ProPublica

by Talia Buford

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For the third year, ProPublica will invite up to 10 news editors from media companies across the country to participate in a yearlong investigative editing training program, led by the newsroom’s award-winning staff.

Applications are now open for the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program. Submissions are due March 24 at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

As the nation’s premier nonprofit investigative newsroom, ProPublica is dedicated to journalism that changes laws and lives and to advancing the careers of the people who produce it. The goal of this program is to address our industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. Building a pipeline of talent is a priority that serves us and our industry.

“A great investigative editor can be a force multiplier for change; they not only make stories better, but journalists better,” said Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas, an architect of the editor training program. “Unfortunately, it’s one of the most difficult jobs to break into. Many who have succeeded learned from other investigative editors, so we created this program to seed those opportunities. We’ve been amazed at how well it’s worked.”

This year’s program will begin in June 2025 with a weeklong boot camp in New York that will include courses and panel discussions on how to conceive of and produce investigative projects that expose harm and have impact. The editors will also get training in how to manage reporters who are working with data, documents and sensitive sources, including whistleblowers, agency insiders and people who have suffered trauma. The program also includes virtual continuing education sessions and support from a ProPublica mentor.

This program is funded by the generosity of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports organizations in journalism, film and the arts whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.

Frequently Asked Questions What is this?

The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program is designed to help expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, to help better reflect the nation as a whole.

What kind of experience can you expect?

The program kicks off with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, which includes a series of courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors, veteran reporters and other newsroom leaders. The boot camp will include hands-on editing exercises and opportunities for participants to workshop projects underway in their own newsrooms.

Afterward, participants will gather virtually for seminars and career development discussions with their cohort and ProPublica journalists. Each of the participants will also be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on story and management challenges or on how to most effectively pursue their own professional aspirations.

What skills should I expect to learn?

• How to evaluate story ideas and determine the right scope, length and time for getting the work done.
• How to manage a reporter through a complicated accountability story and communicate feedback in ways that build trust and confidence.
• How to edit investigative drafts, spot holes in reporting logic, organize a narrative and guide the reporter through the fact-checking process.
• How to work collaboratively with research, data and multimedia teams to elevate an investigative project.

When is the boot camp?

The five-day, all-expenses-paid boot camp will be held June 1 to June 5, 2025, in New York, with remote sessions via Google Meet throughout the year.

Is there a virtual option for the boot camp?

We are planning for the 2025 boot camp to be held in person and will not have a virtual option.

Will I be responsible for my expenses in New York?

ProPublica will cover participants’ expenses for meals, travel and lodging during the boot camp.

How many participants will be selected each year?

Up to 10 journalists.

Who is eligible?

The program is open to all. The aim is to help broaden our industry’s investigative editing ranks to include journalists from a wide array of backgrounds. We encourage everyone to apply, including those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and rural news organizations, as well as women, people of color, veterans, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. Past participants have come from a wide range of news outlets across the country.

The ideal participants will have:

• A minimum of five years of journalism experience, either as an editor or as a reporter primarily doing work with an investigative or accountability focus.
• A strong grasp of the basics of editing, storytelling, structure and framing.
• Experience managing a team of journalists or a complicated multipronged reporting project.
• An accountability mindset: You don’t have to have been on the investigative team, but we are looking for people with an eye for watchdog reporting and editing.

Am I eligible if I live outside of the United States?

No.

How do I apply?

The application period opens Wednesday and closes March 24 at 9 a.m. Eastern time. You can apply via this link.

How can I learn more about the program?

You can view playback of our informational webinar from 2024 here. The dates have changed, but the rest of the program information remains the same.

What if I have other questions?

Send an email to Assistant Managing Editor Talia Buford at talent@propublica.org.

by Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press, and J. David McSwane, ProPublica

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

In late 2020, St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, Montana, fired its oncologist, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, and took the extraordinary step of publicly accusing him of hurting patients. The hospital said the doctor overprescribed narcotics and gave chemotherapy to patients who didn’t have cancer, among other allegations.

Despite being notified by St. Peter’s that it had revoked Weiner’s privileges, the Montana Board of Medical Examiners renewed his license in 2021 and 2023. This week, the board renewed his license again for another two years.

Questions about whether Weiner would be permitted to continue practicing medicine intensified after a December ProPublica investigation exposed a trail of patient harm and at least 10 suspicious deaths tied to his practice. That investigation, which relied on thousands of pages of court records and dozens of interviews, detailed how Weiner built a high-volume business that billed as much as possible to public and private insurance while many of his patients received unnecessary, dangerous or substandard care.

While it’s unclear what the medical board considered before renewing Weiner’s license, the investigation published by ProPublica and Montana Free Press caught the attention of law enforcement. Criminal investigators with the Montana Department of Justice launched an official inquiry this month, according to three sources directly involved in the matter.

Weiner has denied mistreating his patients. He did not respond to a request for comment about his license being renewed and the Montana Department of Justice investigation.

After St. Peter’s fired Weiner, he sued the hospital for wrongful termination and defamation. After a four-year legal battle, the Montana Supreme Court sided with the hospital in a ruling this month. The court wrote that the hospital’s peer-review process leading to Weiner’s dismissal was “reasonable and warranted due to the quantity and severity of Weiner’s inappropriate patient care.”

After it fired Weiner, the hospital inspected the files of more than 2,000 patients to whom he had prescribed controlled substances. Court records show that medical reviewers hired by St. Peter’s highlighted the case of Sharon Dibble, a 75-year-old patient who died shortly after Weiner doubled her morphine prescription. That increase in morphine “led to respiratory arrest and the patient’s demise,” a medical expert hired by St. Peter’s concluded.

Dibble’s son, Tom Stevison, called the medical board’s decision to renew Weiner’s license “ridiculous.”

“There’s just too much evidence against him, pointing to wrongdoing, to recklessly relicense this guy,” he said, referring to the hospital’s allegations and ProPublica’s reporting. “I do believe he should be held accountable.”

Weiner previously denied the allegation that he overprescribed patients, including Dibble, and was critical of the medical review.

In the months after Weiner was fired, thousands of friends and former patients formed Facebook groups in support of him. They raised funds to rent a billboard in Helena that read, “WE STAND WITH DR. WEINER.” On Tuesday, Dayna Schwartz, who led that effort, posted on Facebook, “Congrats Doc on your license renewal!!”

A spokesperson for the state Board of Medical Examiners referred a request for comment about Weiner’s license renewal to its umbrella agency, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry. An agency spokesperson did not respond to questions before publication.

St. Peter’s did not respond to requests for comment on the renewal of Weiner’s license.

The medical board does not typically release information about current or past investigations unless it substantiates allegations of professional misconduct. If it does, a doctor’s license can be suspended or revoked for many reasons, including billing fraud, unprofessional prescribing practices and failure to appropriately document patient care.

The criminal inquiry, led by the Montana Attorney General’s Office, comes just months after the federal government settled with St. Peter’s for making false claims when it billed government health programs for Weiner’s services. The hospital agreed to pay back $10.8 million. The hospital has previously said it provides quality care and “this situation is isolated to a single, former physician, and we remain confident in the exceptional care provided by St. Peter’s medical staff.”

Federal prosecutors also sued Weiner, accusing him of an array of fraudulent practices, including billing federal insurance programs for unnecessary treatments or more expensive treatments than were delivered. Weiner has denied the allegations and, through attorneys, has moved to dismiss the case.

by Jesse Coburn

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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has gained access to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development system containing confidential personal information about hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of housing discrimination, including victims of domestic violence.

Access to the system, called the HUD Enforcement Management System, or HEMS, is typically strictly limited because it contains medical records, financial files, documents that may list Social Security numbers and other private information. DOGE sought access, and HUD granted it last week, according to information reviewed by ProPublica and two officials familiar with the matter.

This is just the latest collection of sensitive personal information that DOGE has tried to access in recent weeks. It has also sought personal taxpayer data kept by the IRS and information on Social Security benefit recipients, and it attempted to enter the Treasury Department’s payment systems. DOGE’s stated mission is to modernize government technology and cut excessive or improper spending. The administration of President Donald Trump has argued that DOGE needs “direct access” to such systems to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE’s data-gathering moves at some agencies have sparked forceful pushback, including lawsuits over alleged privacy violations and opposition from career officials who have resigned or retired following access requests. Judges have temporarily blocked DOGE from gaining access to records at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department. And, faced with resistance, DOGE agreed to view only anonymized taxpayer data at the IRS.

Few records in the HUD system are redacted or anonymized, and many contain deeply personal material about those who have alleged or been accused of housing discrimination. Domestic violence case files can list addresses to which survivors have relocated for their safety. Harassment cases can include detailed descriptions of sexual assaults. Disability cases can include detailed medical records. Lending discrimination files could feature credit reports and bank statements. The names of witnesses who offered information — in some cases anonymously — about landlords accused of discrimination are among the files as well.

HUD enforces numerous civil rights laws, including the Fair Housing Act and aspects of the Violence Against Women Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Such statutes collectively prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, disability and other characteristics.

HUD officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, voiced concern that DOGE’s access to HEMS could violate the privacy rights of discrimination victims and potentially put them at risk if their information is mishandled or leaked.

The episode is one of many roiling HUD, where the Trump administration is reportedly considering a 50% cut to the nearly 10,000-person workforce. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which combats housing discrimination, may see its roughly 500-person staff cut by as much as 76%, according to an unconfirmed projection circulating widely among HUD employees and viewed by ProPublica.

Civil liberties advocates expressed alarm about DOGE’s access to the HUD data, saying it may violate the Privacy Act. “It’s difficult to see why a system dedicated to civil rights complaints would have any impact whatsoever on a department looking for inefficiencies in governmental spending,” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Venzke suggested DOGE may use HEMS data as a basis for scaling back housing discrimination enforcement. “There is deep concern that DOGE is not there to identify government inefficiencies, but rather to shutter programs that the administration disagrees with,” he said.

John Davisson, director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is suing DOGE and other federal agencies and officials over DOGE’s access, contended that the department had gained access to HEMS and systems like it “under the false pretenses of identifying fraud and abuse, when what’s really going on is DOGE is trying to gain control over these databases to direct the activities of federal agencies.”

Spokespeople for HUD, the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment (including a question to DOGE about what it plans to do with HEMS). After this article was published, Kasey Lovett, HUD’s head of public affairs, emailed ProPublica and stated, “to be clear, DOGE does not have access to HEMS.” Lovett declined to provide on-the-record evidence for her assertion.

HUD’s Fair Housing office receives tens of thousands of housing discrimination allegations or inquiries annually and investigates — or assigns to state or local agencies — around 8,000 of them each year. Those investigations can last months or years and lead to financial settlements, compliance monitoring and policy reforms by landlords, mortgage lenders, local zoning officials and homeowners associations.

Access to HEMS is usually limited to Fair Housing staffers, HUD attorneys and auditors, and state and local investigators. However, DOGE requested entry, and HUD granted read-only access last week to Michael Mirski, who has a HUD email address and whom officials at the housing agency have identified in internal discussions as being affiliated with DOGE. Mirski did not respond to a request for comment.

Update, Feb. 26, 2025: This article has been updated to include comment from HUD’s head of public affairs, which was provided only after the article was published.

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Vernal Coleman

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 2021, the number of people in Illinois killed from acts of domestic violence was growing at an alarming pace, and state legislators acted with a sense of urgency.

In a near-unanimous vote, they passed legislation designed to blunt the trend. The state would establish a network of panels to review killings related to domestic violence and identify whether existing strategies for preventing them fell short.

But since then the state has made only meager progress in implementing the plans laid out in that law, and the number of domestic violence killings continues to increase.

The bill called for building the network over six years, but nearly four years after Gov. JB Pritzker signed it, only seven of the state’s 102 counties have helped establish fatality case review teams.

The first reviews began only late last year, and key deadlines have been missed. An initial report of statewide policy recommendations based on reviews by the panels was expected to be delivered to lawmakers in April 2024. But that has yet to happen.

The most glaring absence from the program is Cook County, which is home to Chicago and accounts for nearly 40% of the state’s population. Discussions between organizers of the initiative and agencies that could take charge of a local review panel in the county have failed to yield a commitment.

People familiar with the effort say a lack of funding and a gap in leadership have slowed the initiative’s progress. The law does not provide money to staff the local review panels, hampering recruitment of people to serve. Moreover, a top state administrator in charge of developing the network abruptly left the project and was only recently replaced.

Illinois Sen. Celina Villanueva, one of several sponsors of the bill creating the initiative, acknowledged the delays but expressed confidence in the overall direction. “My hope is that once everything is fully established, that it’s a strong working mechanism to be able to address the larger issues of why we passed this bill to begin with,” she said.

Cristin Evans, spokesperson for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, the state agency that oversees the review effort, said that “the amount of time it has taken for teams to conduct their first review is not unexpected given the structure and complexity of the initiative.”

The current teams are on track to complete a minimum of two cases in 2025, she added.

Chicago police respond to the fatal stabbing of Lacramioara Beldie in the Portage Park neighborhood in November. (Molly DeVore/Block Club Chicago)

Recent killings underscore the urgency of addressing breakdowns in the systems designed to protect people from domestic violence. In November, Chicago police found Lacramioara Beldie stabbed to death in an apparent murder-suicide at the hands of her estranged husband, Constantin. Court records that surfaced after Beldie’s death detailed a disturbing timeline.

Six weeks before he allegedly killed his wife, Constantin Beldie appeared inside a Cook County court to face accusations he’d assaulted and held her inside a car against her will. Prosecutors did seek to detain Beldie ahead of his trial over the incident but failed to submit evidence of his alleged prior abuse. Judge Thomas E. Nowinski denied the state’s petition, noting that state prosecutors had failed to establish Beldie’s alleged history of violence toward his wife and concluded he was a “medium-low risk.” The judge released him on electronic monitoring.

In a letter to the chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, nearly 30 Chicago-area elected officials, including several city alderpersons, blasted the “multiple systemic failures” that led to Beldie’s killing and called for Nowinski to be removed from domestic violence court.

He was later transferred to municipal court, where he will oversee traffic and misdemeanor cases. But the chief judge has defended Nowinski, emphasizing prosecutors’ role in the hearing’s outcome.

Learning from Failure

With the goal of learning from past failures, the fatality review legislation calls for a two-tiered approach, with county-based review teams and oversight from a statewide committee.

The county teams are supposed to review the circumstances surrounding certain killings to assess how systems designed to intervene and prevent domestic violence performed. Just a few counties have joined review teams since 2021: Kankakee, Lake and Will, with joint teams operating in Madison and Bond counties as well as Winnebago and Boone counties. Those teams represent five of the state’s 25 judicial circuits.

The statewide committee consists of representatives of law enforcement, academics and social service providers. Drawing on the local teams’ reviews, it is supposed to submit a report every two years outlining specific recommendations for “legislative, systemic, policy, and any other changes to reduce domestic violence and domestic violence related fatalities.”

In its first report, in 2024, the committee revealed it could not yet provide recommendations because none of the local teams had been formed.

Fatality review committees first appeared around 1995, as advocates and lawmakers around the United States began searching for new ways to stem the tide of domestic violence. In the years since, all but five states have established processes for reviewing fatal cases of domestic or intimate partner violence, according to the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative, an Arizona nonprofit that helps states develop review boards.

Those who back these efforts say they’re a tool that can improve outcomes for the vulnerable people domestic violence prevention policies are intended to protect.

A 2013 University of Washington study of outcomes in states that had established fatality reviews found that recommendations made by the panels had successfully prioritized issues related to their work. But prioritization alone “may not translate into organizational and institutional changes,” the study found.

Other states have experienced similar difficulties to Illinois’, not only in establishing a review process but maintaining it over time.

In South Carolina, implementation of the 2016 law establishing a review process of those killings has been “uneven,” said Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

The state’s apparatus is overseen by a central committee, with local teams operated by county-based district attorneys. But similar to Illinois’ law, the South Carolina law does not include new funding. With resources already stretched thin, that has led to spotty participation among local groups.

Many of the local teams meet only infrequently, Barber said. “I don’t want to say that there hasn’t been progress, but there’s more that could be done,” she said.

Even with all the attention the issue has received, not all states compile tallies of domestic violence-related killings. Tracking those numbers is notoriously difficult. Federal law requires law enforcement agencies to report general crime statistics. But determining whether there was domestic violence leading up to a killing requires collecting and analyzing records from disparate sources, something advocates say not all city or state governments require.

That said, estimates made by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from death certificates, police reports and other sources reveal a steady increase in domestic violence killings across the nation.

Signed by the governor earlier this month, Karina’s Law is named after Jesus Alvarez’s late mother, Karina Gonzalez, and is aimed at giving additional protections to victims of domestic violence. Gonzalez and her daughter, Daniela Alvarez, were shot to death in 2023, allegedly by José Alvarez, Gonzalez’s husband, who has pleaded not guilty. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

In 2017, 1,070 people were killed in the United States in circumstances involving domestic or intimate partner violence. By 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that number had skyrocketed to 1,800.

Illinois’ own tally reflects the national pattern. The total rose from 34 killings to 49 over that same period, according to the CDC tallies.

Lawmakers and advocates in Illinois continue to look for ways to address the problems. Last month, after three failed attempts, the Illinois General Assembly passed Karina’s Law, which will require police to confiscate firearms from anyone whose Illinois gun permit has been revoked because a judge issued an emergency order of protection against them. Pritzker signed the bill into law earlier this month.

The bill is named after Karina Gonzalez, who in 2023 was shot to death along with her 15-year-old daughter in their Chicago home. Her estranged husband has been charged with the killings and has pleaded not guilty.

Jesus Alvarez, Gonzalez’s son, said he believes it’s important not only to pass laws aimed at domestic violence, but to make sure they work as intended. There are obviously flaws in the system, Alvarez said. “But if you get these laws right, it should hopefully be a little bit easier for people, and they won’t have to face the same kind of situation that I faced.”

Two Counties, Two Paths

With so many horrific examples of domestic violence taking place in Chicago and Cook County suburbs, the county’s omission from the review effort remains glaring.

Nonetheless, it was not an initial target as the statewide program launched, said Sara Block, a managing director at the nonprofit social service provider Ascend Justice and volunteer co-chair of the statewide effort.

“There’s just more dynamics to consider in Cook,” she said. “It’s not that it’s not a priority. We very much hope that every single circuit will have one in the end. But some just aren’t ready yet, and it will take more groundwork, it takes more education, more relationship building, before they are.”

The law enforcement and social service agencies asked to lead efforts in Cook County and elsewhere are already stretched for time and resources, said Jennifer Greene, advocacy director for nonprofit service provider Life Span and a member of the statewide overseeing committee.

“You have to have someone who can run that team — who can handle administration and making contact, and there’s just not any funding attached to it to do those things,” she said.

Officials and advocates in Winnebago County, in northwest Illinois, have found a way to overcome those and other obstacles.

When state lawmakers passed legislation calling for the review panels, the city of Rockford’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention saw an opportunity and took a leadership role.

Jennifer Cacciapaglia, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention in Rockford, says there has been wide support for forming a local review panel in Winnebago and Boone counties. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

Forming a local committee wasn’t a hard sell, said Jennifer Cacciapaglia, director of that Rockford office, which is in Winnebago County. A foundation grant to pay for staff and research time helped ease concerns about capacity.

“I think countywide there was a recognition that this could really create positive outcomes for people, so support has been wide,” she said.

Last month, she joined a small group of county advocates and officials to conduct the county’s first reviews of domestic violence killings, focusing on two cases. Cacciapaglia said the panel’s goal is to continue examining cases through the end of the year and submit findings to the statewide committee.

In early February, the statewide committee came together for its bimonthly virtual meeting. These gatherings begin with a moment of reflection, to pause and be reminded of what’s at stake by recalling a recent victim.

“We do this simply to keep survivors and those who have died due to domestic violence in the forefront of our minds,” said Andrea Wilson, recently installed director of the committee, to the assembled group.

The committee’s attention turned to Tanisha Weeks. A judge had granted the 41-year-old mother an order of protection against her ex-boyfriend last December. She was shot dead in January in an apparent murder-suicide in Chicago involving an ex-boyfriend.

Because the killing occurred in Cook County, there is no panel to review the circumstances.

by Mary Hudetz

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Museums, universities and government agencies continued to make headway last year toward repatriating the remains of thousands of Native American ancestors to tribal nations after decades of slow progress drew national attention.

Nowhere was the shift more apparent than at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the agency charged with enforcing the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires items and remains taken from Indigenous gravesites to be returned to tribes.

The department’s subagencies, including the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, collectively repatriated the remains of 1,366 Native American ancestors last year, more than a third of the number in its possession at the start of the year. The department’s efforts reflected an awareness, documented in an internal memo in late 2023, that it has a crucial leadership role to play under NAGPRA. Only the Illinois State Museum, an institution that ProPublica has reported on in-depth, came close to repatriating as many, with the transfer of more than 1,320 remains excavated from a single site.

The emphasis on repatriation increased in tandem with reporting by ProPublica in 2023 about failures to comply with the law.

“For too long ancestors and Tribal cultural items have been disconnected from their communities and resting on museum shelves,” Interior officials said in an October 2023 memo.

In response to questions from ProPublica, an Interior spokesperson did not say whether the department’s focus on repatriation will continue under Donald Trump’s second presidency but pointed to new regulations finalized in 2023 that aimed to speed up the process. The regulations, which took effect last year, require institutions to defer more to tribal accounts of their histories and ties to the regions from which remains were removed; the rules also set new deadlines for institutions to comply with the law.

In total, museums, universities and agencies across the country returned more than 10,300 Native American ancestors to tribes last year. The total makes 2024 the third-biggest year for the repatriation of ancestral remains under NAGPRA, according to an online ProPublica database that allows the public to look up the records of more than 600 museums and universities that must comply with the law. Today, ProPublica is updating the database to show repatriation progress through Jan. 6, 2025.

Outside of the Interior Department and the Illinois State Museum, state universities also recorded significant progress. For example, California State University, Sacramento repatriated the remains of 873 Native Americans previously held in its collection.

The progress made last year followed a record number of repatriations in 2023, when institutions returned 18,000 Native American ancestors.

“The progress shows the regulations are working,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, the chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that advocates for Native American rights.

Nearly 60% of ancestral remains reported as falling under NAGPRA over the years have now been repatriated, but that still leaves at least 90,000 that must be returned to tribes. The Interior Department has acknowledged that many of the human remains it must eventually repatriate have long been unaccounted for in federal inventories. Many of the department’s collections are scattered across the country in university and museum repositories over which the federal government has no oversight, officials said.

Agency staffers also said last year that they would need continued funding for their efforts — a factor that may prove challenging under an administration focused on cutting spending and staffing.

“We need to sustain this work until all of the ancestors that are in DOI control have been repatriated,” one Interior Department employee last year told the National NAGPRA Review Committee, a federal advisory board made up of museum, science and tribal representatives.

The Arizona State Museum in Tucson is among the institutions that have gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government. (Michael Barera/Wikimedia) More Work to do at the Interior Department

Just over a year ago, the Interior Department had yet to repatriate more than 3,000 ancestors, many of which were excavated in 20th century archaeological digs and infrastructure projects on federal and tribal lands.

The department’s progress repatriating 1,366 Native American ancestors last year comes after top officials sent directives in late 2023 instructing Interior agencies to prioritize the work. Some agencies also set aside more money for repatriation work.

“If you look at previous budgets, we weren’t allocated any funding for NAGPRA,” Tamara Billie, the chief of cultural resource management for the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, told the National NAGPRA Review Committee last May.

She estimated it could cost several million dollars over the next three to five years for the bureau to repatriate the hundreds of ancestors it has yet to reunite with tribes.

Since Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, federal staffers have tried to locate the collections excavated on federal and tribal lands, but they have often found that museums and universities transferred their holdings to other institutions without leaving much of a paper trail.

Last year, officials said only a handful of repositories, like the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, had gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government — an early step in the often long repatriation process.

“Some have submitted very detailed, in some cases itemized inventory information,” said Bridget Ambler, with the Bureau of Land Management, during a National NAGPRA Review Committee hearing last year. “But to be honest, for the vast majority we’re not fully aware of what the nature of those collections are and if they include human remains or NAGPRA cultural items.”

Under the new NAGPRA regulations, museums and universities had a deadline of January of this year to hand in lists of items in their facilities that should be included in federal inventories. The requirement resulted in museums and universities submitting roughly 1,000 new notices to the Interior Department, the manager of the National NAGPRA Program said during a recorded training last month. It’s not clear how many ancestral remains are accounted for in those notices.

A display case at the Dickson Mounds Museum previously held human remains. (Sky Hopinka for ProPublica) Progress in Illinois and Ohio

At the Illinois State Museum, which holds the second-largest collection of Native American remains, leadership was already focused on improving their repatriation record. Then, a new state law, along with the Interior Department’s updated regulations, went into effect. The state law, which followed ProPublica’s reporting, gave tribes more control over reburials. It also established a fund for repatriation work, such as paying for tribal members to travel to the museum to consult on collections, and for the reburials of remains.

Many of the remains held by the state museum came from a burial mound dug up in the 1920s by Don Dickson, a chiropractor. He turned the burial site into a roadside attraction. Over the years, Native Americans, whose tribes had been forcibly removed to other states, protested the exhibit that later became the Dickson Mounds Museum, a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

The state eventually closed the burial mounds exhibit, but the museum kept the human remains, maintaining that they could not be traced to living people and therefore would not be repatriated. That was until this past year.

On Feb. 24, 2024, the Illinois State Museum published a notice in the Federal Register saying that 1,325 ancestors and thousands of items buried with them were available to tribes for repatriation. As of the start of this year, the Illinois State Museum held the remains of an estimated 5,800 Native American ancestors.

Only the Ohio History Connection now holds more unrepatriated human remains, over 7,900 in total, according to federal data. In the roughly three decades prior to 2024, the Columbus institution had returned fewer than 20 ancestors to tribes. But it showed signs of progress last year in making more than 150 ancestral remains, or roughly 2% of its skeletal collection reported under NAGPRA, available to be repatriated. In an email, a spokesperson for the museum said it expects to complete more repatriations in consultation with tribal partners, who have asked the museum “not to rush this critical work.”

As in Illinois, the Ohio institution’s collections largely originate from centuries-old burial mounds in a state where tribal nations were forcibly removed.

“It Is Time for the State to Take Repatriation Seriously”

More state support for repatriation also could be on the horizon in Arizona. Last month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced she would ask lawmakers for $7 million to support repatriation efforts at the Arizona State Museum.

The museum on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson is a repository for the state and federal government. Over the years, records show, it has conducted repatriations but has yet to return more than half of its collection reported under NAGPRA — the remains of 2,600 ancestors total — to tribes mostly in the Southwest.

“The hard-working staff at the museum have done their best to repatriate human remains and artifacts to tribes without any significant financial investment from the state,” Hobbs, a Democrat, said in prepared remarks to tribal leaders last month. “It is time for that to change. It is time for the state to take repatriation seriously.”

One of the museums’ challenges in trying to reach full compliance with the law stems from the fact that it continues to receive human remains because of its status as a state repository. Arizona medical examiners have sent the museum human remains that they come across in their investigations, including the ancestors of Native Americans. In some instances, looters have surrendered items and bones unearthed from graves, according to Jim Watson, associate director at the Arizona State Museum. (Looting violates federal laws.)

“We will receive an individual or remains in the mail or objects from private citizens, particularly when individuals pass away and their relatives are going through their stuff,” he told the NAGPRA Review Committee last spring. “They find a box in the garage or the attic, for example, and it says, ‘from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Phoenix’ or ‘ancestral remains.’ So, they will ship them to the University of Arizona, often without contacting us first.”

He estimates the museum receives such packages two to three times per year.

Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.

by Craig Silverman

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

Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people.

“BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called NO Filter Seeking Truth, adding, “Cash in folks.”

Check Your Fact, Reuters and other fact-checkers debunked the claim, and Facebook added labels to posts warning that they contained false information or missing context. ICE has a tip line but said it does not offer cash bounties.

This spring, Meta plans to stop working with fact-checkers in the U.S. to label false or misleading content, the company said on Jan. 7. And if a post like the one about ICE goes viral, the pages that spread it could earn a cash bonus.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduce the spread of false information. At the same time, Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook Content Monetization program is currently invite-only, but Meta plans to make it widely available this year.

The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta, according to former professional Facebook hoaxsters and a former Meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety.

ProPublica identified 95 Facebook pages that regularly post made-up headlines designed to draw engagement — and, often, stoke political divisions. The pages, most of which are managed by people overseas, have a total of more than 7.7 million followers.

After a review, Meta said it had removed 81 pages for being managed by fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves as American while posting about politics and social issues. Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, declined to respond to specific questions, including whether any of the pages were eligible for or enrolled in the company’s viral content payout program.

The pages collected by ProPublica offer a sample of those that could be poised to cash in.

Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims.

With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist.

“The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added.

In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.”

Clayton said Meta’s community standards and content moderation teams are still active and reiterated the company’s Jan. 7 statement that it is working to ensure it doesn’t “over-enforce” its rules by mistakenly banning or suppressing content.

Meta’s changes mark a significant reversal of the company’s approach to moderating false and misleading information, reframing the labeling or downranking of content as a form of censorship. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement. His stance reflects the approach of Elon Musk after acquiring Twitter, now X, in 2022. Musk has made drastic cuts to the company’s trust and safety team, reinstated thousands of suspended accounts including that of a prominent neo-Nazi and positioned Community Notes, which allows participating users to add context via notes appended to tweets, as the platform’s key system for flagging false and misleading content.

Zuckerberg has said Meta will replace fact-checkers and some automated systems in the U.S. with a version of the Community Notes system. A Jan. 7 update to a Meta policy page said that in the U.S. the company “may still reduce the distribution of certain hoax content whose spread creates a particularly bad user or product experience (e.g., certain commercial hoaxes).”

Clayton did not clarify whether posts with notes appended to them would be eligible for monetization. He provided links to academic papers that detail how crowdsourced fact-checking programs like Community Notes can be effective at identifying misinformation, building trust among users and addressing perceptions of bias.

A 2023 ProPublica investigation, as well as reporting from Bloomberg, found that X’s Community Notes failed to effectively address the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Reporting from the BBC and Agence France-Presse showed that X users who share false information have earned thousands of dollars thanks to X’s content monetization program, which also rewards high engagement.

Keith Coleman, X’s vice president of product, previously told ProPublica that the analysis of Community Notes about the Israel-Hamas conflict did not include all of the relevant notes, and he said that the program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

Allen said it takes time, resources and oversight to scale up crowdsourced fact-checking systems. Meta’s decision to scrap fact-checking before giving the new approach time to prove itself is risky, he said.

“We could in theory have a Community Notes program that was as effective, if not more effective, than the fact-checking program,” he said. “But to turn all these things off before you have the Community Notes thing in place definitely feels like we’re explicitly going to have a moment with little guardrails.”

Before Facebook began cracking down on content in late 2016, American fake news peddlers and spammers based in North Macedonia and elsewhere cashed in on viral hoaxes that deepened political divisions and played on people’s fears.

One American, Jestin Coler, ran a network of sites that earned money from hoax news stories for nearly a decade, including the infamous and false viral headline from 2016 “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” He previously told NPR that he started the sites as a way to “infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.” Coler said he earned five figures a month from the sites, which he operated in his spare time.

When people clicked on the links to the stories in their news feed, they landed on websites full of ads, which generated revenue for Coler. That’s become a tougher business model since Meta has made story links less visible on Facebook in recent years.

Facebook’s new program to pay publishers directly for viral content could unlock a fresh revenue stream for hoaxsters. “It’s still the same formula to get people riled up. It seems like it could just go right back to those days, like overnight,” Coler told ProPublica in a phone interview. He said he left the Facebook hoax business years ago and won’t return.

In January, ProPublica compiled a list of pages that had been previously cited for posting hoaxes and false content and discovered dozens more through domain and content searches. The pages posted false headlines designed to spark controversy, such as “Lia Thomas Admits: ‘I Faked Being Trans to Expose How Gullible the Left Is’” and “Elon Musk announced that he has acquired MSNBC for $900 million to put an end to toxic programming.” The Musk headline was paired with an AI-generated image of him holding a contract with the MSNBC logo. It generated over 11,000 reactions, shares and comments.

Most of the pages are managed by accounts outside of the U.S., including in North Macedonia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, according to data from Facebook. Many of these pages use AI-generated images to illustrate their made-up headlines.

One network of overseas-run pages is connected to the site SpaceXMania.com, an ad-funded site filled with hoax articles like “Elon Musk Confronts Beyoncé Publicly: ‘Stop Pretending to Be Country, It’s Just Not You.’” SpaceX Fanclub, the network’s largest Facebook page, has close to 220,000 followers and labels its content as satire. One of its recent posts was a typo-laden AI-generated image of a sign that said, “There Are Only 2 2 Genders And Will Ban Atheletes From Women Sports — President.”

SpaceXMania.com’s terms and conditions page says it’s owned by Funky Creations LTD, a United Kingdom company registered to Muhammad Shabayer Shaukat, a Pakistani national. ProPublica sent questions to the site and received an email response signed by Tim Lawson, who said he’s an American based in Florida who works with Shaukat. (ProPublica was unable to locate a person by that name in public records searches, based on the information he provided.)

“Our work involves analyzing the latest trends and high-profile news related to celebrities and shaping it in a way that appeals to a specific audience — particularly conservatives and far-right groups who are predisposed to believe certain narratives,” the email said.

Lawson said they earn between $500 and $1,500 per month from web ads and more than half of the traffic comes from people clicking on links on Facebook. The pages are not currently enrolled in the invitation-only Facebook Content Monetization program, according to Lawson.

The SpaceXMania pages identified by ProPublica were recently taken offline. Lawson denied that they were removed by Meta and said he deactivated the pages “due to some security reasons.” Meta declined to comment.

It remains to be seen how hoax page operators will fare as Meta’s algorithmic reversals take hold and the U.S. fact-checking program grinds to a halt. But some Facebook users are already taking advantage of the loosened guardrails.

Soon after Zuckerberg announced the changes, people spread a fake screenshot of a Bloomberg article headlined, “The spark from Zuckerberg’s electric penis pump, might be responsible for the LA fires.”

“Community note: verified true,” wrote one commenter.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Stephen Engelberg

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.

By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.

It’s also completely untrue.

You might ask why it’s worth grabbing onto one particular false assertion when there are so many incorrect facts and figures flooding the zone of public conversation. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Musk shared a video of the briefing on X, saying it was the tip of the iceberg. Days later, the president doubled down, saying his administration prevented delivery of $100 million of “condoms to Hamas.”

A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from the U.S. Agency for International Development showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; and it would mean more than 1 billion condoms for the roughly 1 million Palestinian males living in Gaza.

It took Musk two weeks to disavow the condom claim, saying that “we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

A look at how the administration handled the quickly debunked and obviously wrong statement about who is working from home shows that correcting “mistakes” is far from standard practice recently for either the White House or prominent Republicans.

The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support DOGE, and she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as wasteful spending.

The claim was immediately picked up by The New York Post, commentator Sean Hannity and other Trump allies. Hannity tweeted “JOB FOR DOGE: Only 6% of Federal Employees work from an Office Full-time, Some not working at All: Audit.”

The Post followed up hours later with an editorial that derided federal employees for their “privilege” and asked, “How many does the nation actually need?” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, “That is absurd, and it’s not something the American people will stand for.”

Musk retweeted the Post story to his more than 200 million followers soon after it appeared. He said things were even worse than the report had found, asserting that “if you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.”

The 6% figure struck me as highly implausible. I began my career at a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest Navy base. I thought about the number of people needed to staff an aircraft carrier battle group on deployments that last for many months. After Norfolk, I spent years covering national security. Given the restrictions on handling classified information, hardly anyone at the intelligence agencies, the State Department or the Pentagon can work from home.

I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office.

The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.”

The editors said they had also added data from an August 2024 study by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that 54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.

In the world of journalism, this is how editors try to address egregious misreadings of their work. Jared Serbu, the deputy editor of Federal News Network, said he and his colleagues were taken aback by how his organization’s clearly unscientific survey had somehow been transformed into a defining statistic about federal employees.

“It was a survey of our niche audience for our niche audience,” Serbu said. “Nobody’s ever been confused about it before this.”

Later in December, a TV report cited the editor’s note and labeled the 6% number as “false.” At about the same time, PolitiFact looked at Johnson’s claim that only 1% of federal workers show up to work each day and labeled it “pants on fire,” the fact-checking site’s lowest rating for a statement that is “not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

That should have ended the conversation. But it didn’t.

On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, the White House issued a statement that obliquely referred to Musk’s coming assault on federal agencies. It said Trump was “planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.”

A week after that, a senior administration official cited the 6% figure in explaining plans to slash the size of the federal workforce through buyouts. “We’re five years past COVID and just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office,” the official told Axios and NBC News. The quotation also appeared in a memo sent by the White House to Republican allies, the Daily Wire reported.

I asked Ernst’s press secretary, Zach Kraft, whether the senator planned to correct the record or amend her report. He said neither was in the offing.

“To set the record straight — If federal employees were indeed showing up in large numbers, then calling them back to work wouldn’t be controversial,” Kraft said in an email. He noted that a bill introduced by Ernst would require federal managers to “take daily attendance, so everyone knows who is showing up to work and who isn’t.”

The White House did not respond to my questions about why its Jan. 20 statement cited a claim about federal workers that had been so clearly refuted. The portrayal of federal workers as lazy and indolent continues to be a central aspect of the president’s plans to slash government employment.

On Wednesday in Miami, Trump said federal workers should “show up to work in person like the rest of us,” adding that: “You can’t work at home. They’re not working. They’re playing tennis, they’re playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard.” (Multiple news outlets noted that Trump had golfed on nine of his first 30 days in office.)

It’s said that we live in a post-fact society, that everything is arguable and nothing is truly knowable. I vehemently disagree. Now, more than ever, facts matter, and ProPublica is going to continue to track how and when patently false statements are injected into momentous conversations about this country’s future.

by Eli Hager

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

President Donald Trump was asked at a press conference this month if there were any federal agencies or programs that Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency wouldn’t be allowed to mess with.

“Social Security will not be touched,” Trump answered, echoing a promise he has been making for years. Despite his eagerness to explode treaties, shutter entire government agencies and abandon decades-old ways of doing things, the president understands that Social Security benefits for seniors are sacrosanct.

Still, the DOGE team landed at the Social Security Administration this week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments. DOGE has begun installing its own operatives, including an engineer linked to tweets promoting eugenics and executives with a cut-first-fix-later philosophy, in multiple top positions at the Social Security Administration.

Their first wave of actions — initiating the elimination of 41 jobs and the closing of at least 10 local offices, so far — was largely lost in the rush of headlines. Those first steps might seem restrained compared with the mass firings that DOGE has pursued at other federal agencies. But Social Security recipients rely on in-person service in all 50 states, and the shuttering of offices, reported on DOGE’s website to include locations everywhere from rural West Virginia to Las Vegas, could be hugely consequential. The closures potentially reduce access to Social Security for some of the most vulnerable people in this country — including not just retirees but also individuals with severe physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as children whose parents have died and who’ve been left in poverty.

The Social Security Administration, headquartered just outside Baltimore, has more than 1,200 regional and field offices — nearly a fifth of all of the federal government’s offices nationwide. There are 119,000 visitors to these brick-and-mortar facilities every business day. Many of them do not have high levels of computer and internet literacy and need someone to help them through all the legalese of a nearly century-old social program with a wonky user interface. This is also where elderly people can apply for Medicare, which doesn’t have physical outposts of its own. And it’s where hearings are held — due process provided — for beneficiaries who believe that they have been unfairly kicked off of desperately needed assistance.

“It’s where people access government,” said Kathleen Romig, a longtime expert on the program at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who recently served at the Social Security Administration in a temporary capacity.

In the event of more Social Security office closures like the ones that the Trump administration has begun pursuing — the president is broadly moving to close a range of offices and has even floated the idea of terminating every single federal lease — it is disproportionately poor people with lower levels of education who will become less likely to apply for and get help, research on past closures has found.

The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent Fox News interview, press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized “fake news reporters” for “fear-mongering” about Social Security’s future under the Trump administration. She said that Musk is only going after fraud and waste in the program.

The roughly 15 million recipients of Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance benefits — many of whom are severely disabled and destitute, or are orphans — are among the least politically powerful people in the U.S. Many told ProPublica that the distance to their closest Social Security office is already long, and that wait times to get a representative on the phone or a claim or an appeal processed can range from hours to years. Even before Trump was inaugurated, the agency’s staffing levels were at a 50-year low due to a decade of budget caps and cuts authored by congressional Republicans.

Several SSI and SSDI beneficiaries in rural areas told ProPublica that they have been watching with anxiety as Trump and Musk slash through federal agencies, knowing that any further office or staffing cuts to the Social Security Administration could be catastrophic for them.

Bryan Dooley, a 34-year-old with cerebral palsy who lives outside of Winston Salem, North Carolina, uses a wheelchair and struggles with speaking (he communicated with me through a caretaker). He said that his Social Security benefits, which he receives directly because of his disability and because that disability entitles him to a portion of his late mother’s Social Security, were mistakenly cut off several months ago. As he fights to get the assistance turned back on, he has been depleting his savings account trying to pay his mortgage.

“I really want to stay in the house where I lived with my mother,” he said. “Otherwise it’s a 24-hour care facility for me.”

Dooley, who works part time for a nonprofit called Solutions for Independence that helps others with disabilities, said that “we’re all watching” the developments at the Social Security Administration. If his local office were to be closed, he noted, he might have to coordinate with a caretaker or family member to take him 100 miles to Raleigh for administrative hearings on his benefits; scheduling appointments, already extremely difficult, would become almost impossible. “It would be a nightmare for all of us,” he said.

That nightmare is now on its way to becoming a reality in White Plains, New York, the site of one of the agency’s hearing offices on DOGE’s list of closures. According to a letter that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recently sent to the Social Security Administration, the White Plains office, which serves beneficiaries across seven counties, currently has more than 2,000 cases pending. Starting in May, elderly and disabled people across the region will have to travel up to 135 miles to the next-closest office, which for some of them will be in another state.

“Does the Administration have plans to close additional SSA offices?” Gillibrand asked.

The Social Security Administration declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about DOGE’s recent efforts at the agency, including the 10 office closures and staffing reductions. A spokesperson did provide a brief statement on the White Plains situation, saying that the agency had been informed by the General Services Administration that the White Plains office’s lease would not be renewed and that there are no plans to replace the office. Many hearings will take place online through video and audio, the spokesperson said.

DOGE’s capture of the Social Security Administration began this week when Trump elevated to acting commissioner a low-level official named Leland Dudek.

In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, Dudek acknowledged that he had been surreptitiously feeding information to DOGE before his promotion. “I confess,” he wrote. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE… I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” He added: “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”

After Dudek was put in charge of the agency, he told staff that he hoped to reassure them that “our continuing priority is paying beneficiaries the right amount at the right time, and providing other critical services people rely on from us.” He also rebutted some of Musk’s claims regarding widescale Social Security fraud.

In a separate meeting, he told Trump administration officials and congressional staffers that one of his new ideas is to “outsource” the jobs of Social Security Administration call center employees, The Wall Street Journal reported late this week.

Still, DOGE has proceeded more carefully with firings and layoffs at the Social Security Administration than it has at other agencies. Whereas aviation safety and nuclear security specialists, veterans affairs staff and firefighters, medical researchers and many others have all been forced out of their jobs by DOGE in recent weeks, it wasn’t until this Thursday that a much smaller number of recently hired or recently promoted Social Security staff started receiving emails saying that their jobs were not “mission critical.” According to emails shared with ProPublica, these staff members had eight hours to decide if they wanted to request another job within the agency, likely at lower pay and in another city (such a job would not be guaranteed, and relocation expenses would not be covered).

These emails appear to have gone out largely to Social Security Administration policy staff and lawyers, including those who help administrative law judges write decisions in disability cases — decisions that may now take longer and potentially have more errors in them as a result, one agency official told ProPublica. “Claimants will have adverse effects in terms of delay and also losing benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Social Security disability cases already have huge backlogs at the hearing stage, often taking more than a year.

Still, notably, employees “serving the public directly,” like those in field offices, were spared from these layoffs, at least for now.

That said, staff at Social Security’s regional offices around the country were not listed as “mission critical,” reflecting a further misunderstanding on DOGE’s part of what disabled people in particular need from the agency, legal aid attorneys in multiple states told ProPublica. When a low-income SSI or SSDI recipient has a problem that a front-line rep at a field office can’t explain or fix, or is just too overloaded with cases to deal with, it is regional staff who can help resolve the situation. When a person with an intellectual disability doesn’t understand why their benefits are being cut off or why they haven’t received notices in the mail about their case, regional staff can look through the case file and figure out what to do.

Regional staff do not yet appear to have been affected by DOGE’s layoffs, but many are now feeling on edge. One regional team leader, who also spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, said that “nobody knows how the RIF [Reduction in Force] is going to work” in the coming days, weeks and months. Offices could be closed at the same time that remote staff are ordered to return to an office, creating a situation in which some SSA employees will face multiple-hour commutes each way every day, all but forcing them to leave their jobs and thus stop serving beneficiaries.

“We think that’s the plan, so that they don’t have to explicitly do as many layoffs” at an agency as popular and heretofore untouchable as the Social Security Administration, said Jessica LaPointe, a council president for the American Federation of Government Employees. LaPointe represents Social Security’s field office and teleservice workers.

That’s not to mention the attrition that could result from the low morale that has been spreading across Social Security Administration employees’ Signal threads and blogs this week; the agency is already the most overworked and demoralized of nearly any across the federal government, surveys of federal workers have found.

“And meanwhile the beneficiary ranks just keep exploding,” the regional team leader said. (The number of Social Security recipients has grown by over 13 million since 2010, as Baby Boomers surge into retirement.)

Even maintaining level staffing, several Social Security experts told ProPublica, would, in population-adjusted terms, amount to a major reduction in the program’s ability to provide benefits and services to its clients.

Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who was commissioner of the Social Security Administration from December 2023 to November 2024 and also previously served as governor of Maryland, told ProPublica that he believes this week marked just the start of what might be a long four years for Social Security. “The American people through a lifetime of work earn not only these benefits but the customer service necessary to process these benefits,” he said. “Their money went to that, too.”

Trump and Musk “are going to break the largest, most important social program in America,” O’Malley predicted — even if they have to do so gradually.

In recent years, the Social Security Administration along with the U.S. Digital Service were working to make it simpler for people with disabilities to apply for Social Security benefits. Officials conducted surveys of poor, elderly and disabled SSI applicants about what would make the process less burdensome, and they then began creating a simplified application — with plain-language questions and some pre-populated answers — that would eventually be available to complete on paper, by phone or online.

The goal was to reduce the time that applicants spend applying for benefits as well as the time that agency staff spend processing those applications. Or, in other words: government efficiency.

Yet these efforts have been slowed now that Trump has renamed the U.S. Digital Service the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service.

“In conversations with regular people about how Social Security could be more efficient, they usually say that they want more staff on the phone lines and taking appointments, and more office locations, so that they don’t have to wait 60 days after their spouse or parent died, or wait for months after developing a life-changing disability,” said Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Right now we’re hearing all these generalities about the government being too big, rather than a focus on individual people trying to access services from that government.”

Which of these philosophies the Social Security Administration adheres to for the remainder of Trump’s time in office will depend in part on which is embraced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to become the permanent agency commissioner, who will replace Dudek once confirmed by the Senate. Bisignano’s attitude toward Social Security, its staffing, its regional and field offices, and its customer service hasn’t yet fully come into focus. He hasn’t yet been questioned at a confirmation hearing.

What is known about Bisignano is that he’s an experienced finance executive who oversees a $20 billion company. And that during his time as CEO of Fiserv, the payment-processing giant, his company generated savings by closing about a hundred locations and terminating thousands of employees, providing them with the opportunity to apply for other roles.

by Annie Waldman and Duaa Eldeib

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

Every day, they tackled complex issues with life-or-death stakes:

A failure to get donor organs to critically ill patients.

Tobacco products designed to appeal to kids.

Maternal and infant death.

They were hired after lawmakers and bureaucrats debated and negotiated and persuaded their colleagues — sometimes over the course of years — to make those problems someone’s job to solve.

Then, this month, they were fired as part of President Donald Trump’s widespread purge of federal workers. Suddenly, the future of their public health missions was in question.

The White House hasn’t released figures on how many have been fired, but news reports have begun to take stock: about 750 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plays a central role responding to pandemics; more than 1,000 staffers at the National Institutes of Health, which funds and conducts life-saving research; dozens at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages public health care and insurance programs; and scores of employees at the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of food, drugs and medical devices.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to gut the federal health centers, stating “entire departments” at the FDA should be cut. Neither the administration nor the federal agencies responded to ProPublica’s questions, but a White House spokesperson has previously said they were removing newer employees who were “not mission critical.”

“The implications for the health of the public are grave,” said Susan Polan, an associate executive director at the American Public Health Association, which is suing the Department of Government Efficiency, the group leading the firings, for violating federal transparency laws. “It is unfathomable that anybody thinks these cuts have value and are doing anything other than being performative.”

ProPublica reporters have spoken with dozens of federal workers employed in roles safeguarding the American public from harm. They described losing critical positions they’d spent years training for. Many expressed fear at what would happen to the work they left behind.

ProPublica is recording the casualties of the purge, highlighting the scale of what is being lost as public health programs and seasoned experts are caught in the Trump administration’s blunt-force drive to shrink the federal government.

Protecting Kids From Tobacco

Dustin Brace (Courtesy Dustin Brace)

For more than a decade, Dustin Brace has worked various federal jobs, serving as an emergency 911 dispatcher for the Navy and, as a member of the Coast Guard, responding to major chemical and oil spills. “I loved working to protect the American people,” he said. “I never thought that I would leave the government.”

Last year, when he joined the FDA, his mission was no different. As a social scientist at the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, he helped regulate e-cigarettes and related items. Some were being designed to look like kid-friendly foods, resembling cans of grape soda, or decorated with cartoons, like unicorns eating pancakes. In recent years, more young children had been landing in emergency rooms, poisoned by liquid nicotine. And once in a while, devices explode — in people’s pockets, or hands, or faces. One man died after shrapnel entered his brain.

Every week, Brace scrutinized new product applications to ensure that they would not appeal to children and that the devices were safe for consumer use. The work required a close and careful review of thousands of pages of documents, combing them for hidden hazards. “The work takes time to be done properly,” he said.

His job, and the center as a whole, were born out of a bipartisan understanding that the tobacco industry needed to be regulated. It wasn’t until 2009, after decades of industry pushback, that the FDA finally gained the broad legal authority to do so.

If you work or have worked at a government agency, we want to hear from you. You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201.

The agency has historically struggled to recruit enough scientists and experts, who could receive higher salaries in the private sector. “People don’t come to agencies like the FDA and centers like CTP for the money,” said Mitch Zeller, who was the center’s director from 2013 through 2022. “They come because they believe in the mission.”

Notably, the center’s regulatory activities are funded through tobacco industry fees, and it does not rely on direct federal support. “Not one taxpayer dollar is spent to regulate the tobacco industry,” said Zeller.

Last Saturday, Brace received a termination notice along with other newer employees on his team. Like those sent to other federal workers, his contained boilerplate language citing poor performance, even though Brace had received favorable reviews over the past year, according to his assessment records.

Brace estimated that more than 10% of staff at the center’s science office were terminated in the past week.

“Things are going to slow down,” Brace said. “More mistakes may be made because the workload is so much higher.”

Keeping Mothers and Babies From Dying

Arielle Kane (Courtesy Arielle Kane)

When Arielle Kane last year joined a team working on an innovative federal program to make childbirth safer in the U.S., the mission spoke to her.

She could save lives.

America has the worst mortality rate among high-income countries for pregnant and postpartum women, and those in underserved communities face some of the highest risks. Their babies also are in danger if their moms can’t access prenatal care or be seen quickly for complications because they live in so-called “maternal deserts” where obstetric care isn’t available or is limited.

Kane’s program, housed under CMS, was created to support mothers on Medicaid — increasing access to birth centers, doulas and midwives, cutting down on risky procedures like C-sections and tracking outcomes like low infant birth weight. Better blood-pressure monitoring could prevent life-threatening complications like preeclampsia. Extra attention paid to depression and substance use could head off equally devastating consequences.

It officially launched on Jan. 1, and Kane was excited about the possibilities.

But after Trump’s inauguration, they were instructed to halt data collection on race and ethnicity, which troubled many of them. Racial disparities are pervasive in maternal health. Black women are three times more likely than white women to die from a pregnancy-related cause and more than twice as likely to have a stillbirth. Kane said she also was told not to communicate with state officials or attend an upcoming conference on maternal health.

Then, just a month and a half after the launch, Kane and three of her colleagues were fired. With two others planning to leave at the end of the month, she said, the team will be reduced by nearly half.

“I’m just so angry,” Kane said. “This model that has a lot of potential is just being gutted. What does that mean for all of the potential impacts we could have had?”

Keeping Donor Organs From Getting Lost

Amy Paris (Courtesy Amy Paris)

For more than a decade, Amy Paris worked for federal agencies as a problem solver: retooling overly bureaucratic and cumbersome processes to make them easier for the public to navigate.

Last year, she was hired to help reform the nation’s organ procurement and transplantation network, a public-private partnership that connects organ donors to patients in vital need of a transplant.

The program had recently come under fire. As thousands of patients were dying on waitlists, some donor organs weren’t even being used. Multiple kidneys had to be thrown out because of transport delays — couriers not picking them up in time or airlines misplacing them. One was accidentally left on an airport luggage trolley.

After federal and Senate investigations detailed numerous failures, including an archaic information technology system, the Health Resources and Services Administration announced a modernization initiative in March 2023.

Paris joined the team last October as a deputy digital services lead, working with transplant surgeons, technology experts and data scientists on upgrades. “We were making headway,” she said. “We had alignment from Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, we had funding, and they were hiring more of us.”

As a new employee, she figured she would be one of the first to go in the federal workforce purge. Even so, she was devastated when she received her notice.

About half of her team was laid off, she said, which sets the reform effort back indefinitely. After her firing, a planned trip to investigate the underlying technology of the network system had to be canceled.

“We are hollowing out our government in a way that is going to hurt people and is going to get people killed,” she said. “That is the scariest thing in the world.”

We are still reporting. If you work or have worked at a government agency, we want to hear from you. You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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One of President Donald Trump’s most damaging strikes at the foundation of U.S. climate policy is buried deep in a sweeping Inauguration Day executive order focused on “Unleashing American Energy.” Half way through the lengthy document is a directive that would obliterate an obscure but critically important calculation the government uses to gauge the real-world costs that climate change is imposing on the U.S. economy.

Getting rid of the measure, called the “social cost of carbon,” would upend energy and environmental regulations meant to address climate change and could have the long-term effect of shifting costs from polluting industries directly onto Americans as the expenses of climate change rise.

The measure essentially establishes a price for each ton of carbon emitted, based on the long-term damages it is expected to cause in the future. It has become the government’s primary tool to weigh the economic costs of climate change — such as disaster cleanup or health impacts from warming — against the burden of regulations.

The executive order disbanded the working group, which included the treasury secretary, energy secretary and director of national economic policy, that set the social cost of carbon and advised how it should be implemented. It revoked that group’s previous decisions. And it directed the Environmental Protection Agency, which calculates the figure and bases regulatory proposals on it, to reconsider using the social cost of carbon altogether with the goal of eradicating “abuse” that stands in the way of affordable energy production.

The order stems directly from language in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy playbook and is based on work by the conservative think tank, which has consistently opposed climate policy and worked to defend the businesses of fossil fuel industries.

As climate change takes hold — the earth has already warmed more than half the total amount scientists project will cause catastrophic destabilization — the size and frequency of billion-dollar disasters has exploded, and the bills for climate damages have begun to affect people’s lives. Economists warn that it could be the steep financial price of adapting to this rapid shift, as much as environmental change itself, that will prove the most challenging and destabilizing.

If carried out, the shift away from using the social cost of carbon measure would not only make it exceedingly difficult to enact new rules slowing climate change and its growing costs in the future, but it would send the signal that the Trump administration doesn’t believe that climate change carries economic consequences.

The move shows “that we’re abandoning any idea that climate change is a problem,” said Marshall Burke, a climate economics researcher at Stanford University.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. An EPA spokesperson said the agency was working “diligently” to implement what Trump has asked for.

The social cost of carbon calculation — during the Biden administration CO2 was priced at about $190 per ton — is based on a scientifically rigorous set of models that take into account everything from projected warming to the expense of cleaning up after disasters. By putting a dollar value on emissions — and on the savings of reducing those emissions — government agencies are able to compare the costs against the benefits of regulations, as is required by law.

The concept of pricing carbon earned Yale economist William Nordhaus a Nobel Prize, and the approach has been upheld in federal court. It is an integral factor in creating, among other things, fuel economy standards, in setting EnergyStar requirements for appliances and for regulating the amount of pollution allowed to flow from utilities’ smokestacks.

The Heritage Foundation and the Project 2025 authors dispute the validity of the carbon price point, despite the broad scientific consensus supporting the methodology, on technical grounds. They argue that the computer modeling behind it is so flawed as to be easily manipulated by policymakers seeking to justify their desired outcomes. They say that the Biden administration cherry-picked how it reported results in order to produce the highest price possible. They also contend that the long-term economic toll of climate change is modest and will likely be outpaced by growth, warranting, in economic terms, a “discount” on the present value of future damages that emissions would cause, effectively nullifying the social cost of carbon.

Having no social cost of carbon measure in essence asserts that there is no detrimental cost that comes with a warming planet, and that ultimately lowers the burden — or increases profits — for drillers like Exxon, Chevron and Shell as well as the auto industry, the plastics industry, the chemical industries and utilities that generate power.

“All forms of energy should be able to compete on a level playing field, and the best one should win,” said Kevin Dayaratna, the Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician and the acting director of its Center for Data Analysis. “Fundamentally, the regulations being pursued come with significant economic costs to society.”

Ultimately, according to a Jan. 24 Heritage Foundation report, the think tank would like to see Congress “prohibit — by statute — the use of the social cost of carbon in policymaking,” so that no future administration has the option to use it again.

Canceling the measurement of economic impacts from climate change, though, doesn’t make those costs — estimated, using researchers’ projections, to be worth nearly $2 trillion for the U.S. economy this decade — go away. Instead, it will likely have the effect of levying them directly onto citizens, who will see their expenses for everything from housing to food rise higher and faster than they otherwise would.

A report published last month by First Street, a commercial research firm that studies climate threats to housing, found that climate-driven disasters have already spurred rate hikes in homeowners insurance. Over the next 30 years, the report projects, they may double or even quadruple in Florida and other parts of the country especially at risk for disasters, making insurance one of the most expensive aspects of owning a home.

Meanwhile many people are paying more for electricity to run air conditioning to cope with extreme heat. The Rhodium Group, a climate and economic research firm, projects that demand for power could increase as much as 9% on average nationwide within the next 15 years, due to warming alone, and that by later this century people will be paying as much as 20% more for their power than they would if the climate were not warming, especially in parts of Texas and the South.

Extreme heat and humidity are also making it more difficult to work, cutting into both household incomes and company profits as temperatures limit both the number of hours people can labor outdoors and the efficiency of the work they do. An economic study published in the journal Science projects a decline in labor supply as rising temperatures impact worker productivity across parts of the southern United States.

All the while, higher temperatures have already cut into the productivity of farming in the U.S., according to a 2021 study in the journal Nature Climate Change, and crop yields are widely forecast to decrease as temperatures get hotter, cutting into farmers’ livelihoods. Local taxes across the country are expected to rise, as municipalities stretch to raise money for infrastructure projects — from water treatment plants to bridges — that the climate crisis is making necessary.

Collectively, these costs are creating a significant, systemic drag on the U.S. economy. In some of the Gulf Coast counties most vulnerable to hurricanes, according to the Science study and research led by Solomon Hsiang, who heads the Global Policy Laboratory at Stanford University, that drag could amount to as much as a 60% reduction in the growth of the gross domestic product, promising a permanent stagnation of the local economy. Nationally, researchers estimate, climate change is already costing the equivalent of about 1.2% of U.S. GDP per degree of recent warming — which equates to roughly $200 billion each year now and is on pace to rise to more than $1 trillion annually within the next several decades.

These costs touch people already worried about inflation and home affordability, and they stem directly from generations of carbon pollution from fossil fuel consumption that has powered industrial advancement and the growth of the United States’ modern economy. There have been countless and immense benefits to this industrialization. But until the social cost of carbon calculation came along, those costs had been difficult to quantify and had been shifted onto society instead of the balance sheets of the oil and coal companies primarily responsible for them.

Utilizing the social cost of carbon, which began in earnest with the Obama administration in 2009 and was maintained — though minimized — by the first Trump administration, effectively did two things: It reflected some of those expenses back onto the industries that cause them by asking them to pay the expense of complying with regulations that would lower future emissions. And it discounted some of the new costs of climate change to consumers by making the products they use more efficient and thus cheaper to operate. The social cost of carbon calculations have made it possible for Americans to drive cars that go farther for each dollar of gasoline pumped into them or to use refrigerators and light bulbs that gulp fewer kilowatt hours of electricity. Regulators can justify the imposition of those rules because they can quantify the trade-offs.

By eliminating the consideration of carbon’s costs, the Trump administration not only stands to eliminate the consumer benefits, but it will also allow carbon emissions to grow unabated, intensifying the very increases in global temperature that are driving the broader economic damages and hardship in the first place.

Climate scientists and economists say it is fair to question whether the $190 per ton carbon price tag arrived at by the Biden administration — compared with $42 under the Obama administration or the $7 that the Trump administration set during its first term — is too high. There are valid reasons to debate some of the assumptions fed into the EPA’s models and the seeming precision that results from them. But they warn that just because there are a range of calculable outcomes does not make the premise false. Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug, in trying to understand the historic and unprecedented change unfolding on the planet.

But it is implausible to argue that there is no cost at all, Burke, the Stanford researcher, said. That is what the Trump administration and Heritage Foundation appear to be after. The foundation has centered its opposition on the wonky economic process of measuring how much climate damages that are realized decades from now should be worth today. They argue that so long as economic growth continues, there is little reason to pay a premium through regulations now — which the social cost of carbon justifies. So, they seek to discount the metric dramatically, perhaps all the way to zero.

This sounds arcane but is decisive. “Calling for a high discount rate is basically saying that we should give virtually no weight to our grandchildren and successive generations,” said Max Sarinsky, the regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank associated with New York University’s School of Law. “It’s saying we should be willing to spend very little now to make life better in the future.”

The Heritage position — reflected in its Jan. 24 report and emphasized to me in an interview last week — actually goes a leap further, claiming that there is even a chance that there could be an economic benefit to emitting more carbon and that “CO₂ emissions should not be taxed but subsidized.”

The think tank is quick to clarify that it doesn’t necessarily advocate for subsidizing the production of greenhouse gases — that it is merely making a cheeky point about the models’ range of uncertainty. But it goes on to make the argument that continuing to burn fossil fuels and driving up the temperature of the global weather systems and environment could lead to higher crop yields in some places, suggesting that it would ultimately outweigh the damages of extreme disasters, drought, wildfires and hurricanes. In other words, climate change could be a win-win for the environment and for the economy.

“Maybe a little bit of lukewarming is good for society,” Heritage’s Dayaratna said. “You could go on vacation to areas that once you could not necessarily go.”

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday told employees that it would lift its monthlong freeze on investigating discrimination complaints at schools and colleges across the country — but only to allow disability investigations to proceed.

That means that thousands of outstanding complaints filed with the department’s Office for Civil Rights related to race and gender discrimination — most of which are submitted by students and families — will continue to sit idle. That includes cases alleging unfair discipline or race-based harassment, for example.

“I am lifting the pause on the processing of complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of disability. Effective immediately, please process complaints that allege only disability-based discrimination,” Craig Trainor, the office’s acting director, wrote in an internal memo obtained by ProPublica. It was sent to employees in the enforcement arm of the office, most of whom are attorneys.

A spokesperson for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

ProPublica reported last week that the Department of Education had halted ongoing civil rights investigations, an unusual move even during a presidential transition. Department employees said they had been told not to communicate with students, families and schools involved in cases that were launched in previous administrations, describing the edict as a “gag order” and saying they had “been essentially muzzled.”

The office has opened only a handful of new cases since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, and nearly all of them reflect his priorities. The investigations target a school district’s gender-neutral bathroom and institutions that have allowed transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports. Other prioritized investigations involve allegations of discrimination against white students or of anti-semitism.

As of last week, the OCR had opened about 20 new investigations in all, a low number compared with similar periods in prior years. More than 250 new cases were opened in the same time period last year, for example.

The OCR has had a backlog of cases for years — there were about 12,000 pending investigations when Trump took office. Some had been open for more than a decade, which civil rights advocates said failed to bring relief to students when they needed it.

About half of the pending investigations are related to students with disabilities who feel they’ve been mistreated or unfairly denied help at school, according to a ProPublica analysis of department data.

Investigators were pursuing about 3,200 active complaints of racial discrimination, including unfair discipline and racial harassment. An additional roughly 1,000 complaints were specific to sexual harassment or sexual violence, the analysis found. The remainder concern a range of discrimination claims.

Ignoring or attacking disability rights “would be politically unpopular,” said Harold Jordan of the American Civil Liberties Union, who works on education equity issues across the country. “They don’t want to be seen as shutting down all the disability claims,” he said.

But complaints typically investigated by the OCR, many related to discrimination against students of color, do not align with Trump’s priorities on racial bias, which so far have related to prejudice against white students.

“They will pick up race cases once people file, essentially, reverse discrimination complaints,” Jordan said.

The OCR, in fact, decided this month that it would investigate a complaint filed in August by the Equal Protection Project, a conservative nonprofit, that alleges the Ithaca City School District in New York excluded white students by hosting an event called the Students of Color Summit. The Biden administration had not acted on the complaint, but new Education Department leaders decided within days that the agency would proceed with an investigation.

Thursday’s memo also included a “revised” case manual, which details how the office will investigate and resolve complaints that allege violations of civil rights law. During the previous administration, investigators had the authority to open “systemic” inquiries when there was evidence of widespread civil rights issues or multiple complaints of the same type of discrimination at a school district or college. That ability to launch wider investigations appears to have been stripped under Trump; there is no mention of systemic investigations in the new manual.

The manual also no longer includes gender-neutral references; people alleging violations of “their” rights have been replaced by “his or her” in Trump’s updated version. That aligns with his recent anti-transgender policies and his view that there are only two genders.

The shifts at the OCR come as Trump has called the Education Department a “con job” and is expected to issue an executive order that it be dismantled. Last week, Trainor told schools and colleges that they have two weeks to eliminate race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring and training or risk losing federal funding.

“Under any banner, discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is, has been, and will continue to be illegal,” Trainor wrote.

During the past two weeks, the Trump administration has terminated contracts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars that mostly focused on education research and data on learning and the country’s schools. The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which said it also ended dozens of training grants for educators that it deemed wasteful.

But recent contract terminations touted by Musk’s team as ridding the department of “waste” and ending “diversity” programs also abruptly ended services for some students with disabilities.

by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Andy Kroll and Christopher Bing

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While Elon Musk and his underlings demand budget cuts and layoffs across the federal government, funding for their agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — has soared to nearly $40 million, ProPublica found in a review of Office of Management and Budget records.

Billionaire investor Musk has called DOGE “maximally transparent.” President Donald Trump has said that some 100 people work for the group, but his administration has refused to make information about DOGE’s spending and operations public. In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of DOGE’s inner workings, ProPublica has gathered the names and backgrounds of the people employed there. We’ve identified some 46 people, including 12 new names we are adding to the list today.

Trump and Musk have defended DOGE as a tool for trimming fat from what they see as a bloated bureaucracy. The effects of those cuts have proved crippling, bringing a halt to programs that provided essential services to vulnerable populations across the country and the world.

The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told ProPublica she didn’t believe DOGE had the legal authority for the actions it’s taken. She called it a “made-up federal department” that’s wasting taxpayer dollars.

“This unlawful effort is stealing federal funds from American families and businesses,” DeLauro said.

Most of DOGE’s money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority.

The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE’s staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were.

The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then DOGE’s tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned, some contend.

“The administration can’t have it both ways,” said Adam Grogg, a former deputy general counsel at OMB and now the legal director at Governing for Impact, a left-of-center think tank. “Either it’s an agency covered by FOIA with the authority to do what it’s doing, or it’s purely advising the president and can’t be directing agencies in the way it now is.”

A federal judge presiding over one of the many DOGE-related lawsuits also recently grilled the administration’s lawyers about its conflicting stances. In a recent hearing, U.S. District Judge John Bates characterized the government’s position as “we’re not an agency where we don’t want to be an agency, but we are an agency this one instance where we want to be.”

ProPublica has confirmed the names of 12 additional government staffers who are either part of DOGE or are linked to Musk’s constellation of companies and have roles in the new administration. We confirmed the names by cross-referencing agency records, speaking with dozens of sources inside the federal government, and poring through documents from ongoing litigation challenging DOGE’s authority.

They are spread across agencies. At the Department of Education, DOGE staffers are exploring how to expand the agency’s reliance on AI to both identify potential waste and interact with student loan recipients. At the EPA, they have reportedly gained access to contracting databases. Some staffers serve in executive-level roles while others have ambiguous titles, such as “senior adviser,” leaving unclear the nature of their work.

One of the names newly added to the tracker, Kathryn Armstrong Loving, is the sibling of crypto executive Brian Armstrong, who runs the industry leader Coinbase. Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Armstrong met with Trump to discuss appointments to administration posts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Some employees work at more than one agency. None responded to requests for comment.

While Musk has celebrated DOGE’s cuts and disparaged targeted agencies, Trump officials now say he’s not actually running it.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Funding Floodgates

The Trump administration began funding DOGE soon after it took office. It started by tapping $750,000 from a White House fund for information technology initiatives in late January.

Since then, the funding has ballooned; the most recent apportionment came on Feb. 8 and included a $14 million chunk described as part of a “software modernization initiative.” In all, ProPublica found, more than $39 million has been earmarked to DOGE in the Trump administration’s first month.

For perspective, in recent years Congress had allocated around $50 million a year for the IT modernization initiative that DOGE supplanted, budget records show.

The Trump administration has not yet released enough details to trace the exact source of the funding flowing into DOGE or said who is being paid. The money could be coming from agency budgets that have money set aside for IT upgrades or other services. It’s also not yet clear what timeframe the allocation covers or whether it has funded salaries.

Funding one agency from another’s budget is not unusual, experts say. But money cannot be moved around for whatever purpose the White House wants — it is restricted by something called the “purpose statute,” which requires funds to pay for items Congress has specifically prescribed.

DOGE’s operating method “leaves questions about possible violations of the purpose statute,” said Christie Wentworth with the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “If DOGE uses funds that are available only for IT-related purposes for initiatives that have nothing to do with IT, that use could violate federal law.”

Brett Murphy, Kirsten Berg, Pratheek Rebala and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.

Correction

Feb. 21, 2025: This story originally misspelled the name of the sister of cryptocurrency executive Brian Armstrong. She is Kathryn Armstrong Loving, not Katherine.

by Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Kavitha Surana

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

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis.

The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.

The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital.

ProPublica previously reported on two such cases in which miscarrying women in Texas died of sepsis after doctors delayed evacuating their uteruses. Doing so would have been considered an abortion.

The new reporting shows that, after the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid COVID-19-related distortions. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, ProPublica found, it rose substantially in Texas.

ProPublica’s analysis is the most detailed look yet at a rise in life-threatening complications for women losing a pregnancy after Texas banned abortion. It raises concerns that the same pattern may be occurring in more than a dozen other states with similar bans.

To chart the scope of pregnancy-related infections, ProPublica purchased and analyzed seven years of Texas’ hospital discharge data.

When abortion was legal in Texas, the rate of sepsis for women hospitalized during second-trimester pregnancy loss was relatively steady. Then the state’s first abortion ban went into effect and the rate of sepsis spiked.

Note: For hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 weeks’ gestation and the end of the 21st week. Rates are annual. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

“This is exactly what we predicted would happen and exactly what we were afraid would happen,” said Dr. Lorie Harper, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Austin.

She and a dozen other maternal health experts who reviewed ProPublica’s findings say they add to the evidence that the state’s abortion ban is leading to dangerous delays in care. Texas law threatens up to 99 years in prison for providing an abortion. Though the ban includes an exception for a “medical emergency,” the definition of what constitutes an emergency has been subject to confusion and debate.

Many said the ban is the only explanation they could see for the sudden jump in sepsis cases.

The new analysis comes as Texas legislators consider amending the abortion ban in the wake of ProPublica’s previous reporting, and as doctors, federal lawmakers and the state’s largest newspaper have urged Texas officials to review pregnancy-related deaths from the first full years after the ban was enacted; the state maternal mortality review committee has, thus far, opted not to examine the death data for 2022 and 2023.

The standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to offer to empty the uterus, according to leading medical organizations, which can lower the risk of contracting an infection and developing sepsis. If a patient’s water breaks or her cervix opens, that risk rises with every passing hour.

Sepsis can lead to permanent kidney failure, brain damage and dangerous blood clotting. Nationally, it is one of the leading causes of deaths in hospitals.

While some Texas doctors have told ProPublica they regularly offer to empty the uterus in these cases, others say their hospitals don’t allow them to do so until the fetal heartbeat stops or they can document a life-threatening complication.

Last year, ProPublica reported on the repercussions of these kinds of delays.

Forced to wait 40 hours as her dying fetus pressed against her cervix, Josseli Barnica risked a dangerous infection. Doctors didn’t induce labor until her fetus no longer had a heartbeat.

Physicians waited, too, as Nevaeh Crain’s organs failed. Before rushing the pregnant teenager to the operating room, they ran an extra test to confirm her fetus had expired.

Both women had hoped to carry their pregnancies to term, both suffered miscarriages and both died.

In response to their stories, 111 doctors wrote a letter to the Legislature saying the abortion ban kept them from providing lifesaving care and demanding a change.

“It’s black and white in the law, but it’s very vague when you’re in the moment,” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio. When the fetus has a heartbeat, doctors can’t simply follow the usual evidence-based guidelines, he said. Instead, there is a legal obligation to assess whether a woman’s condition is dire enough to merit an abortion under a prosecutor’s interpretation of the law.

Some prominent Texas Republicans who helped write and pass Texas’ strict abortion bans have recently said that the law should be changed to protect women’s lives — though it’s unclear if proposed amendments will receive a public hearing during the current legislative session.

ProPublica’s findings indicate that the law is getting in the way of providing abortions that can protect against life-threatening infections, said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington.

“We have the ability to intervene before these patients get sick,” she said. “This is evidence that we aren’t doing that.”

A New View

Health experts, specially equipped to study maternal deaths, sit on federal agencies and state-appointed review panels. But, as ProPublica previously reported, none of these bodies have systematically assessed the consequences of abortion bans.

So ProPublica set out to do so, first by investigating preventable deaths, and now by using data to take a broader view, looking at what happened in Texas hospitals after the state banned abortion, in particular as women faced miscarriages.

“It is kind of mindblowing that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals,” said perinatal epidemiologist Alison Gemmill, an expert on miscarriage at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In consultation with Gemmill and more than a dozen other maternal health researchers and obstetricians, ProPublica built a framework for analyzing Texas hospital discharge data from 2017 to 2023, the most recent full year available. This billing data, kept by hospitals and collected by the state, catalogues what happens in every hospitalization. It is anonymized but remarkable in its granularity, including details such as gestational age, complications and procedures.

To study infections during pregnancy loss, ProPublica identified all hospitalizations that included miscarriages, terminations and births from the beginning of the second trimester up to 22 weeks’ gestation, before fetal viability. Since first-trimester miscarriage is often managed in an outpatient setting, ProPublica did not include those cases in this analysis.

When looking at stays for second-trimester pregnancy loss, ProPublica found a relatively steady rate of sepsis before Texas made abortion a crime. In late 2021, the state made it a civil offense to end a pregnancy after a fetus developed cardiac activity, and in the summer of 2022, the state made it a felony to terminate any pregnancy, with few exceptions.

In 2021, 67 patients who lost a pregnancy in the second trimester were diagnosed with sepsis — as in the previous years, they accounted for about 3% of the hospitalizations.

In 2022, that number jumped to 90.

The following year, it climbed to 99.

ProPublica’s analysis was conservative and likely missed some cases. It doesn’t capture what happened to miscarrying patients who were turned away from emergency rooms or those like Barnica who were made to wait, then discharged home before they returned with sepsis.

Our analysis showed that patients who were admitted while their fetus was still believed to have a heartbeat were far more likely to develop sepsis.

Sepsis Rates Spiked for Patients Whose Initial Diagnosis Didn’t Include Fetal Death

For patients in Texas hospitals who lost a pregnancy, about half were not diagnosed with fetal demise when they were admitted, meaning that their fetus may still have had a heartbeat at that time. Those patients saw a dramatic increase in sepsis after the state banned abortion.

Note: For hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 weeks’ gestation and the end of the 21st week. We identified patients whose fetus had no heartbeat when they were admitted by looking for a diagnosis of “intrauterine death” or “missed abortion.” Rates are annual. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

“What this says to me is that once a fetal death is diagnosed, doctors can appropriately take care of someone to prevent sepsis, but if the fetus still has a heartbeat, then they aren’t able to act and the risk for maternal sepsis goes way up,” said Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UW Medicine and an expert in pregnancy complications. “This is needlessly putting a woman’s life in danger.”

Studies indicate that waiting to evacuate the uterus increases rates of sepsis for patients whose water breaks before the fetus can survive outside the womb, a condition called previable premature rupture of membranes or PPROM. Because of the risk of infection, major medical organizations like the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advise doctors to always offer abortions.

Researchers in Dallas and Houston examined cases of previable pregnancy complications at their local hospitals after the state ban. Both studies found that when women weren’t able to end their pregnancies right away, they were significantly more likely to develop dangerous conditions than before the ban. The study of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, not yet published, found that the rate of sepsis tripled after the ban.

Dr. Emily Fahl, a co-author of that study, recently urged professional societies and state medical boards to “explicitly clarify” that doctors need to recommend evacuating the uterus for patients with a PPROM diagnosis, even with no sign of infection, according to MedPage Today.

UTHealth Houston did not respond to several requests for comment.

ProPublica zoomed out beyond the second trimester to look at deaths of all women hospitalized in Texas while pregnant or up to six weeks postpartum. Deaths peaked amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and most patients who died then were diagnosed with the virus. But looking at the two years before the pandemic, 2018 and 2019, and the two most recent years of data, 2022 and 2023, there is a clear shift:

In the two earlier years, there were 79 maternal hospital deaths.

In the two most recent, there were 120.

Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, said it’s crucial to examine these deaths from different angles, as ProPublica has done. Data analyses help illuminate trends but can’t reveal a patient’s history or wishes, as a detailed medical chart might. Diving deep into individual cases can reveal the timeline of treatment and how doctors behave. “When you see them together, it tells a really compelling story that people are dying as a result of the abortion restrictions.”

Texas has no plans to scrutinize those deaths. The chair of the maternal mortality review committee said the group is skipping data from 2022 and 2023 and picking up its analysis with 2024 to get a more “contemporary” view of deaths. She added that the decision had “absolutely no nefarious intent.”

“The fact that Texas is not reviewing those years does a disservice to the 120 individuals you identified who died inpatient and were pregnant,” said Dr. Jonas Swartz, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University. “And that is an underestimation of the number of people who died.”

The committee is also prohibited by law from reviewing cases that include an abortion medication or procedure, which can also be used during miscarriages. In response to ProPublica’s reporting, a Democratic state representative filed a bill to overturn that prohibition and order those cases to be examined.

Because not all maternal deaths take place in hospitals and the Texas hospital data did not include cause of death, ProPublica also looked at data compiled from death certificates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It shows that the rate of maternal deaths in Texas rose 33% between 2019 and 2023 even as the national rate fell by 7.5%.

A New Imperative

Texas’ abortion law is under review this legislative session. Even the party that championed it and the senator who authored it say they would consider a change.

On a local television program last month, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the law should be amended.

“I do think we need to clarify any language,” Patrick said, “so that doctors are not in fear of being penalized if they think the life of the mother is at risk.”

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, who once argued that the abortion ban he wrote was “plenty clear,” has since reversed course, saying he is working to propose language to amend the ban. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told ProPublica, through a spokesperson, that he would “look forward to seeing any clarifying language in any proposed legislation from the Legislature.”

Patrick, Hughes and Attorney General Ken Paxton did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about what changes they would like to see made this session and did not comment on findings ProPublica shared.

In response to ProPublica’s analysis, Abbott’s office said in a statement that Texas law is clear and pointed to Texas health department data that shows 135 abortions have been performed since Roe was overturned without resulting in prosecution. The vast majority of the abortions were categorized as responses to an emergency but the data did not specify what kind. Only five were solely to “preserve [the] health of [the] woman.”

At least seven bills related to repealing or creating new exceptions to the abortion laws have been introduced in Texas.

Doctors told ProPublica they would most like to see the bans overturned so all patients could receive standard care, including the option to terminate pregnancies for health considerations, regardless of whether it’s an emergency. No list of exceptions can encompass every situation and risk a patient might face, obstetricians said.

“A list of exceptions is always going to exclude people,” said Dallas OB-GYN Dr. Allison Gilbert.

It seems unlikely a Republican-controlled Legislature would overturn the ban. Gilbert and others are advocating to at least end criminal and civil penalties for doctors. Though no doctor has been prosecuted for violating the ban, the mere threat of criminal charges continues to obstruct care, she said.

In 2023, an amendment was passed that permitted physicians to intervene when patients are diagnosed with PPROM. But it is written in such a way that still exposes physicians to prosecution; it allows them to offer an “affirmative defense,” like arguing self-defense when charged with murder.

“Anything that can reduce those severe penalties that have really chilled physicians in Texas would be helpful,” Gilbert said. “I think it will mean that we save patients’ lives.”

Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a Democrat from outside Dallas who filed a bill to create new health exceptions, said that ProPublica’s latest findings were “infuriating.”

She is urging Republicans to bring the bills to a hearing for debate and discussion.

Last session, there were no public hearings, even as women have sued the state after being denied treatment for their pregnancy complications. This year, though some Republicans appeared open to change, others have gone a different direction.

One recently filed a bill that would allow the state to charge women who get an abortion with homicide, for which they could face the death penalty.

Do you live in a state that has passed laws affecting abortion in the last few years? In the time since, have you or a loved one experienced delayed health care while pregnant or experiencing a miscarriage?

ProPublica would like to hear from you to better understand the unintended impact of abortion bans across the country. Email our reporters at reproductivehealth@propublica.org to share your story.

We understand this may be difficult to talk about, and we have detailed how we report on maternal health to let you know what you can expect from us.

Lucas Waldron contributed graphics. Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Lizzie Presser

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

A first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% after Texas’ near-total abortion ban went into effect in September 2021. The analysis also identified at least 120 in-hospital deaths of pregnant or postpartum women in 2022 and 2023 — an increase of dozens of deaths from a comparable period before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Neither the CDC nor states are investigating deaths or severe maternal complications related to abortion bans. And although the federal government and many states track severe complications in birth events using a federally established methodology, far less is known about complications that arise during a pregnancy loss. There is no federal methodology for doing this, so we consulted with experts to craft one.

We acquired Texas hospitalization data from 2017 through 2023, giving us more than two years of data after the implementation of the state’s six-week abortion ban in September 2021, and more than a year of data following its full abortion ban, which went into effect in August 2022.

We spoke with dozens of researchers and clinicians to adapt the federal algorithm for birth complications to focus on severe complications in early pregnancy, before fetal viability.

This methodology lays out the steps we took to complete this analysis, to help experts and interested readers understand our approach and its limitations.

Identifying Second-Trimester Hospitalizations

We purchased seven years of inpatient discharge records for all hospitals from the Texas Department of State Health Services. These records contain de-identified data for all hospital stays longer than a day, with information about the stay, including diagnoses recorded and procedures performed during the stay, as well as some patient demographic information and billing data.

Within this dataset, we opted to focus on second-trimester pregnancy loss, because first-trimester miscarriage management often occurs in an outpatient setting. In the future, we plan to look at outpatient data as well.

To examine outcomes in the second trimester, we first identified hospitalizations where a pregnancy ended. We used a methodology to identify severe complications in birth events developed by the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, an initiative of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The method is outlined in statistical code published by HRSA, and it first identifies every hospitalization with a live birth, stillbirth or an “abortive outcome” (which refers to an intended or unintended pregnancy loss before 20 weeks). Rather than excluding those abortive outcomes to focus on birth, as the HRSA code directs, we included them to look at all hospitalizations where a pregnancy ended. This narrowed our list of hospitalizations to an average of 370,000 per year.

The HRSA methodology further filters hospitalizations to only patients who are female and between the ages of 12 and 54. Our dataset had five-year age ranges, so we filtered to ages between 10 and 54. This brought our hospitalization list to 364,000 each year, on average.

For each hospitalization where a pregnancy ended, we looked for a diagnosis code recording the gestational age of the fetus. In cases where a long hospitalization had multiple gestational week codes recorded over the course of the stay, we took the latest one.

We excluded pregnancy-end hospitalizations without a gestational week code from our analysis — removing about 49,500 hospitalizations, or 1.9% of our dataset. More than two-thirds had coding that indicated a birth, likely to have occurred after 20 weeks.

Based on conversations with doctors and researchers, we narrowed our focus to hospitalizations where a pregnancy ended in the second trimester before fetal viability, from the start of the 13th week through 21 weeks and six days. While pregnancies that end at 20 and 21 weeks are often coded as births, rather than abortive outcomes, we included those weeks in our definition of pregnancy loss because experts told us it’s extremely unlikely that a baby born at 21 weeks could survive. This brought our list of hospitalizations to 15,188.

The number of second trimester hospitalizations, and characteristics of the women hospitalized, was largely stable from 2017 through 2023, the years of our analysis. In 2023, however, as the number of births in the state increased, the number of hospitalizations in our window declined to 2,036, below the yearly average of 2,169.

The race and ethnicity of patients each year, as well as the proportion of these hospitalizations in which the patients were covered by Medicaid or uninsured, did not change significantly after the state’s 2021 abortion ban, known as SB 8, went into effect.

Determining Sepsis Rates

Within these hospitalizations, we looked for diagnoses of sepsis, a life-threatening complication that can follow delays in emptying the uterus. The CDC defines a list of sepsis codes associated with severe maternal complications, which formed the basis of our definition. However, that list of codes is developed to look at sepsis in birth events, the vast majority of which occur much later in a pregnancy than our hospitalizations. We identified five sepsis codes associated with early pregnancy events like ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage, adding them to the existing list of sepsis codes to develop a definition that more fully captured early pregnancy complications.

To compare rates before and after the implementation of SB 8, we grouped the nine quarters of data we had after the implementation of the ban (October 2021 through December 2023) and compared it with the nine quarters immediately before (July 2019 through September 2021). Our dataset gives us the quarter in which a patient was discharged from the hospital but not the exact date, so the “before” group contains one month of data from after SB 8 went into effect on Sept. 1, 2021.

Identifying Fetal Demise

The standard of care for second-trimester miscarriage or rupture of membranes prior to fetal viability is to offer patients a dilation and evacuation or an induction to end the pregnancy — even if there is still a fetal heartbeat. In our reporting, we’d heard that because of the language of Texas’ abortion law, some hospitals and doctors were waiting for the fetal heartbeat to stop or the mother to develop a life-threatening illness, whichever occurred first. To look into this, we wanted to separate hospitalizations in which doctors would have theoretically been able to offer a termination immediately under the law — ones where the patient had a diagnosis indicating that there was no fetal heartbeat at the time of admission to the hospital — from ones where doctors may have waited to provide care.

We determined that about half of our second-trimester hospitalizations did not have a fetal heartbeat on admission. We identified these cases by focusing on two sets of diagnosis codes: Prior to 20 weeks gestation, a diagnosis of “missed abortion” refers to a miscarriage where the fetus has stopped developing, but the body has not yet expelled the tissue. After 20 weeks, a diagnosis of “intrauterine death” indicates that the fetus has died. For both diagnoses, we included only those that were marked as “present on admission.”

Sepsis Rate Findings

Our analysis found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased after the state’s ban went into effect, and the surge was most pronounced in cases in which the fetus may still have had a heartbeat when the patient arrived at the hospital.

In the nine quarters before SB 8 went into effect, the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations was 2.9%. In the nine quarters after SB 8 went into effect, the sepsis rate was 4.5%, an increase of 55%.

Since our total number of sepsis cases was relatively small, we measured whether the two groups of data were significantly different using a t-test. We calculated sepsis rates for second-trimester hospitalizations in the nine quarters after SB 8 went into effect and compared that with sepsis rates during the nine quarters immediately prior. We found that increase to be statistically significant (p-value < 0.05).

Sepsis Rate Increased Over 50% for Second-Trimester Pregnancy Loss Hospitalizations After SB 8

We compared the nine quarters after SB 8 went into effect — from October 2021 through December 2023 — to the nine quarters before the ban went into effect — July 2019 to September 2021.

Note: For hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 weeks’ gestation and the end of the 21st week.

Sepsis is a reaction to an infection, and the most common additional infection diagnosis in sepsis hospitalizations was chorioamnionitis, an infection of the amniotic fluid that can also cause early rupture of membranes. Rates of chorioamnionitis in sepsis cases remained stable before and after SB 8.

Our analysis also showed that patients admitted while their fetus was still believed to have a heartbeat were far more likely to contract sepsis.

Sepsis Rates Spiked for Patients Whose Initial Diagnosis Didn’t Include Fetal Death

For patients in Texas hospitals who lost a pregnancy, about half were not diagnosed with fetal demise when they were admitted, meaning that their fetus may still have had a heartbeat at that time. Those patients saw a dramatic increase in sepsis after the state banned abortion.

Note: For hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 weeks’ gestation and the end of the 21st week. We identified patients whose fetus had no heartbeat when they were admitted by looking for a diagnosis of “intrauterine death” or “missed abortion.” Rates are annual. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

In the nine quarters prior to the implementation of SB 8, the rate of sepsis was nearly twice as high for those with no fetal demise diagnosis on admission compared with those with a fetal demise diagnosis on admission. After SB 8, the rate increased in both groups, and the gap between them widened.

Again, since the number of total sepsis cases was relatively small, we used a t-test to see if there was a statistically significant difference before and after SB 8 in both groups. We found the increase in rates to be significant on both counts (p < 0.05).

Sepsis Rates for Hospitalizations With Fetal Demise on Admission Sepsis Rates for Hospitalizations Without Fetal Demise on Admission Notes: For hospitalizations involving a pregnancy loss between 13 weeks’ gestation and the end of the 21st week. We compared the nine quarters after SB 8 went into effect to the nine quarters before the ban went into effect. Sepsis Rate Analysis Limitations

Maternal health experts noted that discharge data offers a limited window into the details of patient care. Changes in the frequency of a diagnosis code can signal a change in patient health but also a change in coding practices. Our analysis can’t isolate changes in outcomes from changes in sepsis coding practices over time or doctors taking additional documentation steps to show they’ve complied with the law. And billing records offer no detail into a patient’s history and medical wishes or the decisions that medical staff make in the course of care.

Our analysis also does not account for changes in health care outside of hospitals. Though births typically take place in a hospital, other early pregnancy care often occurs in an outpatient setting and does not require a hospitalization, so we can only see a small subset of this type of care — specifically, the most severe cases. We also can’t account for how closures of reproductive health care clinics in the wake of Texas’ abortion ban changed the role hospitals play in miscarriage care.

We cannot see when hospitals turn patients away rather than admitting them. And if a patient who is miscarrying has an inpatient stay at one hospital and is then transferred to another hospital for another inpatient stay, that patient would be double-counted in our analysis, since we can’t connect patients across visits. This could potentially inflate the number of hospitalizations in our dataset, artificially pushing the sepsis rate down.

Our dataset is missing a handful of records from the fourth quarter of 2023; in a small number of cases — about 300 per quarter, or 0.04% of records — providers submit data on a hospitalization late, and that record is released in the dataset for the following quarter.

Billing data is widely used by researchers to study maternal health. While it will never tell the whole story, in aggregate, particularly in a state with a large population, it can paint a picture of changing health outcomes. Our analysis gives us a broad view of care at Texas hospitals before and after a major policy change.

More than a dozen maternal health experts reviewed ProPublica’s findings and said our analysis adds to mounting evidence that the state’s abortion ban is likely leading to dangerous delays in care. Many said the ban is the only explanation they could see for the sudden jump in sepsis cases.

Pregnancy-Associated Hospital Deaths

We found 120 women who died while hospitalized during pregnancy or up to six weeks postpartum in 2022 and 2023 in the inpatient billing data. The Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee will not review deaths from these years, stating that they will skip to 2024 in an effort to get a more “contemporary” view of deaths, a choice that faced widespread criticism. (The committee chair said there was “absolutely no nefarious intent” behind the decision.)

To identify inpatient deaths in the Texas hospital discharge data, we included all records with a “patient status” of “expired” and with a diagnosis or procedure code indicating that the patient was pregnant or up to six weeks postpartum, with a specific postpartum complication based on the “Identifying Pregnant and Postpartum Medicaid and CHIP Beneficiaries” code list by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The CDC looks at deaths up to within one year of a pregnancy’s end, but our dataset doesn’t explicitly identify pregnant or recently pregnant patients, so we were limited in the hospitalizations we could identify through codes.

Our tally does not include those who died in a hospitalization that took place separately from the end of a pregnancy, unless the patient was diagnosed with a specific postpartum complication. We did not filter for age and gender for our death records, as that data was less reliably filled out than the diagnosis and procedure codes.

Our count of inpatient deaths does not attempt to determine what role a person’s pregnancy or the state’s abortion ban played in their death. That type of analysis would require access to medical records. Our tally would include, for example, a person who was hospitalized after a car crash but who was also pregnant. Experts advised us to leave these cases in, because without investigation by the maternal mortality committee, it’s impossible to know, for example, if there was any relationship between the patient’s pregnancy and the cause of the accident, or if there were any delays in maternal care after the accident.

We found that deaths increased sharply during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and peaked in 2021, and that many cases in 2020 and afterward included COVID-19 diagnostic codes. More than 60% of the deaths that we analyzed had a diagnosis of COVID-19 in 2021, and 27% had a COVID-19 diagnosis in 2022. The COVID-19 diagnostic code was not introduced until October 2020, several months after the pandemic began, and was updated in January 2021. The coding changes, combined with changes in hospital protocols around identifying COVID-19 cases, make it impossible to filter out all COVID-19 related deaths during this time period.

Texas and National Rates of Maternal Mortality

The hospital billing data only includes information about Texas, so to compare with national rates, we used data from the CDC’s WONDER portal, which is based on birth and death certificates. For this analysis, we used a definition of maternal death recommended by CDC research guidelines for this data source. Our denominator includes all live births. For statewide rates, we use the state of residence of the mother in both the numerator and denominator. Rates are reported per 100,000 births.

Between 2019 and 2023, we found a 33% increase in maternal mortality rates in Texas, compared with a decrease of 7.5% nationally during the same time.

While both nationally and in Texas rates of maternal mortality peaked in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic and have dropped since, rates in Texas remain higher than before the pandemic.

Missing Documents

The federal methodology we used as a basis for our analysis of severe complications in pregnancy hospitalizations was outlined in a document available for download from HRSA’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau. The instructions included statistical code that we adapted to do our own analysis, and they were accompanied by a spreadsheet of maternal and child outcome measures over time for all 50 states and nationally.

As of early February, both the instructions and the spreadsheet had been replaced by documents noting that the files were “currently under construction and not available.”

Lucas Waldron contributed graphics.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

The Afghan brothers worked closely with the American military for years, fighting the Taliban alongside U.S. troops, including the Special Forces, and facing gunfire and near misses from roadside bombs while watching their friends die.

They escaped Afghanistan in 2021 when the Taliban seized control of the country. One brother is now an elite U.S. Army paratrooper at Fort Liberty in North Carolina. The other serves in the Army Reserve in Houston. Their eldest sister and her husband, however, were stranded in Afghanistan, forced into hiding as they waited for the U.S. government to green-light their refugee applications. Finally, after three years, they received those approvals in December and, according to the family, were slated to reunite with their brothers this month.

But weeks before the couple was due to arrive, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely suspending the admission of refugees. The order was the first in a series of sweeping actions that blocked the arrival of more than 10,000 refugees who already had flights booked for the U.S. and that froze funding for national and international resettlement organizations.

A top former government official who worked on refugee issues told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that another 100,000 refugees who had already been vetted by the Department of Homeland Security have also been blocked from entering the country. The official, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said the Trump administration is “moving so swiftly that there might not be much of a refugee program left to recover.”

Taken together, Trump’s actions are effectively dismantling the U.S. refugee system and eroding the country’s historic commitment to legal immigration, according to refugee resettlement and U.S. military experts, who say the most egregious examples include denying entrance to thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. military and their relatives.

The refugees “have been going through the process, which is very slow and very detailed and offers extreme scrutiny on each and every individual, and now, all of a sudden, that too is no longer acceptable,” said Erol Kekic, senior vice president with Church World Service, one of 10 national programs that work with the U.S. government to resettle refugees.

“We’re basically abandoning humanity at this moment in time, and America has been known for being that shining star and guiding countries in the world when it comes to doing the right thing for people in need,” Kekic said. “Now we’re not.”

The orders halting aid to international groups also indirectly affected a separate visa program for Afghan translators who worked with the U.S. military, closing off yet another avenue by which thousands hoped to enter the country. Together, the Trump administration’s actions have likely shuttered pathways to the U.S. for about 200,000 Afghans and their relatives whose refugee and military visa applications are currently being reviewed, including tens of thousands who have been vetted, the former U.S. government official said.

Abandoning Afghan allies whose work with the U.S. has them facing threats of retribution and death imperils the country’s standing abroad and makes the military’s job exceedingly difficult, said Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and onetime dean of Texas A&M University’s George Bush School of Government and Public Service.

If the Trump administration does not quickly exempt Afghans from the refugee-related orders, “good luck signing up the next bunch of recruits to help us in our endeavors in the future,” said Crocker, who is now a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan international think tank in Washington, D.C.

“The entire world sees what we do and don’t do to support those who supported us,” Crocker said.

Spokespeople for the White House, the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not respond to requests for comment about the escalated actions by Trump, who slashed refugee admissions to a record low of 15,000 in the final year of his first term.

Refugees and a coalition of resettlement groups filed the first refugee-related lawsuit against the administration last week, seeking to reverse the executive orders. It argues that the recent actions violate Congress’ authority to make immigration laws and that the administration did not follow federal regulations in implementing them. Another resettlement group, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, also sued the Trump administration over its refugee actions this week, arguing that they were unlawful.

The executive orders promise a review in 90 days and say that the State Department and DHS could grant exemptions “on a case-by-case basis,” but refugee groups said that neither agency has explained who is eligible or how to request such a waiver.

The Afghan brothers, who asked to be identified by an abbreviation of their last name, Mojo, are hoping the answers come quickly. They are among at least 200 Afghan Americans currently serving in the U.S. military whose family members applied for refugee status, only to be suddenly denied entrance.

“We feel betrayed,” the brother in Houston said. “We serve this country because it protected us, but now it is abandoning my sister, who is in danger because of our work with America.”

The Army Reserve member shows a letter written by his American military supervisor attesting to his years of risks and service for the U.S. government in fighting the Taliban. The letter argues that the man and his family were in danger as a result of his service and that the U.S. would “benefit” from his presence. (Annie Mulligan for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) “A Community Issue”

The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which Congress created in 1980 following the Vietnam War, allows legal immigration for people fleeing their countries if they meet the narrow definition of being persecuted.

To qualify, refugees must prove that they have been targeted for political, racial or religious reasons or because they are part of a threatened social or ethnic group.

The vetting, which requires multiple security screenings and medical examinations, takes an average of about two years, according to experts.

Those who had made it through the process and are now unable to come because of Trump’s recent actions include the children of a former U.S. military translator living in Massachusetts with his wife. The Afghan couple waited three years to reunite with their children, who were separated from their parents at the Kabul airport on the day of the Taliban takeover and have been living in Qatar during the yearslong vetting process.

The kids, ages six to 17, were about to board their flights in Doha last month when the executive orders suddenly blocked their travel, leaving them in Qatar, where they had been supported by international refugee agencies that were funded, in part, by the U.S. government.

It’s uncertain how much longer they can stay in Qatar, said their father, Gul, who asked that his last name not be published to protect his family.

“When my wife heard this news, she fell on the ground and lost consciousness,” Gul said. “We have waited years for them to come and in a few hours, everything changed.”

A former Texas National Guard member was beside himself when he talked about how his plans to be reunited with his wife later this month had been upended. She is a member of the Hazara minority group, which has historically been the target of widespread attacks and abuses including from the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, according to a 2022 report by Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group.

His work for the U.S. military, he said, put her in even more danger.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he sobbed into the phone.

The actions have also blocked the arrival of persecuted Christians, whom Trump had previously vowed to protect. That includes an Afghan family whose conversion led to violent attacks from conservative Muslims, according to refugee organizations.

Word of their persecution spurred a church in the conservative East Texas community of Tyler to sponsor the family’s refugee resettlement applications. Justin Reese, a 42-year-old software developer in Tyler who volunteers to help resettle refugees, said telling the family that it could no longer come was heartbreaking.

“You went from this level of commitment and certainty to none at all, literally in the space of a couple of minutes,” he said.

Aside from halting arrivals, Trump’s orders have blocked funding to U.S. nonprofit resettlement organizations, which caused them to lay off or furlough hundreds of employees and hindered their ability to help refugees already in the country.

In Houston, for example, the YMCA is currently restricted from offering about 400 new refugees basic services such as housing and health screening to help set them up for self-sufficiency, said Jeff Watkins, the organization’s chief international initiatives officer.

The nonprofit is temporarily relying on private funds and other programs to ensure that refugees’ housing and food needs are met and that they are not stranded, but Watkins said that is not sustainable for the long term.

“This becomes a community issue if those needs aren’t addressed,” Watkins said.

The Afghan Army reservist in Houston hopes the Trump administration will ultimately do right by his family after their previous and continuing service to the U.S. government. (Annie Mulligan for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) “Live Up to Our Word”

The Afghan brothers in Houston and North Carolina said that their sister and her husband were forced to flee their home three years ago after the Taliban published photos of the brothers working with American troops and interrogated neighbors about their whereabouts.

The couple, who are both physicians, could no longer work. They moved every few months, relying on wire transfers sent by the brothers as they waited for the U.S. government to approve their refugee applications.

Now they are forced to continue hiding, but this time the path toward safety feels more nebulous.

Each day with no action increases the danger for stranded Afghans like them, said Shawn VanDiver, a U.S. Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, an organization that he began to help those left behind after the withdrawal.

“The Taliban is routinely harassing and torturing folks associated with us,” he said.

For years, Republicans criticized Biden for his handling of the withdrawal. “Now is the time for them to stand with our Afghan allies and fix this,” VanDiver said.

A Taliban spokesperson disputed in a text that it targeted those who worked with the U.S. military. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, however, in 2023 documented more than 200 killings of former officials and members of the armed forces after the takeover, but international human rights officials have said the true number is likely far higher.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, one of Biden’s critics on Afghanistan, said in a recent interview with CBS News that the U.S. needed to “live up to our word” to protect Afghan allies.

“Otherwise, down the road, in another conflict, no one’s going to trust us,” he said.

But McCaul avoided criticizing Trump in a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, saying that he believed the president would listen to veterans who have called for an exemption for Afghan allies.

The Houston brother said that he hopes that Trump will ultimately do the right thing for the families of servicemen like him and his brother, who have sacrificed so much for America.

His brother in North Carolina has written to his congressman to request an exemption for Afghans who “have been doing everything legally, following the law.”

“We don’t want to be worried about our loved ones being left behind in Afghanistan, and that will help boost our morale and our confidence in serving the American people with integrity,” he said.

That service, according to the North Carolina brother, will soon include a deployment to the Texas border with Mexico, where his unit would be ordered to aid the curtailing of illegal immigration.

Anjeanette Damon and Jeremy Kohler contributed reporting.

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

In January, standing before a cluster of television cameras on the steps of the state Capitol, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp promoted his experiment in Medicaid reform as a showcase for fellow conservatives seeking to overhaul safety net benefits around the country.

“What we are doing is working,” Kemp boasted about Georgia Pathways to Coverage. The federally subsidized health insurance program is supposed to cover nearly a quarter-million low-income Georgians who can prove they are working, studying or volunteering.

What the governor did not disclose, however, was that his program is not achieving two primary goals: enrolling people in health care and getting them to work, according to an examination by The Current and ProPublica. The findings were confirmed recently by an independent evaluation commissioned by the state that has yet to be publicly released.

As of the end of 2024, the Pathways program has cost federal and state taxpayers more than $86.9 million, three-quarters of which has gone to consultants, The Current and ProPublica found. The state asserted that costs increased because of a two-year delay to the program’s launch.

A mere 6,500 participants have enrolled 18 months into the program, approximately 75% fewer than the state had estimated for Pathways’ first year. Thousands of others never finished applying, according to the state’s data, as reports of technical glitches mounted. The state also never hired enough people to help residents sign up or to verify that participants are actually working, as Georgia required, federal officials and state workers said.

As a result, the Kemp administration has quietly rolled back a core tenet it heralded when it launched Pathways as an alternative to government entitlement programs for poor people that many conservatives deride as handouts and the nanny state. Rather than verifying that people are working every month, Georgia is confirming that participants meet these requirements only at the time of enrollment and upon their annual renewal, the state said in January.

Georgia’s experience offers a warning for the nation as conservatives attempt to curtail federally subsidized health care for low-income Americans, as outlined by Project 2025, the playbook designed for a second Donald Trump presidency. Congressional Republicans are pushing for deep cuts to Medicaid along with requiring recipients to work. Right now, Georgia is the only state that imposes a work requirement for Medicaid coverage. But nearly a dozen largely Republican-led states are considering work requirements for Medicaid enrollees.

Federal and state officials who have worked on Pathways say a litany of bad decisions, some technical and some political, doomed the program from meeting Kemp’s original goals. Even some lawmakers in Kemp’s own party want to pull the plug on Pathways.

The quarter-million people eligible for Pathways would have had an easier road to coverage had the state simply chosen to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health reform law that extended insurance to tens of millions of Americans, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. Kemp is one of 10 Republican governors who refused federal government subsidies to expand Medicaid under the belief that entitlement programs encourage freeloaders and are a drag on federal and state budgets. Sixteen percent of working-age residents in Georgia lack health insurance, one of the highest uninsured rates in the nation.

In response to Pathways’ low enrollment numbers, Kemp’s spokesperson Garrison Douglas said the governor never thought it was realistic to enroll the entire pool of eligible Georgians in the program. Douglas said Kemp’s health care strategy for low-income Georgians is superior to Medicaid expansion because it saves the state money and funnels participants into private health insurance, rather than what the Kemp administration has described as overregulated government-mandated plans that reimburse hospitals and doctors at lower rates.

“As the governor has said repeatedly, those who continue to promote full Medicaid expansion are selling Georgians a bill of goods,” he said.

The Pathways program is slated to sunset this fall, but Georgia has filed a request with the Trump administration to extend the experiment for another five years with the less stringent verification rules, as independent evaluators recommended. The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment about its support for Medicaid work requirements and its views on Georgia’s Pathways experiment.

State officials did not explain why Georgia has not been able to meet its own verification standards.

“The governor’s mandate for all state agencies is to continually seek ways to make government more efficient and accessible for hardworking Georgians,” Fiona Roberts, a Department of Community Health spokesperson, said in a written statement.

The state requires Pathways participants to work at least 80 hours a month or be enrolled in school, job training or volunteering — activities the governor’s office says it believes contribute to eventual “financial independence.” Health policy research shows that requiring low-income people to work for health insurance does not increase coverage or boost their economic circumstances because most of them already have jobs.

“If the goal truly is to increase health insurance for low-income Georgians, they are doing it wrong,” said Dr. Harry J. Heiman, a member of a state commission to study comprehensive health coverage and a professor at Georgia State University School of Public Health. “The one thing that Pathways seems to do well is waste taxpayer money on consultants and administrative costs.”

Plagued by Tech Glitches

Pathways was supposed to help a group of Georgians whom the state had previously deemed ineligible for Medicaid: adults between 18 and 64 years old earning less than $15,650 a year if they are single, or $32,150 for a family of four.

The state told the federal government in its application to experiment with Pathways that it hoped to enroll 25,000 of the 246,000 Georgians eligible for Pathways during the program’s first year.

But those seeking coverage faced technical hurdles right away, according to interviews with six applicants as well as federal officials and current and former state employees.

The enrollment portal crashed each of the three times Kelsey Williams tried to apply. The single mother had been kicked off Medicaid last spring, after her son turned 1, per state law allowing her to keep her coverage for a year after giving birth. She called the Pathways customer service hotline for help and was sent through a phone tree that ended in a voicemail asking callers to leave a message.

“You’d go from one robot voice to another,” said Williams, who worked irregular hours as a convenience store clerk outside Macon.

No one called back. She gave up after nearly a month of trying. “I got the feeling that they really didn’t want to help me,” she said.

State officials have paid Deloitte Consulting more than $50 million so far for a software application that often froze and wiped out personal information, forcing applicants to start over. The technology also proved hard to navigate for many of Pathways’ target clients who don’t own smartphones or have access to reliable high-speed internet.

I got the feeling that they really didn’t want to help me.

—Kelsey Williams

As of January, the state’s own documents show that the program had a backlog of 16,000 applications awaiting processing, and in some months, upwards of 40% of people who started applications for Pathways gave up.

An independent evaluation from December, obtained by The Current and ProPublica, analyzed data gleaned from the first 13 months of the Pathways program and noted that applicants experienced administrative barriers to enrollment. People 50 and older had an especially difficult time proving they met the requirements, the evaluation said. The program requires applicants to provide paperwork that verifies their work status, including pay stubs and tax documents. That protocol contradicts Medicaid regulations that states should use available data to confirm most eligibility criteria, when possible, instead of making people provide documentation.

For Georgians who did manage to enroll, the technology problems persisted when they were required to verify each month that they had a job or were otherwise participating in a “qualifying activity.”

Paul Mikell lives in an area outside Atlanta without reliable internet service — and he doesn’t have the income for a phone plan with unlimited data. It takes him more than an hour each month to upload the employment documents necessary to reconfirm his eligibility, often using the free Wi-Fi at his public library.

Sometimes, Mikell said, the task has stretched days, even a whole week, because the Pathways verification portal freezes or crashes. One time, he said, he waited eight days for customer support to retrieve a password and restore his access.

The 49-year-old works part time for a hauling and trucking company in exchange for housing. He also picks up odd jobs to support his young son and elderly father. He does not receive traditional pay stubs that could be easily pulled by the state to verify his work status.

“It’s really, really difficult,” said Mikell, adding that stress over the possibility of losing coverage keeps him awake at night. “But it’s the only health care for someone like me.”

Mikell’s informal employment situation is typical for many low-income Americans who exist outside mainstream financial networks, and illustrates why verification can be an arduous process for programs with work requirements, said Jennifer Wagner, an expert in Medicaid enrollment technology at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank. In Georgia, 65% of people eligible for Pathways are employed at least part time, while many of the rest are tethered to unpaid work such as caregiving that Pathways does not recognize, state data shows.

To help automate the application and verification processes, Georgia uses digital tools to collect wage and work histories of employees at large companies as well as those who are self-employed. But these tools are not comprehensive, and the task of verifying applicants’ eligibility for Pathways largely falls on a cadre of overburdened caseworkers.

In August 2023, a month after Pathways launched, the state was only able to verify that 39 of the 152 enrollees were indeed working or otherwise engaged in activities deemed acceptable by the state, according to state reports to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those reports attributed the low numbers to a lack of “functionality” and did not provide further explanation.

The state’s contracts with Deloitte, which The Current and ProPublica obtained through a public records request, were heavily redacted and reveal no detail about the technical design of Pathways’ digital platform or how it would be tested before launch.

Deloitte declined to comment and referred questions about the technical difficulties to Georgia officials. Roberts, the spokesperson for Georgia’s Medicaid agency, referred to Pathways as “both a policy and technical success” but said it had to work through issues “consistent with the launch of a new program of similar scale and complexity.”

“Based on feedback from customers and the community, the state continues to evolve the Pathways program and its processes,” Roberts said in a written statement.

The state still requires Pathways recipients to upload paperwork every month, but Georgia is only verifying it annually, Roberts said. The state also says it is not kicking anyone off the rolls.

An Overwhelmed Workforce

Loosening Pathways’ verification process does not change what federal and state officials say is another fundamental flaw in the program: Getting people enrolled would ultimately hinge on an understaffed department already struggling to keep up with processing applications for other safety net benefits.

About 30% of the staff at Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services that oversees benefits enrollment and employment verification had turned over between 2017 and 2022, according to state data. Former agency managers attribute the unusually high churn to a workforce fed up with low pay and high stress, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2023, the year Pathways launched, the agency was already swamped.

Caseworkers had started the time-intensive task of reenrolling the 2 million Georgians who had traditional Medicaid benefits, a process that happens every five years to ensure that participants still meet the requirements.

Federal officials were simultaneously scrutinizing the department for its backlog of 157,000 food stamp applications and ordered it to develop a “corrective plan” to process those benefits more quickly. Georgia was also slipping behind the 45-day standard for processing Medicaid applications, according to federal data.

Meanwhile, for approximately six months before Pathways started, caseworkers needed extensive training for the new program, further delaying reviews of food stamps and Medicaid applications, former managers said.

That spring, Kemp approved a temporary fix to the department’s workforce shortage: using federal grants to hire 300 additional caseworkers to handle the flood of Medicaid renewals. But state officials did not beef up staffing to handle Pathways applications, according to two federal employees and one former state manager, despite the fact that so much of Kemp’s political capital was riding on the program’s success.

The workload ballooned after Pathways’ launch in July 2023, according to three former caseworkers. “I’d go into work every day with piles and piles of files, and each of those files represented a real human being with real suffering,” said Deanna Matthews, who quit last year. “What people don’t realize is that some of us were processing food stamp applications and our families were struggling and needing food assistance as well.” (Starting salary for a caseworker who determines applicants’ eligibility for federal benefits is approximately $32,000 — the same as the federal poverty line for a family of four.)

I’d go into work every day with piles and piles of files, and each of those files represented a real human being with real suffering.

—Deanna Matthews

In December 2023, the state agency overseeing DFCS moved 200 caseworkers who had been processing applications for Medicaid to tackle the backlog of food stamp applications.

In Pathways’ first six months, the department had enrolled just 2,300 people, according to state data.

In response to questions from The Current and ProPublica, Ellen Brown, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Human Services, said the state has committed enough people to administer Pathways but that it “can always use more caseworkers” and continues to hire.

At the state Capitol, Republican legislators representing rural counties, where large numbers of uninsured adults live, had begun questioning their governor’s push for Pathways. They sought advice from other Republican-led states that were expanding Medicaid without work requirements.

Arkansas had removed its work requirements after a federal judge ruled that such policies resulted in a significant number of people losing health coverage, which goes against Medicaid’s rules. The former head of North Carolina’s Medicaid agency testified to Georgia lawmakers that Medicaid expansion would boost local economies, rather than drag down state budgets, as many conservatives fear.

Last spring, a bipartisan group of Georgia lawmakers introduced bills in both the House and Senate to allow Medicaid expansion and let Pathways sink into oblivion.

“What we’re doing so far just hasn’t seemed to work. And so, at some point, we’ve got to be open to more ideas,” Georgia state Sen. Matt Brass, a Republican from Newnan and co-sponsor of the bill, said during a committee hearing at the time.

But the measure never made it to a full vote in either chamber.

Kemp quashed the rebellion after his allies in the Legislature argued that Pathways needed more time to prove itself. Georgia awarded Deloitte a $10.7 million advertising contract last summer to create television, radio and social media spots encouraging enrollment and to tout the program at community events around the state.

As a new legislative session is underway, no bill to abandon Pathways in favor of expanding Medicaid has emerged.

“We are focused on Pathways,” said state Rep. Lee Hawkins, a Republican dentist who represents the rural constituency of Gainesville. “We are going to build on what we’ve got and focus on making it better.”

by Peter Elkind

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Even as he has vowed to eliminate “every dollar of waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal budget and operations,” the new acting administrator of the General Services Administration, Stephen Ehikian, has appointed a senior adviser whose firm used to specialize in tax transactions that a bipartisan Senate committee excoriated and that the IRS branded as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The adviser has been battling the tax agency in court over $4 billion in disallowed deductions for thousands of his clients.

The GSA, the federal agency responsible for managing the government’s land and property, will now be taking advice from Frank Schuler IV, the 57-year-old co-founder and longtime president of Ornstein-Schuler, an Atlanta-based real estate investment company. Schuler’s firm was for years among the most prolific promoters of tax-shelter deals known as “syndicated conservation easements.”

Schuler and his colleagues exploited a tax deduction that was created to reward landowners who give up development rights for their acreage, usually by donating those rights to a nonprofit land trust. When used as intended, conservation easements can preserve pristine land, sometimes as a park that the public can use, and reward the land donor with a charitable tax deduction.

But middlemen like Schuler’s firm turned the tax provision into a highly profitable business, packaging easements into what were essentially outsized tax deductions for purchase. After snatching up a cheap piece of vacant land, Schuler and others typically hired a private appraiser willing to declare that the property had huge untapped development value — that it was suited to become anything from a gravel mine to a luxury resort — and was worth many times its purchase price. They then sold stakes in the easement donation to rich individuals, who claimed wildly inflated tax deductions based on the appraisal, cutting their taxes by twice as much as they’d invested. ProPublica first began investigating the syndicated easement business, which has cost the government tens of billions in tax revenue, back in 2017.

The IRS, the Justice Department and Congress struggled for years, through public warnings, hundreds of audits, tax court cases and criminal prosecutions, to shut down the scheme. Those efforts were countered by $11 million in lobbying expenditures from the promoters and the creation of a Washington-based trade group, called Partnership for Conservation, which Schuler founded. Syndication advocates pressed Congress to defund the IRS crackdown.

In 2020, the Senate Finance Committee released a bipartisan investigative report on the transactions. (Schuler was one of six people subpoenaed by the committee to provide information.) The report, which detailed Ornstein-Schuler’s practices, described syndicated easements as a “dollar machine” for wealthy taxpayers, saving them two dollars in taxes for every dollar they put in, “with promoters pocketing millions of dollars in fees for organizing the deals.” The practice was finally curbed through legislation passed in late 2022, but it remains on the IRS’ “Dirty Dozen” list of “bogus tax avoidance strategies.”

“This is someone who made his money by ripping off American taxpayers and who shouldn’t come anywhere near a position of authority over tax dollars,” commented Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who helped oversee the Senate investigation, in a written statement after being told about Schuler’s appointment. “He’ll fit right in with the Trump administration.”

Schuler’s exact role in the government is unclear. A GSA staffer said that he was present on a recent 15-minute video “check-in” conducted by Nate Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old who ProPublica has identified as being part of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Cavanaugh introduced Schuler, who said little, as “my colleague Frank.”

Schuler’s photo and contact information were also listed last week in the agency’s internal staff directory shortly after his profile disappeared from the Ornstein-Schuler website. But it’s unknown whether he’s a paid government employee or a volunteer associated with Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. Schuler and Matt Ornstein did not respond to calls, messages and emails seeking comment. The GSA and Ehikian did not respond to emails sent to the agency’s press office.

Frank Schuler (Ornstein-Schuler website)

In the past, Schuler has described his tax transactions as legitimate and well intentioned. In a 2017 interview with ProPublica, he said his entry into the business of syndicating easements was the result of a personal epiphany sparked when his toddler son compared the paving of a residential development to pollution. As Schuler described it, “The importance of conserving land for him and future generations really pushed me to this point. … That’s why today I’m so passionate about conservation.”

Ornstein-Schuler dropped out of the syndicated-easement business in 2019, citing “recent developments and the uncertainty related to the conservation and gifting of property.” The firm turned to other real estate and tax realms, including launching a new division to buy and sell Georgia state film tax credits. Schuler also reportedly earned a credit as an executive producer on a film in which Mira Sorvino played an AI home security system. (Ornstein, who’s still CEO of Ornstein-Schuler, also co-founded a private equity firm, whose holdings include a chain of dental offices and a chain of car washes.)

But the legal warfare over Ornstein-Schuler’s tax-avoidance business continues today. According to a recent IRS filing, the firm has filed more than 100 tax court cases involving its transactions, contesting more than $4 billion in disallowed charitable deductions from some 2,000 investors. Many of the cases are still pending. Ornstein-Schuler has made long-running efforts to reach a global settlement with the IRS; another filing includes an August 2022 letter from one of its law firms asserting that such an agreement would clear the way for collection of $1.5 billion in taxes and would personally cost Schuler and his partner approximately $150 million in additional taxes, interest and penalties.

A tax court decision handed down last year resolved the first of Schuler’s cases to actually go to trial, involving multiple conservation easements from 2014 on 4,607 acres in rural Alabama. The promoters claimed that the potential for sand and gravel mining justified a total of $187 million in charitable deductions. Investor promotional materials, evidence showed, projected $200,000 in tax savings for every $100,000 invested. The decision, which resolved 13 linked cases involving the property, backed the IRS, disallowing about $180 million of the $187 million in write-offs and imposing 40% “gross valuation misstatement” penalties on most of the disallowed amounts. The judge found that partnerships promoted by Schuler had claimed deductions as high as $50,000 an acre on land that had been purchased less than a year earlier for $2,200 an acre.

In his opinion, Albert Lauber, a senior judge in U.S. Tax Court, pointedly noted how Ornstein-Schuler’s standard pitch of promising investors $2 in tax savings for every $1 they invested assumed he’d obtain a sky-high property appraisal, generating a profitable investor write-off. “When asked at trial how he could have posited in advance a deduction-to-investment ratio of $4.389 to $1, before any appraisals had been performed, Mr. Schuler said that appraisals were basically irrelevant to the tax write-off they were offering,” the judge wrote. He called the land values Schuler’s firm had claimed “wholly implausible.”

“We were making plenty of money,” Schuler testified during the case. “The investors were doing well. And we felt that it was great that land was being conserved.”

Ornstein-Schuler is also among the defendants in a federal class-action suit in Georgia filed by three investors. The suit claims Ornstein-Schuler collaborated with lawyers, accountants, appraisers and others to collect millions in fees through a “fraudulent scheme” that deployed “a mountain of misrepresentations and omissions” to promote invalid easement deductions based on “egregiously inflated appraisals.” Ornstein-Schuler and other defendants have filed a joint motion to dismiss the case, asserting that the risks of the easement investments were fully disclosed and they misled no one.

Ornstein-Schuler has also gone on the attack. In December 2023, it sued the IRS, claiming that the agency had failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for an array of agency documents. The firm complained of “IRS abuses relating to its targeting of conservation easement transactions,” which it said were part of a “well-publicized campaign.” Among the requested documents: “all records of communications between IRS employees and members of the news media,” including ProPublica reporter Peter Elkind, Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin and Forbes reporter Peter Reilly, regarding conservation easements. Rod Rosenstein, a deputy U.S. attorney general during the first Trump administration, is representing Ornstein-Schuler in the case.

Doris Burke contributed research. Avi Asher-Schapiro contributed reporting.

by Anna Clark

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.

It wasn’t about playing God. Rather, it was a better way to feed the world.

That’s how a biotech company called AquaBounty described its AquAdvantage salmon, the first genetically modified animal approved by the federal government for human consumption. By adding a gene from Chinook salmon to Atlantic salmon and using DNA sequences from eel-like ocean pout as a “growth promoter,” the company said its salmon could grow twice as fast.

The silvery superfish is indistinguishable from other Atlantic salmon, the company said, but, with freshwater tanks and less feed, it can reach market size sooner than its conventional cousins. No ocean required.

But it was all easier said than done. After decades of backlash, boycotts and persistent financial losses, on top of the regulatory slog, AquaBounty hooked its hopes for the future on a village in Ohio with an enterprising name — Pioneer — and an accommodating mayor, Ed Kidston.

Eventually, it fell apart. And the village that hoped for a transformative industry is carrying the cost.

Pioneer, population 1,410, is just south of the Michigan border, in a county where fields of corn are cut by spear-straight country roads. AquaBounty promised 112 jobs, plus resources for schools and infrastructure.

And it promised something different from the metal stamping plant or Menards distribution center that opened in the area in past years. Researchers and advocates have long suggested that the Rust Belt use its water wealth to build a “blue economy.” AquaBounty seemed like a forward-looking prospect.

Although the company never made a profit in its 30-some years of existence, public officials rolled out the red carpet.

AquaBounty got a state permit to withdraw up to 5.25 million gallons of groundwater per day to operate the fish farm. JobsOhio, the state’s private economic development arm, executed an agreement to grant it $1 million. The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority authorized up to $425 million in revenue bonds.

An enterprise zone relieved AquaBounty of 15 years of property taxes. With the help of state dollars, Pioneer extended a road, a project estimated at $1.7 million.

Pioneer, which operates its own electric system, borrowed $3.95 million on the municipal debt market — later upped to $5 million — for a new substation project. The substation would provide a boost to AquaBounty’s energy needs.

And before AquaBounty’s plans were public knowledge, a company owned by Kidston purchased land for $600,000. He later flipped it to AquaBounty for nearly $2.1 million.

The mayor did well. Pioneer and the state did not.

Nearly three years after AquaBounty broke ground, there are no fancy fish tanks. No designer fish. No new jobs. Even with so much public assistance, it’s not clear if AquaBounty will ever finish building the farm. This month, it auctioned off “new” and “unused” equipment from the site.

Neither Kidston, who has said that he was merely trying to help the town, nor AquaBounty responded to questions for this story.

Locals are left to grapple with a partially developed site, a short-circuited growth strategy and questions about whether the project was ever viable.

The saga “could potentially send a message that it’s difficult to develop in Williams County,” said Ashley Epling, who took the helm of the county’s economic development organization after AquaBounty arrived in town.

Todd Roth, who oversees the Williams County engineering department, said the promise of development can require tradeoffs that compel public officials to make difficult decisions.

“How far do we go on hope?” he asked.

Residents of Pioneer, Ohio, were promised jobs and economic development that have yet to materialize. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica) Panama to Ohio

In the highlands of Panama, tucked behind padlocked gates and barbed wire, AquaBounty wanted to prove what was possible. There, in 2008, it opened a demonstration facility — a venture that “no one would ever think that anyone in their right mind would do,” said Ron Stotish, former president and chief executive officer.

“We built a small farm basically by hand, with local labor and this local trout farmer,” Stotish said. A visiting reporter told television viewers that it had “shades of Jurassic Park.”

Without precedent for AquAdvantage salmon, the Food and Drug Administration reviewed it as a new animal drug. Inspectors visited AquaBounty’s Panama facility and its hatchery on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. They assessed environmental risks, like transgenic fish escaping and interfering with salmon in the wild. The company said it designed AquAdvantage salmon as sterile females so they won’t reproduce.

Journalists and activists scrutinized AquaBounty too, reporting on a mishap in Panama that cost the company its first batch of commercial-sized fish and supermarkets pledging that they wouldn’t sell bioengineered salmon.

With the fish not even for sale yet, AquaBounty patched together financing to stay afloat, including from a former Soviet oligarch.

Conventional Atlantic salmon is raised in tanks at an AquaBounty facility in Albany, Indiana, in 2019. (Jordan Kartholl/USA Today Network/Imagn Images)

Federal approval came in 2015 — for the Panamanian and Canadian sites only. New facilities needed individual approval. Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental and industry groups, including the Center for Food Safety, filed a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s review. In a case that would take years to resolve, they argued that the agency failed to fully assess the risk of AquAdvantage salmon escaping into the wild.

And genetically modified salmon had an influential foe: U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Following FDA approval, she inserted language into a spending bill that stymied the introduction or distribution of genetically modified fish until labeling guidelines were in place. In comparison to what she dubbed “frankenfish,” she noted that Alaskan fisheries “are world-renowned for their high-quality, productivity, and sustainability.”

Momentum shifted after Canada approved AquAdvantage salmon and the U.S. developed a labeling policy. By 2019, reporters and at least one politician were touring AquaBounty’s small salmon farm in Indiana.

The future seemed bright when Stotish left the company at the end of the year. “I’m the guy that won the Super Bowl and then walked out the door,” he said.

AquaBounty’s search for a place to build its first large-scale production facility brought it to the northwest corner of Ohio, where, according to an account written by Kidston, it considered property he owned. He didn’t name the prospective developer in his letter to a state commission, but details correspond almost exactly to AquaBounty.

The company decided to pursue its project elsewhere, Kidston wrote — paralleling AquaBounty’s announcement about a site in Kentucky — but it retained his business, Artesian of Pioneer, to evaluate the water supply at the site it was considering in another state. The company found the water characteristics unsuitable for its purpose, he wrote.

AquaBounty eventually decided to build on property that it bought from Kidston’s company. At the 2022 groundbreaking, Aquabounty President and CEO Sylvia Wulf was enthusiastic about the company’s future in Ohio. “We thought that Pioneer’s the kind of community that would be receptive,” she said in a newscast.

Pioneer would set a template, the company later proclaimed. AquaBounty would build new farms every two years or so. It eyed global markets: Brazil, Argentina, Israel, China.

Ohio was just the beginning.

Pioneer Mayor Ed Kidston during a Village Council meeting on Jan. 13 (Nick Hagen for ProPublica) The Mayor’s Land, a Town’s Hopes

On a cold night in January 2021, the Madison Township trustees gathered in a truck bay. Kidston, mayor of the village encircled by the township, had requested a special meeting.

First elected in 1995, he’s believed to be Pioneer’s longest-serving mayor, exceeding another Mayor Kidston — his father, Bruce. He has trim white hair, a ruddy complexion and a prominent presence. At last year’s Christmas tree lighting, he dressed as an ornamented evergreen, wearing a crown of lights.

People protest against extracting local groundwater and selling it to Toledo suburbs, before a Pioneer Village Council meeting in 2018. (Lori King/The Blade)

His presence stretches into property and business holdings, including Artesian of Pioneer, founded by his parents, and now specializing in water supply and wastewater treatment. It dips below ground, too. He sparked protests in 2018 and 2019 when he tried to extract and sell up to 14 million gallons a day of groundwater to the Toledo suburbs, which many feared would deplete the local aquifer. Kidston defended the effort, but ultimately the suburbs went with another water plan.

In the truck bay, the topic was a proposal to allow Pioneer to annex about 160 acres from Madison Township so that the village could spur development at its expanded industrial park. Minutes summarizing the meeting indicate that while two Pioneer council members and the Pioneer administrator were present, only Kidston spoke about the proposal with the township trustees that evening.

Kidston signed in as the mayor of Pioneer, according to the minutes and the trustee who said he recorded them. Thanks to a recent purchase, his company Kidston Consultants was one of two landowners of the site. Kidston described his interest in the annexation, what he’d like to accomplish and how development would benefit schools, according to the minutes.

When trustees worried about traffic costs, Kidston offered $5,000 for road maintenance — an annual contribution for 10 years, he indicated.

There was no vote that night. Within days, Kidston wrote an email to several officials who attended the meeting, saying that he was present that night merely as a landowner and representative of the other landowner, not as mayor.

His goal, he added in the email, has always been to ensure that everyone wins. The financial offer was to compensate the township “in exchange for a non-adversarial ‘quick’ agreement,” he wrote.

Kidston then contacted the Ohio Ethics Commission, describing his intersecting interests in a prospective development. His water business had provided services for a company that was interested in a site he’d like to have annexed by Pioneer. The company might also be interested in an ongoing business relationship. He wouldn’t participate in village decision-making about annexation or efforts to secure a tax abatement, Kidston wrote.

An attorney’s response noted that Kidston may retain the same access to governmental entities as any other citizen. But, it said, he cannot use his position as village mayor, “formally or informally,” in any matters involving the proposed annexation of the property, or to secure the annexation of the property. It also said that Kidston cannot take action as a village official “to benefit your personal financial interests or the financial interests of a company with which you have an ongoing business relationship.”

Kidston didn’t attend another special meeting about annexation, held 12 days after the first. But, according to the minutes, Kidston’s company would pay the township $50,000 if the trustees signed an annexation agreement that day. A local development official spoke on behalf of the proposal, telling trustees that she couldn’t guarantee payment from Kidston beyond that day.

The township board unanimously rejected the $50,000 offer. Two of three trustees told ProPublica they felt pressured and had concerns about the ethics of what they considered such an unusual offer, echoing remarks in the local news at the time. (The third trustee didn’t respond to inquiries from ProPublica.)

Two days later, the trustees approved a deal where Pioneer would pay the township $390.54 annually, the approximate sum the township would forgo in taxes.

Kidston Consultants purchased more than 80 acres on Jan. 22, 2021, three days before the truck bay meeting. The communities approved annexation on Feb. 8. On July 23, Kidston’s company nailed down an agreement to sell the land to AquaBounty. The profit: about $1.5 million.

News of AquaBounty’s arrival spread locally when The Bryan Times published a story a week later: “Salmon farm planned for Pioneer.” It was believed to be the largest investment ever in Williams County.

AquaBounty intended to discharge treated wastewater from its Pioneer facility into the east branch of the St. Joseph River. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica) Suddenly, an Upstream Battle

As AquaBounty made its move into Ohio, everybody seemed to get on board.

There were the JobsOhio grant and the port authority’s bond authorization. There was a 15-year property tax exemption. With assistance from state agencies, the village committed millions to developing roadway and power infrastructure that would support AquaBounty.

Some incentives were contingent. In exchange for the abatement, for example, AquaBounty agreed to maintain a certain number of jobs and donate a percentage of its savings to a county infrastructure fund and area schools.

North Central Local schools could get $750,000 a year for 15 years, Kidston estimated in news reports. Maybe even a million.

The coming jobs would have higher wages than usual for the area, a local economic development official told the county commission. They were new types of jobs, too, suitable for people with biology and chemistry degrees or research expertise.

“We both have personal experiences with people who have left our region or not worked in their field because they don’t have those types of jobs here,” she said.

Now, maybe, that’d change.

Sherry Fleming, left, at a Williams County Alliance meeting in Montpelier, Ohio. The grassroots environmental group monitors local water resources and has raised complaints about AquaBounty’s proposed aquifer usage. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Besides financial and infrastructure support, AquaBounty got an unusual state permit to withdraw up to 5.25 million gallons of groundwater a day. The company planned to treat and discharge most of it into the St. Joseph River, where it would eventually flow into Lake Erie instead of replenishing the aquifer.

That instigated a backlash from people who said the plan would draw down the aquifer, thinning lakes and threatening drinking water even beyond Ohio’s borders. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians asked why AquaBounty couldn’t reuse or recirculate more of what it took, and why there wasn’t a review of the impact on wetlands. With the impact from the proposed withdrawal swelling across its border, Michigan’s environmental agency also weighed in with concerns. Sherry Fleming of Williams County Alliance, a grassroots environmental group, said that Ohio “continues to treat water as nothing more than a commodity.”

Some skeptics questioned AquaBounty’s ties to the mayor. “Mr. Kidston swears up and down that the aquifer has enough, and will always have enough water, to withstand 5.2 million gallons of withdrawal a day,” wrote a retiree with a farm to an official with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The mayor sold AquaBounty property and services, he said. “This man has always had a dog in this fight!”

The Aquifer Used by AquaBounty Could be Reduced by 1, 5 and 10 Feet in the Areas Surrounding Pioneer, Ohio Note: Drawdown predictions are not tied to a specific drawdown timeline. They represent the extent of drawdown predicted at the time that no further change would occur. The 5’ and 10’ predictions were created by the engineering firm Burgess & Niple on behalf of AquaBounty. The 1’ prediction was created by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s water use assessment staff. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Despite the opposition, the state granted the water permits, explaining that all requirements were met and certain safeguards were in place. But AquaBounty still had a problem: It didn’t have a way of moving water between its farm and the site about a mile east where it planned to withdraw and discharge it — on land owned by Kidston’s company.

Pioneer applied three times for a right-of-way permit so that AquaBounty could build pipelines across private property. The county rejected each request.

Pioneer and AquaBounty sued, arguing that the pipelines are a utility, serving the broader public good. The commission responded that pipelines between two private property owners are not a public utility, and even if they were, nothing compels commissioners to grant the right of way.

Roth, the county engineer, expressed concern at how much government support AquaBounty got before its plans were clearly viable.

They still didn’t have a way to get the water to their farm, Roth said to ProPublica, “and yet, they were starting to get money.”

Problems mounted. The Indiana farm was fined over permit violations for excess pollutants in its discharged water. Due to a ruling in the FDA lawsuit, the agency was further reviewing the salmon’s escape risk.

And expected costs in Pioneer more than doubled from initial estimates, flirting with $500 million. The bonds authorized by the port authority were never issued. (Contacted by ProPublica, an authority official wouldn’t say why.)

In June 2023, about 13 months after breaking ground, AquaBounty announced a pause on construction in Pioneer, citing “a substantial increase in its estimated cost.”

With its stock price deflated, the company was at risk of slipping off the trading market, so it performed a reverse stock split. It sold the Indiana farm for less than it paid, with certain equipment purchased for Pioneer included. It twice replaced the CEO, put one Canadian facility up for sale and announced it was winding down another — its only remaining active farm.

Along a smooth new road, the Pioneer site now sits frozen, roughly 30% complete, according to a company estimate.

Pioneer officials said in a statement to ProPublica that the village has not been advised that AquaBounty has terminated its project. They emphasized that the court dispute over the pipeline was still not settled and that an initial ruling was in the village’s favor. On Friday, a judge ruled against the county’s appeal.

AquaBounty’s interim CEO said in December that the company would “assess alternatives for our Ohio farm project.” To investors, it mentioned higher costs due to inflation.

The outlook is bleak. While AquaBounty once estimated that it would be operational by now, with salmon ready for market in 2025, there was instead an online auction for its “new unused” assets earlier this month: tanks, filters, pumps, even a 200,000-square-foot pre-engineered metal building.

A sign points toward AquaBounty’s stalled construction site in Pioneer. (First image: Nick Hagen for ProPublica. Second image: John D’Angelo for ProPublica.) An Uncertain Future

In Pioneer and beyond, there has yet to be a full public accounting of what went wrong.

Not every development can be expected to make it, even with incentives, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of the nonprofit Good Jobs First, which scrutinizes public subsidies in economic development. But, he said, it’s important to vet companies with unproven business plans before spending public resources on their behalf — and to have a transparent process before deals are approved.

“If you’re taking on debt or giving them equity, or you’re laying out cash for utilities,” LeRoy said, “those are risky things.”

JobsOhio’s million-dollar grant depended on the creation of 112 jobs, $222 million in capital investment and a payroll of more than $5.4 million by the end of 2026, according to a spokesperson.

When a company fails to meet grant commitments, he said, “we will claw back our dollars so they can be used for future economic development projects to benefit Ohioans.”

As a private entity with a funding mechanism set up by the state, JobsOhio reveals few details about how it spends its money — a lack of transparency that has long been criticized. The spokesperson didn’t respond to a question about whether AquaBounty received some or all of its grant money.

AquaBounty was expected to pay Pioneer millions of dollars a year for the electricity it used and reimburse it for certain costs associated with building the substation. The $5 million note matures in November. In response to ProPublica’s inquiries about the substation, the village said it will pay any debt that it owes, “even if AquaBounty should cease to exist.” According to the state treasurer’s office, the village, which has about 800 electricity customers, is expected to use its electric revenue to pay the debt.

Local schools also face uncertainty. The district has long struggled with finances, and AquaBounty’s contributions were presented as a salve. But that funding hasn’t materialized. Last year, the district twice turned to taxpayers for help, seeking support for basic needs such as utilities, transportation, staffing and custodial supplies.

At both the March and November ballots, voters rejected it.

The district hasn’t responded to ProPublica’s questions. School board President Kati Burt, Kidston’s daughter, declined to comment.

Mark Schmucker, a Madison Township trustee and former board president, marvels at how officials championed AquaBounty as “the biggest infrastructure project in Northwest Ohio,” despite its shaky history.

“They were going to donate a million to the school every year,” he said. “How can they donate a million to the school when they never made a million in a year? Or showed a profit in 30 years?”

Epling, who has led the county’s economic development agency since 2023, said that the government incentives for the company “were publicly documented and structured with clear performance-based contingencies.”

She added, “Moving forward, my goal is to ensure that economic development efforts are well vetted, clearly communicated and beneficial to the community.”

Late last year, an unexpected provision showed up in a massive bill introduced in the Ohio Legislature. It exempted village mayors and other executive officers from key ethical requirements when they do business with the communities they represent. One of the bill’s sponsors said that other ethics laws would still apply.

Kidston’s company, Artesian of Pioneer, employed the lobbyist behind the provision, according to the bill sponsor and disclosure records.

The Legislature passed the bill. But Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it, citing opposition from the ethics commission.

The change, according to the commission, would “invite misuse of taxpayer money.”

by Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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

Before Peter Marocco was selected to dismantle America’s entire foreign aid sector on behalf of President Donald Trump, he was an official with the State Department on a diplomatic mission.

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Marocco was a senior political appointee tasked with promoting stability in areas with armed conflict. That summer, he made a two-week trip to the Balkans, visiting several Eastern European countries in what was advertised as an effort to “counter violent extremism” and “strengthen inter-religious dialogue.”

At the time, the U.S. was trying to maintain a fragile peace agreement it had helped broker two decades earlier in the region. The Balkans are still living in the shadows of the Bosnian war, a 1990s conflict between the region’s disparate ethno-religious groups that led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 people, including thousands of Muslim civilians who were massacred by Serb forces.

To avoid compromising such delicate international relations, American diplomatic work is carefully prescribed, even down to the people U.S. officials meet — and those they should avoid, like politicians under Treasury Department sanctions for corruption or war crimes.

On a 2018 visit to the Balkans, Marocco secretly met with officials whom the American government had determined were off-limits without the highest levels of approval: ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders. Those politicians had been working for years to defy their nation’s constitution and undermine the American-backed peace deal in an effort to promote a Christian Bosnian Serb state. ProPublica pieced the episode together from interviews with seven current and former U.S. officials.

Among those in attendance was Milorad Dodik, according to one of the officials. The leader of a political region within the broader nation, Dodik was at the time under U.S. sanctions by the Trump administration for actively obstructing American efforts to prevent more bloodshed. (The officials interviewed for this article requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the administration.)

Dodik has since called himself “pro-Russian, anti-Western and anti-American” in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and is currently under new sanctions for corruption charges. He has also vowed to tear the country apart rather than allow the U.S. to unify it.

Maureen Cormack, then the American ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, discovered the meeting had taken place and confronted Marocco in the embassy at the end of his visit. Marocco initially demurred, an official said, before finally acknowledging the gathering. Cormack was furious, issuing a sharp rebuke, the official said. Cormack didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Marocco left the country soon after. A year later, he was no longer working at the State Department.

What he had discussed with the Bosnian separatists is not clear. But the meeting itself provided legitimacy to far-right politicians pushing for a Christian state and undermined U.S. foreign policy, experts and officials said.

“He reinforced a whole political trajectory that is antithetical to what the U.S. is trying to do,” one U.S. official told ProPublica, “which is supporting a peace agreement.”

After the State Department, the Trump administration sent Marocco to a senior post at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he attempted to delay or halt dozens of programs — including those that benefited Bosnia and Herzegovina’s unified government — and reinvent the agency to better align with his version of U.S. foreign policy. That agenda, former colleagues told ProPublica, was overtly militaristic and Christian nationalist. The complaints about Marocco alarmed agency leaders so much that they significantly curtailed his duties in the waning months of the administration.

Marocco’s turbulent tenure during the last Trump administration sheds light on his current efforts to destroy the American foreign aid system from the inside out. Current and former officials see it as a campaign of retribution against those who opposed his earlier work, as well as an opportunity to fulfill his most controversial policies by sidelining bureaucrats who get in his way.

Marocco is now the director for foreign assistance at the State Department and has been delegated the power of deputy administrator of USAID — helping lead the two agencies that previously rejected him. And unlike last time, Marocco is now without strictures and answers to few in the executive branch besides Trump himself.

Immediately after the inauguration last month, Marocco drafted the order shutting down all of USAID’s programs and freezing foreign aid. He’s led the efforts to place nearly all of the agency’s staff on administrative leave, though the courts have temporarily lifted many of those. Much of USAID’s work has not resumed, according to interviews with dozens of government employees and nongovernmental organizations, despite the State Department’s claim that waivers allow work involving “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and substance assistance” to continue.

“It’s an exact repeat of what he did but at scale,” said a former senior official at USAID who worked alongside Marocco during his previous stint in government. “He had no problem stopping foreign assistance. … He came in, he said, ‘We’re going to stop all programming, stop everything going on in the field.’”

Marocco and the State Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the meeting or his views. Dodik did not respond either.

Marocco’s meeting was not the only diplomatic misstep in his tumultuous career.

During a trip to Serbia, Marocco on his own volition invited the country’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, to visit Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslims were killed during the Bosnian genocide, according to two officials familiar with the incident. Considered highly inappropriate — Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces had massacred the people buried there — the invitation had not been approved by the U.S. ambassador.

In 2020, the Trump administration appointed Marocco to USAID, the world’s largest foreign aid organization. As assistant to the administrator in charge of the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, he bewildered staff by attempting to reorient the work exclusively toward his brand of U.S. national security interests, according to interviews with his former subordinates and superiors, as well as an official complaint, known as a dissent cable, lodged against him within three months after he’d joined. Some said he frequently favored programs that benefited Christian minorities abroad.

Marocco told subordinates that he disagreed with much of USAID’s traditional “soft power” approach toward diplomacy and ordered wide-ranging but vague reviews of the agency’s programs, insisting that he personally approve any expenses over $10,000, the officials said.

Those who worked alongside him throughout government were particularly alarmed by comments he had made during private conversations when discussing American foreign policy. Those officials told ProPublica that Marocco has questioned whether USAID should be funding programs to combat racist nationalism and hate speech abroad.

While he was at the agency, he frequently expressed wanting to cut programs he didn’t like or understand, his former colleagues said. In the internal cable filed to leaders of the agency, they accused Marocco of trying to withhold congressionally approved funds slated for most of the programs supporting democracy and fair elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina and redirect that money toward addressing Islamic extremism.

That cable warns that “operational capacity and strategic efficacy have been and continue to be rapidly degraded” by Marocco, and that the programs risk being irreversibly damaged “at significant financial cost to the American taxpayer.”

Diplomats said his efforts undermined U.S. strategic interests in the region and, by favoring one religion over another, likely ran afoul of the Constitution’s religious freedom clause, according to the cable. They were concerned that his actions “risk worsening BiH’s tense sectarian tensions by affirming one side’s narrative while stigmatizing the other,” they wrote in the cable, using the abbreviation for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia is about 50% Muslim with large minority populations of Serb Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholic Croats.

“He had it in for Bosnia,” a former official at USAID said, “and I didn’t know why at the time.”

Marocco’s short time at USAID was the last in a stretch of four jobs at four agencies, including the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce.

Marocco was next seen inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, according to footage gathered and analyzed by an online group. He was not charged with a crime and has not responded to multiple requests for comment about his role that day, though he has called the accusations “[p]etty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks by politicians with no solutions.”

Experts in and outside government now consider Marocco to be orchestrating the new Trump administration’s foreign aid policy largely by himself. His official position is director of foreign assistance at the State Department, and the powers of the deputy administrator of USAID have been delegated to him as well. “Right now he is the most important person at the State Department,” one official observed.

Marocco’s rapid-fire assault on USAID has come under legal scrutiny in recent days after dozens of employees and organizations filed lawsuits, seeking to reverse his most consequential changes. Judges have at least temporarily reined in the broad use of administrative leave for thousands of employees across the agency and told the agency to reinstate programs that were funded and approved prior to Trump’s inauguration.

Marocco has defended his sweeping takedown as a necessary measure to root out government waste and support Trump’s agenda to make America safer and more prosperous.

“His thinking was that the people in government were not abiding by the right theory,” another official told ProPublica. “Well we know now how far he’s willing to go.”

Pratheek Rebala and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Do you have any information about government officials leading U.S. foreign policy? If so, please reach out to Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or Anna Maria Barry-Jester on Signal at 408-504-8131.

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 stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The chief justice of the Alaska Supreme Court told state lawmakers this week that the court system is taking steps to reduce the amount of time it takes criminal cases to reach trial, a problem highlighted by a recent ProPublica and Anchorage Daily News investigation.

In an annual State of the Judiciary speech to legislators Wednesday at the Capitol in Juneau, Chief Justice Susan M. Carney said the court system has increased training for judges, created new policies on postponements and authorized overtime pay. She noted that the court system’s mission includes deciding cases “expeditiously and with integrity.”

“You are probably aware that we are not meeting expectations — our own or Alaskans’ — about the expeditious part of that mission,” Carney said.

Noting “recent media accounts” of extreme delays, Carney said the state is gaining ground and that resolving the problem is “our No. 1 priority.”

“We must, and we will, improve how we handle criminal cases to prevent that kind of delay,” Carney said.

The Daily News and ProPublica reported in January that the most serious felony cases in Alaska can take five, seven or even 10 years to reach trial as judges approve dozens of delays. These delays might be requested because defense attorneys are waiting for prosecutors to share evidence or because attorneys have high caseloads to juggle, or even as a tactic to weaken the prosecution’s case with the passage of time.

The category of cases that ProPublica and the Daily News examined, the most serious felonies such as murders and violent sexual assaults, took the judicial system a median of three years to complete in 2023, a threefold increase from 2013.

The newsrooms identified one case that judges described as one of the most “horrendous” sexual assaults they had ever seen and that has been delayed at least 74 times over the course of 10 years.

The Alaska judicial system and lawmakers were aware of serious pretrial delays long before COVID-19 disrupted the courts, particularly in Anchorage. In 2009, a report by the National Center for State Courts noted that the time to resolve felony criminal cases in Anchorage had increased nearly 400% over the prior decade.

While acknowledging the long delays described in news reports and their impact on victims and defendants in major felonies, Carney told legislators that less serious criminal cases — which are most cases in the system — do not take as long to resolve.

“I do this not to justify those extraordinarily delayed cases, but I do want to provide a bigger picture,” said Carney, a Fairbanks judge who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2016 and became the chief justice this year.

The median time to close misdemeanor cases is six months or shorter, Carney said. Less serious felony cases such as vehicle theft and certain assault charges are resolved within a median of six months, she said. Class A felonies, which include some sexual assaults, manslaughter and some drug charges, take a median of 13 months.

Carney also noted that only about 3% of criminal cases go to trial. Many are resolved when the defendant agrees to plead guilty to reduced charges, rather than take the chance of being found guilty by a jury, or when prosecutors drop the charges.

Carney told legislators that judges have created new limits on the number of times a case can be delayed and on the duration of the delays, and that judges devoted one-third of their annual conference to training on how to reduce the number of pending cases.

More cases are now being closed than are being opened, and the number of open cases last month was down by one-third from a year before, Carney said, bringing the number of open criminal cases to its lowest since 2018.

“So we are making progress,” said Carney, who spent nearly three decades as a lawyer for the Alaska Public Defender Agency and Office of Public Advocacy.

She did not provide caseload figures specifically for unclassified felonies, the category of serious crimes that ProPublica and the Daily News focused on.

Alaska’s sluggish justice system has created palpable impacts on crime victims, defendants and the community.

A Daily News and ProPublica report in October found the city of Anchorage dismissed hundreds of criminal cases in 2024 because it didn’t have enough prosecutors to meet speedy trial deadlines. Dismissed cases included charges of domestic violence assault and child abuse.

State prosecutors have responded to that investigation by offering added staff to help the city keep cases moving.