in 2023, asking it to push companies to control emissions.

Inspectors with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality investigated, finding only a handful of violations, some of which the companies addressed. But that did little to allay the concerns of Dermish and his neighbors, who continued to see flares light up the sky and to smell gas wafting over the community.

“Starting first thing in the morning, talk about the stench. Then you call the state and nothing happens,” Dermish said. “They do absolutely nothing.”

His neighbor Lupe Campos, who worked in the oil fields for more than three decades, lives three blocks from a flare. Toxic hydrogen sulfide escapes from nearby wells, giving the air the smell of “burnt rotten eggs,” Campos said. “It’s hard to bear.”

Lupe Campos (Christopher Lee for ProPublica)

While working to expand the nation’s oil and gas production, President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained that drilling in the U.S. is cleaner than in other countries due to tighter environmental oversight. To mark Earth Day, for example, the White House boasted in a statement that increased natural gas exports meant the U.S. would be “sharing cleaner energy with allies” and “reducing global emissions.”

But Texas, the heart of America’s oil and gas industry, tells a different story.

Texas regulators tout their efforts to curtail oil field emissions by requiring drillers to obtain permits to release or burn gas from their wells.

Yet a first-of-its-kind analysis of permit applications to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s main oil and gas regulator, reveals a rubber-stamp system that allows drillers to emit vast amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere. Over 40 months — from May 2021 to September 2024 — oil companies applied for more than 12,000 flaring and venting permits, while the Railroad Commission rejected just 53 of them, a 99.6% approval rate, according to the data.

Natural gas is composed mostly of climate-warming methane but also contains other gases such as hydrogen sulfide, which is deadly at high concentrations. Gas escapes as wells are drilled and before infrastructure is in place to capture it. It also can be intentionally released if pressure in the system poses a safety risk or if capturing and transporting it to be sold is not profitable. Typically, drillers burn the gas they don’t capture, converting the methane to carbon dioxide, a less potent greenhouse gas, in a process called flaring. Sometimes, they release the gas without burning it, in a process called venting.

The permit applications showed oil companies requested to flare or vent more than 195 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year, enough to power more than 3 million homes and generate millions of dollars of tax revenue had the gas been captured. Those emissions would have a climate-warming impact roughly equivalent to 27 gas-fired power plants operating year-round, even if the flares burned every molecule of methane released from the wells.

“It’s a gargantuan amount of emissions,” said Jack McDonald, senior analyst of energy policy and science for the environmental group Oilfield Witness. “Because so much of this gas is methane and so much of it is either incompletely combusted or not combusted at all through the venting process, we see a huge climate impact.”

Oilfield Witness gathered and studied the Railroad Commission data on exemptions to the state’s flaring rules and shared it with ProPublica and Inside Climate News. The news organizations verified the data, including by soliciting input from professors at universities in Texas.

Railroad Commission spokesperson R.J. DeSilva said in a statement that Texas has made “significant progress” in addressing methane emissions. Companies must provide evidence that flaring is necessary, and, when approving permits, the agency follows all applicable rules, he said. “If an application lacks sufficient justification, it is returned with comments for clarification.”

“I am proud of the progress that has been made to reduce the waste of our natural resources,” Jim Wright, chair of the Railroad Commission, said in a statement, adding that “there is always room for further improvement.”

Between May 2021 and September 2024, state regulators approved 280 permits to burn or vent natural gas in Dimmit County, which is home to the small town of Catarina and its 75 residents. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica)

The analysis likely overstates emissions, since the near-guarantee that regulators will approve a permit gives companies an incentive to request authorization for amounts larger than they intend to emit to ensure they’re in compliance. For example, operators in four Texas counties flared about 70% of the volume of gas that their permits allowed, according to a recent effort to compare the state’s flaring data to information collected via satellite. And the Railroad Commission sometimes approves flaring smaller volumes than requested, which is not captured in the data.

“The Texas oil and natural gas industry is committed to ongoing progress in reducing flaring and methane emissions while continuing to meet the ever-growing demand for reliable oil and natural gas across the globe,” Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, told ProPublica and Inside Climate News in a statement.

Residents of communities surrounded by flares and leaking wells, like Catarina, want the state and the industry to do more to control oil field emissions. The Railroad Commission approved eight flares within 5 miles of the town during the study period and 280 across surrounding Dimmit County, according to agency data.

The danger posed by the gas became impossible to ignore on March 27, as a 30-inch steel pipeline a half-mile from Catarina failed. The rupture blasted more than 23 million cubic feet of gas into the air, as much as is used in 365 homes in a year, according to data the company that owns the pipeline, Energy Transfer, reported to the Railroad Commission.

On March 27, a pipeline just outside Catarina failed, spewing a large volume of natural gas into the air. As his house shook, Hakim Dermish captured the aftermath on his cellphone. (Courtesy of Hakim Dermish)

Watch video ➜

Dermish recorded the chaos with his cellphone. “The house is shaking,” he says in the video as the escaping gas roars, its concussions jostling the camera.

Fearing for their safety, he and his wife evacuated, heading to a neighboring town for the day. After they returned home that evening, he called the sheriff to ask what had happened. During the conversation, Dermish could feel the gas causing him to slur his words. The next morning, Dermish noticed new gas flares, presumably lit to release pressure in the pipeline network by burning excess gas. A cellphone video he recorded shows a towering column of flame, taller than a nearby telephone pole, billowing and rippling.

“Have you ever seen ‘Lord of the Rings’? Do you remember the Fire of Mordor?” Dermish said in an interview. “That’s what we have here.”

An incident report submitted to the state by Energy Transfer attributed the pipeline failure to a technician’s errors. Without objection from the Railroad Commission, the pipeline was repaired and back in service three days later. The agency did not assess Energy Transfer with a violation or a fine.

Energy Transfer did not respond to a request for comment.

After more than two decades in Catarina, Dermish and his wife are planning to move away. “It’s just too dangerous,” he said.

Hakim Dermish has for years urged Texas oil and gas regulatory agencies to more closely monitor the flares near Catarina. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica) Is American Oil and Gas Cleaner?

While the Trump administration characterizes American oil and gas as cleaner than fossil fuels from other countries, it has rolled back rules regulating methane.

The Environmental Protection Agency has, under Trump, delayed implementing previously finalized rules that would’ve mandated that the industry monitor for methane leaks and address them. He and Republicans in Congress also repealed the country’s first-ever tax on methane. And in June, Trump revoked a Biden administration guidance document laying out how companies should comply with a law aimed at reducing methane leaks from pipelines.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

As the nation’s highest-producing oil and gas state, Texas is a key barometer of the U.S. regulatory environment and whether it has created a cleaner fossil fuel industry.

The Permian Basin — the country’s largest oil field, which straddles the Texas-New Mexico border — was estimated by a 2024 study to emit the second-most methane of any oil field in the world.

The industry disputes that finding, pointing to a June report from S&P Global Commodity Insights that found that the rate of methane emissions in the Permian Basin dropped 29% between 2023 and 2024. “Methane emissions management” is increasingly a part of the industry’s operations, Raoul LeBlanc, a vice president at S&P, said in a statement announcing the findings. However, S&P’s report acknowledged that satellite data showed a much more modest reduction of 4%, contradicting the company’s own data, which was collected by airplane.

“We can say confidently that there is no evidence that methane emissions from the Permian Basin are low,” said Steven Hamburg, who studies methane as the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief scientist.

Companies dispose of oil field waste in this growing dump in Catarina. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica) Texas’ Attempt to Rein In Flaring

In Texas, State Rule 32 prohibits flaring and venting gas at wells, except under a few specific conditions: while the well is being drilled, during the first 10 days after the well is completed and when necessary to ensure safety. Otherwise, drillers must seek an exception.

The Railroad Commission changed the application process for these exemptions in 2020 and issued new guidance in 2021. Operators would have to explain why they could not suspend drilling to avoid flaring and indicate that they had investigated all options for using the gas before flaring.

Oilfield Witness gathered all exemption requests since 2021, which showed the agency repeatedly approving permits that failed to comply with its guidelines. In many cases, oil companies asked to flare indefinitely or didn’t justify why they needed to flare, leaving blank the section of the application asking why the exemption was needed.

Capturing the gas requires an expensive system of pipelines, compressors and other infrastructure that can cost more than the gas is worth. In their permit applications, companies cite this reality, often listing financial considerations as the reason for seeking exemptions, Oilfield Witness found. These were nearly always approved, even though the agency wrote that finances were an insufficient explanation in a presentation on the permitting process.

“The Railroad Commission seems very interested in devolving decision-making processes to the companies themselves,” McDonald said.

The data also showed that nearly 90% of the approved permit applications were backdated, retroactively giving permission for flares that were already burning. Oil companies typically asked the Railroad Commission for permission to flare 10 days after they had already burned the gas.

A spokesperson said that when the commission revamped its guidelines in 2020, it allowed a longer period in which companies could file for a permit after they’d already started to flare. Even so, nearly 900 of the permits were applied for after the updated filing window and still accepted by the agency.

The Railroad Commission also approved more than 7,000 flares within areas where the gas reservoir being drilled was known to be high in hydrogen sulfide, increasing the likelihood that the toxic gas could escape into the air. Of those flares, 600 were within a mile of a residence, the agency’s data showed.

Minimizing flaring permits is “not a priority in any sense” for the Railroad Commission, said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “The priority is oil produced, and that means revenue for the state. Oil and gas is a priority, so who cares about the flaring?”

Overstating the Progress

The Railroad Commission and the state’s oil industry trumpet their work to reduce flaring. The agency points to state data showing flaring rates dropping dramatically, specifically since 2019. And the Texas Oil and Gas Association announced in early August that drillers in the Permian Basin “slashed methane emission intensity by more than half in just two years.”

But such claims are misleading, according to experts such as David DiCarlo, an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s petroleum engineering school. Using 2019 as a starting point leaves a false impression that there’s been a sharp decline, he said, as methane emissions that year were staggeringly high due to booming production and inadequate pipeline capacity to gather the gas.

DeSilva, the Railroad Commission’s spokesperson, defended using 2019 as the baseline because “about five years ago we began taking proactive steps to reduce flaring in Texas.”

Taking a longer view shows that a median of 2.2% of gas at Texas oil wells was flared or vented over the past decade, according to a ProPublica and Inside Climate News review of state data. (Flaring at gas wells is rare because those sites have the necessary pipeline infrastructure in place to collect the gas.) That figure hovered just north of 2% in the most recently available data, representing a much smaller drop than the state and industry claim. The industry still hasn’t built sufficient pipeline networks to capture gas at oil wells, so, as production rises, so does flaring and venting.

Not Much Recent Progress on Oil Well Flaring

The Texas oil industry and its regulators have celebrated a reduction in the burning of climate-warming gases at oil wells, a practice known as flaring. However, state data shows that, while the flaring rate is below its 2019 peak, it has stayed relatively constant for the past several years.

“They can’t get it below 2% because they keep drilling,” DiCarlo said. Since emissions are highest when a well is being drilled, overall emissions will remain high as long as the industry is drilling new wells. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”

Among the largest beneficiaries of the state’s lax permitting system was an oil company called Endeavor Energy Resources. More than half the approved permanent flaring exemptions went to Endeavor, which merged with the $40 billion Diamondback Energy in September 2024. Endeavor also applied for the longest flaring permit — 6,300 days, or more than 17 years. The Railroad Commission approved the permit without shortening its duration.

Diamondback Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

The industry has simultaneously claimed that it is addressing methane while bristling at oversight.

Natural gas, as seen through a specialized camera that captures infrared energy, streams out of a Diamondback Energy facility near Midland, Texas, in 2023. (Courtesy of Oilfield Witness)

Watch video ➜

Steven Pruett is the president and CEO of Elevation Resources, a Permian Basin oil company, and the immediate past chair of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, one of the industry’s main trade groups. His company saw a 2,408% increase in flaring immediately following new wells being drilled and a 692% increase in flaring overall in 2023, according to emails unearthed by environmental watchdog organization Fieldnotes and shared with ProPublica and Inside Climate News. In the email exchange with University of Texas faculty who were preparing a grant application for a federal methane-reduction program, Pruett blamed the increases on inadequate infrastructure to capture the gas.

Just weeks later, Pruett participated in a tour of the oil field alongside EPA staff, where he echoed the claim that the American oil and gas industry is cleaner than others and that drilling companies were complying with efforts to reduce emissions.

During his term at the helm of the national trade group, it spearheaded multiple lawsuits against the EPA over the government’s methane rules.

Pruett did not respond to a request for comment.

“A Constant Roar”

Those opposed to flaring face long odds in halting the practice, even in rare instances when the Railroad Commission hears objections.

Consider the experience of Tom Pohlman, then sheriff of Fisher County, who had a flare burning next to his home in the Texas Panhandle starting in October 2023. The driller responsible for it, Patton Exploration, solicited companies to extend a pipeline to the oil well to capture the gas and evaluated whether the gas could be used to mine bitcoin. But by July 2024, it still had no deal, so the company sought another permit to continue flaring up to 1 million cubic feet of gas per day for 18 months. “Patton is diligently pursuing every avenue possible to find a solution, but still needs more time,” the company wrote in its application.

When Pohlman learned that Patton Exploration had applied for a new permit, he and his neighbors urged the Railroad Commission to deny it.

“The sound that comes from the flame is a constant roar that we can hear throughout our property both day and night,” the neighbors wrote in their objection. “There is no peace and quiet since the day of its ignition.”

In September 2024, Pohlman became one of the few people to officially challenge a flaring permit in Texas, as he and Patton Exploration representatives went head-to-head in a hearing before a Railroad Commission administrative law judge.

“For approximately 20 of my residents in this area, it completely lights up their yard and everything else,” Pohlman said, telling the judge that the flare was 45 feet high. “I just need liveability for this neighborhood. We’ve had nothing but issues here.”

Patton Exploration’s lawyer, David Gross, acknowledged the neighbors’ frustrations but emphasized the importance of keeping the well pumping.

“You can’t produce the oil without producing the gas,” he told the judge. “It’s the public policy of Texas that the recoverable oil and gas in the state’s reservoirs be recovered because it is in the public interest.”

In January, the three elected members of the Railroad Commission voted unanimously to approve the permit and allow flaring for another 12 months.

A flare lights up the night sky in Catarina. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica)

by Vianna Davila, Liz Sharp and Myron Avant

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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, while ensuring equal opportunities for all. Each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2025; here are our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives. We are committed to removing barriers that have traditionally excluded qualified applicants, including people with disabilities, those from low-income backgrounds, veterans, people of color and women.

“For 10 years ProPublica has reported on its efforts to grow and diversify its staff. That important work continues,” ProPublica President Robin Sparkman said. “We are committed to covering a range of issues in our journalism. To do that effectively we need employees with varied perspectives and backgrounds.”

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 186 full-time employees at the start of 2024 to 193 in 2025.

We’ve added resources to the staff supporting this work, including hiring a talent acquisition manager who has worked to refine our hiring process to make the candidate experience more fair and consistent. We’ve created organizational partnerships to provide access to investigative journalism training and build community with journalists from a variety of backgrounds. We’ve fostered mentorships so that any employee can benefit from a colleague’s experiences and we spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of diverse religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts.

Our Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Vianna Davila and Liz Sharp.

Our work in this area can also be seen in our journalism. Throughout 2024, we reported on the adverse effects of abortion restrictions on women, including those who died after their states banned the procedure. Our reporting resulted in new federal rules that went into effect last year that are aimed at speeding repatriations of Native American remains. Last February, the U.S. Department of Justice started working with a sheriff’s office in Wisconsin on a written policy on how to respond to incidents involving people with limited English proficiency; this followed our reporting on how a grammatical mistake in Spanish led sheriff’s deputies to wrongly blame a Nicaraguan dairy worker for his son’s death. Our reporting on systemic failings by the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat people with mental illnesses, including in cases in which veterans went on to kill themselves or others, resulted in commitments to increase staffing by the VA secretary.

We also partner with news organizations across the country. Last year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill into law that curtailed the controversial contract-for-deed real estate deals and included greater protections for buyers; his action followed a 2022 investigation by ProPublica and the Sahan Journal that revealed questionable real estate transactions that left members of Minnesota’s Somali and Hispanic immigrant communities at risk of losing their homes. Meanwhile in Virginia, the state’s legislature last year approved a statewide commission to investigate the role of public colleges and universities in displacing Black communities, following our reporting on the issue with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we collected aggregate data about our application and interview process. Out of 27 positions filled in 2024, 52% of the finalists identified as women and half identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Fifty-six percent of the people we hired identified as women and 37% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

At the start of 2025, the percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 63%.

For the seventh year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 52% of the staff.

About 2% of our staff identify as nonbinary or transgender.

Since 2022, we have collected demographic information about our board of directors. Of the 15 people on the board, 47% identified as women. About 67% of the directors identified as non-Hispanic white, compared to 64% last year.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here’s how our staff breaks down.

(Please note that the data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, in 2022 we began stating numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” The employee information is as of Jan. 1 of each year. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people, and that group does not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding. Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.)

Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica Race and Ethnicity: Editorial Race and Ethnicity: Managers Gender: All of ProPublica Gender: Editorial Gender: Managers New Initiatives

Added new staff: Part of our goal in 2024 was to build capacity on the team that is responsible for hiring and supporting ProPublicans. We brought on a seasoned talent acquisition manager with over a decade of recruiting experience, including recent years at top news organizations. Their addition ensures our team has the capacity to fully support hiring managers while creating a thoughtful, well-structured recruiting experience for every candidate.

Strengthening fair and inclusive hiring: We’ve taken significant steps to make our hiring process even more fair, transparent and inclusive. By implementing structured interviews across the organization, we’re ensuring every candidate is evaluated consistently. We’ve also increased collaboration with hiring teams through more frequent consultations, ensuring we adhere to fair and nondiscriminatory hiring practices. On the candidate side, we’ve added more touchpoints and improved communication, so candidates are kept more up to date on the process of their applications.

Our Ongoing Efforts

ProPublica thinks about its efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism); recruiting talent and improving our hiring process; and inclusion and retention.

Building the Pipeline

Conference stipends: ProPublica partnered with Investigative Reporters & Editors to sponsor journalists to attend the annual IRE convention. We also sponsored a journalists of color mixer, open to everyone at the conference, which was attended by close to 100 people.

Emerging Reporters Program: The program provides financial assistance and mentorship to five students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible due to cost, so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field. The program is open to all and includes a $9,000 stipend, virtual programming and an all-expenses paid trip to an IRE conference on computer assisted reporting. This is the program’s ninth year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford.

Data Institute: In 2016, ProPublica journalists founded The Data Institute, a workshop for journalists on how to use data, design and code. ProPublica eventually started working with Open News, which coordinates student and instructor participation and provides support for project management and event planning. The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Journalism & Democracy now organize this in-person event. Last year a half dozen current and former ProPublicans served as trainers at the institute, which is focused on empowering people with data skills they can bring back to their own newsrooms.

Investigative Editor Training Program: ProPublica started an Investigative Editor Training Program in 2023 for journalists who want to learn how to manage, edit and elevate investigative projects that expose harm and create impact. The curriculum for the yearlong program was designed by ProPublica Managing Editor Ginger Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas. The program is open to all and tries to address the industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. We selected 10 people to attend a weeklong training at our New York office. Also included in the program were an additional four ProPublica staffers who aspire to become story editors. Participants heard from ProPublica editors on different aspects of the craft, from story selection and memos to managing the reporting and digging into the first draft. They were also paired with ProPublica senior staff as mentors and received additional virtual training for the remainder of the year. We offered this training again in 2025.

Recruiting and Hiring

Affinity conferences: Last summer, ProPublica recruiters and newsroom staff attended the country’s three largest affinity journalism conferences, sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. The newsroom sponsored the NABJ Investigative Task Force mixer and the Visual Task Force Moneta Sleet Photo Competition at the organization’s annual convention in Chicago.

Salary transparency and fairness: ProPublica is committed to paying its employees fairly and transparently and works to ensure that there is no improper discrimination in compensation. Since the fall of 2022, ProPublica has published salary ranges for all posted job openings, regardless of geography. Our staff recently formed a union, and future salary increases will be part of a collective bargaining agreement.

Interview pools: We strive for an interview pool that includes at least one qualified candidate from an underrepresented background. Interview pools are not capped and seek to include all equally qualified candidates.

Freelancer guide: ProPublica publishes a guide for freelancers interested in pitching an investigation to ProPublica. We designed the guide to formalize the pitch process and level the playing field for how freelance projects are presented and considered. Submissions will be reviewed by editors on a rotating basis. ProPublica will respond to anyone who completes the form, even if their proposal is not accepted.

LRN candidate outreach: Editors with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network continue to do personalized recruiting and offer office hours so local journalists can discuss their accountability work with a member of the team. LRN editors were also present at journalism conferences, including affinity group gatherings — where they met with interested applicants in an effort to help them with the project-development and application process. The program also regularly taps the talent team for leads of promising candidates. In addition, the team of editors regularly discusses the diversity of voices in the program and how to adapt our work to meet a range of needs.

Inclusion and Retention

Welcoming new hires and focusing on internal culture: Our inclusion subcommittee consists of about 30 ProPublicans who meet monthly to consider ways to make the newsroom more inclusive and fair, while building support for one another as colleagues. Mariam Elba and Megan O’Matz chair this subcommittee. The group created a tool to help staff identify training and development opportunities; fostered mentorships for new hires; and spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of various religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts. An internal story club meets regularly to discuss particularly enjoyable stories, podcasts or books. The committee spearheaded the institution of voluntary breakout rooms after all-staff meetings, where staff are randomly assigned to groups who discuss a prompt created by the committee to spark conversation and build community. The committee works to improve communication, share knowledge and address challenges faced by a far-flung workforce.

Sensitivity subcommittee: Led by Colleen Barry, this group serves as a resource for editors and reporters to tap the collective brain trust of our newsroom when working on particularly sensitive stories about suicide, sexual abuse, child abuse, racial trauma and more. The committee maintains a Slack channel where anyone can share resources and where editors and reporters can solicit feedback on drafts or ask questions on how best to report on sensitive subjects. When a “sensitivity read” or the discussions during the editing and production of a story are particularly instructive, the subcommittee has shared those experiences at diversity committee meetings so any lessons can be more broadly applied.

ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program, organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song, that is open to all and matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions. Last year, more than 50 ProPublicans participated in this program, which was started in 2018.

Unconscious bias training: Since 2021, ProPublica has used Paradigm Reach to provide ongoing training for staff to create a workplace culture that is intentional, inclusive and high performing. The training is provided to all new staff.

Diversity Committee office hours: We have continued to offer a casual virtual hangout twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm or chat in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new positions, including fellowships, full-time and temporary roles.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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When a source first told me about the case of Lloyd Gray in late 2024, I jotted down these notes: two Black jurors, a swastika and Gov. Jeff Landry. That was an oversimplification of a deeply troubling issue, but it also got to the heart of a story published this week by ProPublica and Verite News that haunts Louisiana and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Gray was just 19 in 1980 when he was tried in a New Orleans courtroom on a charge of aggravated rape. After one day of testimony, the jury returned with a 10-2 split verdict. The 10 white jurors voted guilty and the only two Black jurors not guilty. If you’re a regular consumer of courtroom dramas, you might think a split verdict would mean a mistrial, and today it would. But back then in Louisiana, where nonunanimous juries were legal, it resulted in a life sentence for Gray.

Covering the criminal justice system in Louisiana often means familiarizing myself with things people in other parts of the country might find shocking. For instance, many might be surprised to learn that here, for more than 120 years, the state allowed people like Gray to be sent to prison for life even though two jurors voted not guilty. The only other state to do the same was Oregon.

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice was unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law meant to uphold white supremacy, but the decision only applied in cases going forward; the court left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. Louisiana refused to reconsider the convictions of more than 1,000 mostly Black men sent to prison for lengthy sentences by those split-jury verdicts.

Reporting here can often be a surreal experience. Even when you think you’ve reached a level of cynicism that can’t be breached, something new comes along that shocks your system. For me, that was the swastika.

While Gray’s former attorney was explaining the ins and outs of his case to me, he mentioned that at some point, someone had drawn the Nazi hate symbol on the cover of Gray’s case file. And sure enough, when Gray’s attorneys sent me the cover page of his file, there it was, in the upper right corner: a small doodle of a swastika.

It was hard to contemplate how, even as recently as the 1980s, someone would feel comfortable enough to draw such a disgraceful thing on a government document without fear of repercussion. The district attorney’s office does not dispute its existence or that a staff member might have drawn it, but it doesn’t know who or when.

A doodle of a swastika on the upper right corner of the cover of Gray’s file (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News. Highlight added by ProPublica.)

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections denied our request to interview Gray, either by phone or in person, so the only way to communicate with him for the story was via his attorneys. I provided them with questions, and they relayed his responses.

I wanted to know what his life was like before that fateful night in 1980 when he was accused of rape. He described a happy childhood, saying: “The beauty of it is we were loved. Me and my sister, my brother, we were loved.” But he also recalled witnessing his mother’s mistreatment at a gas station at a young age. “It opened my eyes to racism at its finest,” Gray said.

Gray’s attorneys contend that the swastika, along with the two Black jurors voting to acquit, among other issues, proves that his prosecution was tainted by racial bias and should be enough to, at the very least, reconsider Gray’s sentence.

At one point, the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office appeared to agree and proposed a plea deal that would allow for Gray’s release. In Oregon, after the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling, the state vacated the sentences of everyone convicted by a nonunanimous jury, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences that allowed many to walk free.

But again, this is Louisiana. Unlike Oregon, the state Supreme Court decided not to vacate old split-jury convictions and left it to the Legislature to deal with the issue. In turn, lawmakers, backed by Landry, shut off all paths to freedom for people like Gray. They not only shot down legislation allowing for older split-jury verdicts to be reexamined, they passed a bill gutting the ability of prosecutors to offer plea deals. (The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment.)

The impact of this law played out in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court in late August when the district attorney’s office told Judge Robin Pittman that the new law prevented it from waiving a missed filing deadline by Gray and, as a result, it couldn’t broker a deal. Pittman set a new hearing for Oct. 30 at which she will decide if Gray’s case, in which he asked for his sentence to be reconsidered, can move forward.

“When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” Gray told me through his attorneys. “After 45 years, I’m no closer to freedom than the day I walked into this place.”

by Renee Dudley

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The Pentagon issued a “letter of concern” to Microsoft documenting a “breach of trust” over the company’s use of China-based engineers to maintain sensitive government computer systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week. At the same time, the Defense Department is opening an investigation into whether any of those employees have compromised national security.

The actions came in response to a recent ProPublica investigation that exposed Microsoft’s “digital escort” system, in which U.S. personnel with security clearances supervise foreign engineers, including those in China. ProPublica found that the escorts often lack the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills.

The tech giant developed the arrangement as a work-around to a Defense Department requirement that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

“The program was designed to comply with contracting rules, but it exposed the department to unacceptable risk,” Hegseth said in a video announcement posted on X. “If you’re thinking America first and common sense, this doesn’t pass either of those tests.”

The letter serves as a warning to Microsoft, which has said in earnings reports that it receives “substantial revenue from government contracts.” It is less serious than a “cure notice,” which could lead to termination of Microsoft contracts if problems are not fixed. The department did not release the letter publicly, and it did not reply to ProPublica’s request for a copy of it.

Experts have said allowing China-based personnel to perform technical support and maintenance on U.S. government computer systems poses major security risks. Laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.

Hegseth said the newly opened Pentagon investigation into the digital escort program would focus on Microsoft’s China-based employees. The probe will “help us determine the impact of this digital escort workaround,” he said, including whether “they put anything in the code that we didn’t know about.”

Hegseth said in his video announcement that the department is also requiring a new third-party audit of Microsoft’s digital escort program. It is unclear who will conduct that audit.

Microsoft started using digital escorts about a decade ago, ProPublica found, and went on to win federal cloud computing business worth billions of dollars. Through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, the system escaped the notice of Pentagon officials. ProPublica reported last week that Microsoft failed to disclose key details of the arrangement in the security plans it submitted to the Defense Department. The company has declined to comment on those omissions.

“We expect vendors doing business with the Department of Defense to put U.S. national security ahead of profit maximization,” Hegseth said in the video.

In the wake of ProPublica’s reporting, Microsoft announced last month that it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems. In a statement provided for this story, the company said that it “will continue to collaborate with the US Government to ensure we are meeting their expectations.”

“We remain committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed,” the company said in the statement.

In addition to China, Microsoft has operations in India, the European Union and elsewhere across the globe, and engineers in those places also work on Defense Department cloud maintenance.

Last month, Hegseth said on X that “foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems.” But last week, in response to ProPublica’s questions, the Defense Department left the door open to the continued use of foreign-based engineers with digital escorts, saying that it “may be deemed an acceptable risk,” depending on factors that include “the country of origin of the foreign national” being escorted.

In his announcement, Hegseth did not mention whether the escort program would continue or say whether Microsoft’s reliance on other foreign nationals to maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems would also be reviewed. The department did not respond to questions from ProPublica seeking additional information about the new investigations.

ProPublica reported last month that Microsoft has also relied on its China-based employees to maintain federal cloud computing systems beyond the Defense Department, including those of the departments of Justice, Treasury and Commerce. In response to the reporting, Microsoft has suggested that it would also discontinue the use of China-based engineers for those departments.

In this week’s announcement, Hegseth said the Defense Department was working “with our partners in the rest of the federal government to ensure that all U.S. networks are protected.”

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

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

Leaders in Alaska and elsewhere have repeatedly promised action in recent years to address the nation’s chronic failure to solve the murder or disappearance of Indigenous people.

Federal legislation backed by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski called for improving data collection and information sharing among law enforcement and tribes. Gov. Mike Dunleavy said again and again and as recently as May 5 that the state government would work with Alaska Natives to address the crisis.

“My administration will continue to support law enforcement, victim advocacy groups, Alaska Native Tribes and other entities working together to solve these cases and bring closure to victims’ families,” Dunleavy said in a news release last year.

Yet when an Alaska Native group asked state law enforcement officials in June for one of the most fundamental pieces of data needed to understand the issue — a list of murders investigated by state police — the state said no.

Charlene Aqpik Apok launched Data for Indigenous Justice in 2020 after trying to collect the names of missing and murdered Indigenous people to read at a rally, only to discover no government agency had been keeping track. Over time, the nonprofit built its own homegrown database with the help of villagers, friends and family across the state.

In 2023, the state started publishing a list quarterly with names of Indigenous people reported missing. But the state still does not issue a list for the other key piece of the group’s efforts: Indigenous people who have been killed.

So on June 4, the nonprofit filed two public records requests with the Alaska Department of Public Safety concerning homicide cases the agency had investigated since 2022. The group asked first for victims of all races and then for those identified as Alaska Native.

Apok said she didn’t think the request was controversial or complicated.

But the state rejected the requests a week later. The agency said fulfilling the request would take “several hours” and cited a state regulation allowing a denial if providing information to a requester would require employees to “compile or summarize” existing public records.

“We do not keep lists of victims of any type of crime, including homicide victims, and to fulfil this request DPS would have to manually review incident reports from multiple years to create a record that matched what you are looking for,” Austin McDaniel, communications director for the department, wrote to the nonprofit.

McDaniel offered no direct response when the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asked why the agency could not retrieve homicide records with a simple database query or why, even if the work required manual review and wasn’t required under state law, the agency didn’t simply create a list of homicide victims.

(Alaska’s public records law says any records that take state employees fewer than five hours to produce shall be provided for free, and the state can choose to waive research fees if providing records would serve the public interest. Even if an agency needs to create a new record, as McDaniel asserted in his denial, it’s allowed to “if the public agency can do so without impairing its functioning.”)

Data for Indigenous Justice appealed the denial to the head of the department, Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell, who decided in favor of the agency.

The nonprofit’s records request and the state’s denial revealed that Alaska, four years after creating a council on murdered and missing Indigenous people, cannot readily identify murder cases involving Indigenous victims. The state now employs four investigators who focus on such cases.

“How do they know which cases are Alaska Native or Indigenous people for their MMIP investigators if they cannot do a simple pull of the demographics that we are talking about?” Apok said.

Apok said tracking complete and accurate data on Indigenous people who have disappeared or been killed matters because otherwise, law enforcement can shrug off individual cases and deny the scale of the problem.

“That’s the power of data. That’s the power of collective information,” she said.

Grace Norton holds a photo of her niece, Ashley Johnson-Barr, who was murdered in Kotzebue, Alaska, in 2018. Kotzebue residents walked along Shore Avenue and scattered rose petals in remembrance of missing and murdered Indigenous people in 2023. (Marc Lester/ADN)

In lieu of answering detailed questions for this story, McDaniel provided a one-page response saying that the department receives thousands of records requests each year. He said the agency is a “leader in data transparency” for missing and murdered Indigenous people, adding that “to imply that we are not invested in this work due to the denial of one records request from an advocacy group is absurd.”

He cited as examples of transparency the department’s publication of information about missing Indigenous people and its provision of law enforcement data to tribal governments in support of their requests for federal grants.

Anchorage, which runs the state’s largest municipal police department, recently reversed a policy that withheld the identities of certain homicide victims. The police chief released the records after Daily News reporting revealed the policy had no basis in law and was opposed by some victims’ rights advocates.

State troopers, meanwhile, handle about 38% of all murders in Alaska, according to statistics that law enforcement reports each year. From 2019 to 2023, the most recent data available, troopers investigated an average of 22 murders each year. That means the agency would likely need to review just a few dozen reports to provide the requested names.

Watershed reports published in Canada in 2017 and by the Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute in 2018 revealed the scope of the crisis of missing and murdered people from Indigenous communities.

Those reports, Apok said, “named exactly what a lot of us were seeing and feeling, where we didn’t know our experiences were part of a larger collective.”

In 2021, Data for Indigenous Justice published the first report on the crisis in Alaska, highlighting the failure of media and local governments to gather data on cases of missing and murdered people to analyze patterns. A council appointed by Dunleavy even relied on Apok’s findings — including her conclusion that little data is available — when trying to describe the scope of the problem.

Dunleavy and Murkowski have been vocal on the issue in the years since.

A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions about the state’s failure to provide names of homicide victims to Apok’s group. Told of the decision not to release the names, Murkowski’s office said the senator was unavailable for an interview and offered no comment on the state’s actions.

Apok said her group will continue making public records requests to the state while building its own database through community connections.

“We’re going to keep doing what we do,” she said. “People will keep telling us names.”

by Tim Golden

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More than two decades after victims of the 9/11 attacks began trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia responsible for helping the Qaida terrorists who carried out the plot, a federal judge has ruled that a civil lawsuit against the kingdom can go to trial.

The decision on Thursday, by Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, represents a crucial victory for survivors of the attacks and relatives of the 2,977 people who were killed.

“This is a historic win for the families,” said a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, did not respond to requests for comment on the judge’s ruling.

The Saudi kingdom, which has long rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, could still appeal Daniels’ decision under special protections that are afforded to foreign governments in federal law, legal experts said. However, they added that the Saudi government might be willing to consider a settlement with the plaintiffs to avoid the scrutiny of a major trial and the expansive discovery of information that it would bring.

Already, information uncovered by plaintiffs has rewritten the history of the Sept. 11 plot as it was presented in the years after the attacks by the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

Most significantly, the plaintiffs’ evidence has undermined the FBI’s conclusion that two Saudi officials in Southern California — one a part-time spy, the other a religious official with diplomatic status — acted “unwittingly” when they helped the first Qaida hijackers who arrived in the United States.

In an email, the FBI also declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

It has long been established that in the years before 9/11, some members of the Saudi royal family and some powerful Saudi officials had supported militant Islamist movements and gave money to Islamic charities that in turn helped finance al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

However, both the FBI and the CIA emphasized in the aftermath of the attacks that the Saudi royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its banished leader, Osama bin Laden, and that senior officials of the government had not assisted the group.

The litigation in New York focused on the roles of two lower-level Saudi officials living in the United States. One, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged graduate student in San Diego who had long worked for the Saudi civil aviation agency. The other, Fahad al-Thumairy, was a religious official serving in Los Angeles as an imam at a new Saudi-funded mosque and as a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate.

The FBI quickly determined that Bayoumi met the first two hijackers near the mosque soon after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000 and that he helped them rent an apartment in San Diego, open a bank account and buy a car.

Bayoumi also introduced the two jihadists — who knew no one in the United States, spoke virtually no English and had no experience of living in the West — to a group of Muslim men who provided them with crucial support over the months that they lived in the city.

Bayoumi moved his family to Birmingham, England, in the summer of 2001. Within days of the attacks, he was detained and questioned by the British police at the FBI’s request before being allowed to return to Saudi Arabia.

In a search of Bayoumi’s home, the British authorities turned up documents, notebooks, videotapes and computer files that they shared with the FBI, officials said. But only in the last two years did lawyers for the 9/11 families obtain much of that cache — and then only from the British government.

From the start, U.S. investigators were skeptical of Bayoumi’s account. In the end, though, the FBI largely accepted his claims that he met the two Qaida operatives by chance, helped them as he would any compatriots and had no idea of their terrorist plans. Both Bayoumi and the Saudi government insisted repeatedly that he had no ties to Saudi intelligence.

Despite the efforts of a small group of FBI agents to pursue the case, it was eventually closed by the bureau. The civil lawsuit nearly died in 2016, when President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to carve out an exception to the sovereign immunity of foreign governments and permit the families to sue the Saudi kingdom. Congress overrode that veto, however, allowing the suit to go forward.

President Donald Trump later blocked the families from obtaining classified government documents on the 9/11 investigations, claiming they were state secrets. President Joe Biden later reversed that stance and declassified documents that included reporting confirming that Bayoumi was a part-time agent of the Saudi intelligence service.

The evidence that plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved even more powerful.

It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaida plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video.

In his ruling, Daniels noted that the two sides had different interpretations of almost every piece of evidence. But he endorsed the plaintiffs’ views of several key exhibits, including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks. Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son with homework.

Daniels said the plaintiffs’ evidence created “a high probability as to Bayoumi and Thumairy’s roles in the hijackers’ plans, and the related role of their employer,” the Saudi government. “In many instances,” he added, “it even appeared that Bayoumi actively injected himself” into the hijackers’ illicit activities.

Eagleson, the families’ spokesperson, noted that during the long pretrial litigation, the plaintiffs had been allowed to pursue only limited discovery about Bayoumi, Thumairy and a handful of other Saudis.

“We did all of this with our hands tied behind our backs,” he said, “and even with the FBI pushing back and President Trump invoking state secrets, we created an overwhelming picture of Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting the 9/11 hijackers.”

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom, and Yilun Cheng, Houston Chronicle

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 Newsroom, the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

The devastating flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed dozens of people, inundated hundreds of thousands of homes and left the community desperate for a solution.

Since then, local flood experts have extensively studied the possibility of a multibillion-dollar tunnel system across Harris County, where Houston is located. Studies have focused on the construction of pipelines, 30 to 40 feet in diameter, that could ferry massive amounts of water out to the Gulf in the event of a storm.

Now, after years of research and discussion, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project.

An investigation by The Texas Newsroom and the Houston Chronicle has found that the billionaire, in partnership with Houston-area Rep. Wesley Hunt, has spent months aggressively pushing state and local officials to hire Musk’s Boring Co. to build two narrower, 12-foot tunnels around one major watershed. That could be a potentially cheaper, but, at least one expert said, less effective solution to the region’s historic flooding woes.

Hunt’s team has said the Boring project would cost $760 million and involve the company getting 15% of the cost up front from state and local coffers.

Within two months of this push, the Harris County Commissioners Court unanimously voted to study a pilot program that included a look at smaller tunnels, with specifications similar to what Boring had pitched. The commissioners court, made up of five elected members including a county judge, oversees the county’s budget.

Both Musk and Hunt stand to benefit should Boring be selected to build any part of the project. Hunt is reportedly considering a challenge to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary. And landing a job like this would also be a significant win for Boring, which has not completed a major public project in Texas and faces criticisms for its ventures elsewhere.

The discussions about the Boring pitch have happened mostly out of the public eye. Hunt mentioned the project in passing at a town hall in Houston in February. Since then, he has refused to answer the newsrooms’ questions about when Musk sold him on the idea and why he became its pitchman.

Efforts to reach Musk and representatives with Boring were unsuccessful.

Experts and some local officials question whether Musk and his company are the right pick for the job. The Boring Co. has focused on transportation tunnels, not flood mitigation.

“If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water,” said Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues. “So what have you saved? Have you reduced the flooding upstream by an inch? And are you going to spend multimillions of dollars to do that? Well, maybe that’s not worth it.”

In response to the newsrooms’ questions, state and local officials said no public money has been allocated to Boring. County officials added that they have not chosen a tunnel contractor and any process to do so would follow normal procurement rules.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whose staff met with Hunt’s team during the legislative session to discuss the proposal, remains open to the idea. As president of the Texas Senate with close ties to President Donald Trump, he is a powerful ally.

“If Elon Musk and the Boring Company, or any other company, can build two massive tunnels under the Houston bayous in a few years to save the city from flooding, I am always going to be interested to listen,” Patrick, a Republican, told the newsrooms. “The truth is, Elon Musk is one of the only people in the world who could accomplish this.”

Then-candidate Wesley Hunt, now a Republican representative, speaks with volunteers before they campaign on his behalf in 2020. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle) The Pitch Process Begins

In 2022, the Harris County Flood Control District released findings from its yearslong tunnel study, which has so far cost nearly $3 million in local and federal funds.

The idea was to build eight tunnels, totalling around 130 miles in length, according to the report. The tunnels would be huge, wide enough for a container ship, and buried 40 to 140 feet underground, depending on the location. Austin and San Antonio have similar systems, although on a smaller scale.

The Buffalo Bayou segment of the Houston project — which Boring has proposed to build — is a centerpiece of the design and would run through the city’s core and some of its most developed neighborhoods. The county estimated it would cost $4.6 billion.

The total cost for the system was projected to be $30 billion, funded by a potential mix of federal, state and local dollars, and the timeline was 10 to 15 years to complete construction.

Given the scope and complexity of the project, the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in discussions about the tunnels since the beginning. The corps also has jurisdiction over the two federal reservoirs in the area.

Eight years after Harvey, however, the tunnel project has not broken ground.

Hunt has accused the Army Corps of “​​dragging their feet a little bit” because its study of the tunnel system has been delayed. In December, Congress ordered the Corps to finish the analysis. Hunt hailed the decision, but to date the Army Corps has not completed the study.

Just two months later, however, his staffers and Musk’s team started shopping Boring’s proposal to politicians across the state.

Emails, text messages and policy memos the newsrooms obtained through public records requests show Hunt’s chief of staff, James Kyrkanides, repeatedly attempted to obtain public money on behalf of Boring. The documents, which have not been released previously to the public, also lay out how Hunt worked to secure Musk access to lawmakers and other officials ahead of the formal bidding process.

Kyrkanides declined to comment for this story.

In February, Boring pitched its proposal to elected officials in Harris County as an “innovative and cost-effective solution.”

“We are confident in our ability to execute this project successfully to bring peace of mind to residents of Harris County and the greater Houston area during future flood events,” Jim Fitzgerald, Boring’s global head of business development, wrote in a two-page memo about the proposal addressed to Kyrkanides and shared with local officials.

That same month, Hunt spoke at a town hall meeting about his involvement.

“I talked to him” — Musk — “about Hurricane Harvey and how we need tunnels,” Hunt said, according to Community Impact. “He told me, ‘I can do that at a fraction of the cost the Army Corps of Engineers would do it.’”

A few days later, the head of a local nonprofit wrote to a county commissioner saying she’d heard Hunt and Musk were shopping the proposal around and that the idea may have been discussed on board the president’s jet.

“I hear that Congressman Hunt talked to Elon Musk about his boring company while on a trip on Airforce 1,” Colleen Gilbert, executive director of the Greens Bayou Coalition, emailed.

It’s unclear if Trump was on board or took part in the discussions. The president’s spokespeople didn’t answer questions about the apparent meeting.

In April, Kyrkanides made a detailed pitch in an email to Patrick’s staff. He passed along Boring’s proposal and suggested that $60 million be set aside in the state budget “that will be matched with another $60 million” from the Harris County Flood Control District as a “down payment for the $760 million project Elon pitched Wesley.”

“I believe the Lt. Gov. spoke with Elon and the Boring Company this week,” Kyrkanides emailed in May, a month before the regular legislative session wrapped up. “Wesley also spoke with Elon, and everything seems on track!”

Kyrkanides followed up once more mid-month: “Anything you need from us?”

Pushing for Smaller Tunnels

As they pushed the idea to state lawmakers, Hunt’s team repeatedly lobbied Harris County officials, reaching out to at least two commissioners, the county’s legislative liaison and flood control experts.

Early on, Houston officials had concerns about what Boring proposed.

The two-page letter from Boring said its tunnels would be “no shallower than 15 feet to 30 feet below ground surface,” while the county’s previous research proposed a much deeper range for the Buffalo Bayou segment.

An engineering expert in County Commissioner Tom Ramsey’s office warned that Boring’s shallower plan could interfere with bridge foundations, utility lines and existing easements.

“It discusses that the tunnel would be much shallower then anticipated,” Eric Heppen, Ramsey’s director of engineering, wrote in an email to other staffers in his office on Feb. 17. “I would quickly confirm if it can be deeper or if that becomes a load challenge for the system.”

Boring said in its pitch that the tunnel depth is “flexible,” but the company did not respond to the newsrooms’ question about whether it can build to the standards outlined in the county’s study.

Volume was another concern. A single 40-foot-wide tunnel can move about 12,000 cubic feet of water every second, county studies show. Two 12-foot-wide tunnels, laid side by side, as Boring proposed, might struggle to keep pace in a flood emergency, according to Dunbar, the veteran water resources engineer.

“One would need eleven 12-foot diameter tunnels to provide the same flow capacity as one 40-foot diameter tunnel,” he told the newsrooms. “Providing only two 12-foot diameter tunnels does not provide the flow capacity that Harris County or the Corps of Engineers are seeking.”

Boring Co.’s Proposed Tunnels Would be Narrower and Shallower Than County Plan Calls for (Sources: Harris County Flood Control District study; Boring Co. tunnel pitch. Graphic: Ken Ellis, Houston Chronicle.)

The county continued to engage with the company despite these concerns.

In March, Scott Elmer, who’s overseen the tunnel study for the past few years at the county’s flood control district, reached out to Boring executives to set up a meeting. In the following weeks, he and other flood control officials met with Boring engineers at least twice to discuss the specifics of Boring’s capabilities.

During one of the meetings, flood control officials pressed Boring representatives on whether the company could build tunnels that are at least 20 feet wide, according to an agenda shared with attendees via email.

The company was reportedly studying how to make tunnels as wide as 21 feet several years ago. But it’s unclear if Boring ever developed that capability or what it told county officials about its potential to make bigger tunnels. On its website, Boring notes it “maintains the same tunnel design for all projects to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ for every tunnel.”

An April 10 commissioners court meeting in Houston was a turning point.

That appears to be the first time county officials brought up in public the fact that Hunt had been pitching them on a smaller-scale version of the flood plan they’d studied for years. They referred to this idea as a pilot program that would focus on just a few sections of a larger, countywide tunnel system.

Ramsey, the panel’s only Republican, specifically mentioned the pilot program tunnels could be narrower in diameter, as small as 12 feet, and shallower — specifications that would fit the kind of tunnel Boring has typically built.

Commissioner Lesley Briones, a Democrat, said a pilot project may help kick-start a huge, expensive project that the county has struggled to get off the ground.

No one mentioned Boring or Musk explicitly until Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a Democrat, said he’d gotten wind that the tech billionaire might be involved.

“I’ve heard all of the stories about Elon Musk having a tunneling company,” Ellis said. “I’ve got pretty good ears. I’ve got good Republican friends, too, now.”

He questioned the pitch, saying he was worried it would take the county off track.

However, Ellis and all of the commissioners unanimously voted to produce a white paper studying the idea of a scaled-down pilot project. They also voted to ask the state for flood mitigation funds. The vote didn’t require the county to commit to a specific project.

Later that month, records show the county’s legislative liaison reached out to staff for state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, to indicate the county’s support for a $60 million budget rider for “underground flood risk reduction systems in Harris County.”

A two-page memo explaining the pilot project included with the request did not mention Musk or Boring and still referenced the larger 30- to 40-foot tunnels.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, points to a Texas- and Tesla-themed belt buckle as he answers a question about operating his business in Texas. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle) What’s in It for Musk’s Allies

Hunt has been a leading voice on the need for flood mitigation during his short time in Congress.

Last year, he partnered with Democratic U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher to order the Army Corps of Engineers to move forward with the underground tunnel study. The effort was applauded as a bipartisan victory.

But Fletcher, a Democrat, said she was not involved in Hunt’s work with Musk on the Boring proposal and has “not heard from anyone advocating for it.” She said she’s worked with Army Corps of Engineers and local communities “on a transparent, informed, community-driven effort to address water conveyance and flood control in our region.”

A West Point graduate and former Army captain, Hunt has shaped a political brand that appeals to both GOP insiders and MAGA-leaning voters. He was a regular at Trump campaign events in and outside Texas and secured a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He is the only Black Republican in the Texas congressional delegation.

But if Hunt enters the U.S. Senate race against Cornyn, he will likely need a high-profile political win to stand out, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, as incumbent senators in Texas have won nearly every primary over the past few decades.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also challenging Cornyn in the primary.

Given the volatile dynamic between Trump and Musk, aligning with the latter carries political risk but also the potential for major reward, Rottinghaus said.

“Hunt certainly is well-known enough as a member in his district, but the problem is that when you’re in Congress running for a statewide office, your base support can sometimes be very provincial,” Rottinghaus said. “To partner with Musk would provide for a kind of national profile that Hunt would need to be successful.”

Musk has tapped local politicians when pursuing similar big projects elsewhere.

In Tennessee, Republican leaders recently announced that Boring would build a transit tunnel for cars from downtown Nashville to the nearby airport. The city’s mayor and other Democratic leaders have raised questions about a lack of transparency, competitive bidding and environmental planning. At a public meeting in early August, a Boring official said the company would seek public input for the project but did not answer reporters’ questions about why they had not yet done so, according to the Nashville Banner.

In Las Vegas, where Boring built a transit tunnel system, the company was able to avoid many of the lengthy governmental reviews typical of these kinds of projects because it is privately operated and receives no federal funding, ProPublica previously reported.

In 2022, Bloomberg reported the company had pitched eight projects to Texas officials. Two were water drainage projects in Austin and Houston. Neither appears to have been built.

If Boring secures part of the Houston job, it would appear to be the company’s first public flood control project. The company lists only transportation-related projects on its website.

Texas law requires county governments to open large public projects to competitive bidding and give all potential contractors an equal shot under the same conditions.

While the law does not explicitly bar local officials from discussing projects with individual companies ahead of time, that kind of early outreach — though common in some places — hasn’t been expressly authorized by state courts or the attorney general, according to legal guidance from the Texas Municipal League, which provides legal guidance to local government officials.

Emily Woodell, the spokesperson for the Harris County Flood Control District, said the agency has not shared any sensitive information with Boring about the Houston project and only met with the company to understand its capabilities.

Ramsey, the county commissioner, told the newsrooms he believes there’s nothing wrong with officials entertaining private pitches before the formal bidding process begins.

“All companies that might have an interest in it, that might understand and offer us information, certainly we’d be open to listening,” Ramsey said.

What’s Next

The future of the project, and Musk’s involvement, are still up in the air.

The state never granted Boring the $60 million it wanted for the project. Huffman, the senator overseeing the finance committee, confirmed the rider was never placed in the state budget and told the newsrooms she had nothing to do with the proposal.

“The only involvement my office had with this proposal was when Rep. Hunt’s chief of staff reached out to my scheduler to arrange a meeting between Rep. Hunt and me, but it never took place,” she said in a statement.

County officials also told the newsrooms that they haven’t provided any public money to Musk.

However, in June, the Harris County Flood Control District produced the pilot project report that commissioners voted for in the spring, looking at a scaled-back version of the original tunnel design. This white paper proposed focusing on only a few segments of the countywide tunnel system and considered tunnels as small as 10 feet in diameter as a real option — well within Boring’s ability to construct.

The white paper also floated the idea of a public-private partnership allowing a private firm to design, build and even run the system afterward, just as Boring has done elsewhere.

It does not appear that this report has been released to the public. The flood control district provided it to the newsrooms upon request.

Carlos Gomez, acting public affairs chief for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Galveston District, told the newsrooms he had not heard about the pilot project potentially involving The Boring Co. and could not say if his agency would be interested.

After the newsrooms presented them with the findings of this investigation, Briones and Ramsey emphasized they are not committed to one particular company and that all solutions would be subject to due diligence. Ellis told the newsrooms that Musk should not be involved, calling him “someone who has shown blatant disregard for democratic institutions and environmental protections.”

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Adrian Garcia, both Democrats, declined to comment.

Woodell, with the flood control district, said there have been no further discussions with Boring in months. She said the county has looked at smaller tunnels before but acknowledged that engineering analyses found large-diameter tunnels would be the most effective option for a countywide system. Woodell added the county might still consider smaller tunnels in “specific locations.”

“There will never be a single solution to flooding in Harris County,” she said.

If Harris County moves forward with a smaller-scale project like the one Hunt wants, which doesn’t rely on federal funding, the process to design and build it could still take up to a decade.

Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center, said Musk’s slimmer tunnels might still prove useful. But he warned against handing a project of this magnitude to a private company without proper vetting.

“The scale of the problem we have really demands, I think, all of us to be open-minded about ideas,” Blackburn told the newsrooms. “Invite them in. Just don’t give them the contract tomorrow.”

Lauren McGaughy is an investigative reporter and editor with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Yilun Cheng is an investigative reporter with the Houston Chronicle. Reach her at yilun.cheng@houstonchronicle.com.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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 the fall of 2016, as wind-stoked wildfires raced across parched forest and threatened lives around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, state and local officials went back and forth about blasting an evacuation order over the federal government’s emergency alert system. As they consulted one another, a critical 15 minutes slipped away. Cell service and electricity failed. Many people in the fire’s path could no longer receive the alert ultimately sent out. More than a dozen people died.

A few months later, across the country, torrential storms drenched the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, flooding the area around San Jose’s Coyote Creek. Local officials there didn’t send alerts over the federal system, which can, among other things, sound a blaring alarm with evacuation orders on cellphones in geotargeted areas.

“There was a general lack of institutional knowledge on how to utilize these communications technologies,” a review of the disaster later concluded.

Fast-forward seven years and myriad disasters later. Last September, when Hurricane Helene barreled north from the Gulf of Mexico, very few officials in all of Western North Carolina sent alerts over the federal system ahead of the massive storm’s arrival to warn people of risks or suggest what they do. As ProPublica reported in May, emergency managers’ actions varied considerably across the region.

Some hadn’t become authorized to use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Others weren’t confident in using it. More than 100 people in North Carolina died.

The threats have changed, as have the places. But over the past decade, the same story has played out over and over.

The problem isn’t that there is no way to alert residents. It’s that officials too often don’t use it.

ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides.

Formal reviews after disasters have repeatedly faulted local authorities for not being prepared to send targeted IPAWS alerts — which can broadcast to cellphones, weather radios, and radio and TV stations — or sending them too late or with inadequate guidance.

In 2023, a CBS News investigation similarly found that emergency alerts came too late or not at all. Yet the same problems have persisted during recent catastrophic disasters, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the flash floods in Texas among them.

Each time these failures occur, journalists and others examining what went wrong “tend to treat it as though it’s a new problem,” said Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado Denver professor who is among the country’s top researchers of public alert and warning systems. “In fact, it is the same problem we’ve seen again and again since at least 2017.”

Local emergency managers sit at the center of alerting decisions. They are supposed to prepare their communities for disasters and guide the response when they hit. But some fear sending too many alerts to a weary public. Many are busy juggling myriad other duties in small, resource-strapped offices. More than a few face political headwinds.

“There is a certain reluctance to send emergency messages out,” said Steven Kuhr, former emergency management director for New York state who now runs a crisis management consulting firm. Counterparts in the profession have lost their jobs and faced public backlash for sounding alarms, only to see the predicted disaster fizzle. “You don’t want to get it wrong.”

Perhaps no major disaster in recent years underscores what’s at stake more than the July 4 flooding in Central Texas. Officials in Kerr County failed to adequately alert residents, tourists and the hundreds of children slumbering in summer camp cabins about raging flash floodwaters barrelling down the Guadalupe River. They sent no emergency alerts over IPAWS warning people of the threat or suggesting what they do until hours into the disaster.

Instead, as people awoke to flash floods encircling their homes and to children shrieking in terror, key county leaders were asleep or out of town. Even once roused, they sent no IPAWS alerts of their own. More than 100 people — a third of them children — died.

Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s emergency management office, where he led the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy, among other disasters. To him, skipping alerts indicates a lack of training and planning.

“As a profession, we have to get our act together,” McKinney said. “We have to emerge from our complacency.”

Failure to Initiate

Terrie Burns stands in the middle of her destroyed home in Santa Rosa, California, during the Sonoma County wildfires in 2017. The state conducted an audit of the county’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Flash back eight years to 2017, when wildfires threatened Sonoma County in Northern California. Officials sent no alerts to cellphones via IPAWS telling residents what was happening or what actions to take. They feared people outside of an intended evacuation area might get the alert, causing traffic congestion. Two dozen people died.

The local sheriff conceded, “In hindsight, we should have used every tool we had.”

California conducted an audit of Sonoma County’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. It’s the type of mistake repeated across the country.

Among the 15 major disasters ProPublica identified, reviews of local officials’ actions have been completed for 11. Nine of them identified a lack of training or planning — or both — in sending alerts as a key problem.

Some, like Sonoma officials, have taken those critical lessons and made big changes. The county expanded its emergency management office from five to 20 full- and part-time employees, including one whose job is to focus on alerting the public. That isn’t possible in many lower-resourced communities. But by the end of 2020, Sonoma had so improved its approach to alerts that it was among the counties that sent the most — 59 of them — during that dangerous wildfire season. Its two major wildfires that year, while fast and destructive, weren’t as swift-moving through densely populated areas as the worst of 2017’s wildfires. With the new protocol and staff, nobody in Sonoma died in them either.

Firefighters keep a close watch on a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. Massive wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses in 2017. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Jorge Rodriguez is the county’s current alert coordinator. He described the litany of training and exercises required of employees, including creating templates of emergency messages ahead of time. “We really prepare to push the button,” he said.

That’s not true in many places.

Art Botterell, who retired in 2018 from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services as senior emergency services coordinator, calls the nation’s alert system “a moth-eaten patchwork quilt.” Officials in different places can try to get emergency messages to the public through IPAWS, their local alert programs, social media, email, phone calls, press conferences, flyers, door knocking, sirens, bullhorns and so on. Or they can do none of those things.

But if officials tap too few of them, or wait too long as danger closes in, then the tools become useless.

“The most common mode of warning system failure,” Botterell said, “is failure to initiate warnings in the first place.”

Tragedy in Texas

A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing of the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the July 4 floods that left more than 100 people dead. (Scott Stephen Ball for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Last month, along the hills of Kerr County in Central Texas, visitors settled into RVs, residents slumbered in homes and summer campers dreamed of fun in the cabins that lace the Guadalupe River. But at 1:14 a.m., a blaring alarm punctured that calm, for those who received it. A National Weather Service alert sounded over weather radios and mobile devices in the area that had service — not a guarantee in this rural stretch — with a flash flood warning.

The weather service can, and often does, send its most pressing messages over IPAWS. But those alerts can lack important information for high-risk locations, including evacuation orders. Local officials can use the system to blast alerts that go to more specific areas — a few streets, a neighborhood, a river — along with directions for what people in those places should do to protect themselves.

It was July 4. Kerr County’s top elected official was asleep at his lake house 100 miles away. The sheriff was at home dozing, too. The emergency manager was sick in bed. That’s what each later said at a Texas legislative hearing. The weather service forecasts they’d heard the day before hadn’t struck them as particularly worrisome.

Farther up the Guadalupe River, around the town of Hunt, rain was falling. It fell and fell, pummeling the area so ferociously that children at camps along the river woke in fear and teenage counselors tried to soothe them. But the rain still poured and the power failed and the river rose. By 3 a.m., the two 911 dispatchers toiling overnight were overwhelmed with the most horrifying of calls. A deputy heard children screaming in the river.

Deputies and volunteer firefighters rushed to pound on doors and rouse people as the river hauled entire homes away, occupants trapped inside. The weather service posted on X, “A very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.”

At 3:57 a.m., someone called 911 from Camp Mystic in Hunt, where hundreds of children were attending Christian summer camp in cabins along the waterways. They climbed through windows, fought floodwaters and cowered under darkness along hillsides. The flood swept many away. At least 27 campers and counselors would die.

At 4:03 a.m., the weather service intensified its messaging for south-central Kerr County to a rare flash flood emergency — its most dire flood alert — which again blasted out over IPAWS to any cellphone that could receive it: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”

The county judge, who as the top elected official heads emergency management, still slept, as did the emergency management coordinator. The sheriff didn’t wake until 4:20 a.m. Forty minutes later, Kerr County sent out an emergency message — but not over IPAWS.

Instead, officials opted for CodeRed, their local alerting system. Using software by companies like Everbridge and Smart911, systems like these are not nearly as far reaching as IPAWS. Residents have to sign up in advance to receive the local alerts, and not many typically do. In comparison, IPAWS is designed to reach any cellphone within a selected geographic area unless a person has turned off its notifications, has the phone turned off or in airplane mode, or isn’t connected to a working cell site broadcasting the alert.

The emergency management coordinator later told Texas legislators that he had helped incorporate IPAWS into Kerr County’s emergency response plans in 2020 partly to help ensure that its large seasonal population receives alerts while in town. But when he was finally woken during the floods that morning, he didn’t use it. He said the weather service had issued more than a dozen alerts already, and he thought that was enough.

By then, more than four hours had passed since the weather service blasted out its first IPAWS alert that day, during which local officials could have started sending their own messages telling people whether to evacuate or otherwise move out of harm’s way. Almost a third of those who died were camping or staying at campgrounds, the Houston Chronicle found.

As Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican, said at a legislative hearing last month: “We have to find a way to give the locals more tools and more confidence” to make critical calls about issuing alerts quickly. “It cannot be when you see the river cresting.”

Roberto Marquez, left, created and installed crosses in Guadalupe Park in Kerrville, Texas, to honor the victims of the devastating flash flood along the Guadalupe River. (Desiree Rios for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Lack of Consistency

No federal policy tells local officials how to send emergency alerts in disasters — or whether to send them at all. Nor are there requirements of what alerts should say or who should get them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, outlines best practices but deems alerting decisions “a matter of local emergency official communications plans, governance, policies and procedures,” a FEMA spokesperson said.

Nor do local authorities have to learn a lot about IPAWS alerts to become authorized to send them. They must complete an online FEMA training module that goes over the basics, then apply for public alerting permission and sign an agreement.

“You do have to demonstrate that you have the software to utilize IPAWS, but you don’t have to demonstrate that you’re good at it,” said Jeannette Sutton, a University at Albany professor and key researcher of public alert messaging. FEMA offers alert guidance and 24/7 technical help, but using them isn’t mandatory. Its IPAWS division also will review local plans for sending alerts and suggest improvements — but local officials must request this help.

The biggest hurdle to accessing IPAWS isn’t training or testing. It is money. Local governments must pay a third-party vendor for software that can interface with IPAWS — an expense of potentially tens of thousands of dollars that rural and lower-income counties struggle to afford.

A study released in July by a team at Argonne National Laboratory found that 82% of local emergency managers cited a lack of funding as their main barrier to adopting more technology. More than half cited a lack of expertise or training.

In late 2019, Congress required FEMA to create a training and recertification process that IPAWS users would have to complete each year, but that remains in the works. Although FEMA was pursuing a contract to create the program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, did not approve the funding for it, a FEMA spokesperson said.

Despite this, FEMA “continues to lean forward to launch” the program, the spokesperson said in an email.

Using IPAWS also can be daunting. Some of the software systems that local governments purchase to interface with it are confusing and require practice, Sutton said. With a disaster looming or upon them, officials face a blank white text box. They must write the alert, code it correctly and get whatever permissions their policies require.

In the back of an emergency manager’s mind is that nagging question: What if I send out this alert and the threat turns out to be a big dud? “Then they’re going to get a lot of people who are really mad,” Sutton said.

Sending alerts also doesn’t always go perfectly. In 2018, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message said, before being corrected 38 minutes later. The employee who sent it was later fired, although his attorney argued he was made a scapegoat.

Other times, software and other technical problems play a role. In January, a wildfire evacuation order sent to cellphones over IPAWS was intended for a specific area in Los Angeles County but instead blasted to all of its 10 million residents. The error stemmed from location data failing to save properly in the IPAWS system, likely due to its software vendor’s technical glitch, according to a recent congressional report.

A few months earlier, in September, an emergency manager in North Carolina hesitated to send IPAWS alerts as Hurricane Helene closed in on his county because a past experience had left him reluctant to try again.

A water line stains the side of an antique store in Yancey County four months after Hurricane Helene hit the mountainous region of Western North Carolina in September. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Jeff Howell was the emergency manager in Yancey County, a rural expanse of mountainous beauty that Helene would soon decimate. A few years earlier, when he’d sent an IPAWS alert, the message blasted to cellphones in a neighboring county and to Johnson City, Tennessee. He fielded an angry phone call from a counterpart displeased that residents in his county had received it.

Howell, who has since retired, said was told the area’s mountainous topography played a role in the message casting too far. He didn’t want that to happen with Helene approaching.

Although the weather service warned almost 24 hours before Helene’s devastating floodwaters hit that the storm would be among the region’s worst weather events “in the modern era,” Yancey County sent no IPAWS alerts giving warnings or directions to people living along its rivers and creeks, which ferry water down steep mountains. In the end, 11 people died there, more per capita than in any other county.

In hindsight, Howell said he wished he’d tried harder to send an IPAWS alert before the unprecedented flash flooding and deadly landslides tore down the mountains. But he’d often fielded complaints from residents who told him they turned off weather notifications because they got so many of them.

Few other county or city governments across the wide swath of Western North Carolina inundated by Helene’s rainfall issued any of their own alerts over IPAWS before the storm knocked out cell service and electricity. Most used only their local systems or social media accounts, although ProPublica found wide variations across the region. Some made more aggressive efforts to warn residents, including rounds of door knocking. One county distributed flyers; another issued a dire video warning. But most residents remained in their homes, largely unaware that catastrophic danger approached. The vast majority of deaths in North Carolina were flood-related.

IPAWS asked Sutton to assess the warning messages sent during Helene. She wasn’t impressed: “There was a total lack of consistency.”

Hurricane Helene destroyed areas of Swannanoa, North Carolina, first image, as well as Micaville, where a massive fuel tank remained on its side four months after the storm hit. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) “We Need to Bring Some Coherence”

During his first weeks as a new congressman in 2023, Rep. Kevin Mullin’s district in Northern California faced flooding that left one person dead. A Democrat from the San Francisco area, he began doing research. He read about incidents in other areas where alerts were confusing, delayed or not sent, leading to terrible consequences.

“This is really at the core of what government needs to get right — protecting public health and safety, protecting lives,” Mullin said. “The emergency alert is quite literally the front line of public interface.”

He also was looking for potentially bipartisan issues to work on. He hopes he’s found one.

Mullin and his staff are crafting a bill that would authorize $30 million a year for a decade to help FEMA provide technical assistance to authorities who send alerts. The money would fund things like live testing, field training and community-based exercises that can identify weaknesses in disaster plans and alert systems. These can be tough for local governments with fewer resources to afford. FEMA also would develop metrics for assessing alerts’ effectiveness.

Mullin, who expects to introduce the bill in the coming days, also supports creating basic standard operating procedures for alerts and templates for messages. “We need to bring some coherence to the way this infrastructure is set up,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin of California and his staff are crafting a bill that would require FEMA to provide more technical and financial assistance to local authorities who send emergency alerts. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

The template piece is out there. In 2021, FEMA hired Sutton’s team at the University at Albany to create the Message Design Dashboard. The new online toolkit walks message writers through a series of prompts to more quickly create an alert that includes content that social scientists have found best reduces the time people delay before taking action.

“By giving that tool to emergency managers, it’s a game changer,” Sutton said. “They’re not staring at that blank box anymore.”

Before her team’s contract ended in May, they trained 500 emergency managers to use the software, which is now free and publicly available through FEMA. But thousands more still need to be trained. And nothing requires emergency managers to learn to use it. That is up to them, and they still ultimately must decide for themselves whether to push that button.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

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 late July, Missouri state troopers walked into St. Louis County government headquarters and seized the cellphone of one of the most prominent Democratic officials in this solidly red state.

Two days later, a grand jury indicted Sam Page, the St. Louis County executive. Acting as a special prosecutor, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, secured two felony counts of stealing by deceit and two election-law violations.

For Bailey, bringing felony charges against the leader of the state’s biggest blue stronghold added to the resume of a MAGA warrior who had already interviewed for a key position in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Less than three weeks later, Trump tapped Bailey to help run the FBI. He’ll serve as co-deputy director with Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conservative podcast host. Bailey said he’ll resign as Missouri’s attorney general on Sept. 8 to take the post. A spokesperson said he was not taking questions from the media.

The case against Page was the latest in a string of legal strikes against Democrats by Bailey, bringing the full weight of the state on a political adversary. It wasn’t about bribery or self-dealing. Page, the top elected official in a county with about 1 million residents, wasn’t accused of stealing a dime for himself.

Instead, the charges turned on something mundane: the printing and mailing of flyers weeks before about a measure on the ballot in April — the kind of informational material local governments often send to voters and the sort of action that experts said had never led to criminal charges in Missouri.

The election asked voters to give the County Council the power to fire the county’s department heads and its top attorney. Page spent more than $25,000 of taxpayer money to print and mail flyers to voters outlining the measure. The flyer at issue did not overtly tell voters to vote no, but it listed groups that opposed it, including the police board and NAACP, and it quoted a state judge’s ruling that the ballot language was misleading and unfair. It also suggested that a yes vote would allow directors to be fired for political reasons or in emergencies and that a no vote would maintain stable leadership.

Documents filed in the case against Page also showed that he did not follow a county lawyer’s advice to make some changes to the flyer. Bailey alleged that the flyer crossed the line from providing information, which is legal, to urging a no vote, which he said was an unlawful use of tax dollars — and, in his view, grounds to seek felony charges.

If convicted on the most serious count, Page could face three to 10 years in prison and $10,000 in fines. He could also face removal from office and sanctions against his medical license; he’s an anesthesiologist, though he doesn’t currently practice full time.

“Public officials must follow the law,” Bailey wrote in a news release, “and my Office will work to ensure that they always do.”

The playbook was familiar: Trump has talked about arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Federal agents just raided the home of John Bolton, the former national security adviser in the first Trump administration and a prominent Trump critic.

Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Ed Martin, who had worked as an attorney in Missouri, to head the U.S. Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group and to investigate two prominent Democrats, New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff of California, on allegations of mortgage fraud.

“Bailey really was auditioning for that role, or something like it, and what better way to show loyalty than to do exactly what Trump wants on the federal level, but replicated on the state level,” said Paul Nolette, the director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University. “It’s a template for what type of approach Bailey is going to take on the federal level. Political opponents are going to get targeted.”

Bailey has called himself a defender of the rule of law, portraying his high-profile lawsuits and investigations in Missouri as necessary to protect the state from what he has described as illegal or unconstitutional actions by the federal government and abandonment of the rule of law by the left.

St. Louis County Executive Sam Page (Jeff Roberson/AP Images)

Page became county executive in 2019 after a federal corruption case toppled his predecessor, Steve Stenger. Page had led a bipartisan bloc on the County Council against Stenger, who was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for a pay-to-play scheme that steered county contracts to political donors. (St. Louis County wraps around — but does not include — the much smaller independent city of St. Louis.)

The cooperative spirit collapsed as Page set St. Louis County on the aggressive end of Missouri’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing early emergency orders limiting gatherings and indoor dining. That stance put him at odds with state officials who were moving to curb local power.

Despite this and other political battles, Page has twice won countywide elections — first in 2020 to finish Stenger’s term, then in 2022 to a full four-year term. He has said he will decide by the end of the year whether to run again in 2026. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday.

“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said in brief remarks to local news reporters at a ribbon-cutting for a county road project.

A Page spokesperson referred questions to his lawyer, Jeff Jensen, a former U.S. attorney in Missouri during Trump’s first term. Jensen did not respond to requests for comment.

Many have questioned the legitimacy of the case and whether Bailey’s successor, Catherine Hanaway, will see it through. Hanaway, also a former U.S. attorney, as well as a former speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, did not respond to questions.

“It certainly seems, based on my reading of it, a stretch,” said Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in legal ethics and trial practice. “It would be an uphill battle for the state to make this charge stick.”

Ken Warren, a political scientist and pollster at Saint Louis University, said the charges were “totally phony” but that “the more outrageous you are, the more you are going to attract the attention of Donald Trump.”

“Let’s say the same thing occurred but the county executive happened to be a Republican,” Warren said. “Would Bailey go after him? Of course not.”

Missouri has become a proving ground of sorts for Trump appointees. Martin — a longtime state GOP insider with a record of stoking controversies — was named the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. After it became apparent he couldn’t win Senate confirmation, he was moved to the administration’s pardon office and the Justice Department’s weaponization group.

John Sauer, a former Missouri solicitor general and anti-abortion activist who last year helped bankroll a campaign to defeat Missouri’s abortion rights ballot issue, defended Trump’s claim to presidential immunity before the Supreme Court. Now, as U.S. solicitor general, he serves as the federal government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court.

Will Scharf, who lost a primary bid last year to unseat Bailey, pivoted straight into Trump’s legal inner circle. Then there’s Billy Long. The six-term ex-congressman was confirmed in June as IRS commissioner — despite having once pushed to abolish the agency — amid scrutiny over his ties to questionable tax-credit plans. He was recently ousted and said he will become ambassador to Iceland.

That roster of loyalists is no accident. Over the past two decades, Missouri has moved from being a competitive bellwether state to a deep-red stronghold, with a political environment that rewards the kind of hard-line conservatism and culture-war ethos that Trump prizes.

John Danforth, a Republican who served as Missouri’s attorney general from 1969 to 1976 and then as a U.S. senator until 1995, said the office has shifted dramatically from its core mission. Under him, he said, the job was to represent state agencies, handle every felony appeal, respond to legal opinion requests and manage litigation with a small staff. Asked about a move last year in which Bailey investigated a St. Louis-area school district after a student was beaten during school hours — blaming its diversity policies and removal of resource officers for safety failures — Danforth said, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

As the state has shifted right, many races are effectively decided in the primary. Candidates don’t need to win over most voters, according to political experts and observers — just the small, very political group that shows up for low-turnout, winner-take-all primaries. That favors hard-line candidates.

Nowhere is that change clearer than in the attorney general’s office.

Bailey is a U.S. Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq as an armored cavalry officer. He started his career as an assistant Missouri attorney general, then worked as a prosecutor. He joined the governor’s office as deputy general counsel in 2019 and later served as general counsel to then-Gov. Mike Parson.

His politicization of the attorney general’s office follows a path blazed by two predecessors, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, who each used relatively brief tenures as the state’s attorney general to launch themselves into the U.S. Senate. In Hawley’s case, out-of-state political consultants were embedded in the office from his first weeks on the job, directing taxpayer-funded staff, shaping his policy rollouts and boosting his national profile ahead of his Senate run. Schmitt used the office to wage headline-grabbing legal fights, from suing China over COVID-19 to challenging pandemic restrictions, elevating his profile as he prepared his own Senate campaign.

Neither Hawley nor Schmitt could be reached for comment.

After Schmitt was elected to the Senate in November 2022, Parson announced that he would appoint Bailey to fill the vacancy. That set up a high-profile Republican primary last year against Scharf, a candidate with backing from the conservative establishment. Bailey won 63% of the vote and cruised to an easy general-election victory in November.

Within a week, Bailey was interviewing with Trump for the job of U.S. attorney general in the new administration.

With no Democrats holding statewide office and a GOP supermajority in the legislature, Bailey has turned his fire on Democratic officials in Missouri’s two largest cities. He pressured St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner to resign by filing a lawsuit to remove her from office that alleged willful neglect of duty and a failure to prosecute violent crimes, and he recently sought to remove St. Louis Sheriff Alfred Montgomery, accusing him of misconduct. Gardner repeatedly denied any wrongdoing before resigning; later she acknowledged misusing some public funds. Montgomery has denied wrongdoing and has refused to resign.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has also been a frequent target: Bailey threatened a Missouri Human Rights Act investigation into Lucas and his staff after a city-run social media account, responding to a speech by the Kansas City Chiefs football player Harrison Butker about women being homemakers, named the suburb where Butker lived. The city deleted the post and apologized. Bailey framed the post as discrimination against Christians.

Last year, Lucas suggested the city could benefit from asylum-seeking immigrants joining the local workforce, then clarified that he meant immigrants who were in the U.S. legally. Bailey — who had sued the Biden administration over what he called an “illegal” parole program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — accused Lucas of trying to involve Missouri businesses in a “fundamentally unlawful program.” He posted a letter on the social media platform X calling Lucas’ comments “wildly irresponsible” and said he was “putting him on notice that it is a Class D felony to knowingly transport an illegal alien in the State of Missouri.”

Lucas responded in a statement then that Bailey’s letter was “a political campaign press release with no legal effect.”

“It’s not effective lawyering,” Lucas said in a recent interview. “It’s a whole new branch of lawyering that I, as a lawyer, didn’t grow up knowing, which is: If you get a story out, who cares if you drag people through the mud?”

Bailey, on the other hand, has stepped up to defend Republican allies. His office intervened to defend three GOP state senators who were sued for false light invasion of privacy after wrongly identifying a Kansas man as the shooter at a Super Bowl parade honoring Kansas City’s NFL team — and falsely calling him an undocumented immigrant.

Two of the senators called the lawsuits frivolous, while Bailey has argued the posts were protected by legislative immunity, as the senators were acting in their official capacity.

Lawsuits against two of the officials, who are represented by the Missouri deputy solicitor general, a high-ranking lawyer in the attorney general’s office, remain pending in federal court.