ProPublica

by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

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

When Steven Moniz Jr. and his wife, Sheri, got the keys to their new home in 2013, their kids were so happy that they made “snow angels” on the carpet. It was the first time the couple had ever owned property, and they too were overjoyed.

For years, they had rented an apartment in a low-income housing project on Oahu, unable to afford a house amid the island’s booming real estate market. But then, because Steven is Native Hawaiian, they were able to purchase a new residence at roughly half the going rate through a unique homesteading program created a century ago to return Hawaii’s Indigenous people to their ancestral lands.

With the help of a federal grant, the Moniz family bought a three-bedroom house for $281,000 in a West Oahu subdivision built specifically for the program. The couple cried at their good fortune, knowing that thousands of other Hawaiians are still waiting for such an opportunity. “For us, it was like tears of joy,” Sheri said.

The elation didn’t last long.

Within months of moving in, she said, the wall near a window frame in the master bedroom started to swell and mold began growing as water seeped through the frame. Their central air conditioning stopped working. And, when a family member climbed into the attic to inspect the AC system, he discovered that one of the main wood beams supporting the roof was cracked in half.

“How could they have missed that?” Moniz asked.

Dozens of other Native Hawaiian homeowners have found themselves asking similar questions, alleging problems with their new homes, according to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser-ProPublica survey of nearly 80 residents.

The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which administers the homesteading program, has the right to inspect new construction under its contracts with builders. But DHHL never inspected the Monizes’ new home or the hundreds like it that cropped up over roughly the past decade in their subdivision and another one nearby. Instead, the agency relied on the developer it hired to inspect the properties and vouch for the quality of the work.

Sheri and Steven Moniz Jr. stand in the cul-de-sac in front of their home. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

DHHL is a unique entity: It exists to manage a trust that returns people who are at least 50% Native Hawaiian to their ancestral land, recompense for the government’s history of taking property. And the agency says that inspections conducted by the builder and the city are sufficient to protect the buyers’ interests.

But legal scholars and former DHHL officials disagree with the state agency’s view. They say that as a trustee, DHHL has a heightened legal duty to act in the best interests of Steven Moniz and the thousands of other beneficiaries eligible for homesteads. And by forgoing inspections, they say, the agency is shirking that responsibility, leaving no one who represents only the buyers, some of whom waited decades for homesteads.

“Inviting beneficiaries to put their life savings into homes that the department has never bothered to inspect is not a close question,” said attorney Carl Varady, who along with a colleague has successfully sued the state and DHHL for breach of trust in a separate matter. DHHL “can’t delegate that.”

Moreover, the department has no system in place for tracking complaints once beneficiaries move into their new residences. Instead, DHHL directs homeowners to the private developers who built the homes.

Given questions about the department’s responsibilities to Hawaiians and its approach to construction oversight, the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica undertook to find out how satisfied beneficiary homeowners were. The news organizations canvassed the two most recent homesteading subdivisions in Kapolei, a region of former sugar cane land where much of Oahu’s single-family housing has been built the past several decades. Gentry Kapolei Development began building in one subdivision in 2009, the other in 2018.

Through our survey, we found dozens of homeowners claiming multiple problems with their residences, including some that started within days or months of moving in. Many residents criticized DHHL’s lack of oversight, and some sought help from the agency but were turned away. And while the builder, Gentry, ultimately fixed many of the problems, some homeowners said they ended up spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on repairs not covered by warranties.

“I’ve been running across problem after problem since we’ve been in this house,” said Peter Kamealoha, who described a range of issues in his 2010 Kanehili home, including a cracked air-conditioning duct and cracks in the ceiling. “A brand-new home shouldn’t have problems like this.”

Gentry, which has built more than 14,000 homes in Hawaii over half a century, says it takes pride in delivering quality homes to Native Hawaiians and would not jeopardize its reputation for the sake of small, short-term gains. “It’s an honor to build these homes,” said Gentry President Quentin Machida. A spokesperson also said the company is responsive to homeowner complaints and has performed many “courtesy” repairs beyond the warranty periods, including for Moniz and Kamealoha.

The homeowner experiences are adding to many beneficiaries’ frustration with DHHL’s management of the program. As the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica previously reported, the historically underfunded agency has consistently failed to meet its main mission of getting Hawaiians onto trust-held land on a timely basis. Now, the news organizations have found that the agency, in the eyes of many beneficiaries, is failing even some who get housing.

“They’re telling beneficiaries F you,” said Mike Kahikina, a trust beneficiary and former member of the Hawaiian Homes Commission that oversees DHHL. “We’re treated as fourth-class citizens.”

The Monizes said they found one of the main wood beams in their attic had cracked in half. After the homeowner complained, Gentry said it attached splints on either side to reinforce the beam. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

The newsrooms’ investigation comes as the Legislature considers whether to appropriate a record $600 million to help DHHL address the needs of the thousands of Hawaiians waiting for homesteads, particularly those who cannot afford to purchase their own homes. The proposal was sparked in part by the news organizations’ coverage, including the revelation that at least 2,000 beneficiaries have died while waiting.

“The Beneficiaries Deserve More”

Under the homesteading program, Hawaiian beneficiaries apply for a 99-year land lease from DHHL. Upon award, they then take one of two primary routes to housing: hiring a contractor to construct a home on the parcel, or buying a completed home from a developer hired by the department. The latter is by far the most common option.

Home inspections emerged as a major issue in the mid-1990s after a number of legal settlements with beneficiaries who sued DHHL over allegations of shoddy construction.

In one case, the agency paid out $1.5 million to settle claims involving a 50-home development in Panaewa, located on the Big Island’s eastern shoreline. Homeowners alleged they were given substandard septic tanks, defective concrete foundations and keys that opened multiple houses.

Following the settlements, DHHL said in 1996 it would step up oversight, beginning twice-weekly inspections of construction projects. Then-Director Kali Watson told reporters that the measure was designed to prevent another Panaewa. Today, Watson, who heads a nonprofit developer of affordable housing, still believes DHHL should handle inspections. “They do need people with a lot more expertise to actually monitor construction and make sure it’s done well,” he said in an interview.

In the intervening decades, the agency spent more than $200 million on Kapolei projects, including an unprecedented effort to develop four subdivisions totaling more than 1,000 homes.

Sometimes DHHL served directly as the developer for new units, and in those cases it did continue the inspection system. But other times, like in the two most recently built subdivisions, Kanehili and Kauluokahai, it hired a private developer who was also responsible for the inspections.

Still, the development contracts DHHL signed with Gentry in 2008 and 2018 included a provision giving the agency the right to inspect the homes during construction. The provision was standard in DHHL’s development agreements.

But given the layer of inspections already in place, including those done by the builder and city, DHHL decided not to exercise that right. Doing so “would take additional resources, depriving or reducing service to the other class of beneficiaries, those on the waitlist,” said William J. Aila Jr., the department’s director and chair of the commission that oversees it. DHHL could not say how much it saved by forgoing inspections. Aila also said Gentry had done excellent work in the two subdivisions.

Attorneys versed in trust law, however, say DHHL is obligated to do inspections as part of its legal duty as trustee.

The Kauluokahai subdivision where Gentry has built more than 125 homes (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

“With respect to the duty of loyalty owed to the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries deserve more,” said Susan Gary, a retired University of Oregon law professor with expertise in trust law. “And I think that’s where the problem is. That’s not something you can delegate.”

David Kauila Kopper, litigation director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., said courts have required the state to protect beneficiary interests in other matters related to trust duties. In 2000, for example, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state could not delegate to a developer the state’s trust responsibility to determine whether a planned Big Island project protected the customary and traditional rights of Native Hawaiians to access the property for cultural practices. And in 2019, the high court determined that the state breached its trust duty to care for public lands by failing to conduct regular inspections of Hawaii Island property that the military was leasing for live-fire training exercises. In nearly 50 years, the state had only inspected the land a few times. “It all stems from the same trustee obligation,” Kopper said.

When it comes to DHHL and homestead construction, “an argument could be made that by relying on Gentry or the city and putting your hands up and saying, ‘Well, that’s good enough,’ you’re delegating the duty to further the best interests of your beneficiaries to entities that perhaps don’t have that in mind — and that’s not their job,” Kopper added.

DHHL counters that it only has a constitutional obligation to provide beneficiaries with a buildable vacant lot, not a home. Therefore, officials say, the department has no duty to check the houses themselves. Beneficiaries, the agency noted, purchase homes directly from the builder, who must comply with government code under its development agreement with DHHL.

For the two Kapolei subdivisions, Gentry used in-house and third-party inspectors. The company said the level of monitoring, including daily checks by Gentry superintendents, was thorough and matched what is done at its private developments. Additionally, the buyer is able to walk through the home after it’s completed to do a final check.

John Merriman, vice president of Mid Pac Engineering, one of the outside companies used by Gentry, said, “There are multiple people out there who want the quality to be high enough that those homeowners don’t have issues.”

Regarding the Moniz case, Gentry said that if the support beam had been cracked before the home was sold, the problem would have been caught during the inspection process. The company told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that it reinforced the beam after the homeowner complained.

“They Did Do a Bum Job”

DHHL says it has no jurisdiction over homeowners’ construction-defect claims because the transaction is between the buyer and the builder, so the department typically doesn’t investigate or track such complaints. Gentry, however, conducts regular surveys of its customers and said the overall feedback from their DHHL projects has been positive.

For our own survey, the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reached out to the occupants of the roughly 500 developer-built homes in the two newest homestead communities in Kapolei. Over the course of several months, the news organizations sent mailers and emails, made phone calls, knocked on over 100 doors, advertised on social media, spoke at a homeowner meeting and published a questionnaire on the websites for both media outlets. Seventy-eight people responded, including 53 who reported two or more problems or concerns with their residences. The majority of those raising multiple issues were from Kanehili, the older of the two subdivisions. The issues ranged from simply cosmetic — hairline cracks in the ceiling, for instance — to more serious, such as mold growing inside the home or flooring damaged by sewage backups.

Gentry provides a warranty that covers the cost of parts and labor for all repairs during the first year, as well as similar coverage for electrical and plumbing issues for another year. And some manufacturer warranties for specific items extend beyond that, though the length of the guarantees vary and they typically cover parts only.

In an interview, Aila, the head of DHHL, stressed that homeowners have the responsibility to properly maintain their residences. If they don’t do so and the warranties expire, “three or four years later, they can’t come back and make accusations that there’s poor quality because the faucet is leaking and now the cabinet is rotten,” he said.

Dozens of respondents, however, told the news organizations that their problems emerged within about a year of moving in. And many said they were surprised when they had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on repairs not covered by warranties in the first few years. DHHL declined to comment on the cases, except to say the house is the responsibility of the homeowner.

One respondent who reported issues was Marlena Brown-Clemente, who said her AC unit stopped working just over a year after moving in. When she called DHHL to complain, she said the agency directed her to Gentry. The company told her the problem was her responsibility, she said, so she ultimately paid about $1,000 to fix it. Still, problems persisted. That was not what Brown-Clemente expected when, in 2016, she inherited her late father’s rights to pick a lot in Kauluokahai, which at the time had no homes. Two years later, she and her husband purchased a four-bedroom, three-bath house there for about $360,000. As luck would have it, the home model was called The Lena, the nickname Brown-Clemente’s father used for her. “I looked at my husband and cried,” she said in an interview. “I said, ‘Whatever you do, you have to get me that house.’”

Marlena Brown-Clemente holds a portrait of her father, Arthur Brown Sr., who died in 2016. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

Gentry said it had no records of calls about air conditioning from Brown-Clemente, and that the system performs well if regular maintenance is done. Brown-Clemente, 49, a full-time volunteer for her church, said the couple hires a company to service the system every six months, like Gentry recommends. “I came into this thinking I’m just lucky to have it, so I didn’t complain too much,” she told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. “But now I’m looking back: Yeah, they did do a bum job on my house.”

Air conditioning, which is all but essential in Kapolei during the humid summers, was the most commonly cited problem in the Star-Advertiser/ProPublica survey, mentioned by nearly 40 respondents.

Plumbing was another top concern, flagged by more than two dozen.

Kealii Cabrera, a construction supervisor who bought his new $390,000 Kanehili home in 2020, said his problems started almost immediately. A week after moving in, he said, sewage started backing up through a downstairs shower drain, flooding part of the first floor. Cabrera said he had to relocate his family to a hotel for a month while repairs were made to the flooring and walls.

He said he complained to DHHL multiple times. At first, the department referred him to Gentry, which initially refused to take responsibility for the damage. When conversations with the builder stalled, Cabrera said he went back to DHHL, which told him the department couldn’t get involved. He said he asked the department whether it had a quality control system, and it responded no. “That’s the root of the problem,” Cabrera said.

In response to written questions from the news organizations, a Gentry spokesperson said the company ultimately paid Cabrera over $50,000 to cover cleanup, temporary housing and other costs, after reviewing his request and the circumstances around the incident. The spokesperson described the temporary housing payment as “a very rare occurrence.”

In the Moniz case, Gentry said it performed many “courtesy” repairs beyond the warranty periods, including paying for refrigerator and AC fixes in 2017 and 2018, in addition to reinforcing the beam.

Some respondents to the news organizations’ survey lauded Gentry for its customer service and quality of work. About 18 reported no or only minor problems, including nearly a dozen who said they were very happy with their homes. “It’s like the promised land for us,” John Gora said of the Kauluokahai house he and his wife, Melissa-Ann Gora, purchased last summer after she spent nearly 40 years on the waitlist.

No Forum for Help

If homeowners are unable to resolve disputes over alleged defects with the builder, they usually can’t expect help from DHHL. The agency provides no forum for owners to pursue such claims — even when DHHL served as the developer and oversaw inspections.

Timothy McBrayer and Iwalani Laybon-McBrayer learned that firsthand.

For more than a decade, the couple has unsuccessfully sought DHHL’s help to resolve alleged construction defects that they say have been present almost from the time they moved into their new home in 2007. Shioi Construction, which built the home, disputed their claims and noted that the city and a DHHL special inspector had checked the dwelling.

The couple live in Kaupea, a Kapolei subdivision that was constructed just before Kanehili and for which DHHL served as the developer. The department hired Shioi to build homes and a project manager to monitor the work.

The carpet in one of Iwalani Laybon-McBrayer’s bedrooms was removed after a water leak caused mold to grow, she said. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser) Laybon-McBrayer said one of the home’s outdoor outlets caught fire in 2018. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

In the first year or two, the McBrayers said they experienced plumbing, mold and electrical problems that they reported to Shioi and DHHL. The problems largely continue to this day. The couple can no longer get homeowner’s insurance.

The McBrayers kept a log showing they sought assistance from 25 different DHHL representatives since 2007, and they said they received multiple assurances that the agency would deal with the situation.

Eric Seitz, their attorney, told DHHL in August that the couple relied on those promises. And DHHL, which supervised the builder, owed the McBrayers a fiduciary duty that went well beyond a normal home transaction, Seitz said. “The department is there to provide a service to Hawaiians, to help them, not merely to sell them a house and say, ‘You’re on your own,’” he said in an interview. “When complaints are brought to them, they have a much deeper and overriding responsibility to help.”

But when the McBrayers tried to take their case to the commission, their request was denied because DHHL lacked jurisdiction, a position the agency took repeatedly with the couple, its records show.

One of Laybon-McBrayer’s upstairs bathrooms. She says the tub and shower cannot be used because of plumbing leaks. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

Still, some commissioners have raised concerns. At a February 2019 meeting, one questioned why the McBrayer problems have taken so long to resolve. Another, Zachary Helm, cited the case to highlight the need for greater oversight of construction. As contractors build more homes, “we can do a little better job in monitoring the work these people do,” said Helm, who recently declined additional comment.

DHHL also declined to comment.

“The Wild, Wild West”

Some beneficiary families remain skeptical of DHHL’s ability to remedy their concerns. Kepa Maly, one of the original homeowners in the Panaewa development plagued by problems, recently sold the house he and his wife shared for 30 years. “Our children didn’t want anything to do with it,” Maly wrote in an email. “And given the choice, I doubt we would ever live in a DHHL-developed project again. They’ve demonstrated incompetence and a lack of common decency throughout their history.”

Former Gov. John Waihee, the only Native Hawaiian to serve as the state’s top executive, said the solution is simple: DHHL should hire an inspector or two. The costs, he said, would be negligible.

But Robin Danner, who heads the largest beneficiary organization in Hawaii, says that after decades of state mismanagement, something more is needed: greater federal oversight. That could come in two forms. One, the U.S. government could sue the state for breach of trust, a step it has never taken. Or two, it could further specify how DHHL implements the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, the federal law that created the program a century ago. As written now, the law is vague about a range of issues, including quality control.

In fact, the homesteading program, which was taken over by the state as a condition of statehood, ran for more than 90 years without a single federal regulation in place.

A 2013 White House discussion where Robin Danner, far right, who leads a group for homestead beneficiaries, said she asked if the Obama administration could start developing federal regulations for the homesteading program. (Courtesy of the White House)

At the request of Danner’s group, the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations, the Obama administration in 2016 adopted the first two federal regulations in the program’s history. But neither dealt with housing; one established procedures for land exchanges and the other a process for amending the 1921 law. No more have been adopted since, continuing to leave large sections of the law open to interpretation. And that has enabled DHHL to undermine its fiduciary obligation to beneficiaries, according to Danner, who says the federal government should adopt a rule requiring DHHL to perform inspections.

“When federal regulations are silent, that’s when you get the wild, Wild west,” Danner said.

She and other Native Hawaiians are now looking to President Joe Biden, who has vowed to fulfill “Federal trust and treaty responsibilities” to Indigenous people and appointed Deb Haaland to lead the Interior Department, which oversees the Native Hawaiian land trust. As the first Native American to lead the department, Haaland has pledged to champion Indigenous issues.

But it’s unclear what, if any, action will come from Washington.

Haaland’s office has not made her available for an interview, despite several requests since June. But an Interior spokesperson issued a statement in response to questions from the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. “Both the state and the federal government have roles in administering the laws governing the Hawaiian Home Lands trust,” he said. “However, the day-to-day administration of the trust and the governance of home inspections are the responsibility of the state.”

The news organizations also reached out to Hawaii’s four members of Congress, but three of them declined comment or did not respond. Sen. Mazie Hirono issued a statement. “DHHL has an important obligation to provide access to affordable, safe housing for Hawaii’s Native Hawaiian community,” she said. “I remain committed to supporting the Native Hawaiian community and working to ensure that both the state of Hawaii and the federal government meet their obligations under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act.”

Hirono did not address the question of greater federal oversight.

Laybon-McBrayer, who is president of the Kaupea Homestead Association, said the situation leaves families like hers to go it alone. “I just say, ‘Lord, keep us safe,’” she said. “I gotta trust in a higher power rather than a broken system.”

Beena Raghavendran and Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed reporting. Kacie Yamamoto of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser contributed research.

by Isaac Arnsdorf

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Former President Donald Trump has officially endorsed a plan, created by a man who has self-identified with the Oath Keeper militia, that aims to have Trump supporters consolidate control of the Republican Party.

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The plan, known as the “precinct strategy,” has been repeatedly promoted on Steve Bannon’s popular podcast. As ProPublica detailed last year, it has already inspired thousands of people to fill positions at the lowest rung of the party ladder. Though these positions are low-profile and often vacant, they hold critical powers: They help elect higher-ranking party officers, influence which candidates appear on the ballot, turn out voters on Election Day and even staff the polling precincts where people vote and the election boards that certify the results.

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“Just heard about an incredible effort underway that will strengthen the Republican Party,” Trump said Sunday in a statement emailed to his supporters. “If members of our Great movement start getting involved (that means YOU becoming a precinct committeeman for your voting precinct), we can take back our great Country from the ground up.”

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Trump’s email named Dan Schultz, an Arizona lawyer and local party official who first developed the precinct strategy more than a decade ago. Schultz spent years trying to promote his plan and recruit precinct officers. In 2014, he posted a callout to an internal forum for the Oath Keepers militia group, according to hacked records obtained by ProPublica.

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“Why don’t you all join me and the other Oath Keepers who are ‘inside’ the Party already,” Schultz wrote under a screen name. “If we conservatives were to do that, we’d OWN the Party.”

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Federal prosecutors in January charged the leader of the Oath Keepers and 10 of its other members with seditious conspiracy in last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. One of them pleaded guilty, as have several members of the group in related cases who are cooperating with the investigation. The group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, pleaded not guilty.

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There is no indication that Schultz had any involvement in the Capitol riot.

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Schultz told ProPublica he never became a formal member of the Oath Keepers organization. “I have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution as a West Point cadet, as a commissioned U.S. Army officer and as a practicing attorney,” Schultz said in a text message. “Those oaths do not have expiration dates, by my way of thinking, and I have kept my oaths. In that sense, I am an ‘oath keeper.’”

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According to experts on extremist groups, the Oath Keepers recruit military and law enforcement veterans using the idea that their oath to defend the Constitution never expired. The group then urges people to resist what they say are impending orders to take away Americans’ guns or create concentration camps.

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“I don’t ever want to be pulling the trigger on an AR-15 in my neighborhood,” Schultz said in a 2015 conference call with fellow organizers, referring to the semi-automatic rifle. “Oath Keepers, I love them for instilling the oath. But what they need to do also, I think, is spread the message that hey, we can do stuff politically so we never get to the cartridge box.”

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In more recent interviews on right-wing podcasts and internet talk shows, Schultz has repeatedly described his precinct strategy as a last alternative to violence.

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“It’s not going to be peaceful the next go-round, perhaps,” Schultz said in a June interview with the pro-Trump personality David Clements. “But it ought to be, and the way to ensure that it will be is we’ve got to get enough of these good decent Americans to take over one of the two major political parties.”

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It was not clear whether Trump or his aides were aware that Schultz has self-identified with the Oath Keepers. Trump’s spokesperson, Liz Harrington, did not respond to requests for comment.

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Schultz has spent months trying to get his idea in front of Trump. Steve Stern, a fellow movement organizer, told ProPublica that he met a former Trump administration official for lunch at Mar-a-Lago, the ex-president’s private club in Palm Beach, in December. While there, Stern said, he got a chance to briefly mention the project to Trump.

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Then, last month, Schultz and Stern landed an interview on a talk show hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who promotes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Lindell said he would discuss the plan with Trump personally. Schultz and Stern followed up with a conference call with Harrington and Bannon, according to Stern. Harrington previously worked at Bannon’s “War Room” website.

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“I know the president’s very jacked up about it,” Bannon said on his podcast, speaking with Schultz after Trump released the endorsement. “Help MAGA, help the America First movement, right? Help the deplorables, help President Trump, help yourself, your country, community, your kids, grandkids, all of it. Put your shoulder to the wheel.”

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Bannon, who led Trump’s 2016 campaign, originally lifted the precinct strategy to prominence in a podcast interview with Schultz last year. After the episode aired, thousands of people answered Bannon’s call to become precinct officers in pivotal swing states, according to data compiled by ProPublica from county records and interviews with local party officials.

As of last August, GOP leaders in 41 counties reported an unusual increase in sign-ups since Bannon’s first interview with Schultz, adding a total of more than 8,500 new precinct officers. The trend appears to have continued since then. New precinct officers started using their powers to remove or censure Republican leaders who contradicted Trump’s election lies and to recruit people who believe the election was stolen into positions as poll watchers and poll workers.

Bannon received a last-minute pardon from Trump after the former adviser was charged with financial fraud. He has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to Bannon and Lindell, the precinct strategy has won support from pro-Trump figures such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law, and lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who led some of the lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Right-wing groups such as Turning Point Action, which organized buses to transport rallygoers on Jan. 6, also joined the effort to recruit precinct officers.

While Stern said he’s thrilled about Trump’s written statement endorsing the precinct strategy, he said he hopes to hear it from Trump’s own lips at an upcoming rally. Stern said he plans to be there with tables to sign more people up.

Jeff Kao and Mollie Simon contributed reporting.

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.

More than a year after the acting Alaska attorney general suddenly resigned, the criminal investigation into his alleged sexual contact with a teenager decades ago is not complete, and two special prosecutors hired to look into the case have billed for less than two weeks’ time.

Nikki Dougherty White told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica in January 2021 that Ed Sniffen began an illegal sexual relationship with her in 1991 when she was a 17-year-old high school student and Sniffen was the coach of her school’s mock trial team. Sniffen was 27 years old at the time.

Under Alaska law, it is a felony for an adult to have sex with a 16- or 17-year-old if the adult is the minor’s coach. (In most other cases, the age of consent in Alaska is 16.)

Former acting Alaska Attorney General Ed Sniffen. (National Association of Attorneys General)

Sniffen resigned as the Daily News and ProPublica were preparing an article about the allegations.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who appointed Sniffen to the role, has said through a spokesperson that he was unaware of the allegations against Sniffen until the newsrooms began investigating White’s story. The governor then directed incoming Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor to “appoint a special outside counsel, independent of the Department of Law, to investigate possible criminal misconduct by Mr. Sniffen.”

Billing records obtained by the Daily News and ProPublica show two special prosecutors hired to look into the case have spent a combined total of 70.5 hours investigating the matter. As of Feb. 11, the state of Alaska had spent about $19,500 of a budgeted $50,000 on the investigation.

White, who has cooperated with the investigation, says she’s tired of waiting for answers.

“I feel like the state’s letting me down,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a high level of interest from the government in getting this right.”

A spokesperson for the state Department of Law referred questions to the independent prosecutor and said the department “is not involved in this investigation in any way and has no input or influence over the timing or status.” The special prosecutor, Gregg Olson, said this month that he cannot proceed until he receives a final report from the Anchorage Police Department.

“I anticipate that the investigation is near its conclusion,” said Olson, a retired state prosecutor who worked in the office of special prosecutions and as the district attorney in Bethel and Fairbanks. “But I don’t make any conclusions, form any opinions about a case until the investigation is complete.”

The Anchorage Police Department declined to answer questions about the investigation, which according to Olson is being handled by a detective within the Crimes Against Children Unit.

Sniffen has turned down repeated interview requests and, through his attorney, Jeffrey Robinson, would not say if he has cooperated in the investigation. Neither Olson nor the Department of Law spokesperson would say whether Sniffen has cooperated.

“Mr. Sniffen disputes any allegation of wrongdoing, and out of respect for the process undertaken by Mr. Olson, declines to comment any further,” Robinson wrote in an email.

One Resignation Followed Another

Dunleavy appointed Sniffen to the attorney general position on Jan. 18, 2021, pending confirmation by the state Legislature. Sniffen was a longtime attorney for the Department of Law’s consumer protection unit but was unfamiliar to many Alaskans until he was named as the replacement for Attorney General Kevin Clarkson.

Clarkson had resigned in August 2020 after the Daily News and ProPublica revealed that he had sent hundreds of personal text messages to a junior state employee. (In his resignation letter, Clarkson acknowledged errors in judgment but characterized his texts to the woman as “‘G’ rated.”)

When Sniffen resigned, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law said the new attorney general had determined that it would have been a potential conflict of interest for one of the state attorneys who had been working for Sniffen to investigate the case, and the state would “contract with special counsel to ensure an independent and unbiased investigation into any possible wrongdoing.”

That was 397 days ago.

The Department of Law originally selected former sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Gernat to oversee the case. Gernat said at the time that she did not know Sniffen personally and was not a current or recent state employee.

Potential witnesses told the Daily News and ProPublica they were contacted for interviews in the first six months of 2021, and White said the investigation seemed to be moving swiftly.

White and her attorney, Caitlin Shortell, said they held multiple Zoom meetings with Gernat, providing additional details and the names of other potential witnesses.

“One thing that we heard from Rachael Gernat was that this case is astonishingly well corroborated despite the fact that it happened so long ago,” Shortell said. “That it is more well corroborated than cases that happened last month.”

Shortell said she doesn’t know what remains to be done in the investigation and that as far as she knows, “almost all of the witnesses were able to be contacted.”

But on June 8, 2021, while still under contract with the Department of Law, Gernat applied for a job within the agency.

“Based on that inquiry, I was replaced as the special prosecutor,” she wrote in an email to the Daily News and ProPublica. “This replacement was to avoid any appearance of bias and to ensure the confidence in the neutrality of the special prosecutor.”

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Olson replaced Gernat as special prosecutor a month later, on July 12, 2021. Gernat had worked 49 hours on the case.

The next day, Gernat emailed White’s attorney to inform her of the change, noting that the “investigation itself is coming to a conclusion.”

To White and her attorney, there has appeared to be little movement in the case since Gernat’s departure.

“It’s been months and months of nothing but radio silence,” White said. “It’s difficult to have gone through first the article, and then to go through the three intense interviews with the Anchorage Police Department, and then to have multiple calls with the previous prosecutor.”

“And I feel like now it’s just kind of gone into this void of nothing,” she said.

Olson said that after his initial request for the police to take additional steps in the investigation, he has been waiting too.

“Honestly I personally would have hoped that I was going to get this case, get the report, make a decision and move on,” he said. “I’m still waiting for that. Hopefully, it will happen soon.”

Compelled to Speak Out

In 1991, when, according to White, she and Sniffen began a sexual relationship on a high school trip to New Orleans, the Alaska Legislature had recently changed state law to ensure that educators and other authority figures could not legally have sex with teenagers under their care or influence. The legislation was seen as closing a loophole that had been revealed two years before when an Anchorage teacher and newspaper columnist was charged with having a sexual relationship with one of his 17-year-old students. A judge at the time found there was no law against the relationship.

The Legislature amended the sexual abuse of a minor law in 1990 to make it a crime for a teacher, coach, youth leader or someone in a “substantially similar position” to engage in sexual activity with someone who they are teaching or coaching and who is under the age of 18.

That law took effect on Sept. 19, 1990, according to state law library records. A substantially similar version remains on the books today.

State prosecutors have used the law to file criminal charges against 12 people over the past five years, according to sex crimes data provided by the Alaska Court System.

One of the most recent cases, filed June 8, 2021, involves a village public safety officer accused of having sex with a high school student who had asked for a ride home from a party. The officer was 27 years old at the time; the alleged victim was 17.

Alaska State Troopers learned of the alleged crime when the VPSO confessed to another law enforcement officer and that officer reported the case as required by state law, according to charges filed in state court. The former officer has pleaded not guilty.

Another two cases resulted in convictions, two were dismissed and seven are awaiting trial.

Under current Alaska law, there is no statute of limitations on felony sexual abuse of a minor, although Gernat said at the time of her appointment that it can depend on the severity and timing of the offense. In one 2016 case, an Anchorage jury found a man guilty of sexually abusing a 16-year-old while acting as an authority figure, for abuse that occurred in 2005.

Asked if he had concluded whether any statute of limitations might apply to allegations against Sniffen, Olson said only, “I have not made any final legal determinations in the case.”

White said she does not regret going public with her story despite the delays. She is Athabascan and Alaska is her home state, she said, and when she heard Sniffen had been named as the state’s top law enforcement officer, she felt compelled to speak out.

“This means a lot to my family and I wouldn’t have been able to sit by and say, ‘Oh I just need to let this go,’” she said. “If Clarkson was drummed out for text messages to an adult woman, I felt that Sniffen had absolutely zero business sitting behind the desk of the attorney general.”

by Ilya Marritz

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Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.

One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)

Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.

Americans Making Money Abroad. What’s the Problem?

Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.

In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”

Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv. One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”

Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”

Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.

“We Are Going to Have So Much Fun, and Change the World in the Process”

In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year, Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.

With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.

“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.

According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)

A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”

According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.

The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”

Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.

After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.

Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.

“Do Us a Favor”

With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.

By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.

Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.

Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.

((<a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-parnas-yovanovitch-recording-transcript-trump-discusses-firing-yovanovitch-at-donor-dinner">Transcript</a> courtesy of rev.com))

Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.

Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:

These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.

In December 2019, as an impeachment inquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.

Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”

In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Where They Are Now...

Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:

Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump

Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI

Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch

Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal

Key Documents

• US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities
• Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report
• Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account

by Samantha Hogan, The Maine Monitor

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

This article was produced in partnership with The Maine Monitor, a former member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

Civil rights lawyers sued Maine officials on behalf of impoverished criminal defendants on Tuesday, alleging the state failed to create an effective public defense system in violation of defendants’ constitutional rights.

Maine doesn’t supervise the attorneys it contracts with to represent adults who are charged with crimes and cannot afford their own lawyer, said Zach Heiden, chief counsel for the Maine branch of the ACLU. For more than a decade, Maine has not implemented rules to evaluate attorneys, trained lawyers or compensated attorneys properly, he said. That has denied defendants of their Sixth Amendment right to counsel or creates an “unreasonable risk” of doing so, Heiden added.

“The state has the power to fix this problem and we’ve only brought this lawsuit really as a last resort because the state was — for whatever reason — unwilling to make the necessary changes,” Heiden said.

Maine is the only state that employs no public defenders and instead relies exclusively on private attorneys to defend the state’s poor against criminal charges and other legal matters. The Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, was formed in 2010 to meet the state’s obligation to provide lawyers to adults and juveniles charged with crimes who cannot afford to hire their own attorney.

The Maine Monitor and ProPublica reported in 2020 how MCILS hired attorneys with criminal convictions and histories of professional misconduct to represent the state’s poor in court. An analysis by the news organizations found that 26% of lawyers who were seriously disciplined — reprimanded, suspended or disbarred — between 2010 and 2020 by the state’s attorney licensing agency were later contracted by MCILS.

MCILS also repeatedly failed to enforce its own rules and allowed lawyers who were not eligible and sometimes underqualified to defend people facing serious criminal charges, including sexual assault and violent felonies, the news organizations reported last year.

“There are some excellent lawyers who are participating in the criminal defense system and there are also some lawyers who are in need of substantial training — are underperforming — the issue in our case is the state makes no efforts to identify which category those lawyers fall into and to get underperforming lawyers the remedial help they need,” Heiden said.

The agency’s executive director, Justin Andrus, and eight commissioners appointed to oversee MCILS are named in the lawsuit that was filed in Kennebec County Superior Court on Tuesday. The class action was filed on behalf of five plaintiffs who are adults currently charged with crimes, incarcerated and receiving legal assistance from attorneys paid by MCILS.

“I’ve been seeking from the beginning of my tenure the funding and authority necessary to fully comply with the requirements of a constitutionally adequate indigent defense system and this lawsuit, as far as I understand it, does nothing more than seek the same things that I’ve been seeking publicly,” said Andrus, who was appointed as executive director of MCILS in January 2021.

As recently as Friday, Andrus released an outline of proposed changes to improve the supervision and training of court-appointed counsel. Multiple defense attorneys said they opposed the proposed rules, which would require them to check-in weekly or monthly with supervisors.

An email seeking comment from the office of Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, was not returned Tuesday morning.

For a decade, MCILS relied on a quick review of invoices that were submitted at the conclusion of a criminal case to assess attorneys’ performances. Eleanor Maciag, the agency’s deputy director since 2012, estimated she and the former director spent one to two minutes reviewing each invoice before approving the payment in 2019, she told The Maine Monitor at the time.

Maine lawmakers added $18.5 million to the state’s budget for MCILS in 2021 to hire more employees and increase the hourly pay for lawyers from $60 to $80 an hour. State lawmakers also unanimously supported legislation to open the state’s first trial-level public defender office, but it remains unfunded.

“You look at the amount of money that was increased and it looks like a lot, but most of that is just changing the assigned counsel rates and that’s just buying the same system for a greater price,” said David Carroll, the director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that evaluates criminal defense systems, which was hired by the state Legislature to review Maine’s defense system.

The changes improved oversight of MCILS’ finances but not of the quality of the representation that attorneys provide indigent clients, Carroll said. The Sixth Amendment Center conducted a review of Maine’s public defense system in 2018, which determined the state’s criminal docket was advancing at the expense of defendants’ constitutional rights.

The center made seven recommendations to improve how legal services are provided to defendants. State lawmakers implemented some, but not all, of the recommendations. The report was not meant to be an a-la-carte menu of reforms, Carroll said. Among the recommendations: that Maine shift to a hybrid system of public defenders and private assigned counsel.

The ACLU sued the state of New York in 2007 for not meeting its responsibility to fund and manage its public defense systems in five counties.

The case was litigated for seven years when on the day before trial, in October 2014, the NYCLU and its litigation partner, Schulte Roth & Zabel, announced a settlement mandating that New York provide lawyers to defendants during their first appearance before a judge, set caseload standards and strengthen oversight by the state-level office among other changes. The state was ordered to pay $5.5 million in lawyer fees.

The ACLU has also filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of criminal defense systems in Connecticut, Mississippi, Michigan, Idaho and Nevada.

MCILS is currently run by seven employees. It does not have the staff necessary to assess or remediate the representation that contracted attorneys provide to clients, Andrus recently told lawmakers.

Maine is also not meeting most of the American Bar Association’s “Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System,” Andrus said. MCILS does not have resources equal to prosecutors, and lawyers are not immediately assigned because of delays with the courts and screenings for financial eligibility.

“What we are unable to do yet is move forward in the direction of a public defense system that really meets the strictures of the Sixth Amendment,” Andrus recently told lawmakers.

by Brooke Stephenson

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.

If you watch TV, you’ve likely been inundated with ads about tax prep services that promise to meet your every need or let you file for free.

It’s the time of year when people open search engines and ask: “Is TurboTax free?”

A screenshot from Google’s Keyword Planner, showing a large jump in searches for the phrases: “Is TurboTax free” and “Is H&R Block free” over the last three months. (Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: jcphoto/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

ProPublica has been asking similar questions since 2013, when we first reported on how Intuit, TurboTax’s parent company, fought to keep the government from setting up a free, simple tax filing process. In the intervening years, our reporters have stayed on the story, uncovering the company’s sweeping history of lobbying and “dark pattern” customer tricks, which have helped it fend off a free government tax-filing option and create a multibillion-dollar software franchise.

Last year, we wrote a guide presenting several ways people could file their taxes for free. But this year a few things have changed: For one, TurboTax is no longer participating in the IRS Free File program, a public-private partnership that it helped construct. Under Free File, tax prep companies agreed to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers, and in exchange the government agreed not to offer its own free filing tools. In 2019 and earlier years, TurboTax and H&R Block together accounted for around two-thirds of all filings through the program, according to ProPublica’s analysis. But H&R Block left the program in 2020, and now, Intuit wrote in a blog post, it too is leaving “to focus on further innovating in ways not allowable under the current Free File guidelines.”

A spokesperson for Intuit said the company was “at all times clear and fair with its customers” and has upheld its obligations to the IRS under the Free File program.

Despite the departure of the two major players, the IRS Free File program will still let you file your federal taxes for free if you make less than $73,000 a year. You can browse the list of the remaining providers yourself, or you can answer a couple questions and have the lookup tool connect you with the providers you are eligible to use.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Sezeryadigar/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Wait, in case you missed that: If you get nothing else from this story, please remember that you can file your federal taxes FOR FREE.

Still, TurboTax’s departure made me wonder: What are these amazing innovations it’s offering that aren’t “allowable” under IRS guidelines? Are they worth the cost of dealing with TurboTax?

A TurboTax spokesperson said, “The Free File Program rules did not allow Intuit to provide all of the benefits we can deliver to help consumers with their complete financial health, not just in tax, but beyond.” Leaving the program would, for example, allow TurboTax to offer customers access to tax experts and other financial services, he said.

I decided to run a little test. Even though it has dropped out of the IRS Free File program, the company still offers its own “free” version and pours millions into marketing it. To see how TurboTax’s “free” version measured up, I went through the steps to file my taxes through TurboTax’s service as well as through an IRS Free File provider.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: AlpamayoPhoto/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

I’ve actually used both before — TurboTax on my first few years of income, and IRS providers starting in 2019, after I read reporting by ProPublica and commentary by the comedian Hasan Minhaj.

The IRS claims that 70% of Americans can file their taxes for free through Free File, but in reality, only about 1% of those who are eligible actually use the service. And we reported in 2019 that in recent years, the IRS had spent no money at all to advertise the program. On top of that, participating companies often set up roadblocks to genuinely free filing for the folks who do find the service.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Free File only requires that the partner companies offer free federal returns, so it may be difficult or impossible to file your state taxes for free, depending on your income bracket. And while the state return is the most common source of a tacked-on charge, providers can also pitch loans, “audit defense” scans or even products that have nothing to do with taxes to Free File users.

Some companies are advertised as free on the IRS website, but then require taxpayers with certain tax documents, like 1099s, to pay for a much more expensive service.

The people who get 1099s often aren’t wealthy — recipients include the approximately 1 million people who drive for Uber, and women with care-taking responsibilities who take low-paid contract work to accommodate child or elder care schedules.

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Finding providers that are both genuinely free and user-friendly adds another layer of difficulty. Several of the IRS providers allow you to upload photos of your tax forms to make the process easier, but some had state restrictions and others charged you to file a 1099, which I needed to do.

In fact, I had quite a few forms to file.

In 2021, I was:

• A contract worker for a Southern California nonprofit.

• A full-time fellow for ProPublica in New York City.

• A part-time crew member at Trader Joe’s (Store 20 forever).

• A freelance writer for a local investigative paper.

• And a very sporadic email newsletter writer for my hometown running store in Virginia.

That adds up to three W2s and two 1099s across three states, and less than $50,000 in income, which is just the kind of low-paying tax mess that TurboTax’s innovative services should be able to help with,right?

Let’s dive in.

The TurboTax Saga

Below is the screen TurboTax shows you while trying to figure out if its free version is “right for you.”

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

These are the buttons that steer you away from the free version of TurboTax:

• “I want to maximize deductions and credits.”
• “I donated over $300 to charity.”
• “I’m self-employed/freelancer.”
• “I sold stock, crypto, or own rental properties.”
• “I own a small business.”
• “I own a home.”

Intuit’s spokesperson told me that “Pressing buttons has no effect on whether or not a user qualifies or disqualifies from using TurboTax Free Edition. Pressing buttons generates a recommendation to use a particular TurboTax product, but the consumer is free to use whatever product they wish.”

The cheapest program I can file under as an ex-freelancer was TurboTax Deluxe, for $39.

So I start there and wait to see if TurboTax’s excellent features will make me that money back in refunds.

(Spoiler: They don’t.)

The bummer is, I love using TurboTax. Not because it saves me money, but because clicking the big, eye-catching buttons gives me a false sense of control and a hit of dopamine.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Jennifer A Smith/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Check! I’m achieving!

And I think Intuit knows what appeals to me about its software, because back when it offered a genuinely free service through the IRS, that website was confusing, slow and ugly. There were no pretty buttons. And almost no one could find it, because Intuit hid it from Google and other search engines. (It stopped hiding the page from search engines after ProPublica reported on the practice.)

Anway, back to my tax filing.

After a soothing video in which I am assured that TurboTax can handle the complexities of my tax situation, the site asks for permission to access my tax returns “for purposes other than the preparation and filing” of my tax return. If I wasn’t really paying attention (which would be understandable; taxes are mind-numbing), it would be easy to assume these permissions were necessary to file my taxes and not a ploy to give TurboTax additional access to my information. I decline.

An Intuit spokesperson told us, “The consent you referenced allows us to surface offers for other Intuit products or services, or those of third parties that would be relevant for our customers,” but “Intuit does not use or share tax information anywhere outside of the tax prep process — even with other Intuit products — unless a customer gives express consent.”

Next it tries to upsell me TurboTax MAX: Defend and Restore, which offers insurance against identity theft for another $49. I skip that too.

I’m five minutes into this process, and I’ve spent half my time rejecting TurboTax’s attempts to collect additional money or information.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source image: tirc83/Getty Images.)

I know that reading about me doing my taxes might seem even more boring than doing your own, but bear with me as I describe a few notable events from my TurboTax journey because I think they’ll help us understand more about how the tax prep industry works.

Here are some features that initially appealed to me:

• Free live online chats with tax specialists.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

• The ability to link to my eTrade account just by logging in, saving me the trouble of entering information about stocks and dividends manually.
• Expandable explainers that answer questions like, “Why am I taking the standard deduction?” and, “How do I know if I got my 2021 stimulus check?”
• The ability to automatically pull my 2021 W2s for the employers that I worked for in previous years I filed with TurboTax.
• The option to upload a photo of my W2 from the places where I started work during 2021, like ProPublica, instead of manually entering details from each individual box. There were occasional clarifying questions (“Box 20 seems to be blank — can you confirm this?”), but they were easy to deal with.

And all the while, TurboTax is doing the software equivalent of gently patting my head.

After I submit each W2, I’m shown an encouraging screen that tells me I’m on track for my biggest refund yet! I feel inches from those promised dollars.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Once all my W2 information has been submitted, little animated papers file themselves under the heading “Sit back while we fill in your New York return.” It gives me the impression TurboTax is working hard for me.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Images: Veronique Beranger/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

In reality, this is the digital equivalent of TurboTax twiddling its thumbs.

Former staffers told reporter Justin Elliott that Intuit’s designers added these animated delays between screens to both reinforce and ease consumers’ “fear, uncertainty and doubt.” TurboTax encourages this subconscious sense I’ve had the whole time that taxes are a scary dark maze that I can only navigate if I let the software lead me by the hand.

In a statement, an Intuit spokesperson said, “The process of completing a tax return often has at least some level of stress and anxiety associated with it. … To offset these feelings, we use a variety of design elements — content, animation, movement, etc. — to ensure our customers’ peace of mind.”

The cute face of this software creates a feeling of trust that I can’t totally shake, even though I’m going through all this for a ProPublica piece, which is about the least trusting way you can undertake any activity.

This feeling fades slightly when I move on to inputting my freelance (1099) income.

Because taxes weren’t withheld from that income when I was paid, all taxes are instead calculated and owed when I file, a fact I always forget and never enjoy remembering.

TurboTax tells me I can reduce my self-employment tax by entering self-employment expenses, like cellphone service or gas mileage.

On the next screen, TurboTax offers me a list of possible applicable expenses I could deduct, and I feel a rush of affection for the site. This could be the moment TurboTax finally starts paying for itself.

Ah, but wait.

It’s another upsell — this time for TurboTax Self-Employed.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

The site tells me that if I have at least $630 in expenses to report, TurboTax Self-Employed will pay for itself. At first this seems like helpful information. Then it strikes me that if my qualifying expenses fail to clear that threshold, or just barely clear it, then by taking the offer I would have happily paid TurboTax $70 to “save” $70, and essentially walked away empty-handed.

I check: “I don’t have expenses,” even though I do. I just don’t have enough that I can afford to pay for the pleasure of reporting them.

I go through the same song and dance for a second 1099, and then we hit upsell number three.

Remember that offer of “NO COST” chats with tax specialists that endeared me to this service?

Well, the tax experts are back!

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

And ol’ Intuit is once again trying to sell me something it claims to offer for free, this time in the form of TurboTax Live Deluxe. Intuit said that while product experts are available to connect with tax filers to answer questions about the filings themselves, Live connects customers with tax experts that specialize in specific filing statuses (such as someone who knows a lot about freelancers).

Shortly after declining the live services, I get a question about how my experience has been so far.

Me:

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

When we get to the state tax section, I learn that TurboTax will charge me an additional fee for each state I need to file in.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Images: Kypros/Getty Images.)

That adds up to a $156 bill: $39 for each of the states I need to file in — California, New York and Virginia — plus $39 for TurboTax Deluxe.

According to TurboTax’s website, “Actual prices for paid versions are determined based on the version you use and the time of print or e-file and are subject to change without notice.” You can find this information if you click to expand a box called “*Important offer details and disclosures” at the very bottom of the page.

And before I can pay, it tries to sell me TurboTax MAX one last time.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

Overall, a “not so good” experience.

Free File Through the IRS

After looking through four or five providers, I ultimately decide to use FreeTaxUSA to test the process of filing through an IRS Free File provider. I’ve used it in the past, and while the service requires users to input their W2 and 1099 information by hand, it claims to offer free state tax filing and doesn’t charge for 1099s.

The questions don’t come with as many cool graphics, but they’re still clear and easy to answer.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

Like TurboTax, I’m upsold right out of the gate, but unlike TurboTax, the upsell is not mandatory just because I did freelance work, and the upgrade they’re offering is relatively inexpensive — FreeTaxUSA Deluxe is $6.99. The offer also only appears once, rather than four times, during the process.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

FreeTaxUSA also allowed me to deduct my freelance expenses for no extra cost, which helped reduce my tax bill.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Image: DreamPictures/Getty Images.)

In the end, FreeTaxUSA asked me for $15 for each of the states I filed in — my federal return was, as advertised, free — for a total of $45. When I reached out to FreeTaxUSA support to ask why I didn’t receive the free state tax filing I was promised, they told me that in order to file for free I needed to create an account through their Free File link.

I had entered the FreeTaxUSA website via the IRS’ Free File link, but I struggled to log in to my old account that way. After cycling through this twice, I tried to see if I would have better luck restarting from the site’s homepage.

I did, but in doing so, I apparently lost that golden /freefile2021/ in my url.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

At that point, I had been doing taxes for about two days straight. I got fed up and just paid, which is about the most everyman American taxpayer experience I could have had.

As a taxpayer and consumer, you have the right to know your options, particularly when you could be spending less money. But the big takeaway is not necessarily that one tax filing software is better or more honest than another. It’s not even that you should contact customer support before you pay (though I really should have).

The takeaway, at least for me, is that filing your taxes for “free” online is confusing and soul-sucking by design.

So take a deep breath, release a guttural scream, and don’t let some fun buttons lure you into paying more than you need to.

To paraphrase TurboTax:

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot and annotation by ProPublica.)

Screenshots have been edited by ProPublica.

by Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel

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

Last year, ProPublica began publishing “The Secret IRS Files,” a series that has used a vast trove of never-before-seen tax information on the wealthiest Americans to examine their tax avoidance maneuvers.

Since then, the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress have been trying to close loopholes in the code and raise taxes on the rich to fund their legislative priorities. But the efforts have stalled, amid claims by Republicans that tax increases on billionaires would “destroy investment in America and punish success in America” and resistance from key Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin, who called such a plan divisive, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has opposed tax increases more broadly.

Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, is one of the top experts in Congress on tax matters and an advocate of raising taxes on the rich. He has proposed a bill that would build on his past efforts to tax the wealthiest. The most recent legislation would tax people with $1 billion in assets (or $100 million in income for three years in a row) not just on their income as it is traditionally defined but also on the growth of their wealth each year. It would take a bite out of so-called unrealized gains, taxing a rise in the value of the stocks, bonds and other assets owned by the ultrawealthy — even if they didn’t sell the assets. For assets that are not readily traded, Wyden’s bill would impose a deferred tax, an annual interest charge that would be added to any capital gains tax owed when the wealthy person sells the asset.

Wyden’s bill seeks to counteract a technique that the ultrawealthy can use to avoid income taxes: They hold on to their assets and simply avoid the income — and tax — that comes when they sell them. The rich can live lavishly by employing a technique known as “Buy, Borrow, Die,” in which they buy or build assets, borrow against them and then avoid estate and gift taxes when they die.

We checked in with the senator to ask about his proposal and the prospects for any new laws in the coming year.

The interview that follows has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As you know, we’ve been reporting on how little tax the ultrawealthy in America pay. Our reporting for the first time has put names and faces and specifics on this issue by pointing out that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and the like have paid zero in taxes in recent years. And that the ultrawealthy really pay a low rate when compared to their wealth growth. I’m wondering if seeing these numbers has had an effect on your thinking, and if you think there’s been an effect on colleagues of yours who may not have had this full appreciation the way you did?

The answer is really yes and yes. It has affected me, and it’s affected, I believe, other senators. And the fact is my bill raises $557 billion, and it does so by simply requiring billionaires to pay taxes every year, the way nurses and firefighters do. At the same time, I feel very strongly — and this is the point where I think we’ve made real headway — this is about more than revenue. This is about fixing a thoroughly broken tax code and showing working people in America that billionaires don’t get to play by a different set of rules. My view is the big scandal is what’s legal. When you walk these people through it, it causes people to lose faith in government, lose faith in democracy.

What really causes people to lose faith? I think the fact that billionaires occasionally pay zero in taxes will strike most people as wrong. But are there other things that strike you as really jeopardizing their faith in the system?

The fact is it’s so brazen. Some of the leading conservative publications write articles: “Buy, Borrow, and Die if you want to pay little or nothing. Here is the plan.” I tell people about this at my town hall meetings and everybody starts hollering: “Don’t let people back here get played as suckers by letting billionaires pay little or nothing for years on end while those of us who represent a vast majority of Americans get hammered.”

We’ve been struck that some of the most loyal and closest readers of our stories have been the wealth advisory industry, figuring out a how-to manual. This is not what we intended ...

You have a proposal, which you alluded to, that would raise in your estimate almost $600 billion over 10 years. What are the prospects for that? Because you re-upped a version of that last year and it was quickly shot down by Joe Manchin, as I understand.

A couple of things, first of all, Joe Manchin has always said that he believes that the wealthiest should pay their fair share. And that’s very much in sync with what we say. And I go on to say that paying your fair share and being successful are not incompatible. That’s one of the things that special interests that have opposed my proposal say: “Oh, this is going to keep people from being successful.” Are you kidding me?

We know that there are lots of lobbyists and PR firms working around the clock to protect the status quo. There are terrific organizations like Patriotic Millionaires and Americans For Tax Fairness, but they just don’t have the same resources that the billionaires have. That’s why we’re trying to get the message out and lay out that this is basically a fairness issue. This is fundamentally about fairness so the affluent pay their fair share and it is not going to unravel the American dream of being successful.

The other part about this is the double standard. We had another hearing last week, and some of the conservative Republicans were talking about Earned Income Tax Credit recipients being the problem with tax evasion and noncompliance. The reality is you can be a tax cheater, a wealthy tax cheater. You can have one of these very large passthroughs and you are more likely to get hit by a meteor than you are to get audited.

In another part of our series, we focused on the ways that fortunes can persist from generation to generation. We wrote a story about the Scrippses and Mellons and their heirs getting vast amounts of income from fortunes that were created over 100 years ago. We also wrote about how many of the current 100 wealthiest people in the country are using GRATs [Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts] and other trusts to avoid paying income taxes. Is that on the agenda in DC? I know there was a proposal out of the House with the original version of Build Back Better, but is fixing that on the agenda, still?

I’m glad you asked that question. We get around that and stepped-up basis [the provision that, at the time of a person’s death, wipes out any increases in the value of their holdings for tax purposes, allowing people to pass on assets without paying capital gains tax] and all these things [with my proposal], because the billionaires could pay taxes each year and their heirs no longer get to wipe out billions and billions of dollars worth of gain. And I support proposals to fix GRATs. We’ve worked on them, and the bottom line is the overarching change, which is that billionaires are going to pay taxes every year.

So you’re saying under that proposal all these other fixes like stepped-up basis wouldn’t be as important. But is something like ending stepped-up basis, which was floated earlier this year, still on the table?

I’ll give you an example. I worked for a long time on the idea of making it crystal clear that farms and family-owned small businesses were fully exempt from [my proposal to end] stepped-up basis. But the ultrawealthy just kept saying, “Oh, the sky’s going to fall” once we allow this. Everybody is going to get hit with their farm and their small business and the like, and basically what they do is they play to people’s fears and try to create enough lobbying pressure. The billionaires try to get these small guys out in front to do their bidding for them.

And one quick thing. This is about a billionaires income tax. It’s a very important differentiation. This is about paying every year. They’ve got a stock account, for example, and this year it’s $20 billion and next year it goes up to $23 billion. They pay the capital gains tax on three billion bucks, because we feel that they’re basically evading capital gains taxes. And this is the way we respond with a billionaires income tax. And we chose that word very specifically.

Right. It’s a definition of income. It’s a definition that some economists have embraced. It’s not the orthodox definition. It’s not the definition that is in the current tax system, of course.

It’s particularly important when people say, “Oh, well, what are we going to do if it goes down?” Well, our proposal would account for losses as well.

But the fact is that extra $3 billion that they have this year that they didn’t have last year, they can use for all kinds of things. They can borrow against it. They can have a wonderful lifestyle, they can do all kinds of things. It’s very real to them in terms of how they can use it. And it’s immediate.

Now, I was interested in the counterarguments because one of those is that if they take a loss, how does that get accounted for in the system? The other is that you don’t want to force people into having to sell to raise cash to pay the tax. Another argument is that this will push people into illiquid, hard-to-value assets and out of the public markets. And I’m curious how you address all these objections.

We technically make that unlikely because the hard assets, they pick up interest charges as time goes along.

Washington seems to be very focused on marginal rates, on income tax with the traditional definition of income. I wonder what you think of that, if that’s kind of frustrating to you?

There can be that argument for raising those marginal rates, particularly on, again, wealthy people. But here’s an example of the kind of bizarre reality you get. I went to school on a basketball scholarship, dreaming of playing in the NBA — pretty ridiculous idea because I’m 6-foot-4 and made up for it by being kind of slow. I still kind of follow basketball. And as we heard about the fact that some members wanted to raise marginal rates and weren’t going to do anything on billionaires, it became clear to me that you could have a young basketball player, first one to go to college, get a scholarship. They come out, get a big contract. It’s all income. They’re going to come out under the marginal rate. Meanwhile, the owner of the club who is a billionaire doesn’t pay, themselves. an income tax, gets off scot-free. How is that fair?

That is the other point that you guys are raising.

What could be the basis of some kind of compromise that could shift this dynamic, because it sort of stalled last year?

We have looked at virtually every other approach to ensure a sense of fairness, that billionaires would pay taxes every year, like nurses and firefighters. And a number of the people who are most knowledgeable on the other side have actually committed candor when they said, [your bill] will actually require that we pay something every year, and everything else that’s been put out there can basically be gamed. People in the industry who are the advocates for the billionaires said that it’s going to be hard to avoid.

I’m not sure anything is going to get a perfect solution, but this is the one they’re really worried about because I can explain it pretty straightforwardly. If you make $3 billion between ’22 and ’23, you pay a capital gain rate at 23.8%.

One other point: We had folks say that they were concerned about founders of companies, and so we’ve made some adjustments to allow founders of companies to designate some stock as nontradable.

We’re always listening to members and trying to respond to their concerns.

People would say, “Well, what about philanthropy?” Well, philanthropy is terrific. We encourage it, but you have Medicare and Social Security and these critical needs that need to get addressed. Because if we’re all in this together, philanthropy is not going to take care of Medicare and Social Security.

These proposals, and your proposal in particular, are being blocked by members of your own party. Do you have any understanding of what Joe Manchin would support or what Kyrsten Sinema would support?

I’m not going to speak to the concerns of any one member, but let’s put it this way: No member is saying that they are publicly opposed to the idea of billionaires paying their fair share.

I’m not underestimating the power of the billionaires. You got to get everybody on board, got to hit 50 votes. And that’s what we’re focused on. But nobody has publicly said that billionaires shouldn’t pay their fair share. And the reason why is because this idea has enormous potency with people.

Do you think that anything can be done before the midterm elections?

We’re doing everything we can to come back as soon as possible from what happened in December. It kind of went off the rails. The next round of discussion will be built on health care, particularly holding down the cost of prescription drugs and filling in gaps in the Affordable Care Act like Medicaid coverage, our Clean Energy for America bill, which says for the first time the more you reduce carbon emissions, the bigger your tax savings, and then revenues evaded by tax avoidance and closing loopholes.

Gotcha. And another big problem here is that the IRS is in profound straits with the budget problems and tens of thousands of employees having left. How dire a situation is that, and where is the consensus to fund the IRS adequately?

So, first of all, as the chairman of the finance committee, I have led the effort, the pushback against Republican cuts in the IRS budget for years. Republicans in their big 2017 tax bill didn’t do anything to deal with the IRS budget cuts.

Now, I also want to take this opportunity because people have asked about the ability to administer our bill. There isn’t any issue with the IRS valuation because the value of stocks and the like is easily known and nontradable assets are only taxed when sold, just like today, so that “oh my God, Western civilization is going to end,” the IRS can’t administer it, I think is just contradicted by the facts which I just gave you. And, by the way, when billionaires said it’ll be difficult to comply, they got armies of accountants and lawyers to help them avoid taxes, paying as little as possible. They can just use their accountants and lawyers to comply and pay what they owe.

I’ll just for my closure say that, when you really look at the challenges for democracy, tax fairness is one of the keys and that’s what this is all about. Yes, it’s about raising over $550 billion — no question, it’s the biggest revenue raiser in the package — [but] this is about core issues of fairness.

Help Us Report on Taxes and the Ultrawealthy

Do you have expertise in tax law, accounting or wealth management? Do you have tips to share? Here’s how to get in touch. We are looking for both specific tips and broader expertise.

by Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News, and Perla Trevizo and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

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

It was also produced in partnership with NBC News.

The U.S. agency responsible for protecting consumers announced this week that it intends to recommend new mandatory rules to make portable generators safer, saying manufacturers have not voluntarily done enough to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning deaths caused by their products.

The announcement, part of a 104-page staff report by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is a key step toward regulating gas-powered generators, which can emit as much carbon monoxide as 450 cars and which kill an average of 80 people in the U.S. each year.

The commission’s move comes more than two decades after U.S. regulators identified the deadly risks posed by portable generators and two months after an NBC News, ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found that federal efforts to make portable generators safer have been stymied by a statutory process that empowers manufacturers to regulate themselves, resulting in limited safety upgrades and continued deaths.

Portable generators, which are often used to power life-saving medical equipment, air conditioners, furnaces and refrigerators after major storms, emit enough carbon monoxide to kill within minutes when operated in enclosed spaces or too close to exterior openings. Carbon monoxide deaths caused by generators occur after nearly every major power outage, including 10 fatalities in Texas tied to generators during last year’s winter storm and power grid failure.

Generator manufacturers say that their products are not dangerous when users follow the safety guidelines in instruction manuals, which include keeping the machines outside, away from doors and windows. But safety advocates say those instructions aren’t always easy to follow, because the machines can’t be operated in rain or snow. And a review of user manuals by the news organizations found that they can provide conflicting messages. Some manuals suggest keeping generators a shorter distance from windows or doors than the 20-foot minimum recommended by the CPSC, while others provide more general guidance such as keeping the machines “far away” from homes.

The new push for mandatory rules has been years in the making. In 2016, after concluding that generator manufacturers could save lives by making machines that emit less carbon monoxide, the CPSC announced plans to makethe modification mandatory.

But before the CPSC could impose the rule, industry-friendly federal law required the agency to first allow generator manufacturers to come up with their own safety upgrades and to study whether those voluntary measures were enough to protect consumers.

Industry representatives instead proposed a cheaper safety upgrade: switches that would automatically turn the devices off when carbon monoxide builds up to an unsafe level. They said the shut-off switches would prevent 99% of deaths, but safety advocates argued that that claim was exaggerated.

Three years after the industry unveiled the voluntary standard, many manufacturers still had not adopted the change, the NBC News, ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found. This week’s CPSC report echoed those findings. The commission found that too few manufacturers had adopted voluntary changes, clearing the way for it to continue the process of developing and implementing mandatory regulations.

“Think how many lives could have been saved had the CPSC gone forward with a mandatory standard in 2016,” said Marietta S. Robinson, who served as a CPSC commissioner from 2013 to 2018 and supported mandatory generator safety standards.

The CPSC report concluded that voluntary changes implemented by some manufacturers did reduce the risk to consumers, but not to the degree that industry officials had promised.

Based on tens of thousands of simulations of common generator carbon monoxide accidents, CPSC staffers found that the industry’s preferred solution of adding shut-off sensors without reducing carbon monoxide emissions would prevent about 87% of generator deaths, while still leaving some consumers exposed to CO levels toxic enough to require hospitalization.

CPSC staffers also tested a more stringent approach of equipping the machines with both shut-off sensors and engines that emit far less carbon monoxide, and found that the combination would eliminate “nearly 100 percent” of generator deaths and the vast majority of hospitalizations.

The agency’s staff will urge the CPSC’s five commissioners, who have the final say, to make the recommended mandatory standard a priority in the next fiscal year, which begins in October.

Alex Hoehn-Saric, the group’s newly appointed chair, said in a statement that the new CPSC staff report on portable generators “demonstrates the need to move forward as quickly as the law permits with mandatory rulemaking designed to address this invisible killer.”

A ProPublica, Tribune and NBC News analysis of CPSC data showed that more than 300 people died from carbon monoxide poisoning from generators in the four years after CPSC proposed its rule lowering emissions.

“It’s about time,” said Sheletta Brundidge, a Houston native who lost five family members in 2020 when they left a portable generator running inside an attached garage after Hurricane Laura knocked out power across Louisiana. “You can’t expect these companies to police themselves. And, you know, I gladly and I’m sure most Americans would pay some additional money to have some safety measures in place.”

The CPSC previously estimated that reducing generators’ carbon monoxide emissions would add about $115 to the manufacturing cost of most units, which typically sell for $500 to $1,500.

Joseph Harding, technical director at the Portable Generator Manufacturers’ Association, the trade group that developed the voluntary shut-off switches standard, said in an email that the group was still in the process of reviewing the CPSC’s report. Harding reiterated the industry’s belief that shut-off switches alone would eliminate 99% of deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning, and disputed the agency’s conclusion that too few companies had adopted the safety measure.

“Compliance with the standard is already at a high level and is projected to grow substantially in the next year,” Harding wrote. The industry group declined to provide data supporting that contention to the news organizations, saying it was confidential.

Rachel Weintraub, general counsel for the advocacy group Consumer Federation of America, said this moves the CPSC closer to establishing a mandatory standard for portable generators.

The lack of widespread compliance, she said, provides the CPSC with direct evidence that refutes the industry’s claims that voluntary measures are enough to protect consumers. “There are less levers that they can pull to slow the process,” Weintraub said, referring to the industry.

Brundidge said she hopes the latest effort to mandate safety upgrades moves more quickly.

“It shouldn’t have taken all of these people to die and get sick for somebody to come and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we need to do something,’” she said. “And so I’m glad that finally something is being done to police the manufacturers, because we’ve been putting it on the consumers, and that’s not right.”

by Maya Miller, Lisa Song and Ava Kofman

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

Three Democratic U.S. representatives introduced a bill last week that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to create a pilot program for air monitoring in communities overburdened with pollution. The program would have a $100 million annual budget over five years to allow local agencies to monitor the air quality in neighborhoods, block by block.

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One of the lead sponsors, Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., cited ProPublica’s work on toxic air pollution as a factor motivating her introduction of the Environmental Justice Air Quality Monitoring Act. “I’m grateful for ProPublica’s work to expose the devastating consequences of air pollution, economic inequality, and environmental racism on vulnerable Americans,” Castor said in an emailed statement to ProPublica, after highlighting stories from our “Sacrifice Zones” and “Black Snow” series on social media.

“The data provided by ProPublica’s air pollution mapping tool and the Environmental Protection Agency demonstrates the urgent need to decisively address toxic air pollution that is putting Americans at greater risk for cancer and other harmful health outcomes,” Rep. A. Donald McEachin, D-Va., a co-sponsor of the bill, wrote in an email. “For too long, low-income communities and communities of color have borne the brunt of environmental degradation and injustice, and it must end.”

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced a nearly identical bill last July, weeks after ProPublica and The Palm Beach Post published an investigation into air quality in the Florida Glades, one of the country’s largest cane-sugar-producing regions. For years, residents in the area’s largely Black and Hispanic communities had been saying that the sugar industry pollutes the air when, as part of the harvest, workers set fire to the crops to rid the cane of its outer stalk. Sugar companies have long insisted the air was safe to breathe.

State officials used a single monitor to track air quality across the entire 400,000-acre sugar-growing region. So the news organizations worked with residents to set up commercially available air sensors that measured particulate matter during the burn season and identified short-term spikes in pollution on days when the state had authorized cane burns and when smoke was projected to blow toward the sensors. These shorter-term spikes in pollution, which are a defining feature of Florida’s harvesting process, had been obscured by federal and local regulators’ reliance on longer-term averages. The spikes often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area — high enough that experts said they posed health risks.

U.S. Sugar operates a tour of fields, sugar mills and other harvesting activities in and around Clewiston, Florida. (Thomas Cordy/The Palm Beach Post)

In November, ProPublica began publishing “Sacrifice Zones,” a series of stories that exposed how and where toxic air pollution elevates the cancer risk of residents who live close to industrial facilities. An estimated 256,000 people live in areas where the cancer risk exceeds levels the EPA considers acceptable, ProPublica found through a first-of-its-kind analysis. Predominantly Black census tracts have more than double the estimated cancer risk of majority-white tracts.

Our analysis used EPA air modeling to reveal the estimated industrial cancer risks at a granular level in every neighborhood across the country. Such models are a starting point for identifying areas in need of actual monitoring. The new bill proposes a hyperlocal approach by requesting “ongoing measurements of air pollutants at a block-level resolution.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., another lead sponsor of the bill, said in an email that ProPublica’s stories “helped raise attention on this issue as well as concerns from our constituents. Our congressional district, NY-15 based in the South Bronx, has one of the highest levels of pollution in the entire state of NY. Residents are deeply impacted by bad air quality that leads to dangerous health conditions.”

If passed as currently written, the Environmental Justice Air Quality Monitoring Act would award grants or contracts to state, local and tribal agencies in partnership with local nonprofit groups or organizations that have a demonstrated ability to conduct hyperlocal air quality projects. The bill does not outline what steps should be taken if the air monitoring finds unacceptable levels of pollution in the air. The EPA said it does not comment on potential legislation.

After Markey introduced his version of the bill in July, the Senate referred the legislation to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. There is no vote scheduled for the bill, according to committee aide Jake Abbott.

The legislation “is what communities around industrial facilities have needed for a long time,” Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert, said in an email. Subra has spent her career helping communities struggling with air and water pollution. She said the data from localized air monitoring could tell residents what they’re exposed to and when the pollution exceeds government standards, which could prompt additional scrutiny of industrial polluters.

The House bill was introduced amid a nationwide push for more monitoring of air pollution. In the wake of ProPublica’s “Sacrifice Zones” investigation, the EPA announced that it would establish a new team to conduct aerial monitoring from planes and track emissions on the ground. It pledged to spend more than $600,000 on air monitoring in parts of the southern U.S., such as Mossville, Louisiana, one of the hot spots highlighted in ProPublica’s analysis. The agency also ordered a Louisiana chemical plant to install air monitors along its boundary. These initiatives follow the EPA’s decision last summer to make $50 million in American Rescue Plan funding available to communities interested in improving air quality monitoring. The deadline for applications is March 25.

Applying for federal funding, however, can be a lengthy and complex process. Penny Dryden grew up a few miles away from a handful of chemical plants just south of Wilmington, Delaware. Last summer, Dryden worked with community members to set up five handheld air quality monitors in the area after securing a grant from a local health care system. She is now working with a team to apply for EPA funds to expand that effort so that residents and regulators can better understand which chemicals they are breathing and whether more protections are warranted.

“I’ve been at this work for over 30 years, but there were rarely federal funding opportunities, and now here we are, and it is even difficult for me,” said Dryden.

She and others were encouraged by the introduction of this latest bill, which could push agencies and organizations to partner with communities like Dryden’s.

“Hopefully through this bill people can have their voices heard in wanting to understand what’s going on in their community that could be impacting their health and well-being,” said Sheryl Magzamen, a Colorado State University professor who specializes in air quality and health. Magzamen helped ProPublica and Palm Beach Post reporters design the air quality monitoring plan and assess the results of the “Black Snow” project. The work prompted Magzamen to submit a research proposal to NASA, which awarded her team a $218,000 grant to use low-cost sensors and satellite data to better track pollution in Florida’s cane-burning region and other areas.

“Problems are able to be solved when we have data that points us to what the problems actually are, and monitoring is a huge step in the right direction,” Magzamen said.

by Nuala Bishari

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

At a bustling makeshift flea market on a street corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ladybird sells her wares. One afternoon in December, wearing a black hoodie, faded black jeans embroidered with roses and carefully applied makeup, she biked three blocks from the city-sanctioned tent encampment where she lives, carrying a bag with a still-sealed Minnie Mouse stationery kit and a brand-new pair of brown high heels. Almost immediately, she was approached by a man interested in buying the stationery kit to give to his daughter for Christmas. “Eight dollars,” she said. He talked her down to five, and a deal was made.

During a pause in bartering, a text message appeared on her phone. “I’ve been assigned a case manager! It happened this morning,” she exclaimed, calling over her friend Johnny to tell him the news. “I’m going to be moving indoors in the next couple weeks.”

Ladybird said she hasn’t lived indoors in seven years. This winter, she said, she finally got approved for a permanent supportive housing unit — a subsidized room with health, employment and social services, paid for by the city and federal government. But despite her optimism, that didn’t mean the end of her wait. In San Francisco, the path from homelessness to housing can take as long as two years, and that’s for someone lucky enough to make it onto the waitlist.

San Francisco’s struggle with housing its homeless population is notorious across the nation. Multiple mayors have promised to get the crisis under control. The city’s dedicated homelessness department, created in 2016, has an annual budget of $598 million — a sum that has more than tripled in its short existence.

Nonetheless, as of early February, the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reported 1,633 homeless people like Ladybird — approved for housing and awaiting their turn to move in. Yet records provided by the department show 888 vacancies in its permanent supportive housing stock as of Feb. 22. Filling those empty rooms would not just cut the waiting list by more than half. It would be enough to house roughly one in every eight homeless people in the city. The homelessness department said it cannot talk about individual cases, but officials acknowledged that at least 400 people have been waiting more than a year, far beyond the department’s professed goal of placing applicants into housing 30 to 45 days after they’re approved.

Hundreds of Housing Units Sit Vacant as Only a Small Fraction Are Filled

Monthly vacancies in permanent supportive housing compared with the number of people who moved in.

(Source: San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing)

These persistent vacancy numbers stem largely from two new bureaucratic problems. First, the homelessness department created a policy that bumped hundreds of people who had previously been approved for housing to the bottom of a new list. In December 2020, the department rolled out a plan that reserved all available permanent supportive housing units for residents of shelter-in-place hotels, which had been opened during the pandemic to keep people who had been living on the streets safe from COVID-19.

This led to a spike in vacancies as many hotel-dwellers opted to stay in place rather than accept a more permanent option. It also meant that everyone else — people on the streets, in shelters, in navigation centers and in city-sanctioned tent sites — was out of luck, simply based on where they slept at night.

It’s into this void that Ladybird fell. A resident of a tent site, she was behind an even larger number of people on an already-massive list.

Second, even when someone is approved to move in, the city is slow to send the paperwork — what’s called a “referral” — over to the private nonprofit organizations contracted by the city to manage housing units. Over the course of the pandemic, this problem has grown steadily worse.

Doug Gary recently retired from one of those organizations, Delivering Innovations in Supportive Housing. A year ago, he reported that the organization had 38 vacant units, with no referrals. Gary remembered passing people sleeping on the sidewalk as he walked to work, knowing he had empty units languishing in his buildings.

“There are going to be 38 people stuck on the street tonight, and they could be in DISH housing,” he recalled thinking. “And that’s been true for months.”

The last count of San Francisco’s homeless population numbered more than 8,000. There is not enough housing for all of them. To try to help, the city’s mayor, London Breed, is pursuing a new goal: She has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to procure 1,500 new units by the end of 2022. The city is on track to hit Mayor Breed’s goal, and may even exceed it.

But with so many units of housing already sitting vacant — a number that according to the department has roughly doubled during the pandemic — a critical question arises: Will the city be able to fill them?

A Deprioritized Population Struggles to Get Indoors

Funding for permanent supportive housing constitutes the largest piece of San Francisco’s budget for the homeless, and the supply of housing is growing rapidly. It consists mostly of older hotels converted into single-room-occupancy residences. The city contracts with a dozen nonprofit organizations to run the nearly 150 buildings and manage social services, such as moving people in and out of units, maintaining the properties and managing individual cases, including everything from connecting people to treatment for substance use disorder to helping someone apply for food stamps. Residents pay 30% of their income, including Social Security benefits, toward rent, and the city subsidizes the rest.

All of the 1,633 people in line for a permanent supportive housing unit had to answer a series of questions to determine who is most vulnerable and therefore most in need of housing. Every year, more than 3,000 people take this assessment, called “coordinated entry,” which takes into consideration, among other things, how long they’ve been homeless, if they have any mental or physical disabilities and if they’re addicted to drugs. Those who score highly by the city’s complex algorithm — in theory the most vulnerable — are marked “housing priority status,” and are then put on a waitlist for permanent supportive housing.

But actually getting off of the waitlist and into those units isn’t easy. The city’s software to track vacant units is error prone, unit maintenance problems take a long time to resolve, case managers quit and it can be impossible for people who have been living on the street to meet document requirements. (The homelessness department said that the city is currently working on the software and documentation issues, and has put a raise for case managers into its budget request for next year.)

Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica

On top of all that, the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic made getting housed harder by creating a system that gave top priority to those least likely to want to move in: those who suddenly found themselves living for free in shelter-in-place hotel rooms.

In spring 2020, as the city locked down and its housed residents stayed indoors, advocates raised concern for the thousands of homeless people living outside and in temporary shelters, many of whom had health conditions that increased their risk for severe COVID-19. Those fears were realized when 92 residents of a large one-room shelter contracted the illness just one month after the city shut down.

In response, San Francisco leased hotel rooms to help people experiencing homelessness quarantine indoors. It was always meant to be a temporary measure, and as the pandemic dragged on, the homelessness department strategized on how to wind the program down. The optics of sending anyone back to the street were not great, and the city created a policy of prioritizing residents of the shelter-in-place hotels for housing.

“I will be candid: It is both one of the biggest opportunities and one of the biggest challenges our city has faced in our homelessness space,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, then director of the homelessness department, during a Nov. 10, 2020, Board of Supervisors meeting at City Hall, where she justified the new policy. She added that the department would keep an eye on the data, and would “course correct” to ensure the process was successful. In subsequent interviews and email exchanges, the department did not respond to additional questions about why that policy was created and pursued.

The data over the past 15 months shows a gradually increasing crisis: In October 2020 there were 544 vacant units. A year later, vacancies had nearly doubled to 1,064. While units sat vacant, people living outdoors were waiting to get indoors. Any course correction has been slow to come.

From the get-go, the policy of reserving housing for people in hotels was difficult to implement. Although residents knew the hotels were temporary and could close at any time, many were reluctant to move from free, modern rooms with private bathrooms into small, older units with bathrooms down the hall, at a cost of 30% of their income. All of a sudden, one housing provider said, three applicants for housing had to be referred in order to fill one vacant room.

Inside one of San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing buildings, the kind of housing both Ladybird and Marquita Stroud hope to move into (Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press)

In the first seven months after the policy was implemented, supportive housing vacancies jumped 61%, from 600 units in November 2020 to 964 in June 2021, a period when the city was also adding new units. In February 2021, the homelessness department reported that 70% of shelter-in-place hotel residents who were offered a spot in the Granada Hotel, a newly purchased permanent supportive housing building, had rejected the placement.

When someone turned down an available housing unit, it sat vacant until a new referral appeared. Providers found themselves in a new position: having to offer incentives to persuade potential tenants to move in.

Georgetta Lovett, a property supervisor at DISH, oversees more than 300 units of permanent supportive housing. She said the organization now provides move-in benefits: free rent for the first month, free meals for three months and a free Muni transit pass.

Resistance to moving into permanent housing is not something Lovett experienced when showing units to people who had been living outside.

“People coming directly off the streets would take the place immediately,” she said. “We would be able to show them a room, they’d say, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ Most of them don’t come with a lot of stuff, and they were like, ‘I can move in today, or I can move in tomorrow.’ And normally we can make that happen right away.”

A Feb. 24, 2021, a budget hearing at City Hall on shelter-in-place hotels showed the homelessness department was aware early on that the policy was adding to the vacancy crisis in permanent supportive housing.

“We are noting that people who are not in shelter-in-place hotels are more eager to take permanent supportive housing placements,” Stewart-Kahn said, adding that it was “putting pressure on our system.” She said that the department was “reevaluating” the policy.

Three weeks later, Stewart-Kahn resigned, moving to a new role as an adviser to the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. That same month, the city established an 18-person shelter-in-place hotel housing team. Their task: to more efficiently implement the policy and move everyone qualified for housing from shelter-in-place hotels into vacant units. As a result of the change, move-ins did increase. In the six months before the housing team was established, the city moved 325 people into permanent supportive housing. In the six months after its creation, that number grew to 488.

In an email exchange with the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica in February, Megan Owens, who oversees much of the housing process of the city’s homelessness department, acknowledged that the policy “caused a huge delay” for adults living outside of the hotels.

In June, the department told the news organizations that it planned to open up a portion of permanent supportive housing vacancies to unhoused people living outside of shelter-in-place hotels. But the department offered no transparency about how units were being allocated.

Neither effort did enough to catch up to the growing supply. By September 2021, vacancies were at their height, with 1,064 permanent supportive housing units empty.

The delay in access to housing has been rough for people living outdoors. According to the official numbers, the current median wait time for a unit is 82 days.

But Owens admitted that the software the city uses doesn’t accurately track the time between being approved for housing and moving indoors. The city and federal government spent $8.5 million for that system over the past five years, but information on people trying to get indoors still isn’t recorded accurately.

For example, if someone doesn’t contact their case manager for 90 days, their spot on the waitlist expires. In acknowledgment of the long delays, at the start of 2021 the city automatically reinstated those applications, but the software then started the timeline over from scratch.

“The 300 people that expired off the queue and were reinstated in December and January are now listed as having waited 20 to 45 days, depending when they were reinstated, but their experience is that they’ve been waiting for months,” Owens explained.

That lack of clear data worries Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. People who are unsheltered “have very high needs, and they need to get into permanent supportive housing,” she said. “If you don’t keep good administrative data, you can’t track them. You can’t support them. You can’t find them. You can’t know what their situation is. It’s very important to have good data to make these programs work properly.”

Many of those who are waiting are living in city-sanctioned tent encampments in empty parking lots around the city.

A view inside the sanctioned tent encampment where Ladybird lived for 15 months, starting in late 2020 (Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press)

That’s where Ladybird, ineligible for housing under the policy that prioritizes hotel dwellers, lived for 15 months. (She requested the use of her nickname for this story due to complicated family matters; her identity was confirmed by a member of the city’s health department.)

After years on the streets, Ladybird committed herself to finding a home. She said she took the coordinated entry assessment for housing three times — going through a mandatory six-month wait between attempts. She was finally approved in November.

“Six months is a long time,” she said about the time between applications. “You basically have to be sitting out here waiting to be raped every night.” (A University of California San Francisco study found that 32% of women living outdoors reported instances of sexual or physical assault.)

Research backs up Ladybird’s experience. “The impact of waiting weeks, months or years in a shelter or outside rather than a home has devastating consequences for a person,” said Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. “Homelessness for even short periods of time has negative impacts on people’s physical, behavioral and mental health, can strain familial and social relations, have lasting impacts on future employment opportunities, and can entangle people in the criminal justice system.”

In the city-owned parking lot where Ladybird lived during the last year, her cheap camping tent, which rested on a wooden platform in a parking lot, got moldy during a wet winter. She developed pneumonia, and said rats would run around at night, hiding under the pallet she slept on.

“I can’t be there anymore,” she said when interviewed in December. “Your body goes through a lot being homeless. I’ve had pneumonia for two months now, from black mold on my tent. My tent is literally killing me.”

While the city said it is taking steps to mitigate delays, months of living in a wet tent site took its toll on residents. In text messages sent late one night, Ladybird described the chaos that had ensued as one of her neighbors had a mental breakdown. “This situation is getting worse by the day, it’s more twisted than anything I’ve seen in my decade out here,” she said. “I would be better off on the streets.”

The situation felt hopeless. “This site hasn’t placed anybody,” Ladybird said. “Anybody who’s getting out of there is doing it on their own. There’s no social worker. It’s just a dead end.”

Paperwork Bottlenecks Stall the Process of Moving People Indoors

A tall fence encircles a city-sanctioned tent encampment in San Francisco’s Mission District. (Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press)

While the policies of the last two years left people like Ladybird living outdoors, those living in shelter-in-place hotels haven’t always fared better, with some of them waiting more than a year to be connected to a home.

Marquita Stroud is one of those. She said that she has been homeless for 15 years, but that about a month before the COVID-19 outbreak began in earnest, she was approved for permanent supportive housing. “God was on my side!” she said when interviewed in December.

In April 2020, she was relocated to the Hotel Whitcomb, a historic tourist hotel repurposed to allow people experiencing homelessness to quarantine safely. Stroud was one of 500 homeless people the city moved from large, warehouse-style shelters into 25 hotels around town.

Stroud is an optimist, high-energy and cheerful, who wears her hair tied up neatly in a scarf. “It’s wet!” she exclaimed on a rainy morning, as she strode confidently down Market Street with an umbrella in one hand, pushing a cart containing her small, fluffy dog, Blue, with the other. She headed straight to a corner of the public library, a place she knows well.

Under COVID-19-era rules, Stroud isn’t allowed visitors where she lives, so she meets people at their apartments, outside or in public places. The prohibition on guests didn’t bother Stroud too much when she first moved in. But she felt isolated and, as the months dragged on, no one contacted her about moving into her own place. Stroud watched her friends and neighbors — many of whom arrived in the hotel the same day she did — move into permanent housing. Her turn never came.

In large part, that’s because the homelessness department’s process for reviewing and selecting unhoused people for referral is slow. And in the period when Stroud was waiting, things were markedly worse. In October 2020, 32% of vacant units had no pending referrals for a resident. In January, that ratio had more than doubled, to 66% of available units, according to the city’s own data. The department did not respond to questions about why this might be.

Gary ran eight buildings through DISH. In February 2021, before he stepped down, he said the problem wasn’t new, but it was getting worse.

“Somewhere there is a bottleneck where the city is not sending us the housing application — that is, the documented representation of that person that we can process,” he said. “We report the vacancy to the city, and those vacancies languish for weeks to months without a referral of a real live human being who can be housed.”

(Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica)

At least part of the problem is a shortage of case managers, who are the crucial link between vacant units and the hundreds of people approved for housing. There is frequent turnover in the high-stress positions, and nonprofits struggle to fill new job openings.

Stroud said she has been assigned six case managers in two years. To figure out who is assigned to her, she regularly checks a piece of paper taped to a wall in her hotel, which lists the name of the case manager assigned to each floor. She describes calling her case manager repeatedly to set up an appointment and not getting through.

“They pretty much don’t go knocking on your door,” Stroud said. “You got to ask for them. If I see one in the hallway — like if I see a worker talking to a client in the hallway — I always ask, ‘Are you a counselor? Are you my counselor?’ Because they don’t tell you.”

Nearly two years after being approved for a housing unit, Stroud is still at the Hotel Whitcomb. Although she dreams of going back to school, publishing her journals and giving back to the homeless community, her reality is much different. She’s had items stolen from her room, and the building has fallen into disrepair. “When we first got to this hotel, it was so cute,” she said. “Now they got the bedbugs, the roaches, the mice. Every other day, the pipes are messing up.”

Recently she met a woman who had recently moved into the Whitcomb, but was already on her way out: She’d been assigned a housing unit.

“I was asking her, what did she do to get her housing that quick? And she said her counselor just came knocking on her door like, ‘You ready to go?’” Stroud said, clearly frustrated. “I haven’t talked to anyone about housing,” she said this month, as she approaches her two-year anniversary at the hotel. “I’m still here just waiting.”

As for Ladybird, she was approved for housing in November, but three months later, she is still without a home. In January, she left the tent encampment for a short-term residential hotel, but it comes with a time limit. “After 28 days, we get put out.”

Are you currently homeless in San Francisco, and trying to get housing? Do you have experience with the city’s housing process? Email us at nuala@sfpublicpress.org.

by Justin Elliott

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

Faced with a class-action suit filed on behalf of customers who claim they were tricked into paying to file their taxes, TurboTax-maker Intuit knocked the case down. The company insisted its customers had agreed to forego their right to take their grievances to court and were required to use the private arbitration system instead.

But even as Intuit was winning in the class-action case, that very arbitration system was being weaponized against the Silicon Valley company.

A Chicago law firm is using a novel legal strategy by bankrolling customers bringing tens of thousands of arbitration claims against Intuit. Win or lose, this strategy could cost Intuit tens of millions of dollars in legal fees alone — a threat that could prod the company to be more open to a giant settlement.

Nearly three years after ProPublica first reported on how many customers wound up paying for TurboTax when they could have filed their taxes for free, Intuit is fighting a complex set of legal battles to stop consumers from trying to recover money.

Besides the huge number of consumer claims that have been filed, federal regulators and state-level prosecutors are also advancing efforts against the deep-pocketed company, which made $2 billion last year.

The most unusual front in the fight is the strategy to bring tens of thousands of individual consumer claims in arbitration, the alternative to the public court system that has historically been considered friendly to business.

The so-called mass-arbitration tactic was pioneered in recent years as the legal terrain became less friendly to class-action lawsuits, the traditional tool used to recover money for consumers through the court system.

The tactic is akin to using guerilla warfare rather than having soldiers mass on the battlefield and face each other in lines. The law firm pursuing Intuit, Keller Lenkner of Chicago, has generated attention for successfully using the strategy on behalf of delivery workers for DoorDash and Postmates.

Intuit has vigorously defended its practices, denying any wrongdoing in each case. It stresses that millions of people do file their taxes for free using TurboTax each year.

“Intuit was at all times clear and fair with its customers,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica, adding that it “not only did not hide free filing options from consumers, Intuit helped drive the adoption of free tax prep by helping more people file their taxes free of charge than all other online tax prep providers combined.”

Following ProPublica’s initial stories, Intuit was first sued in May 2019 in federal court. The case centered on customers who had to pay after starting the filing process using TurboTax’s Free Edition.

At the time, TurboTax maintained the heavily advertised Free Edition alongside a similarly named Free File product. The Free Edition routed some filers to a version of TurboTax that charged them a fee based on which tax forms they had to file.

Meanwhile, the Free File product, which was offered as part of a partnership with the IRS, did not route users to paid products and was truly free for anyone making less than an income threshold. But it was difficult to find. At one point Intuit added code to its website that removed the product from online search engine results. (The company later removed those lines of code.) A subsequent investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that in 2019 alone, more than 14 million tax filers paid for online tax prep software from TurboTax and other firms that they could have gotten for free. That amounted to roughly $1 billion in revenue for the industry.

The 2019 lawsuit was a traditional class-action case, in which plaintiffs’ lawyers sue a company on behalf of an entire category of consumers who have allegedly been harmed. If the plaintiffs prevail or the company settles, millions of people may be eligible to get money from the defendant.

But for decades, corporate America waged a successful battle against class-action suits, seeking to narrow their use. In recent years, companies got help from the Supreme Court, which issued a series of decisions that smothered many class-action lawsuits by making it easier for companies to hold customers to binding arbitration agreements. When consumers, including TurboTax users, sign up for a service, the terms-of-service contracts they click on often contain a buried clause that has them agreeing to pursue any grievance through private arbitration, not a lawsuit.

Studies have shown that hardly any users actually read these sprawling contracts. TurboTax’s current terms-of-use agreement, which still contains an arbitration clause, runs to over 15,000 words of dense legalese.

Arbitrations are handled in a private forum outside the court system. Crucially for business defendants, those claims are not bundled together, as class-action cases are. This fundamentally shifts the economic incentives: If one customer was defrauded of $50, it’s not worth a lawyer’s time to pursue the case. The calculus is different if a lawyer can represent an entire class of 20 million customers who each lost $50.

“It’s been just catastrophic for consumers and workers,” said Paul Bland of Public Justice, an advocacy nonprofit affiliated with plaintiff-side law firms. “It has wiped away tons of very well-merited and powerful cases where companies clearly break the law and they just get away with it because of the arbitration clauses.”

Business groups have argued that arbitration is a “simpler and more flexible” alternative to lawsuits and that class-action cases have served mainly to enrich plaintiffs’ lawyers.

After more than a year of litigation and an appeal, Intuit effectively won the federal class-action case against it by relying on TurboTax’s arbitration clause. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that TurboTax users had agreed to arbitration by clicking a “Sign In” button on the software that stated users agreed to the service’s terms of use. Those terms contained the arbitration clause.

In that clause, the law firm Keller Lenkner recognized an opportunity. The strategy pioneered by the firm essentially called the bluff of companies that required their workers and customers to settle claims via binding arbitration. It also took advantage of the fact that companies typically must pay fees to the private arbitration organization, running perhaps a few thousand dollars per case.

What makes the strategy even more unusual is that the firm does not have the typical pedigree of plaintiffs’ lawyers, who have long been a stalwart constituency of the Democratic Party. Keller Lenkner was founded by a pair of former clerks for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee; one also was a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh when he was a George W. Bush-appointed appeals judge.

If a handful of consumers pursue arbitration, the fees companies must pay amount to a rounding error. But if businesses are facing thousands of individual arbitrations — a tactic they didn’t anticipate — the potential fees quickly add up and companies can be pressured into settling. The strategy also requires deep pockets on the part of the plaintiffs’ law firm, since they advance money to their clients to cover a modest arbitration filing fee.

While the strategy has so far been used in only a small number of cases, an academic article on the phenomenon by Georgetown Law professor Maria Glover termed it a revolution of the civil justice landscape, “one in which virtually all Americans are subject to mandatory arbitration agreements with class-action waivers, and one wherein a broad swath of claims—for consumer fraud, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, wage theft, and workplace sexual harassment—have been all but eliminated.”

Keller Lenkner disclosed in a related court filing in 2020 that more than 100,000 consumers had sought individual arbitration against Intuit. The firm advanced the consumers several million dollars in filing fees.

Intuit has tried to stop the mass arbitrations. In late 2020, following the appeals court ruling that doomed the federal class-action lawsuit, the company offered to pay a settlement of $40 million in that case.

If the court had approved the class-action settlement, consumers who failed to opt out would not be able to pursue their arbitration claims. A settlement for the entire class of consumers could have knocked out many of the ongoing arbitrations for a relatively cheap price. Keller Lenkner objected to the settlement.

At a hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, a lawyer for Intuit complained that “the Keller firm is able to threaten companies — Intuit’s not alone — into paying $3,000 in arbitration fees, for a $100 claim.”

Breyer questioned whether the proposed settlement was in the best interest of consumers.

“I did think when I looked at this, and saw that, really, that this was a way to avoid or otherwise circumscribe arbitration, that it seemed to be that Intuit was, in Hamlet's words, hoisted by their own petard,” Breyer said, adding, “I think arbitration is the petard that Intuit now faces.” His comments were first reported by Reuters.

Breyer rejected the settlement in March 2021.

Since then, the arbitrations have proceeded slowly.

Limited data disclosed by one of the main arbitration organizations covers cases resolved through the end of 2021. It offers a glimpse of the arbitration dynamics, showing outcomes in a handful of cases: Intuit won at least nine and consumers won five, with the arbitrator awarding consumers as little as $35 and as much as $3,348. Intuit has continued to win most of the cases this year, according to a person familiar with the claims.

In one case, Intuit had to pay the consumer’s attorney fees of $9,500. In another, the plaintiff’s lawyers had to pay Intuit’s attorney fees of $5,025. Arbitrators can order the plaintiff to pay the company’s attorneys’ fees if a claim is deemed to be frivolous.

The data also shows several dozen cases that were either dismissed or settled, without giving any detail on how much money changed hands, if any.

The biggest hit for Intuit was on the cost of the arbitration itself, with administrative fees totaling more than $220,000 for around 125 cases. At that rate, 100,000 cases would cost the company more than $175 million in fees alone.

Legal filings suggest Intuit may have already paid tens of million dollars in arbitration fees by now, but public records of the payments won’t be disclosed until more arbitrations are completed.

Intuit has argued that many of the arbitration claims are bogus, and a lawyer for the company dubbed Keller Lenkner’s tactic “a scheme to exploit the consumer-arbitration fee structure to extort a settlement payment from Intuit.”

The lawyer also asserted that many of the claims involve users who either didn’t use TurboTax or did use it but filed for free. More than 1,000 cases — likely ones that fall into one of those two categories — have been withdrawn by Keller Lenkner, the public data shows.

In part because arbitrations are conducted in secret, it’s difficult to tell much about the success of the strategy in past mass arbitrations. Keller Lenkner has previously said that in a recent two-year period it secured more than $190 million for more than 100,000 individual clients, an average of $1,900 per client.

In a separate case filed against Intuit by the Los Angeles city attorney and Santa Clara County attorney on behalf of California consumers, the two sides are still fighting over what documents and data Intuit has to hand over. Both sides recently proposed a trial date of July 2023, but it has not yet been finalized.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission and a set of at least five state attorneys general are still actively investigating Intuit. Tech news outlet The Information reported last month that the FTC, now led by progressive chair Lina Khan, was pushing forward with the investigation despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that trimmed the agency’s authority in such cases.

One FTC commissioner, Rohit Chopra, voted to proceed with the case before he left the agency last October. But Chopra’s vote was in place only temporarily, according to a person familiar with the matter. The rest of the commission did not take up the matter at the time. An FTC spokesman declined to comment.

This year, the IRS Free File program allows anyone making less than $73,000 last year to use tax prep software and file a federal return for free.

But the program, which was originally conceived as an alternative to the IRS offering its own free filing service, is entering its first year without the participation of the two titans of the online tax prep industry. In 2019 and earlier years, TurboTax and H&R Block together accounted for around two-thirds of all filings through the program, according to ProPublica’s analysis. Intuit announced last year it was leaving the program “to focus on further innovating in ways not allowable under the current Free File guidelines.”

Only much smaller and less recognizable companies like TaxAct, TaxHawk and TaxSlayer, which only hold a sliver of the overall market, remain.

Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger contributed reporting.

by Megan O’Matz

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.

After the judge in her Wisconsin divorce case ruled that her ex-husband — a man who had sought treatment for anger and alcohol issues — would get legal custody of and equal time with their four children, Julie Valadez vowed to fight back.

But in every key ruling that followed, the Waukesha County Circuit Court judge overseeing her case, Michael J. Aprahamian, found Valadez’s concerns about her ex-husband not credible and her actions unacceptable. Aprahamian took away her ability to co-parent her children. He held her in contempt four times. And after Aprahamian ordered her arrest, she braced herself for jail.

Valadez, whose accusations of domestic abuse had led to her husband’s arrest, ran through a string of attorneys and represented herself at times. Eventually she found a Milwaukee civil rights attorney to represent her, along with a public defender, and enlisted the help of a Washington, D.C., legal service for domestic violence survivors.

And in recent weeks, with a pair of rare appeals court victories and Aprahamian’s decision to remove himself from the case, Valadez has found reason to hope that better days are ahead for her and her children.

Appellate reversals in these kinds of cases are unusual, in part because of the time and money it takes to pursue them. Valadez’s case provides a window into the largely unexplored world of family court, the appeals process and the problems encountered by women who say they’ve been victims of domestic abuse.

A common concern in these situations is that family courts will favor shared custody even if one parent says the other is abusive, sometimes misapplying the law and forcing long, expensive legal battles. ProPublica reported in September on another woman’s lengthy family court ordeal, which also took place in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, but before a different judge. That story explored how Wisconsin courts, in working to give fathers equal parenting rights, often fail to deal with the complexities that arise in these cases and downplay women’s concerns about their own safety and that of their children.

State systems, according to women’s advocates, often put mothers who survived domestic violence at a disadvantage, liable to be seen as noncooperative when the court seeks some sort of compromise.

Valadez, believing that her case was being mishandled, went to great lengths to be heard while also fending off accusations that she was unruly or was somehow failing to do what’s best for her children.

Then, late last year, Valadez won her state appeal challenging Aprahamian’s custody decision on the basis that Ricardo Valadez, her former husband, had not completed the legally required treatment for domestic abusers. In its rebuke, the state Court of Appeals in Waukesha County found Aprahamian had “failed to explicitly apply the proper legal standard” required in cases involving domestic abuse.

The court stated in its Dec. 29 opinion that the judge “read words into the statute that are not there” and “ignored words that are there.” It ordered Aprahamian to reconsider the Valadez decision.

In the wake of that ruling, a January court session drew several spectators from the community: mothers who wore “#Julie4Change” T-shirts, a reference to a website Julie Valadez set up to bring attention to her legal quest.

But from the bench, Aprahamian declined to immediately alter the custody arrangement. The two sides were ordered to appear in court again at a later date.

“Why do we have to wait that long?” Valadez whispered to her attorney.

Weeks later, in early February, Valadez won at the appellate level again, as the court found that the judge had erred when he held her in contempt for emailing him after he had told her not to, failing to sign a release of records and refusing to undergo a psychological exam.

The contempt charges were a reflection of the tense atmosphere inside the court and how Valadez’s own actions have come under heavy scrutiny.

Ricardo Valadez’s lawyer has said that Julie Valadez has made unsubstantiated claims against her ex-husband and undermined the relationship between father and children. Guardians ad litem appointed by the court to determine the best interests of the children also have generally favored her ex-husband and supported the idea that Julie Valadez is being unreasonable. The judge, meanwhile, described her as disruptive and unwilling to follow his instructions.

Aprahamian has since acquiesced to her request for a new judge and is now off the case. He said he could not discuss the case with ProPublica. Ricardo Valadez, through his attorney, also declined to comment.

The victories have given Julie Valadez a measure of satisfaction, but they have yet to produce the desired effect: She’s still separated by court order from her four children, ages 8 to 16. The next hearing is set for Thursday.

“It’s been torture,” Valadez said of the legal battle that’s been going on since 2018 and now includes more than 800 documents. “I don’t even know what will happen to our family; it’s truly horrifying.”

Alcohol, Outbursts and a Fractured Marriage

Julie Valadez was a bride at 19 and a mother at 21. Her husband was 27 when they married. He studied to become a pastor and also sold life insurance.

They had three more children over their 16-year union, and Julie spent her days taking care of the brood and doing volunteer work. Two of the children are autistic, and she primarily handled the doctor’s appointments and school schedule and arranged for help from behavioral therapists, life-skill helpers and outside specialists.

In court papers, she described enduring her husband’s intimidating and violent outbursts, property damage, verbal insults and alcohol abuse. In about 2014 she took refuge for a couple of days at a domestic violence shelter, her husband acknowledged on the witness stand. She then returned home.

The Valadez marriage hit a breaking point in December 2017 when, according to a criminal complaint, Ricardo Valadez came home drunk, yelled and cursed at his wife for being on her cellphone and smashed an iron to pieces. Officers with the City of Waukesha Police Department found him “visibly intoxicated,” handcuffed him and took him out of the house.

He was formally charged months later, in May 2018, with one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor classified as domestic abuse. It later was downgraded to a municipal ordinance violation after he started participating in counseling.

At one point, Ricardo Valadez described his therapy sessions in criminal court, saying: “I cried, and I dealt with my alcohol issues. We dealt with my anger issues. We dealt with, obviously, my whole life changing, no longer in a marriage and seeing my children as much as I wanted to see my children.”

He added, “I continue to do counseling just because I want to improve myself as a person. I want to be a better dad, obviously providing for my children.”

He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.

By then, Julie Valadez had filed for divorce and secured a restraining order against him, describing incidents of stalking, harassment and violence, according to court records. “He always has threatened me if I was to ever leave him,” she wrote in her request for the restraining order. “He has said a number of times that he would kill me; and if I was ever with someone else, he’d kill them.”

At one point during the divorce, Valadez said, she abandoned her home and moved with her children to a protected address under Wisconsin’s Safe at Home program.

Wisconsin’s family law prizes cooperation between exes, but the law anticipates that interaction between parents in abusive relationships can present a dangerous, if not lethal, situation.

The law instructs court-appointed attorneys for children, called guardians ad litem, to investigate possible domestic abuse in families and then advise judges on their findings. A 2021 study by the University of Wisconsin, however, found that guardians ad litem typically don’t have enough resources for evidence collection or expert help, and they lack training about domestic abuse.

Julie Valadez has argued in her case that the initial guardian ad litem did not investigate the abusive dynamics in her marriage; she alleged that a second such attorney, appointed later during the appeal, dragged her and her ex back into court over parenting issues after the custody decision, even though neither parent had filed a motion requesting circuit court intervention about the children.

As the case wore on, Julie Valadez exasperated the court officials, including the guardians ad litem and the judge. Aprahamian deemed some of her allegations about her ex-husband “vindictive and picayune.”

As a result of her complaints, police arrested her ex-husband twice for allegedly violating the restraining order — once after he sent her reproachful electronic messages about money and once after he stepped inside the house when she wasn’t there to bring a child to a school bus. Ricardo Valadez was not prosecuted for entering the home and was found not guilty of violating the restraining order for sending the messages.

Kurt M. Schuster, Ricardo’s attorney, accused Julie in court filings of creating an unsettling environment for her children. “I don’t think she’s capable of putting her children’s best interest above her own,” Schuster said in an interview.

To Julie Valadez, the notion that she has benefited in any way from the custody battle is laughable. For instance, she said, she took a huge financial hit when she left the large house that her husband was making payments on for an apartment she had to pay for.

“It was a disaster for me,” she said. “I lost everything.”

A Skeptical Judge

The Valadez divorce trial, in early 2020, lasted five days.

Julie Valadez testified in detail about her allegations of abusive behavior by her husband. She recalled one incident in which she said he was “very drunk and being aggressive verbally and physically” as they struggled over car keys and another in which she said he grabbed her arm “to the point where it hurt and left red marks.” She testified that he threatened her, saying she would regret leaving him and he would “make me pay for this.”

She described for the judge outbursts by her husband where, she said, he punched holes in the walls of their homes. “He had punched them next to my head or he kicked a hole in the wall,” she said in court.

While on the stand, Ricardo Valadez refused to answer certain pointed questions about his wife’s allegations of domestic violence, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The questions included: “Isn’t it true you have physically hurt Miss Valadez?”

Aprahamian issued a 34-page decision in April 2020.

He agreed with recommendations by a court-appointed social worker and the first guardian ad litem that the couple exchange the children weekly. The handoffs were to be done at a police station.

Shared legal custody, however, was a different matter because of questions whether the former spouses could cooperate (although the social worker thought it unwise for either of them to act without the other’s input). Julie Valadez argued that a restraining order she obtained in 2018 against her husband made communicating with each other problematic and that she alone should have legal custody.

Aprahamian made note in his ruling of Ricardo Valadez’s 2017 arrest. Referencing incidents that spurred the divorce filing, the judge wrote that there was a “pattern of domestic abuse occurring coincident to the initiation of this case.” But he said he would not take into consideration Julie Valadez’s other accusations.

“The Court does not find credible Ms. Valadez’s other allegations of abuse and battery, including uncorroborated allegations of sexual abuse, physical abuse, stalking and property damage,” Aprahamian concluded.

The judge acknowledged that Ricardo Valadez, whom he described as an alcoholic, had lied to the court about his sobriety. Still, he wrote, “As a general matter, the Court found Ms. Valadez not credible.”

“She was evasive in answering questions and repeatedly asked to have simple, straightforward questions repeated prior to answer,” Aprahamian ruled.

For example, asked by the then guardian ad litem Katherine J. De Lorenzo if she believed she could cooperate with her ex-husband if awarded joint legal custody, Julie Valadez said at trial: “I have been cooperative.”

“Can you answer the question?” the judge asked.

“If I would be cooperative, is the question? Can you repeat your question?” she replied.

De Lorenzo obliged but warned: “Try and listen to my questions. They’re pretty simply stated, Ms. Valadez.”

Valadez said in an interview that in this and other similar instances she merely was trying to make sure she understood what she was being asked.

Aprahamian concluded that Ricardo Valadez “likely would put his children’s interests above his own.” He ruled that Ricardo should have sole legal custody, giving him control of decision-making on major issues in the children’s lives, though he was instructed not to change the kids’ school or doctors.

For Julie Valadez, the ruling was a harsh blow. She worried about how her ex would manage all the special services the children needed and about his drinking and anger issues.

“It was just a dangerous situation,” she said. “To me it seems obvious.”

She first undertook handling her own appeal in June 2020 but later had assistance from Washington, D.C., attorney Jay C. Johnson, acting as pro bono co-counsel with DV LEAP, a nonprofit that seeks to help victims pursue appeals in cases involving domestic violence.

Judges have wide discretion in custody cases and appeals are rare, said Elizabeth Vogel, DV LEAP’s managing attorney. Many litigants in family court don’t have a trial attorney, discover it’s hard to find an attorney to pursue an appeal and face short deadlines to file challenges.

DV LEAP saw merit in Julie Valadez’s case because the judge had recognized a pattern of domestic abuse but had concluded wrongly that her husband still had satisfied conditions for custody despite not receiving adequate counseling.

“Julie’s case is, sadly, such an excellent example of how judges take liberties in their reasoning to get around statutes that are meant to protect survivors,” Vogel said.

The Court of Appeals agreed that Ricardo Valadez was not entitled to sole legal custody because he had not shown he had successfully completed state-mandated treatment for batterers from a certified program.

Also, though Aprahamian required “absolute sobriety” from Ricardo and ordered the exchange of children at the police department, the appellate court ruled he did not make the safety of Julie and her children a “paramount concern” in determining who the children would live with, as required by state law.

Reversing the judgment by Aprahamian, the appellate court sent the case back to family court for reconsideration.

After the favorable appellate court ruling, Johnson tweeted that the decision “sets strong precedent for domestic abuse victims who are seeking custody of their children.”

Appealing to a Higher Court

During the year and a half that the case was on appeal, Vogel said in an interview, Aprahamian appeared to subject Julie Valadez to “an extreme level of retaliation” through his multiple rulings.

That’s not unheard of. Women across the country have told ProPublica that family courts have not only overlooked their allegations of domestic abuse but have acted to punish them by taking away much or all of their time with their children for making what the court considers to be false, or minor, allegations of abuse.

When these women openly complain, file motions or defy the court orders, judges can view them as mentally unfit or hold them in contempt.

In Valadez’s case, tensions between her and the judge never seemed to abate, and along the way she lost the ability to regularly see her children.

Aprahamian appointed a new guardian ad litem, Molly Jasmer, in September 2020 to interact with the appellate court and represent the children’s best interests.

In April 2021, Jasmer filed a 38-page brief with the appellate court outlining why Aprahamian’s ruling was correct. The brief was also signed by Ricardo Valadez’s attorney.

A month earlier, Aprahamian had taken away Julie Valadez’s parenting time with her second oldest child, then 13, after she didn’t make the boy available to meet with Jasmer. Because the judge had already ruled on custody a year earlier, Valadez questioned Jasmer’s involvement.

Jasmer declined to comment for this story.

Valadez contested the no-contact order not just in family court but in a suit she brought against Aprahamian and Jasmer in federal court in June 2021. That suit was dismissed.

“From my standpoint, it’s not personal,” Aprahamian said of the federal suit in a July hearing on the Valadez custody case. “It’s like ‘The Godfather.’ This is just business.”

Less than a month later, Aprahamian issued a bench warrant for Julie Valadez’s arrest for failing to comply with his directive to sign over certain records and undergo a psychological exam requested by Jasmer. At the same hearing, he suspended her parenting time — in effect, preventing her from seeing any of her children except under limited, supervised circumstances.

Her attorney at the time, Will Green, was taken aback. “Holy cow,” he said in court.

“Am I saying she is going to cause harm to them intentionally? That’s not what I’m saying,” the judge explained. “I’m finding she’s taken steps that are not in the best interests of the children and continues to do so.”

The judge had expressed frustration, for example, with Valadez bringing her children along with her when she served Jasmer with the federal suit.

Psychological testing is widely used in custody cases when there is a concern about a parent’s fitness.

The use of such tests, however, can be unwise when there’s a history of abuse, according to the Domestic Abuse Guidebook for Wisconsin Guardians Ad Litem. Abuse victims, it notes, may reasonably show symptoms associated with a large range of mental health difficulties, such as anxiety, paranoia, trouble sleeping, frequent worry or blaming others for their problems.

Ricardo Valadez was not asked to undergo such an exam.

“I was found to be a fit parent,” Julie Valadez said of the initial custody order. “I was never found to be an unfit parent. They had provided no valid reason for me to have a psych eval.”

Aside from some therapy sessions together, she said, she hasn’t had any significant time with her one son for nearly a year and her other three children for several months.

Valadez avoided jail when the Waukesha County public defender’s office got involved and persuaded the Court of Appeals in September 2021 to quash the bench warrant and stay the jail term during her appeal of the custody decision.

She received additional help when, last fall, William F. Sulton, a Milwaukee civil rights attorney, agreed to represent her.

“The case is so unusual in that the judge tried to put her in jail,” Sulton said. “So I really believe she was at risk of losing her liberty.”

Said Sulton: “Unfortunately, the court system does not treat unrepresented people with the respect that they deserve. And so it is not uncommon to see judges and other lawyers singling out, with draconian measures, people who are unrepresented.”

In reversing Aprahamian earlier this month, the appeals court found that the type of contempt the judge used was “punitive” and not lawful — except in one instance when the judge used it to preserve order in the court when he took issue with Julie interrupting him. It vacated the three other contempt rulings.

Getting those rulings took months of perseverance, as Valadez chased down transcripts, switched attorneys, filed court documents and appeals and studied the intricacies of Wisconsin law and court procedures. She believes her appeals exacerbated tensions inside Aprahamian’s courtroom.

“They didn’t want this,” she said. “It’s a big deal to get reversed like they did."

At the crux of the appellate court’s ruling in the custody case were the counseling sessions Ricardo Valadez attended as a result of his criminal case and Aprahamian’s decision to accept those as proof of rehabilitation even though they weren’t certified by the Wisconsin Batterers Treatment Providers Association.

Ricardo Valadez’s lawyer said his client has received additional counseling. A few days after Christmas, he filed a new document with the court stating Valadez completed a 20-week domestic violence treatment program from a certified provider.

Aprahamian’s replacement will now have to rule on custody and other related issues. Sulton said in an interview that the latest treatment program completed by Valadez should be disregarded because it came too late and is inadequate because there is no proof it reduces violence.

Still to be determined is when Julie Valadez can be an active mother to her children again.

“I just want to get my kids back,” she said. Their Christmas gifts, she said, are still waiting for them, by the fireplace in her apartment.

by Steven Lee Myers and Paul Mozur, The New York Times, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica

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

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

Read in Chinese • 阅读简体中文版

Inside the Potemkin village of China’s propaganda, the Winter Olympics have unfolded as an unalloyed success, a celebration of sports and political harmony that has obscured — critics say whitewashed — the country’s flaws and rights abuses.

At Beijing 2022, the hills are snowy, not brown as usual this time of year. A Uyghur skier is the symbol of national unity, the tennis player Peng Shuai just a curious spectator. Athletes and foreign journalists praise the polite volunteers and marvel at the high-speed trains and the robots that boil dumplings and mix drinks.

While China’s control of what its domestic viewers and readers consume is well established, the country has spread its own version of the Games beyond its borders, with an arsenal of digital tools that are giving China’s narrative arguably greater reach and subtlety than ever before.

With bots, fake accounts, genuine influencers and other tools, China has been able to selectively edit how the events have appeared, even outside the country, promoting everything that bolsters the official, feel-good story about the Winter Olympics and trying to smother whatever doesn’t.

“For the Chinese Communist Party, the Winter Olympics are inseparable from the broader political goal of building up the country’s national image,” said David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, a monitoring organization. Referring to the country’s leader, he added: “This is what Xi Jinping has called ‘telling China’s story well.’”

On Twitter, which is banned in China, Chinese state media outlets and journalists, as well as diplomats, have tried to buff the image of the Games, raving about venues and cooing over the Olympic mascot.

An account called Spicy Panda used artificially boosted posts to accuse the United States of attempting to “stain the Olympics.” Notations were added by ProPublica. (Screenshot from Twitter by ProPublica)

China has also sought to influence online discussions in more concealed ways. The New York Times and ProPublica identified a network of more than 3,000 inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state media posts with identical comments, for instance. Such accounts tended to be recently created with very few followers, tweeted mostly reposts and nothing of their own, and appeared to operate solely to amplify official Chinese voices.

Some of their efforts have centered on an account called Spicy Panda, which has been posting cartoons and videos to push back against calls for a boycott of the Olympics. In one cartoon, Spicy Panda accused the United States of wielding “its deceiving propaganda weapon to stain the Olympics.”

The tweet was reposted 281 times, all by the fake-looking accounts, but received little other engagement, a strong indication that the network was mobilized to promote the message. Aside from the bursts of promotion, Spicy Panda’s posts about the Olympics received almost no attention.

Watch video ➜

An analysis of Spicy Panda’s supporters turned up 861 accounts — 90% of which were created after Dec. 1. The accounts’ first wave of coordinated posts pushed Beijing’s stance that Hong Kong’s Legislative Council elections were legitimate, though critics have called the vote a sham. Then the accounts turned their attention to the Olympics. (By Thursday, all but one of the accounts had been suspended, shortly after the Times and ProPublica asked Twitter about them.)

Posts by Spicy Panda received hundreds of reposts but little other engagement, strongly suggesting coordinated promotion. Notations were added by ProPublica. (Screenshots from Twitter by ProPublica)

Spicy Panda appears to have a connection with iChongqing, a state media-linked multimedia platform based in Chongqing, a city in central China. The accounts that shared Spicy Panda’s posts often did the same with the tweets by iChongqing’s account. IChongqing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other botlike accounts promoted hashtags that seemed aimed at drowning out criticism of China, a hallmark of previous campaigns.

They promoted content under hashtags like #Beijing2022 and #TogetherForASharedFuture, this year’s official Olympic motto. Some accounts repeatedly posted tweets with identical wording, such as: “China’s hosting of the #Beijing2022 as scheduled has boosted the world’s confidence in defeating the pandemic.”

Twitter said in an emailed statement that it had suspended hundreds of the accounts identified by the Times and ProPublica for violations of its platform manipulation and spam policies. It said it was continuing to investigate the accounts’ links to state-backed information operations.

Beijing's Olympic mascot Bing Dwen Dwen. (Photo by Lian Zhen/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Even the Games’ official mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, a cuddly panda in a suit of ice, has been the subject of an organized campaign on Twitter, according to Albert Zhang, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center.

Thousands of new or previously inactive accounts have helped the mascot go viral, he said — which China’s state media presented as evidence of the mascot’s popularity and, by extension, that of the Games.

“If you want to push out a lot of content on something like the Beijing Olympics, this is an easy way to do it,” Zhang said. He added that the campaign now underway was like others sponsored by the Chinese state to push Beijing’s narrative on topics such as COVID-19 and the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The information space inside China is not unlike the elaborate measures that have created the “closed loop” that keeps athletes, journalists and other participants strictly segregated from the general public.

Inside the “closed loop” of official propaganda, the state carefully curates almost anything ordinary Chinese people see or read. The effect has been an Olympics free of scandal or criticism or bad news.

When the United States men’s hockey team played an overmatched Chinese team, the game was not shown on the main state television sports channel, CCTV 5, and the 8-0 defeat was mentioned only glancingly in news reports. A state media slide show devoted to the men’s figure skating competition conspicuously omitted the gold medalist, Nathan Chen of the United States.

In Chinese footage of the Games, the mountains where many competitions are being held have been deftly framed to exclude the dry, brown slopes in the background, until Day 8 when a snowstorm covered them in a frosting of white.

One of the biggest political stories of these Games has also unfolded outside China’s internet firewall: the appearance of Peng Shuai, the professional tennis player and three-time Olympian who created a furor when she accused a senior Communist Party leader of sexually assaulting her.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, met her for dinner, as he promised he would when the global outcry over her fate threatened to overshadow the Games. Peng has appeared at curling and figure skating, among other events. None of that was shown inside China, where all references to her accusations have been erased.

“It’s absolutely critical to understand that this is not just another narrative,” Bandurski, of the China Media Project, said of the Olympics. “It’s a narrative that implies widespread censorship and the manipulation of public opinion, which is actually policy.”

Jack Stubbs, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a social media monitoring company, said his firm had observed another Chinese propaganda network using foreign social media platforms, including Facebook. The network, which the company has dubbed Spamouflage, has spread videos emphasizing the Olympics as environmentally friendly and crooning about strengthening Chinese-Russian ties, punctuated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s attendance at the opening ceremony.

A video posted to Facebook by a fake account identified by the social media monitoring company Graphika criticized American media outlets’ reporting on the Ukraine conflict as “provoking China Russian relations.” (Facebook)

China has defended its use of Twitter and Facebook, platforms that it bans at home. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said last year that such sites were an “extra channel” to combat negative portrayals in the West.

One American company, Vippi Media Inc., based in New Jersey, signed a $300,000 contract with the Consulate General of China in New York to help promote the Games, according to the company’s filing with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

New Jersey-based Vippi Media Inc. signed a $300,000 contract with China to help promote the Games. (Screenshot obtained from FARA eFile database by ProPublica)

Under the contract, first reported by the research group Open Secrets, the company has been promoting the Games by recruiting “social media stars” to post on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, the company’s founder, Vipinder Jaswal, said in a telephone interview.

“They were very clear and I was very clear that it’s about the Olympics and the Olympics only, nothing to do with politics,” he said.

Once the Games began, the drama of the sports themselves dominated attention. Protests over China’s human rights record have not materialized, as some activists hoped. On the contrary, many athletes have heaped praise.

“When you really meet the people here and talk to them,” Jenise Spiteri, the American snowboarder competing for Malta, said in a state media interview, “everyone has a very good heart.”

Spicy Panda tweeted a state media report about another American competitor, the freestyle skier Aaron Blunck. In remarks posted by the official China Daily newspaper, Blunck praised China’s COVID-19 protocols.

“#AaronBlunck revealed the real China that is totally different from what some American media have said!” Spicy Panda’s post read.

Spicy Panda posted positive comments by American athletes about China’s administration of the Games. (Screenshot from Twitter by ProPublica)

Claire Fu and John Liu of The New York Times contributed reporting.

by Bianca Fortis

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

When President Joe Biden was campaigning for office, he said that to beat the coronavirus, the U.S. needed the testing equivalent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board.

That board had sweeping powers to shift the country’s economy to support the war effort, and it ultimately oversaw a reported 40% of the world’s munition production during World War II.

“It’s how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time,” the Biden campaign website said. “And it’s how we can produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.”

The day after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order creating the Pandemic Testing Board. He said he would be putting the “full force of the federal government” behind expanding testing.

A year later, though, it’s remarkably hard to tell what the board has done.

As far as we can find, the group has put out no press releases, held no hearings and made no announcements. Biden’s executive order states that the head of the board would be, or be chosen by, the White House’s head of COVID-19 response. That’s Jeffrey Zients, but when we contacted him, he didn’t respond.

When we asked White House officials about the Pandemic Testing Board — who was on it and what actions it had taken — they declined to answer our questions and pointed us to the Department of Health and Human Services.

That agency did respond to our inquiries about the board, but its answers offered few details about the board’s work. It did not say who is on the panel or what decisions it has made.

“The Pandemic Testing Board serves as the forum where agencies across the federal government which are involved in testing can describe emerging challenges and what they are learning,” the agency said. “It provides a mechanism for addressing policy and implementation issues regarding the supply and distribution of tests, as well as increasing access to and affordability of tests in the community.”

The agency’s full statement also notes that the board has met regularly and has been split into two groups, one focused on test supply and the other on testing policies.

Public health experts told us they, too, hadn’t heard much about the board.

“I had assumed that they jettisoned these plans,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “If it still exists, it is certainly very low profile,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. The country’s first coronavirus testing czar, Adm. Brett Giroir, said he knew little about it as well. “It is rumored to have met, but I did not see public disclosure or reports from the meetings.”

Of course, the inner workings of a board are less important than whether the government is getting the job done. But as ProPublica detailed in November, the Biden administration has been slow to roll out wider testing — just what the board was created to do.

In October, White House officials reportedly disregarded a proposal from testing experts to send rapid tests directly to Americans in anticipation of a COVID-19 spike during the holidays. Press secretary Jen Psaki also infamously dismissed the idea in a December briefing.

Later that month, the Biden administration announced it would send tests directly to Americans. But the tests are arriving just as the omicron wave is receding, and critics have argued that the effort shortchanges communities of color.

“I think it’s damn well about time,” said David Paltiel, a professor of public health at Yale University. “It’s never too late, but some of us have been screaming and yelling about the idea for more than 18 months.”

There was no shortage of money for expanding testing. As part of last year’s stimulus package, Congress appropriated nearly $48 billion for testing, contact tracing and other efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That is in addition to $48 billion set aside for testing in 2020.

But just like with the board’s activities, details about where exactly the money has gone have been hard to come by. Since the Biden administration hadn’t released a breakdown, we submitted a request for specifics more than two months ago.

Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Roy Blunt, R-Mo., sent a letter on Jan. 3 asking for similar information. After Burr’s office shared what it had learned, the Biden administration sent ProPublica a one-page rundown of COVID-19 spending last week.

The allocations thus far include: $10 billion for testing in schools, $9 billion for manufacturing testing supplies, nearly $5 billion for testing uninsured individuals, and more than $4 billion for testing and mitigation measures for high-risk populations. Nearly $3.9 billion went toward free community testing at pharmacies and federally qualified health centers, and $2.9 billion went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for expanding labs and testing capacity. More than $1.9 billion has gone toward COVID-19 testing of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border. About $3.6 billion is listed as simply “activities previously planned for PPPHCEA,” a reference to the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The Indian Health Service received an additional $1.5 billion. Another $4.4 billion is still pending allocation.

Mara Aspinall, an Arizona State University professor and an adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation on the subject of COVID-19 testing, has been tracking HHS press releases to figure out how the stimulus funds have been spent, since the numbers are not publicly disclosed. She said testing should have been more of a focus since the beginning of the pandemic, but there’s still plenty left to do.

“There are a lot of indications that the federal government and state governments are understanding the power of the information that tests bring,” she said. “But what we can’t repeat is the error of last spring thinking it was over and therefore not continuing to focus.”

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Lydia DePillis contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Karim Doumar

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our data newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

In October 2021, ProPublica published a gutting and outrageous narrative of a juvenile court judge who oversaw a system that jailed children at extraordinary rates, and a county full of officials who collaborated or looked the other way.

In one particularly egregious case that reporters Meribah Knight and Ken Armstrong found, several Black children were arrested at school and jailed for a crime that didn’t even exist. Two police officers who were sent to arrest them couldn’t help but wonder: If the kids had been white, would any of this have happened? A lot of readers wondered, too. Counterfactuals like that bring up a point worth flexing some investigative muscle on, even if they are challenging to answer definitively.

Ken and Meribah had discovered a story that showed that the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth had tracked how often counties violated the law by jailing kids for longer than allowed, at least up to 1999. But it was unclear if the state still collected or kept that information, and if so if it would be willing to share it. In an effort to give some scope to the issues in Rutherford County, Ken and Meribah put in a records request, but didn’t hold their breath.

This is something reporters grapple with all the time. When do we stop gathering facts and write the article? Can we tell this story without a specific piece of information? Should we wait and see, or is what we have found too important not to publish now?

In this case, since Ken and Meribah didn’t quite know what the reports would show, and they had already uncovered disturbing realities about how the Rutherford County juvenile justice system was run through other documents, depositions, interviews and more, they worked with what they had.

After the story published, the data they’d requested showed up with a surprise. Not only did the state have records going back 11 years, the reports also held aggregate totals of the children sent to jail and their races, too.

OK, bear with me as I quickly dive into the mechanics of what happened next. The data consisted of dozens of monthly inspection reports the commission had done for the juvenile detention center in Rutherford County, saved as PDFs. The PDFs included counts of children jailed, the county they came from and their races. Meribah and Ken brought ProPublica’s deputy data editor Hannah Fresques on board. To analyze the data, she needed it compiled neatly. So Ken spent a day or two moving the information by hand from the PDFs into a Google spreadsheet. (I’m sure many of you data practitioners are familiar with the soothing monotony of manual data entry.)

Hannah then used one of the most advanced, complex and highbrow techniques known to humankind. Just kidding — she used a pivot table. Pivot tables are like Data Analysis 101. They allow you to take data sets and sort, analyze and summarize them in different ways.

So Ken had compiled a spreadsheet that had the numbers of children booked into jail by each race every year for the last 11 years, and Hannah pivoted the spreadsheet to show totals by race.

The results: 38% of children Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system sent to jail were Black.

That number means pretty much nothing out of context, so the reporters used census data to compare the rate to the Rutherford County population at large.

The results: From 2010-2019, between 14% and 16% of children in Rutherford county were Black. Far below the 38% of jailed children.

That’s a huge racial disparity. But there was more context to add still.

This is where data reporting, and especially racial disparity data, can get dicey. To me, that seemed like a huge and shocking disparity. Front page news. Stop the presses. To Ken, who has been reporting on the criminal justice system for decades, it seemed expected. (Not acceptable and definitely in need of attention, but certainly not surprising.)

In fact, The Sentencing Project showed that in 2019, 41% of the children incarcerated nationally were Black, even though Black children make up only 15% of the nation’s youth.

And that’s consistent with how a lot of data reporting goes, especially when journalists uncover racial disparities. To the people paying attention, especially people living through inequalities, the journalists haven’t “uncovered” anything at all. It’s hardly even news.

“We're so used to seeing how profoundly unfair the criminal justice system is that we're almost numb to it. And then when you see something that lines up with your expectations, the temptation’s to just shrug your shoulders and say, yeah, I thought so,” Ken told me.

But there was another piece of context to check, to see if Rutherford County stood out. Hannah created another pivot table to see how the disparity had changed over time.

The results: While the racial disparity in most of the country had been decreasing for years, in Rutherford County, it was only getting larger. So even though its disparity was roughly consistent with the nation’s, we were still able to show that something is different in Rutherford County.

This straightforward analysis exemplifies the power of ProPublica’s data team. “We’re trying to document some basic on-the-ground realities,” Hannah said about the data team’s work. “These racial disparities were not things previously documented and were not public.”

But there’s still more information you’d need to make sense of the data, and it can’t be found with a pivot table or any other advanced methodology. I’m talking about causes and effects.

Doing the analysis to definitively document reality allows for more accurate next-step reporting lines.

Here’s what I mean.

In a lot of ProPublica projects, data like this might prompt reporters to ask some important questions: Who is responsible for this disparity? Why is it getting larger? What does it look like to the actual children going to jail, or to their families?

We published a great example of this just a few weeks ago. Data ProPublica obtained and analyzed showed that Black and Latino drivers in Chicago were getting a disproportionate amount of tickets from traffic cameras. But traffic cameras are supposed to take racial bias out of the equation. So the reporters dug in to try to understand what the disparity might really be exposing. They found that pedestrian- and bike-friendly infrastructure like bike lanes, large sidewalks, medians and crosswalks do a whole lot to slow cars down and are much more prevalent in white neighborhoods.

That context allowed the reporters to find a very simple but damning truth: Some of the factors that contribute to ticketing disparities, such as wider streets and lack of sidewalks in low-income communities of color, also make those neighborhoods more dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and even motorists.

And independent of the factors that caused the ticketing disparity, there was a clear effect. As that story says: “Black neighborhoods have been hit with more than half a billion dollars in penalties over the last 15 years, contributing to thousands of vehicle impoundments, driver’s license suspensions and bankruptcies, according to ProPublica’s analysis.”

In the case of Rutherford County, though, the data that documented the on-the-ground realities came after the initial investigation was published. Even without the data, Ken and Meribah were able to write a piece that examined the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County and exposed mishaps, wrongdoing, unfairness and more. It was punctuated by members of the system themselves wondering aloud about how racism had played a part in their work. It dove deep into the background of the Judge Donna Scott Davenport, who oversaw the court and the jail, and readers walked away with real questions about her qualifications, motivations and actions. (Davenport declined to comment for the initial investigation and did not respond to a request for comment about the racial disparity information. Since the first investigation was published, Davenport has lost her adjunct instructor position at Middle Tennessee State University and announced she was retiring from the bench, saying, in part “I am so proud of what this Court has accomplished in the last two decades and how it has positively affected the lives of young people and families in Rutherford County.)

You didn’t need the data showing racial disparities to know something was wrong. The reporters proved it in other ways, too. The data confirmed it.

The team at ProPublica is committed to the hard work of crunching the numbers to understand the truth as best as possible and digging past those numbers to understand how disparities come to be and the actors and systems responsible for them. We’re always wondering: What realities does this data expose?

Because data without context only gets you part of the way toward understanding the truth.

by Eli Hager

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This story was co-published with The Washington Post.

Those in Congress who are blocking President Biden’s proposed child tax credit — a monthly federal stipend for families with children of up to $300 per child — have been making a curious claim of late. They’ve been saying that there is already a highly effective cash assistance program for low-income parents and kids: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

If the child tax credit were to be provided to these families going forward, “all the requirements that apply to those receiving TANF … would be gone,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in October.

Doing so would “shatter a decades-old consensus” that TANF has successfully transitioned people from welfare to work, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., added in December.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and key Democratic swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin, W.Va., among others on the Hill, have recently echoed these sentiments.

Here’s the problem: They are simply wrong about the success of TANF. It is a program distinguished by failure.

Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the Clinton-era welfare reform law that created TANF, which inspired me and my colleagues at ProPublica to investigate the current state of cash assistance in this country. Our reporting found that the requirements of TANF, which McConnell, Manchin and the others praised, are more often just plain cruel.

In New Mexico and many other states, for instance, low-income single mothers applying for TANF are forced, in a relic of colonial “bastardy” laws, to first identify the father of their child (and his eye color, license plate number and parents’ addresses), and also to recall under penalty of perjury the exact date when they got pregnant, before they can get a small amount of cash assistance for things like rent, child care and diapers. Many are also made to submit their children to genetic testing.

When a state has all of this information, it can then go after the dads for child support — much of which the government pockets. (ProPublica found that in 2020, nationally, more than $1.7 billion in child support from fathers meant to go to their kids was instead diverted into government coffers, as part of TANF’s design.)

Some states go even further out of their way to avoid spending TANF dollars to help struggling moms, dads and kids. In Arizona, only 6% of families below the poverty line are able to obtain assistance from the program, partly because the state uses more than $150 million a year of its TANF funding to instead pay for child welfare investigations of many of the very same poor parents, as well as the foster care costs of removing their children from them. (More than 60% of Black children in Maricopa County — metro Phoenix — will see their parents investigated by the time they turn 18, according to a recent academic study.)

And across the nation, $5.2 billion in TANF funding that is supposed to be helping provide direct assistance to low-income families is instead sitting entirely unused in states’ bank accounts, with the amount actually increasing during the pandemic even as need soared.

The sheer difficulty of accessing these dollars often leaves applicants casting about for other options. In Utah, for example, so few families seeking TANF are approved or eligible for the aid that many parents I’ve spoken to in my reporting say they feel they have to seek help from the LDS Church instead. There, they are sometimes pressured to get baptized, work for the church or read aloud from the Book of Mormon in order to receive assistance.

But if spending less on helping those in need is actually the point of welfare law, then opponents of the child tax credit in Congress are right to say that TANF works well enough already.

In fact, spending less on parents and children was built into the original structure of TANF. The program’s funding was frozen in 1996 — and has not been increased since to account for inflation or population shifts. That means less and less is available per poor family with every passing year, especially in the rapidly diversifying desert Southwest where I live.

Take Nevada, which since the ’90s has changed demographically more than any other state, due both to immigration and to an influx of tech companies and other young newcomers. Between 1997 and 2015, as the state’s increasing population caused its cost of living to skyrocket, the number of kids living in poverty there more than doubled, from 67,852 to 143,407. The result: Nevada now gets the smallest population-adjusted amount of TANF funding in the nation, at only $63 a year per child. By comparison, neighboring California receives $409.

This is the program that America’s families will be left with if Congress does not pass the child tax credit this year.

Ruby Duncan, who led marches of poor working mothers down the Las Vegas Strip and into its casinos at the height of the city’s Rat Pack glory days, a half-century ago, and who remains a leading advocate for families in the Southwest, put it best. TANF “is not a caring program,” she said. “It’s too late for it to be caring.”

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by Anjeanette Damon

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The email arrived in Elliot Malin’s inbox from his cousin’s mom.

“Scott needs a kidney,” the subject line read.

The message matter-of-factly described Scott’s situation: At 28 years old, Scott Kline was in end-stage renal failure. He wasn’t on dialysis yet. But he probably should have been.

His mom was reaching out to as many people as she could, asking them to be screened as a potential donation match.

“Thank you for considering it, but please don’t feel any pressure to do it,” she wrote. “Sorry I have to share this burden, but the best potential match is family.”

Malin didn’t need to be pressured. For him, the decision was easy.

“There was no other thought besides trying to help Scott,” Malin later said.

He clicked on a link in the email to begin the screening process.

If he turned out to be a match, Malin knew the surgery could put his health at risk. The recovery would be physically painful. What he didn’t anticipate was that it would put his finances in jeopardy. That just as he would have to trust the skilled hands of the surgeon to make sure the operation went well, he’d have to trust in the expertise of billing coders and financial coordinators to navigate the increasingly complex system that covers the costs of transplant surgeries.

Living organ donors are never supposed to receive a bill for care related to a transplant surgery. The recipient’s insurance covers all of those costs. This rule is key to a system built on encouraging such a selfless act. And for most uninsured patients in end-stage kidney failure, Medicare would pick up the tab. But in Malin’s case, he would end up facing a $13,000 billing mistake and the threat of having his bill sent to collections.

A bill from NorthStar Anesthesia to Malin for $13,064 (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

Donors like Malin play a critical role in the nation’s transplant system. According to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, in the last three years more than 30% of kidney donations came from living donors. Neither UNOS nor other national advocacy organizations track how often billing problems like those encountered by Malin occur. But advocates say they do happen and can deter donors from coming forward.

“Living donors should not be receiving any bills at all whatsoever regarding any part of the living donation process,” said Morgan Reid, director of transplant policy and strategy for the National Kidney Foundation.

Malin and Kline describe themselves as cousins, but their blood relationship is distant. Their great-grandfathers were brothers, making them third cousins. Still, they’re the same age and grew up as friends, sometimes traveling and spending holidays together. Kline attended Malin’s wedding in 2019.

Exactly what went wrong with Kline’s kidneys is a mystery. In the summer of 2020 he had just moved to Fort Worth, Texas, for work. He went in for routine blood work to monitor a medication he was taking. When the results came in, the doctor called to ask if he was on dialysis.

“You’re in end-stage renal failure,” the doctor told him.

“Oh, no I’m not,” Kline responded.

The bloodwork wasn’t wrong. He had just 17% kidney function. Thus began his search for a new organ. Kline was told his wait for a kidney could be three to five years if a friend or family member didn’t step forward. In February 2021, Kline and his family began reaching out to everyone they knew. Volunteers signed up for medical screening, but insurance would only pay to test one at a time. Waiting for one potential donor to be ruled out before testing another drew out an already lengthy process.

Four months after Malin signed up to be screened, he got final confirmation he was a match.

By June, the two cousins were deep in the byzantine organ transplant bureaucracy: screeners, financial counselors, doctors, specialists, laboratories and, the most difficult, insurance companies.

“The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do this is pretty extraordinary,” Malin said, describing rounds of medical tests, mountains of paperwork and preauthorizations for procedures. A multidisciplinary team of professionals assembled to assist the two patients through the process.

“The hospital was amazing on trying to make everything as easy as possible,” he said of the team.

Malin said they gave him one assurance: He wouldn’t have to contend with any bills or be responsible for a dime of the surgery’s estimated $160,000 cost. The team had received preauthorization from Kline’s insurance plan, which would pick up all of Malin’s medical costs.

That assurance, however well-intentioned, fell flat.

Malin, right, and his cousin Scott Kline in the hospital for the transplant surgery (Courtesy of Elliot Malin)

In July, Malin traveled from his home in Reno, Nevada, to Fort Worth, where the cousins underwent the transplant surgery at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center. The surgery was successful.

Malin spent three days in the hospital recovering, Kline a day or two longer — a painful experience made bearable by their companionship.

“We would do our little walks around the hospital floor,” Kline said. “We would be suffering together. It was really nice to have that. Usually you’re there alone, especially during COVID.”

By early August, Malin was back in Reno to finish recuperating. The next week, he started law school. Life was getting back to normal.

When the first bill arrived, it was more annoying than stressful. It totaled just $19.15 for blood work done before the surgery. The hospital said it would take care of it, Malin said. Then he got a notice that an old insurance plan he was no longer a member of had been billed $934 for lab work. Again, he notified the hospital.

In late September, Malin got a bill for a stomach-dropping amount: $13,064. While he was startled by the cost, it didn’t worry him too much. He knew Kline’s insurance was responsible for paying it. He notified the hospital and forgot about it.

A month later, a second notice arrived. Then, on Dec. 6, Malin received a document that scared him.

“Final Notice! Your account is now considered delinquent,” the notice read. If he didn’t take action, the billing company warned, it would attempt “further collection activity.”

The bill was from NorthStar Anesthesia, a firm that provides anesthesia services to hospitals across the country, including Baylor Scott & White All Saints.

NorthStar Anesthesia warns Malin that his bill could be sent to collections. (Courtesy of Malin, highlight added by ProPublica)

Now, Malin wasn’t only irritated that the bills just kept coming, he was worried about his credit.

“I did call them and kind of chewed them out a little bit,” Malin said. “I walked through what this was for, that it was a kidney donation and I’m not the responsible party.”

Malin complained on Twitter about the aggressive billing practice, eliciting an array of responses, from jokes about asking for his kidney back to outrage that he’d be in this position after such a gift.

After he called the billing company and the hospital, there was nothing else he could do.

“I’m just waiting to see if I go to collections or not,” Malin told ProPublica two weeks later.

He did his best to leave Kline out of it entirely.

“He’s had a lot on his plate,” Malin said of his cousin. “His recovery has been harder than mine. He’s the one accepting the organ, so he’ll be on immunosuppressants the rest of his life. Because of COVID, he’s largely stuck indoors. I don’t tell him a lot of it. I don’t want to stress him out.”

Still, it troubled Kline that Malin was facing such problems.

“At the end of the day, I want everything to go as smoothly as possible for Elliot,” Kline said. “He was doing me an unbelievable kindness. I owe my life to him.”

A stack of bills for Malin's transplant surgery (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

Malin heard nothing until Jan. 19, one day after ProPublica reached out to NorthStar for comment.

“The CFO of NorthStar just called me and told me she’s taken care of the bill,” Malin texted a reporter.

The next day, the company emailed Malin, confirming he would not be responsible for the bill, that he was never sent to collections and that his credit wouldn’t be affected.

“On behalf of NorthStar, I apologize for causing any confusion or concern for you regarding this matter and assure you that it has been resolved,” wrote Kate Stets, the company’s chief financial officer.

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She said that after his call on Dec. 7, the bill had been rerouted to “the correct parties,” but that the company had failed to communicate that to him. The letter explained that NorthStar had received incorrect insurance information at the time of the surgery. (A spokesperson later said NorthStar received no insurance information at the time of the surgery.) In such cases, bills are automatically sent to the patient.

The company has since adjusted its policy to prevent that from happening in future transplant cases, Stets wrote.

“To be clear, it is not NorthStar’s policy to bill transplant donors for bills related to their donation surgeries,” Stets wrote. “We recognize the well-established public policy standard and practice that transplant donors should not be billed for such services — that we and the nation’s health care system have a responsibility to foster and encourage such acts of selflessness and generosity.”

In a statement, a NorthStar spokesperson said no other organ donors owe “out of pocket payments.”

“NorthStar did not hear from Baylor on this matter previously and was first notified of the billing error on December 7, 2021 after insurance information was not provided to NorthStar by the transplant center at the point of care,” a spokesperson said. “NorthStar resolved the error immediately and closed the account that same day, prior to any inquiry from ProPublica.”

Both Malin and Kline commended the team at Baylor Scott & White All Saints that guided them through the process. The hospital, however, declined to grant an interview to ProPublica about what went wrong with the billing.

A spokesperson provided a short statement: “We are pleased this has been resolved for our patient by NorthStar. Although billing can be complicated, these occurrences are rare. We have also been in touch with the patient and we don’t have anything further to report.”

Financing such surgeries is so complex that transplant centers employ coordinators to help both patients with the process.

“I tell donors, I can’t guarantee you won’t get a bill, but if you do, call me,” said Deidra Simano, president of the Transplant Financial Coordinators Association.

In one case, after trying everything to get a provider to bill the proper insurance, Simano resorted to paying a patient’s $200 bill with the transplant center’s credit card.

“That’s what we had to do to make it go away,” she said.

Malin said he feels fortunate to be equipped to fight the billing issues. He worries about others with fewer means facing a similar situation, recognizing it could be a barrier to those selfless enough to donate an organ.

“It sucks but I wouldn’t have changed any of it,” he said. “I like my cousin. I want him to be healthy.”

Malin with a kidney-shaped pillow given to him at the hospital for his recovery (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

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by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS, and Chris Morran and Mariam Elba, ProPublica

ProPublica and Rocky Mountain PBS would like to talk to Coloradans who have lived in a community with a homeowners association. We know there are a lot of you: As of 2020, an estimated 74 million residents belonged to one of America’s 355,000 HOAs. There are more than 10,000 of these groups in Colorado alone, and they’re estimated to be home to nearly 2.4 million residents. These resident-governed organizations collect dues and fees from members to provide for improvements to and upkeep of shared areas, and to pay for some insurance coverage. HOAs can also set standards for public-facing aspects of members’ homes, including lawn maintenance, exterior paint colors and the use of lights and other decor.

HOA members who fall behind on dues or run afoul of rules set by the board can face additional fees, including legal fees charged by the HOA board’s attorney. If the dispute is left unresolved, the HOA could place liens on the homeowner’s property and attempt to foreclose on the home.

Because these processes often occur outside of the public eye, it is difficult to know just how common they are. If you have firsthand experience with an HOA, please fill out the brief questionnaire below.

by Caroline Chen, Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp, graphics by Haru Coryne

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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as of the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report of what we’re doing about it. This is the report for 2022; here are all our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is crucial to fill our newsroom with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, not only in journalism but particularly in investigative journalism. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 137 full-time employees at the start of 2021 to 160 in 2022, largely due to the launch of regional units in the South and Southwest and the expansion of our Midwest office. In addition to our talent recruitment efforts, mentorship opportunities and financial stipends, many of ProPublica’s diversity efforts this year continued to be internal, focused on onboarding and staff development.

The Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Caroline Chen, Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we tracked candidates through the application and interview process. Out of 50 positions filled in 2021, 55% of the candidates we interviewed identified as women, and 47% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Of those we hired, 45% identified as women and 44% as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

The percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as last year. In editorial positions, staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white also stayed the same as last year, at 58%.

For the fourth year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 51% of the staff.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here are the breakdowns:

Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica Race and Ethnicity: Editorial Race and Ethnicity: Managers Gender: All of ProPublica Gender: Editorial Gender: Managers

Note: The data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, from this year onward we are stating these numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” We hope this will provide more specificity and accuracy. In previous years, we have sometimes given statistics with the term “people of color.” To better compare current data to previous years, ProPublica used employee information as of Jan. 1, which was not the date used in the 2021 annual report; as a result, figures for 2021 differ from what was previously reported. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people and do not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding.

Our Ongoing Efforts

We think about our efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism), recruiting talent and improving our hiring process, and inclusion and retention. As the pandemic continued to disrupt our ability to carry out many in-person diversity initiatives, ProPublica has continued to offer virtual training and development opportunities:

• The conference subcommittee, led by Maya Miller and Irena Hwang, partnered with Journalism Mentors in the lead-up to the summer conference season. Twenty ProPublica staff members provided affinity conference attendees with general advice or portfolio reviews. The partnership was so successful that we decided to keep it active outside of the traditional conference season. (Interested in signing up for a session? You can do so here.)

• In June 2021, Ellis Simani, Irena Hwang and former ProPublica staffer Beena Raghavendran continued a career-building webinar for “alumni,” current members and selected finalists of ProPublica programs (Conference Stipends, Data Institute and Emerging Reporters) to hear from our staff about topics including journalism ethics, burnout and side-hustles. ProPublica is working on a similar virtual gathering for 2022.

• Diversity Committee Office Hours: We have continued to offer a casual hangout on Zoom twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, ask questions about ProPublica’s ongoing DEI programs or chat about diversity-related concerns in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Building the Pipeline

• Conference Stipends: ProPublica offers funding to help student journalists attend conferences. This effort is coordinated by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo. In the sixth year of the program, we teamed up with The Pudding to award 25 stipends of $750 each. Because of the pandemic, we also gave students the option to use the money for journalism-related expenses in addition to online conference expenses. Apply for this year’s stipend here.

• Emerging Reporters Program: This program provides stipends and mentorship to six students who have demonstrated financial need and encourages applications from people with diverse backgrounds. The program includes a $9,000 stipend and admission to a journalism conference. This is the program’s seventh year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford. Check out our most recent class and find out more about the program.

• ONA (Online News Association) Diversity Breakfast: An annual breakfast at the ONA conference, facilitated by Ruth Baron, Karim Doumar and former ProPublica staffer Beena Raghavendran, pairs managing editors, executive editors and other leading professionals in the industry with journalists from historically underrepresented communities. For the past two years, we have hosted a virtual breakfast at the conference and plan to keep doing so, whether in person or virtually, this year.

• Chicago External Mentorships: Quarterly mentorship sessions with The Real Chi, a Chicago-based learning newsroom powered by young reporters and editors ages 18 to 25 that cover the city’s West and South sides. Led by Duaa Eldeib and Tony Briscoe, workshops include sessions about public records, fact checking and investigative reporting.

• Outreach Trips: A team coordinates visits, in person or by Zoom, by ProPublica journalists to schools across the country, especially historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions with journalism programs. Contact Topher Sanders if you’d like us to visit your school virtually or in person, once we’re able to do so safely.

Recruiting and Hiring

• Rooney Rule: We require that hiring managers interview at least one person who does not self-identify as solely non-Hispanic white. In addition, we have made it explicit that every application must be read by at least two people.

• Application Process Data Analysis: We gather and analyze data about our job, fellowship and Local Reporting Network candidates to better understand who’s making it to the interview stage and look at the makeup of our overall applicant pool.

• Affinity Conferences: Our conference subcommittee coordinates and encourages ProPublica presence, participation and events at affinity conferences such as NAHJ, NABJ and AAJA. The subcommittee spent the year reassessing its budget and relationships with affinity groups, and its members are excited to be entering 2022 with more opportunities to engage in conferences as a result.

Inclusion and Retention

• Unconscious Bias Training: In 2021, ProPublica hired Paradigm Reach to conduct ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training with staff, including mandatory training for all managers.

• ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song that matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to meet each other, develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions.

• Welcoming New Hires and Focusing on Internal Culture: Following a year of expansion and rapid hiring at ProPublica, two new subcommittees, led by Michael Grabell and Ariana Tobin, were formed to think about how to improve the news organization’s onboarding process and how to be more inclusive and equitable in our newsroom.

• Rethinking Language Around Identity: An ad hoc subcommittee led by Melissa Sanchez was created to discuss best practices for language in job application forms and other ProPublica internal documents to allow people to identify themselves most accurately.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new full-time positions, and here’s our fellowships page. At the bottom of either page, you can sign up to be automatically notified when we have a job or fellowship available.

by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo

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We are proud to announce our seventh annual conference stipend program (formerly the Diversity Scholarship), aimed at providing students with an opportunity to learn from professionals in the field. This year we are once again teaming up with The Pudding, a longform data journalism publication.

ProPublica, with additional support from The Pudding, will be sponsoring need-based stipends for 25 students to attend journalism conferences in 2022. Anyone who is U.S. resident for tax purposes is eligible. All are welcome to apply. We especially encourage students from underrepresented groups in journalism — including people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities — with interests in investigative and data journalism to apply. Check out last year’s scholarship recipients.

The $750 stipends will go to students who would otherwise be unable to attend conferences. If a student intends to go to a conference that ends up going virtual, they will have the opportunity to use any leftover portion of the stipend toward journalism-related expenses such as subscriptions to news publications, software, FOIA fees or equipment (think cameras, recorders, etc.).

Journalism conferences offer great opportunities for networking and professional development, especially for those just starting out in their careers.

The deadline is March 7 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time. Students have the option to select a conference as part of their application. We understand that dates and formats may change, but we would still like to know which you are interested in attending. Please note that the list below is not exhaustive.

• AAJA, Asian American Journalists Association. Los Angeles, California, July 27-30.
• AHCJ, Association of Health Care Journalists. Austin, Texas, April 28-May 1.
• IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors. Denver, Colorado, and virtual, June 23-26.
• JAWS, Journalism and Women Symposium. Austin, Texas, Sept. 8-11.
• NABJ, National Association of Black Journalists. Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug. 3-7.
• NAHJ, National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug. 3-7.
• NAJA, Native American Journalists Association. Phoenix, Aug. 25-27.
• NLGJA, Association of LGBTQ Journalists. Chicago, Illinois, Sept. 8-11.
• NPPA, National Press Photographers Association (Northern Short Course). Virtual, March 31-April 2.
• ONA, Online News Association. Los Angeles, California, Sept. 21-24.
• RNA, Religion News Association. Bethesda, Maryland, March 24-26.
• SND, Society for News Design. Location and dates TBD.
• SRCCON, organized by OpenNews. Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 22-23.
• MVJ, Military Veterans in Journalism. Washington, D.C., October, exact dates TBD.
• LSM, Latino Media Summit. New York City and virtual, June 3-4.

Every year, we share what ProPublica is doing to increase the diversity of our newsroom and of journalism as a whole. These stipends are a small but important step to help student journalists from underrepresented communities take advantage of everything these conferences offer.

High school, college and graduate students are welcome to apply. You must be a student at the time of application, but it’s OK if you’re graduating this spring. Students currently in a gap year are not eligible.

Questions about the application process? Want to contribute to our stipend fund to send more students to these conferences? Get in touch at student.conference@propublica.org.

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