ProPublica

by Lynzy Billing

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For more than two decades, the U.S. military has been barred from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

The law, named for its author, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, applies to military assistance for foreign units funded through the Defense or State departments. Lawmakers including Leahy, a Democrat, acknowledged that it does not cover commando outfits like Afghanistan’s Zero Units.

In an email, Leahy said he believes that the law’s human rights requirements need to be expanded to “cover certain counter-terrorism operations involving U.S. special forces and foreign partners.

“U.S. support for foreign security forces, whether through the Department of Defense, Department of State, CIA or other agencies,” Leahy wrote, “must be subject to effective congressional oversight so when mistakes are made or crimes committed, those responsible are held accountable.”

Leahy called on the Biden administration to apply the law “as a matter of policy” to all overseas military forces that work with any U.S. government agencies.

Tim Rieser, an aide to Leahy, acknowledged that the Leahy Law “is not all-encompassing, as much as we wish it were.” The Leahy Law, he said, applies only to congressional appropriations that fund the State and Defense departments.

“Sen. Leahy’s position has always been that the policy should be consistent, that we should not support units of foreign security forces that commit gross violations of human rights regardless of the source of the funds, but that is not what the law says.”

A source familiar with the Zero Unit program said the CIA’s officers in the field, and special forces soldiers working under their direction, are required to follow the same rules of combat as American service members. The agency does not fall under the Leahy Law.

U.S. military operations fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate and House Armed Services committees. Congressional oversight of the CIA and other intelligence agencies is handled by separate committees in the House and Senate that hold most of their meetings and hearings in secret. By law, the agencies are required to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” of all covert operations. Intelligence committee staffers have the authority to ask the CIA for documents and testimony about classified missions like the support for the Zero Units under the broad national security law known as Title 50.

Congressional officials said the two oversight committees are ill-equipped to monitor the complexities of paramilitary operations in foreign countries. The Pentagon and State Department have created entire bureaucracies to make sure foreign units meet the requirements of the Leahy Law. The intelligence oversight committees, with their relatively small staffs, are not set up to track what’s happening on the ground when U.S. military officers on loan to the CIA work with elite units in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria.

“The sense I get from former operators is they don’t give a shit,” said one congressional source. “Their attitude is, the world’s dangerous and you partner with bad people, that’s why we have Title 50.”

Congressional staffers said they believed the failure of Congress to extend the Leahy Law to intelligence agencies was no coincidence.

“I mean, it’s a huge and intentional gap,” one said. “It’s designed to not have oversight; it is meant to not be under the public view.”

In his email, Leahy said an amendment to the Leahy Law, which would expand the scope to certain counter-terrorism operations, is now in the works.

The lack of consequences for blatant human rights violations, he said, “foments anger and resentment toward the U.S., undermines our mission in these countries where we need the support of the local population, and weakens our credibility as a country that supports the rule of law and accountability.”

Stephen Engelberg contributed reporting.

by Sharon Lerner

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

Before his shift at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Niagara Falls in May 2021, a worker peed in a cup.

Before he clocked out, he did it again.

Goodyear shipped both specimens to a lab to measure the amount of a chemical called ortho-toluidine. The results, reviewed by ProPublica, showed that the worker had enough of it in his body to put him at an increased risk for bladder cancer — and that was before his shift. After, his levels were nearly five times as high.

It’s no secret that the plant’s workers are being exposed to poison. Government scientists began testing their urine more than 30 years ago. And Goodyear, which uses ortho-toluidine to make its tires pliable, has been monitoring the air for traces of the chemical since 1976. A major expose even revealed, almost a decade ago, that dozens of the plant’s workers had developed bladder cancer since 1974.

What is perhaps most stunning about the trail of sick Goodyear workers is that they have been exposed to levels of the chemical that the United States government says are perfectly safe.

The permissible exposure limit for ortho-toluidine is 5 parts per million in air, a threshold based on research conducted in the 1940s and ’50s without any consideration of the chemical’s ability to cause cancer. Despite ample evidence that far lower levels can dramatically increase a person’s cancer risk, the legal limit has remained the same.

Paralyzed by industry lawsuits from decades ago, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has all but given up on trying to set a truly protective threshold for ortho-toluidine and thousands of other chemicals. The agency has only updated standards for three chemicals in the past 25 years; each took more than a decade to complete.

David Michaels, OSHA’s director throughout the Obama administration, told ProPublica that legal challenges had so tied his hands that he decided to put a disclaimer on the agency’s website saying the government’s limits were essentially useless: “OSHA recognizes that many of its permissible exposure limits (PELs) are outdated and inadequate for ensuring protection of worker health.” This remarkable admission of defeat remains on the official site of the U.S. agency devoted to protecting worker health.

“To me, it was obvious,” Michaels said. “You can’t lie and say you’re offering protection when you’re not. It seemed much more effective to say, ‘Don’t follow our standards.’”

David Michaels, then-director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, attends a hearing on Capitol Hill in 2010. (Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

The agency has also allowed chemical manufacturers to create their own safety data sheets, which are supposed to provide workers with the exposure limits and other critical information. OSHA does not require the sheets to be accurate or routinely fact-check them. As a result, many fail to mention the risk of cancer and other serious health hazards.

In a statement, Doug Parker, the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, acknowledged the agency’s impotence. “The requirements of the rulemaking process, including limitations placed by prior judicial decisions, have limited our ability to have more up to date standards,” he said. “Chemical exposure, including to o-toluidine, is a major health hazard for workers, and we have to do more to protect their health.”

Agency officials did not reply to a follow-up question asking what more they will do.

Goodyear, in a statement, said it “remains committed to actions to address ortho-toluidine exposure inside our Niagara Falls facility.” The company said it requires workers to wear protective equipment, invests in upgrades like ventilation and offers regular bladder cancer screenings “at no cost” to workers. It pointed out that ortho-toluidine levels at Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant had plummeted over the past decades and that the levels have “consistently been far below the permissible exposure limits as set by government regulators,” meaning 5 parts per million.

James Briggs worked for 20 years in the Niagara Falls plant before taking a job with the United Steelworkers union, which represents dozens of Goodyear employees there. While pushing for changes that would reduce its members’ exposure to ortho-toluidine at the plant, the union has essentially given up on eliminating the risk.

“If I could have my way, would I like to be able to wave a magic wand and take the risk away? Yes, I would,” he said. “Everybody that works in that plant realizes there’s some risk that comes with it. They all get it. We tell them. It’s part of the orientation for new employees.”

Former Goodyear plant worker James Briggs at the Niagara-Orleans AFL-CIO central labor council workers’ memorial at Reservoir Park in Niagara Falls (Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

Gary Casten never got such a talk when he started at the plant in 1965, he alleged in court testimony. A devoted union leader, bowler and Yankees fan, he let the government test his urine in 1990; he, too, had a chemical level five times as high after his shift than before it. More than once in his 39 years at Goodyear, Casten’s lips and fingernails turned blue, a well-known sign of ortho-toluidine poisoning.

Still, it came as a shock to Casten when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020. “If you looked up ‘nice’ in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of Gary,” said Harry Weist, one of his former co-workers. Casten underwent surgery and chemotherapy and lost his strength and his appetite. It soon became clear that the cancer had spread.

Along with dozens of other Goodyear employees, he sued the chemical companies that manufactured the ortho-toluidine used at the plant; workers’ compensation law prevented them from suing their employer. When asked at a legal proceeding in April 2021 whether anyone had warned him about the risks, he said, “If I had been told that from the first day I walked through the gates, I wouldn’t have worked there.”

He died four months later.

Last year, the grim tally of Goodyear plant workers’ bladder cancer diagnoses reached 78.

The recent test results suggest it is likely to keep climbing.

“The System Is Broken”

Created in 1970 in response to mounting injuries, illnesses and deaths from workplace hazards, OSHA was supposed to issue regulations based on scientific research conducted by its sibling agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

At first, the pair got off to a somewhat promising start, with OSHA using NIOSH research to issue more protective standards for lead, arsenic, benzene, asbestos and several other carcinogens. “The goal of the early administrators was to set lower and lower and lower standards so that industries could adapt and ultimately eliminate the use of these materials,” said David Rosner, a historian of public health at Columbia University.

But within a few years, asbestos, which was already well established as a carcinogen, presented a political challenge. “For asbestos, NIOSH said nothing other than a number approaching zero can be considered safe,” said Rosner. “But then they sent that science over to OSHA, and OSHA realized if you do that you’re going to have to shut plants everywhere.”

Chemical companies pounced, warning that OSHA’s standards would lead to job losses amid a recession; they turned the agency into “a whipping boy for why American industry was in chaos,” as Rosner put it. By 1973, the Asbestos Information Association/North America suggested that health-based regulation of its members’ product might be a “nefarious conspiracy afoot to destroy the asbestos industry.”

Two years later, the director of NIOSH declared that there was “virtually no doubt that asbestos is carcinogenic to man” and proposed lowering the safety threshold. But OSHA hedged. It acknowledged that no detectable level of asbestos was safe, but put off changing its standard due to a legal requirement to take “technical and economic factors” into consideration.

While OSHA eventually updated its asbestos standard more than a decade later, lawsuits helped chill — and ultimately all but freeze — progress on setting limits for most chemicals by requiring the agency to do more and increasingly complex analyses.

One such suit, brought by the American Petroleum Institute and decided by the Supreme Court in 1980, challenged OSHA’s limit for benzene. Although there was no scientific question that benzene causes leukemia, the court decided that, before setting a new standard, OSHA would have to first establish that the old one put workers at “significant risk” of harm. Another lawsuit, filed by the lead industry, left OSHA responsible for not just calculating the costs of complying with its standards but also demonstrating “a reasonable likelihood” that they would not threaten “the existence or competitive structure of an industry.”

Faced with massive requirements for updating a single limit, in 1989 OSHA tried another tack: lowering and setting safety thresholds for 428 chemicals at once. The move could have prevented more than 55,000 lost workdays due to illness and an average of 683 fatalities from hazardous chemicals each year, according to the agency’s estimates.

But that attempt was stymied, too. The American Iron and Steel Institute, the American Mining Congress, the American Paper Institute, the American Petroleum Institute and the Society of the Plastics Industry were among the dozens of trade associations that joined to sue OSHA, criticizing the agency’s decision to lump the chemicals together and claiming that they had inadequate time to respond to the proposed changes. While most unions supported the agency’s effort, some sued OSHA as well, arguing that some of the updated standards were not protective enough.

In 1992, the court of appeals vacated all of the safety limits that OSHA had set and updated three years earlier, finding that the agency had failed to prove that exposure to the chemicals posed a significant risk of health impairments and that the proposed changes were not economically and technologically feasible for the companies that used the chemicals.

By the time he was appointed to run OSHA in 2009, Michaels was well aware of the risks of the chemical used at Goodyear. Just before he took the helm of the agency, he devoted a chapter of his book about industry influence over science to ortho-toluidine, chronicling the cancers at the Niagara Falls plant and the fact that manufacturers had evidence of the chemical’s carcinogenicity as far back as the 1940s.

Outside the Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls (Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

But given how onerous the limit-setting process had become — and how many other chemicals were in even more desperate need of accurate limits, in part because greater numbers of workers were exposed to them — he decided not to attempt to update the ortho-toluidine standard.

In the past 25 years, OSHA has updated just three standards.

Forced by a lawsuit, in 2006 the agency issued a standard for chromium, the carcinogen featured in the movie “Erin Brockovich,” which was also causing cancer at exposure levels far below its outdated limit. In 2016, OSHA issued a protective standard for silica, a cancer-causing dust that millions of workers are exposed to each year. And, in 2021, OSHA put the finishing touches on a rule for beryllium, an element that can scar the lungs and cause cancer and that thousands of shipyard and construction workers are exposed to every year. The prior limit was nearly 70 years old when OSHA revised it in January 2017, then tweaked the rule over the next four years. Each update took more than a decade to complete as the agency amassed the voluminous data it needed to justify the changes.

While the 1972 standard for asbestos was just five pages long, the one for silica stretched across 600 pages. “And that’s mostly because of the requirements that followed all these lawsuits,” said Michaels, who worked on the silica standard throughout his time as administrator and is now a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

Michaels argues the problem isn’t the agency itself as much as its small budget and the court-imposed burdens resulting from the lawsuits.

“Don’t blame OSHA,” said Michaels. “The system is broken.”

“A Form of Self Regulation”

Tucked in a binder in the foreman’s office at the Goodyear plant is another tool that might have helped workers. Since 1983, OSHA has required chemical manufacturers to create safety data sheets: documents that present clear information about a chemical’s hazards. Workers and employers consult these to make decisions on what kinds of precautions to take.

The Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls (Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

OSHA does not routinely check to see whether the data sheets contain inaccuracies or even require them to be accurate. Companies must note carcinogens as cancer-causing only if they are on OSHA’s own very truncated list, which notably omits ortho-toluidine. OSHA specifies that companies “may” rather than “must” rely on the National Toxicology Program or the International Agency for Research on Cancer for determinations on whether a chemical causes cancer.

In comments submitted to OSHA in 2016, the advocacy groups Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the BlueGreen Alliance said the agency’s hands-off approach ignored the inherent conflicts of interest.

“Allowing manufacturers to disregard hazard assessments by two authoritative bodies and to conduct their own hazard assessment of products in which they have significant financial investment is a form of self-regulation that will undoubtedly compromise transparency, accurate and timely disclosure of information, and ultimately workplace health and safety,” the environmental organizations wrote.

The groups suggested the agency should take the job of evaluating chemicals away from the companies that make them. But OSHA again failed to act. As a result, experts say, the safety data sheets for hazardous chemicals are still riddled with errors.

Almost one-third of more than 650 sheets for dangerous chemicals contain inaccurate warnings, according to a study, published today, that was conducted by the BlueGreen Alliance, an organization that focuses on the intersection of labor and environmental issues, and Clearya, a company that alerts consumers to the presence of toxic chemicals in products. Of 512 sheets for carcinogenic chemicals the groups reviewed, 15% did not mention cancer in the hazards identification section, and 21% of 372 safety data sheets for chemicals that pose a risk to fertility and fetal development omitted that fact.

Even sheets for well-known carcinogens like benzene and vinyl chloride often don’t include warnings that they cause cancer. One for asbestos, for example, fails to say in its hazard section that the mineral causes lung cancer and mesothelioma, instead warning only of skin irritation, serious eye irritation and the possibility of respiratory irritation.

While the inaccuracy of safety data sheets is a global problem, companies in the U.S. are among the worst offenders, according to the analysis by the BlueGreen Alliance and Clearya. Safety data sheets in the U.S. are far more likely to be missing information about health hazards than those in Europe, their analysis showed. In part, that’s because of differing approaches to regulating chemicals.

“In other jurisdictions like Europe, Australia and Japan, they say, ‘There’s a list of chemicals we’re concerned about, and here’s how we’re classifying them.’ So they can’t play around with the truth,” said Dorothy Wigmore, an industrial hygienist based in Canada.

By law, OSHA can fine companies no more than $14,502 for each violation of its hazard communication standard, which amounts to a slap on the wrist for most companies, according to experts. The agency most recently responded to a complaint at the Goodyear plant in 2015, when it issued a citation for violation of its Respiratory Protection Standard but did not issue a fine.

Of the regulatory approach to safety data sheets in the United States, Wigmore said, “It’s a series of situations that are just designed to let all kinds of hazards get out into the marketplace.”

“Impermissible Secrecy”

The primary law governing the regulation of chemicals in the United States, called the Toxic Substances Control Act, contains a provision designed to keep chemical makers honest and the public informed.

If companies that manufacture, import, process or distribute chemicals find any evidence that their products might present a substantial risk to human health or the environment, they must immediately share that information with the Environmental Protection Agency.

DuPont, which had supplied ortho-toluidine to the Goodyear plant since 1957, had just that kind of information back in 1993. An industrial hygienist named Tom Nelson who worked at DuPont calculated that the permissible exposure level was at least 37 times too high to protect workers.

Almost three decades later, an attorney named Steven Wodka stumbled upon Nelson’s calculations while reviewing thousands of documents he had obtained from the company through discovery, in cases his clients — Goodyear plant workers, including Casten — brought against DuPont. The information should have been public. Yet, when Wodka checked Chemview, an EPA database that contains such information supplied by companies known as 8(e) reports, he found no mention of Nelson’s bombshell discovery. The agency did make public five reports that DuPont submitted about the chemical, but none disclose the calculations showing just how ineffective the permissible exposure level is.

In January 2021, Wodka wrote to the agency to report that DuPont was violating the 8(e) provision of the chemicals law by withholding information about just how dangerous ortho-toluidine is.

“There is a direct connection between DuPont’s failure to abide by this statute and the continuing cases of bladder cancer in the Goodyear workers in Niagara Falls, New York,” the letter stated, before urging the EPA administrator to “enforce this statute to its full extent against DuPont.”

After months of silence, Wodka received a response from the EPA this September. “We did not take further enforcement action because we had a document that demonstrated that they met their 8e obligations,” Gloria Odusote, a program manager in the agency’s waste and chemical enforcement division, wrote to Wodka. She said the document contained “confidential business information” and was exempt from public disclosure.

The kind of exemption she cited was designed to allow companies to keep secret information that could give their competitors a window into their business practices, such as manufacturing processes and chemical formulas whose disclosure could “cause substantial business injury.” But companies routinely use the exemption to shield all kinds of information, including the names of chemicals, the amounts produced and the location of plants that make them. The chemicals law forbids companies from claiming health and safety studies as confidential business information.

“EPA can’t keep this information secret,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who directs the Toxic Exposure & Health Program at Earthjustice. The agency’s failure to list the document on Chemview and make it available to the public upon request, she said, “adds an additional layer of impermissible secrecy.”

DuPont declined to comment, noting in an email that ortho-toluidine was produced by “E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., not DuPont de Nemours,” as the company now calls itself after relaunching in 2019. It has settled all 28 lawsuits in which Wodka represented Goodyear workers with bladder or urothelial cancer.

EPA officials said they are looking into the matter.

“Shouldn’t Have to Struggle Like This”

On a snowy November morning in western New York, Harry Weist awaited his next cystoscopy. A 66-year-old retired Goodyear worker with a graying buzz cut and a horseshoe mustache, Weist has already undergone dozens of these tests, in which a tiny camera is inserted through his urethra and into his bladder. On three occasions, in 2004, 2019 and 2020, the images revealed cancerous tumors that had to be surgically removed.

Harry Weist (Matt Burkhartt for ProPublica)

It can take days and sometimes weeks for the pain and discomfort from the surgery to ease. What never goes away, though, is the dread about the cancer that future probes will find. “My doctor said it’s not if it will return, but when,” Weist said.

During his 34 years working at the Goodyear plant, Weist ran the Super Bowl pool, served in the union and became “thick as thieves” with a few of his co-workers. He also breathed in fumes so stinging and strong that he was left gasping for air. But on that November day, he preferred to think about the lifelong friends he made at the plant.

One, a close relative who has also had three bouts of bladder cancer and undergone chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to treat it, has gotten a job delivering car parts at age 84 to cover some of his medical costs. According to Weist, the family member (who declined to be interviewed) is so loyal to the company that “if you cut him, he would bleed Goodyear blue.” Weist makes the joke affectionately; the men remain close, even as they sharply disagree about their former employer.

“He says we made these bills so we’re going to pay them,” Weist said. It is difficult to definitively prove the cause of any individual cancer. But Weist feels sure his and that of his relative were due to decades of extreme exposure to a chemical known to cause bladder cancer. “I tell him, ‘Goodyear gave us cancer. We worked at their factory and wound up getting bladder cancer. You shouldn’t have to struggle like this.’”

Weist thinks often of Casten, who died at 74, leaving behind a daughter and grandkids who called him Popcorn. Like his old friend, Weist would have made a different choice had he been warned about the risks of working around ortho-toluidine. “Of course I wouldn’t have taken the job if I knew I was going to go through this,” he said.

Last year, NIOSH scientists published a risk assessment of ortho-toluidine that put the finest point yet on exactly how dangerous the chemical is — and how egregiously wrong the permissible exposure limit remains. OSHA says it strives to keep worker risk under one in 1,000, meaning one in every thousand people being harmed, after the Supreme Court suggested this threshold more than four decades ago. To bring the risk at the Goodyear plant to that range, the safety threshold for ortho-toluidine in the air should be about one three-thousandth that level, the assessment concluded.

The current permissible limit, 5 parts per million, is the same as 5,000 parts per billion. Yet even just 10 parts per billion in the air would cause each 1,000 exposed workers to contract between 12 and 68 “excess” cases of bladder cancer, meaning the number they’d likely develop above the number expected in the general population, according to the study.

The average amount of ortho-toluidine in the air at the plant is even higher: 11.3 parts per billion, according to testing completed by Goodyear in 2019. The company said that it has continued to measure air concentrations of the chemical in the plant since then, but declined to share results of that testing with ProPublica.

That measurement along with pre- and post-shift urine samples from workers at the plant “provide conclusive evidence that the Niagara Falls workers are still absorbing ortho-toluidine into their bodies during the workshift,” Wodka wrote to OSHA in March in a petition co-authored by a physician and a toxicologist who have served as expert witnesses in Goodyear worker cases, as well as an epidemiologist who previously worked for the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Public Health Service.

The occupational health experts asked OSHA to update the standard. Specifically, they asked that the permissible exposure limit in air for eight hours be reduced from5,000 parts perbillion to 1 part per billion and that the agency require companies to clearly inform their workers that the chemical causes bladder cancer.

OSHA has not responded to their petition.

Clarification, Dec. 15, 2022: This story has been updated to clarify that OSHA revised the beryllium limit in 2017 and, after some making changes, finalized the rule in 2021.

by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS, and Vernal Coleman, ProPublica

This story was co-published with WTTW/Chicago PBS. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In 2013, Roseland Community Hospital was looking for a new leader. Its former chief executive had alienated the Illinois governor and other lawmakers amid a messy fight over the hospital’s funding.

The small nonprofit facility on Chicago’s South Side turned to Tim Egan, a longtime hospital executive who had begun to make a name for himself as a political operative and fundraiser with an ability to navigate the insular circles of state and local government.

Egan ran for alderman of the North Side’s 43rd Ward in 2007 and 2011, and he has served as the leader of the Cook County Democratic Party’s 2nd Ward committee since 2016, during his time as head of the hospital.

In his close to nine years as Roseland’s president and chief executive, Egan’s political activities and the hospital’s operations have become increasingly entwined: hospital business awarded to friends and associates, employees and contractors making donations to Egan’s campaign funds, at least one fundraiser using the hospital’s name on invitations.

In the runup to the November elections, Egan appeared in a commercial for Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s reelection campaign that, according to experts in nonprofit governance, blurred the lines even further between Egan’s stewardship of Roseland and his efforts in state and local politics.

“Susana is a giant for saving the New Roseland Community Hospital,” Egan declared in the commercial for Mendoza, a Democrat and longtime ally who last month won a second full term. As the state’s chief financial officer, Mendoza pays the state’s bills, including reimbursing hospitals like Roseland for patients on Medicare and Medicaid.

Egan this year also co-hosted a Mendoza fundraiser at which tickets cost as much as $5,000.

Tim Egan, president and CEO of Roseland Community Hospital (Courtesy of WTTW/Chicago PBS)

Samuel Brunson, a professor and associate dean at Loyola University Chicago, said Egan’s appearance in the commercial crossed a line. IRS rules bar nonprofits from participating in political campaigns.

“That looks to me like a pretty flagrant violation of this rule,” said Brunson, who specializes in nonprofits and the tax code and viewed the Mendoza commercial at the request of WTTW/Chicago PBS and ProPublica.

In the commercial, Egan is identified as Roseland’s president and CEO and stands in what appears to be a hospital setting in front of two people dressed in lab coats.

“It’s not him saying the hospital endorses her, but it’s him saying, ‘I am the CEO of the hospital, I’m speaking in my capacity as CEO … about what she did for the hospital itself,’” Brunson said.

A spokesperson for Egan and the hospital said in a statement that Egan’s political work is not a secret to Roseland’s leadership, and it has only helped the hospital achieve its goals in the community. The spokesperson did not address the question of whether Egan’s appearance violated federal nonprofit rules.

“Mr. Egan has an excellent relationship with his board and keeps board members fully apprised of all of Roseland’s major contracts and business developments, often times to seek their advice and approval,” said the spokesperson, Dennis Culloton. “Similarly, the board members are updated on his efforts to establish strong government contacts to support the mission of Roseland Community Hospital.”

Rupert Evans, a health care consultant and the chair of Roseland’s board of directors, said in a statement that Egan has done a “tremendous job” in his role leading Roseland and that the hospital board is “fully aware” of his political activities.

“None of his activities outside of his primary duties cause any conflict of interest for the hospital and have been fully disclosed,” said Evans, a former chair of the health administration program at Governors State University.

The most serious penalty for violating rules barring political activity by nonprofits is termination of an organization’s nonprofit status — though that sanction is rarely levied for this kind of activity.

The Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, declined to comment on the commercial.

A spokesperson for the Mendoza campaign said the commercial refers to the comptroller’s work getting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to cash-strapped hospitals, including to Roseland.

“Roseland Hospital plays a critical role in providing healthcare to the underserved communities on Chicago’s South Side, so we asked Tim Egan to attest to the Comptroller’s work in our video spot which ran this fall,” campaign manager Jack Londrigan said in a statement. “We would have never asked Tim to do anything we thought would pose a problem for him or the hospital as we believe his efforts to save and protect the lives of Roseland residents are of the utmost importance.”

Longtime hospital consultant James Orlikoff, a Chicago-based adviser on governance and leadership issues for the American Hospital Association, said Egan’s appearance in the campaign commercial “probably pushed the boundary, if not crossed it.” But he also says given the “unprecedented financial pressure” hospitals are facing, having an experienced political operator at the helm could be beneficial.

Egan’s appearance in the commercial follows a trying period for Roseland. ProPublica and WTTW/Chicago PBS reported in October that federal inspectors found that, since January 2020, errors or neglect had contributed to the deaths of at least seven Roseland patients, including one who was pregnant.

Those incidents prompted federal watchdogs to admonish the hospital and threaten sanctions unless the facility took corrective measures. Federal records indicate that Roseland leaders fixed those immediate safety violations. A spokesperson for the hospital and a top official there have said that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to many of Roseland’s challenges.

A 2021 federal whistleblower lawsuit alleges other problems at Roseland. Unsealed this month in federal district court in Chicago, the complaint claims that Roseland was complicit in a scheme by a physician who worked at the hospital to bill for millions of dollars in unnecessary or fraudulent COVID-19-related medical care.

Culloton, the spokesperson for Roseland and Egan, said neither Egan nor the hospital had been involved in any improper conduct. The lawsuit is pending.

The campaign commercial for Mendoza wasn’t the first time Egan has used his position as part of Mendoza’s campaign. An invitation to a $250-to-$5,000-a-ticket fundraiser in May at the swanky 95th-floor Signature Room of what was once the John Hancock Center was billed as an opportunity to join “Roseland Community Hospital President Tim Egan for a healthcare heroes reception in support of Susana Mendoza.”

“That looks a whole lot like an endorsement, and it looks like an impermissible endorsement,” Brunson said.

Neither Culloton nor Mendoza’s campaign responded to questions about the campaign event.

For a hospital executive like Egan, such a move into politics may have pitfalls, especially if their preferred candidate loses an election. “Now,” said Brunson, “they’re on the outs with whoever got the office.”

The board has signed off on at least one move Egan has made that tied the hospital to a friend and political associate. In October 2020, the board’s executive committee voted unanimously to transfer the management of Roseland’s emergency department from the medical group that had long held the contract to a wholly owned subsidiary company.

That December, that subsidiary of Roseland signed a three-year, $10,000-a-month consulting contract with P2C Healthcare Consulting, a company that had registered with the state just a month earlier. P2C’s manager, Leonard Cannata, has no apparent experience in health care management.

Cannata is a lawyer and political consultant who has worked for at least one of Egan’s political campaigns. Several photos posted to the Roseland CEO’s personal social media accounts show the two smiling as Cannata displays holiday gifts given by Egan. In a 2011 endorsement of Cannata’s skills on LinkedIn, Egan described him as a “detail oriented and determined” professional. “Len is destined to succeed in life,” he added.

Watch the WTTW/Chicago PBS Report

Egan’s spokesperson didn’t answer questions about the political relationship between Cannata and Egan, but said the contract with P2C “significantly lowered the costs to Roseland, including lower insurance costs. This arrangement was arrived at in collaboration with and with the approval of the Roseland Community Hospital Board.”

P2C, according to its contract, is charged with physician recruitment, performance metrics, and business plan implementation. In an internal hospital email obtained by WTTW/Chicago PBS and ProPublica, a hospital executive said P2C was the management group for the emergency department.

Cannata did not respond to requests for comment. Evans, the board chair, did not respond to questions about the contract.

In another instance, Roseland signed a contract with the company American Medical Lab to run the hospital’s in-house lab for five years at an annual cost of $1.5 million. That deal was signed in February 2021. That fall, the company donated $5,000 to one of Egan’s political funds.

The president of the lab company did not respond to a request for comment.

Culloton also did not respond to questions about the American Medical Lab contract.

Roseland serves a majority-Black community on Chicago’s far South Side that has long faced segregation and disinvestment. According to the hospital, 86% of the people living in its service area are Black. In 2020, nearly 92% of the people receiving care at the hospital relied on Medicare or Medicaid.

But on at least two occasions during the fall of 2020, while the hospital provided on-site coronavirus testing, it also offered clinics in mostly white Chicago neighborhoods where residents had average incomes far higher than those of the residents that Roseland is supposed to serve. In September and December of 2020, Roseland offered COVID-19 testing in the North Side’s 2nd Ward, where Egan works as the Democratic committeeperson. One of the testing events was held in the city’s upscale Gold Coast neighborhood. It’s not clear how many such events Roseland provided.

The Roseland and Egan spokesperson said the testing clinics served a need in the community.

“Roseland Community Hospital,” the spokesperson said in the statement, “makes no apologies for its effort to assist the City of Chicago Department of Public Health and other public health authorities in making COVID-19 testing available to as many people as possible.”

Meanwhile, Egan’s political activities have received contributions from people and businesses associated with both Roseland and his former employer Norwegian American Hospital, which is now known as Humboldt Park Health.

Between Egan’s first run for alderman in 2007 and this year, political funds that he chairs have received nearly $100,000 in donations, loans and in-kind contributions from hospital staff and leadership, board members for both hospitals and their respective charitable foundations, and people and businesses who have done work for the hospitals.

Among those donors is Dr. Tunji Ladipo, former director of Roseland’s emergency department. Ladipo, who was listed as a member of Roseland’s board of directors in its most recent available tax filing, donated $14,000 to Egan’s political committees between 2016 and July 2022.

Ladipo did not respond to requests for comment.

Enrique Lopez, another of Egan’s donors and political allies, has prepared hospital tax returns and has audited its financial statements. Lopez and his accounting firm have given more than $7,000 in donations and in-kind contributions to Egan’s various political funds; Lopez is treasurer of one of those funds.

Angel Chatterton, a senior accounting instructor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said those kinds of political and financial ties could make outside observers question whether the audits conducted by Lopez’s firm were swayed by “undue influence” from hospital leadership.

“Auditors not only need to be objective, they need to be perceived as objective as well,” Chatterton said. “That’s at the heart of the credibility of our profession.”

She added that while the arrangement may be entirely aboveboard, “when you’re dealing with any type of political situation like this, I would say additional safeguards need to be put into play.”

Culloton, the Egan spokesperson, defended the use of Lopez’s firm, saying the firm was brought in after the hospital had not performed an audit or filed some key documents for close to 20 years.

Egan “is grateful for the excellent work of the hospital’s auditor Mr. Enrique Lopez who holds his firm up to the highest standards of professionalism,” Culloton said. “Mr. Egan complies with Roseland Community Hospital Board policies and procedures including those addressing disclosure and potential conflicts of interest.”

Lopez did not respond to a request for comment.

by Maya Miller, ProPublica, and Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

Update: Dec. 15, 2022: This story was updated to include comments from U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

State and federal lawmakers in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the region’s tribal leaders, are calling for environmental policy changes and increased funding to address toxic contamination in salmon following an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Salmon is a pillar of tribal diets and culture, often served at ceremonies and largely considered a medicine.

Although tribal members and researchers have been raising concerns about this contamination for decades, federal and state governments have failed to consistently monitor the waters of the Columbia River Basin for pollution in fish. Given the gaps in testing, ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting did their own, revealing levels of contaminants in Columbia River salmon that, when consumed at average tribal rates, would be high enough to put many of the 68,000 tribal members living in the basin at risk of adverse health impacts.

“These deeply troubling results directly endanger people’s health and must lead to change,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in an emailed statement in which he also referenced recent Congressional funding for the Columbia River Basin Restoration Program. “I intend to continue to fight for funding for this and other programs, as well as policy changes, to end this toxic threat to Tribal members from the salmon they count on.”

When pressed for specifics, many of the lawmakers did not offer any. A spokesperson for Wyden said the longtime elected official will be working on the issue with his counterpart Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

“Our rivers and waterways are the lifeblood of our communities, and if they are filled with toxic chemicals, everyone and everything suffers — these results showing their devastating impact on our salmon confirms that,” Merkley said in an emailed statement. “I will keep pushing to expand and protect the Columbia River Basin Restoration Program I created, and support other changes and funding that will help tackle toxic pollutants.”

Washington’s Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee wrote in an emailed statement that the state “must carry on our work to identify and clean up contaminated sites, find safer alternatives to keep toxics out of products in the first place, and use our regulatory and enforcement authorities to limit the amount of toxics going into the water.”

Tribal members and researchers say the problem requires multiple approaches. They say lawmakers must make sure companies are legally and financially responsible for the pollution they emit, and regulators must enforce stricter water quality standards while fast-tracking industrial cleanups. Right now, when health agencies issue advisories warning people against eating fish from contaminated waters, environmental agencies are not required to act, which can allow the contamination to fester.

“We have fish advisories just about everywhere,” said Laura Klasner Shira, an environmental engineer for Yakama Nation Fisheries. “I can’t think of one that has been lifted.”

Staff with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a coordination and management agency representing area tribes, said that Wyden and Merkley have been responsive to tribal leaders’ calls for action in the past, conducting listening sessions with tribal members and incorporating tribes’ proposed solutions into legislation. If the lawmakers fail to institute changes that would protect tribal health going forward, the commission plans to quote their own statements to them in response. “I’m looking forward to publishing a letter back to them the next time” a rule or regulation falls short, said Dianne Barton, the group’s water quality coordinator.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., also said that failing to take action in response to the findings could open up the government to legal liability. In the mid-1850s, the United States government signed binding treaties to preserve tribes’ right to fish for salmon as the country overtook millions of acres of tribal land. “This is the federal government’s obligation,” Blumenauer said.

For its investigation, ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting purchased 50 salmon from Native fishers along the Columbia River and paid to have a certified lab test them for 13 metals and two classes of chemicals known to be present in the river. The testing showed concentrations of two chemicals — mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as Oregon’s and Washington’s health agencies, deem unsafe at the levels consumed by many of the tribal members of tribes living in the basin today.

A spokesperson for Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., said she is considering introducing legislation to address this toxic contamination impacting salmon and other fish in the Columbia.

Additional members of the congressional delegations in Oregon and Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

The federal government has taken modest steps this year to clean up the region. In August, the EPA received $79 million over five years to reduce pollution in the Columbia River after Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. While this is the most money ever dedicated to cleaning up the Columbia, tribal leaders, local legislators and environmental advocates say it is just a fraction of what is needed to truly address pollution in the river.

At the White House Tribal Nations Summit two weeks ago, the federal agency announced proposed revisions to the Clean Water Act that would require tribal health and culture to be incorporated into federal water quality standards. These standards are used to sustain environmental objectives like clean drinking water and fish healthy enough for people to eat.

“The ability to exercise treaty rights to fish is completely dependent upon clean water and healthy ecosystems,” Aja DeCoteau, the executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission wrote in a letter to the EPA last September, when the agency first began engaging with tribes on this potential revision. “EPA must consider their treaty-based obligations.”

Staff with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said that while the Clean Water Act revisions would be a major step in the right direction, there are still gaps in the regulatory system that enable toxic pollution to continue to be dumped into and spread throughout the river.

For one, reports have found that the Clean Water Act does not sufficiently regulate materials like pesticides and fertilizers that end up on the ground then flow into waterways. This type of pollution, generated by large-scale farming, timber harvesting and other industries, is responsible for a significant share of contamination reaching the Columbia River today.

There are also new chemicals constantly entering the market and ending up in waterways like the Columbia, courtesy of what Barton describes as the reactive nature of the Toxic Substances Control Act. Historically, the law has not required companies to disclose the health impacts of new chemicals.

The general public, as well as tribal members, will have more opportunities to weigh in on the proposed revisions to the Clean Water Act during public meetings in January. Anyone interested in submitting written feedback to the EPA can do so until March 6.

As these processes play out, the results from the testing effort will be front of mind for many, especially those who continue to consume Columbia River salmon. “It’s definitely concerning,” said Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, a group of tribes whose land abuts a section of the Columbia River in northern Washington. “It gives me more fuel to work on these issues.”

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Andrew Perez and Aditi Ramaswami, The Lever

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

Flush with money after receiving the largest-known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, conservative activist Leonard Leo and his associates are spending millions of dollars to influence some of the Supreme Court’s most consequential recent cases, newly released tax documents obtained by ProPublica and The Lever show.

The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.

The records also show that the Leo-aligned nonprofits paid millions of dollars to for-profit entities connected to Leo.

Leo and one of his top associates did not respond to requests for comment.

The money flowed mostly through so-called dark money groups, which don’t have to disclose their donors. They are required to reveal the recipients of their spending in their annual tax returns, which are released to the public, but often those are also dark money groups or other entities that have minimal disclosure rules.

As ProPublica and The Lever detailed in August, Leo was gifted a $1.6 billion fortune last year by a reclusive manufacturing magnate, Barre Seid. The newly revealed tax documents cover last year, just as Leo was in the process of receiving that enormous donation.

The Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based website designer who refuses to work for same-sex couples provides a window into Leo’s strategy.

At least six groups funded by Leo’s network have filed briefs supporting the suit, which seeks to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which records show received $1.9 million from Leo’s network, submitted a brief supporting the web designer. So did Concerned Women for America, which has received at least $565,000 over the past two years from the Leo network, as well as an organization called the Becket Fund, which got $550,000 from a Leo group.

Leo’s network has also been the top funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which spends money to elect GOP attorneys general and serves as a policy hub for the state officials. Twenty Republican attorneys general have also filed a brief in support of the case. One Leo group donated $6.5 million to RAGA during the 2022 election cycle, according to the association’s federal filings.

The largest donation by Leo’s network was $71 million given to DonorsTrust, a so-called donor-advised fund that pools money from numerous funders and gives it out to largely conservative and libertarian groups. Past reports have described DonorsTrust as a “dark-money ATM” of the conservative movement.

Another case that Leo groups have sought to influence is Moore v. Harper, which could have sweeping implications for American democracy. The question posed in the case is whether the Constitution affords state legislatures the power to create rules for federal elections without state court oversight or intervention.

The Honest Elections Project, an initiative within another key Leo organization, the 85 Fund, has backed the plaintiff’s case with an amicus brief. The tax documents show that the 85 Fund also donated $400,000 in 2020 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indianapolis-based conservative legal group that filed a supportive brief in the case.

Thirteen Republican attorneys general filed a brief backing the suit as well.

The Supreme Court is also hearing two cases this term brought by the conservative group Students for Fair Admissions that are challenging universities’ affirmative action policies. The group received $250,000 from the 85 Fund in 2020, the tax records show, more than a third of the total it raised that year.

Speech First, which the records show received $700,000 in 2020-21 from the 85 Fund, filed briefs backing Students for Fair Admissions in both cases. Republican attorneys general, backed by Leo’s network, submitted briefs, too.

The other theme to emerge from the new tax records is the large amount of expenditures going to for-profit entities run by or connected to Leo. The 85 Fund’s largest outside vendor for 2021 was CRC Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm chaired by Leo. The 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors $22 million last year, tax records show.

The largest outside vendor to the Concord Fund, another hub in Leo’s network, was also CRC Advisors, which received nearly $8 million over the course of a year. Concord also paid $500,000 to BH Group, another for-profit firm led by Leo.

There is no prohibition on nonprofits sending business to companies they have connections to, but any deals must be made at a fair market value.

The companies did not immediately respond to questions about the payments.

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by Neil Bedi, Sharon Lerner and Kathleen McGrory

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When ProPublica published stories this fall cataloging new evidence that American chemical workers are being exposed to asbestos, readers reacted with surprise over the most simple fact: Asbestos, the killer mineral whose dangers have been known for over a century, is still legal?

Asbestos is only one of many toxic substances that are linked to problems like cancers, genetic mutations and fetal harm and that other countries have banned, but the United States has not. That includes substances like hexabromocyclododecane, a flame retardant used in some building materials that can damage fetal development and disrupt thyroid hormones, and trichloroethylene, a toxic industrial degreaser that has contaminated communities, including a whole neighborhood that suffered a string of tragic pediatric cancer cases.

Michal Freedhoff, the head of chemical regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency, concedes to decades of regulatory inaction. She says a chronic lack of funding and staffing, plus roadblocks created by the Trump administration, have hamstrung the agency in recent years. Still, Freedhoff believes in the regulatory system’s ability to protect the public from dangerous substances and says the EPA is “moving as quickly as we can to put protections into place that have been desperately needed.”

But the flaws of the American chemical regulatory apparatus run deeper than funding or the decisions of the last presidential administration. ProPublica spoke with environmental experts around the world and delved into a half century of legislation, lawsuits, EPA documents, oral histories, chemical databases and global regulatory records to construct a blueprint of a failed system. This is how the U.S. became a global laggard in chemical regulation.

1. The Chemical Industry Helped Write the Toxic Substances Law

The Toxic Substances Control Act authorizes the EPA to ban or restrict the use of chemicals that pose serious health risks. But industry magnates were so intimately involved in the drafting of the original 1976 bill that the EPA’s first assistant administrator for its chemical division joked the law was “written by industry” and should have been named after the DuPont executive who went over the text line by line.

The resulting statute allowed more than 60,000 chemicals to stay on the market without a review of their health risks. It even required the EPA, a public health agency, to always choose regulations that were the “least burdensome” to companies. These two words would doom American chemical regulation for decades.

In 1989, the EPA announced after 10 years and millions of dollars of work that it was banning asbestos. Companies that used asbestos sued the EPA, and in 1991, a federal court ruled that despite all of the work it had done, the EPA did not sufficiently prove that a ban was the least burdensome option. The rule was overturned.

It wasn’t until 2016 that Congress amended the law to cut the “least burdensome” language. The bill was hailed as an extraordinary compromise between health-focused lawmakers and the chemical industry. It created a schedule where a small list of high-priority chemicals would be reviewed every few years; in 2016, the first 10 were selected, including asbestos. The EPA would then have about three years to assess the chemicals and another two years to finalize regulations on them.

(Simon Bailly, special to ProPublica)

Behind the scenes, though, the bill text began not as a reformative measure, but as a company-friendly statute that would help industry avoid some regulations. Many public health advocates and several progressive lawmakers did not support it. Then-Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., announced at one point that in the metadata of a draft of the bill she had received, the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobbying group, was listed as the document’s originator. “Maybe I am old fashioned,” Boxer said, “but I do not believe that a regulated industry should be so intimately involved in writing a bill that regulates them.” (The ACC and a congressional sponsor of the bill denied her claim.)

Freedhoff, who was previously a lead Senate negotiator for the new chemicals bill, said that when the bill was finally signed into law a year later, it went from being a piece of legislation that was mostly supported by Republicans to one with wide bipartisan support. Both the ACC and health advocacy organizations were at the final signing ceremony, she added.

Some experts point out though, that during the legislative process, the chemical industry prevented the inclusion of some stronger regulations and collected several key wins, including the federal preemption of state-level chemical regulations. In the years before the amendment passed, progressive states like California and Vermont had stopped waiting for the EPA to regulate chemicals and started imposing their own restrictions. Under the new law, federal restrictions would overrule those state-level statutes in certain cases, creating a simpler regulatory structure that was easier for companies to comply with.

2. Following Early Failures, the EPA Lost Its Resolve

When the EPA failed to ban asbestos in 1991, some experts say the agency could have tried again. In the court’s decision, the judge did provide a road map for future bans, which would require the agency to do an analysis of other regulatory options, like import limits or warning labels, to prove they wouldn’t be adequate. “That to me is so telling,” said Eve Gartner, an environmental attorney who worked on the 1991 case and is now a managing attorney at Earthjustice. The EPA “clearly could have taken the steps it needed to ban asbestos in the ’90s.”

But EPA officials froze, believing it would be nearly impossible to prove a chemical should be banned under the “least burdensome” constraints. Many of the most dangerous substances, which faced bans in other countries, remained on the market for decades.

Among them was trichloroethylene, or TCE, a clear, colorless liquid with a sweet odor that resembles chloroform. Its chemical properties make it suited for a number of tasks, and it was used as everything from an anesthetic used during childbirth to a solvent used in the production of decaf coffee to, most commonly, a degreaser for cleaning machinery in factories. But its properties also made it toxic and carcinogenic to humans. Because of the health effects, the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of TCE in medicines, anesthetics and food products in 1977. The European Union placed TCE under its highest level of restriction almost 10 years ago. But the EPA never banned its use in workplaces and industrial factories, including some plants that let TCE leak into the environment.

In 2014, Kari Rhinehart, a nurse from Franklin, Indiana, was at work when she got a call about her daughter, Emma Grace Findley. Doctors had found signs of swelling during the 13-year-old’s annual eye exam and said she needed further testing. She was taken to the same emergency room where Rhinehart worked and prepped for an MRI. When a tech returned to inject more dye, Rhinehart, who held her daughter’s hand as she lay inside the machine, started sobbing silently. She knew that Emma Grace had a brain tumor. It turned out to be glioblastoma multiforme, a rare cancer mostly seen in adults over 50. Only three months after the diagnosis, a week before Christmas, Emma Grace died at home in her mother’s arms.

After WTHR, a local news station, discovered that many children in the community were developing abnormal cancers, Rhinehart learned that sites near her home were polluted with TCE. Even though they had been investigated by EPA, government-ordered tests showed they were still contaminating the air and groundwater. Parents demanded government action. Authorities reopened an investigation and ordered new cleanup efforts, including the replacement of thousands of feet of sewer lines. (Because the causes of most pediatric cancers haven’t been scientifically proven, no direct link has been established between the childhood cancer cases and TCE.)

After the “least burdensome” language was removed from the law in 2016, the EPA named TCE as one of its 10 high-priority chemicals and tried to propose a ban on high-risk uses that year. But the agency under Trump shelved the proposal following industry complaints and decided to reassess the risk of the chemical. Then, in 2021, the Biden EPA restarted the effort after finding that the previous administration had ignored ways the public could be exposed to chemicals like TCE. “It would have been a disservice to the people that we are charged with protecting” to not take the time to fix those issues before moving forward, said Freedhoff.

In July, the agency published a draft version of a new assessment, which found that 52 of 54 uses of TCE present an unreasonable risk to human health. The EPA still needs to finalize that assessment before it can start the yearslong process of writing a regulation.

Asked about the delays, Rhinehart said, “How does the EPA say with a straight face their job is to protect human health?”

3. Chemicals Are Considered Innocent Until Proven Guilty

For decades, the EU and the United States followed the same “risk-based” approach to regulation, which puts the burden on government officials to prove that a chemical poses unreasonable health risks before restricting it. The process can take years while evidence of public harm continues to mount.

(Simon Bailly, special to ProPublica)

In 2007, the EU switched to a more “hazard-based” approach, which puts the burden on chemical companies to prove that their products are safe when evidence shows a chemical can cause significant harm like cancer or reproductive damage. Named REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), the new system started by requiring the registration of every chemical that is imported or manufactured at a volume of more than 1 metric ton annually. Under a “no data, no market” policy, companies would be required to submit toxicological studies on those chemicals. And if those studies or other scientific research showed that a chemical could significantly harm human health, it could be prioritized for regulation.

Some experts say REACH isn’t perfect and there are ways for companies to subvert science or mislead regulators. For example, because the EU receives large amounts of information on thousands of chemicals, companies have been able to submit improper data or conduct inadequate testing without their actions being noticed for some time.

Nonetheless, the new system has fundamentally changed regulation in Europe. Under this approach, the EU has successfully banned or restricted more than a thousand chemicals.

While the Europeans discussed a hazard-based approach, the United States Congress was doing the same. Then-Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the Kid Safe Chemicals Act in 2005, which would require companies to reassess the safety of their chemicals every three years. The bill also required the EPA to assess 300 chemicals by 2010, and thousands more by 2020. Lobbyists and industry-friendly lawmakers were quick to fight back. They argued that this approach would ruin innovation in the United States and only a risk-based one was acceptable.

“Over and over again, we’ve seen this fail,” said Anna Lennquist, a senior toxicologist at ChemSec, an international nonprofit that works on chemical safety. “For the most harmful substances, the only way to ensure there is no risk from them is to ban them. That’s one main difference between the U.S. and EU.”

Neither the 2005 bill nor similar efforts over the years gained traction. Lautenberg died in 2013 before any reform passed in Congress. The 2016 law, a bill that maintained the risk-based approach with some improvements, was named after him.

Experts say a risk-based reform was likely the only type that could have passed in the U.S. legislature. The chemical industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers to support its fight against stronger restrictions. The ACC alone has been one of the top lobbying organizations in the country in recent years.

Asked if the EPA needed a new stronger law to better regulate chemicals, Freedhoff said no and argued that the 2016 law “hasn’t been given half of a chance to succeed” because of a lack of funding and resources.

4. The EPA Mostly Regulates Chemicals One by One

Six years after the reform led the EPA to create a priority system to keep chemical regulations moving, the agency is behind on all such rules. So far, it has only proposed one ban, on asbestos, and the agency told ProPublica it would still be almost a year before that is finalized. In June, Freedhoff testified to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee: “I think we can all recognize that the law is not yet working as everyone had hoped.” Speaking about the chemicals the agency selected in 2016 to be a priority, Freedhoff admitted that, without additional resources, the EPA would “not get more than a handful of those rules on the books before 2025 or beyond.”

The 10 Top-Priority Chemicals Pending Regulation

The first batch of chemicals chosen by the EPA for regulatory review, along with the agency’s latest actions on each one. The final rules are due between 2022 and early 2023, and the agency has said it will be late on all of them.

Asbestos

BAN PROPOSED IN APRIL 2022

Primarily used by the chemical industry as part of chlorine production. Some asbestos-containing products like vehicle brake blocks are also imported in small quantities.

Asbestos can cause a number of cancers, including the aggressive cancer mesothelioma, and other health problems like asbestosis, which scars the lungs.

1-Bromopropane

DRAFT RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN JULY 2022

Used in degreasers, spot cleaners for dry cleaning, spray adhesives and automobile-care products.

It can be toxic to human development and can increase a person's chance of developing cancer.

Carbon Tetrachloride

DRAFT RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN AUG. 2022

A raw material for producing refrigerants, agricultural products and other chemicals in industrial and laboratory settings.

Health risks include possible damage to or cancer in the liver, and cancer of the adrenal gland or brain.

C.I. Pigment Violet 29 (PV29)

FINAL RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN SEPT. 2022

Used in paints, coatings, plastics and rubber products in the automobile industry and in industrial carpeting and commercial printing. The coloring is also used in some consumer watercolors and paints.

The pigment can damage the lungs by increasing the number of cells there, a condition called alveolar hyperplasia.

Cyclic Aliphatic Bromide Cluster (HBCD)

FINAL RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN JUNE 2022

A flame retardant used in insulation and other building materials. It also shows up inside some pastes, recycled plastics and automobile parts.

Known to cause reproductive damage and developmental effects, and to disrupt the operation of the thyroid.

1,4-Dioxane

FINAL RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN DEC. 2020

Used in the production of other chemicals, as a laboratory chemical, and in some adhesives and sealants.

Exposure can lead to vertigo, drowsiness and headaches. The chemical may also damage organs like the liver and kidneys.

Methylene Chloride

FINAL RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN NOV. 2022

An ingredient in products like paint strippers, adhesives and degreasers.

It can cause suffocation, coma and death. It has also been linked to neurotoxicity, damage to the liver, and cancer.

N-Methylpyrrolidone (NMP)

DRAFT RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN JULY 2022

A solvent used in some paint strippers, adhesives and lubricants, and in industrial products used for cleaning metals, textiles and plastics.

NMP can damage the reproductive system and affect fetal development.

Perchloroethylene

DRAFT RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN JUNE 2022

Mostly used in industrial settings as a metal degreaser. It's also used in dry cleaning.

The colorless liquid can damage the nervous system and has been linked to cancer.

Trichloroethylene (TCE)

DRAFT RISK EVALUATION ISSUED IN JULY 2022

An organic chemical used mostly in industrial settings as a metal degreaser. It is also an ingredient in some cleaning, furniture-care and automotive-care products.

It can damage the immune system, cause reproductive and developmental effects, and damage the heart, lungs, kidney and liver. It is also a carcinogen.

Source: EPA

Freedhoff told ProPublica the delays are not caused by a lack of commitment and the agency’s entire staff is working to “make sure that people are protected from these dangers.” But she pointed out that the chemical division’s workload increased exponentially in 2016, and funding has mostly remained flat since then. “The fundamental truth is [the Toxic Substances law] has existed in its current form for almost six and a half years now and we still have the budget of the old broken law,” she said. In the EPA’s 2023 budget request, it asked for an additional $63 million and 200 new employees to better handle the workload.

A key reason the system is moving so slowly is that the law requires that every chemical go through a yearslong process, and the underfunded EPA division must face industry resistance for each one. “The whole regulatory process is designed to be slow and to be slowed down by those opposed to regulation,” said Joel Tickner, a professor of environmental health at University of Massachusetts, Lowell and a leading expert on chemical policy. “Frankly, unless EPA doubled their size, they can’t do much with the resources they have.”

Chemical company representatives and industry groups like the ACC have challenged the risk evaluations for many of the first 10 chemicals labeled as high priority. The organizations have submitted lengthy public comments accusing the EPA of conducting unscientific assessments and asked for extended time frames that further delayed regulation. When the EPA updated some risk assessments from the Trump administration to include risks from air and water exposure for chemicals like TCE, the industry groups were quick to challenge the agency with a 34-page rebuttal, accusing it of not following the letter of the law.

The industry has also vehemently argued against a full asbestos ban. Trade groups like the ACC insisted that workers were protected from the dangers of asbestos. Industry-friendly scientists wrote papers accusing the EPA of overestimating the substance’s dangers. And 12 Republican attorneys general wrote to the head of the agency questioning the EPA’s legal authority to pursue the ban.

Even when the EPA used its new authority under the 2016 law to have companies conduct toxicology tests of 11 prioritized chemicals, some industry organizations sued the agency in an attempt to invalidate the orders. One trade group sued over testing of 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a possible human carcinogen that is released in huge quantities by plants all across Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” In its complaint, the group argued the order was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.” The lawsuit is still ongoing. The testing for all of these chemicals was originally due to be done in December 2021. So far, testing has been completed on only one of the 11 chemicals.

“The conveyor belt is sort of stopping,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who served as a deputy administrator for the EPA during the Clinton administration. “The sobering reality is that [the Toxic Substances Control Act] was supposed to change that with the new law, but now when you take a step back, that was maybe unrealistic to expect.”

Meanwhile, the EU has authored a new plan to regulate chemicals even faster by targeting large groups of dangerous substances that can cause cancers, genetic mutations, endocrine damage, immune system damage and more. If it’s enacted, it would lead to bans of another 5,000 chemicals by 2030, according to the European Environmental Bureau, a nongovernmental organization.

5. The EPA Employs Industry-Friendly Scientists as Regulators

The EPA has a long history of hiring scientists and top officials from the companies they are supposed to regulate, allowing industry to sway the agency’s science from the inside.

For example, in 2010, the agency worked with a panel of scientists to evaluate the risks of hexavalent chromium, the chemical featured in the movie “Erin Brockovich.” But the Center for Public Integrity found that several scientists on that panel had actually defended PG&E, the company that poisoned a community with the substance. Some of those scientists disagreed with this characterization and one said he had gone through the EPA’s conflict-of-interest vetting. In 2017, the EPA hired a new top official at its chemical division who had been an executive at the ACC for five years. The New York Times found that she helped direct much of the Trump administration’s decisions to deregulate chemicals.

And then there’s Todd Stedeford. A lawyer and toxicologist, Stedeford has been hired by the EPA on three separate occasions. During his two most recent periods of employment at the agency — from 2011 to 2017 and from 2019 to 2021 — he was hired from corporate employers who use or manufacture chemicals the EPA regulates.

Before 2011, Stedeford worked for Albemarle Corp., which was among the largest makers of flame retardants in the world. The chemicals, which are added to furniture, electronics and other products to help prevent fires, have been associated with neurological harm, hormone disruption, and cancers. A 2012 investigation by the Chicago Tribune revealed that Albemarle and two other large manufacturers founded, funded and controlled a front group that deceived the public about the safety and effectiveness of flame retardants used in furniture. Albemarle argued its products were safe, effective and extensively evaluated by government agencies. When Stedeford left the job defending flame retardants, he went on to head the EPA program that assessed the risks of chemicals including those same flame retardants, the Tribune reported. In response, Stedeford told ProPublica that he had recused himself from work on flame retardants when he joined the agency.

(Simon Bailly, special to ProPublica)

Then Stedeford left the EPA in 2017 and went to work for Japan Tobacco International, where he defended the company's “novel tobacco products,” such as vape pens and e-cigarettes. When he returned to the EPA in 2019, Stedeford became involved in a scientific project with a former Japan Tobacco colleague that looked into how to evaluate the dangers of chemicals in e-cigarettes. Stedeford said that he was hired to advance “new approach methodologies” at the agency and that the project fell under that purview and there was nothing wrong with that.

Some close watchers of the agency say people like Stedeford epitomize the EPA’s revolving-door problem. “He represents the sense that industry science is the best science, which is very much in line with regulators deferring to industry-funded studies showing there isn’t cause for concern,” said Alissa Cordner, an academic who wrote the book “Toxic Safety: Flame Retardants, Chemical Controversies, and Environmental Health.”

In response, Freedhoff said she didn’t believe her current staff was “corrupt, or unduly responsive to industry” and that she has seen “the dedication and the commitment and the passion that the career staff here feel for the work that they’ve been charged with doing.” She declined to comment on Stedeford, who was last hired by the previous administration.

When he was hired again in 2019, Stedeford was in a pivotal position to influence how the new chemical regulation law would be implemented. Whistleblowers have accused Stedeford of changing the findings of health assessments of new chemicals that were being evaluated before being allowed on the market, minimizing and sometimes deleting hazards listed in the documents, according to The Intercept. The EPA’s Office of Inspector General is now investigating those claims. Stedeford declined to comment on the accusations.

During this stint at the EPA, Stedeford was also tasked with leading an effort to update the agency’s approach to assessing polymers, chemicals that make up the vast majority of plastics. Polymers can cause “lung overload,” a condition in which tiny particles accumulate in the lungs, potentially causing chronic lung diseases. The EPA had Stedeford work with companies that make these chemicals on a paper about lung toxicity and, in October 2020, Stedeford proposed a new policy based on their unpublished research.

The change was set to affect how dozens of new plastics were assessed, increasing the amount of the polymers that it was considered safe to inhale, according to a complaint submitted by EPA scientists who opposed the policy. (Stedeford told ProPublica that he disagreed with those scientists and that he had told agency staffers they didn’t need to use the new approach if they felt it was inappropriate in a particular case.) After the complaint was filed, the agency withdrew the policy.

Stedeford left the EPA again in 2021 to work for a law firm that represents chemical companies. Emails obtained by ProPublica show he continued to work with agency staff on the paper about lung overload. Stedeford said “there’s nothing untoward about that” because he had “contributed scholarship” to the paper while at the agency. The EPA said “employees that worked on this paper did so with the full knowledge and support of their management at the time the work was occurring. Other co-authors on the paper include scientific experts from industry and NGOs.”

Do You Work With These Hazardous Chemicals? Tell Us About It.

by Annie Waldman, Aliyya Swaby and Anna Clark, with additional reporting by Nicole Santa Cruz, photography by Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica

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

In Amite County, Mississippi, where a third of adults struggle to read, evidence of America’s silent literacy crisis is everywhere.

It’s in a storefront on Main Street, in the fading mill town of Gloster, where 80-year-old Lillie Jackson helps people read their mail. “They can’t comprehend their bills,” she said. “So many of them are ashamed that they haven’t finished grade school.” She longs for the day she can retire, but she doesn’t want to abandon her neighbors. “That’s the only reason I really stay open,” she said.

It’s in the Greentree Lumber mill, where dozens of residents cut Southern yellow pine into boards, but supervisors — who must be able to page through machine guides and safety manuals — are recruited from other counties. “We’re going to have demand for jobs with no people to supply them,” mill accountant Pam Whittington said.

Lillie Jackson helps a customer pay bills from her business on Main Street in Gloster, Mississippi. Greentree Lumber mill in Liberty, Mississippi.

And it’s in the local high school, in a district where a fifth of students drop out, one of the highest rates in the state. Principal Warren Eyster has seen low literacy trickle from one generation to the next — an unusually American phenomenon.

In other wealthy countries, adults with limited education who were born into families with little history of schooling are twice as likely to surpass their parents’ literacy skills. Here, one’s destiny is uniquely entrenched. Though nationwide graduation rates have risen in recent decades, the number of adults who struggle to read remains stubbornly high: 48 million, or 23%.

If there were local programs that could teach adults the reading skills they never got, those parents could help educate their kids and get better jobs, Eyster said. The entire county would benefit: “Our tax base would go up,” he said. But in Amite County, no such program exists.

Amite County High School Principal Warren Eyster believes his community would benefit from an adult education program.

In a nation whose education system is among the most unequal in the industrialized world, where race and geography play an outsize role in determining one’s path to success, many Americans are being failed twice: first, by public schools that lack qualified teachers, resources for students with disabilities and adequate reading instruction; and next, by the backup system intended to catch those failed by the first.

Nearly 60 years ago, the federal government established funding to provide free education for adults who could not read to help them improve their literacy and obtain employment. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson recognized how low literacy intertwined with poverty and all the ills that came with it. The adult education system they built was supposed to give people everywhere a second chance at success.

States Vary Widely in Funding Adult Education (Source: Data for state funding came from the 2020-21 <a href="https://nrs.ed.gov/">initial federal financial reports</a> through the National Reporting System for Adult Education, as required by the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act, Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Data for the eligible number of students by state came from U.S Department of Education estimates of qualifying adults obtained through a records request. The funding data is derived from initial reports and is subject to change. Note: As of Dec. 13, 2022, Kentucky’s <a href="https://nrs.ed.gov/rt/ky/2020">initial federal financial report</a> for 2020-21 was not available through the National Reporting System for Adult Education.)

But, ProPublica found, access to this instruction is limited, increasingly insufficient and — much like the nation’s school systems — highly dependent on geography and the political will of elected officials.

The federal government provided roughly $675 million to states for adult education last year, an amount that’s been relatively unchanged for more than two decades when adjusted for inflation. It’s not enough, and states that oversee these programs are required to commit their own share of funding. A review of adult education spending found glaring disparities among states, with some investing more than four times as much as others for each eligible student.

“The magnitude of the need for adult education services has long eclipsed Congressional appropriations,” a U.S. Department of Education spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Funding levels have not kept pace with the rising cost of service delivery, nor are funding levels commensurate with the millions of people who could benefit from adult education services.”

ProPublica reporters interviewed dozens of students and adult education workers in states that historically have contributed some of the least funding. We found that in some states, programs keep adults on waitlists, unable to meet demand. Some students succeed in these programs, but many drop out within weeks or months, before they are able to make progress. Students often find themselves in overstuffed classes led by uncertified part-time or volunteer teachers.

Resources are scant. An adult education manager at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Mississippi said she can’t afford enough practice exams. The supervisor of Nevada’s programs, unable to hire enough teachers, worries about having to put students on waitlists. And most programs across the country lack the specialized staff to help adults with learning disabilities that public schools failed to have diagnosed.

In fact, the entire system is set up to prioritize students who can quickly graduate with a high school or work credential, often leaving behind those who need more time to overcome greater reading gaps. Programs that offer more personalized assistance frequently say they can only do so with private support.

Vast swaths of some states are literacy deserts, lacking any government-run adult education classes. This is the case for about a fifth of Mississippi counties, where hundreds of thousands of people live. Students are forced to cross county lines to attend classes or forgo them altogether. “In an ideal world, each county would have a physical location where adult education classes are offered,” said Kell Smith, the interim executive director of the state’s Community College Board, which oversees adult education. “However, due to financial constraints, this is not possible.” (Read the full response here.) Gov. Tate Reeves did not respond to a request for comment.

Many counties that lack programs also double as hot spots of low adult literacy. These are primarily in the mountains of Appalachia, the Southern Black Belt, the Central Valley of California and along the Texas border with Mexico, but they exist throughout the nation. In about 500 American counties, nearly a third of adults struggle to read basic English, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal literacy data. These adults may have a basic vocabulary and be able to interpret short texts, but their reading comprehension may be limited beyond that.

Hot Spots of Low Literacy Persist Across the Country (Source: National Center for Education Statistics. Note: The NCES defined adults with low literacy skills as those who tested at or below Level 1, the lowest outcome of its <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/">national survey</a>, or those who were unable to participate in the survey because of cognitive, physical or language barriers. People with low literacy skills may be able to read a basic vocabulary and decipher short texts, but their reading comprehension abilities are limited.)

In communities with lower literacy, personal challenges magnify into collective crises. In Detroit, for example, former police Chief James Craig recalled how, in their coursework, academy recruits from poorly performing schools had the most trouble with reading. It was harder for them to complete the program, he said, which added to the recruitment challenges faced by the police in Detroit and other cities.

Back in Amite County, Cartina Knox, 50, said she’d jump at the chance to learn what she missed after dropping out of school in ninth grade. But the nearest program is 30 miles away, and she can’t afford a car to get there. “They need places like that out here,” she said.

Standing before a sea of glaring television lights in the packed congressional chamber, President Kennedy exposed an invisible epidemic, reflected in the rates of military rejections, welfare enrollment and incidents of crime.

Millions of Americans were “functionally illiterate,” Kennedy told the nation during his 1962 State of the Union address. In the distinctive clip of his Boston accent, he called for a “massive attack to end this adult illiteracy,” marking a shift from decades of limited and sporadic federal action.

“The economic result of this lack of schooling is often chronic unemployment, dependency or delinquency,” he later told lawmakers. “The twin tragedies of illiteracy and dependency are often passed on from generation to generation.”

President Johnson soon delivered on this call to action, launching the nation’s first federal adult education program as part of his War on Poverty. The goal: Educate Americans whose inability to read or write kept them impoverished and out of the workforce.

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The federal government covered the vast majority of costs for free, state-run adult literacy classes. The funds were initially limited to basic instruction, excluding high school credential programs. As the effort expanded, the government mandated that states recruit adults with the highest literacy needs and urged programs to help with transportation and child care. Buoyed by federal funds, enrollment that started at 38,000 in 1965 soared to a peak of about 4 million by 1996.

But in more recent years, fundamental shifts in the program’s goals and funding impeded its success.

The adult education system began to morph into what is now effectively a credentialing program largely aimed at pumping out students with high-school equivalency or workforce certificates. The federal government started tracking student gains as a way to measure performance. States can use these indicators to determine local funding levels or even eliminate funding to programs not meeting high enough standards. This shift led programs to prioritize more advanced students, often at the expense of those originally envisioned by Kennedy: adults who lacked basic reading skills and needed more help.

“The purpose of these programs is no longer to provide literacy education. That is not what they do anymore,” said Amy Pickard, an assistant professor of education at Indiana University Bloomington.

All the while, as federal funding stagnated, states were called on to put up more money or risk atrophying their programs. National enrollment has careened down to only 700,000 students last year. Despite the country’s immense need, less than 3% of eligible adults receive services.

Jacqueline Davis in front of her home in Memphis. She was kept out of school as a child.

By the time Jacqueline Davis sought reading help, the system was no longer built to serve her. The 62-year-old lives in Shelby County, Tennessee — home to Memphis — where more than a quarter of adults struggle to read. Her father, who was traumatized by a racist assault he experienced as a child, kept her out of school. He read history books to her but didn’t provide any formal instruction. As an adult, Davis stumbled over large words and grammar. Her low reading level made chores out of basic tasks. At the doctor’s office, she had to ask for help filling out intake forms, and she later looked up unfamiliar words in the privacy of her home.

For most of her life, Davis worked as a cashier at places like Popeyes and Kmart, which sometimes required applicants to have a high school credential. She usually lied on the forms so they would hire her, she said. To her knowledge, no one found out. She dreamed of running a small produce business, sustaining herself with what she could grow with some dirt and her own hands. But her inability to fill out hiring or grant paperwork stopped her.

A family portrait taken in the mid-’80s shows Davis, left; her father, Samuel Gathing; and her daughters, Ginger Foster, right, and Mecca Stevenson.

More than a decade ago, Davis signed up for free classes with Messick Adult Center in East Memphis — one of the few in the county at the time. The program, like many across the nation, catered to adults who were close to getting a high school credential, not those who lack basic reading skills like she did. Davis tried to follow the lessons but quickly fell behind. “I just didn’t have the foundation,” she said. “My writing skills are not good, my spelling is not good.”

Her daughter, Mecca Stevenson, recalls watching Davis struggle with homework, too proud to ask her children for help. She only found out her mother had dropped out when the center called their home phone to check on her. Years later, Tennessee shut the center down for failing to graduate enough adults with a high school credential. The state has since worked to improve the quality of instruction in adult education, including providing more training to teachers, according to Jay Baker, the assistant commissioner of adult education.

After she dropped out, Davis kept looking for other options, frustrated by her inability to keep up in a group setting but determined to find something that worked. Several years later, she saw a television advertisement encouraging adults to sign up for classes at the library. She enrolled in a program run by the nonprofit Literacy Mid-South, which provides one-on-one tutoring for adults with a sixth-grade reading level or less. It was exactly what she needed.

Davis reads with her grandsons before they head to school, first image, and fixes the hair of her mother, whom she cares for.

Over five years, her abilities and confidence have risen, as her tutor encouraged her to take apart long words and sound out each letter. She says the program has changed her life. “I’ve learned how to pronounce words and read words that I’ve never seen,” she said.

The difference: Literacy Mid-South is not part of the government’s adult education system, so it has more flexibility to help students at Davis’ level.

While it’s one of the only programs in Memphis offering free tutoring for adults like Davis, it doesn’t get federal or state funding to do so. Adult program coordinator Lee Chase said he hasn’t applied because his program doesn’t work the way those funded by the government do, pushing students to get their high school credentials as quickly as possible. “Our learners choose their goals and we don’t want to limit what those are,” he said.

Lee Chase is the adult program coordinator of Literacy Mid-South, which provides one-on-one tutoring for adults with a sixth-grade reading level or less.

The lack of additional funding has hampered the program’s ability to grow. All tutors are volunteers, and only two employees receive salaries. Applicants often face a monthslong waitlist for a tutor.

“We’re just plugging holes in a lifeboat,” Chase said.

The nation’s approach to adult education has so far failed to connect the massive number of people struggling to read with the programs that could help them. ProPublica reporters heard time and again that in communities stricken with low literacy, programs had to close sites because not enough students had enrolled. Meanwhile, more than two dozen adults in these hot spots told us that a lack of transportation or child care or busy work schedules prohibited them from attending classes. As a result, many have fallen through the cracks.

Steven Binion couldn’t get the kind of help he needed from Detroit’s troubled schools.

For years, Steven Binion wanted to improve his reading level beyond the eighth grade. He didn’t get the one-on-one help he had needed in Detroit’s notoriously troubled schools. Then, he said, after family fights began to escalate, he left home at age 14. Knowing he would have to support himself, he soon dropped out. He survived for years on low-paying jobs: trimming lawns, sorting packages, working at factories. When he had a baby, his worries escalated as he struggled to afford diapers and shoes for his son’s growing feet and couldn’t rent an apartment for his family. He tried several times to attend education programs, but he couldn’t sacrifice the time spent earning a paycheck.

Meanwhile, Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit was watching this pattern play out at scale. When he was elected in 2013, the city was bankrupt and nearly 1 in 5 adults were unemployed. Adults struggled to read — so many of them, generation after generation, that the city had grown to epitomize the nation’s literacy crisis. While difficult to measure, low literacy estimates for Detroit and its surrounding county have ranged from more than a quarter to nearly half of all adult residents.

The lack of skilled workers stunted the city’s ability to attract industrial investment. Middle-wage jobs all but disappeared. The city struggled to expand its tax base and maintain its public services. “At the time I got elected, the streetlights weren’t on in the city and the ambulances didn’t show up for an hour,” Duggan told ProPublica. “It was pretty much nonfunctional.”

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan spearheaded a plan to increase the education of the city’s residents.

The mayor realized that to interrupt this cycle, the city needed to better educate its residents. But even with the handful of literacy programs available, not enough adults were attending to make a meaningful difference. Too often, people like Binion couldn’t balance learning with work. While the earlier vision of America’s adult education system prioritized helping students overcome these barriers, many programs today cannot offer this support.

Eric Murrow, at left in the first image, is tutored in math by senior adult education manager Aubrey Williams as he prepares for a GED practice test. Deonte Ruff studies for a GED practice test at St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center in Detroit.

Duggan and other city officials came up with an unprecedented plan, one that accounted for the city’s responsibility in creating the crisis. They launched Skills for Life last year; unlike most municipal job programs, it pays participants to go to school. Two days a week, they can improve their reading abilities, prepare for high school credential exams or develop skills like masonry or electrical wiring. The other three days, the city employs participants either in blight remediation, clearing vacant lots or as park ambassadors, tending the city’s green spaces. They’re paid at least $15 an hour — about $5 more than the state minimum wage — for all five days. The city also provides assistance for participants without transportation or child care.

As many as 2,200 residents are expected to participate in Skills for Life over three years; it has up to $75 million in funding committed through 2024.

“The first responsibility of government is to show folks who dropped out because they thought things were hopeless, who didn’t learn to read because they thought there was no value — to show them there is a real and immediate benefit,” Duggan said.

Relying on a temporary stream of pandemic aid dollars, the city pays local adult education programs to run the classes. Detroit is simultaneously addressing some of the root causes of the literacy crisis: With an additional $1.3 billion in federal relief funding, the school district is on its way to dramatically improving facilities and expanding literacy tutoring for children.

While it’s too early to measure the success of the Skills for Life program, the mayor says he is confident that it will prove an integral part of Detroit’s turnaround.

“By the end of 2024, we’re going to be able to show definitively: Yes, you can fundamentally reduce poverty rates, raise literacy rates, raise income,” said Duggan, who believes this could be a model for other communities. “At least so far, we’re feeling very optimistic.”

After searching online, Binion, now 32, came across Skills for Life. Though incredulous that it would provide him with paid time to learn alongside a city job, he showed up an hour early to the interview, he said, and was hired that day.

Binion takes part in Detroit’s Skills for Life program.

Three days a week, he cleared the city’s abandoned lots, and two days a week, he worked with a tutor through the nonprofit St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center. The city’s program also set him on a path to earning a certificate in masonry, which will open up dozens of job opportunities. But first, he had to attain his high school credential.

Within months of starting the program, he passed the exam’s science and math sections. But he stumbled on language arts, failing the section twice.

Without the encouragement of his tutors, Binion would have given up. But after several more months of the city paying him to learn, he passed.

One in Five Americans Struggles to Read. We Want to Understand Why.

by Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel

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

Ken Griffin, the multibillionaire CEO of the Citadel investment firm, sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department today for what he alleges was an “unlawful disclosure of Griffin’s confidential tax return information.”

Beginning in 2021, ProPublica started publishing The Secret IRS Files, a series of stories on the tax avoidance techniques of the ultrawealthy. The series is based on IRS tax information covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans over more than 15 years. Articles have detailed how Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other billionaires keep their income tax rates lower than those of average Americans and how some billionaires can go years and years without paying any income tax.

Republican members of Congress have repeatedly criticized the IRS over what they allege was a data breach and have vowed investigations now that the party has secured a majority in the House for 2023. Griffin is one the top Republican donors in the country.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and Justice Department have said they are investigating the tax record disclosures. The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit.

Two ProPublica stories this year revealed Griffin’s income in recent years and his tax payments.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida, alleges the IRS “made these unlawful disclosures knowingly, or at the very least negligently or with gross negligence.”

“Despite being aware of its security deficiencies for over a decade, the IRS willfully failed to establish appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to insure the security of confidential tax return information, including Mr. Griffin’s confidential tax return information,” it says. “IRS personnel exploited these willful failures to misappropriate Mr. Griffin’s confidential tax return information and unlawfully disclose that information to ProPublica for further publication.”

Griffin, who Forbes estimates is worth $32 billion, is seeking $1,000 for each act of “unauthorized” disclosure, citing a specific IRS statute, as well as unspecified legal damages, and that taxpayers pay his legal costs.

In a comment, a Griffin spokesperson wrote: “IRS employees deliberately stole the confidential tax returns of several hundred successful American business leaders. It is unacceptable that government officials have failed to thoroughly investigate this unlawful theft of confidential and personal information. Americans expect our government to uphold the laws of our nation when it comes to our private and personal information — whether it be tax returns or health care records.”

He did not respond to a question about how much the legal effort is costing him.

In an essay published alongside the first article in the Secret IRS Files series, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, Stephen Engelberg, and its then-president, Dick Tofel, explained that ProPublica was publishing the tax information “quite selectively and carefully” because “we believe it serves the public interest in fundamental ways, allowing readers to see patterns that were until now hidden.” The Secret IRS Files series sparked a broad conversation about the fairness of the U.S. tax system, and a number of legislative proposals followed in its wake, including a proposal by the Biden administration for a billionaire’s tax.

ProPublica has declined to elaborate on how and when we obtained the tax information or to comment on any investigations of the leak. We do not know who the source or sources of the tax information was.

In an April story about the top earning Americans and what taxes they paid, ProPublica reported that Griffin had the fourth-highest income in the country between 2013 and 2018, according to the data. He reported an average annual income of nearly $1.7 billion. Griffin paid a tax rate of 29.2% during these years, a higher rate than many of his hedge fund manager peers but significantly lower than the top marginal income tax rate of around 40%.

That article explained that even though our system is designed to tax the rich at higher rates than everyone else, it doesn’t work that way for those at the apex of the income pyramid. On average, they pay far lower tax rates than the merely affluent do. And even among the top 400 earners, people from certain industries have it better than others: Tech billionaires pay rates well below hedge fund managers.

In response to that article, a spokesperson for Griffin said the tax rates in the IRS data “significantly understate” what Griffin pays, because the rates were lowered by charitable contributions and do not reflect local and state taxes. He also said Griffin pays foreign taxes, which aren’t included in IRS calculations of effective tax rate.

In a second story, ProPublica showed how much Griffin stood to gain from having bankrolled a fight against an income tax increase in his then-home state of Illinois. He spent $54 million fighting that tax. The effort was a success and the increase went down in defeat.

That campaign spending was worth it for Griffin. Based on his past income, the increase could have cost him as much as $80 million in a year. (Subsequently, Griffin moved from Illinois to Florida, which has no state income tax.)

In another series about the IRS, this one in 2018, ProPublica highlighted how the agency was gutted. Congress, driven by Republicans after the Tea Party wave election in 2010, repeatedly cut the IRS budget, resulting in a loss of billions of dollars of funding. Tens of thousands of IRS employees left. Audits, particularly of the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations, plummeted. Criminal investigations of tax evasion fell dramatically.

During the years of budget cuts, IRS commissioners repeatedly pleaded with Congress for increased funding. This year, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress allocated $80 billion over ten years to the agency to rebuild its systems and hire staff.

by David Hammer, WWL-TV

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

This is Part III of an investigation into how Road Home, the federally funded program to rebuild Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, underpaid people in poor neighborhoods while giving those in wealthy ones more of what they needed to repair their homes. Read Part I: The Federal Program to Rebuild After Hurricane Katrina Shortchanged the Poor. New Data Proves It.

Rebuilding a home in a poor neighborhood can cost a lot more than the house is worth on paper. So after Hurricane Katrina, when the U.S. government decided that home values would factor into rebuilding grants, it left many Louisiana homeowners short.

Why the federal government required that has long been a mystery. It had rarely, if ever, allowed home values to be used to calculate rebuilding aid after a disaster. It doesn’t allow it anymore.

But it did for Katrina. That formula hurt poor neighborhoods, most of which in New Orleans were majority Black, according to an investigation published this week by WWL-TV, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, and ProPublica.

Louisiana's Road Home Program Had a Fatal Flaw, Rooted in Partisan Politics

Now, the news organizations have pieced together what led officials to use home values to calculate aid for Road Home, the largest housing recovery program in U.S. history. In Congress and the White House, leaders were worried about federal spending and how Louisiana corruption would come into play, the news outlets found.

So when Louisiana officials negotiated with congressional leaders and the White House, they settled on pre-storm value as a way to achieve two goals: Help Louisiana rebuild after an unprecedented disaster, but limit the size of the check.

In doing so, they created a system in which many poor homeowners would get less money than they needed to rebuild, perpetuating long-standing inequities in New Orleans.

“The tension was always, are the American taxpayers paying more than what the value was worth and what the current market held?” said Don Powell, President George W. Bush’s coordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding.

“One man’s accountability,” he said, “is another man’s red tape.”

A Key Meeting in Texas

The back-to-back 2005 hurricanes of Katrina and Rita devastated south Louisiana, damaging or destroying 305,000 housing units. Most homeowners didn’t have sufficient insurance to cover all rebuilding costs. Louisiana leaders were concerned that without a massive injection of federal housing aid, communities would never recover.

In December 2005, Congress allocated $11.6 billion to Louisiana and Mississippi. Louisiana got $6.2 billion, of which state leaders said they would use about $4.5 billion to rebuild owner-occupied housing.

Those leaders said that wasn’t enough even to start a housing recovery program; the Louisiana Recovery Authority estimated it needed at least $14 billion to run what would later become Road Home.

State officials worked to convince the federal government to give them more. Powell was the intermediary.

“I was a fiduciary trying to represent the American taxpayer and trying to make sure that the people along the Gulf Coast were taken care of,” said Powell, now 81 and retired.

The negotiations were intense, he recalled, in part because of the fraught relationship between then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, and the Republicans who controlled the White House and Congress. Blanco, who died in 2019, had complained loudly when GOP-led Mississippi got almost half of the initial aid package, despite having just 20% of the damaged housing units.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., presented the biggest obstacle to getting more money, former Powell aide Taylor Beery said. Just days after Katrina, Hastert suggested large parts of New Orleans should be “bulldozed” and said spending billions of dollars to rebuild the city “doesn’t make sense to me.” (He later backtracked, saying he meant the city should be rebuilt in a way that protected residents.)

Louisiana’s reputation for graft also worked against it, according to former LRA officials. State leaders repeatedly promised to be good stewards of federal aid.

Beery and former LRA staffer Adam Knapp said factoring in the value of homes was raised in a series of meetings as a way to limit the price tag.

In January 2006, Powell said, three LRA board members — Xavier University President Norman Francis, shipbuilder Boysie Bollinger and investment banker David Voelker — went to Powell’s home in Amarillo, Texas, to make their case for more money.

Powell recalled that “several folks,” including “some staff members in Congress,” suggested using homes’ pre-storm value to limit grants. He doesn’t know exactly who first mentioned it, because federal and state staffers had already addressed a lot of those details beforehand.

Bollinger, a Republican who acted as a liaison between the Bush and Blanco teams, confirmed that pre-storm value was first brought up during those tense negotiations, but he doesn’t remember who raised it. Francis, who is 91, was not available to comment, and Voelker died in 2013.

Powell indicated there was no discussion about how using pre-storm value could lead to unequal impacts. “I think that’s one of the misfires,” he said.

Building a Housing Program From Scratch

When Louisiana leaders returned from Texas, they had a commitment from Congress to provide $4.2 billion more in recovery aid. Combined with the initial appropriation, Louisiana now had enough to run a $7.5 billion housing recovery program. (It ended up being a $10 billion program.)

LRA Executive Director Andy Kopplin and Walter Leger, who headed the LRA’s housing task force, introduced the housing plan a month later, in February 2006, with a presentation that read, “Louisiana contributes up to pre-storm value” to cover home repairs.

Without another disaster program to model it on, Leger said the LRA took cues from the Victim Compensation Fund set up after the Sept. 11 terror attacks — which was also designed to compensate people for their losses.

In order to get money to people as quickly as possible — and follow federal rules — Louisiana officials ended up compensating people for their losses even before they rebuilt, rather than reimbursing them for repairs as work was completed. HUD had to issue a waiver from its disaster aid rules to allow Louisiana and Mississippi to do that.

When HUD later approved similar waivers for Louisiana and Texas after hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, the Federal Register entry said there was little data on how compensation money had been used during previous programs. The only examples it cited were the programs run by Mississippi and Louisiana after Katrina and Rita.

The U.S. government now forbids state and local governments from using HUD’s disaster recovery grants to compensate people for losses after a disaster, so home values are no longer a factor. Since 2010, HUD has required states to reimburse people for approved expenses, including repairs.

HUD made that decision after it and Louisiana settled a federal lawsuit in which Black homeowners and housing advocates alleged discrimination by Road Home.

“After the Road Home settlement, HUD made the decision that, for future disasters, it would not permit its recipients of disaster relief to distribute ‘compensation for loss’ directly to homeowners as an eligible use of that money,” De’Marcus Finnell, deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said in a written statement.

“HUD and other federal partners recognized the shortcomings of the federal response in Louisiana,” Finnell said, “and have worked to improve those programs in the 15 years since.”

People Who Need the Most Help “Are Given the Least”

Even after Road Home launched, the LRA changed how it would calculate grants several times, which resulted in larger grants. Each formula still capped initial awards at a home’s pre-storm value.

Under the final formula, approved in November 2006, damage assessments would be done on every home. Grants would be based on the home’s pre-storm value or its damage assessment, whichever was lower. Road Home would subtract any payments from insurance or FEMA, plus a penalty for those who didn’t have insurance. The maximum award was $150,000.

In interviews, former LRA board members and staffers said they realized factoring in home values would mean some people would get more help than others, but they thought an affordable loan program for low- to middle-income homeowners — later converted to a grant — would eliminate the gaps.

The news organizations’ analysis of state data found those additional grants helped. But even with that extra money, people in the poorest areas of New Orleans had to cover an average of 30% of their rebuilding costs after Road Home, FEMA aid and insurance. In the wealthiest areas, where residents had far more resources to draw on, the shortfall was 20%.

The state Office of Community Development took issue with the analysis, but none of the points it raised affected the news organizations’ findings. Leger and Kopplin said they found the findings troubling.

How Road Home’s Grant Calculations Led to Different Outcomes

The first to make waves criticizing how grants were calculated was Melanie Ehrlich, a genetics professor at Tulane University School of Medicine. She had founded a grassroots organization, Citizens Road Home Action Team, to advocate for Road Home applicants.

Melanie Ehrlich stands outside her home in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

In October 2006, she emailed Leger to ask him to allow applicants to choose whether their grants would be based on pre-storm value or the cost of rebuilding. By then, nine months had passed since that meeting in Amarillo.

Leger shot her down, saying the Road Home “has always contained a grant cap of the lesser of pre-storm value or $150,000.” He wrote, “Neither the limited budget nor time would allow for change in the cap.”

Later that month, Ehrlich sent Leger and other officials a chart showing that using pre-storm value on homes with lower appraisals meant people who needed the most help “are given the least help.”

Leger said he agreed and took her complaint to HUD officials. He got HUD to allow the state to include land values in property appraisals, but he said the agency still insisted that initial calculations had to be capped at the property value.

At the next LRA meeting in December 2006, Leger reported that HUD had insisted on limiting grants to pre-storm value, according to board minutes.

Walter Leger, then-chair of the Housing and Redevelopment Task Force for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Jan. 29, 2007. (Ellis Lucia/The Times-Picayune)

“This wasn’t and isn’t the way America should fund major disaster recovery,” Knapp said in an interview. Political battles led to budget shortfalls in Road Home, he said, and “budget was always the problem to the program design.”

Leger said he didn’t remember any of the 16 other LRA board members, including the eight Black members, ever raising concerns about inequitable impacts of the grant formula.

Two Black former board members, Francis and Virgil Robinson Jr., said in 2010 they never realized the formula could end up being discriminatory. This month, another Black former board member, Calvin Mackie, said he raised concerns about using home values but they were lost in the shuffle.

“Everyone was rushing to get a workable solution,” he said, “and get the money out the door.”

His father, whose home in the Gentilly neighborhood flooded in Katrina, didn’t get anything from Road Home, he said. “My dad died in the process of fighting for the money, and in the end we got $0,” Mackie said. “For me, it’s real. I’m still living it.”

Jeff Adelson, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, and Sophie Chou, ProPublica, contributed data reporting.

by Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times

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

Washington state education officials are proposing to expand oversight of private schools for students with disabilities, citing a Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation that revealed that the state failed to intervene despite years of complaints about these schools.

The state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s request for new legislation, which will likely include a budget increase, appears to be welcomed by some lawmakers frustrated with the private special education schools, called “nonpublic agencies,” which accept public school children and tax dollars.

In its monthly special education bulletin, OSPI announced last week it was working on legislation that would expand the agency’s power over the specialty schools. The OSPI bulletin said the Seattle Times and ProPublica reports “show us that more changes are needed” in the system.

The news organizations found OSPI failed to address problems at the largest chain of such schools, the Northwest School of Innovative Learning, despite complaints from parents, school district administrators and others. Allegations against the school, dating back to at least 2014, included unqualified aides struggling with a lack of curriculum, misuse of isolation rooms to manage student behavior and a staffer who repeatedly choked students.

Northwest SOIL is owned by a subsidiary of Universal Health Services, one of the nation’s largest health care corporations. The school accepts only public funds for tuition and took in more than $38 million in taxpayer funds over the five school years ending in 2021.

State Rep. Gerry Pollet, D-Seattle, said publicly funded private schools should be held to higher standards, including requirements for curriculum, certified staffing and special education teacher-to-student ratios.

“I think the reporting showed that they’re operating in their own legal black hole and that is not acceptable,” he said. “We need to have very clear requirements and consequences for nonpublic agencies.”

A representative from the school’s parent company said it had no comment in response to the state’s proposal. Previously, the company defended its program in a statement to the news organizations, writing that it takes students’ complex needs seriously. It denied that Northwest SOIL understaffed campuses and said its hiring practices ensure that “only appropriate and qualified candidates are hired.”

Public school districts across Washington outsource a small but very high-needs segment of their special education population — about 500 students a year — to Northwest SOIL and about 60 other schools. These programs promise tailored therapy and instruction and, in the case of Northwest SOIL, can receive more than $68,000 per child.

While short on specifics, the state education department’s bulletin offered a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes efforts to improve special education ahead of this legislative session, which begins Jan. 9 and lasts 105 days.

The OSPI proposal seeks to improve the agency’s complaint investigations and monitoring of the private schools. It would also create new application and renewal requirements for programs seeking to contract with school districts and instruct the schools to collect student data and report it directly to the state.

Suzie Hanson, the executive director of the Washington Federation of Independent Schools, said private school educators are open to reporting restraint and isolation data and complaints directly to state officials. But it may require collaboration among multiple state agencies, she said. Though all nonpublic agencies are approved by OSPI, some are approved as private schools by the State Board of Education. Others, such as Northwest SOIL, are run by hospitals, which report to the Department of Health.

“I think together we can come up with legislation that would strengthen the communication and care for students with disabilities,” Hanson said. (Northwest SOIL is not a member of the trade group.)

The Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation, detailed in two stories published in the past three weeks, exposed a critical gap in the state’s oversight of such schools. Currently, the system places responsibility for monitoring the private schools not on the state but on individual school districts.

But that arrangement doesn’t address systemic issues at Northwest SOIL or other schools like it. More than 40 districts at a time send students to Northwest SOIL’s three campuses, and each district only receives information about its own students, so no single school district or agency has a complete picture of what’s going on there.

“I think the nonpublic agencies should be directly supervised by the OSPI, that there should be reporting directly to the OSPI and that OSPI should have authority to shut down and close schools based on their own observations and investigations,” said Mary Griffin, a special education attorney at the Northwest Justice Project, which provides legal services to low-income families.

OSPI already has the authority to revoke a nonpublic agency’s status, but the state has been reluctant to act, saying school districts are better positioned to spot and correct problems. Griffin said any new legislation should clearly spell out that OSPI has the duty to investigate problems and force changes at nonpublic agencies.

California law, for instance, requires the state Department of Education to visit and regularly monitor its specialty schools and to investigate if it receives evidence of “a significant deficiency in the quality of educational services” or if there is “substantial reason to believe that there is an immediate danger to the health, safety, or welfare of a child.”

The Times and ProPublica also reported that, unlike some other states, Washington requires just one special education teacher per nonpublic agency school, even though they serve some of the state’s highest-needs students.

Pollet, the state representative, is also spearheading a bill that would overhaul the state’s special education funding model, which has long been a source of contention in Washington state. Currently, the state funds special education services for up to 13.5% of a school district’s student population, regardless of how many students are eligible for services. It leaves school districts to pay the remainder of those education costs — or deny services to students, Pollet said.

The request would cost about $972 million between 2023 and 2025, according to OSPI, which recommended removing the 13.5% cap.

The Times and ProPublica series coincided with efforts by OSPI and advocates to curtail the misuse of restraint and isolation in both public and private schools. The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and Disability Rights Washington, another advocacy group, have been working on a report examining how restraint and isolation is used disproportionately on students of color, disabled students and others from marginalized communities, said Kendrick Washington, policy director at the ACLU of Washington. The groups’ report is expected early next year.

Lawmakers, educators and advocates have been exploring alternatives to isolation and considering banning the practice in the state, Washington said.

An OSPI advisory committee has also been crafting recommendations on changes to restraint and isolation policy. Its report is set to be published later this month.

Sarah Snyder, who complained to state officials after her son Christopher was restrained and isolated at Northwest SOIL in 2017, said she was “cautiously optimistic” about OSPI’s request, noting that parents deserve more transparency from the schools.

“If there’s a problem, we need to know about it,” said Snyder, of Puyallup. “It makes me super happy that they’re finally taking action, but I hope they follow through.”

by Marilyn W. Thompson

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

In a victory for public health advocates, a federal judge in Montana has blocked the state from implementing a law that would make it illegal for hospitals to ask employees if they are vaccinated. The measure, which passed last year, was the country’s most extreme anti-vaccination law.

Health care providers in Montana had sued the state over the law, arguing that it violates constitutional protections for disabled Americans. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy agreed with them. His ruling permanently enjoined the state from implementing its law in any health care facility.

ProPublica recently investigated the passage of the law, known as House Bill 702, and detailed how a hospital just a short walk from the state Capitol soon faced horrific choices amid COVID-19’s delta wave.

Montana’s GOP-controlled Legislature had passed the bill as debate raged in the state about government efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. The legislation made it illegal for hospitals and doctor’s offices to require vaccinations of any kind. It also prohibited them from reassigning employees based on vaccination status.

The legislation covered not just COVID-19 vaccines but any vaccines, including childhood immunizations for mumps, measles and rubella.

The bill’s author, Republican Rep. Jennifer Carlson, told ProPublica in an interview this year that the legislation was an important privacy protection. “Believing that individuals have the right to make their own private medical decisions is not the same thing as being ‘anti’ anything,” Carlson had said.

The Montana Medical Association and other groups challenged the legislation in a federal lawsuit, and Molloy issued a preliminary injunction in March.

During hearings on the case, immunocompromised patients testified about how routine medical visits had put them at high risk because health facilities could not ensure basic protections.

The judge’s final decision “ensures that Montanans can obtain safe, quality health care without arbitrary government interference,” said Raph Graybill, lead counsel for the Montana Nurses Association, a plaintiff in the case.

The office of Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, which defended the bill as a human rights protection, told local media that it will consider appealing the decision. Knudsen’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

At least a dozen states have placed limits on vaccine mandates, according to tracking from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Meanwhile, the National Conference of State Legislatures identified hundreds of bills introduced in the last two years aimed at prohibiting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, though few have succeeded.

In ProPublica’s story, administrators and staff at St. Peter’s Health in Helena described their terror as patients, many of them unvaccinated, flooded the facility and clogged its small intensive care unit. Deaths reached record highs in October 2021 while the hospital was operating under “crisis standards of care,” a legal distinction that warns patients they cannot expect usual levels of treatment.

Hospital staff who served on its Scarce Resources Committee recounted a dramatic episode when the panel had to decide which of a handful of critically ill patients would get an ICU bed.

St. Peter’s told ProPublica that no COVID-19 patient went without treatment.

St. Peter’s administrators struggled to get staff vaccinated, and Carlson’s bill added to widespread uncertainty about how to best protect the public. Most health care facilities in Montana rely heavily on payments from federal agencies and have been under pressure to comply with vaccine mandates from the Biden administration that conflicted with the state law.

Vicky Byrd, CEO of the nurses association, said the federal ruling means that acute care facilities will be better able to protect their patients. “It was and is the right thing to do,” she told ProPublica.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Max Blau

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.

The owner of one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest industrial plants has agreed to pay a nearly $1 million fine after releasing excessive amounts of toxic air pollution into nearby historic Black neighborhoods, according to a proposed consent decree filed Friday in a Jefferson County court.

If the consent decree is approved by a judge, the Jefferson County Board of Health’s $925,000 penalty against Bluestone Coke would be the largest fine in the agency’s history. But it represents a small fraction of the more than $60 million in fines the company could have faced for its alleged violations. The consent decree would not require Bluestone to admit to wrongdoing.

The plant was the subject of a ProPublica investigation in September that revealed how Bluestone, owned by the family of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, repeatedly failed to make crucial repairs to the facility. The lack of timely maintenance accelerated the release of cancer-causing chemicals into the air that neighboring residents breathed.

In August 2021, after finding Bluestone in rampant violation of its air pollution rules, the Jefferson County Department of Health denied the company’s request to renew its permit to operate. The board that oversees the Health Department also sued Bluestone, alleging that the company’s operation of the plant was a “menace to the public health.” Because of the scope of repairs needed, the plant, which for more than a century has processed coal into a fuel called coke, has been idle since October 2021. Bluestone will be able to work toward reopening the plant once a judge signs off on the deal.

In the generations before Bluestone acquired the plant in 2019, people living in the area — some of them forced to reside there because of racist housing policies in the 20th century — faced exposure to levels of contaminants in the air and soil that have ranked among the worst in the nation. The pollution has stained the facades of nearby houses a dark charcoal, helped drive down home values to as little as $1,000 and sickened so many residents that families feared letting children play outside.

The coke plant was part of a cluster of industrial facilities on the city’s north side that became a symbol of environmental injustice in the South. Government agencies across the region have struggled to reduce the harm to working-class communities of color due to disproportionate exposure to industrial pollution, according to Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former environmental justice official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmental experts have told ProPublica that any penalty under $1 million would be shockingly low.

Steve Ruby, an attorney who works with the Justice family, said in a statement that “any criticism that the amount is too low is unfounded and fails to take account of the full context of the resolution.” He added that the consent order “will provide the certainty that the company needs to complete its evaluation of the plant’s future.”

“Despite investing tens of millions of dollars in long-deferred maintenance, Bluestone was unable to fully overcome those challenges, and it ultimately concluded that only a rebuild would allow the plant to operate profitably and in compliance with environmental requirements,” Ruby said.

Wanda Heard, a spokesperson for the Health Department, declined to make anyone available for an interview or to comment on the Bluestone penalty. She said in a statement that the consent decree will “protect the public as well as the environment.”

Bluestone faces a long, complicated road to get a permit allowing it to restart operations.

This past summer, Jefferson County health officials noted during an inspection that Bluestone “cannot resume production without substantial capital investment.” Industry experts familiar with the plant estimate that Bluestone will need to spend more than $150 million to reopen it. On top of that, the company still owes millions of dollars in unpaid fees to government agencies such as the city of Birmingham and to companies and contractors who had worked at the plant before it stopped making coke in the fall of 2021.

The consent decree requires that Bluestone draft extensive plans that outline the necessary repairs to the plant and hire an independent engineer to assure that its coke ovens can operate in a “safe and compliant” manner. Bluestone will then need to submit those records when it applies for a new permit.

Health Department officials could deny Bluestone a permit if the company were to fail to resolve enough of the problems related to its past violations. And the EPA could force Bluestone to pay a higher fine if the federal agency determines the county’s consent decree or permit is too lax. EPA spokesperson James Pinkney said in a statement that the agency “would coordinate with JCDH in its oversight role” if Bluestone applies for a permit but declined to specify any actions that might be taken. Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator for the EPA, said that officials with the federal agency rarely take this step.

If Bluestone resumes production, the consent order will likely force the plant to reduce emissions compared with previous years, said Michael Hansen, executive director of environmental advocacy group GASP, which represented the interests of community members in the lawsuit and signed onto the consent decree. He said the consent decree would ensure that Bluestone “cannot continue to pollute without consequences.”

“This is one step among many to ensure that residents get justice,” Hansen said. “It’s not the end of the road. There are lots of steps along the way for Bluestone to reopen. There’s more we can do to hold them accountable.”

The proposed consent decree calls for monitoring of a single pollutant, sulfur dioxide, which can harm people’s lungs. In recent years, officials with the EPA had modeled that high levels of sulfur dioxide were coming from the Bluestone plant and ABC Coke, a nearby plant that is still operating after its owner reached a $775,000 settlement last year with environmental regulators over alleged air pollution violations. The Jefferson County Board of Health is mandating that the company operate at least two air monitors along the fence of its property for five years if the plant reopens.

But the consent decree would allow Bluestone to sidestep extensive rounds of monitoring for other toxic chemicals in the air. Before the company suspended coke production, the Health Department was not routinely monitoring for toxic air pollutants on the city’s north side. As a result, GASP hired experts to test air in the surrounding communities, and they discovered chemicals such as benzene or naphthalene at levels high enough to elevate the risk of cancer. Despite these findings, the consent decree will not require Bluestone to test for benzene, naphthalene or other cancer-causing chemicals associated with coke production. Heard told ProPublica that the study results that GASP provided to the Health Department “don’t reveal any new or concerning air pollution data.”

The consent decree also commits half of the $925,000 penalty to community improvement projects. The funding would come at a time when some local officials are considering the scope of what is owed to the communities harmed by the plant.

Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s administration has crafted a $37 million plan that would pay for property buyouts for residents and revitalize the city’s north side communities for those who wish to stay. Woodfin, who has yet to find partners to help fund the plan, believes that companies including Bluestone should cover some of the costs. Bluestone executives have not responded to questions about their willingness to contribute to the plan.

Charlie Powell, founder of the community advocacy group People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination, doesn’t believe that the amount Bluestone has agreed to pay in the consent decree goes far enough to offset the harm to nearby residents.

“It’s a get out of jail free card,” Powell said. “It ain’t gonna be enough.”

Update, Dec. 15, 2022: This story was updated with comment from EPA spokesperson James Pinkney.

by James Bandler

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

In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google.

In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans.

Standing with their Navy sponsor behind them, the Google scientists posed for a photograph, beaming.

Mostly unknown to the public, the trove and the staff who study it have long been regarded in pathology circles as vital national resources: Scientists used a dead soldier’s specimen that was archived here to perform the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 Flu.

Google had a confidential plan to turn the collection of slides into an immense archive that — with the help of the company’s burgeoning, and potentially profitable, AI business — could help create tools to aid the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases. And it would seek first, exclusive dibs to do so.

“The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.”

More than six years later, Google is still laboring to turn this vast collection of human specimens into digital gold.

At least a dozen Defense Department staff members have raised ethical or legal concerns about Google’s quest for service members’ medical data and about the behavior of its military supporters, records reviewed by ProPublica show. Underlying their complaints are concerns about privacy, favoritism and the private use of a sensitive government resource in a time when AI in health care shows both great promise and risk. And some of them worried that Google was upending the center’s own pilot project to digitize its collection for future AI use.

Pathology experts familiar with the collection say the center’s leaders have good reason to be cautious about partnerships with AI companies. “Well designed, correctly validated and ethically implemented [health algorithms] could be game-changing things,” said Dr. Monica E. de Baca, chair of the College of American Pathologists’ Council on Informatics and Pathology Innovation. “But until we figure out how to do that well, I’m worried that — knowingly or unknowingly — there will be an awful lot of snake oil sold.”

When it wasn’t chosen to take part in JPC’s pilot project, Google pulled levers in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and in Congress. This year, after lobbying by Google, staff on the House Armed Services Committee quietly inserted language into a report accompanying the Defense Authorization Act that raises doubts about the pathology center’s modernization efforts while providing a path for the tech giant to land future AI work with the center.

Pathology experts call the JPC collection a national treasure, unique in its age, size and breadth. The archive holds more than 31 million blocks of human tissue and 55 million slides. More recent specimens are linked with detailed patient information, including pathologist annotations and case histories. And the repository holds many examples of “edge cases” — diseases so vanishingly rare that many pathologists never see them.

Human tissue samples from 1917 and 1918 stored in paraffin are part of the Joint Pathology Center’s collection, which contains more than 31 million tissue blocks and 55 million slides. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Google sought to gather so many identifying details about the specimens and patients that the repository’s leaders feared it would compromise patients’ anonymity. Discussions became so contentious in 2017 that the leaders of the JPC broke them off.

In an interview with ProPublica, retired Col. Clayton Simon, the former director of the JPC, said Google wanted more than the pathology center felt it could provide. “Ultimately, even through negotiations, we were unable to find a pathway that we legally could do and ethically should do,” Simon said. “And the partnership dissolved.”

But Google didn’t give up. Last year, the center’s current director, Col. Joel Moncur, in response to questions from DOD lawyers, warned that the actions of Google’s chief research partner in the military “could cause a breach of patient privacy and could lead to a scandal that adversely affects the military.”

Joel Moncur (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

Google has told the military that the JPC collection holds the “raw materials” for the most significant biotechnology breakthroughs of this decade — “on par with the Human Genome Project in its potential for strategic, clinical, and economic impact.”

All of that made the cache an alluring target for any company hoping to develop health care algorithms. Enormous quantities of medical data are needed to design algorithmic models that can identify patterns a pathologist might miss — and Google and other companies are in a race to gather them. Only a handful of tech companies have the scale to scan, store and analyze a collection of this magnitude on their own. Companies that have submitted plans to compete for aspects of the center’s modernization project include Amazon Web Services, Cerner Corp. and a host of small AI companies.

But no company has been as aggressive as Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, has previously drawn fire for its efforts to gather and crunch medical data. In the United Kingdom, regulators reprimanded a hospital in 2017 for providing data on more than 1.6 million patients, without their understanding, to Alphabet’s AI unit, DeepMind. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had a secret deal, dubbed “Project Nightingale,” with a Catholic health care system that gave it access to data on millions of patients in 21 states, also without the knowledge of patients or doctors. Google responded to the Journal story in a blog post that stated that patient data “cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data.”

In a statement, Ted Ladd, a Google spokesperson, attributed the ethics complaints associated with its efforts to work with the repository to an “inter-agency issue” and a “personnel dispute.”

“We had hoped to enable the JPC to digitize its data and, with its permission, develop computer models that would enable researchers and clinicians to improve diagnosis for cancers and other illnesses,” Ladd said, noting that all of Google’s health care partnerships involve “the strictest controls” over data. “Our customers own and manage their data, and we cannot — and do not — use it for any purpose other than explicitly agreed upon by the customer,” Ladd said.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the JPC said none of its de-identified data would be shared during its modernization process unless it met the ethical, regulatory, and legal approvals needed to ensure it was done in the right way.

“The highest priority of the JPC’s digital transformation is to ensure that any de-identified digital slides are used ethically and in a manner that protects patient privacy and military security,” the JPC said.

But some fear that even these safeguards might not be enough. Steven French, a DOD cloud computing engineer assigned to the project, said he was dismayed by the relentlessness of Google’s advocates in the department. Lost in all their discussions about the speed, scale and cost-saving benefits associated with working with Google seemed to be concerns for the interests of the service members whose tissue was the subject of all this maneuvering, French told ProPublica.

“It felt really bad to me,” French said. “Like a slow crush towards the inevitability of some big tech company monetizing it.”

The JPC certainly does need help from tech companies. Underfunded by Congress and long neglected by the Pentagon, it is vulnerable to offers from well-funded rescuers. In spite of its leaders’ pleas, funding for a full-scale modernization project has never materialized. The pathology center’s aging warehouses have been afflicted with water leaks and unwelcome intruders: a marauding family of raccoons.

The story of the pathology center’s long, contentious battle with Google has never been told before. ProPublica’s account is based on internal emails, presentations and memos, as well as interviews with current and former DOD officials, some of whom asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter or for fear of retribution.

Google’s Private Tour

In December 2015, Google began its courtship of the JPC with a bold, unsolicited proposal. The messenger was a junior naval officer, Lt. Cmdr. Niels Olson.

“I’m working with Google on a project to apply machine learning to medical imaging,” Olson wrote to the leaders of the repository. “And it seems like we are at the stage where we need to figure exactly what JPC has.”

Niels Olson (Kate Copeland for ProPublica)

A United States Naval Academy physics major and Tulane medical school graduate, Olson worked as a clinical and anatomical pathology resident at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego.

With digitized specimen slides holding massive amounts of data, pathology seemed ripe for the coming AI revolution in medicine, he believed. Olson’s own urgency was heightened in 2014 when his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

That year, Olson teamed up with scientists at Google to train software to recognize suspected cancer cells. Google supplied expertise including AI scientists and high-speed, high-resolution scanners. The endeavor had cleared all privacy and review board hurdles. They were scanning Navy patients’ pathology slides at a furious clip, but they needed a larger data set to validate their findings.

Enter the JPC’s archive. Olson learned about the center in medical school. In his email to its leaders in December 2015, Olson attached Google’s eight-page proposal.

Google offered to start the operation by training algorithms with already digitized data in the repository. And it would do this early work “with no exchange of funds.” These types of partnerships free the private parties from having to undergo a competitive bidding process.

Google promised to do the work in a manner that balanced “privacy and ethical considerations.” The government, under the proposal, would own and control the slides and data.

Olson typed a warning: “This is under a non-disclosure agreement with Google, so I need to ask you, do please handle this information appropriately. The chief concern is keeping this out of the press.”

Senior military and civilian staff at the pathology center reacted with alarm. Dr. Francisco Rentas, the head of the archive’s tissue operations, pushed back against the notion of sharing the data with Google.

“As you know, we have the largest pathology repository in the world and a lot of entities will love to get their hands on it, including Google competitors. How do we overcome that?” Rentas asked in an email.

Olson, center, and Google scientists Martin Stumpe and Lily Peng took a private tour of the JPC collection in 2016. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Other leaders had similar reactions. “My concerns are raised when I’m advised to not disclose what seems to be a contractual relationship to the press,” one of the top managers at the pathology center, Col. Edward Stevens, told Olson. Stevens told Olson that giving Google access to this information without a competitive bid could result in litigation from the company’s competitors. Stevens asked: “Does this need to go through an open-source bid?”

But even with these concerns, Simon, the pathology center’s director, was intrigued enough to continue discussions. He invited Olson and Google to inspect the facility.

The warehouse Olson and the Google scientists entered could have served as a set for the final scene of “Raiders of Lost Ark.”

Pathology slides were stacked in aisle canyons, some towering two stories. The slides were arranged in metal trays and cardboard boxes. To access tissue samples, the repository used a retrieval system similar to those found in dry cleaners. The pathology center had just a handful of working scanners. At the pace they were going, it would take centuries to digitize the entire collection.

One person familiar with the repository likened it to the Library of Alexandria, which held the largest archive of knowledge in the ancient world. Myth held that the library was destroyed in a cataclysmic fire lit by Roman invaders, but historians believe the real killer was gradual decay and neglect over centuries.

The JPC’s collection is the largest biorepository on the planet. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The military’s tissue library had already played an important role in the advancement of medical knowledge. Its birth in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum was grisly. In a blandly written order in the midst of the Civil War, the Army surgeon general instructed surgeons “diligently to collect and preserve” all specimens of “morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable.”

Soon the museum’s curator was digging through battlefield trenches to find “many a putrid heap” of hands, feet and other body parts ravaged by disease and war. He and other doctors shipped the remains to Washington in whiskey-filled casks.

Over the next 160 years, the tissue collection outgrew several headquarters, including Washington’s Ford Theater and a nuclear-bomb-proof building near the White House. But the main mission — identifying, studying and reducing the calamitous impact of illnesses and injuries afflicting service members — has remained unchanged in times of war and peace. Each time a military or veterans’ hospital pathologist sent a tissue sample to the pathology center for a second opinion, it was filed away in the repository.

As the archive expanded, the repository’s prestige grew. Its scientists spurred advances in microscopy, cancer and tropical disease research. An institute pathologist named Walter Reed proved that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, an important discovery in the history of medicine.

For much of its modern history, in addition to serving military and veterans hospitals, the center also provided civilian consultations. The work with elite teaching hospitals gave the center a luster that helped it attract and retain top pathologists.

Congress and DOD leaders questioned why the military should fund civilian work that could be done elsewhere. In 2005, under the congressionally mandated base closure act, the Pentagon ordered the organization running the repository to shut down. The organization reopened with a different overseer, tasked with a narrower, military-focused mission. Uncertainty about the organization’s future caused many top pathologists to leave.

In its first pitch to the repository’s leaders, Google pointedly mentioned a book-length Institute of Medicine report on the repository that stated that “wide access” to the archive’s materials would promote the “public good.” The biorepository wasn’t living up to its potential, Google said, noting that “no major efforts have been underway to fix the problem.”

Following the tour, a Google scientist prepared a list of clinical, demographic and patient information it sought from the repository. The list included “must haves” — case diagnoses; pathology and radiology images; information on gender and ethnicity; and birth and death dates — as well as “high-value” patient information, including comorbidities, subsequent hospitalizations and cause of death.

This troubled the JPC’s director. “We felt very, very concerned about giving too much data to them,” Simon told ProPublica, “because too much data could identify the patient.”

There were other aspects about Google’s offer that made it “very unfavorable to the federal government,” Simon later told his successor, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.

In exchange for scanning and digitizing the slide collection at its own expense, Google sought “exclusive access” to the data for at least four years.

The other deal-breaker was Google’s requirement that it be able to charge the government to store and access the digitized information, a huge financial commitment. Simon did not have the authority to commit the government to future payments to a company without authorization from Congress.

Today, Ladd, the Google spokesperson, disputes the claim that its proposal would have been unfavorable to the government. “Our goal was to help the government digitize the data before it physically deteriorates.”

Ladd said Google sought exclusive access to the data during the early stages of the project, so that it could scan the de-identified samples and perform quality-control measures on the data prior to handing it back to the JPC.

Niels Olson, who spearheaded the project for the Navy in 2016, declined requests for interviews with ProPublica. But Jackson Stephens, a friend and lawyer who is representing Olson, said Olson had always followed the Institutional Review Board process and worked to anonymize patient medical data before it was used in research or shared with a third party.

“Niels takes his oath to the Constitution and his Hippocratic oath very seriously,” Stephens said. “He loves science, but his first duty of care is to his patients.”

Google’s relentlessness in 2017, too, spooked the repository’s leaders, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica. Google’s lawyer put “pressure” on the head of tissue operations to sign the agreement, which he declined to do. Leaders of the center became “uncomfortable” and discontinued discussions, according to the DOD email.

Though he banged on doors in the Pentagon and Congress, Simon was not able to convince the Obama administration to include the JPC in then-Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot. Simon left the JPC in 2018, his hopes for a modernization of the library dashed. But then a Pentagon advisory board got wind of the JPC collection, and everything changed.

“The Smartest People on Earth”

In March of 2020, the Defense Innovation Board announced a series of recommendations to digitize the JPC collection. The board called for a pilot project to scan a large initial batch of slides — at least 1 million in the first year — as a prelude to the massive undertaking of digitizing all 55 million slides.

“My worldview was that this should be one of the highest priorities of the Defense Department,” William Bushman, then acting deputy undersecretary of personnel and readiness, told ProPublica. “It has the potential to save more lives than anything else being done in the department.”

As the pathology center prepared to launch its pilot, the staff talked about a scandal that occurred just 40 miles north.

Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman who died of cancer in 1951 while being treated at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital. Without her or her family’s knowledge or consent, and without compensation, her cells were replicated and commercialized, leading to groundbreaking advances in medicine but also federal reforms on the use of patient cells for research.

A photo of Henrietta Lacks sits in the living room of her grandson, Ron Lacks. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Like Lacks’ cancer cells, every specimen in the archive, the JPC team knew, represented its own story of human mortality and vulnerability. The tissue came from veterans and current service members willing to put their lives on the line for their country. Most of the samples came from patients whose doctors discovered ominous signs from biopsies and then sent the specimens to the center for second opinions. Few signed consent forms agreeing to have their samples used in medical research.

The pathology center hired two experts in AI ethics to develop ethical, legal and regulatory guidelines. Meanwhile, the pressure to cooperate with Google hadn’t gone away.

In the summer of 2020, as COVID-19 surged across the country, Olson was stationed at a naval lab in Guam, working on an AI project to detect the coronavirus. That project was managed by a military group based out of Silicon Valley known as the Defense Innovation Unit, a separate effort to speed the military’s development and adoption of cutting-edge technology. Though the group worked with many tech companies, it had gained a reputation for being cozy with Google. The DIU’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, sat just across the street from the Googleplex, the tech giant’s headquarters. Olson joined the group officially that August.

Olson’s COVID-19 work earned him Navy Times’ coveted Sailor of the Year award as well as the attention of a man who would become a powerful ally in the DOD, Thomas “Pat” Flanders.

Flanders was the chief information officer of the sprawling Defense Health Agency, which oversaw the military’s medical services, including hospitals and clinics. A garrulous Army veteran, Flanders questioned the wisdom of running the pilot project without first getting funding to scan all of the 55 million slides. He wanted the pathology staff to hear about the work Olson and Google had done scanning pathology slides in San Diego and see if a similar public-private partnership could be forged with the JPC.

Over the objections of Moncur, the JPC’s director, Flanders insisted on having Olson attend all the pathology center’s meetings to discuss the pilot, according to internal emails.

In August 2020, the JPC published a request for information from vendors interested in taking part in the pilot project. The terms of that request specified that no feedback would be given to companies about their submissions and that telephone inquiries would not be accepted or acknowledged. Such conversations could be seen as favoritism and could lead to a protest by competitors who did not get this privilege.

But Flanders insisted that meeting Google was appropriate, according to Moncur’s statements to DOD lawyers.

In a video conference call, Flanders told the Google representatives they were “the smartest people on earth” and said he couldn’t believe he was “getting to meet them for free,” according to written accounts of the meeting provided to DOD lawyers.

Flanders asked Google to explain its business model, saying he wanted to see how both the government and company might profit from the center’s data so that he could influence the requirements on the government side — a remark that left even the Google representatives “speechless,” according to a compilation of concerns raised by DOD staffers.

To Moncur and others in attendance, Flanders was actively negotiating with Google, according to Moncur’s statement to DOD lawyers.

To the astonishment of the center staff, Flanders asked for a second meeting between Google and the JPC team.

Concern about Flanders’ conduct echoed in other parts of the DOD. A lawyer for Defense Digital Service, a team of software engineers, data scientists and product managers assigned to assist on the project, wrote that Flanders ignored legal warnings. He described Flanders as a “cowboy” who in spite of warnings about his behavior was not likely “to fall out of love with Google.”

In an interview with ProPublica, Flanders disputed claims that he was biased toward Google. Flanders said his focus has always been on scanning and storing the slides as quickly and economically as possible. As for his lavish praise of Google, Flanders said he was merely trying to be “kind” to the company’s representatives.

“People took offense to that,” Flanders said. “It’s just really pettiness on the part of people who couldn’t get along, honestly.”

A spokesperson for the Defense Health Agency said it was “totally appropriate” for Flanders to ask Google about its business model. “This is part of market research,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that no negotiation occurred at the meeting and that all government stakeholders had been invited to attend.

Moncur referred calls to a JPC spokesperson. A spokesperson for the JPC said in a statement that “Moncur was concerned about meeting with vendors during the RFI period.”

“An Arm of Google”

In late 2020, the modernization team received more troubling news. In a slide presentation for the JPC describing other AI work with Google and the military, Olson disclosed that the company had “made offers of employment, which I have declined.” But then he suggested the offer might be revived in the future, writing, “we mutually agreed to table the matter.” He said he had “no other conflicts of interest to declare.” Google told ProPublica it had never directly made Olson a job offer, though a temp agency it used did.

More facts surfaced. Olson also had a Google corporate email address. And he had access to Google corporate files, according to internal communications from concerned DOD staff members. Google said it is common for its research partners in the government to have these privileges.

“I am more worried than ever that DIU’s influence will destroy this acquisition,” a DOD lawyer wrote, referring to efforts to find vendors for the pilot project. He called DIU “essentially an arm of Google.”

At the time, a DIU lawyer defended Olson. The lawyer said Olson had “no further conflict of interest issues” and had done nothing improper because the job offer had been made three years earlier, in 2017. An ethics officer at the DOD Standards of Conduct Office agreed.

Today, a spokesperson in the Office of the Secretary of Defense told ProPublica the department was committed to modernizing the repository “while carefully observing all applicable legal and ethical rules.”

Olson’s friend and lawyer, Stephens, said Olson had been upfront, disclosing the job offer to the innovation unit’s lawyer as well as in the conflict-of-interest section of his slide presentation. He said Olson had declined the offer, which was withdrawn. “He’s not some kind of Google secret agent.”

Stephens said the JPC would have been much further down the road had it cooperated with Olson. Stephens said it became apparent to Olson that Moncur was “essentially ignoring” a “gold mine that could help a lot of people.”

“Niels is the tenacious doctor who is just trying to do the science and build a coalition of partners to get this thing done,” Stephens said. “I think he’s the hero of this story.”

Google Turns to Congress

In 2021, the pathology center selected one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world, Johns Hopkins — which plans to erect a building honoring Henrietta Lacks — to assist it in scanning slides. It picked two small technology companies to start building tools to let pathologists search the archive.

Google wanted to be selected, and in a confidential proposal, it offered to help the repository build up its own slide-scanning capabilities.

When Google was not selected for the pilot project, the company went above the JPC leaders’ heads. Google claimed in a letter to Pentagon leaders that the company had been unfairly excluded from “full and open competition.” In that August 2021 letter, Google argued that the nation’s security was at stake. It asked the DOD to “consider allowing Google Cloud” and other providers to compete to ensure the “nation’s ability to compete with China in biotechnology.”

Time was of the essence, Google warned. “The physical slides at the JPC are degrading rapidly each day. … Without further action, the slides will continue to degrade and some may ultimately be damaged beyond repair.”

Google stepped up its advocacy campaign. The company deployed a lobbying firm, the Roosevelt Group — which boasts of its ability to “leverage” its connections to secure federal business opportunities to its clients — to raise doubts about the JPC’s pilot project. Their efforts worked. In little-noticed language in a report written to accompany the 2023 Defense Authorization Act, the House Armed Services Committee expressed its concern about the speed of the scanning process and the choice of technology, which the committee claimed would not allow the “swift digitization of these deteriorating slides.”

The committee had its own ideas of how the pathology center’s work should be carried out, suggesting that the center work in tandem with the DIU, using an augmented reality microscope whose software was engineered by Google.

In a statement, the Roosevelt Group told ProPublica it was “proud” of its work for Google. The firm said it helped the company “educate professional staff of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees over concerns about the lack of an open procurement process for digitization of slides.” The group chided DOD officials for being “unwilling to provide answers to Congress around the lack of progress on the JPC digitization effort.”

The pathology center staff was dismayed by the committee’s recommendations that it work with Olson’s group.

In a video conference meeting late last summer with Armed Services Committee staff, the leaders of the pathology center attempted to rebut the House committee report. The JPC’s work was going as planned, they said, noting that a million slides had been scanned. And the pathology center was collaborating with the National Institutes of Health to develop AI tools to help predict prognoses for cancer treatments.

The House Armed Services Committee ordered Pentagon leaders to “conduct a comprehensive assessment” on the digitization effort and to provide a briefing to the committee on its findings by April 1, 2023.

In a statement in response to ProPublica’s questions about the bill, Ladd, the Google spokesperson, acknowledged the company’s influence efforts on Capitol Hill. “We frequently provide information to congressional staff on issues of national importance,” Ladd said. The statement confirmed that the company suggested “language be inserted” into the 2023 Defense Authorization Act calling for a “comprehensive assessment” of the digitization effort.

“Despite efforts from Google and many at the Department of Defense, our work with JPC unfortunately never got off the ground, and the physical repository of pathology slides continues to deteriorate,” Ladd said. “We remain optimistic that if the repository could be properly digitized, it would save many American lives, including those of our service members.”

On this last point, even Google’s critics are in accord. A properly funded project would cost taxpayers a few hundred million dollars — a minuscule portion of the $858 billion defense budget and a small price if the lifesaving potential of the collection is realized.

Last year, as tensions grew with Google, the modernization team at the repository launched a publicity campaign to call attention to the project and the high ethical stakes.

An entire panel discussion was devoted to the JPC effort at the 2021 South by Southwest conference. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I want to make sure we do it right, we do it responsibly and we do it ethically,” said Steven French, the DOD cloud computing engineer assigned to assist the repository.

Then without mentioning Google’s name, he added a Shakespearean barb. “There’s plenty of vendors, plenty of companies, plenty of people,” French said, “who are more than willing to do this and extract a pound of flesh from us in the process.”

Additional image credits: Duncan1890, Cultura RM Exclusive/PhotoStock-Israel, Rob Jones III, Kampee Patisena, Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library, Sebastian Condrea, Jason Edwards, undefined undefined, Mikroman6, Trifonov_Evgeniy, Zoranm, Wladimir Bulgar/Science Photo Library, Michael Burrell, DanielBendjy, John Parrot/Stocktrek Images, PansLaos, SDI Productions, George Marks, Carlofranco, Tetra Images, Leonello Calvetti/Science Photo Library, Mashuk, and Thepalmer/Getty Images

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Richard A. Webster and Jeff Adelson, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, and Sophie Chou, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

This is Part II of an investigation into how Road Home, the federally funded program to rebuild Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, underpaid people in poor neighborhoods while giving those in wealthy ones more of what they needed to repair their homes. Read Part I: The Federal Program to Rebuild After Hurricane Katrina Shortchanged the Poor. New Data Proves It.

Once, Mark Benfatti couldn’t imagine living anywhere but St. Bernard Parish, a close-knit, working-class community perched precariously between New Orleans and the wetlands leading to the Gulf of Mexico.

His parents had moved there in 1963, when he was a year old. It’s where he met and married his wife, Donna, and where they raised their three daughters. It’s where he ran four restaurants, serving the same familiar faces every day of the year.

He planned to spend the rest of his life there. But after Hurricane Katrina, Benfatti said, he had no choice but to leave.

Katrina flooded the parish with up to 15 feet of toxic, fetid water that stagnated for weeks. It took everything. His home. His businesses. It spared only a few things stored in his attic, he said.

Top: Murphy Oil Refinery in Chalmette, St. Bernard Parish, on Sept. 10, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. Bottom: Murphy Oil Refinery on Dec. 8. During Hurricane Katrina, one of Murphy’s storage tanks floated off its foundation, dumping more than a million gallons of crude oil into a square-mile segment of Meraux and Chalmette. In 2009, a class-action lawsuit against Murphy Oil Corp. ended in a settlement requiring the company to pay $330 million to 6,200 claimants, including owners of about 1,800 homes. (David Grunfeld/The Times-Picayune)

“My wife had a mother that was elderly, and there was going to be no hospital. We had a daughter in school, and there was going to be no schools,” Benfatti said. “We just knew that we couldn’t be down there. We made a choice, and it wasn’t easy.”

Benfatti was among an estimated 6,500 St. Bernard residents who moved across Lake Pontchartrain to St. Tammany Parish in the year after the storm, an exodus unlike any other in post-Katrina Louisiana.

The utter devastation of St. Bernard was a big reason. But so was Road Home, the program that was supposed to help people rebuild.

St. Bernard Parish had the state’s highest share of homeowners — more than 76% — whose damage wasn’t completely covered by Road Home, insurance payouts and Federal Emergency Management Agency aid, according to an analysis of Road Home grants by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV.

Many homeowners took those Road Home checks, which state leaders hoped would be used to revitalize their communities, and they left.

Unlike New Orleans, where several neighborhoods were spared from the catastrophic flooding, all of St. Bernard was left in ruins.

In New Orleans, households in areas with a median income of $15,000 or less had 70% of their damage covered through grants from the state’s recovery program, FEMA and insurance payments. Those in areas with a median income greater than $75,000 had 80% of their damage covered. The state trend was almost identical.

All of St. Bernard Parish was on the low end of payouts. Regardless of income, most residents had about 70% of their costs covered, about the same as poor residents in New Orleans. Poverty tracks closely with race in New Orleans, so the shortfalls in the city disproportionately hurt Black people. In St. Bernard, where nearly everyone was white, there wasn’t as much extreme wealth or poverty.

Two former Road Home officials acknowledged inequities in the program. The state Office of Community Development took issue with the analysis, but none of the points it raised affected the news organizations' findings.

For homeowners who couldn’t make up the difference or didn’t want to rebuild, Road Home provided an option to sell to the state. Many St. Bernard residents did. About 37% of residents there who got Road Home grants chose to sell their properties, compared to about 8% statewide and about 11% in New Orleans.

“People didn’t want to be the only house on their block, and they didn’t really get enough money to rebuild a house from scratch, so they took the buyout option,” said Alison Barrios, a real estate broker in St. Bernard.

After the storm, St. Bernard’s population dropped by nearly half, from about 67,200 to about 35,900 in 2010, according to the census.

That’s not what state leaders hoped for when they designed Road Home. “I didn’t want areas that had been severely damaged to disappear off the face of the earth,” said Walter Leger, a St. Bernard resident and a key architect of Road Home. “We wanted to help people get back into their homes and rebuild those communities.”

But it was understandable, said St. Bernard Parish President Guy McInnis.

“You’re looking at your home being 100% damaged in a community that's under 36 inches of sludge,” he said. “You’re in Houston or you’re in Kenner, or you’re in Baton Rouge, and there’s a house you can buy with a school nearby. People moved because, rightfully so, they wanted to put their lives back together as soon as possible.”

The shortfall in grants in St. Bernard owed in large part to lower property values. The Road Home based the size of a homeowner’s rebuilding grant on the lesser of two numbers: the pre-storm value of the home or the cost of repairs. This meant in areas where property was worth less, many homeowners were shortchanged.

Community leaders complained at the time that the program was unfair, but architects of Road Home said the federal government required those rules.

HUD no longer allows disaster relief to be used to compensate homeowners for losses; instead it reimburses them for expenses incurred as they rebuild.

“HUD and other federal partners recognized the shortcomings of the federal response in Louisiana and have worked to improve those programs in the 15 years since,” said De’Marcus Finnell, HUD deputy press secretary.

Property values in St. Bernard are lower in part because the parish is harder to get to, cut off from most of the city by drawbridges and railroad crossings. Historically it has had a greater risk of flooding. To the north and east lie wetlands. To the west, just past the Lower Ninth Ward, is the Industrial Canal, where floodwalls collapsed not just during Katrina, but during Hurricane Betsy in 1965.

Because of the lower property values, even the tonier areas of St. Bernard got less of their damages covered. More than 92% of all Road Home properties in St. Bernard suffered damage that exceeded their pre-storm value, according to the news organizations’ analysis. In New Orleans, 66% of the properties had damage that exceeded their pre-storm value.

Over the past 12 years, St. Bernard’s population has slowly rebounded; it’s now 65% of its pre-storm size. Parish officials credit low crime rates, a low cost of living and an aggressive anti-blight campaign. The risk of flooding has decreased after the closure of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal, which carried storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico, and the construction of a 22-mile levee system around the parish.

Parish officials describe the community’s recovery as a hard-fought miracle. But for those like Benfatti who made the difficult decision to leave, it remains a bittersweet success.

“It’s 17 1/2 years now, and every day I miss my community,” said Benfatti, who now lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. “But we didn't have time to wait for it to get going again.”

David Hammer of WWL-TV contributed reporting.

by Richard A. Webster and Jeff Adelson, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, David Hammer, WWL-TV, and Sophie Chou, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The complaints started as soon as Louisiana launched its massive program to help homeowners rebuild after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Community leaders said the largest rebuilding program in U.S. history would be unfair to the state’s poorest residents.

Activists and real estate experts spoke out at meetings of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which designed and ran the Road Home program. An attorney representing poor homeowners testified before Congress. A fair housing group sued the state and federal governments.

State officials made tweaks and settled the lawsuit, but they never changed a core part of the formula that determined how much homeowners received.

Now a groundbreaking analysis of nearly 92,000 rebuilding grants statewide shows critics were right all along: Road Home shortchanged people in poor neighborhoods while giving those in wealthy neighborhoods more of what they needed.

People in the most impoverished areas in New Orleans — those with a median income of $15,000 or less — had to cover 30% of their rebuilding costs after Road Home grants, Federal Emergency Management Agency aid and insurance. In areas where the median income was more than $75,000, the shortfall was 20%, according to the analysis by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV.

Lower-Income Homeowners in New Orleans Had Less of Their Hurricane Damage Covered by Road Home Grants (Source: Louisiana Office of Community Development. Note: Median household income calculated based on the census block group of grant recipients.)

Poverty tracks closely with race in New Orleans, so the shortfalls in the city disproportionately hurt Black people. Road Home also underpaid residents of St. Bernard Parish, a mostly white, working-class community devastated by the hurricane.

Had properties in the lowest-income parts of New Orleans been covered at the same rate as the wealthiest, each of those households would have received about $18,000 more on average. Across the city, covering all homeowners’ repair costs at the rate of the highest earners would have resulted in another $349 million for rebuilding.

The Road Home program was hugely consequential for Louisiana, and much more so for its largest city, most of which flooded after Katrina’s storm surge overwhelmed its levees. Most homeowners didn’t have adequate insurance. Facing the possibility of a mass exodus, state leaders devised Road Home to cover the gap and encourage people to rebuild.

(Jennifer Zdon/The Times-Picayune) Top: A woman walks by a growing pile of debris dumped at the approved Katrina dump site on the neutral ground between West End Boulevard and Pontchartrain Boulevard, on Oct. 10, 2005. Bottom: The Lakeview neighborhood is underwater on Sept. 9, 2005. (Kathy Anderson/The Times-Picayune)

Road Home also allowed homeowners to sell their property to the state and move elsewhere, though housing was scarce in the region. If homeowners didn’t stay in Louisiana, they forfeited 40% of their home’s value.

New Orleans was the biggest beneficiary of rebuilding grants, and half of all owner-occupied homes in New Orleans received rebuilding grants, with $3.3 billion awarded citywide. Some neighborhoods rebounded quickly. Others languished.

Housing advocates say that’s due to the original sin of the Road Home program: It calculated each grant based on a home’s value before the hurricane or on the cost of repairs — whichever was less.

The value of most homes in poor areas was lower than the cost of rebuilding them, so the resulting grants didn’t cover all repairs. But for most people in affluent areas, the rebuilding cost was lower than the value of their homes. They got grants that came closer to covering their needs.

“The practical effects of how this program shaped the city can still be seen today,” said Davida Finger, an attorney who testified to Congress in 2009 about unfairness in the Road Home program.

Poor New Orleanians had a much harder time covering the costs. For a homeowner in the lowest-income areas, it would have taken more than 43 months at the average annual salary to pay the cost of repairs not covered by Road Home, FEMA and insurance, the news outlets found. In the highest-income areas, it would have taken less than eight months.

The shortcomings in the Road Home program are part of a broader tapestry of failures in the ways America helps people affected by catastrophes. A yearlong investigation by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV has found that disaster programs often shortchange the people who need it most, worsening inequities in the wake of disaster.

Finger said the news organizations’ findings were “shocking but not surprising.”

“What Black homeowners, what lawyers, what advocates, what community organizers, what reporters were telling the program designers all along was completely accurate,” Finger said. “They simply didn't want to hear it.”

The state Office of Community Development took issue with the analysis, but none of the points it raised affected the news organizations' findings.

Two officials who were in charge of the recovery told the news outlets that the findings were troubling.

Andy Kopplin, the first executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, stressed that state officials took pains to steer more money to poorer homeowners through a second grant program. But Kopplin acknowledged in a written statement that the findings show that low- and middle-income households should’ve received more.

That’s “upsetting to those of us who were working to create more equitable outcomes and especially to those families who needed and deserved more resources for their recovery,” he wrote.

Walter Leger, who was a key board member of the LRA, said the findings should spur the state to seek more federal aid from Congress to fill the gaps.

De’Marcus Finnell, deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, declined to address the findings directly. But in a statement he said HUD’s experience after Katrina led it to favor programs that guide homeowners through rebuilding rather than giving homeowners money “and letting them manage the recovery process on their own.”

Andrew Kopplin, then-executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, speaks to Walter Leger, then-chair of the LRA’s Housing and Redevelopment Task Force, as Department of Housing and Urban Development official Pamela Patenaude testifies on Jan. 29, 2007. (Ellis Lucia/The Times-Picayune)

In fact, federal rules no longer allow homeowners to be compensated for losses after a disaster, and Leger said using property values to determine aid after Katrina now appears to have been a misstep.

“The plan was to help the homeowner repair his home or her home and get back in the home,” Leger said. The news organizations’ analysis shows there were disparities, he said, and “that's something that should have been, and maybe should be, addressed.”

One City, Two Recoveries

Before Katrina, the neighborhoods of Lakeview and Gentilly Woods had a lot in common. Both sat below sea level on reclaimed swampland near Lake Pontchartrain. They boasted similar post-World War II housing stock.

Lakeview was almost entirely white, and Gentilly Woods was more than two-thirds Black. Lakeview residents had higher incomes, and their homes commanded higher prices.

Both neighborhoods were swamped when the floodwalls along New Orleans’ drainage canals buckled after Katrina. Water reached the eaves of many homes.

Road Home appraised the average Lakeview home at $326,000 and the average repair cost at $286,000. With a grant based on the repair cost, the average homeowner received 83% of what was needed to rebuild, according to the news organizations’ analysis.

In Gentilly Woods, the average property was valued at $121,000, with $203,000 in rebuilding costs. With a grant based on the home’s value, the average homeowner ended up with just 73% of what was needed to rebuild.

Among those served well by Road Home was Lakeview retiree Rita Legrand, 86. She had to gut her modest ranch home. But she was determined to rebuild.

Rita Legrand lives on Louis XIV Street in the Lakeview area of New Orleans. (hris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

With $53,000 from insurance in hand, Legrand applied for a Road Home grant in fall 2006. Road Home estimated her home’s value at $320,000 and her repair costs at $188,000. Her grant, based on repair costs minus what she’d already gotten from insurance, was $135,000.

The grant and insurance proceeds covered her entire loss, as it was supposed to, and by April 2007 she had completely rebuilt. “The program worked great for me,” she said.

The experience was quite different for Cynthia and Charles Heisser of Gentilly Woods. Like Legrand, the Heissers had a small ranch house, and they had a similar repair estimate: $190,000. But their initial grant was just $32,000.

Charles Heisser, a 90-year-old Korean War veteran, still has the documents explaining how Road Home arrived at that figure.

Program officials estimated the pre-storm value of their home at $83,000. The state subtracted $40,000 in insurance proceeds, which their lender had made them use to pay off their mortgage, and $10,500 in FEMA aid they had received for living expenses.

Charles Heisser appealed, arguing Road Home had failed to factor in tens of thousands of dollars in improvements they had made before the storm. Their home was reappraised for $135,000.

That increased their grant to about $83,500. Even then, their total compensation including insurance and FEMA grants was $135,000 — just 70% of Road Home’s original estimate of what it would take to make their home livable.

The Heissers spent some of the Road Home grant to convert their garage into living quarters so they could move out of the FEMA trailer in their front yard. For most of the next 10 years, the house sat with a new roof and an unfinished interior where they hung laundry.

Cynthia Heisser couldn’t help but notice how differently things went in mostly white parts of New Orleans.

“It was unjust, more unjust to the Blacks than it was to the whites,” she said. People used to ask her, she recalled, “‘Oh, you don’t have your house yet?’ Or ‘You’re not in your home yet?’ And we’d say, ‘It isn’t because we're not fighting for it. We are.’”

A nonprofit called Rebuilding Together New Orleans eventually provided labor and materials to help finish repairs. The Heissers finally moved back into their house in 2018 — 13 years after the storm.

“Victims of Hurricane Katrina Were Being Victimized Again”

From the beginning, Road Home had a problem. On the one hand, thousands of residents desperately needed rebuilding aid. On the other, Road Home, like many disaster aid programs, had guardrails to make sure people didn’t end up better off than before the storm.

Charles and Cynthia Heisser stand in their dining room next to family photos that they framed in a window that was removed from their flooded house after Hurricane Katrina. The Gentilly Woods homeowners didn’t receive enough from Road Home to cover all of their Hurricane Katrina damage costs, but their house has been restored thanks in part to the work of Rebuilding Together New Orleans. (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

The idea was that “it would be illegitimate for somebody whose house only had a market value of $100,000 to get $120,000, even if that was how much it would cost to repair,” said Andy Horowitz, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and author of “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.”

When people complained that using home values to calculate grants would help some people more than others, officials argued that pre-storm value had been part of the formula from the start. Besides, Leger said at the time, it was required by the federal government, and there wasn’t enough time or money to change the rules.

In a June 2006 interview shortly after the program was approved, Louisiana Recovery Authority chair Norman Francis dismissed the very problem many poor homeowners would soon face — that the cost of rebuilding could far exceed the value of their homes.

“That money is going to cover the difference between your damages and how much insurance you got,” Francis said. “Now, if you had a $50,000 home, not likely that you had $200,000 worth of damage. So the formula has to take into consideration your home value.”

A family member said Francis, now 91, was unavailable to comment for this story.

Melanie Ehrlich, who lived in Baltimore while her Gentilly home was rebuilt, said she quickly saw the problem with the formula. She founded a grassroots organization, the Citizens’ Road Home Action Team, and became a thorn in the side of Road Home officials.

Melanie Ehrlich stands in her yard in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

“It was crystal clear how very unfair the program was in its design,” said Ehrlich, a Tulane University genetics professor. “What I saw is that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were being victimized again.”

In October 2006, shortly after Road Home was launched, Ehrlich met with officials in charge of the recovery and argued their formula for calculating grants was unfair. She followed up with examples. Basing grants on the pre-storm value of homes, she wrote, would “justifiably anger the middle and lower economic classes, or, more specifically, everyone who does not have an expensive house or lot.”

As homeowners received their grant letters over the course of 2007, hundreds showed up at Finger’s low-income law clinic at Loyola University. She attended dozens of public meetings in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Washington to ask officials to fix the inequity baked into the calculations.

In August 2009, Finger told a congressional committee that the formula disproportionately hurt Black residents because their homes tended to be valued for less. “Road Home’s grant formula design assured that some homeowners would not receive sufficient rebuilding funds,” she said.

Six state officials involved with the recovery effort said they didn’t ignore these complaints. But they noted that they were building a program of unprecedented scope and dealing with unforeseen problems, all while under intense pressure to get money to homeowners quickly.

Birds fly off a rebuilt section of the 17th Street Canal floodwall in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. The wall collapsed here during Hurricane Katrina. Homes stood in the green space before the storm. (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

Leger said he took Ehrlich’s complaint about pre-storm value to HUD officials and asked to use higher repair estimates instead. “We were told no,” he said.

Soon after the program launched, state officials said, they made changes that increased grants for all applicants: factoring land value into appraisals, using the highest of several appraisal methods and increasing rates for repair estimates.

They originally envisioned an affordable loan program to fill any gaps between grants and the actual costs of rebuilding, but it never got off the ground.

In 2007, they created another grant for less affluent homeowners whose initial grants didn’t meet their damage estimates. That enabled the state to meet a HUD requirement to pay at least half of grant money to low- and moderate-income households.

Three years later, after Black homeowners sued the head of the LRA and HUD alleging the program was discriminatory, Francis said, “That did not pass on my radar screen. If it had, I would have questioned why the program wasn’t treating people equitably.”

Francis was a revered civil rights leader and longtime president of Xavier University, a historically Black school, and Finger said she does not believe he and the other architects of Road Home intended it to be discriminatory.

Nonetheless, Finger said, “It is very difficult to look at a system that’s trying to roll out that much money as quickly as possible and to not do it in a way that replicates historic, systemic inequities.”

$297,000 in Damage, $3,468 in Aid

The plaintiffs in the suit included Almarie Ford, who said the hurricane shutters that adorn her New Orleans East home are all she ever got from Road Home.

A month after Katrina, Ford returned to find her Kingswood subdivision in ruins. The now-73-year-old social worker recalled walking into her house and gagging on the smell of black mold. She turned around, locked the front door and left, unsure what to do next.

Like many homeowners, she expected significant government assistance, but it never came. Road Home officials assessed her damage at about $297,000 but based her grant on her home’s value, $150,000. They gave her just $3,468 after subtracting about $146,500 in insurance payments.

Almarie Ford at her home in New Orleans East (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

If the grant had been based on rebuilding costs, she would have received the maximum Road Home grant of $150,000. Instead, Ford took out a loan and exhausted her savings.

“I was shocked,” Ford said of the size of her grant. “But what could you do? You could complain that you only got $3,500. But they said, ‘Well, those are the rules.’”

She wasn’t willing to accept what she described as an injustice without a fight. So she went to the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

In 2008, the housing center had joined with PolicyLink, a California nonprofit, to collect examples that showed Road Home’s formula disproportionately hurt poor communities and people of color.

Ironically, PolicyLink had teamed with the LRA two years earlier to present the state’s initial recovery plan. In a sign of just how unexpected the inequities were, a PolicyLink representative spoke at an LRA board meeting in April 2006 and “applauded the board for the design of the housing action plan,” according to meeting minutes.

James Perry, the head of the housing center, said his organization examined two nearly identical homes: four bedrooms, two bathrooms, brick construction. Each had flooded with 6 feet of water and had damages estimated at more than $200,000. But one house was in a white neighborhood and the other in a Black neighborhood.

Each homeowner received a grant based on their home value. Perry said the white homeowner got $150,000; the Black homeowner, $90,000.

Perry said his organization gave that information to Road Home and HUD, but neither took immediate action. Perry said he was shocked by what he perceived to be their lack of interest. “It wasn’t easy to remedy, but it seemed to me they would want to.”

In the resulting lawsuit, attorneys cited 2000 census data to prove their case: About 93% of Black-owned homes in New Orleans were valued at less than $150,000, compared to 55% of white-owned homes.

The homeowners secured an important victory before a federal district judge in 2010. The next year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned that ruling and sent the case back to district court, rejecting claims the grant formula was discriminatory.

The appeals court ruled that any gap in grants for Black families had been eliminated when, after the lawsuit had been filed, the state removed a $50,000 cap on the additional grant for low-income homeowners.

But the news outlets’ analysis shows the appeals court’s assessment was wrong. The additional grants did help homeowners in lower-income, nonwhite areas in New Orleans, most of which are majority Black. Thanks in part to the program, the average grant to a Black homeowner in Louisiana was slightly larger than the average grant overall, according to state records.

But in the end, the additional grants merely boosted the average share of damage covered by grants and insurance from about 51% to about 70% in those parts of New Orleans. That meant poor, nonwhite areas ultimately fared about the same as middle-income nonwhite areas, but not as well as even the poorest white ones.

The analysis backs up what U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy wrote in 2010 in a preliminary ruling: “The Court does not take lightly that some African American homeowners received lower awards than they would have if their homes were in predominantly white neighborhoods.”

Louisiana and HUD “offered no legitimate reason for taking pre-storm home values into account” when calculating grants, he wrote.

While the appeals court accused plaintiffs of cherry-picking their data by focusing on majority-Black New Orleans, the news outlets’ analysis shows the disparity between wealthy and poor neighborhoods statewide was similar to that in New Orleans.

Three months after the appeals court ruling, Louisiana and HUD settled the lawsuit. The state agreed to put $62 million aside for yet another program, this one for people who made too much money to qualify for additional grants but needed more help.

It was a drop in the bucket. According to a state analysis in 2010, 25,000 New Orleans homeowners received a total of $1.2 billion less from the Road Home because their grants were calculated using pre-storm value rather than the cost of damage.

Despite being a plaintiff in the suit, Ford said she didn’t receive anything from the settlement. Fewer than 500 people did.

It took more than three years for her to complete repairs. During that time, she rented an apartment in Baton Rouge and continued to pay her mortgage, a strain that she said nearly broke her.

“It didn’t work for the people it was supposed to work for,” Ford said of the recovery program. “None of the people that I know in New Orleans East actually got any Road Home money. A lot of people, especially people who are more elderly, they just didn’t come back.”

Silence in the Seventh Ward; McMansions in Lakeview

One morning in September, Lynette Boutte picked up a piece of artwork in her Seventh Ward beauty salon. In the middle was a photo illustration of hundreds of Black people near the intersection of North Claiborne and Orleans avenues.

It depicted Super Sunday in 2003, two years before the storm. Boutte gazed wistfully, as if she could still hear the calls of the Mardi Gras Indians that day. Since Katrina, there hasn’t been such a raucous Super Sunday celebration in her neighborhood.

Music was once the lifeblood of the Seventh Ward, a working-class Creole neighborhood near the French Quarter. It has produced musical greats such as Jelly Roll Morton and John Boutte, one of her nine siblings.

After school, the sound of children playing trumpets would echo through the streets. In the evenings, musicians would fill her house for jam sessions.

The Seventh Ward doesn’t sing like it used to, she said. “There are no children in this neighborhood anymore.”

Top: Lynette Boutte walks in front of her house in the Seventh Ward neighborhood of New Orleans on Dec. 1. Boutte’s roof was damaged by a hurricane in 2021. Bottom: Boutte, center, shows Rebuilding Together New Orleans staff the damage to her house. (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

Boutte didn’t receive a dime from Road Home to rebuild, she said, because the state lowballed her property value and repair costs.

It took her nearly a decade, but she managed to rebuild with the help of relatives and church volunteers. Many weren’t so lucky.

Families who had lived in the neighborhood for generations were unable to return because they couldn’t afford to fix their homes. In the two decades after 2000, the number of children in the Seventh Ward dropped by more than a third, according to the Data Center, a community research nonprofit. The Black population in the Seventh Ward decreased by about 19 percentage points.

When asked how much responsibility the Road Home program shares for these changes, Boutte didn’t hesitate. “They are responsible for it all,” she said.

William Stoudt, executive director of Rebuilding Together New Orleans, which focuses on the Seventh Ward, said over the past 15 years his staffers have witnessed many people living in “completely substandard conditions.” Road Home’s grant formula is partly to blame, he said.

Residents who got shortchanged had to cut corners, often hiring subpar contractors and using cheaper materials, he said. Some abandoned their properties because they couldn’t afford to rebuild; others sold them to predatory developers at below-market prices.

“Most of the homeowners that we help work their entire lives for 11 bucks an hour at a hotel in the Quarter cleaning rooms day after day and have no savings,” he said. “They never had a chance.”

The community is now pockmarked with empty lots and abandoned homes. Nearly 1 in 4 Seventh Ward houses were vacant in 2020, a 51% increase compared to two decades prior, according to the Data Center.

In Lakeview, where Stoudt grew up, the post-Katrina recovery looks dramatically different.

Homes being built on Bellaire Drive in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans, where a historical marker explains the 17th Street Canal floodwall failure. The wall collapsed here in Hurricane Katrina. (Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

Stoudt remembers standing in his street three weeks after the storm amid uprooted trees and abandoned cars covered in dried mud. The waterlogged front door of his family home had swollen shut. To get inside, his parents climbed a ladder and went in through a second-story window.

It was the silence, though, that haunted him. Stoudt said it seemed as if everything had died. “It was the quietest place you’ve ever been in your life.”

That silence was soon replaced by the sound of hammers and saws. His parents’ flood insurance policy covered the cost of repairs, so they didn’t need a Road Home grant. Construction began almost immediately. Within a year, their home had been rebuilt.

Today, he said, Lakeview is largely unrecognizable. People didn’t just rebuild, they expanded — replacing their ranch houses with multistory, modern homes.

“Now it’s McMansions, 4,000 square feet, double-lot monsters,” Stoudt said. “If you were in the right neighborhood, you got what you needed to rebuild.”

About the Data

To evaluate the impacts of the Road Home program, The Times-Picayune, ProPublica and WWL-TV obtained a novel dataset of more than 130,000 grants from the Louisiana Division of Administration. The anonymized dataset included, for each grant recipient in the state, the grant amounts, the pre-storm value of the property and any insurance and FEMA payouts. The analysis was conducted on a subset of 91,771 rebuilding grants that had valid grant and damage amounts, were not part of a lawsuit over errors in grant calculations and did not fall under a limited number of other circumstances that could yield incorrect information. Our analysis focused on 30,188 records from Orleans Parish and 5,911 from St. Bernard Parish.

For our analysis of demographics and income, we used data from Summary File 3 in the 2000 U.S. Census, downloaded from IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota. This dataset contains survey responses from the longform census questionnaire, which was sent to approximately one in six households, and is available on the block group level. In the city of New Orleans, additional analysis using 2000 census data was conducted using Neighborhood Statistical Areas provided by the New Orleans Data Center, a nonprofit research center that defines those boundaries. Any use of “neighborhoods” refers to these boundaries. The word “areas” refers to census block groups.

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY

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

In November, we published a story about three New York City teenagers who struggled to get mental health services that the city’s public schools are legally obligated to provide. We identified one of those teenagers by her full name and the second by his first name only. For the third teenager, we agreed to use just his middle name and — unlike the other two — to refrain from naming a parent at all.

We followed families’ stated preferences for their children’s privacy. But in doing so, we wrestled with difficult questions about how to best serve readers and the kids we were writing about.

The standard in journalism is to identify sources by their full names whenever possible. Readers deserve to know who’s talking, particularly when a source is accusing a person or a public system of wrongdoing. And it’s part of our job, as reporters, to demonstrate why we deserve a reader’s trust. Especially in investigations, credibility is the most important currency we have, and we try to earn it by being as transparent about our reporting as we possibly can.

In writing about kids with mental health challenges, however, things get complicated. Over the year that I’ve been working on this series about access to mental health care for kids in New York, I’ve found myself writing about some of the most intimate, painful moments in the lives of people who aren’t old enough to give informed consent.

In many cases, I’ve been able to speak directly to the kids I’m writing about, on or off the record. In other cases, that wasn’t possible — either because the kids were in crisis, or away in a residential program, or just because they were so tired of the whole subject that they had no interest in rehashing it with me. Young people in the mental health system are often required to discuss their worst memories — or the worst things they’ve ever done — with what can seem like an endless succession of intake specialists, new therapists, school principals, deans, probation officers and so on. There’s a limit to how many times anyone wants to tell the story of how they attempted suicide or the time they attacked their mother.

Reporting for my most recent article posed an additional ethical dilemma: The family asking for the highest level of anonymity — that of the teenager we identified by just his middle name — was also the family with the greatest financial resources, a fact that was crucial to the story. In granting their request, were we contributing to the idea that the kid with the most money was the most deserving of privacy or that he had more to lose? Were we implying that a wealthy family should be more ashamed of mental illness than a poor one?

In the end, we stuck with the policy we’ve used from the beginning of the project — which is that we allow parents and guardians to decide how identifiable or anonymous their children will be.

Parents’ decisions have often been fraught with worry: How will their kids feel seeing personal information published online? Will their family be publicly defined by what we write? Will the story pop up in a Google search if a future college admissions counselor or employer looks up their child’s name? Will their in-laws see it?

Some parents also worry about retaliation. The universe of care for children with very serious mental health challenges is small, and the sickest kids are often in the physical custody of outside caregivers. What if families need to put their children back in a hospital or school that they’ve publicly criticized?

There was one thing, though, that every child and parent I’ve spoken to has said about why they decided to talk to me: They all wanted to make the system better. Kids in mental health crises face a nearly universal set of problems, including underfunded programs, waitlists for services, constant staff turnover and inadequate care. And yet those problems are all but invisible to the outside world. Without exception, the kids and parents who appeared in these stories decided that they were willing to compromise their privacy in the hope that some other family wouldn’t have to endure what theirs did.

“I’m just hoping that someone will take this on — some legislator, some oversight committee, someone will really take this on,” said Tamara Begel, a Long Island parent who spent many hours this year helping me to understand her yearslong fight to get mental health care for her son. “When politicians just hear the numbers, ‘Oh it’s hundreds or thousands of kids sitting in waiting rooms or psych ERs, waiting for beds,’ it’s too easy to say ‘aww’ and move on. I want them to see that it’s real.”

When I first wrote about Begel’s family, she chose to identify herself and her son by their middle names. Shortly after the story was published, however, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, held a hearing about the lack of access to mental health care across the state, and Begel decided to testify publicly. Since then, she’s become more outspoken in her advocacy for Long Island kids and families.

But the choice to be public with her name and story remains difficult, Begel told me recently. “I’m still not 100% comfortable. I still wake up at night wondering if I did the right thing, or if it will have a negative effect on my child. Only time will tell.”

by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi

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

As more workers speak up about being exposed to asbestos in chlorine plants, public health leaders are questioning whether these facilities should be allowed to be in a special program that shields them from scrutiny by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

OSHA’s Star Program, one of its so-called Voluntary Protection Programs, exempts plants with model safety systems from random, unannounced inspections. At least four of the eight chlorine factories that currently use asbestos are in the program, according to OSHA’s website.

“On its face, a company whose business model relies on using asbestos does not have an exceptional health and safety management system,” the American Public Health Association’s Occupational Health and Safety Section wrote in a letter to OSHA last week. “There are alternative processes available and used by (chlorine) plants in the U.S. and in other nations.”

Asbestos has long been known to cause deadly cancers and a chronic lung disease called asbestosis. Its tiny fibers are extremely potent; public health experts say there is no safe level of exposure.

While the vast majority of industries that once used the carcinogen no longer do, two chemical companies, OxyChem and Olin Corp., continue to import hundreds of tons annually for use in their oldest chlorine plants. They use the material as a protective coating on large metal screens that separate volatile chemicals.

The companies say they use asbestos under strict controls and that workers are rarely, if ever, exposed. But workers at an OxyChem plant in Niagara Falls, New York, told ProPublica that asbestos dust hung in the air and accumulated in some places until it was inches thick. Workers at an Olin plant near Mobile, Alabama, said they had scraped dry asbestos off the beams and floors without any protective gear. Workers at three other plants said they, too, were concerned about the potential for asbestos exposure at their workplaces.

The Niagara Falls facility was part of OSHA’s Star Program from 1996 until its closure late last year, government records show. The plant outside of Mobile participated from 2001 until 2015.

In its letter to OSHA, the public health association said it was “alarming for us to read the testimony from former workers about the magnitude of asbestos exposure” at the site in Niagara Falls.

The group also raised concerns about the plant’s management using its status in the Star Program “to game the system.” Plants in the program know when most OSHA inspections will take place. Former employees at the Niagara Falls plant told ProPublica they spent months preparing for such visits, and that work in certain parts of the plant came to a halt when OSHA inspectors were on campus. (Even still, inspectors found asbestos on the floor and covering equipment in 2011, records show.)

The letter, which included a request for a meeting, was signed by three members of the public health association’s leadership team: Angela Laramie, an epidemiologist with expertise in occupational health; Celeste Monforton, a lecturer in public health at Texas State University who previously worked for OSHA; and Mary Miller, an occupational health nurse who retired from the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries.

OSHA told ProPublica it was reviewing the correspondence but declined to comment further on its content. After this story was published, the agency provided the following statement: “Health and safety are OSHA’s top concern, and we are focused on improving our efforts and looking at ways to protect workers from occupational exposure to asbestos moving forward.”

OxyChem has repeatedly said it complies with federal regulations. “Dating back to the early 1970s, there have been no violations issued by OSHA related to our handling and use of asbestos in any of our chlor-alkali production operations,” the company said in a statement, which it has provided to ProPublica several times.

Olin has not returned calls or emails from ProPublica.

Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary of labor, said it was unlikely OSHA would remove certain chlorine plants from the Star Program strictly because they use asbestos-dependent technology. “There are a lot of companies that handle dangerous materials,” he said.

But Barab said OSHA had the power to drop in on plants where workers had complained or even develop a special program to look at hazards specific to the chlorine industry.

“OSHA should be looking at these (plants), without a doubt,” he said. “They should have been doing it before, but especially now.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who has been working on legislation that would ban asbestos, echoed that sentiment. “None of this is a one-off safety lapse,” he said in a statement. “It’s systemic throughout the industry and it’s time for OSHA and safety regulators to step up so not one more American falls victim to this preventable hazard.”

OSHA declined to say whether it would investigate any of the plants that use asbestos in response to ProPublica’s reporting.

Update, Dec. 9, 2022: This story was updated to include a statement provided by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after the story was published.

by Peter Elkind

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

Beyond developing their camping skills, participating in a food drive to aid the hungry and donating pajamas for seniors, Girl Scouts across America this year were offered a new way to earn a special uniform patch: learning about the wonders of 5G cellphone technology and, in some cases, promoting it.

The opportunity came courtesy of Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications giant, which sponsored the “Ericsson Limited Edition 5G & IoT” (Internet of Things) patch program. The program, still available on at least one Girl Scout website, targets all age levels, from Daisies (kindergarten-age Scouts) to Ambassadors (those in high school), with an array of activities intended to “introduce Girl Scouts to 5G and the Internet of Things.”

These include watching “Explaining 5G to Kids,” a five-minute video featuring Mats, a bearded Ericsson employee, as he chats with Siofra, Freya and two other squirming but charming children, who speak English with what sound like hints of Swedish accents. Mats explains that 5G is a “new technology for the mobile phone. So everything will be much better.” He explains that the technology could allow the kids’ toys to connect. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” he asks. “This is what Ericsson is doing,” Mats explains. “This is what 5G can do.”

Other recommended activities sound more like do-it-yourself advertising. High school-age members on one Girl Scout site are encouraged to “Find a cell tower and make a video explaining how 5G would change the world for you. Share the video you made with a friend or fellow Girl Scout. Or, with an adult’s permission, post your video on social media and tag @gsheartofnj, @ericsson, #girlscoutstalk5G.”

And Scouts of all ages are invited to “discuss with your troop or an adult how mmWave spectrum is safe and does not cause harm to our health.”

The Ericsson “Limited Edition 5G & IoT” patch offered by Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey (Image courtesy of GSHNJ and Ericsson)

Some health experts, who are concerned that wireless radiation poses a health risk to children, criticize the Ericsson program as an improper and inaccurate form of industry marketing. “Anytime corporations advertise directly to children, I’m very suspicious,” Dr. Jerome Paulson, a pediatrician and emeritus professor in George Washington University’s department of environmental and occupational health, told ProPublica. “It would be like Exxon Mobil sponsoring a patch on climate change.” Paulson previously chaired the Council on Environmental Health at the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has criticized the Federal Communications Commission’s wireless-radiation standards for failing to protect children.

The Environmental Health Trust, an activist nonprofit which first spotted the Ericsson program, recently sent a letter of protest to the Girl Scouts’ national office, saying the patch materials “misleadingly state that 5G networks and cellphones are safe,” and urging their removal from all Girl Scout websites. The ten signers included “former Girl Scouts and parents of Scouts,” the chair of the obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences department at Yale’s medical school, the former president of Microsoft Canada and a Swedish scientist who has conducted influential epidemiological studies on cellphone radiation.

In an emailed statement, Vidya Krishnan, global chief learning officer for Ericsson, who sits on the Girl Scouts National Board, defended the program: “The Ericsson Girl Scouts 5G patch has the sole purpose of educating our next generation about the latest wireless technologies that are shaping their lives and their future. Educational awareness is the only intention and impact.” (In October, the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas honored Krishnan as a “Woman of Distinction” at its annual fundraising luncheon, where a “presenting sponsorship” went for $100,000 and individual tickets sold for $300.)

The Girl Scouts, of course, are hardly strangers to the world of commerce. They have long been renowned for their annual cookie sales — the Scouts call it “the largest girl-led entrepreneurial program in the world” — which raise about $800 million annually for local activities. Girls are eligible for special “Cookie Business” badges by honing their sales pitches and tapping into market research.

And the Girl Scouts have offered other patches sponsored by corporations. Among them: Fidelity Investments, which sponsors a “girls’ guide to managing money.” One Texas chapter offered a patch for “Fluor Engineering Month.”

The Ericsson 5G patch was first made available in March 2021 through the website of the Northeast Texas council of the Girl Scouts. Ericsson’s U.S. headquarters is in Plano, Texas, and the company, which boasts of being “the leading provider of 5G network equipment in the U.S.,” has been involved with the area’s Girl Scouts program for several years. Ericsson has focused on promoting interest in science, technology, engineering and math careers, known as STEM, where girls are historically underrepresented. (The company’s Facebook page includes photos of hardhat-wearing Girl Scouts on a 2018 field trip to an Ericsson training center with mock cell towers and transmitters.) A second Ericsson executive serves on the local Girl Scouts board, and, according to public disclosures, Ericsson has donated more than $100,000 annually to the northeast Texas council for the past three years.

Ashley Crowe, chief program officer for the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas, said 697 Girl Scouts have obtained the Ericsson 5G patch. Crowe praised Ericsson’s support for the Girl Scouts, saying, “I for one would never feel exploited by Ericsson,” but she added that she was unaware of health concerns about children’s exposure to cellphone radiation. “I had never even heard about that,” she said. “This has not been brought to our attention at all.”

After ProPublica’s inquiries about the matter, the patch program was removed from the Texas council’s website. (A spokesperson for the council asserted that “the patch program was removed from our site at the beginning of October,” explaining that “the Ericsson 5G IoT patch program was funded by Ericsson as a one-year optional program for local Girl Scouts and concluded September 30, 2022.” However, a ProPublica reporter saw the patch on the Texas site as late as Nov. 21.) It remains available on the website of a New Jersey Girls Scouts council.

A spokesperson for Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey submitted a statement on behalf of its CEO, Natasha Hemmings, asserting that “the safety and well-being of our Girl Scouts is and always has been our top priority.” The statement continued: “In line with our mission, we partner with numerous organizations and corporations, including Ericsson, to expand access to education and to empower girls to become leaders of tomorrow.”

The national office for Girl Scouts of the USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Scientific concern about whether cellphone radiation poses a human health hazard, including increased risk of cancer, fertility issues or other problems, has been rising in recent years. (ProPublica recently explored this issue in detail.) The research includes a massive U.S. government study that in 2018 found “clear evidence” that cellphone radiation caused cancer in lab animals. Some researchers have also warned of special risk to children, citing studies showing that their developing brains absorb more radiation because of their thinner, smaller skulls. The American Academy of Pediatrics has echoed this concern, urging the FCC to revise its exposure standards, saying they don’t adequately protect children.

More than 20 foreign governments have adopted protective measures or recommended precautions regarding wireless radiation, with many of them focused on limiting exposure to children. The European Environment Agency offers similar guidance, noting: “There is sufficient evidence of risk to advise people, especially children, not to place the handset against their heads.”

The wireless industry and U.S. regulators, including the FCC and Food and Drug Administration, deny that there is any proven health risk for anyone. They dispute that the technology poses any special hazard to children and don’t advocate any precautions. The FCC’s “Wireless Devices and Health Concerns” page, for example, notes that “some parties” recommend safety measures, “even though no scientific evidence currently establishes a definitive link between wireless device use and cancer or other illnesses.” It then states, in bold: “The FCC does not endorse the need for these practices.”

by Eli Hager and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, and Hannah Rappleye, NBC News, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

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.

PHOENIX — In 2015, Nydea Richards decided to move her family to the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, in search of lower crime and better weather than in her hometown of Milwaukee. She was pregnant at the time.

Before arriving here, Richards, like most Americans, never thought of child protective services as having a major presence in people’s lives, unless they’ve committed some sort of clear-cut child abuse. As a Black mother, she was more concerned about her kids encountering the police someday.

But within months, she found herself being investigated by the Arizona Department of Child Safety — based on the initial result of a drug test administered to her newborn daughter at the hospital, according to DCS case records she shared with ProPublica and NBC News.

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It is not hospital policy to test for drugs after all births, but staff told her that she and her child were being screened because she was from out of town, she said. Richards, who tested negative for substances herself, believes the reason was the color of her skin.

DCS then prohibited her from being alone with her baby for five days while a caseworker interrogated her about her marital status, whether she received food stamps and how she usually handles stress, the records show. The investigator also inspected her other six children’s bodies and questioned them for hours about their chores, their meals, their mom’s employment and more.

Then, the department learned that there had been a false positive on the test and deemed the case unfounded, according to the records.

“They never explained or apologized,” Richards said.

Just months later, Richards, a case manager for a behavioral health care company, was investigated again, when she sought medical care after her daughter fell off a couch. That allegation of child maltreatment, too, was unfounded, according to a DCS spokesperson.

Nydea Richards with three of her children in Phoenix

The department declined to comment further on the two cases.

Richards now feels intense dread when any of her children have even a minor injury or come down sick, fearing that DCS will show up again if she takes them to the doctor.

And in the years since her own experiences with Arizona’s child welfare system, she said, two of her family members in Phoenix, as well as a neighbor and a client at her job, have also endured these investigations of their parenting. All of them are Black.

From 2015 to 2019, the last full year of federal child welfare statistics available before the pandemic, DCS investigated the family lives of 1 of every 3 Black children in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and home to Phoenix, according to an analysis by ProPublica and NBC News of data obtained from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Last year, a study published by the National Academy of Sciences used similar data to project that by the time Black children in Maricopa County turn 18, there’s a 63% chance that they will see their parents investigated by child services, the highest rate of any of the 20 largest counties in the nation.

Put another way, more Black children in metro Phoenix will go through a child maltreatment investigation than won’t.

That’s significantly more likely than a Black teen being stopped by the police — an issue that has gained far more attention in recent years — according to multiple studies and interviews with criminal justice data experts.

Note: Figures are based on the risk of each event occurring before a child turns 18, according to estimates from a study by researchers at Rutgers and Duke universities. (Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Over the past year, ProPublica and NBC News have interviewed more than 30 Black parents across the Phoenix region who’ve faced a child welfare case, as well as several of their children and an additional nine teenagers who experienced DCS investigations.

Some of the parents were working single dads or moms, like Richards, many of them living in the historically Black neighborhood of South Phoenix. Some were middle-class couples in the cactus-lined gated communities that dot suburbs like Mesa and Glendale. Some were adoptive parents, or extended family members caring for a child.

Almost all described a system so omnipresent among Black families that it has created a kind of communitywide dread: of that next knock on the door, of that next warrantless search of their home. And many expressed disbelief that it was so easy for the state government to enter their family realm and potentially remove their kids from them.

Black families and their advocates said DCS’ ubiquity does not just take the form of unnecessary investigations in which racial bias may have played a role, as Richards believed happened in her case. It’s also a product, in some cases, of public policy choices in Arizona that take a punitive rather than preventative approach toward Black parents, many of whom are struggling under the legacy of racism, a lack of inherited wealth and a slashed social safety net.

The state — the last in the nation to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday, in 1992 — spends a majority of its welfare budget on DCS investigations rather than on direct assistance to families in need, as ProPublica reported last year.

A residential development in South Phoenix, a historically Black neighborhood in the city. Many Black families first moved to the area as a result of redlining and racial covenants that blocked them from renting or owning property elsewhere.

These priorities are borne out in the data.

Only 2% of children in Maricopa County whose families were accused of child maltreatment from 2015 to 2019 were ultimately determined or suspected by caseworkers to be victims of any form of physical or sexual abuse following an investigation, one of the lowest rates among large counties in the U.S.

But 15% allegedly experienced neglect, a term encompassing parenting problems typically associated with poverty, including a lack of decent housing, child care, food, clothing, medical care or mental health treatment. The category also includes alcohol and drug use, which numerous studies have found are more policed but no more common among Black or low-income people than other groups.

Roughly 20% of Black people in Maricopa County are living below the poverty line, compared to about 13% of all county residents, though having money should not be thought of as a requirement for good parenting, family advocates said.

In an interview, the director of DCS, Mike Faust, said the data used for this article is based on a stretch of time, 2015 through 2019, that began with a caseload crisis for the department. Over that period, he said, the agency made sweeping changes, including improving its intake and risk assessment tools in order to reduce subjective decision-making and unnecessary investigations.

“We’ve gone from what I think most people would describe as the worst-performing child protection agency in the country to one that — I don’t know if you’ll ever have a high-performer child protection agency, given the nature of the work we do — but it’s drastically different,” said Faust, who is white and has led the agency since 2019.

Yet the most recent available federal data through September 2020 shows that while it is true that DCS has reduced the overall number of families it looks into statewide, the decline did not improve — and in fact worsened — the racial disparity.

Although 7,400 fewer white children were the subject of investigations completed from the 2016 to 2020 fiscal years, the number of Black kids whose parents were investigated dropped by less than 100. (Some children did not have a race identified.)

“It didn’t have an immediate impact on just African American children,” Faust acknowledged. “The commitment that I make is to continue to stay engaged as an organization. And trust me, these are some challenging conversations to be in. It’s been difficult. But you’ve got to keep coming back to the table regardless of, at times, that people share that raw emotion.”

Faust, a conservative Republican with a private-sector background, may be out of a job by next spring. The election last month of Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, as Arizona governor likely means that DCS will have a new leader and possibly a new approach to racial disproportionality in the coming years.

In a statement, Joe Wolf, a spokesperson for Hobbs’ transition, pointed out that her career has included stints working with homeless youth and helping to run one of the largest domestic violence shelters in the country, giving her perspective on what affects Arizona’s most vulnerable. Wolf also said that as the governor-elect prepares to take office, her team is developing plans to improve the way the state provides social services, including “addressing the racial disparities that have plagued the system for so long.”

Still, Black community leaders in Phoenix continue to have concerns, saying that it has been challenging to effectively advocate for reforms across both Republican and Democratic administrations.

For one thing, the metro area’s Black community — just 7% of its population — is sparse and spread out compared to that of similarly large U.S. cities. That makes it hard to organize around this common experience to make DCS a pressing political issue and hold its officials accountable.

Richards’ daughter at the family’s apartment

What’s more, sharing that you were investigated by child services remains more stigmatizing in many families than saying you’ve been stopped by the police.

As a result, some local leaders said it took them a while to realize just how pervasive DCS’ presence is.

Janelle Wood, founder and president/CEO of Phoenix’s Black Mothers Forum, said that when she started her community organization in 2016, she thought its members would mainly be focused on police violence and the criminalization of Black youth, which they have been to an extent. “But what kept coming up at meetings was DCS,” she said, noting that the confidentiality of the gatherings allowed for these conversations. “The most heart-wrenching stories — so many mothers had them.”

Kenneth Smith, principal of a Phoenix alternative high school and a community organizer who works with the local chapter of the NAACP and a group of nonprofits in the city, said he doesn’t usually talk about this issue openly due to the stigma, even though he knows of several people who’ve had DCS cases.

The statistics identified by ProPublica and NBC News, he said, are “like turning on the lights, and all of us are now standing in the room together saying, ‘What? You too?’”

“It Becomes a Generational Curse”

This year, ProPublica and NBC News have been investigating child welfare in the U.S.

What reporters have found is that child protective services agencies investigate the home lives of roughly 3.5 million American children each year, opening refrigerators and closets and searching kids’ bodies in almost every case. Yet they determine there was physical or sexual abuse in only about 5% of these investigations.

And while Phoenix is an outlier, the racial disproportionality of this system is a national problem.

In Maricopa County, Black children experienced child welfare investigations at one of the highest rates among large counties nationally, and nearly three times the rate of their white peers, from 2015 to 2019.

But throughout the country, investigations were more pervasive among Black families. And in many smaller counties, the rates were even higher than in the Phoenix area.

Note: Figures are the number of children investigated as a percentage of population from 2015 to 2019, for all U.S. counties with at least 5,000 children of each race. (Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica. Data Source: National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect.)

Matthew Stewart, the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church, First Institutional Baptist, joined DCS as a case manager in 2009. He did so in part because he had an interest in social justice and youth mentorship from his upbringing.

But in 2018, Stewart, by then a training supervisor, came across an internal agency spreadsheet showing a large racial disparity in Arizona’s foster care population, which mainly consists of children removed from their families following investigations. He hadn’t fully absorbed the problem until then.

He was flooded with shame.

Stewart quit two years later, after deciding he couldn’t achieve meaningful change from within the department. He has since founded a community organization, Our Sister Our Brother, which advocates helping families rather than separating them.

Generational poverty and the resulting trauma within families have been “centuries in the making,” he said. Are parents supposed to believe that after DCS takes custody of their children, “these things will be solved?”

“I simply don’t think DCS is the agency to do this,” he said.

One of the parents whom Stewart has partnered with is Tyra Smith, of nearby Mesa, who now works for his growing group as a parent advocate.

Tyra Smith with three of her sons at their apartment complex in suburban Mesa, Arizona

In 2020, Smith left her four sons (triplets who were 7 as well as a 4-year-old) in her apartment for roughly 20 minutes, according to a case report. She said she was going for a walk to calm down after a heated argument by phone with her sister, who then called the police on her.

While she was away, a police officer arrived and called DCS because she wasn’t there. Responding to her alleged lack of supervision and her growing anger about the ensuing encounter, the department removed all of her boys that night, agency records show.

As often happens in the child protection system, this temporary removal led to a broader DCS inquiry into Smith’s mental health history, her troubled relationship with her ex, her marijuana use (which is legal in Arizona) and the tidiness of her home, records show. Based on these concerns, the department kept custody of the boys for a year and a half before returning them.

Smith said that when she was growing up, her own mother underwent such an investigation, and that several of her friends from school, all Black, have since endured one as new parents.

Now, she worries about her sons getting arrested or shot when they are older; when that happens to Black men, she pointed out, the news reports often say, “Oh, their childhood, they were ‘in the system.’”

“It becomes a generational curse,” Smith said.

ProPublica and NBC News presented DCS spokesperson Darren DaRonco with the names and anecdotes of the families described in this article, and he checked with agency leadership and case records and said that all of them were indeed investigated and that there was nothing inaccurate in their recounting of events. Arizona law, he noted, would allow him to clarify or correct anything that is factually wrong.

In interviews, Katherine Guffey, executive consultant to DCS’ director, pointed to additional steps that their team has taken to address the disproportionality issue, especially since the racial justice movement following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Smith kisses her son in their living room.

The department, said Guffey, who is white, has been incorporating the feedback of Black employees who formed a disparity committee, including Stewart before he left, helping them to write a charter and create an action plan. Staff have also taken part in a workshop on the systemic causes of racial inequity, as well as an empathy training developed by Arizona State University professors.

Earlier this year, DCS helped convene a confidential two-hour focus group of a dozen Black people to hear how the department’s frequent involvement with families has affected them. The child welfare consulting firm Casey Family Programs has been brought in to hold continuing discussions.

And the agency plans to start a Cultural Brokers program to ensure that a trusted community member of the same race is present upon parents’ contact with caseworkers.

Critics say that while these are positive moves, no proposals have been made that would rein in the fundamental power of this agency, which has a billion-dollar budget, to remove children from their loved ones.

As Stewart put it, “We have a culture that says Black families need to be watched and if we don’t agree with the things that are going on with them, we are the saviors of these children and are charged with punishing their parents.”

Until that fundamental outlook of the child welfare system changes, he said, some of the well-intended steps being taken may amount to just restating or even perpetuating the problem.

Is This Just Arizona?

Arizona was a Confederate territory, whose early leaders had business ties to and a sense of common cause with the slave states of the Deep South. Its first major wave of Black residents were largely recruited to the Phoenix area from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma starting in the 1910s and ’20s, to work in cotton camps.

These families were soon forced to live in South Phoenix via redlining and racial covenants, which blocked them from renting or owning property anywhere else.

Yet despite the injustice of residential segregation, said Rod Grimes, a scholar of Arizona Black history, it did create a sense of Black density in a town that still had few Black people. Once families were able to move, many heading to the suburbs, he said, some of that strength in numbers fell away.

Today, Black residents of metro Phoenix are geographically and therefore politically diffuse. Without either the powerful voting blocs that exist in some parts of the South or the sense of protection of living in a majority-Black urban neighborhood elsewhere, they are more likely to be surrounded by white neighbors, teachers and health care workers whom they fear could call DCS on them, many said in interviews. They are also less likely to have the legislative representation that could conduct oversight of the department or fight for better social services to help prevent child welfare cases.

Smith’s son rides a bike at their apartment complex.

Even after the November election, Arizona has just two Black state legislators out of 90 — the same number as in 1950.

The result, said Clottee Hammons, an Arizona history expert and the creative director of Emancipation Arts, is a business-oriented white leadership class whom she and other Black Arizonans feel cannot relate to what it is like to raise a Black child, let alone on a low income.

Due to this experiential gap in the halls of power, critics say, the state Legislature rarely addresses concerns specific to Black families, instead focusing on topics of interest to many white voters, like school choice and border security.

Nor have lawmakers created a well-funded, easily accessible statewide system that parents living in poverty (as well as mandated reporters of child neglect, like teachers) can call to get help. Many other states have invested heavily in such services, but in Arizona the main option is to call DCS, which comes with the possibility of family separation attached.

In a statement, DaRonco, the department spokesperson, said of the parents and community members making this criticism, “We share their desire to reduce DCS presence in their homes by creating access to community-based supports that get them what they need without the stress of a DCS encounter.”

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Once DCS is involved, the emphasis is on child safety and possibly child removal rather than addressing problems at their root, as reflected in the agency’s funding structure. In fiscal year 2022, the department spent roughly $90 million on group homes and other congregate facilities for foster youth, $99 million on foster care and $278 million on adoptions, compared to just $15 million on prevention efforts and $29 million on in-home services for families themselves.

DaRonco noted that top-line decisions about how DCS spends its funding are made by the Legislature, not the department. He added that the budget includes additional subsidies for parenting programs and substance use treatment, which can lead to family reunification.

Much of the foster care and adoption money comes from the federal government in the form of annual incentives.

“I’m just telling you, people in the community feel like their babies are being sold and trafficked — that’s how easy it feels, and how profitable,” said Roy Dawson, executive director of the nonprofit Arizona Center for African American Resources and a leading Phoenix advocate for racial equity in the child welfare system.

Dawson also said that all the well-meaning foster care nonprofits in Arizona, which exist in part because there is so much funding available for foster care in the state, help perpetuate the system’s vast size and reach.

It’s unclear whether the election of Hobbs as governor will translate into a realignment of budget priorities at DCS, let alone a shift in the anti-poverty agenda at the Legislature, where Republicans continue to hold a majority.

Many families and experts were also skeptical about the possibility of change because of the agency’s long history of claiming to address its problems with race without making much progress.

In 1995, the Arizona Republic published a story about child protective services with the sub-headline, “Blacks are overrepresented in Arizona’s system, study says.” The article went on to say, “Officials haven’t been able to find out why Arizona’s figures are 2.5 times the national average” and that “the state has formed a task force to examine why Blacks are having difficulty.”

In 2008, Arizona reported to the federal government that it was developing an “Eliminating Racial Disproportionality and Disparity” strategy for its child welfare system, which would include technical assistance to evaluate Maricopa County’s data on race as well as a focus group and a training video.

And in a 2014 DCS report, the agency said it was partnering with local churches as part of a racial “Gap Closing Collaborative.”

“I can say with certainty that many DCS and previous CPS administrations have seen this information and been aware of it,” Guffey acknowledged, referring to the former name of the department.

Dana Burns, right, walks with Tierra, whom Burns has raised as her daughter, at a park near their home in Phoenix.

Dana Burns, a mom, musician and founder of the child welfare advocacy organization A Permanent Voice Foundation in South Phoenix, said that DCS’ pervasiveness in the community feels of a piece with a larger anti-Black attitude that she and other parents face in this state, from officials and neighbors alike.

“It’s Arizona,” she said. “It’s an attitude that we were never supposed to be here.”

A White Idea of Family

For many of the Black families who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News, their first interaction with DCS was when an unfamiliar caseworker arrived at their door.

Department data show that its frontline staff are most often white and disproportionately in their 20s, which reflects national trends. Many said in interviews that this was their first or second job out of college, and a large proportion do not have children themselves. Turnover at the agency has also been notoriously high, further lowering the average experience level.

As a result, the typical scenario is a white person with little or no parenting experience entering a Black home and having minimal time, by the nature of the job, to make a judgment as to whether what is going on there is dangerous for kids.

“It felt like we were on display, like they had a white glove on checking everything. And I had to smile and say good morning,” said Tressie King, who lives with her husband Jamel and their 13-year-old adoptive son in the suburb of Chandler. (King was accused of briefly leaving her child, who is autistic, unattended in her car while she ran in to a store, an allegation that case documents show was ruled unfounded but only after several inspections of their home.)

“It felt like they were checking me out, not my child,” she said. “I said if I am being made to feel ashamed, how is that good for the kid?”

Tressie King, right, plays a matching card game with her husband, Jamel, and their adoptive son at the family’s home in Chandler, Arizona.

Many Black parents also said that if they get combative, precisely because the most precious thing in their life may be about to be taken from them, their anger is too often interpreted as a potential threat.

Sarah Encarnacion, a DCS child safety specialist from 2019 to 2021, said her goal was always to keep families together and for them to feel she was a trusted presence. But she acknowledged that as “a small, petite white woman,” she was “responsible for preparing and educating myself on how to enter this home where I’m such a foreign entity.”

DaRonco, the spokesperson, said that DCS has several initiatives to “change the power dynamic” between its staff and the families they work with. These include holding “team decision making” meetings near the beginning of an investigation, so that parents — and any friends, neighbors, teachers, clergy or others they want with them in the room — can have more of a say in the process.

There are also differences in cultural attitudes toward corporal punishment, which is more common on average in Black families. Many Black parents and children interviewed for this article distinguished between what they called a whooping and abuse, with some parents saying they would rather spank a child, which is legal in Arizona, than risk the child getting out of line and experiencing something far worse at the hands of a police officer.

“Nine times out of 10, parents raise their kids how their parents raised them,” said Richards, the Phoenix mother accused at the hospital, who has since become an advocate around the child welfare issue. “If the state is not agreeing with that way of raising kids, the solution is just to take the children every time? Every generation?”

Richards and many others said DCS’ prevalence can eventually cause insidious damage to relationships between Black parents and their children, who sometimes threaten to call DCS on each other when they’re in normal family disputes.

“That’s messed up,” she said, but the agency has become “so much a part of our lives that it’s a real thing to say.”

In part because of her struggles with the child welfare system, Richards said that she and her family are planning to relocate again, likely leaving Arizona next year.

Stephan Muhammad, a chef who lives in a suburban development in South Phoenix, agrees that no matter what DCS is now doing to address racial disproportionality, its harms linger in Black families like his.

Stephan Muhammad watches his daughters at their home in Phoenix, Arizona.

Muhammad had his children taken from him by the department twice; they were placed in foster care, including group homes where they say they experienced repeated violence, for about two years in each case. The first time was based on a neglect allegation that he left his four youngest at home while he picked up his oldest daughter at kindergarten just across a nearby park. The second was for spanking his son, who was nearly 9 at the time, for getting in trouble at school — which the agency said was child abuse, according to Muhammad, his family members and reporting by the Arizona Republic.

In both cases, a judge ultimately returned them home.

“I missed years of my childhood,” said one of his daughters, Sierra, 12, who was separated from her siblings while in state custody. “If I could talk to the head of DCS, I would say don’t take my father from me ever again.”

In an interview at Muhammad’s house, in front of a wall-sized calendar on which one of his children had written in the square of his birthday, “aka Big Head Day,” he said that he obviously has been overjoyed to have them all back. Still, he said he feels a trepidation that thousands of Black parents across Phoenix must be coping with every day: Is he in fact a bad parent?

“It’s impossible not to internalize,” he said. “It’s an attack on who you are as a parent in every way.”

Mollie Simon contributed research. Asia Fields contributed reporting

by Agnel Philip and Eli Hager, ProPublica, and Suzy Khimm, NBC News

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.

A yearlong investigation by ProPublica and NBC News has explored inequities across the U.S. child welfare system, looking at mandatory reporting requirements, frequency of investigations and more.

By some estimates, the likelihood of Black youths experiencing an investigation by a child protective services agency is far higher than their likelihood of being stopped by police.

And in Maricopa County, a study from last year estimated that 63% of Black children will experience an investigation before they turn 18, the highest rate among the 20 largest counties in the country.

That study was based on an analysis of child protective services cases in two databases obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect: the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, which provides information on child maltreatment reports and investigations, and the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, which provides information on removals of children from home, terminations of parental rights and adoptions.

We obtained both datasets to broaden the scope of the study’s county-level analysis and dive deeper into why families were being investigated. NDACAN and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau work together to make this data available to researchers. They do not endorse the independent findings of researchers, and bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

Our analysis confirmed that Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, had one the highest rates of investigation for Black children among the nation’s largest counties. The rate there was nearly three times as high as the county’s rate for white children.

The analysis, which took more than a year to complete and included counties of all sizes, also found that Maricopa County isn’t much of an outlier nationwide, as dozens of counties had similar or higher rates of investigations for Black children.

How We Analyzed the Databases

The NCANDS database required steps to clean and deduplicate before we could make comparisons across counties and states.

For our analysis of investigations, we merged the separate fiscal year files for the NCANDS database between 2015 and 2020 and deduplicated according to the unique child IDs provided in the dataset. For race and ethnicity information, we took the information from the most recent report for each child ID for which the race and ethnicity was known. Then we filtered this list to the first investigation by county for each child that occurred between the calendar years 2015 and 2019, the latest full year of available data, based on the date the investigation started.

We grouped this list by county and counted the number of entries by race. For this count, we excluded children for which multiple races were indicated to match data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. For our count of white children, we included only the entries in which the ethnicity was marked as “non-Hispanic.” The final rate calculation took the number of children investigated by race over the five-year time period and divided it by the under-18 population from the 2015-2019 ACS survey.

For Maricopa County, we found that 38% of Black children had their families investigated by a child welfare agency during the period analyzed, the sixth-highest rate among the 20 largest counties in the country. Due to changes in the underlying population over the five-year period, such as births, deaths and moving in and out of the county, our rate figures should not be interpreted as the likelihood that a child living there would be involved in an investigation. Rates could not be calculated for many smaller counties because the data archive masks what county an investigation took place in if that county has less than 1,000 entries in a fiscal year.

We used a similar deduplication method to analyze the types of allegations in each case and whether they were substantiated, but instead of limiting it to the first investigation for each child, we looked at all investigations that started between 2015 and 2019. Using this list, we counted how many children were either confirmed or suspected of being victims of maltreatment and how many of those cases were for allegations of physical or sexual abuse.

Differences Between Our Analysis and Other Methods

While our analysis used the same dataset as the study that found 63% of Black children will experience a CPS investigation during their childhoods, there are some important differences in how we analyzed the data.

The biggest difference is that the study used the number of children who experienced their first CPS investigation ever during a five-year period (2014 to 2018) to estimate the likelihood that a child would experience an investigation before they turn 18. To ensure that the estimate was as accurate as possible, the researchers used statistical methods to impute what the races would likely be for children whose races were marked as unknown. Furthermore, the study included cases for children with multiple races.

Because we chose not to impute the missing race values or include cases involving children with multiple races, our counts of investigations by race could be lower than the true number.

Mike Hixenbaugh and Hannah Rappleye, of NBC News, and Lucas Waldron, of ProPublica, contributed reporting.