ProPublica

by Anna Clark

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After decades of intense debate and stalled legislation, the Food and Drug Administration has taken a critical step in overseeing a vast category of lab tests that reach patients without any federal agency checking to ensure they work the way their makers claim.

Among the tests that are not reviewed by the FDA: popular prenatal genetic screenings that ProPublica recently reported on, as well as certain cancer screenings and tests for rare diseases.

On Wednesday, a notice of the proposed rule was posted. This is the first concrete evidence that the FDA is preparing to apply its regulatory powers to these lab tests.

“A modern oversight framework that is specifically tailored to assuring tests work is critical to position ourselves for the future — whether it is preparing for the next pandemic or realizing the full potential of diagnostic innovation,” an FDA press officer said in a statement to ProPublica.

Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, applauded the move. “It’s exciting to see the agency taking concrete steps to address this long-standing hole in the public health safety net,” he said.

The agency’s hands-off approach to lab-developed tests — which are designed, manufactured and used by a single lab — traced back to a time when they were deployed at a small scale. The idea was to spare hospital labs, for example, from the time, money and hassle of getting approval in Washington whenever they needed to create a simple test for their own patients.

Nowadays, so-called LDTs are an enormous part of the health care system, including a number of high-stakes tests made by commercial companies. Because they aren’t registered with the federal government, nobody knows how many exist. A 2021 study by Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that 12,000 labs are likely to use such tests, many of which process thousands of patient samples each day. Currently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reviews lab operations, but it doesn’t check whether the tests themselves are clinically valid.

While these tests “play an important role in our health care system,” said the FDA press officer, the agency “is very concerned about problematic LDTs currently used in the U.S. that might not provide patients with accurate and reliable results.”

ProPublica’s investigation of prenatal genetic screenings detailed how the FDA doesn’t review the tests before they reach patients, nor does it verify marketing claims made by companies that sell them. False positives, false negatives and uncertain results about genetic anomalies have sometimes led to devastating consequences for families, the investigation found. Companies aren’t required to publicly report instances of when the test gets it wrong, and no federal agency is able to recall faulty tests. (We also made a guide to prenatal screening tests for expectant parents.)

The next step for the FDA is to publish a draft of the proposed rule, which seems likely to happen in August. It will go through a public comment period, and then the agency will develop a final rule. Both the proposed and final rules need to be cleared by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget. Experts said this process could go relatively quickly, or it could take a year or more, pushing up against a 2024 election that might change priorities in Washington.

Over the years, a large coalition of labs, professional associations and academic medical centers have argued that FDA oversight over the lab tests would be overly burdensome and inflexible — so much so that it would stunt critical innovations and limit patient access to quality health care. Opponents also express concern about the FDA’s capacity to oversee the tests.

Mary Steele Williams, executive director of the Association for Molecular Pathology, said in a statement to ProPublica that AMP is updating its proposal for an alternative approach to lab testing reform, one that doesn’t rely on the FDA. Instead, it recommends modernizing existing regulations through CMS, “which we believe to be the most effective and streamlined approach.”

Williams also said that AMP intends to continue working with other institutions to “raise our shared concerns with FDA regulation” over lab-developed tests. It remains committed, she said, “to working with Congress and other stakeholders to establish a more efficient regulatory framework that ensures high-quality patient care while continuing to foster the rapid innovation and promise of new diagnostic technologies.”

An earlier effort by the FDA to rein in LDTs came in 2014, when the agency issued draft guidance. But after facing nearly two years of stiff opposition, the agency pulled it. One of the strongest critics was the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a national trade group. It challenged the FDA’s authority over the tests by filing a citizen petition and making clear its intent to sue if necessary.

In a statement on Wednesday to ProPublica, an ACLA spokesperson said the association has long taken the position that any regulation of LDTs must be done through legislation. It should be a framework “that recognizes the essential role of clinical laboratories in advancing public health, preserving and fostering innovation and maintaining access to critical testing services,” the spokesperson said, adding: “We stand ready to provide expertise and technical assistance to Congress.”

There have been several efforts to reform lab testing through Congress over the years, and the FDA has signaled that it welcomes legislative action that would create a modern framework specifically tailored to clinical testing.

In 2022, a bipartisan bill known as the VALID Act seemed to have its best shot at passing, having gathered momentum after the scandal over fraudulent Theranos blood tests and the coronavirus pandemic. But, facing pushback, it was dropped from a must-pass bill at the end of the year. While ACLA’s spokesperson said the association worked with the bill’s sponsors to help shape it, in the end, ACLA didn’t endorse it. The act was reintroduced in the House in March.

If the FDA enacts a new rule, supporters anticipate legal challenges, said Cara Tenenbaum, a former policy adviser for the agency whose consultancy signed onto a recent letter urging it to assert oversight.

But over the past decade, the FDA tried every alternative to address what it sees as a public health problem, she said.

“All they have left is their existing device authority,” Tenenbaum said. “They’ve been backed into a corner, if you ask me.”

The FDA pushing ahead with a proposed rule, even while legislation is on the table, makes sense because “the clock is ticking on the administration,” said Lurie, a former top FDA official who worked on lab testing reform.

At the same time, he said, “the problem is long-standing and, frankly, in fact, growing. More and more products come to market every day, and very few of them get regulated.”

by Max Blau, photography by Lucy Garrett for ProPublica

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This story was produced in partnership with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and co-published with the Commercial Appeal.

On a brisk morning in the winter of 2019, at a standing-room-only reception, a procession of speakers lavished praise on the surgeon who more than tripled the size of the liver transplant program at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis. The lifesaving doctor was receiving an honor often reserved for the dead: Methodist’s leaders announced that the hospital’s new state-of-the-art transplant center would be named for Dr. James Eason.

Eason seemed to have reached the summit of what was then a 25-year career. A decade earlier, he had performed one of the highest-profile liver surgeries in recent history: the transplant that extended the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs by more than two years. That operation earned Eason the gratitude of Jobs’ widow, who later donated a total of $40 million to the transplant center he helmed and the medical school where he worked as a professor. At age 58, Eason had become one of the country’s highest-paid transplant surgeons, earning $1.7 million a year, more than anyone at Methodist but the head of its nearly 13,000-employee, six-hospital health system.

But for all the lives the liver transplant program saved, the hospital’s leadership had growing concerns about the number of patients dying on Eason’s watch. During the five years before the renaming ceremony, those deaths had sparked investigations from the federal contractor that oversees transplant centers. They also prompted multiple health insurers to remove the liver program from their preferred networks, according to internal documents.

In 2018, following the most recent investigation, Methodist hired a consulting firm to audit the program. The audit, conducted by peers from other transplant centers, found that numerous errors had contributed to patient deaths — and that to reduce the rate of failed liver transplants, Methodist likely would have to perform fewer transplants overall. But according to the audit, that would be difficult. Staffers felt “powerless to make change due to the resistance of leadership,” who gave the employees the impression that “volume is king,” the audit said.

The audit concluded that “disruptive, disrespectful, non-collaborative individuals” had put the liver transplant program and its patients “in a constant state of risk.”

In December 2018, Methodist University Hospital President Roland Cruickshank wrote a letter to the federal contractor acknowledging the transplant program’s worrisome number of deaths. “The decline in our outcomes is of the utmost concern,” he wrote, “and is not taken lightly.” Weeks later, Cruickshank sat in the front row of the renaming ceremony and stepped up to unfurl a banner with the words “James D. Eason Transplant Institute.”

ProPublica and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism obtained an extraordinary cache of internal records that reveal Methodist leaders failed to comprehensively fix problems with the liver program before the renaming ceremony. The records include the independent audit, detailed internal reviews of patient deaths and the hospital’s correspondence with the federal contractor, a nonprofit called the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS.

One of the documents was an internal analysis drafted at Eason’s behest. In part of the analysis, one of his most senior colleagues determined that between late 2014 and mid 2018, 25 deaths — more than half of the program’s 48 total fatalities — were preventable.

The analysis found that some liver recipients had died after their transplant as a result of “process/protocol issues.” It also found that a portion of patients “should not have been listed” for transplant due to preexisting medical conditions.

Along with the documents, interviews with families of nearly two dozen liver transplant recipients who died over the past decade show that, in some cases, Methodist staffers didn’t tell them about the extent of the problems that contributed to their loved ones’ deaths.

Terry Green, a retired Army noncommissioned officer who donated a portion of his liver to his identical twin brother, did not know that Eason’s team had, according to medical records and internal documents, failed to conduct enough testing to rule out the risks of cardiac and pulmonary complications before Eason himself performed the transplant. His brother died from cardiac arrest in the operating room.

Terry Green donated a portion of his liver to his identical twin brother, Jerry Green.

Stacy Roberts was unaware that, following her father’s transplant, Eason’s team had identified major problems with the donated liver it had placed inside him, issues it may have been able to identify with further screening, internal records show. Methodist had accepted the liver from another hospital, which had failed to spot that the organ bore the early signs of cirrhosis. Days later, after her father experienced serious complications, Methodist providers conducted their own biopsy, discovering the full extent of the damage to the organ. Her father died about a month after the surgery. Hospital records show that transplant program leaders later required surgeons to more rigorously review liver donations before accepting those organs for patients.

For years, Tiffany Garrigus was haunted by the memory of watching her 59-year-old father die just several hours after his transplant. Unbeknownst to Garrigus, a nurse had reported concerns about internal bleeding to the surgical fellow on shift and noted that the doctor failed to quickly alert the attending surgeon. The miscommunication delayed potentially lifesaving care. The independent auditors later determined that Methodist’s own review of Steve Garrigus’ death was a “missed opportunity” to prevent similar issues in the future.

“They screwed up,” Garrigus said after she learned about records that outlined Methodist’s treatment of her father. “No one was held accountable and nothing changed.”

Tiffany Garrigus visits the grave of her father, Steve Garrigus, in Union City, Tennessee.

Garrigus and five other families who spoke with ProPublica and MLK50 signed documents waiving their rights to privacy so Eason and Methodist could answer questions about their loved ones’ deaths. Eason and Methodist declined to address those questions. The hospital and Eason also did not answer specific questions about the dozens of deaths detailed in the investigations, the findings in the audit of the transplant program or the correspondence between the hospital and UNOS.

Spokespeople for Eason and the hospital asserted that ProPublica and MLK50 singled out patients with negative outcomes. Methodist spokesperson Tabrina Davis also said in a statement that the news organizations had “settled on a clear narrative, one which we believe is a misleading and inaccurate portrayal of the institute.” The statement went on to say that “the transplant institute is on a continuous journey of improvement, focused on providing the highest quality care for each patient.”

Eason turned down multiple requests to be interviewed for this story but responded to questions in writing at various points. In one statement, he said that he and his team at Methodist “tried to give every patient the opportunity for transplant.” He also said in that statement that while there were “2-3 unexpected deaths per year” between 2011 and 2018, “we also saved more than 100 lives each year, all of whom would have died without liver transplantation.” Eason’s lawyer, Elizabeth Sacksteder, said in a separate letter that “performing more transplants rather than fewer” and using “the best available organs rather than waiting for the perfect organ” are pivotal parts of Eason’s approach to running a liver transplant program.

Dr. James Eason discusses Methodist’s liver transplant program with the advisory board of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s College of Medicine in 2015. (via University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s Facebook)

For more than a decade, Methodist liver recipients had a greater-than-expected chance that their liver would not be functioning one year after transplant, a metric used by UNOS to assess transplant centers’ performance. Eason said in his statement that UNOS had overrelied on that metric without taking into account that programs like Methodist have accepted more high-risk patients who would otherwise die imminently. He added that Methodist has excelled at minimizing the extent to which patients die on the waitlist, a metric that is now part of how UNOS evaluates transplant programs.

“I would never choose to let a single high-risk patient die instead of giving that individual a good chance of living,” Eason said in another statement.

Eason, however, is no longer making those choices at Methodist. This past August — after years of investigations and years of Methodist leaders celebrating Eason’s accomplishments — hospital employees were unexpectedly pulled into a conference room at the transplant center. Standing at the front of the room, along with other top executives, was the head of the health system. He shared a brief message that caught employees off guard: Eason was no longer with the James D. Eason Transplant Institute.

Methodist’s Liver Transplant Outcomes Drew Scrutiny From Investigators

The United Network for Organ Sharing launched two investigations over the past decade after Methodist University Hospital’s liver transplant program performed worse than expected.

Note: Transplant centers report data about their performance to UNOS, which along with the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients examines whether the performance of transplant programs was worse than expected. To do so, UNOS analyzes the extent to which transplanted livers still functioned one year after a surgery. Each percentage is based on outcomes over the prior 30-month period. For still-functioning transplants performed in the last six months of the study period, the chance of a liver continuing to function one year after the surgery is modeled after the outcomes of previous transplants in the study period. The blue line shows the percentage of Methodist patients expected to have a functioning transplanted liver at one year, based on characteristics of the liver transplant program’s prior recipients and donors. The yellow and gray lines show the chance of a patient having a functioning transplanted liver at one year, modeled after real-world outcomes. (Source: The Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients)

Before his arrival at Methodist, Eason led another transplant center that was investigated for its poor performance during his tenure.

In the winter of 1998, Eason left his post as head of a San Antonio military hospital’s transplant center to begin a new job. He now oversaw liver and kidney transplants at the Ochsner Foundation Hospital just outside New Orleans. Eason’s team increased the number of liver transplants Ochsner performed from 23 in 1998 to 76 in 2001. But the rapid growth was followed by higher rates of deaths within a year of transplant, according to data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.

One of Eason’s colleagues, Dr. Ari Cohen, subsequently wrote in a presentation to a group of transplant experts that the rate of adult patients living for one year after their liver transplants at Ochsner became “significantly worse than expected” between July 2002 and December 2004.

In 2005, a UNOS committee began investigating the reasons behind poor outcomes at Ochsner, according to an article written by Ochsner doctors that was later published in the health system’s academic journal. The article described the liver transplant program’s culture prior to 2005 in a way that was similar to what Methodist’s audit would turn up years later: A “feeling of fear” had left employees “unable to freely express their views” about the program’s problems.

In response to the UNOS investigation, Ochsner put together a team that determined the transplant center’s leadership was one of the biggest problems contributing to the liver program’s poor patient outcomes.

UNOS spokesperson Anne Paschke said that the organization does not comment on specific investigations. Cohen, along with other Ochsner doctors who contributed to the article, did not respond to emails or phone calls. An Ochsner spokesperson declined to respond to ProPublica and MLK50’s questions or make anyone available for an interview. Eason declined to comment on the UNOS investigation or his former colleagues’ reflections on the program under his leadership. In his statement, he said that he came to Ochsner after the program had been “closed due to loss of leadership” and that the program “went from saving zero lives to saving more than 80 lives each year.”

Before the UNOS committee completed its investigation, Eason accepted an offer that would allow him to return to his home state of Tennessee — and provide an opportunity to take another small liver transplant program and grow it even more dramatically.

In the five years following Eason’s departure, his former colleagues addressed the problems, according to the journal article. They turned Ochsner’s liver program into one of the top performers in the South, according to health care ratings organizations.

When Methodist announced Eason’s hiring in 2006, Dr. Hosein Shokouh-Amiri was deeply concerned. The veteran Methodist surgeon said he had heard about the rapid expansion of Ochsner’s transplant program and was worried that a similar approach might lead to higher rates of failed liver transplants for Methodist patients.

Amiri was afraid that Eason would override clinical decisions that Amiri or his colleagues had determined were in the best interest of patients. And so he decided to leave the transplant program shortly after Eason arrived. Before Amiri’s final day at Methodist, Eason wanted to know if he would reconsider. Sitting in Eason’s office, Amiri asked if Eason would ever require a surgeon to accept a donated liver that the surgeon would rather decline because of poor quality. Amiri recalled that Eason wouldn’t answer at first. Amiri said that when he pressed for an answer, Eason told him that he would do so if he felt it was necessary.

Dr. Hosein Shokouh-Amiri, a former surgeon at Methodist, resigned because of concerns over how Eason might lead the liver transplant program.

As Amiri saw it, Eason’s track record of boosting volume would “bypass the moral and ethical standard we had promised” to Methodist patients.

“He wanted my approval,” Amiri said. “I resigned.”

Eason did not respond to questions about Amiri’s recollections and concerns. Eason’s spokesperson, Stefan Friedman, wrote in an email that Amiri left Methodist “to go to a program that performed only 11 transplants last year with higher deaths on the waitlist and lower one-year survival rates.” Amiri said that his liver transplant program had lower survival rates “because we took sicker patients.” Federal health data confirms that Amiri’s program accepted a higher percentage of patients at high risk of death from liver disease than Methodist.

During his early years in Memphis, Eason led the dramatic growth of Methodist’s liver transplant program. The year before he started, in 2005, Amiri and his colleagues had performed 34 liver transplants. Over the next three years, Eason’s team more than tripled the hospital’s annual number of liver transplants, replacing 117 organs in 2008. Methodist leaders celebrated this growth as a historic achievement — one that allowed the liver transplant program to serve more patients in a majority Black city that had a higher poverty rate than the national average. Eason’s lawyer said in a letter that the population of the Memphis region “disproportionately suffers from co-morbidities associated with poverty” that “heighten the inherent risks of liver transplant surgery.”

By performing 126 transplants in 2009, Methodist became one of America’s 10 largest liver transplant programs. As hospitals across the country expanded their transplant centers, they stood to profit from treating more patients suffering organ failure. According to a 2009 study published in Medical Care Research and Review, the average cost of a U.S. liver transplant and the subsequent days spent recovering in the hospital was about $163,000. Around that time, The Wall Street Journal reported that some hospitals charged nearly three times as much for the surgery. Friedman said in a statement that Eason did not receive additional compensation for performing more transplants, “nor was any aspect of his compensation based on such a metric.” Methodist did not respond to questions about the program’s finances.

The growth of Methodist’s program was fueled in part by a special agreement with federal health officials that allowed the program to obtain livers across the entire state of Tennessee and parts of Arkansas and Mississippi. As the program grew, it began attracting more patients from beyond the greater Memphis area. A central Ohio minister received a liver transplant at Methodist in 2009 after being rejected by three other programs. He lived for another 12 years. A mechanic from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who experienced liver failure received a transplant at Methodist in 2010; in an interview translated by his wife, Carlos Acevedo Martinez told ProPublica and MLK50 that he had no complications and was grateful “Methodist gave him life again.”

Near the end of his third year at Methodist, Eason was in touch with his friend George Riley, a Memphis native whose parents had been doctors at Methodist. Riley, a California lawyer, wanted to know if Eason might help his client. Steve Jobs faced a long wait to get a new liver in his home state of California. His wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, had learned that people could be simultaneously added to waitlists in multiple states. Since Jobs had a plane, he could fly to whichever transplant center was willing to accept him. Tennessee, it turned out, had a shorter waitlist.

One day in March 2009, before dawn, Eason waited for Jobs’ plane at the Memphis airport. “I went to meet him and escorted him to the hospital,” Eason later told WMC-TV. One of Jobs’ biographers, Walter Isaacson, wrote that Eason closely oversaw Jobs’ care after the transplant, assigned nurses solely to his recovery and “would even stop at the convenience store to get the energy drinks Jobs liked.” Jobs later recovered in a 5,784-square-foot mansion in Memphis that Riley purchased through a shell company, according to The Commercial Appeal.

Weeks after Jobs returned home that spring, news broke of his surgery. Media outlets including CNN and The New York Times published articles that explored whether Eason gave preferential treatment to the billionaire. The surgeon pushed back: Jobs was the sickest, most deserving patient on the day that liver became available, he said. Starting that summer, Eason lived on and off in the mansion — a perk he didn’t publicly disclose at the time. Two years later, in 2011, he bought the house from the shell company for $850,000, the same price the company paid for it in 2009. (Home sale prices in the greater Memphis area had fallen in the interim.) Eason did not respond to questions about living in or buying the home.

Eason speaks with a nurse in Methodist’s transplant ward on Aug. 18, 2009. (Lance Murphey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Around the time of Jobs’ transplant, Methodist’s liver recipients had a better estimated chance of their organs functioning at least one year after a transplant than the national average. But in the years after Jobs’ surgery, Eason’s liver transplant program began to struggle. The rate of failed liver transplants increased between July 2010 and December 2012. As a result, the UNOS committee that had scrutinized Ochsner’s performance under Eason opened an investigation in early 2014. The committee’s work is confidential, but ProPublica and MLK50 obtained records that described the investigation. (UNOS declined to confirm when the investigation ended.)

The UNOS committee, which is composed of several dozen transplant experts who volunteer to review their peers’ programs, can recommend the discipline of transplant centers for their poor performance. But the committee rarely punished programs. In fact, the committee was so toothless that in 2018 the then-CEO of UNOS likened the committee’s investigations to “putting your kids’ artwork up at home.”

“You value it because of how it was created rather than whether it’s well done,” the UNOS leader wrote of the investigative committee. “Only in this case, we persuade ourselves that it’s well done anyway.”

Though Eason now defends the program he led, he acknowledged in an April 2014 letter to the UNOS committee that Methodist’s outcomes “were not as expected.” He pledged to address the committee’s concerns.

According to internal documents from June 2014, Methodist was anticipating potential financial fallout from those poor outcomes. A Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official had informed Methodist that its liver transplant program was out of compliance with federal standards because it had “significantly lower than expected” outcomes and did not have an adequate policy for evaluating the reasons behind its failed liver transplants. The official warned that CMS would terminate the liver program’s participation in Medicare, which covered the costs for nearly a third of the liver transplants performed at Methodist, if it failed to correct those problems.

In its written plan outlining how it would fix the problems, Methodist told CMS that one way it would improve outcomes was through Eason encouraging a “higher scrutiny of patients” whose risks of complications outweighed the potential benefits of surgery. Methodist ultimately avoided termination from Medicare.

But records obtained by ProPublica and MLK50 show that Methodist kept accepting patients whose poor health increased the risk of complications after a transplant. Eason’s team soon approved for transplant a 356-pound woman with a BMI of 66 and a woman who struggled so much with drinking alcohol that she only stopped after getting sick from liver failure. The team also signed off on a patient for transplant in spite of the fact that she was septic the day before the surgery. All three died within a year after their transplants.

Dr. Satheesh Nair, one of Eason’s most senior colleagues, later determined in an analysis of patient deaths that Methodist should not have placed these patients on the transplant waitlist. Nair did not respond to questions. Eason did not comment on the findings of the analysis, but said that he asked for it to be done as part of his transplant program’s efforts to improve its quality of care.

Davis, the Methodist spokesperson, also declined to comment on Nair’s findings. She said in a statement that Methodist has turned away liver transplant candidates because they “do not meet the criteria to indicate they would have successful outcomes” after a transplant.

By the time Jerry Green arrived at Methodist in 2016, the 46-year-old minister from West Memphis, Arkansas, was experiencing symptoms of liver failure, including fatigue and jaundice. As Green underwent a battery of tests, the evaluation revealed potential signs of pulmonary hypertension, according to hospital records. That condition can increase the risk of death from a transplant.

Medical experts have written in journal articles that when a transplant candidate has signs of pulmonary hypertension, additional testing, including what’s known as a right heart catheterization, should be done to more precisely determine the risk of complications during or after a transplant. If the risk is too great, liver transplant programs can either reject the patient or postpone the surgery until the patient receives care to improve their health. But “no further assessments were made,” according to an internal analysis of Green’s treatment that the liver transplant program later conducted.

Methodist doctors calculated that Green had a strong chance of surviving for three months without a transplant. But that also meant he was unlikely to get a liver from a deceased donor because he would be low on the waitlist. According to hospital records obtained by ProPublica and MLK50, Eason encouraged Green to get a transplant immediately the only way he could: by finding a living donor. Green was reluctant. But when he gave in, he asked his twin brother, Terry. He agreed.

First image: Terry Green shares a photo of himself and Jerry with their mother. Second image: Terry and Jerry as babies.

In the summer of 2016, as the Green family packed inside Methodist to support the twins, a surgeon sliced open Terry’s abdomen. It was one of the first living liver donor transplants ever performed at Methodist. Once they started Jerry’s surgery, his pulmonary arterial pressure rose so much that surgeons considered halting the transplant. Methodist providers gave Jerry medication that lowered his pressure. According to an operative report from a surgical fellow, Eason “had extensive discussion with his family, where they strongly hoped to undergo the surgery with any possible measures.” (Jerry’s wife, Jacqueline Green, said that she was notified about the concerns over his pressure but did not have an in-depth discussion with Eason about the risks of proceeding with the surgery.) Eventually, surgeons began replacing his liver with a segment of Terry’s.

Once Terry woke up, Eason stopped by to check on his abdomen. The surgeon then shared the worst news of Terry’s life. Jerry’s heart had suddenly stopped. The staff tried to revive him in the operating room but could not pull him back from the brink of death. “His heart wasn’t strong enough,” Terry remembers Eason saying. “What we learned here will help others in the future.”

After the funeral, Jacqueline met with Eason to learn more about what went wrong. As Jacqueline asked questions about Jerry’s death, Eason said that the liver transplant was successful. “It was just his heart” that failed, she recalled Eason saying.

Jacqueline Green at home next to a burial flag for her husband, Jerry Green, who served in the Marines.

The following year, Methodist enacted several new policies designed to more rigorously test patients’ cardiac and pulmonary risks ahead of a liver transplant. In the program’s internal analysis, Nair later determined that Green’s death was preventable. Jacqueline said Eason never told her about that finding.

Not long after Jerry Green’s death, Eason and nearly two dozen colleagues gathered for a confidential meeting. A familiar problem that had dogged the program was now resurfacing.

Four years earlier, in December 2012, CMS had announced it would cut off a crucial part of Methodist’s organ supply from central and east Tennessee. Some transplant experts praised the decision because they felt Methodist had unfairly benefited from an old policy that provided access to more high-quality organs from a large geographic area. To avoid shrinking what had become the nation’s fourth-largest liver program, Methodist accepted more livers that posed a higher risk of complications for their recipients. Eason’s transplant quality director later wrote in a document responding to the UNOS committee’s investigation that the strategy was justified as the country faced a chronic organ shortage. As the quality director explained, the additional risk was in “balance against the risk of candidate death on the waitlist.”

At the confidential meeting, Eason and his staff focused on a case that exemplified the perils of such risk-taking. That July, Methodist had received a liver offer from a North Carolina hospital. The liver had belonged to a 34-year-old military veteran who had struggled for years with use of hard drugs and alcohol. The way that he died required that his liver be removed after his heartbeat stopped, known as a donation after circulatory death or DCD. Such donations involve an organ that has been deprived of sufficient oxygen between the time of death and the organ’s removal. As a result, these donations can elevate the risks of complications for a recipient. That year, about 6% of U.S. liver transplants involved DCD organs, according to data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. The data also showed Eason’s team accepted DCD livers at a percentage nearly triple the national average.

The night that Methodist received the liver offer, one of Eason’s surgeons described the donor’s history to Eugene Willard, a 61-year-old grandfather who served as the mayor of his small town of Amagon, Arkansas. Willard wanted to reject the offer, according to his daughter, Stacy Roberts. Two weeks earlier, another Methodist doctor had determined Willard would be a “suitable candidate for liver transplantation providing he loses weight,” records show. That doctor had encouraged Willard to slim down to lower his risk of complications whenever the transplant did happen. But with the offer on the table that night, the surgeon urged Willard to accept the liver, his daughter recalled. “If you don’t do it, you’re going to die,” she remembered the surgeon saying. Willard followed the surgeon’s advice and agreed to accept the organ.

After Willard’s new liver showed signs of poor function, Methodist providers ordered another biopsy to better understand his complications. This time, they saw that the donated liver had so much scarring that the early stages of cirrhosis were present. He died about a month after the surgery.

At the confidential meeting, the team concluded that the North Carolina hospital’s biopsy of the donated liver “may have been inadequate.” Eason’s team responded by approving a policy change that required surgeons to more rigorously examine biopsies before accepting livers. Nair’s analysis later determined that Willard’s death was preventable, citing “donor selection” issues.

Data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients shows that Methodist continued to accept DCD livers in 2017 and 2018 at rates higher than twice the national average. Eason’s transplant quality director later explained in the response to UNOS that Methodist’s surgeons accepted more high-risk livers because they had “access to fewer local organs than the national rate,” leaving the program little other choice for saving patient lives. The quality director defended the practice as one that “represents our effort to provide care to an underresourced patient population.”

“Most have no other opportunity or hope of transplantation,” the quality director wrote.

Over the course of 2018, Methodist’s transplant center leaders were confronting a new round of scrutiny. After a period of improved patient outcomes following the UNOS committee’s investigation four years earlier, the liver transplant program’s failure rate had again worsened. As a result, the UNOS committee opened another investigation.

Methodist responded with a step intended to help its struggling program. It hired the transplant consulting firm Guidry & East to conduct an audit of its liver transplant program’s operations.

Five transplant experts — including doctors affiliated with medical schools at the University of California, San Francisco and Cornell University — traveled to Memphis in October 2018 for the two-day audit. They toured the center’s halls, interviewed employees and reviewed liver transplant records. The experts wrote a 35-page report, a final draft of which was obtained by ProPublica and MLK50, that identified a list of problems that they said contributed to patient deaths.

Excerpt from Guidry & East’s 2018 audit of Methodist’s liver transplant program (highlights added by ProPublica)

The audit stated that Eason’s program appeared to “maximize the number of transplants by disregarding flags” as to whether patients were suitable candidates for surgery and, according to one Methodist doctor, was “currently accepting less than ideal donor organs for transplantation.” It also determined that the program had failed to thoroughly review the causes of patient deaths in order to prevent repeat mistakes with future patients, a problem previously identified during federal inspections.

To better protect patients, Eason would need to improve its policies in a way that would limit surgeons from operating on patients unlikely to survive long after transplant, in addition to limiting the number of high-risk organs the program accepted, the experts’ audit determined.

The experts also flagged problems with the hospital’s oversight of its liver transplant program. The audit noted the stark “disconnect” between Eason’s team and hospital leadership. “There is a lack of transparency in what is reported,” the experts determined.

After the audit, Methodist University Hospital President Cruickshank pledged in a letter to the UNOS committee that senior hospital leadership would “work closely” with Eason’s team to adopt Guidry & East’s recommendations. Those changes, Cruickshank said, would “once again allow us to meet the UNOS requirements and our own expectations of exceptional outcomes.” (Cruickshank, who has since left Methodist, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eason at the transplant center renaming ceremony at Methodist University Hospital in 2019. (via Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s Facebook)

In February 2019, less than two months after Cruickshank’s letter, Eason stood at the renaming ceremony before his supporters, including Laurene Powell Jobs, an internationally known philanthropist who has donated to a wide variety of causes. (Powell Jobs’ social impact organization Emerson Collective contributes to numerous media organizations, including ProPublica and MLK50, and owns a majority stake in The Atlantic. Through a spokesperson, Powell Jobs declined to comment about her support of Eason and Methodist.) In the halls of Methodist’s new $275 million nine-story tower, a portion of which would be home to the transplant center that had received her donation, Eason and Powell Jobs posed for a photo before a wood-paneled wall lettered with the surgeon’s name on it.

Later that month, Methodist received a letter from the chair of the UNOS committee overseeing the investigation, whose members had met to review the Guidry & East audit. The letter stated that “recent outcomes do not seem to be improving.”

In April 2019, as Methodist was about to welcome patients to its new transplant center, Eason wrote in a letter to the UNOS committee that the liver transplant program was headed in the right direction. To address the committee’s concerns, Eason presented a detailed plan that outlined how Methodist was overhauling policies within its liver transplant program. He attached newly written guidelines that directed the program to be more stringent in accepting high-risk patients and livers. He also noted that transplant leaders were routinely holding conferences where staffers more thoroughly reviewed cases with bad outcomes, openly discussed medical mistakes and identified ways to prevent repeat errors.

“We believe our team has made tremendous progress in improving the outcomes of our Liver Transplant Program,” Eason wrote.

Davis, the Methodist spokesperson, said in a statement that Methodist “considered every recommendation” from Guidry & East and enacted some of those policies “right away.” Neither Eason nor Nair responded to questions about the Guidry & East report.

After the new transplant center facility opened that spring, the liver program’s numbers did, in fact, begin to turn around. The program’s rates of failed liver transplants continually improved in 2019 and 2020. But they did not improve enough to clear the threshold that the UNOS committee typically required to close an investigation.

In 2021, UNOS rewrote the rules for investigating transplant programs. Ian Jamieson, then the chair of the investigative committee, said that judging programs on post-transplant outcomes alone had created a “disincentive to transplantation.” To remove that barrier, UNOS leaders decided, a program would have to have far worse rates of failed liver transplants before UNOS would automatically step in to investigate.

UNOS touted the policy as “a more holistic approach” to evaluating transplant programs, since the committee would now also consider the extent to which patients were dying on the waitlist. The changes were not universally praised: Critics worried that the policy would lead to fewer transplant programs being held accountable.

Around the time the new UNOS policy began to take effect last year, the committee ended its investigations into numerous transplant programs, including the liver transplant program at Methodist.

Eason and a spokesperson for Methodist said that the investigation was closed because the program’s outcomes had improved. (UNOS declined to comment on the reason.) Eason said in his statement to ProPublica and MLK50 that UNOS’ new policy was recognition that UNOS had been relying on a transplant metric that was “outdated and invalid.” He sees that decision as part of a broader shift in which federal transplant policy is falling more in line with his philosophy to offer transplants to as many people as possible.

With outcomes improving and policy shifting, Eason seemed poised to keep leading his team at the center that bore his name. But one morning this past August, Methodist transplant center employees were unexpectedly summoned into a meeting down the hall from where the renaming ceremony had taken place. For the prior week, Eason hadn’t made his usual rounds through the halls of the transplant center. His staff even had to postpone a living donor transplant because of his absence.

Once the seats were filled, Michael Ugwueke, the president and CEO of Methodist’s six-hospital health system, asked for everyone’s attention. He informed them that Eason was no longer with the transplant center. When staffers asked what happened, Methodist executives said they couldn’t provide any details. As part of the decision, the transplant center suspended conducting liver transplants for living donors.

Methodist and Eason declined to answer questions about his departure. Methodist has scrubbed many mentions of Eason from its website. In the six months following Eason’s departure, he remained employed as the director of the Transplant Research Institute at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the medical school affiliated with Methodist. In late February, he retired from his tenured position, according to emails obtained through an open records request. UTHSC spokesperson Peggy Reisser declined to comment on the retirement.

So far, no hospital has publicly announced that Eason will lead its transplant center. Medical board records show that he has obtained licenses in Ohio and Pennsylvania. When ProPublica and MLK50 asked about Eason’s departure and search for a new job, his lawyer, Sacksteder, responded in a letter on March 15 that he is a “highly respected” liver transplant surgeon whose name still graces the transplant center he had helmed.

Just a few weeks later, Methodist employees noticed something had changed at the hospital. Workers had removed several signs throughout the facility. The words “James D. Eason Transplant Institute” are no longer affixed to the front of the building.

A new sign simply reads: “Methodist Transplant Institute.”

First image: The exterior of Methodist, showing the James D. Eason Transplant Institute sign, on Feb. 17. Second image: The exterior of Methodist, without Eason’s name sign, on April 18. (Andrea Morales for MLK50) Tell Us About Your Experience With the Organ Transplant System

Wendi C. Thomas and Jacob Steimer, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and Mollie Simon, ProPublica, contributed reporting.

Design and development by Allen Tan.

by Mark Olalde and Umar Farooq, ProPublica, and Anna V. Smith, High Country News

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The Dilkon Medical Center, a sprawling, $128 million facility on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, was completed a year ago. With an emergency room, pharmacy and housing for more than 100 staff members, the new hospital was cause for celebration in a community that has to travel long distances for all but the most basic health care.

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But there hasn’t been enough clean water to fill a large tank that stands nearby, so the hospital sits empty.

The Navajo Nation has for years been locked in contentious negotiations with the state of Arizona over water. With the tribe’s claims not yet settled, the water sources it can access are limited.

The hospital tried tapping an aquifer, but the water was too salty to use. If it could reach an agreement with the state, the tribe would have other options, perhaps even the nearby Little Colorado River. But instead, the Dilkon Medical Center’s grand opening has been postponed, and its doors remain closed.

The Dilkon Medical Center. There hasn’t been enough clean water to fill a large tank that stands nearby, so the hospital sits empty. (Sharon Chischilly for ProPublica and High Country News)

For the people of the Navajo Nation, the fight for water rights has real implications. Pipelines, wells and water tanks for communities, farms and businesses are delayed or never built.

ProPublica and High Country News reviewed every water rights settlement in the Colorado River Basin and interviewed presidents, water managers, attorneys and other officials from 20 of the 30 federally recognized basin tribes. This analysis found that Arizona, in negotiating those water settlements, is unique for the lengths it goes to extract concessions that could delay tribes’ access to more reliable sources of water and limit their economic development. The federal government has rebuked Arizona’s approach, and the architects of the state’s process acknowledge it takes too long.

The Navajo Nation has negotiated with all three states where it has land — Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — and has completed water settlements with two of them. “We’re partners in those states, New Mexico and Utah,” said Jason John, the director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, “but when it comes to Arizona, it seems like we have different agendas.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that tribes with reservations have a right to water, and most should have priority in times of shortage. But to quantify the amount and actually get that water, they must either go to court or negotiate with the state where their lands are located, the federal government and competing water users. If a tribe successfully completes the process, it stands to unlock large quantities of water and millions of dollars for pipelines, canals and other infrastructure to move that water.

But in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, whatever river water a tribe wins through this process comes from the state’s allocation. (The basin includes seven states, two countries and 30 federally recognized tribes between Wyoming and Mexico.) As a result, states use these negotiations to defend their share of a scarce resource. “The state perceives any strengthening of tribal sovereignty within the state boundaries as a threat to their own jurisdiction and governing authority,” said Torivio Fodder, manager of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Governance Program and a citizen of Taos Pueblo.

While the process can be contentious anywhere, the large number of tribes in Arizona amplifies tensions: There are 22 federally recognized tribes in the state, and 10 of them have some yet-unsettled claims to water.

Federally Recognized Tribal Reservations and Trust Land in Arizona *Congress has not yet ratified the treaty that would create a reservation for the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe out of land that is currently part of the Navajo Nation. Boundaries of reservations and trust land are from the 2018 U.S. Census. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

The state — through its water department, courts and elected officials — has repeatedly used the negotiation process to try to force tribes to accept concessions unrelated to water, including a recent attempt to make the state’s approval or renewal of casino licenses contingent on water deals. In these negotiations, which often happen in secret, tribes also must agree to a state policy that precludes them from easily expanding their reservations. And hanging over the talks, should they fail, is an even worse option: navigating the state’s court system, where tribes have been mired in some of the longest-running cases in the country.

Arizona creates “additional hurdles” to settling tribes’ water claims that don’t exist in other states, said Anne Castle, the former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. “The tribes haven’t been able to get to settlement in some cases because Arizona would impose conditions that they find completely unacceptable,” she said.

Neither Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who left office in January after two terms, nor his successor, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, responded to requests for comment on the state’s approach to water rights negotiations. The Arizona Department of Water Resources, which represents the state in tribal water issues, declined to answer a detailed list of questions.

Shirley Wesaw, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, lives near the yet-to-open Dilkon Medical Center. She eagerly watched as it was built, anticipating a time when her elderly parents would no longer have to spend hours in the car to see their doctors off the reservation after it was completed in June 2022. But Wesaw is familiar with the difficulty accessing water in the area. Shared wells are becoming less reliable, she said. It’s most difficult during the summer, when some of her relatives have to wake up as early as 2 a.m. to ensure there’s still water to draw from a community well.

“When it’s low, there’s a long line there,” Wesaw said, “and sometimes it runs out before you get your turn to fill up your barrels.”

Pipe Dream

One impact of Arizona’s negotiating strategy was particularly evident at the outset of the pandemic.

In May 2020, as the Navajo Nation faced the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the country, the tribe’s leaders suspected that their limited clean water supply was contributing to the virus’ spread on the reservation. They sent a plea for help to Ducey, the governor at the time.

More than a decade earlier, as the tribe was negotiating its water rights with New Mexico, Arizona officials inserted into federal legislation language blocking the tribe from bringing its New Mexico water into Arizona until it also reaches a settlement with Arizona. John, with the tribe’s water department, said the state “politically maneuvered” to force the tribe to accept its demands.

First image: Jason John, director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources. Second image: The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project pipeline east of Window Rock, Arizona. (Sharon Chischilly for ProPublica and High Country News)

A multibillion-dollar pipeline that the federal government is building will connect the Navajo Nation’s capital of Window Rock, Arizona, to water from the San Juan River in New Mexico. But without a settlement in Arizona, the pipe can’t legally carry the water. The restriction left the tribe waiting for new sources of water, which, during the pandemic, made it difficult for people to wash hands in communities where homes lacked indoor plumbing.

“For the State of Arizona to limit the access of its citizens to drinking water is unconscionable, especially in the face of the coronavirus pandemic,” then-Navajo President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer wrote to the governor. Nez and Lizer included with their letter a proposed amendment that would change a single sentence in the law. They asked Ducey to help persuade Congress to pass that amendment, allowing enough water for tens of thousands of Diné residents to flow onto the reservation.

Arizona rejected the request, according to multiple former Navajo Nation officials.

The Department of Water Resources did not provide ProPublica and High Country News with public records related to the state’s denial of the Navajo Nation’s request for help getting its water to Window Rock. Hobbs’ office said it could not find the communications relating to the incident.

Land and Water

Nearly half of the tribes in Arizona are deadlocked with the state over water rights.

The Pascua Yaqui Tribe has 22,000 enrolled members, but limited land and housing allow only a third to live on its 3.5-square-mile reservation on the outskirts of Tucson. A subdivision still under construction has just started to welcome some Pascua Yaqui families to live on the reservation. But the new development isn’t nearly enough to house the more than 1,000 members on a waiting list. More than 18,000 additional acres of land would be needed to accommodate the tribe’s future population, according to a 2021 study it commissioned.

But Arizona has used water negotiations with tribes to curtail the expansion of reservations in a way no other state has.

It’s state policy that, as a condition of reaching a water settlement, tribes agree to not pursue the main method of expanding their reservations. That process, called taking land into trust, is administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and results in the United States taking ownership of the land for the benefit of tribes. Alternatively, tribes can get approval from Congress to take land into trust, but that process can be more fraught, requiring expensive lobbying and travel to Washington, D.C.

The policy will force the Pascua Yaqui “to choose between houses for our families and water certainty for our Tribe and our neighbors,” then-Chairman Robert Valencia wrote to the Department of Water Resources in 2020. “While we understand that our Tribe must make real compromises as part of settlement, this sort of toll for settlement that is unrelated to water is unreasonable and harmful.”

Despite the construction of new homes on the Pascua Yaqui Tribe’s reservation, there is still a long waiting list of members hoping to move there. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News)

For tribes across Arizona and the region, building homes and expanding economic opportunities to allow their members to move to reservations is a top priority.

The Pueblo of Zuni was the first tribe to agree to Arizona’s land requirement when it settled its water rights with the state in 2003. The Zuni had hoped to take into trust more land they own near their most sacred sites in eastern Arizona, but that will now require an act of Congress. Since the Zuni settlement, all four tribes that have settled water rights claims with Arizona have been required to agree to the same limit on expansion, according to ProPublica and High Country News’ review of every completed settlement in the state.

In a 2020 letter, the Navajo Nation’s then-attorney general called the state’s opposition to expansion “an invasion of the Nation’s sovereign authority over its lands and so abhorrent as to render the settlement untenable.”

The Department of the Interior, which negotiates alongside tribes, has agreed, objecting on multiple occasions in statements to Congress to Arizona’s use of water negotiations to limit the expansion of reservations. In 2022, as the Hualapai Indian Tribe settled its rights, the department called the state’s policy “contrary to this Administration’s strong support for returning ancestral lands to Tribes.”

Tribes in Arizona Often Wait Decades to Secure Water Rights

Seven federally recognized tribes in Arizona have filed but not settled any of their claims to water rights. The settlement process can take decades and wind through courts and Congress.

Note: Dates for the chart reflect the first year a tribe filed a claim for comprehensive water rights, known as Winters rights, after the 1908 Supreme Court decision that ruled reservations have inherent water rights meant to support a tribal homeland. In some cases, those rights are recognized through a court ruling, in others through an out-of-court settlement. Some tribes’ Winters rights, like the Tohono O’odham Nation’s, have only been partially settled. Data provided by Leslie Sanchez, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Tom Buschatzke, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources, explained the reasoning behind Arizona’s stance to state lawmakers, noting it’s based on Arizona’s interpretation of a century-old federal law that Congress is the only legal avenue for tribes to take land into trust. “The idea of having that tribe go back to Congress is so that there’s transparency in a hearing in front of Congress so the folks in Arizona who might have concerns can get up and express those concerns and then Congress can act accordingly,” he told the Legislature, adding that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ process, meanwhile, puts the decision in “the hands of a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.”

The state water department has even gone outside water rights negotiations to challenge reservation expansion without an act of Congress. When the Yavapai-Apache Nation filed a trust land application with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2001, the Department of Water Resources fought it, according to documents obtained via a public records request. The department went on to argue in an appeal that the trust land transfer would infringe on other parties’ water rights. A federal appellate board eventually ruled in favor of the tribe, but the state’s opposition contributed to a five-year delay in completing the land transition.

Pascua Yaqui Chairman Peter Yucupicio has watched non-Indigenous communities grow as he works to secure land and water for his tribe. “They put the tribes through the wringer,” he said.

Pascua Yaqui Chairman Peter Yucupicio said that the process to secure land and water puts tribes “through the wringer.” (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News) Arizona’s Demands

No one has defined the terms of water negotiations between Arizona and tribes more than former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl.

Before entering politics, he was a long-time attorney for the Salt River Project, a water and electric utility serving parts of metro Phoenix. During that time, he lobbied for and consulted on state rules that force tribes to litigate water disputes in state court if they’re unable to reach a settlement. After landing in the Senate, Kyl and his office oversaw meetings where parties hashed out disputes, and he viewed his role as that of a mediator. He helped negotiate or pass legislation for the water rights of at least seven tribes.

“I wasn’t taking a side,” Kyl told ProPublica and High Country News, “but I was interested in seeing if they could all reach agreements.”

Tribes, though, often didn’t see him as a neutral party, pointing especially to his handling of negotiations for the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe. He was shepherding a proposed settlement for the tribes through Congress in 2010 when he withdrew support, saying the price of the infrastructure called for in the proposal was too high to get the needed votes. A 2012 version of the tribes’ settlement also died after he added an extension to allow a controversial coal mine to continue operating.

Even when Kyl wasn’t directly involved, tribes were pushed to accept concessions, including limits on how they used their water. Settlements across the basin, including in Arizona, typically contain limits on how much water tribes can market, leaving unused water flowing downstream to the next person in line to use for free.

And several tribes in Arizona were asked to give up the ability to raise legal objections if other users’ groundwater pumping depleted water underneath their reservation.

Jon Kyl played a major role in negotiating water settlements between tribes and Arizona when he served in the U.S. Senate. (Drew Angerer/The New York Times/Redux)

Tribes also often have had to trade the priority of their water — the order in which supply is cut in times of shortage like the current megadrought — to access water. The Bureau of Reclamation recently proposed drastic cuts to Colorado River usage, and, in one scenario based on priority, a quarter of the proposed cuts to allocations would come from tribes in Arizona.

“Some of the Native American folks had a hard time with the concept that they had to give up rights in order to get rights,” Kyl said, adding that tribes risked getting nothing if they kept holding out. “If you’re going to resolve a dispute, sometimes you have to compromise.”

Given the long list of terms Arizona typically pursues, some tribes have been hesitant to settle — which can leave them with an uncertain water supply — so the state has tried to push them.

In 2020, Arizona legislators targeted the casino industry — the economic lifeblood of many tribes. Seven Republicans, including the speaker of the House and Senate president, introduced a bill to bar tribes from obtaining or renewing gaming licenses if they had unresolved water rights litigation with the state. The bill failed, but Rusty Bowers, the House speaker at the time, said the legislation was intended to put the state on a level playing field with tribes. “Where is our leverage on anything?” Bowers said. If tribes weren’t using the water, then others would do so amid a drought in the growing state, he said.

The Pascua Yaqui reservation, with a casino and golf course, lower left. Arizona Republicans introduced a bill in 2020 to bar tribes from renewing casino licenses if they had unresolved water rights litigation with the state. The measure failed. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica and High Country News. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.)

The state’s economic and population growth has presented tribes with other challenges. They must now negotiate not only with the state and federal governments but also with the businesses, cities and utilities that have in the interim made competing claims to water.

It has taken an average of about 18 years for Arizona tribes to reach even a partial water rights settlement, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis of data collected by Leslie Sanchez, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, who researches the economics of tribal water settlements. The Arizona tribes that filed a claim but are still in the process of settling it have been waiting an average of 34 years.

Chairman Calvin Johnson of the Tonto Apache Tribe — with a small reservation next to the Arizona mountain town of Payson — remembers as a child watching his uncle, then the chairman, begin the fight in 1985 to get a water rights settlement.

Still without a settlement, the tribe hopes to one day plant orchards for a farming business, build more housing to support its growing population and reduce its reliance on Payson for water, Johnson said. But, faced with Arizona’s demands, the tribe has not yet accepted a deal.

“The feeling that a lot of the older tribal members have is that it’s not ever going to happen, that we probably won’t see it in our lifetime,” Johnson said.

Turning to the Courts

Tribes that hope to avoid Arizona’s aggressive tactics can instead go to court — an even riskier gamble that drags on and takes the decision-making out of the hands of the negotiating parties.

The Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians is the only federally recognized tribe in Arizona yet to file a claim for its water. It has a reservation near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but with 400 members and minimal resources, the tribe would face a daunting path forward. To settle its rights, the tribe would have to engage in court proceedings to divvy up Kanab Creek, the only waterway that crosses its reservation; bring to the courtroom anyone with a potential competing claim to the creek’s water; find money to complete scientific studies estimating historical flows; and then, because the waterway spans multiple states, possibly face interstate litigation before the Supreme Court.

“It’s about creating and sustaining that permanent homeland,” said Alice Walker, an attorney for the band, but the path between the tribe and that water “boils down to all of those complex, expensive steps.”

Arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of Arizona and other parties in 1983, Kyl successfully defended a challenge to a law called the McCarran Amendment that allowed state courts to take over jurisdiction of tribal water rights claims.

“Tribes are subject to the vagaries of different state politics, different state processes,” explained Dylan Hedden-Nicely, director of the Native American Law Program at the University of Idaho and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “As a result, two tribes with identical language in their treaties might end up having, ultimately, very different water rights on their reservations.”

Some states, such as Colorado, set up special water courts or commissions to more efficiently settle water rights. Arizona did not. Instead, its court system has created gridlock. Hydrological studies needed from the Department of Water Resources take years to complete, and state laws add confusion over how to distinguish between surface and groundwater.

Two cases in Arizona state court that involve various tribes — one to divide the Gila River and another for the Little Colorado River — have dragged on for decades. The parties, which include every person, tribe or company that has a claim to water from the rivers, number in the tens of thousands. Just one judge, who also handles other litigation, oversees both cases.

Even Kyl now acknowledges the system’s flaws. “Everybody is in favor of speeding up the process,” he said.

After years of negotiations that failed to produce a settlement, the Navajo Nation went to court in 2003 to force a deal. Eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court, which heard it this March. Tribes and legal experts are concerned the court could use the case to target its 1908 precedent that guaranteed tribes’ right to water, a ruling that would risk the future of any tribes with unsettled water claims.

The Navajo Nation, according to newly inaugurated President Buu Nygren, has huge untapped economic potential. “We’re getting to that point in time where we can actually start fulfilling a lot of those dreams and hopes,” he said. “What it’s going to require is water.”

The Navajo Nation has untapped economic potential, according to President Buu Nygren, but realizing it will require water. (Sharon Chischilly for ProPublica and High Country News)

Just across the Arizona-New Mexico border, not far from Nygren’s office in Window Rock, construction crews have been installing the 17 miles of pipeline that could one day deliver large volumes of the tribe’s water to its communities and unlock that potential. Because of Arizona’s changes to the federal law, that day won’t come until the state and the Navajo Nation reach a water settlement.

For now, the pipeline will remain empty.

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by Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest, and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois

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

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill into law on Friday that strengthens the range of penalties that a state watchdog can mete out for health care employees who conspire to hide abuse or interfere with investigations by the state police or internal oversight bodies.

The legislation was introduced following an investigative series by Capitol News Illinois, Lee Enterprises Midwest and ProPublica into rampant abuses and cover-ups at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, a state-run institution in southern Illinois that houses people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and mental illnesses. The new law applies to employees at state-run institutions and at privately operated community agencies for people with developmental disabilities and mental illnesses that operate under the oversight of the Illinois Department of Human Services and its Office of the Inspector General.

The news organizations detailed how employees had lied to investigators, leaked sensitive investigative details, retaliated against people who reported abuse and sought to indoctrinate new workers into the cover-up culture. Employees who engaged in such actions made it difficult to pursue cases of patient abuse, yet they rarely faced serious consequences. IDHS Inspector General Peter Neumer suggested the change in law last year.

The new law allows the OIG to report workers who engage in such misconduct to Illinois’ existing Health Care Worker Registry, which would bar them from working in any health care setting in the state.

The registry identifies any health care worker who has been barred from working with vulnerable populations in any long-term care setting, such as state-operated developmental centers or group homes. Under prior law, workers could be barred because they had been found to have engaged in financial exploitation; neglect that is considered “egregious”; or physical or sexual abuse. The new law adds “material obstruction” of an investigation to the list of findings that can be reported to the registry, which is maintained by the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Pritzker signed the bill on the same day the IDHS inspector general released a 34-page report that recommended a “top to bottom analysis” of all processes related to the reporting of abuse and neglect at Choate “because at the present time there appear to be fundamental problems with all aspects of that system.”

The OIG report referenced the beating of a patient with a developmental disability by Choate staff in December 2014 that was covered by the news outlets. Four mental health technicians were charged with felonies in connection to the beating. Three of them pleaded guilty to failing to comply with abuse reporting laws for state employees, and one — Mark Allen, a mental health technician who had been originally charged with felony aggravated battery — pleaded guilty to felony obstruction of justice.

The report noted that at least eight people colluded to obstruct the state police and OIG investigation. Few staff members were forthcoming with details, even though they later told investigators it was the worst case of abuse they had ever seen.

“This was a textbook example of a code of silence, in which staff seek to protect each other from the consequences of their misconduct by remaining silent about what they witnessed or lying to protect their fellow employees,” the new OIG report stated. While Allen was ultimately reported to the registry after the inspector general found him responsible for the abuse, the other three were not. Even though they were criminally convicted of failing to report what they’d witnessed, and the inspector general found that they had engaged in the cover-up, prior law did not include obstruction as a reportable offense.

The new law is a “necessary reform that will provide additional protection for residents and hold accountable any bad actors who violate the trust of a resident or patient,” Alex Gough, a spokesperson for Pritzker, said in a statement.

“Governor Pritzker continues to take the longstanding problems at Choate very seriously, and he remains committed to providing a healthy, safe living environment for every single person residing in the state’s care.”

On Monday, Neumer said in a statement that he was pleased that the governor and legislators supported the measure, which passed both chambers unanimously, because it “serves as a strong deterrent to those who would engage in ‘code of silence’-type conduct, where employees lie or omit key facts to investigators in an effort to protect themselves and/or their fellow employees.”

“When employees fully and completely cooperate with OIG’s investigations, that also enhances OIG’s ability to fact-find, which serves as an additional deterrent to misconduct,” he said.

IDHS Secretary Grace Hou noted in a letter to Neumer, which was included in the inspector general’s report, that she also had backed the legislative change. That is one of several steps her department has taken to address conditions at Choate and in the agency’s 12 other developmental centers and psychiatric hospitals, the letter said.

In a statement, Marisa Kollias, a spokesperson for IDHS, said that a “system-wide transformation” of the agency’s facilities is already underway.

In March, Pritzker and Hou announced that more than 120 residents of Choate — about half of the facility’s population — would have to move out for their safety. The residents and their guardians were given up to three years to find an alternative placement, such as in a community group home or another state-run facility.

In addition to the relocation of some of Choate’s residents, the department has also hired a chief resident safety officer and is implementing other safety enhancements.

Kollias noted that Hou asked the inspector general to conduct the review of Choate last September, the same month the news organizations published their first in a series of reports about Choate.

“IDHS leadership continues to be deeply concerned by the events investigated and reported on by the OIG,” Kollias said. “The report underscores the importance of actions that IDHS has taken since the beginning of the administration, including substantially expanding training, hiring new staff and installing security cameras.”

The inspector general has repeatedly called for the installation of security cameras at Choate and in other IDHS facilities, but the department had previously said that doing so was complicated by federal regulations. The department said late last week that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which partially funds its institutional care, has provided new guidance that will allow for the installation of cameras in indoor, common area locations. The department, the statement said, “will be installing those expeditiously.”

by Marilyn W. Thompson

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Election maps across the Deep South are likely to be redrawn because of a surprise Supreme Court ruling that upheld a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, changes that could alter the balance of power that has given Republicans a razor-thin majority in Congress.

The court’s 5-4 decision in Allen v. Milligan, written for the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts, affirmed the section of the act that prohibits maps drawn to dilute minority voting strength. It was an unexpected victory for a law passed in 1965, which has been gradually dismantled under the Roberts court.

The Supreme Court is now expected to rule quickly on a similar challenge to election maps pending in Louisiana, which could create another congressional district favorable to Democrats in addition to the one in Alabama.

And a racial gerrymandering case from South Carolina is moving toward oral arguments in October. Republican state leaders appealed a decision from a three-judge federal panel that found illegal targeting of Black voters in a map that gave the GOP control of the state’s last remaining swing district. If the panel’s decision is upheld, the Republican-led legislature will have to redraw the lines for the 1st Congressional District.

Republicans won a slim majority in the House in 2022 as legal challenges over redistricting simmered, including the one in Alabama, which the court stayed until after the election. If all of the redistricting challenges were resolved in favor of minority plaintiffs, that could dramatically impact the composition of Congress in 2024. David Wasserman, a senior editor at Cook Political Report, said states creating new majority-minority districts may also need to reconfigure numerous surrounding districts, further altering election maps.

The ruling did not expand the Voting Rights Act but merely maintained the status quo. Nevertheless, it was an unexpected setback to the Republican Party’s redistricting operation. Alabama’s Republican-led Legislature drew only one seat offering an opportunity for Black candidates to win. Black Alabama voters had hoped to create a second congressional district that would offer an opportunity for an additional seat for a minority candidate. Today, 2 in 7 Alabama voters are Black but 6 of 7 congressional seats are held by white politicians. Republicans argued in a court brief that Democrats were “exploiting” the opening created by the Alabama case to make a power grab.

Roberts’ opinion brought a strongly worded dissent from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who accused the majority — including his colleague Brett M. Kavanaugh — of creating a “consciously segregated districting system” in the name of the Voting Rights Act.

But the South Carolina case offers a case study in how nuanced redistricting cases can be. A ProPublica story in May showed that one of the state’s most powerful Democrats, Rep. Jim Clyburn, made recommendations behind the scenes to protect his seat. That ultimately also helped the GOP. Lawyers for South Carolina Republican leaders argued that they did not intentionally target Black voters and followed Clyburn’s wishes.

Any state with a long history of “extremely polarized” voting is likely to feel the impact of the Alabama decision, which relied heavily on expert analysis of “airtight data” of racial voting patterns, said Christian R. Grose, a University of Southern California political science professor.

A pending federal case in El Paso, Texas, brought by MALDEF, a Latino civil rights organization, challenges maps drawn in 2021 by the Texas Legislature that limited the number of districts in which Black and Latino people make up the majority of eligible voters. Nina Perales, MALDEF’s vice president for litigation, said she’s encouraged by the Alabama decision, which “affirmed the traditional test” for fair maps and “closed the door on fringe theories that undermine voting rights.”

The Louisiana case was put on hold while the court considered Alabama, and minority groups believe a favorable decision could unlock a second majority Black district in the state. Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, Jeff Landry, asked the court in a letter to schedule oral arguments in the dispute.

In Florida, a map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis and approved by the Legislature may have violated the state constitution in eliminating a congressional district held by a Black Democrat. Voting rights groups have challenged the map, and a Democratic consultant told the Tampa Bay Times that the Alabama decision could signal to the courts that race is a legitimate factor to consider in redistricting.

Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said the Alabama case shows that states now have new technologies that “allow plaintiffs to search out potential VRA districts in ways not possible in prior decades.” This makes it harder for states to make excuses that they could not draw maps offering opportunities for minority voters.

Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Democratic Foundation, which provided legal support for the Alabama plaintiffs, said she expects the court to move quickly to send some of the disputed maps back to state legislatures for redrawing. The process will not always be smooth, she said, since some of the lawmakers have resisted efforts to broaden minority representation. If legislatures do not act, the courts could step in to remedy the mapping errors.

Democrats in Alabama believed the Supreme Court thwarted minorities in 2022 by delaying its consideration of the case until after the election.

“We’re obviously very happy to see success in the case and excited that voters will be able to have more fair representation,” Jenkins said. “But it is obviously disappointing that this could have been representation that those voters already had.”

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Kartikay Mehrotra, ProPublica, and Julia Ingram, FRONTLINE

This story describes fatal car-crash injuries.

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“America’s Dangerous Trucks” is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica. The documentary premieres Tuesday, June 13, 2023, at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.

It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra.

Marcos had spent a long day toiling as a mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now he was headed home on U.S. Route 281, a long swath of asphalt that runs parallel to the Rio Grande in this part of Texas. His wife, Irma Orive, was waiting for him.

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But Marcos, 61, never made it.

Big commercial trucks are ubiquitous in this part of the world, an endless stream of massive diesel-powered vehicles ferrying goods across the border, and on his drive home, Marcos encountered a large truck pulling a 53-foot trailer. The truck edged out of a driveway and began, slowly, to turn left onto the road, blocking traffic in both directions. It was as if someone had erected a big steel wall.

Video shows what happened next on that night in 2017. Traveling at more than 40 mph, Marcos’s Hyundai slammed violently into the larger vehicle and became wedged beneath it. The impact ripped the top half of the car apart. Marcos did not survive.

Ricardo Marcos died after a collision in which his Hyundai Elantra became wedged under a tractor-trailer. (Courtesy of Irma Orive)

The collision did terrible things to his body, breaking his ribs, lacerating his liver and spleen, snapping his neck and damaging the frontal lobes of his brain, according to the medical examiner’s report.

An investigator with the local police department blamed the collision on the truck driver, who was initially charged with negligent homicide, though charges were eventually dropped. ProPublica and FRONTLINE were unable to contact the trucker.

“I still miss him. I miss him every day,” said his widow, 70. “We did everything together.”

Ricardo Marcos and Irma Orive in 2009, first image, and in 2011, second image. (Courtesy of Irma Orive)

The incident was awful and tragic. But it wasn’t particularly uncommon. Collisions in which a passenger vehicle such as a car, SUV or pickup truck slides beneath a large commercial truck are called underride crashes in the jargon of the transportation industry. And they happen all the time: Each year hundreds of Americans die in this type of collision.

The federal government has been aware of the problem for at least five decades.

Reporters for ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained thousands of pages of government documents on underride crashes — technical research reports, meeting notes, memoranda and correspondence — dating back to the 1960s. The records reveal a remarkable and disturbing hidden history, a case study of government inaction in the face of an obvious threat to public wellbeing. Year after year, federal officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country’s primary roadway safety agency, ignored credible scientific research and failed to take simple steps to limit the hazards of underride crashes.

NHTSA officials failed to act, in part, because they didn’t know how many people were killed in the crashes. Their poor efforts at collecting data over the years left them unable to determine the scale of the problem. This spring the agency publicly acknowledged that it has failed to accurately count underride collisions for decades.

According to NHTSA’s latest figures, more than 400 people died in underride crashes in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. But experts say the true number of deaths is likely higher.

Records show the agency often deferred to the wishes of the trucking industry, whose lobbyists repeatedly complained that simple safety measures would be prohibitively expensive and do lasting damage to the American economy. During the 1980s, for example, industry leaders argued they couldn’t afford to equip trucks with stronger rear bumpers, which are also called rear underride guards; the devices are meant to prevent cars from slipping beneath the trailer during a rear-end collision. The beefier, more robust rear guards would’ve cost an additional $127 each, according to industry estimates.

David Friedman was a top official at NHTSA during the Obama years. “NHTSA has been trying, for decades, to do something about underride deaths. And yet over and over, they haven’t made the progress that we need. Why? Well, I think part of it is because industry just keeps pushing back and undermining their efforts,” said Friedman, who served as the agency’s acting administrator in 2014. “There are so many hurdles put in the way of NHTSA staff when it comes to putting a rule on the books that could address issues like underride.”

The technology at issue — strong steel guards mounted to the back and sides of trucks — is simple and “relatively inexpensive,” Friedman argued. “The costs are small.”

Rear and side underride guards can prevent smaller vehicles from sliding under trucks in some crashes. (Illustrations by Matt Twombly)

The circumstances surrounding underride crashes vary widely. In some cases, the driver of the smaller vehicle is at fault — they are speeding, texting or simply not paying enough attention to the road. In other cases, the trucker is to blame. Take, for example, a crash that occurred in Caledonia, Wisconsin, in 2020. A truck going roughly 40 mph blew past a stop sign at a four-way intersection. A Volkswagen SUV plowed directly into the side of the larger machine, became trapped between the wheels of the truck and was dragged down the block as shards of glass, steel and plastic shot into the air like shrapnel; miraculously, the SUV driver survived. Police cited the trucker, who declined to be interviewed.

The biggest trucks on the road — properly called tractor-trailers or semi trucks — consist of two parts. At the front is the tractor, which is equipped with a high-horsepower engine capable of pulling 80,000 pounds. A hitch connects it to the trailer, which can range from 28 feet to more than 50 feet long. The typical semitrailer rolls on an array of giant wheels, its floor sitting nearly 4 feet off the ground.

Modern automobiles come equipped with a host of meticulously engineered safety technologies. There are bumpers and crumple zones meant to absorb kinetic energy and reduce the violence of an impact. There are airbags to cushion the driver and passengers.

But in an underride crash, these technologies are rendered moot by the height difference between a large truck and the average passenger vehicle. Typically, it is the windshield of the smaller vehicle that takes the brunt of impact, slamming into the bottom edge of the trailer as the steel pillars holding up the car’s roof collapse. In many cases the airbags don’t even deploy.

Watch video ➜

Crash test videos from 2017 show how crashes can play out dramatically differently for the passengers in the smaller vehicle. One truck is equipped with only a fiberglass skirt for fuel-efficiency. The other has a steel side underride guard. (Videos provided by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

Watch video ➜

This violent sequence of events often produces grievous injuries. Start looking at underride crashes and you’ll quickly notice a pattern of awful head injuries: broken skulls, severely damaged brains, even decapitations. Some victims suffer crushing injuries to the torso or get speared in the chest by jagged chunks of steel.

Truck drivers are rarely harmed in the crashes.

NHTSA officials and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg declined to be interviewed by ProPublica and FRONTLINE. NHTSA did not respond to written questions from the news organizations, including about why the agency had moved so slowly to address the lethal hazards posed by underride collisions. In a statement, NHTSA defended its record, noting that it had recently created a committee to study the issue and developed new safety rules; it had been directed to take those steps by federal legislation passed in 2021. “Safety is the top priority for the U.S. Department of Transportation and NHTSA,” the agency said.

The American Trucking Associations, a trade group representing the nation’s major commercial haulers, for decades opposed safety regulations that would’ve improved rear underride guards and saved lives. Dan Horvath, the ATA’s vice president for safety policy, said he has little information about the organization’s past positions, but he acknowledged that costs were “a very real factor” for the industry.

Trucking companies now spend billions annually to improve safety, investing in everything from new braking systems to stringent drug-testing for drivers, Horvath said. “Safety is not just a slogan with our members,” he added. “It’s really the fundamental foundation of their operations.”

Eventually the ATA came to support government rules aimed at improving rear guards.

Still, the ATA and other industry groups are continuing to fight congressional efforts to require semitrailers to be equipped with side guards, which could prevent underride crashes like the one that killed Marcos. They said there’s not enough research to support a government mandate, which would impose huge costs on businesses that operate on thin profit margins.

During these five decades of industry resistance and government paralysis, thousands of people have died.

I. Decades of Delay

The year was 1967 and Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield was riding in the front seat of a gray Buick Electra, a massive boat of a sedan, cruising along U.S. Route 90 in Louisiana. It was after 2 in the morning. Ahead of the Buick, a semi truck had slowed to about 35 mph.

Mansfield’s driver failed to brake in time, striking the rear of the vehicle. The Buick’s long hood slid beneath the belly of the semitrailer. The top half of the car was destroyed. The actress and two others were killed. Mansfield’s three children, who’d been riding in the back of the vehicle, survived. One of them, Mariska Hargitay, is now an actor in the “Law & Order” TV franchise.

First image: A man reads about the death of actress Jayne Mansfield in a car crash in 1967. Second image: The 1966 Buick Electra 225 in which Mansfield and two others were killed in an underride crash outside New Orleans. (Robert Simmons/Pix/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images)

In the days after Mansfield’s death, leaders at the Department of Transportation began looking into underride crashes — and they quickly made a worrisome discovery.

The federal regulations in place at the time required that large trucks and semitrailers come equipped with a rear bumper, known as a rear guard, meant to prevent underride collisions. But the rules were lax: The guard could hang as much as 30 inches off the ground, far higher than the typical car bumper, and didn’t have to cover the full width of the truck or trailer. And it didn’t have to meet any strength standards.

Most rear guards of this era consisted of three pieces of rectangular steel: a horizontal bar welded to two vertical beams that bolted to the bottom of the trailer. Often crudely fashioned from thin, low-grade metal, the guards did little to prevent underrides — they had a tendency to simply collapse when hit.

A bigger guard built from stronger materials, top officials realized, could save lives.

They announced plans for a new regulation requiring tougher, more substantial guards. “Accident reports indicate that rear end collisions in which underride occurs are much more likely to cause fatalities than collisions generally,” the department noted in a 1969 statement regarding the proposed regulation.

The proposal was not well received by the major trucking companies or the firms that built and sold trucks and semitrailers. In a 1970 letter to the department, the ATA complained about “the unfairness of inflicting upon the industry the heavy cost penalty which would be brought about by the incorporation of a guard of the proposed type.”

The Truck Trailer Manufacturers Association, a lobbying outfit representing semitrailer builders, had little desire to make safer rear guards. In correspondence with the department, the TTMA said it would be “far more practical” to force Volkswagen and other companies making compact cars to produce larger vehicles that were less likely to slip beneath a truck.

Facing backlash, the department scuttled its proposed regulation. “At the present time, the safety benefits … would not be commensurate with the costs of implementing the proposed requirements,” officials wrote in a statement explaining their decision.

Congress in 1970 established NHTSA, giving the new agency broad powers to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries on America’s roadways. The agency would function as a unit within the larger Department of Transportation, a vast and sprawling bureaucracy tasked with overseeing everything from ships and planes to trains and automobiles. It was a moment of growing public concern over the carnage on America’s roadways — concern fueled in part by consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s damning exposes.

NHTSA immediately took on the underride issue, commissioning a series of studies by scientists in Arizona who ran Chevrolet Impalas and VW Rabbits into rear guards mounted on a simulated semitrailer body. The researchers determined the guards needed to be built bigger and stronger to prevent underrides.

Days before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in 1981, NHTSA went public with a revised rule that would beef up the rear guards on trucks and semitrailers. The cost was minimal: The agency estimated the new guards would cost $50 more per vehicle.

But the ATA and other trade organizations voiced their unhappiness about the added expense, which they believed would come out to $127 per trailer. As they had a decade earlier, they said the guards cost too much and would not save many lives.

After Reagan took office, NHTSA underwent a dramatic transformation. The new president had campaigned on promises to slash government regulation, which he saw as an unfair burden on the American economy, and he quickly began reshaping the executive branch.

He installed a new administrator at NHTSA, Raymond Peck Jr., a former lobbyist for the coal industry, who fired agency workers, rescinded existing safety rules and delayed regulations that were under development. The underride rule was jettisoned.

The entire regulatory process at NHTSA “came to a halt,” recalled Lou Lombardo, a physicist who was at the agency at the time. “We had nothing, nothing, nothing to do.”

Asked if people died as a result of the agency’s failure to act on rear underride crashes, Lombardo had an instant reply: “Oh heck yes.”

II. Devastating Consequences

Matt Brumbelow demolishes cars and trucks for a living.

At a sophisticated laboratory near Charlottesville, Virginia, he spends his days smashing brand new vehicles into a slab of superhard concrete and steel. The goal, always, is to identify hidden vulnerabilities — doors that collapse catastrophically, car seats and headrests that could worsen whiplash injuries during a violent impact. A complex pulley system is used to yank the pristine cars, trucks and SUVs — loaded with sensors, and, in some cases, biomechanical dummies — into the test block.

“I love it,” said Brumbelow, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia. “It’s definitely more than a job.”

First image: Demolished crash test vehicles at a laboratory run by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Second image: Matt Brumbelow at the lab. (FRONTLINE)

He gave journalists from ProPublica and FRONTLINE a tour of the facility, which is run by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the harm done by motor vehicle crashes on the nation’s roads. The lab looks like the world’s tidiest and best-lit auto salvage lot — horribly mangled vehicles are everywhere.

By the 1990s, NHTSA had finally adopted a regulation requiring tougher rear guards. The new requirements only applied to newly built semitrailers; older models that were already on the road were exempted.

It took effect in 1998, more than 30 years after Mansfield’s death first drew attention to the issue.

In time, though, it became clear to Brumbelow and his colleagues that this landmark safety regulation was deeply flawed. Sifting through the data from 1,070 collisions, Brumbelow and his team noticed a distinct pattern: Guards built to the new federal standard were still failing, leading to severe underride crashes.

NHTSA, he believed, hadn’t done enough testing on these new guards to see how they would perform under real-world conditions. And other countries had established much more stringent standards — guards used just across the border in Canada, for example, had to be far stronger than those required under NHTSA’s 1998 rule.

By 2010, the institute had purchased a fleet of Chevrolet Malibu sedans and was slamming them into semitrailers equipped with guards meeting the updated federal standard. The results were dismal. “In crash tests that we were running at 35 miles an hour, they were failing,” he recalled.

Watch video ➜

A rear guard that met the 1998 federal standards fails on impact in this test, while the stronger rear guard proves capable of stopping an underride. It took the government more than two decades to mandate the stronger guards. (Videos provided by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

Watch video ➜

Brumbelow and his colleagues tested guards made by the eight largest semitrailer manufacturers in the U.S. All but one of them collapsed catastrophically; if these had been real crashes, the people in the cars would’ve been killed or badly injured.

One of the Malibus is still sitting on the floor of the lab. It bears the signature wounds of an underride crash: There is no damage to the bumper and the hood is only mildly dented, but the windshield has been destroyed and the roof is shredded. The dummy in the driver’s seat fared very poorly.

“It’s clear the standard is inadequate,” he said, adding that in his view NHTSA is making crucial policy decisions based on “bad science.”

NHTSA’s dubious decisions have had devastating consequences in the real world.

In 2013, Marianne Karth was behind the wheel of her Ford Crown Victoria sedan, traveling through Georgia on her way to a family wedding. Two of her daughters, Mary and AnnaLeah, were in the back seat; her son Caleb was sitting next to her in the front.

“I came upon slow traffic. I slowed down and a truck driver — apparently — did not. He hit us,” she recalled. Karth’s Ford spun around, then slammed into the rear end of another semi truck and became wedged underneath it.

The truck’s rear guard, which Karth believes met the 1998 federal standard, “just came off onto the ground. It totally came off the truck.”

Photos taken at the crash site show debris scattered all over the roadway. To extricate Karth and her children, a rescue team equipped with hydraulic cutting tools hacked the car apart.

The collision killed 17-year-old AnnaLeah instantly; her sister, 13, survived for a few days in the hospital before dying of her injuries. Caleb sustained a minor concussion.

In the years since the crash, Karth and her husband, Jerry Karth, have channeled their grief into constant activism — petitioning NHTSA, helping to draft federal legislation, meeting with members of Congress, talking to anybody who will listen.

Marianne Karth has been working to improve truck safety standards, including by requiring stronger underride guards, after two of her daughters died in a collision with a truck in 2013. (FRONTLINE)

If the truck had been equipped with a stronger guard, said Karth, “it’s possible that my daughters would be alive.”

After witnessing the tests conducted by Brumbelow and the Insurance Institute, many of the country’s major trailer companies voluntarily began building better guards that are far more capable of withstanding a collision.

“We place such a high value on the safety of both our customers and the driving public that we have chosen to provide this improved level of safety and performance as a standard feature — and at no additional cost,” said Bob Wahlin, president and CEO of Stoughton Trailers, a large manufacturer, in a 2016 press release touting the company’s new guards.

In the view of Andy Young, an attorney and truck driver who has testified before Congress about underride collisions, “the industry made changes because they were worried about bad publicity. … They were embarrassed.”

NHTSA, however, did not spring into action. Instead, the agency allowed companies to continue building trailers with the weaker guards. In 2022, more than a decade after Brumbelow’s tests, NHTSA updated its rules. Even then, the agency acted only after the passage of a federal law directing it to do so.

Some safety advocates panned the revised regulation, noting that most big trailer companies are now building guards that are more robust than those required by the new government rule. They saw it as a step back.

“The record speaks for itself: There’s no way you can say that NHTSA acted swiftly to protect people from this known danger,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, a network of crash survivors and victims’ families. “This is a story I can tell you over and over for different issues. You can’t tell me that people are laser focused on safety.”

While the government has made what Cahalan calls “incremental progress” on rear underride crashes, it has yet to craft regulations addressing collisions that occur when a passenger vehicle runs into the side of a large truck. Such accidents kill hundreds of people annually.

III. Side Guard Safety

Eric Hein sat on a bench on the grounds of a small Methodist church in the rugged Sandia Mountains north of Albuquerque, New Mexico. From time to time, a semi truck chugged up a steep four-lane road nearby, sending a low rumble through the canyon.

In his hands he held photos of his teenage son, Riley Hein, who was killed in a collision with a heavy truck in 2015. He wept softly. The years, Hein said, have scarcely dulled his sorrow.

Eric Hein’s son, Riley, died in a collision with a heavy truck on a New Mexico highway in 2015. (FRONTLINE)

Riley Hein was driving to high school when an 18-wheeler drifted into his lane. The teen’s Honda Civic smacked into the side of the massive vehicle and became wedged beneath it, trapped between the front and rear wheels.

Instead of stopping, the trucker pulled Riley Hein and his damaged Honda down the highway for half a mile. The car erupted in flames. By the time firefighters were finally able to extinguish the fire, it had been reduced to a husk of charred metal. Riley Hein — a smiley, gregarious teen who played trombone in the school marching band — was dead.

ProPublica and FRONTLINE reporters repeatedly tried to contact the driver, but were unable to locate him.

“We had to sell the house and leave after Riley was killed,” Eric Hein recalled. “It was just too quiet. And it was very painful driving down the highway and seeing the place where his car burned.”

Eric and his son, Riley (Courtesy of Eric Hein)

Riley Hein’s story points to another problem: Even when semi trucks are equipped with rear guards, there is nothing to keep a car from hitting the side of a truck and getting stuck beneath it. NHTSA has never adopted regulations requiring any type of underride guard on the sides of trucks.

During the late 1960s, the Department of Transportation said publicly that it intended to “extend the requirements for underride protection to the sides of large vehicles.” But department officials quietly dropped the idea. In 1991, NHTSA revisited the concept and determined that it would be too costly.

Over the past several decades, engineers have developed a host of devices that can be mounted to the underbelly of a semitrailer to prevent underride crashes like the one that took Riley Hein’s life. Most are built from a lattice of thick steel tubes. Wabash National, a major trailer builder based in Indiana, has patented several designs.

But the technology has largely been shunned by the trucking industry. Wabash has never put its side guards into production. (Many semitrailers are equipped with lightweight panels that hang between the front and rear wheels; these are not side guards. These devices are meant to improve fuel-efficiency but don’t provide any safety benefits — they’ll collapse during a crash.)

Hein was shocked when learned about this history. The semitrailer that smashed into his son’s Civic was built by Utility Trailer Manufacturing Company, one of the biggest players in the U.S. market. Eric Hein decided to sue the company, alleging they’d been “negligent for not putting on side underride guards on the trailer that killed Riley.”

It was a relatively novel strategy, and his attorney Randi McGinn, was initially skeptical, pointing out that there had been few successful legal cases built on the theory.

But as McGinn and her co-counsel, Michael Sievers, dug into the evidence, they became increasingly convinced that Hein’s instinct had been right. During discovery they obtained a seven-page document signed by executives from Utility and 10 other semitrailer companies. The document, drafted in 2004, was a pact struck by the biggest companies in the business, a pledge to work cooperatively — and secretly — to thwart any lawsuits stemming from side and rear underride crashes. The arrangement had been orchestrated by Glen Darbyshire, an attorney for the TTMA, the trade group.

As part of the agreement, the firms would keep crucial safety information confidential. That material — including “documents, factual material, mental impressions, interview reports, expert reports, and other information” — wasn’t to be shared with anyone outside of the circle.

Darbyshire declined to be interviewed by ProPublica and FRONTLINE, as did the TTMA.

To McGinn, it seemed the companies had spent years battling lawsuits rather than directing their engineers to address an obvious hazard. “This is the same thing that the tobacco companies did — rather than fix the problem, or admit the problem,” said McGinn. “Corporations have to be responsible for safety, too. They can’t put their profits before the lives of 16-year-old kids.”

In the course of the litigation, Jeff Bennett, Utility’s vice president for engineering, said he’d spent 32 years with the company and had never heard of a car getting trapped under a trailer, other than in the Hein case. The company, he testified, had never designed or built a side guard.

Utility executives argued that adding side guards to trailers would unleash a cascade of new problems: They could cause trailers to get hung up on steep loading ramps, interfere with the functioning of brake lines, and fatigue the frame of the trailer.

After a two-week trial in 2019, jurors in Albuquerque found Utility negligent, ordering the company to pay nearly $19 million to the Hein family. It was one of the largest verdicts to hit the trucking industry in recent years.

Utility did not respond to emails from FRONTLINE and ProPublica requesting comment.

In a statement issued after the trial, the company said, “Utility Trailer does not believe it negligently designed, tested, or manufactured its trailers. Utility Trailer presented uncontroverted evidence that adding a side-underride guard to its trailers would make the trailers more dangerous to the motoring public.”

Since then, however, the company’s stance has shifted dramatically. Utility now sells what it calls a “side impact guard,” offering it as an additional safety feature on its trailers. In its sales brochure, Utility says the guard has been mounted to “over 20 trailers” currently on the road.

In recent years, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., have repeatedly pushed legislation that would require semis and other heavy trucks to have some sort of side guard. Introduced three times since 2017, the bill has not made it out of committee.

While the senators haven’t been successful with the legislation, they managed to insert language instructing NHTSA to study side guards into the infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden in November 2021.

“You know, people don’t like change. And certainly, you know, the trucking companies don’t want to have to invest more money necessarily on safety,” Gillibrand said, when asked about the criticism. “But this is something that is necessary.”

Rubio declined to be interviewed by FRONTLINE and ProPublica.

The industry remains strongly opposed to side guards. In one letter to Congress, the ATA said there wasn’t “sufficient science” on side guards and urged the government to conduct more research on the devices before mandating them.

“When we talk about installing side underride guards, we’re focusing on mitigation after that crash has already happened,” said Horvath, the ATA’s top safety official. “Unfortunately, resources are not limitless. And if I’m going to direct resources as a trucking company, I want to focus on avoiding that crash from ever occurring.” Big trucking companies are supportive of new electronic technologies such as automatic emergency braking systems, which use cameras or sensors to detect road hazards and halt the truck before it crashes, or engine modules that limit the speed of a truck, he said.

Lewie Pugh, a retired trucker, is executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, a group representing individual drivers and small trucking firms. “Speaking as somebody who has real-world experience driving a truck, I believe there are probably certain instances, certain situations where side und­­erride guards will work and save lives,” Pugh said. “I also believe that there are certain instances where side underride guards will cost lives, and we don’t know the unintended consequences.”

If you ask Pugh, he’ll tell you that truckers have every right to be skeptical of both the government and new technologies. In 1975, NHTSA adopted a regulation requiring anti-lock brakes on large trucks and trailers. The new braking systems, however, proved to be glitchy and prone to failure, leaving truckers rolling down the road without any way to stop.

He worries that if side guards are mandated, the costs will hit independent truckers and small operators hard.

“Research is key, and don’t use the truck drivers and the trucking companies as the guinea pigs,” Pugh said. “Let’s make sure this stuff is working.”

IV. Counting Crashes

NHTSA operates on a $1.3 billion annual budget. The agency is responsible for everything from setting standards for motorcycle helmets to investigating defective vehicles to studying automated driving technologies. It is America’s primary roadway safety agency.

And yet NHTSA is unable to count the number of underride crashes that occur in the U.S. each year.

An analysis of the agency’s data by ProPublica and FRONTLINE indicates that more than 400 people, including several truckers, died in underride collisions in 2021, the most recent year for which complete figures are available.

But the true death toll is likely far higher. Pointing to a series of studies dating back to the 1970s, experts say NHTSA has never been able to properly track underride crashes, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on data-collection efforts.

“There is a severe undercounting of the number of underride crashes in this country,” said Harry Adler, a co-founder of the Institute for Safer Trucking, an activist group that follows the data closely.

Part of the problem is that NHTSA relies on local and state law enforcement officers to investigate serious collisions and document their findings. Those police reports are sent to NHTSA and compiled into a single, mammoth database, cataloging tens of thousands of incidents every year.

The agency, however, has never required these first responders to track underride crashes and has offered police little training on the issue. As Adler notes, “only 17 states have a field on their police accident reports to indicate if an underride occurred.”

Underride “fatalities are likely underreported,” stated the Government Accountability Office in a 2019 report urging NHTSA to do a better job of educating police officers and other law enforcement personnel about the crashes.

NHTSA’s own data can be conflicting. ProPublica and FRONTLINE compared two agency databases. One contained detailed information, including photos and crash diagrams, on 27 fatal side and rear underride truck collisions. In the other one — the primary data set of fatal crashes — only three of those 27 accidents were listed as underrides.

Recently, the agency acknowledged that its numbers on underride crashes are unreliable. NHTSA said it has recently taken steps to improve its data-collection practices.

The issue is not academic. When NHTSA looks at a new safety rule, it makes strict economic calculations. How many lives will be saved by the regulation? How much will it cost businesses to implement the rule?

NHTSA generally won’t adopt a new safety measure unless it can be shown to work and to cost the industry no more than $12.5 million for each life it saves.

Critics said the undercount of fatalities played an important role this spring, when NHTSA released new research on the costs and benefits of side guards.

The agency determined the devices aren’t economically feasible — they would be too expensive and save too few lives. According to NHTSA’s calculations, mounting the devices on every new semitrailer in the U.S. would cost upwards of $778 million and would only prevent 17.2 deaths per year.

Some experts, though, are skeptical of NHTSA’s calculations. They said that NHTSA made faulty assumptions about the efficacy of side guards and the number of lives at risk. The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency, has said publicly that NHTSA’s analysis underestimated the potential benefits of the guards.

Brumbelow’s organization concluded that a more realistic estimate of the lives that side guards would save each year is 159 to 217, far higher than what NHTSA found.

The higher number flips the cost-benefit equation in favor of requiring trucks to have side guards.

“There are hundreds of lives that are being lost every year in side underride crashes,” he said. “The system that would be needed on a trailer to prevent so many of those fatalities from occurring is not overly complex.”

NHTSA, he concluded, needs to take the matter “more seriously.”

V. “Complete Success”

Against one wall in a crowded workshop in Cary, North Carolina, are an array of tool chests and welding equipment. Hunks of steel and extruded aluminum — truck parts — lie on a tall workbench. A shelving unit holds several child car seats.

In the center of the space, Aaron Kiefer is sorting through a pile of manilla folders. He is a mechanical engineer and accident reconstructionist. Clients — insurance firms, attorneys and, quite often, trucking companies — hire him to figure out what transpired in the moments before a serious crash.

Aaron Kiefer shows reporter A.C. Thompson one component of a steel guard that mounts to the bottom of a semitrailer. (FRONTLINE)

Kiefer has plenty of work. In recent years America’s streets and highways have become more perilous, with fatal collisions of all types increasing significantly; Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, recently declared it a “national crisis.” Deaths due to truck crashes have surged by nearly 50% over the past decade, to 5,788 in 2021; nearly 155,000 people were injured that year.

Kiefer’s case files are the stuff of nightmares. One particularly gruesome investigation involved a car that had been cut in half by an encounter with a semi truck. Looking at photos from the crash, which occurred in Alabama, he said, the auto “passed all the way underneath the trailer.” He added, flatly, “It was not a survivable crash.”

Kiefer said he’s investigated “at least 100” underride collisions. “Seeing these types of accidents, over and over, has become increasingly a frustration of mine, personally,” he explained. “When you have this mismatch between the commercial vehicle and the passenger vehicle, the passenger vehicle always suffers. And I feel like there are reasonable ways to prevent these types of accidents.”

In hopes of reducing this roadway violence, even a little, Kiefer has designed a side guard using superstrong polyester webbing — the same material is used to lift extremely heavy cargo — attached to a matrix of steel bars. The goal is to get the trucking industry to adopt the device, which weighs 400 pounds, far less than other side guards; the lighter weight should translate into better fuel efficiency and other benefits for truckers.

On a warm day last fall, Kiefer staged a test of the device, dubbed a Safety Skirt, on a huge square of asphalt at the North Carolina State Highway Patrol training center in Raleigh. It was a grassroots effort. Welders at Maverick Metalworks, a local business, had helped Kiefer fabricate the guard. A salvage yard had donated a sacrificial Nissan Altima, which was delivered by volunteer from a nearby towing company.

Kiefer brought an old, battered semitrailer equipped with his guard to the facility, which under normal circumstances is used by police practicing high-speed driving techniques. He was planning a T-bone-type crash: The Nissan would strike the side of a trailer at a 90-degree angle. Marianne and Jerry Karth were on hand to witness the event, as was Lois Durso, an activist who had driven up from Florida with her husband.

With police officers and local reporters watching, the car was towed toward the trailer at 35 mph, smacked into the guard with loud thud and bounced off. The blow crunched the hood of the Nissan and set off the airbags, but no underride had occurred. It worked. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” shouted Marianne Karth.

“Complete success,” Kiefer said, smiling. “This is awesome. It’s a step towards highway safety.”

Now he just has to get NHTSA and the trucking companies to agree.

A crash test dummy in a Nissan Altima remains intact after a T-bone-type collision with a trailer equipped with prototype side guards. (FRONTLINE)

How We Conducted Our Analysis

To analyze the faulty reporting of underride collisions, ProPublica and FRONTLINE examined two databases maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country’s top road safety authority.

First, we examined the agency’s Crash Investigation Sampling System. This database contains a representative sample of accidents from across the country. For each incident, NHTSA analysts create a thorough report, which includes photos and crash diagrams.From this data set, we identified 27 cases that documented fatal rear and side underride crashes from 2017 to 2021.

We then took those 27 cases and matched them to the same 27 accidents as they were recorded in NHTSA’s primary fatality database, called the Fatal Accident Reporting System. The FARS database is designed to record all road accidents involving fatalities. It has long been criticized as being inaccurate, even though it is frequently used in setting safety policies at the agency.

Our findings demonstrated the inaccuracy of FARS. In comparing the two data sets, we found that only three of the 27 accidents in FARS were correctly identified as underride crashes.

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Reporting contributed by Jeff Ernsthausen of ProPublica and Gabrielle Schonder and Chantelle Lee of FRONTLINE. Design and development by Lucas Waldron of ProPublica.

by Tim Golden

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When the PGA Tour announced a long-term partnership with LIV Golf, the upstart organization bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, no one sounded angrier than survivors of the 9/11 attacks and the families of those who were killed.

The pact on June 6 marked an abrupt reversal for the PGA, which had fought LIV Golf since it emerged in 2021. The rival league courted star golfers with vast payouts that were widely seen as part of a global public-relations campaign by the Saudi government.

“All of these PGA players and PGA executives who were talking tough about Saudi Arabia have done a complete 180,” one spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, said in an interview. “All of a sudden they’re business partners? It’s unconscionable.”

Before the new alliance, PGA officials had highlighted the Saudi government’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks, along with the kingdom’s record of human rights abuses, as important reasons for their opposition to LIV Golf.

The Saudi government has long denied that it provided any support for the attacks. But, over the past few years, evidence has emerged that Saudi officials may have had more significant dealings with some of the plotters than U.S. investigations had previously shown.

Since 2017, the 9/11 families and some insurance companies have been suing the Saudi government in a Manhattan federal court, claiming that Saudi officials helped some of those involved in the Qaida plot.

The Saudi royal family was a declared enemy of al-Qaida. In the early 1990s, it expelled Osama bin Laden, the son of a construction magnate, and stripped him of his citizenship. At the same time, the kingdom funded an ambitious effort to propagate its radical Wahhabi brand of Islam around the world and tolerated a religious bureaucracy that was layered with clerics sympathetic to al-Qaida and other militant Islamists.

From the start of the FBI’s investigation into a possible support network for the 9/11 plot, one of its primary suspects was a supposed Saudi graduate student who helped settle the first two hijackers to arrive in the United States after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000.

The middle-aged student, Omar al-Bayoumi, told U.S. investigators that he met the operatives by chance at a halal cafe near the Saudi Consulate in Culver City, California. The two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were trained as terrorists but spoke virtually no English and were poorly prepared to operate on their own in Southern California.

Bayoumi insisted he was just being hospitable when he found Hazmi and Mihdhar an apartment in San Diego, set them up with a bank account and introduced them to a coterie of Muslim men who helped them for months with other tasks — from buying a car and taking English classes to their repeated but unsuccessful attempts to learn to fly.

As ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine detailed in an in-depth report on the FBI’s secret investigation of the Saudi connection in 2020, agents on the case suspected that Bayoumi might be a spy. He seemed to spend most of his time hanging around San Diego mosques, donating money to various causes and obtrusively filming worshippers with a video camera.

Yet both the FBI and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission accepted Bayoumi’s account almost at face value. In a carefully worded joint report in 2005, the CIA and FBI asserted that they had found no information to indicate that Bayoumi was a knowing accomplice of the hijackers or that he was a Saudi government “intelligence officer.”

But FBI documents that were just made public last year sharply revised that assessment.

While living in San Diego, one FBI document concludes, Bayoumi was paid a regular stipend as a “cooptee,” or part-time agent, of the General Intelligence Presidency, the Saudi intelligence service. The report adds that his information was forwarded to the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a close friend to both presidents Bush and their family. The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to questions about Bandar’s alleged relationship with Bayoumi.

As Bayoumi was helping the hijackers, FBI documents show, he was also in close contact with members of a Saudi religious network that operated across the United States. He also dealt extensively with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni American cleric who the documents suggest was more closely involved with the hijackers than was previously known. Awlaki later became a leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in a 2011 drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama.

One of the Saudi officials with whom Bayoumi appeared to work, Musaed al-Jarrah, was both a key figure in the Saudi religious apparatus in Washington and a senior intelligence officer. After being expelled from the United States, Jarrah returned to Riyadh and worked for years as an aide to Prince Bandar on the Saudi national security council.

Another Saudi cleric with whom Bayoumi worked, Fahad al-Thumairy, was posted to Los Angeles as both a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate and a senior imam at the nearby King Fahad Mosque — a pillar of the global effort to spread Wahhabi Islam that had opened in mid-1998.

According to another newly declassified FBI document from 2017, an unnamed source told investigators that Thumairy received a phone call shortly before the two hijackers arrived in Los Angeles from “an individual in Malaysia” who wanted to alert him to the imminent arrival of “two brothers … who needed their assistance.”

In mid-December 1999, according to the 9/11 Commission report, a key Saudi operative in the plot, Walid bin Attash, flew to Malaysia to meet with Hazmi and Mihdhar. Although the men were kept under surveillance by Malaysian security agents, they were allowed to fly on to Bangkok and then Los Angeles, using Saudi passports with their real names. The FBI source said that Thumairy arranged for Mihdhar and Hazmi to be picked up at the Los Angeles International Airport and brought to the King Fahad Mosque, where they met with him. Thumairy and Jarrah have both denied helping the hijackers.

The FBI revelations were especially stinging for the 9/11 families because previous administrations made extraordinary efforts to keep them under wraps. President Donald Trump, who promised to help the families gain access to FBI and CIA documents, instead fought to shield them as state secrets. (Trump has been a vocal supporter of LIV Golf, hosting several of its tournaments at his golf courses and saying after the merger, “The Saudis have been fantastic for golf.”)

The more recent disclosures — which came in documents declassified under an executive order that President Joe Biden issued just before the 20th anniversary of the attacks — are now at the center of the federal litigation in New York. While the families are pressing to reopen discovery in the case based on the new FBI information about Bayoumi and others, lawyers for the Saudi government continue to insist there is no evidence of the kingdom’s involvement in the plot.

To prove their case, the families must show that people working for the Saudi government either aided people they knew were planning a terrorist action in the United States or helped members of a designated terrorist organization like al-Qaida. At the time that Bayoumi aided Hazmi and Mihdhar in California, officials have said, the CIA and Saudi intelligence had identified the two as Qaida operatives.

The two federal judges overseeing the Manhattan litigation have yet to rule on requests from the families, based on the newly declassified FBI documents, for further inquiries to the Saudi intelligence service.

The PGA official who brokered the new alliance with LIV Golf, James J. Dunne III, told the Golf Channel he was confident that the Saudi officials with whom he negotiated were not involved in the 9/11 plot. Dunne, an investment banker, added, “And if someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill him myself.”

Eagleson, whose father, John Bruce Eagleson, died in the same south tower of the World Trade Center where 66 employees of Dunne’s bank were killed, suggested that he read the declassified FBI documents about Bayoumi, Thumairy and other Saudis. “It’s the same government,” Eagleson said.

by ProPublica and PBS's Frontline

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“America’s Dangerous Trucks” is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica. The documentary premieres June 13, 2023, at 10 p.m. EDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream in the PBS Video App and on FRONTLINE’s website starting at 7 p.m. EDT.

Read Part I: How Regulators Failed to Act to Prevent Underride Crashes

An average of about 5,000 people a year are killed in crashes involving large trucks, a death toll that has soared by almost 50% since 2011, according to the most recent federal data. Tens of thousands more have been injured.

“America’s Dangerous Trucks,” a joint investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, examines one particularly gruesome kind of truck accident — underride crashes — and why they keep happening. 

Underride crashes occur when a car slides beneath the trailer of a big truck. Trucks can also crush pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists. Hundreds of people die in such accidents every year.

There is a simple solution for reducing these deaths and injuries: build barriers that hang from the sides of the trucks to help prevent vehicles and people from slipping underneath.

Drawing on thousands of court records, government documents and interviews with survivors and industry insiders, the FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigation will show why regulatory agencies and the trucking industry have long refused to mandate the safety devices — and why the struggle continues today.

The news organizations will reveal explosive emails detailing how trucking industry officials pressured Department of Transportation regulators to alter a report that recommended a nationwide mandate for guards specifically designed to protect pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists. The guards are already used around the world and in several U.S. cities.

“The industry holds a lot of sway on what rules get made, and they all hate the idea of additional rules,” said Martin Walker, the recently retired chief of research at the agency that regulates trucking. “Unfortunately, the public doesn’t have much impact on what DOT does. But there’s a very close relationship with industry, there’s no doubt about that.”

Representatives of both the trucking industry and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say that their top priority is safety, with NHTSA also saying it has taken steps to reduce underride crashes. Both say that the cost of the guards outweighs any potential live-saving benefits. “America’s Dangerous Trucks” is a powerful examination of where the fight over underride safety measures stands and why it matters.

“America’s Dangerous Trucks” airs Tuesday, June 13, 2023, at 10 p.m. ET/9 p.m CT on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. It will also be available to stream starting at 7 p.m. ET/6 p.m. CT the night of its release at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS Video App.

The ProPublica and FRONTLINE stories will publish on Tuesday and June 22 on the news organizations’ websites.

Update, Tuesday, June 22: This story was updated to note a new publication date for the second installment of the series.

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

Leer en español.

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Local officials in Wisconsin are planning to improve how sheriff’s deputies communicate with people who don’t speak English in response to a ProPublica report that found that an investigation into the death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy living on a dairy farm was mishandled due to a language barrier.

Dane County supervisors said that their goals include making language access a key part of department equity plans and creating a dedicated countywide language-access coordinator.

The efforts come as the parents of the boy, Jefferson Rodríguez, have settled a lawsuit against the farm and its insurance company over the July 2019 death in rural Dane, about a half hour north of Madison. As ProPublica reported in February, sheriff’s deputies wrongly concluded that the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, had accidentally run his son over with farming equipment.

But it was another worker, on his first work day at D&K Dairy, who had been driving the 6,700-pound Bobcat skid steer that crushed Jefferson, ProPublica found. The man had waited at the scene, expecting to be questioned, on the night Jefferson died. But deputies never interviewed him, in part due to a language barrier. ProPublica was able to reach him and he acknowledged he was driving the skid steer that night.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident and nobody was charged criminally. But Rodríguez was blamed in the official account. Rodríguez and Jefferson’s mother, María Sayra Vargas, who lives in Nicaragua, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020 against the farm and its insurer, Rural Mutual Insurance Company.

The trial was originally scheduled to begin this week in Dane County Circuit Court. But, about a month after ProPublica published its story, Jefferson’s parents reached a tentative agreement with the farm and insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The agreement was later finalized in court and the lawsuit was dismissed in April.

Lawyers for Rural Mutual and the farm declined to comment.

Rodríguez said that the truth about his son’s death “has come to light” because of ProPublica’s reporting. He declined to share the settlement amount, but said the money will be helpful to him and his family.

“It doesn’t mean I’m happy. The sadness remains,” said Rodríguez, who now works on another dairy farm in Wisconsin. “All the money in the world wouldn’t make me the person I used to be. … I would like to be able to share this with Jefferson. That is what would fill me with joy.”

José and Jefferson Rodríguez (Courtesy of José Rodríguez)

In the weeks after our initial story was published, more than a half-dozen members of the Dane County Board of Supervisors told ProPublica they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to Jefferson’s death and the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Jefferson lived with his father above the farm’s milking parlor, the barn where hundreds of cows were brought day and night to be milked by heavy, loud machinery.

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for and can make recommendations to the sheriff’s office. But it is limited in its ability to set policy.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s department, which was not a defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit, said there have been no changes to its language access practices. The department has no written policies on what deputies should do when they encounter people who speak a language other than English or when to bring in an interpreter. The department relies on deputies to self-report their ability to speak languages other than English.

County Supervisor Dana Pellebon said one way she and her colleagues on the county board hope to improve language access at the department is through its equity work plan, a road map that each county agency lays out for how it can become more inclusive and fair. County departments are now updating those plans, she said, and the plans are then approved by the Equal Opportunity Commission, which she chairs. “Language access is something that will be a part of all the plans,” Pellebon said.

One area she hopes the sheriff’s office can address is ensuring language access in rural parts of the county where cellphone reception is weak and phone-based interpretation services aren’t available. “We want to make sure there is a workaround,” Pellebon said. “Either get to a space where there is cellphone service or find a landline at the space they’re at.”

She and other county officials are also considering the possibility of testing deputies’ proficiency in a foreign language instead of relying on their self-assessments. The deputy who interviewed Rodríguez the night his son died had described herself as a proficient Spanish speaker. But when a ProPublica reporter interviewed her, we discovered that the phrase she had used to ask Rodríguez whether he had run over his son with the farm machinery didn’t mean what she thought it did: It lacked a verb and a subject, and the result was confusing.

Rodríguez later told ProPublica he thought the deputy had asked whether his son had been run over by the skid steer, not whether he was driving the machine.

Dane County Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner said she will prioritize creating a countywide language-access coordinator position in next year’s budget to help agencies fulfill their obligations and organize the county’s plans and resources.

“It’s a basic access-to-government civil rights issue that permeates every department,” Wegleitner said. County departments that receive federal funding are required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to take steps to make their services accessible to people who speak limited English.

The challenges that non-English-speaking immigrants face in communicating with law enforcement officials extend beyond Dane County. ProPublica found that sheriff’s deputies and police officers across the state routinely fail to communicate directly with Spanish-speaking immigrant workers on dairy farms when responding to incidents ranging from assaults to serious accidents. Records from dozens of incidents show that law enforcement officials routinely rely on employees’ supervisors and coworkers to communicate with immigrant workers. Often they turn to Google Translate. Sometimes they don’t speak with the workers at all or ask children to interpret.

Language access is “haphazard throughout the system,” said Nancy Rodriguez, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine who co-authored a May supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on the issue. The report, which was based on a survey of criminal justice agencies and organizations across the country, recommended that agencies do more to understand the language needs of the people they serve and to monitor compliance with a language-access plan.

Our investigation into Jefferson’s death was the first story in our series “America’s Dairyland.”

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; difficulty accessing medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and problems with employer-provided housing.

Do you have ideas or tips for us to look into? Please reach out to us using this form.

And if you know a Spanish speaker who might be interested in this topic, please share with them a translation of the story about Jefferson’s death — which also includes an audio version — or this note about how to get in touch with us.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

by Jeremy Schwartz

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

For months, Texas lawmakers were on track to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to continue distributing child identification kits to Texas schoolchildren, a program championed by state officials.

In April, both the Texas House and Senate approved preliminary budgets that included money for the National Child Identification Program’s kits.

But less than a month after a ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigation found no evidence the kits have helped locate missing children, lawmakers quietly zeroed out the funding.

The news outlets also found that the Waco-based company that distributes the kits had used exaggerated statistics as it sought contracts in Texas and other states. And the investigation revealed that Kenny Hansmire, a former NFL player who leads the company, had a string of failed businesses, had millions of dollars in outstanding federal tax liens and had previously been barred from some finance-related business in Connecticut by banking regulators because of his role in an alleged scheme to defraud or mislead investors.

“After review and consideration, the House and Senate budget conferees agreed to remove this specific funding request for the upcoming biennium,” said state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Republican from Houston, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. Huffman did not elaborate on the closed-door discussions of the lawmakers who had been appointed to work out differences between the two spending plans.

A 2021 law states that the Texas Education Agency, which was tasked with purchasing the kits, isn’t required to continue providing them if the Legislature stops the funding. In a statement, a spokesperson said the agency isn’t aware of any “alternative funding sources for the program.”

Hansmire, who did not respond to emailed questions for this article, has said the kits help law enforcement find missing children and save time during the early stages of a search. But none of the Texas law enforcement agencies contacted by the news outlets could recall the kits having helped to find a missing child.

Hansmire previously said that his legal disputes, including his sanction in Connecticut, had been “properly resolved, closed and are completely unrelated to the National Child ID Program.” He also claimed to have “paid debts entirely,” but did not provide details.

Texas lawmakers were among the first in the nation to enshrine into law a requirement that the state purchase the kits. The kits contain an inkpad and a piece of paper where parents can record their children’s physical attributes, fingerprints and DNA. Parents can store the form in their homes and present it to law enforcement if their child goes missing.

In April 2021, state Sen. Donna Campbell, the New Braunfels Republican who authored the law, said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Hansmire had brought her the legislation.

The Legislature allocated about $5.7 million to purchase kits despite numerous government agencies and nonprofits providing similar kits for free or at a lower cost. The envelopes contained the claim that 800,000 children go missing every year. Experts say the figure, which is based on a 1999 study, is inflated and out-of-date in part because it includes hundreds of thousands of children who were reported missing for benign reasons like coming home later than expected.

Hansmire previously told the news outlets that his company’s messaging has shifted away from what he called the “historically high” number of missing children.

Patrick did not respond to requests for comment, but he previously told the news outlets that the company’s broad base of support among the football community and its long history in Texas gave it credibility. He said he didn’t remember meeting Hansmire before the businessman pitched the kits in 2021 alongside former Chicago Bears player and NFL Man of the Year Mike Singletary, who has helped promote the company.

Patrick and Campbell were among a group of politicians honored by the company at an October 2021 Green Bay Packers game.

Working largely with state attorneys general, Hansmire has landed contracts and partnerships in at least a dozen states, including South Carolina, Iowa, Utah and Delaware. Only officials from Delaware responded to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Delaware Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, whose office announced the state’s partnership with the company, called the state’s fledgling child ID program “an effective tool” in helping families prepare for the “unimaginable.”

Asked if the state’s partnership with the company, which launched May 24, would change upon learning of Texas’ action, communications director Jen Rini said: “Just like any program we initiate, we will monitor and adjust as necessary.”

Kiah Collier contributed reporting.

by Andrea Suozzo

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ProPublica has added more than a million new tax records for tax-exempt organizations to Nonprofit Explorer, making it easier to assess the finances of charities operating across the nation.

The update includes more than 900,000 filings published by the Internal Revenue Service from recent fiscal years, resolving a yearslong delay that had stymied regulators, journalists and donors. The filings, known as Form 990s, detail how organizations have carried out their public interest mission and disclose executive pay, as well as grantmaking and fundraising activities. Tax-exempt organizations must submit them annually.

We’ve also added more than 400,000 older tax records that had been missing from our database, primarily dating back to 2016 and 2017. This will make it easier to assess long-term financial information for nonprofit organizations.

These documents provide insight into a key sector of the U.S. economy, one that employs more than 12 million Americans.

"For charity regulators, the Form 990 series not only helps ensure transparency and accountability, but also provides vital information for state investigations into potential fraud and misuse of charitable resources," the National Association of State Charity Officials wrote in a letter to the IRS last year, urging officials to fix the agency’s backlog. "It is critical that the availability of that data be timely."

The new filings come after more than two years of limited or irregular data releases by the IRS, as the agency struggled with staffing shortages and, in January 2022, moved to a new system for releasing the forms.

Though the agency posted some new filings to its own website in early 2022, it also uploaded a batch of nonpublic forms by accident. After discovering the error in August 2022, it removed nearly two years’ worth of documents from its website and notified Congress of the mistake. Several months later, the agency reposted several batches of data, again including the nonpublic forms, an error it blamed on a contractor.

Asked about the delays in December, the agency said it was doing an end-to-end assessment of its posting processes before resuming data releases.

The new filings, which primarily cover fiscal years between 2020 and 2022, the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, are all now available on Nonprofit Explorer.

For regulators, donors, funders and researchers alike, the filings offer insights into the financial operation of nonprofits during turbulent economic years. “Now we can better understand in what ways they struggled, how they coped,” said Cinthia Schuman Ottinger of the Aspen Institute, who coordinates a group of nonprofit data practitioners. (ProPublica is a part of this group.)

“I’m hopeful that this cornucopia of 990 releases marks an improvement in the release of consistent and timely data on a regular basis.”

by Vianna Davila

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

After a week’s delay, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has forwarded to the governor legislation that aims to increase the transparency of the state’s public records law.

Patrick had been holding up the bill amid increasingly frayed political relations between him and his Republican counterparts in state leadership, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Gov. Greg Abbott.

A priority for Phelan, House Bill 30, filed by Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, was the only measure out of more than 1,300 bills that Patrick had not signed. That is a requirement before legislation can be sent to the governor.

State law allows government agencies to withhold or heavily redact law enforcement records if a person has not been convicted of a crime or received probation. If approved by Abbott, the bill would close a long-standing loophole in the law that government agencies have used to withhold information in situations in which suspects die in police custody, are killed by law enforcement or kill themselves, as ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported last month.

Phelan publicly expressed support for closing the loophole after advocates and families raised concerns that government entities might use it to keep secret information about the dead shooter in the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

On Tuesday, near the end of a news conference that Patrick mostly spent lambasting Phelan and Abbott’s plans for cutting property taxes, the lieutenant governor offered his reason for the delay.

Patrick told reporters that the Senate agreed to pass the transparency bill on the condition that the House pass a measure that would reform how complaints can be filed against Texas judges, including requiring people to make sworn statements in order to file grievances.

After learning that the judicial conduct measure failed, Patrick accused the House of “playing games.” He said he pulled Moody’s bill out of a stack that he was slated to sign. “I said: ‘What’s that bill all about? Let me see that bill.’”

Patrick said he “stuck” the legislation on his podium, where it remained for days. He told reporters Tuesday that he’d always planned to sign it. The lieutenant governor’s office did not respond to additional questions.

Phelan’s communications director, Cait Wittman, said the delay “absolutely is political.”

“The bottom line, he has a constitutional duty to sign this bill,” Wittman said. “You don’t make deals off the constitution.”

Wittman also accused Senate officials of initially lying about what happened to the bill by blaming the House. A Senate journal clerk told Austin television station KXAN last week that the House never delivered the bill to the Senate. House officials maintained the bill made it to the Senate for signature.

Moody declined to publicly comment on the bill’s status until after the legislation was en route to the governor’s office Tuesday. In a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, Moody did not address the delay, focusing instead on the eight years he’s spent trying to close this loophole.

“I don’t mind waiting another week for the bill to come to the governor as long as Texas families don’t have to wait any longer for the answers they deserve,” Moody said in the statement. “I appreciate Speaker Phelan making it a priority to shine this light on something that should never be in the dark in a free society.”

by Nat Lash, Mark Olalde and Ash Ngu, and photography by Liz Moughon

As millions of newcomers have flocked to the Las Vegas Valley over the past 50 years, every level of government in the nation’s driest state has worked to ensure that water shortages don’t stop the growth.

Since 1999, southern Nevada has ripped out thousands of acres of turf from lawns, sports fields and roadway medians under the West’s most ambitious grass-removal program. These efforts helped halve the amount of water each resident consumed and freed up enough for Clark County to add nearly 1 million people.

Now, the valley is again looking to grass removal to continue growing without increasing its overall water use. In 2021, the Nevada Legislature passed a first-of-its-kind law mandating the elimination of “nonfunctional turf,” defined as grass that is decorative and rarely used. The Southern Nevada Water Authority promised this would do away with 3,900 acres of grass (roughly 3,000 football fields) within six years.

But by analyzing the water authority’s own aerial imagery, ProPublica found that the agency grossly overestimated how much of that grass could be removed: That number could actually be as low as 1,100 acres. That error, combined with pushback to the ban — especially from homeowners associations looking to avoid turf removal costs and preserve their communities’ aesthetic — could leave the region short of the water savings it needs.

See more in our interactive story.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated.

The research, which adds novel detail about who will be most affected and where, suggests that climate-driven migration could easily eclipse even the largest estimates as enormous segments of the earth’s population seek safe havens. It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.

“There are clear, profound ethical consequences in the numbers,” Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s lead authors and the director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., said in an interview. “If we can’t level with that injustice and be honest about it, then we’ll never progress the international action on this issue.”

The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could be by 2070.

The new study reconsiders population growth and policy options and explores scenarios that dramatically increase earlier estimates, demonstrating that the world’s environment has already changed significantly. It focuses more heavily on temperature than precipitation, finding that most people have thrived in mean annual temperatures of 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Should the world continue on its present pathway — making gestures toward moderate reductions in emissions but not meaningfully reducing global carbon levels (a scenario close to what the United Nations refers to as SSP2-4.5) — the planet will likely surpass the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and instead warm approximately 2.7 degrees. That pathway, which accounts for population growth in hot places, could lead to 2 billion people falling outside of the climate niche within just the next eight years, and 3.7 billion doing so by 2090. But the study’s authors, who have argued in other papers that the most extreme warming scenarios are well within the realm of possibility, warn that the worst cases should also be considered. With 3.6 degrees of warming and a pessimistic climate scenario that includes ongoing fossil fuel use, resistance to international migration and much more rapid population growth (a scenario referred to by the U.N. as SSP3-7), the shifting climate niche could pose what the authors call “an existential risk,” directly affecting half the projected total population, or, in this case, as many as 6.5 billion people.

The data suggests the world is fast approaching a tipping point, after which even small increases in average global temperature will begin to have dramatic effects. The world has already warmed by about 1.2 degree Celsius, pushing 9% of the earth’s population out of the climate niche. At 1.3 degrees, the study estimates that the pace would pick up considerably, and for every tenth of a degree of additional warming, according to Lenton, 140 million more people will be pushed outside of the niche. “There’s a real nonlinearity lurking in there that we hadn’t seen before,” he said.

Slowing global emissions would dramatically reduce the number of people displaced or grappling with conditions outside the niche. If warming were limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius targeted by the Paris accords, according to a calculation that isolates the effect of warming, half as many people would be left outside of the optimal zone. The population suffering from extreme heat would be reduced fivefold, from 22% to just 5% of the people on the planet.

Climate research often frames the implications of warming in terms of its economic impacts, couching damages in monetary terms that are sometimes used to suggest that small increases in average temperature can be managed. The study disavows this traditional economic framework, which Lenton says is “unethical” because it prioritizes rich people who are alive today, and instead puts the climate crisis in moral terms. The findings show that climate change will pummel poorer parts of the world disproportionately, effectively sentencing the people who live in developing nations and small island states to extreme temperatures, failing crops, conflict, water and food scarcity, and rising mortality. The final option for many people will be migration. The estimated size of the affected populations, whether they’re 2 billion or 6 billion, suggests an era of global upheaval.

According to the study, India will have, by far, the greatest population outside of the climate niche. At current rates of warming, the researchers estimate that more than 600 million Indians will be affected, six times more than if the Paris targets were achieved. In Nigeria, more than 300 million citizens will be exposed, seven times more than if emissions were steeply cut. Indonesia could see 100 million people fall out of a secure and predictable environment, the Philippines and Pakistan 80 million people each, and so on. Brazil, Australia and India would see the greatest area of land become less habitable. But in many smaller countries, all or nearly all the land would become nearly unlivable by traditional measures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Niger. Although facing far more modest impacts, even the United States will see its South and Southwest fall toward the hottest end of the niche, leading to higher mortality and driving internal migration northward.

Throughout the world, the researchers estimate, the average person who is going to be exposed to unprecedented heat comes from a place that emitted roughly half the per capita emissions as those in wealthy countries. American per capita emissions are more than twice those of Europeans, who still live a prosperous and modern existence, the authors point out, so there is ample room for comfortable change short of substantial sacrifice. “The idea that you need the level of wasteful consumption ... that happens on average in the U.S. to be part of a happy, flourishing, rich, democratic society is obviously nonsense,” Lenton said.

Each American today emits nearly enough emissions over their lifetime to push one Indian or Nigerian of the future outside of their climate niche, the study found, showing exactly how much harm Americans’ individual actions can cause (1.2 Americans to 1 future person, to be exact). The lifestyle and policy implications are obvious: Reducing consumption today reduces the number of people elsewhere who will suffer the consequences tomorrow and can prevent much of the instability that would otherwise result. “I can’t — as a citizen of a planet with this level of risk opening up — not also have some kind of human and moral response to the figures,” Lenton said. We’ve all got to deal with that, he added, “in our own way.”

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by Cassandra Jaramillo

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

Conservative activists Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips used the nonprofit True the Vote to enrich themselves, according to a complaint filed to the IRS.

On Monday, the nonprofit watchdog group Campaign for Accountability called for an investigation into True the Vote, which has made repeated false claims about voter fraud in elections. The complaint said True the Vote may have violated state and federal law when the charity used donations to issue loans to Engelbrecht, its founder, and lucrative contracts to Gregg Phillips, a longtime director. The organization also failed to disclose the payments to insiders in its tax returns, including excessive legal bills paid to its general counsel at the time, who filed election-related lawsuits in four states, the complaint said.

“Such disclosure lapses heighten suspicion regarding whether True the Vote and or its current or former officers and directors intended to conceal the payments from the public or IRS,” the complaint said. The self-dealing contracts and loans were first reported by Reveal.

Engelbrecht started Texas-based True the Vote in 2010 after getting involved in Tea Party activism in the Houston area. Over the years, she and Phillips have promoted probes into voter fraud in their fundraising efforts, but they have failed to deliver evidence of such activity for years. The pair catapulted to national prominence when conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza featured the nonprofit’s discredited work in the film “2,000 Mules,” which played in theaters across the country.

Engelbrecht and Phillips have defended their voting work, and their attorney has previously said there was nothing wrong about the loans and contracts. Engelbrecht and Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.

“The so-called Campaign for Accountability filed this IRS complaint as a form of harassment,” a True the Vote spokesperson wrote in response to questions. “The complaint is without merit and we believe it will be terminated in due course.”

The federal government allows nonprofit organizations to operate tax-free, and in return they are required to disclose substantial information about their finances to make sure donor funds are used appropriately. Charities like True the Vote are also not allowed to engage in certain political activity.

“I hope that the IRS and other applicable authorities take seriously what appears to be a pattern of bad behavior by Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, and that makes the pursuit of accountability that much more important,” said Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of Campaign for Accountability. The organization previously filed a separate complaint in 2020 about True the Vote engaging in political activity with Georgia’s Republican Party. The IRS did not respond to that complaint.

The group’s legal woes have mounted following the D’Souza movie. A Georgia voter sued the pair and D’Souza for defamation because he said he was wrongfully accused of committing voter fraud. The case is pending. A state investigation found the voter was dropping off ballots for himself and family members, which is legal. Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office asked federal authorities to investigate True the Vote’s finances after Engelbrecht and Phillips did not produce purported evidence on voter fraud to investigators in 2022.

James Bopp Jr., the former general counsel, is now suing True the Vote in federal court for breach of contract for nearly $1 million in unpaid legal bills dating back several years, according to court records obtained by ProPublica. True the Vote has countersued Bopp’s law firm, denying the unpaid invoices and accusing it of engaging in fraud and substandard lawyering, the records show.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bopp said that True the Vote’s counterclaim has no merits. “We were shocked they responded this way. They did nothing but praise our work,” he said. “This is what unscrupulous people will do when they try to avoid the repayment of debt.”

In January, ProPublica and The Dallas Morning News reported Engelbrecht and Phillips created another charity, the Freedom Hospital. It aimed to help children and elderly people affected by the war in Ukraine with medical care. Its website, which has since been taken down, said it raised halfway to $25 million for a mobile hospital. ProPublica and the News found the effort never materialized. Attorneys for Engelbrecht and Phillips said that it was a good-faith effort and that his clients only raised $268 for the project through PayPal. Lawyers said donations were returned “at Mr. Phillips’ direction.”

In its most recently available tax return, True the Vote in 2021 raised about $1.7 million but fell $289,157 into the red. The 2021 return no longer includes Phillips as a director. In 2020, the organization raised $5 million. For 2019, the organization had given a reporter and the IRS two widely different tax returns that were riddled with inconsistencies over key questions about governance and Engelbrecht’s $113,000 loan. At the time, True the Vote said it planned to file an amended return. It does not appear to have been filed with the IRS.

Despite Texas law stating directors of nonprofits can’t receive loans from their own organizations, Engelbrecht — who was a director and an employee at the time — regularly received loans from the nonprofit, ranging from about $40,000 to $113,000, according to tax filings. She also earned a salary.

Phillips first joined True the Vote as a board member in 2014. Phillips received at least $750,000 related to a research analysis contract. The Campaign for Accountability, in its complaint, raised questions about what, if any, services were actually rendered.

Bopp was paid approximately $280,000 over a seven day period related to filing and supervising attorneys on election-related lawsuits to challenge the results in key states, according to court records. Originally, there were seven lawsuits planned to be filed, but Bopp filed only four. He quickly withdrew them. Bopp previously justified the costs to file the complaints as legitimate because each state had different laws.

“Such legal fees seem excessive for a few days of work in lawsuits that never proceeded past an initial complaint and which The Bopp Law Firm voluntarily dismissed shortly after filing,” the complaint said.

In 2020, True the Vote did not report those contracts in its tax returns, which are required for contracts above $100,000. “Ms. Engelbrecht, as President of True the Vote, appears to have voluntarily and intentionally filed a false, incorrect, and incomplete Form 990,” the complaint said.

Do you have tips on any other voting groups with questionable arrangements? Cassandra Jaramillo can be reached by email at cassandra.jaramillo@propublica.org or by Signal at 469-606-9665.

Update, June 5, 2023: This story was updated with comment from a True the Vote spokesperson provided after publication.

by Eli Hager

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

The New York State Legislature could by the end of this week pass groundbreaking legislation requiring child protective services agents to read people their constitutional rights, just like the police have to do.

But New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, despite publicly claiming to support the “family Miranda warning,” has in recent weeks quietly proposed gutting the measure, according to eight lawmakers, staffers and lobbyists involved in the negotiations.

The agency even lobbied for the removal of the word “rights” from the bill text.

And the state Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, has repeatedly blocked the popular proposal (it has dozens of co-sponsors), throwing into question whether it will get a full vote before the legislative session ends on Friday.

Last fall, a ProPublica investigation found that ACS caseworkers — without a warrant — conduct full home searches of more than 50,000 households every year across New York City, disproportionately affecting Black or Hispanic and low-income families. Despite the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, these government officers rifle through families’ refrigerators and medicine cabinets and inspect children’s unclothed bodies without informed consent.

They conduct these warrantless searches even if the allegation of potential child neglect they are investigating has nothing to do with the condition of the home, such as a kid missing too many days of school. They also sometimes use manipulative tactics, including threatening child removal or calling the police, to get inside residences, according to dozens of interviews with caseworkers, families and attorneys.

The agency ultimately finds a safety situation requiring removal of a child from the home less than 4% of the time.

Lawmakers in Albany repeatedly cited ProPublica’s reporting this spring as they reintroduced legislation, which had failed in the past, creating a Miranda-style warning to be read aloud by child protective services agents like cops do on “Law & Order.” Caseworkers would have to notify parents of their right to deny entry to their home, to have a lawyer present, to be told what they’re being accused of, and to say no to releases of their family’s personal information and to drug or alcohol tests without a court order, while also specifying that anything they say can and will be used against them.

The bill had been gaining momentum in the Assembly, passing unanimously out of that chamber’s children and families committee as its chair, Andrew Hevesi, flanked by grassroots activists, asked, “When in life do you want Americans not to know their rights?”

He continued, “The only time you need them not to know their rights is when their rights are about to be violated.”

The proposed law would not create any new rights, but rather inform families with less education or ones without a lawyer of the rights they already have. It also would not affect the ability of caseworkers to enter a home without a warrant if a child is in danger or if there are other exigent circumstances.

But then ACS sent Senate leadership staff revisions to the legislation that would have removed mention of several of the rights, neutering the proposal to such an extent that advocates could no longer support it, many said in interviews.

Maddy Zimmerman, spokesperson for Democratic state Sen. Jabari Brisport, the bill’s lead sponsor in the Senate and chair of its children and families committee, said that accepting ACS’ version would have been the same as passing nothing at all. She and a half-dozen others who saw the agency’s suggestions said the edits included not only removing the word “rights” but also cutting the sections about informing parents that what they say can be used against them, that they don’t have to agree to body searches of their children without an order from a judge, and more.

Brisport said in interviews with ProPublica that he tried to put the bill, without the ACS changes, on his committee’s agenda — three times. But on each attempt, he said, Stewart-Cousins, the Senate’s majority leader and president pro tempore, removed it from consideration without telling him why.

Stewart-Cousins could still revive the measure and give it a chance of passing this week, provided that the Assembly continues to move it as well.

It is not clear whether ACS has effectively lobbied her or if she has a philosophical objection to the proposal.

Stewart-Cousins’ staff did not respond to calls and emailed questions about her position on the matter.

In recent years, she has highlighted her achievements on affordable housing, pre-K, the sealing of criminal records, bail reform and not criminalizing poverty — all issues that affect many of the same constituents who would be protected by the family Miranda warning.

But advocates say that progressive politicians, not just in New York but across the country, have so far failed to understand how fighting against child welfare agents’ abuses of power is part of the same agenda.

Protesters, including many parents of color who plan to drive up from New York City, said they will be at the state Capitol this week demanding that the bill get a vote.

In a series of emails, an ACS spokesperson did not deny that ACS wanted to remove the word “rights” from the bill.

She did say that it would be “a major and important change to the law” to notify parents of their right to “not let us in” and that they can call an attorney.

The spokesperson added that the agency “has been supportive of legislation that would require child protective specialists to provide oral and written information to parents, about their rights, at the initial point of contact,” but that the measure should account for “the need for child welfare agencies to assess the safety of children who have been reported as possibly abused or neglected.

“ACS has been participating, in good faith, in discussions about pending legislation,” she said of the administration’s lobbying in Albany. “To be clear: ACS does not get a vote on the bill.”

It had appeared to family law professors and activists in New York that ACS was becoming more progressive under its new commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, who was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams last year. At public appearances and conferences, Dannhauser has expressed respect for low-income families of color and their rights.

“I’ve been struck by how Dannhauser is willing to say that these are rights — that the Constitution applies here,” said Anna Arons, a professor at the St. John’s University School of Law and an expert on search and seizure protections in the child welfare context. But, she said, there’s a “disconnect” between “what he’s willing to say and what position he’s willing to stake ACS to. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

The ACS spokesperson did not respond to a question about this characterization of the commissioner.

If ACS agents were to regularly read these rights and it caused some parents to refuse to let them in, then the agency could still go to court and get a warrant like police do, experts said. Or if a child is in danger, agents can already enter under existing law.

Brisport pointed out that the Texas Legislature recently passed a bill creating a similar family Miranda warning — and Texas is not a state known for its protections of poor nonwhite families.

No matter what happens, he said, the New York measure has gotten further than it ever has before.

Hevesi, the Assembly member, said in an interview that he also saw ACS’ proposed changes. The bottom line, he said, is that denying families knowledge of their rights while threatening family separation, in the name of investigating alleged child neglect, is “essentially fighting a childhood trauma with a childhood trauma.”

by Vianna Davila

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.

Texas lawmakers passed more than 1,300 bills before the end of this year’s contentious legislative session, quickly sending them to the governor for consideration.

All of them but one.

House Bill 30, a priority of state Democratic Rep. Joe Moody to increase transparency in Texas’ public records law, still hasn’t been signed in the Senate, leaving it in legislative limbo and raising concerns about the fate of the measure, which was lauded by First Amendment advocates as a major victory.

If signed by the governor, the bill would close a long-standing loophole in state law that allows government agencies to withhold or heavily redact law enforcement records if a person has not been convicted or has received probation. The law was designed to protect people who are accused of unsubstantiated criminal activity, but some government agencies have instead used it to withhold information in situations where suspects die in police custody or are killed by law enforcement.

Agencies have also used what is known as the “dead suspect loophole” to withhold records in cases such as that of Logan Castello, an Army private first class, who died by suicide in his Central Texas apartment in November 2019. Last month, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune highlighted his parents’ yearslong fight for information about his death.

Both the state House and the Senate passed Moody’s bill after hammering out a compromise in the waning days of the session, which ended Monday. The measure received the necessary signatures in the state House, including that of Speaker Dade Phelan, who publicly voiced support for the bill last year after the Uvalde massacre raised concerns that government entities might use the loophole to withhold information about the dead shooter. (They have cited other reasons for keeping information from the public.) The bill was then sent to the Senate so that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick could sign off.

That hasn’t happened.

Because the bill hasn’t been signed, it hasn’t been sent to the governor to either veto or approve.

The Texas Constitution requires the presiding officer of each house to sign all bills and joint resolutions.

“It is a mandatory provision,” said Randy Erben, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law who previously was Gov. Greg Abbott’s legislative director. “And the bill is invalid if it’s not signed by both presiding officers.”

Neither Patrick’s nor Abbott’s offices responded to a request for comment. Moody also did not respond to a request for comment. The bizarre predicament was first reported by the Austin TV station KXAN.

Asked whether the bill ultimately needs the lieutenant governor’s signature to have a chance to become law, Phelan’s communications director, Cait Wittman, said it was not clear.

“Because we are unaware of any similar situation in modern history, this is an open legal question,” she said.

Missing Bill

Moody was elated when he finally got the bill over the finish line last month, calling it possibly the most consequential legislation he’d ever sent to the governor.

“Ultimately, the way this is written now, it cuts to the core of how people were abusing this exception to the Public Information Act,” Moody told ProPublica and the Tribune. “So if anyone’s going to hide information, now, they’re going to have to work a lot harder and find a new way to do it.”

The Senate and the House adopted the final version of Moody’s bill on May 28. The last step in both chambers was for Phelan and Patrick to sign it by the following day, which is considered a pro forma step after legislative bodies approve bills even if the officials personally oppose them.

Video from the House floor on Monday, the last day of the regular session, shows a clerk reading off enrolled bills to be signed that day, including HB 30.

In the video, the reading clerk can be seen handing a stack of bills that includes HB 30 to Mark Cervantes, the assistant chief clerk in the House. He told ProPublica and the Tribune he then handed the bills to staff from the Texas Legislative Council. Bills are printed out, and legislative council staffers are responsible for distributing those documents.

After the reading in the House, council staffers delivered a stack of bills that should have included Moody’s to the Senate.

But a video from the Senate on the same day shows the bill was never read.

Legislative council staffers discovered Moody’s bill was missing Tuesday morning, the day after the session ended.

KXAN reported Friday that a Senate journal clerk said the bill was never delivered to the chamber and that “it seems” the bill was left in the possession of the House.

A list of House measures ProPublica and the Tribune obtained through an open records request shows HB 30 among a batch of bills delivered to the Senate that day. Wittman, Phelan’s communications director, said it is “inconceivable” the bill went missing before it was delivered to the Senate because every other bill in the same batch was signed and returned to the House.

Still in Limbo

On Tuesday, the chief clerk of the House sent a certified duplicate of the bill to Patsy Spaw, the secretary of the senate. Spaw signed for the copy, acknowledging she had received it, according to documents ProPublica and the Tribune received through an open records request.

Patrick did not sign the bill on Friday, when the Senate briefly convened for a special session.

Phelan’s office would not speculate on what happened to the bill or why the lieutenant governor still has not signed the measure.

“The Texas House and Senate voted overwhelmingly in support of House Bill 30, one of Speaker Phelan’s many legislative priorities, and on May 29th, he was proud to fulfill his constitutional obligation of signing this legislation in the presence of the House,” read a statement his communications director provided to the news organizations. “There are several administrative tasks that need to take place after a bill’s passage before it can be signed into law, and House Bill 30 has cleared all of those necessary procedures in the House.”

The bill’s disappearance comes amid a blistering war of words between Phelan, Patrick and Abbott, as the three Republicans have publicly squabbled over their dueling property tax reform proposals. Abbott publicly sided with Phelan’s House proposal this week.

It is unclear if any of the back-and-forth affected the bill’s path to the governor. But Erben said he could not identify any part of state law that addresses what would happen if Patrick declines to sign a measure.

“It would be a very interesting case,” Erben said. “Let’s just put it that way.”

by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune

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 story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

Each time he stood before a Chicago traffic court judge and told his story, the judge asked his name.

“Jeffrey Kriv,” he’d say. That was true.

Then he’d raise his right hand and get sworn in. What came next was also consistent.

“Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv, who had been ticketed for running a red light, testified in January 2021.

“Yeah, I broke up with my girlfriend earlier that morning, had a knock-down, drag-out fight, verbally, of course. She took my car without my knowledge,” he told a different judge when fighting a speeding ticket in August 2021.

“I broke up with my girlfriend that day and she took my car without my knowledge. … I didn’t get my car back for like three days. But it was her driving the car,” he said while contesting a speeding ticket, once again under oath, in May 2022.

The excuse worked, just as it had many times before.

At the ticket hearings, Kriv often provided what he said were legitimate police incident reports as evidence of the car thefts; they had officer names and badge numbers, and he explained that he got the reports at police headquarters.

But Kriv did not let on that he, himself, was a Chicago cop.

As bold as he was when fighting his tickets, he was equally brazen in his professional life. He attracted a remarkable number of complaints from citizens he encountered — and even from other officers. And just as he did in his personal life, he defended himself vigorously against the allegations.

Kriv doesn’t register as one of Chicago’s most notorious corrupt cops — those who tortured suspects for confessions or shook down drug dealers. But his on-duty conduct regularly flouted rules and disrupted lives. Once, he punched a handcuffed man in the back of his patrol car, records show.

But given Chicago’s long-standing and dramatic shortcomings in police discipline, none of his on-duty misconduct cost him his badge and gun.

It took a tip to an outside agency and questions about Kriv’s testimony as a private citizen in traffic court to unravel his career.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department would not comment for this story or answer any questions.

A lawyer for Kriv, informed of the reporting by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, said “many of the facts you compose are incomplete or not true,” though he did not say what was inaccurate. The lawyer, Tim Grace, said that Kriv had received nearly 150 commendations and recognitions and had earned two awards for saving lives.

“Officer Kriv has served his city with honor for over 25-plus years,” Grace said.

Listen to Former Chicago Police Officer Jeffrey Kriv Try to Avoid Traffic Fines by Repeatedly Claiming His Ex-Girlfriend Stole His Car

Kriv used the alibi to get out of paying for 44 traffic tickets since 2013, Cook County prosecutors allege.

(Lucas Waldron, ProPublica) His Troubles Began Almost Immediately

In 1996, Kriv was sworn in as a Chicago police officer. The first complaint about him came about eight months later, while Kriv was still a probationary hire. A man said Kriv broke his car window with a flashlight while directing traffic; Kriv was not disciplined in that incident.

Supervisors reprimanded him a few months later, however, after Kriv failed to notice there was a marijuana cigarette on the back seat of his squad car.

But there was more to come, records show: being rude, offensive or physically abusive; flipping someone off; and writing in a police report that one woman was “white trash” and a “raving lunatic.”

He was held in contempt of court and arrested after he flung papers into the air and called the judge’s ruling “a joke.” He apologized in court the next day, and the contempt charge was vacated. An assistant deputy superintendent recommended against removing his police powers after the incident, records show. In another case, a different judge ordered him removed from a courtroom after he wouldn’t stop talking.

Most officers face only a handful of complaints over the course of their careers. But at least 92 misconduct complaints were filed against Kriv, according to city and police disciplinary records compiled and analyzed by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica. Even more exceptional: About 28% of complaints against Kriv were found to have merit, compared with about 4% of complaints against all Chicago police officers going back decades.

In 2005, after a city Streets and Sanitation Department employee towed his illegally parked personal car, Kriv sent a letter via the city’s interoffice mail system threatening to ticket the cars of Streets and Sanitation workers in retaliation. He was suspended for 20 days. In 2006, he left the scene of a vehicle fire he had responded to, removed the numbers that identified his squad car and went into a strip club to visit a waitress, according to internal police investigation records. He was issued a 90-day suspension that was later knocked down to 45 days.

In 2009, Kriv was accused of punching a woman whom he’d arrested after seeing her arguing with her husband on the street. The woman was found not guilty at trial on charges of domestic battery and resisting arrest.

“I had to have surgery. I had to have plastic implanted under my eye because of this,” said Jessie Wangeman, who lives in Indianapolis. “My face is not symmetrical anymore. He really messed me up on the outside. And inside it was a really traumatic experience.”

Wangeman sued Kriv and the city of Chicago over the encounter; the city paid her $100,000 to settle in 2011. Wangeman declined to talk with investigators looking into Kriv’s alleged misconduct, and Kriv wasn’t disciplined.

Meanwhile, Kriv’s personal vehicles — a BMW sedan and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle — were ticketed 22 times between 2008 and 2013. He paid some of those tickets, records show.

At a traffic court hearing in December 2013, Kriv used the girlfriend alibi for the first time, authorities now allege.

“May I ask you why you’re contesting this ticket, Mr. Kriv?” the judge asked.

“Yes, my ex-girlfriend, well, took my car two days prior after I broke up with her. I filed a police report that it was stolen and they recovered it approximately a week after the fact,” he testified. “Here’s the police report that was done. I did have her arrested approximately three weeks ago and I got a court date coming up in January.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

False Statements and False Arrests

Kriv was investigated at least 26 times over allegations of dishonesty as a police officer. That included accusations of falsifying records, writing unwarranted tickets, performing improper searches, making false arrests.

One man accused Kriv of writing him false parking citations. A woman complained that Kriv issued her eight baseless citations in two weeks while her vehicle was parked in an assigned space on private property. And another man made two other complaints accusing Kriv of repeatedly writing tickets to him at his business as a way to harass him. Department investigators concluded that Kriv wrote unwarranted tickets to that man; investigations into the other allegations could not be pursued because the accusers did not sign formal complaints.

As a cop, Kriv’s specialty was DUI enforcement. He made more DUI arrests in Chicago than any other officer in 2021, and he topped the list statewide the same year, according to one anti-drunken-driving group.

But one woman sued him over her 2015 drunken driving arrest after she was acquitted at trial. The lawsuit alleged that Kriv falsely arrested her and made false statements against her. Kriv denied the allegations.

“He would lie under oath for a piece of bubble gum,” the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Kriv, told a reporter.

The woman later dropped the lawsuit because she said Kriv was disparaging and intimidating her.

Even outside of his job and his chutzpah in traffic court, Kriv’s history is notable.

While Kriv was growing up in Highland Park, his father, an attorney, funded a messy fraud scheme, survived an assassination attempt meant to silence him about it, and was sent to federal prison for a second fraud racket that involved sending falsified accident claims through the mail, according to court records at the National Archives. Kriv’s father testified at trial in the first fraud case and did not face charges for his role in that scheme.

Kriv then attended the University of Iowa for six years. A university spokesperson said he never graduated — though he claimed that he had in an application for another city job in 2013. Kriv’s attorney did not respond to a question about his educational history.

When Kriv was in his late 20s, the unemployment insurance division of the Illinois attorney general’s office sued him to recoup about $3,800 in benefits for which the government claimed he wasn’t eligible, records show. Details about what led to the attorney general’s claim are missing from court files, and there’s no public record of how it was resolved.

Neither the Police Department nor the city’s human resources division could locate Kriv’s initial application to the Police Department, so it’s unclear how much hiring officials knew about his background.

It’s also unclear whether the department knew how often Kriv was being ticketed for traffic violations — nine times in 2014 alone, records show. He got all of those tickets dismissed, including a speeding ticket issued in the fall for going 21 miles an hour over the speed limit near a school.

“My ex-girlfriend stole my car,” Kriv told the judge. “There is this police report over here that was done and, a matter of fact, I had another ticket I contested last week … another speed camera.

“They only charged her with trespassing because it was my girlfriend. She stole my key and racked up all these tickets here.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

When Other Cops Complained

Kriv’s conduct as a cop stands out in yet another way: Even other cops complained about him.

Internal affairs records show that a police lieutenant filed a complaint against Kriv in 2016 accusing Kriv of failing to arrest an off-duty sergeant who was involved in a crash, even though the sergeant was unsteady, was slurring his speech and had urinated in his pants — “wasted,” according to a police report. Kriv was suspended for 15 days for violating five department rules in that incident.

His police partner once reported that he made her get out of their squad car after an argument, forcing her to walk more than a half-mile back to their station. Investigators concluded there wasn’t enough evidence in that case to discipline Kriv.

In 2014, supervisors — including the head of the DUI task force that Kriv was on — filed a complaint against Kriv alleging that he disobeyed commands from a higher-ranking officer and impounded a car without justification after a traffic crash.

Over the other officers’ objections, Kriv declared that the driver of the car involved in the crash was drunk, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of his squad car, according to accounts from the driver, Jaime Garcia, and other officers. He also ordered Garcia’s Nissan Altima towed and impounded.

“He kept telling me, ‘I know you’re drunk, I know you’re drunk.’ I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock, I was scared,” Garcia said in an interview.

The officers on the scene filed the complaint against Kriv.

“For some reason, he was trying to put a false arrest on this guy. I apologized to him, said, ‘Sorry you had to go through this.’ I told him about filing a complaint,” said retired Lt. David Blanco, the supervisor that night. After its investigation, the department acknowledged Kriv was wrong to have impounded Garcia’s car, knowing there would be no DUI charges against him.

Kriv ultimately wasn’t disciplined for his behavior that night, once again benefiting from the Police Department’s feeble accountability system, which has long been marked by delays, red tape and lax punishment.

Though he regularly escaped punishment altogether for alleged misconduct on the job, in some cases, he was reprimanded or received suspensions of between one and 45 days. The department suspended Kriv at least 20 times for 170 days total, according to a Tribune-ProPublica analysis of his disciplinary records.

One citizen told the investigating agency that Kriv was unconcerned when he threatened to file a complaint. Kriv, the man said, told him that complaints “are not going to go anywhere,” no matter how many an officer was facing. The man’s complaint was closed after he declined to participate in the investigation.

Kriv appealed disciplinary decisions at least eight times over his career, including through the department’s grievance system. A 2017 investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found that 85% of disciplinary cases handled through the department’s grievance process since 2010 had led to officers receiving shorter suspensions or, in many cases, having their punishments overturned entirely.

“It doesn’t hurt to grieve it. Why wouldn’t I?” Kriv told the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica for that story.

Kriv got a five-day suspension reduced to a reprimand, another five-day suspension reduced to two days, and a 90-day suspension — for going to the strip club while on duty — cut in half.

“It sounds to me like several of these cases — each of them standing on its own, independently — should have triggered a discharge case,” said Mark Iris, who until 2004 was the executive director of the Chicago Police Board, the civilian body that decides disciplinary cases involving Chicago officers. He also studied the use of mathematical analysis to prevent police misconduct and taught at Northwestern University.

“The unit commanders had to have known this guy was a headache,” Iris said in an interview.

Records show the department never tried to fire Kriv.

Blanco, like many of the people Kriv encountered, said he doesn’t get how Kriv remained on the force.

“That’s what I couldn’t understand — with all the suspensions, why they didn’t get rid of this guy. There’s obviously a red light flashing over this guy’s head,” Blanco told ProPublica and the Tribune.

During Kriv’s career, the Chicago Police Department had eight superintendents, three iterations of an independent police investigation body and at least two versions of an internal affairs division. The Police Department has stalled on at least two attempts to implement an early-warning system to spot problem behavior.

In its 2019 consent decree with the Justice Department, the Police Department agreed to develop a system to identify officers at risk of misconduct, alert their supervisors and provide training. That system still has not been implemented, according to the latest consent decree update.

In addition, for most of Kriv’s career, the police union’s contract with the department allowed investigators to consider only the most recent five years of an officer’s disciplinary history. (The current union contract eliminates that requirement). That meant that even officers with extensive histories of misconduct could have looked problem-free when department leaders weighed discipline options.

As a result, when investigators in 2013 looked into a complaint against Kriv, his recent disciplinary history was clean, so they proceeded as if he’d never been disciplined. The truth was that, by then, he had been suspended or reprimanded for at least 15 different incidents, but the most recent complaints were more than five years old or didn’t appear on his record yet because they were still under investigation.

As Kriv successfully appealed Police Department discipline, he also was successfully beating more and more traffic tickets.

From 2015 through mid-2022, Kriv got 51 tickets but paid only two.

(Obtained by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune)

Other tickets — issued for reasons including exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour, running red lights, blocking an area and parking where he shouldn’t — were dismissed.

He got some tickets dismissed by making technical arguments — claiming a ticket wasn’t filled out properly, for example — but most were dismissed after he blamed his girlfriend, records show.

Kriv contested tickets using that defense before at least 23 different judges. Sometimes he went before the same judge with the same story, but those appearances were typically years apart.

At a hearing in 2018, he tried to get out of a speeding ticket issued in a school zone.

“My girlfriend and I got in an argument that morning,” he told the judge. “We broke up. She took my fob and she took my car and I do have a police report.”

“I didn’t get it back until later that night around 9 o’clock. And I did have her arrested about a week later. We went to her workplace, but here’s a copy of the police report.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

“The System’s Like a Joke”

Citywide, it’s rare for people to succeed in getting their tickets dismissed. In a typical year, the city issues about 1 million automated-camera tickets for speeding and red-light violations. People contest about 4% of those tickets, and about 1 in 10 win, according to an analysis of city ticket data.

There’s no indication the Police Department knew how often Kriv was contesting his tickets in court. There’s also no indication in records that the girlfriend he used as his alibi was real.

Last year, the city’s Office of Inspector General received a tip to look at Kriv — not for his work in uniform, but for a potentially fraudulent defense of a parking ticket he had received, records show.

The OIG followed that tip and concluded that Kriv had provided false testimony and fraudulent documentation related to parking and traffic violations since 2009, according to prosecutors. Since 2013, he had contested 44 tickets by saying his girlfriend had stolen his car. All 44 had been dismissed.

The office notified the Police Department that it was investigating Kriv.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office in October barred Kriv from testifying in court as a witness, placing him on a list of police officers whose truthfulness is in question. Nonetheless, the police department kept him on the streets and he continued to write tickets and make DUI arrests.

The final time Kriv took an oath to tell the truth and then blamed his girlfriend for a speeding ticket was in September of 2022, records show. Once again, the story worked.

“Well, I had her arrested,” Kriv said when the judge asked what happened to the woman. “They charged her with a misdemeanor trespassing to a vehicle. That pretty much went nowhere.

“She got, like, three months’ supervision or something like that. It’s kind of a, I don’t want to say the system’s like a joke, but it didn’t really do anything.”

As Kriv, who is 56, was defending himself in traffic court last year, he also was eyeing retirement, going back and forth with the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago to sort out his pension benefits. He was told he’d gain another year of seniority — and a larger pension — if he stayed on the force until Jan. 15.

On Jan. 12, the department collected his badge and stripped him of police powers.

On Jan. 14, Kriv got another speeding ticket.

On Jan. 17, Kriv retired.

The next day, Kriv’s car was ticketed again for speeding.

On Jan. 31, Cook County prosecutors charged Kriv with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all of them felonies, for allegedly lying to judges under oath and providing fictitious police reports in four traffic ticket cases.

The girlfriend story, prosecutors allege, was fake. Prosecutors calculated that, by getting out of 44 tickets, Kriv saved himself $3,665.

Excerpt of a police report that Kriv provided to a judge, which says that Kriv’s girlfriend took his car. (Obtained by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune)

The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment about its case against Kriv.

Kriv emailed the pension board the day after he was charged and released on $10,000 bond, writing: “When do I start getting my pension checks and does it come bi-weekly or once a month?” His pension started at about $6,000 a month, according to the board.

Deborah Witzburg, the inspector general whose office helped build the case against Kriv, declined to comment for this story. In a news release about the charges, she said: “The truthfulness and credibility of police officers is foundational to the fair administration of justice, and to CPD’s effectiveness as a law enforcement agency.”

Grace, Kriv’s attorney, noted that the criminal charges are not related to his duties as a police officer. “He understands the importance of accountability by all citizens when it comes to paying his outstanding tickets and looks forward to resolving this matter by making good on any oversights he may have,” Grace said.

In late March, a Cook County judge called out, “Jeffrey Kriv,” and the former officer stepped forward to be arraigned. He pleaded not guilty. Each offense is punishable by up to five years in prison.

When reached by phone, Kriv said he didn’t want to talk because “nobody gets a fair shake with the media” and his attorney had advised him not to say anything.

“When it is all said and done, this will be dismissed,” he said. “There is nothing to it.”

Kriv got three more speeding tickets soon after he retired in mid-January. He didn’t contest any of them, and he paid the fines.

Then he got three more speeding tickets.

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Melissa Sanchez contributed reporting.

by Corey G. Johnson

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

From the movie theater to the shopping mall, inside a church and a synagogue, through the grocery aisle and into the classroom, gun violence has invaded every corner of American life. It is a social epidemic no vaccine can stem, a crisis with no apparent end. Visual evidence of the carnage spills with numbing frequency onto TV shows and floods the internet. Each new shooting brings the lists of loved ones lost, the galleries of their smiling photos and the videos of the police response. And each mass shooting brings another surge of national outrage.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns became the leading killer of children and teens in 2020, overtaking car crashes, drug overdoses and disease for the first time in the nation’s history. Yet as the one-year anniversary of the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, passes, nagging questions loom.

Why haven’t lawmakers acted with forceful correctives? What will it take to regain a sense of safety? When will change happen? And how, exactly, did America end up here?

Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer, recently shared his thoughts on these questions with ProPublica. He was vice president of sales at Kimber America from 1995 to 2020 but broke with the industry and has become a gun safety advocate. He testified about mass shootings and irresponsible marketing last July in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and authored the book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America.”

In June 2021, he became a senior adviser for Giffords, a gun violence prevention group led by Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman gravely injured in 2011 during a mass shooting. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Where are we, as a nation, on guns? And where do you think we need to go?

I think we might be on the precipice of things getting much worse. I think this Bruen decision, the Supreme Court ruling, quite possibly will unleash so many lawsuits against so many counted-upon regulations that citizens may wake up to the equivalent of, like, no stop signs in their town anymore, except for it’ll be on gun regulation. [The Bruen decision has been called one of the court’s most significant rulings on guns in decades. It struck down New York’s concealed carry law as unconstitutional, saying it conflicted with the Second Amendment.]

What do you attribute this trend to?

As I write in my book, there was a time not that long ago, maybe about 15 to 20 years ago, when the industry understood a sort of fragile social contract needed to be maintained on something as immensely powerful as the freedom to own guns. And so the industry didn’t do certain things. It didn’t advertise in egregiously irresponsible ways. It didn’t put, you know, growth, company growth, above all other things. There were just these unspoken codes of conduct the industry knew not to violate. And those seem to have broken down. And now it’s kind of a victory at all costs. And sadly, I think there’s a lot of cost.

What do you say to people who make the argument that guns are protected by the Second Amendment and that yes, a deranged person here or there may do something bad, but is it fair to punish or penalize law-abiding gun owners with unnecessary or extra government intervention?

I am a gun owner. I hunt and shoot with my boys. I want to continue doing that. I believe and I think that I have a right to do those things. On the other hand, I do not believe that right can exist without a commensurate amount of responsibility. And that responsibility either has to be voluntary or it has to be legislated.

I don't think universal background checks are an infringement. I just don’t buy that. I think it’s part of the responsibility of exercising this right. I don’t think strengthened red flag laws are in any way an infringement. I think that’s what we must do as responsible citizens. I don’t think that controlling irresponsible marketing is an infringement on our Second Amendment rights. In fact, I think it’s our responsibility to do it. I think there’s a small thread of truth in the position you portray, but democracies function in a sort of carefully balanced gray area. And I think our balance in the country right now is way, way off.

Are there others in the gun industry who share your view?

There were people who agreed with everything I said before the sort of radical shifts started to happen in about 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. But, you know, as with most things, when you earn a paycheck from something, you’re likely to be greatly influenced by it. And so, over time, most of the people in the industry have either converted to a true belief in the sort of radicalized Second Amendment absolutism that now I think is very dangerous, or they have just left the industry. There is only a place for complete, 100% devotion.

What caused the radicalization?

It was a combination of factors. After Columbine in 1999, the National Rifle Association in very well-publicized meetings now, thanks to sleuthing and digging by reporters at NPR, we now have tapes of the meetings where they literally said, are we going to be part of the solution here? Or maybe we can use these things to drum up hate and fear in our members? We might even be able to use them to drive membership. And they chose the latter. They perfected that system for about seven or eight years, getting their feet underneath them. They figured out it can drive politics. And then an explosion hit. That explosion was the future Black president leading in the polls in 2007. And then Barack Obama won in 2008. So you have this sort of uncapping of hate and conspiracy, much of it racially driven, that the NRA was tapping into. Prior to 2007, people in the United States never purchased more than 7 million guns in a single year. By the time Barack Obama left office, the United States was purchasing almost 17 million guns a year. And so I think it’s impossible to discount the degree to which Obama’s presidency lit this whole thing on fire.

When Trump was elected, there was what was called in the industry the “Trump Slump,” meaning since a Republican was elected, the fear of Obama was gone, and Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected. The sort of fear and conspiracy subsided, and sales stagnated for a little while because the industry and gun owners believed that the threat had passed. But with Trump, we experienced a whole new, never seen before level of fear, racism, hatred and conspiracy that culminated in 2020. In that year, you had George Floyd, COVID lockdowns, Black Lives Matter, Antifa protests and Kyle Rittenhouse. I mean, it’s the most tumultuous year any of us can remember with the most hatred and conspiracy and nastiness. None of us can remember a year like that. In that year, the United States consumers bought almost 23 million guns in a single year, more than three times as much as before Barack Obama took office.

Last year there was a rash of youth-related mass shootings. Uvalde comes to mind. The tragedy at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket comes to mind. How do race, conspiracy and these political headwinds you mention result in young people committing these massacres?

When those things happen, they’re not products of one particular event or series of events. They are the culmination of lots of turmoil in our society. And we’ve always had turmoil in our society, and every society has always had turmoil in it. What no other society has had is 425 million guns and this culture, on the right, that tells young men that to be real young men, they must purchase an AR-15 and go out and solve their problems. The industry 15 years ago would not even allow the AR-15 to be used or displayed at its own trade shows. I mean, they were locked up in a corner. You had to have military or police credentials to even go in there. Now, they’re spread around like crazy, and the marketing campaigns are so aimed at young men that in some ways, it’s not shocking that Uvalde or Buffalo or [the July 4 shooting at a parade in the Chicago suburb of] Highland Park, all three heinous crimes, all three committed with AR-15s, all by very young men. It’s not shocking to me that those happen; it’s shocking to me that they don’t happen every day.

What is more powerful in this country right now than social media advertising? And if it’s not so powerful, why do all the gun companies and the tactical gear companies maintain such polished social media accounts? Advertising is something that happens over time, and creates a perception and creates brands, and creates ways of thinking. And I think that certainly happened with the Buffalo shooter.

The Buffalo shooter wrote in his manifesto about perusing YouTube videos, social media accounts, all the places where tactical gear — which are some of the most egregiously advertised items in the firearms industry right now, bulletproof vests, helmets, gloves, all things that weren’t marketed at all 20 years ago. He studied very carefully what bulletproof vest to wear, what tactical gear to wear, he used the exact same gun that was used in Sandy Hook, the Bushmaster XM-15, the same gun that was advertised in [Remington Arms’] man card campaign that told young men: “You don’t have a man card if you don’t have one of these rifles. And you do have a man card if you do have one of them.”

Now, can you draw a direct line from that ad to those two shooters? I don’t know that you can draw a direct line, but I think you could damn sure draw an obtuse line. I mean, two young men who, obviously, I mean, come on, like, that’s not a mistake. And if advertising doesn’t matter, then why are they doing it?

What are the fixes? Are there any fixes?

What did Winston Churchill say? “Americans will eventually do the right thing.” And I think we may be in for more ugliness before we do the right thing. Some of that will be demanding that the Supreme Court not apply foolish originalist reasoning to instances like this. So part of that will be demanding that either through public pressure or through eventually, in the long game, replacing those justices with ones who don’t believe that way.

The other thing is, we’re going to have to, as a society, just rise up and demand responsibility, the same kind of responsibility that the industry that I worked in once imposed on itself.

You know, I tell the story that 15, 20 years ago, the industry named guns like the Smith & Wesson 629 or the Remington 870 because you had [industry] attorneys that knew that even the names of guns could be important. They could encourage people to do irresponsible things. And so you’d never wanted to even name things that might encourage bad things to happen. Now we have a gun called the Wilson Urban Super Sniper. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? We now have a gun called the Ultimate Arms Warmonger. What are you supposed to do with that? We now have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms, as in when you don’t get what you want, you vote from the rooftops. And what happened in Highland Park? A kid got up and killed people from a rooftop. You see the old self-imposed responsibility; those old norms of behavior have been just completely trashed.

So we can, as a society, demand reinstatement of those norms. Those have nothing to do with laws. They don’t require legislation. They don’t require two-thirds of the vote in the Senate. We can demand that. And we may have to.

Justin Cooper, chief of operations at Rooftop Arms, told ProPublica the business name stems from the origins of founders and is in no way related to “voting from the rooftops,” past events or political causes, or views.

ProPublica contacted Remington Arms and Bushmaster for comment but didn’t receive a response.

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Clarification, June 5, 2023: This article has been updated to clarify that guns have become the leader cause of death for teens as well as children.

by Ken Ward Jr., Mountain State Spotlight

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

Federal authorities sued West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s business empire on Wednesday, seeking $7.6 million in unpaid environmental fines and overdue fees. The move adds to Justice’s growing legal and debt problems and comes just a month into his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Justice Department lawyers filed the suit to collect fines assessed by the Interior Department against 13 companies for strip mining violations that “pose health and safety risks or threaten environmental harm” to neighboring communities.

For years, Justice has been dogged by allegations that his family businesses haven’t paid their business and regulatory debts. In 2020, an investigation by ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight found that the total judgments and settlements owed by Justice family businesses had reached $140 million. The review found hundreds of lawsuits that dated back more than 30 years, with many filed by workers, vendors, business partners and government agencies, alleging they hadn’t been paid.

This week’s lawsuit is the third time in the last two months that either federal agencies have pursued legal action against the Justice companies or a court has ruled against them over fines for environmental and worker safety violations. In April, a federal appeals court ruled that Justice companies must pay $2.5 million in fines assessed by the Environmental Protection Agency. In mid-May, the Labor Department sought a judge’s help in collecting millions of dollars in fines, alleging Justice companies are habitually late making payments related to violations that could have endangered the health and safety of coal miners.

The new suit cites more than 130 violations and more than 40 more serious enforcement orders issued between 2018 and 2022. The Justice companies previously argued that the government had reneged on a deal to resolve some of these violations for a $250,000 fine. But a federal judge threw out their case.

In response to this week’s suit, Justice sought to divert attention from the substance of the case by implying that the White House was using regulatory agencies for political purposes. “Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and the Democrats have seen the polling that show me winning this U.S. Senate race. Now the Biden Administration has started their political games to beat me,” the governor said in a tweet.

Justice, a hugely popular Republican, is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is often the swing vote on key legislation.

Government lawyers said the underlying violations included the failure to maintain and ensure the stability of a dam, violating pollution limits and not controlling erosion or sediment from mine sites.

Christopher R. Kavanaugh, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said in a statement that the companies “failed to remedy those violations and were ordered over 50 times to cease mining activities until their violations were abated.”

Kavanaugh continued, “The filing of this complaint continues the process of holding defendants accountable for jeopardizing the health and safety of the public and our environment.”

In addition to unpaid environmental penalties, the case also seeks nearly $200,000 in unpaid Abandoned Mine Land fees, which fund the federal cleanup of coal mines abandoned prior to 1977. West Virginia has more than 175,000 acres of abandoned mine sites awaiting cleanup, the second-highest total in the country. According to one estimate, the Interior Department program for cleanups is projected to have a shortfall of more than $25 billion nationwide by 2050.

As the mining industry continues a downward economic spiral, reclamation of abandoned mines is an increasing concern in coalfield communities, especially in the wake of corporate bankruptcies that threaten to shift the costs to taxpayers.

The total amount sought by the government also includes interest and administrative expenses.

Justice has said that he and his family’s companies always pay their debts. The governor was not named as a defendant in the Interior Department suit, but 12 of the 13 companies involved were listed among his business holdings on his most recent financial disclosure filed with the West Virginia Ethics Commission.

The new lawsuit does name the governor’s son, James C. “Jay” Justice III, as a defendant. The suit states that Jay Justice is a “controller” of 12 of the companies named in the complaint and that he was previously assessed fines as a corporate owner, as allowed by the federal strip mine law.

Representatives for Jim Justice’s businesses and for Jay Justice did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

Four years ago, Jay Justice issued a news release after the family’s coal firms sued the Interior Department over what was then $4.2 million in unpaid strip mining penalties and fees. The companies alleged that they had a verbal deal to resolve the matter for $250,000. But, they said, the agency backed out. Fearing a government collection action like this one, the Justices sued to try to enforce that verbal deal.

“We don’t want to have to go to court to get the government to do the right thing and live up to its end of the bargain,” Jay Justice said at the time, “but we can’t sit back and let the government take advantage of our good faith efforts to resolve this matter.”

Five months after that case was filed, a federal judge in Virginia dismissed it.