ProPublica

by Allan Sloan and Carson Kessler

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In recent months, federal antitrust regulators have notched some notable achievements, blocking four hospital mergers. Those actions follow the announcement of a major change in antitrust philosophy, embodied by President Joe Biden’s executive order last year aimed at promoting competition. That order criticized hospital consolidation for the ways in which it has left “many areas, particularly rural communities, with inadequate or more expensive healthcare options.”

Suddenly, antitrust regulators seem to have swagger. News articles have described the Federal Trade Commission, whose job is to stop anti-competitive behavior, as being “unleashed” under its aggressive new chief, Lina Khan. Republicans have responded with complaints of “radical” policies. An FTC official told Kaiser Health News, “We are feeling invigorated and looking to fulfill the executive order’s call to be aggressive on antitrust enforcement.”

What can be gleaned about hospital consolidation 15 months after Biden’s executive order? An examination of the cases the FTC has taken on — and those it hasn’t — suggests that so far the rhetoric has been more muscular than the reality. The agency initiated three challenges of hospital mergers during this period (the fourth example noted above was initiated during the Trump administration) and allowed 54 to proceed without taking public action. By contrast, the FTC challenged a total of three hospital mergers over the four years of the Trump administration, while permitting 375 to go through unchallenged.

One reason the numbers haven’t risen further is an impediment that is rarely mentioned outside of antitrust circles: The FTC’s guidelines focus exclusively on challenging mergers of hospitals within a single geographic region, not when a major player in one region buys up a hospital in a different one. And those so-called cross-market deals make up an increasing portion of hospital mergers.

Not only does the FTC face that obstacle, it’s short on the money and staffing it would take to duke it out over big-time cross-market mergers. “Our resource constraints overhang every enforcement decision,” Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, told us in a statement. “It’s not possible to quantify the number of additional mergers that we could challenge, but there’s little doubt that being able to invest more resources in our investigations would bolster our enforcement.”

Let’s start with a quick review of the quarter century of hospital consolidation that brought us to today. There were 1,887 hospital mergers announced from 1998 through the end of last year, according to the American Hospital Association and health care consultants Kaufman Hall. Absent those mergers, we’d have about 8,000 hospitals in the U.S. rather than the 6,093 that the AHA says we had at the end of last year.

Over the years, the FTC has generally attempted to block about 1% of those mergers, which made it a very small sandbag in the path of a fast-moving flood of deals. (Those sympathetic to the FTC point out that, due to its limited resources, the agency attempts to select winnable cases whose prominence or importance will send a message to the hospital industry and discourage similar transactions.) The agency isn’t notified about all hospital mergers, only those with a value of more than $101 million, a number that gets adjusted every year for the size of the economy. These days the number of mergers is slowing down, Kaufman Hall said, but the size of deals is increasing.

Fewer hospitals means less competition for patients. And as they teach you in Market Economics 101, fewer competitors generally results in higher prices. Lots and lots of studies have been conducted of mergers and pricing, which aren’t published until years after mergers are completed because it takes so long to do the analyses. They show that, in general, having fewer hospitals competing for business makes prices higher than they would otherwise be.

Health care consolidation is the “No. 1 driver of health care spending inflation,” according to professor David Dranove of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, co-author of “Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America.”

Unlike things like higher gasoline prices or rising food costs, the cost of hospital consolidations isn’t obvious, and usually isn’t paid by people directly. Rather, employers who pick up some or most of the cost of their workers’ medical insurance, either directly or through payments they make to health insurance companies, pass on those costs indirectly by giving workers less in salary and benefits than they might otherwise get. (Similarly, when it comes to government health insurance plans such as Medicare, Medicaid and various state and local programs, the cost of hospital mergers is paid indirectly, through higher taxes or bigger government deficits.)

“The more money that is going into benefits, the less money is going to employees,” said Bill Kramer, senior adviser for health policy at Purchaser Business Group on Health, which represents some 40 private employers and public entities that collectively purchase health care for more than 15 million Americans.

Employees’ health care costs are also rising rapidly, a trend expected to continue in 2023. “Workers’ contribution to family health insurance premiums grew 259 percent from 1998 to 2018, while nominal average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers grew by only 68 percent,” according to a 2020 paper by economist Martin Gaynor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a founder of the Health Care Cost Institute.

This brings us to today’s FTC. Over the past year or so, the agency blocked two mergers involving the two biggest hospital companies in New Jersey, both of which had been vacuuming up hospitals in the state since they were created by mergers in 2016. One involved a deal for Hackensack Meridian Health to buy Englewood Health, which was announced in 2019 and prompted an FTC suit in late 2020, in the waning days of the Trump administration. The FTC prevailed in both U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, leading the hospitals to officially raise the white flag in June.

The second deal was for the state’s other Big Two hospital chain, RWJBarnabas Health, to acquire St. Peter’s University Hospital of New Brunswick. In that case, the filing of an administrative complaint by the FTC in June was enough to get the hospitals to drop their merger plans.

The FTC prevailed in the Hackensack Meridian case by proving to the courts’ satisfaction that a merger with Englewood would raise costs for patients in New Jersey’s Bergen County. However, some key numbers — such as projections by an outside expert hired by the FTC — were blacked out in the publicly available documents, and remain so even after the proposed merger was dropped, because they’re still considered proprietary. (The FTC’s other prominent victories in 2022 include blocking the merger of the two largest hospital systems in Rhode Island and getting HCA Healthcare to abandon its plans to take over Utah’s Steward Health Care System after the FTC went to court.)

The FTC’s successes in the Hackensack Meridian and Barnabas cases are examples of a strategic change in the FTC’s approach to hospital deals. After losing every anti-hospital merger case that it brought in the 1990s, the FTC improved the quality of its market analysis and has since run up an excellent record — six wins against just one loss since 2020 — in the relative handful of cases that it brings. The analysis concentrates on competition within what are defined as geographic markets, such as Bergen County (where Englewood is located and where Hackensack Meridian has significant market share) and Middlesex County (where St. Peter’s is based and Barnabas is a big player).

While the FTC appears to have gotten better at winning local antitrust cases like those two in New Jersey, its reach is severely limited when it comes to so-called cross-market mergers, marriages between entities that do not directly compete in the same geographic or product market.

The number of cross-market mergers has been increasing. Over the past decade, more than half of all hospital mergers have occurred across geographic markets, according to University of California Hastings College of the Law professor Jaime King, who specializes in health care and competition issues. None have been challenged in federal court.

Despite the rise in cross-market mergers and emerging data that suggests that they contribute to rising prices, the FTC’s formal guidelines on hospital mergers haven’t been updated since 2010. The FTC guidelines include 34 detailed pages on how to evaluate and challenge an intramarket merger and zero pages on how to evaluate or challenge a cross-market merger. That’s largely because courts tend to support the FTC if it can demonstrate that one local competitor is merging with another local competitor, reducing the number of hospital options and increasing the chances that the acquirer can raise prices.

Consider one merger this year that the FTC allowed to proceed without a word of public objection. In February, two Michigan systems, Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health, combined to create the largest health system and private employer in the state, with 22 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient locations.

“I believe the FTC decided to not intervene in this case because both the Beaumont system and Spectrum system are geographically dispersed from each other,” said Bret Jackson, president of the nonprofit Economic Alliance for Michigan, who said he spoke to the FTC regarding the deal. Jackson sees elevated prices as an inevitable result. “It is still too soon to see the price effects of the merger on health care costs, since both systems are under existing contracts with insurers,” he said. “But never in the history of hospital mergers in the country has a hospital come down in pricing after a merger.” (A spokesperson for Corewell Health, the newly merged entity, said, “We remain focused on quality, affordable care for the communities we serve.”)

Experts like King argue that courts and the FTC should recognize that if one chain buys multiple hospitals in different markets, that chain can also wield significant power to raise prices.

The FTC and its fellow antitrust enforcer, the Department of Justice, have taken some preliminary steps toward retooling their approach. In January, the two agencies began soliciting public input on ways to modernize merger guidelines, specifically for markets that “may fall outside the frameworks under the current approach.” More than 1,900 comments have been submitted to the agencies.

King applauds the FTC for that step and for its recent aggressiveness. But she thinks the agency still has a ways to go before it can effectively combat hospital consolidation. “There’s a need to reevaluate old assumptions about how health care markets are working,” King said. “It’s almost like they’re two decades behind.”

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by Mark Olalde

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The price of oil produced in California this year reached its highest level in a decade. President Joe Biden is releasing millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep prices in check. And fossil fuel companies’ earnings are so high that Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a windfall tax on their profits.

It might seem like a lucrative time to drill for oil in the Golden State. Yet, some of the world’s largest oil companies, several of which have done business in the state for more than a century, are selling assets and beginning to pull out of California.

Even with strong cash flow in the short term, producers have more to gain from offloading wells and the associated liability — chiefly expensive environmental cleanup — than from pumping more oil and gas, experts say.

“This is the kind of deal you see when an industry is in its twilight,” said Andrew Logan, senior director for oil and gas at Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in companies and markets.

Some industry experts, lawmakers and environmentalists are concerned about the recent deals, noting that the sales shift environmental liability from corporate powerhouses to less-capitalized firms, increasing the risk that aging wells will be left orphaned, unplugged and leaking oil, brine and climate-warming methane. They see a threat that the state’s oil industry could repeat a pattern seen in other extractive industries like coal mining and lead to taxpayers bearing cleanup costs.

California Assemblymember Steve Bennett, a Democrat who has long worked on oil policy, has seen oil companies in his Ventura district walk away from environmental liability. “It gets passed on to a smaller company and to a smaller company until someone declares bankruptcy and the public is stuck with the cleanup bill,” he said.

IKAV Enters the Fray

Supermajors Shell and ExxonMobil recently agreed to sell more than 23,000 wells in California, which they owned through a joint venture called Aera Energy, to German asset management group IKAV for an estimated $4 billion. Aera accounts for about a quarter of California’s oil and gas production, largely from pumping in Kern and Ventura counties.

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Shell and ExxonMobil say the deal will strengthen their businesses.

But Greg Rogers, an attorney and accountant who researches the oil and gas industry, said the deal allows the sellers to shed decommissioning costs. “You got bad assets with big liabilities, and you can get rid of both at the same time. That’s a win for Exxon and Shell,” he said.

IKAV will inherit a portfolio littered with wells past their prime. Nearly 9,000 Aera wells were idle as of early October, meaning about 38% of the company’s unplugged inventory isn’t producing oil or gas, according to state data.

“With oil being over $100 a barrel, any well that would’ve come back has likely come back,” Logan said, adding that long-idled wells are simply “orphan wells in waiting.”

In an email, Aera spokesperson Kimberly Ellis-Thompson said the company is capable of managing its large portfolio of idle wells. “Since 2019, when new idle well management program regulations were published, we have met or exceeded the requirements for retiring idle wells,” she said. The company has decommissioned and plugged nearly 1,000 wells on average every year since then, she said.

IKAV, Aera’s soon-to-be new owner, manages about $2.5 billion in energy-focused assets. News releases on the Aera sale quoted Constantin von Wasserschleben, IKAV’s chairman, saying, “We advocate a co-existence between renewable and conventional energy for decades to come.”

As the world increasingly shifts to cheaper renewable energy to address climate change, IKAV has been snapping up oil and gas wells from supermajors exiting the market. The firm, which once focused exclusively on renewable energy, began expanding into oil and gas in 2020 when it purchased BP’s gas assets in the San Juan Basin, spanning New Mexico and Colorado. The deal was part of BP’s push to divest $10 billion in assets, including aging American gas fields.

BP declined to comment.

An Aera facility and a pump in Ventura. Aera accounts for about a quarter of California’s oil and gas production. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

If it’s not profitable to return wells to production, they need to be plugged. But if a company doesn’t plug its wells before walking away, wells are orphaned and the cleanup costs ultimately fall to taxpayers and current operators through fees.

This has happened with thousands of wells in California and hundreds of thousands, or more, across the country.

For example, the Greka group of companies left more than 750 wells for California to plug when its wealthy owner began pushing his businesses into bankruptcy in 2016 and retired to his Santa Maria winery. And a subsidiary of one of the country’s largest mining companies, Freeport-McMoRan, left dozens of likely orphaned wells, state records show, even though the company brought in nearly $23 billion in revenue last year.

Greka’s CEO didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Freeport spokesperson said the company is working with the state to verify details about its orphaned wells.

To minimize the government’s exposure if wells are orphaned, producers must put up a bond, typically held as cash or a surety policy. The bonds act like a security deposit: The company gets its bond back if it cleans up its mess, but the government keeps the money if the company orphans its wells.

Newsom has called for an end to all oil extraction in the state by 2045, but his administration has yet to use another tool to hold producers responsible for cleanup.

California has the authority to ask for an additional $30 million in financial security from a single operator but only requires Aera to hold a $3 million bond. As a result, Aera’s bonds cover less than half a percent of the $1.1 billion that ProPublica estimates it would cost the state to plug the wells based on the average cost to California for past well plugging. (That estimate does not include the additional cost of full surface remediation.)

California Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk said in a statement that his agency reviews bonds for all oil companies in the state but did not say whether the amount of Aera’s financial security would be increased through the sale.

Aera, Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to a question about the gap between their bonds and the estimated cost to plug their wells. IKAV did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, ExxonMobil spokesperson Meghan Macdonald said that “when we make divestments, we always try to work with partners like Aera and IKAV who are also committed to a lower-emissions future.”

Costs vary widely, but states have paid $100,000 or more to plug wells — and the same to clean up surface pollution — meaning there’s a significant gap between what’s needed and what California has available in bonds.

“If they don’t have the financial resources when it comes time to plug those wells, there’s a possibility that the public will be left holding the bag and paying those costs even though it’s the company that made the profit from selling the oil,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Who Will Be Liable?

More than 240,000 wells have pierced the state since the late 1800s, when Southern California’s first producing well spouted oil near where Dodger Stadium now stands. Of those, more than 5,300 are “orphan, deserted, and potentially deserted wells,” according to data the California Geologic Energy Management Division published in September.

Many on that list belong to individuals who died long ago or companies that dissolved in the shuffling of corporate paperwork. However, some responsible parties are still around but no longer legally liable after offloading their wells through sales and bankruptcies.

So who will be responsible for cleanup?

California is unique because state law allows regulators to call on former operators such as Shell and ExxonMobil to help pay for plugging onshore oil wells if they are later orphaned, even by a different owner. But companies have escaped responsibility under this stronger legal standard by exploiting loopholes such as a porous bankruptcy code.

Some experts question whether Shell and ExxonMobil would be required to pay if the wells they are selling to IKAV are ultimately orphaned, saying their ownership of the wells through a separate company, Aera, might shield them from liability.

“Exxon and Shell do not directly operate those wells. There’s corporate structuring going on in between,” Rogers said. And IKAV now adds another layer of corporate paperwork, holding the wells it acquired in New Mexico, Colorado and California through companies that were registered in Delaware shortly before the sales.

Aging wells that are left orphaned and unplugged can leak oil, brine and climate-warming methane. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Alongside Aera, two other companies — California Resources Corp. and Chevron — account for the vast majority of California’s oil and gas production, and they too are shrinking their positions in the state. California Resources, which has been in and out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in recent years, sold most of its Ventura Basin operations in November 2021. Chevron recently sold its California headquarters and plans to consolidate some of its unused Bakersfield office space as it shifts employees to Texas. Reuters reported in early October that Berry Corp., another large oil company that for many years has operated in California and Utah, was considering selling.

Berry did not respond to a request for comment.

Shell acknowledged its California wells were overvalued, suggesting the wells are even nearer to the end of their economic life than previously predicted. The company is wiping as much as $400 million off its books through the sale via an impairment charge.

Shell has been shedding assets in part to hand off associated greenhouse gas emissions. A 2021 Dutch court ruling ordered it to significantly reduce emissions, although the company has appealed the ruling. Zoe Yujnovich, the company’s upstream director, said in a news release about the sale of Aera that Shell will instead be “focusing on positions with high growth potential.”

For its part, ExxonMobil plans to focus on oil and natural gas that costs less to extract, Liam Mallon, president of ExxonMobil Upstream Co., said in a news release announcing the sale to IKAV.

Large public companies are handing off oil and gas assets around the country. Between 2017 and 2021, more than a quarter of oil and gas mergers and acquisitions took public companies private, with private equity often involved, according to a study conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. The report voiced concern that private companies are less transparent and have less incentive to protect the environment.

California Is Just the Beginning

With more than 2 million unplugged oil wells believed to be scattered across the U.S., California is the tip of the iceberg.

A massive boom in American oil and gas production over the past 15 years spurred by technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked previously inaccessible geologic formations. But the shale revolution and current market highs buoyed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine won’t last forever.

Longtime petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis laid out the reality at a recent conference. This shale revolution revitalized only some oil fields, and more than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells are either idle or minimally producing and unlikely to make a major comeback, according to his research.

“The bulk of the wells are producing from plays where there is no hope of another deus ex machina,” Purvis said, referencing nearly depleted oil fields.

The oil industry also faces an impending decline in demand from the shift to renewable energy and the trend toward banning the sale of new internal-combustion engine cars, as well as plans to phase out drilling in metro areas.

“The overall industry is being assaulted right now through policy changes at the state and federal level. That’s the story writ large,” Rogers said. “The industry is dying.”

by Neil Bedi and Kathleen McGrory

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Days after ProPublica detailed dangerous working conditions at a chlorine plant that used asbestos until it closed last year, public health advocates and two U.S. lawmakers are renewing calls for Congress to ban the carcinogen.

“American workers are dying from asbestos. It is way past time to end its use,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon. “This ProPublica report confirms our worst fears: workers dealing with asbestos are often left vulnerable to this deadly, dangerous substance.”

Merkley and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., are sponsoring the Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act, which would permanently ban the importing and use of asbestos. The proposed legislation is named after Alan Reinstein, who died in 2006 from mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos. Alan’s wife, Linda, co-founded the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, one of the leading nonprofits that has advocated for protecting the public from the dangers of asbestos.

The lack of a ban “puts workers, their families, and the surrounding communities at risk for deadly disease and death from asbestos exposure, which as ProPublica detailed, is sickeningly frequent and widespread and without consequences for the companies that allow it to continue,” said Linda Reinstein in a statement.

Reinstein has helped build a coalition of doctors, public health experts, trade unions and advocates to push Congress to pass the asbestos ban. This week, Reinstein’s organization sent letters to members of Congress calling for their support and highlighting the findings of the ProPublica investigation.

Linda Reinstein on Capitol Hill at a June hearing about banning asbestos (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

“This powerful article explodes the decades-long claim of the chlor-alkali industry that its use of asbestos is safe for workers,” said Bob Sussman, a former deputy administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration who now works as counsel for the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. “There can no longer be any doubt that, as EPA has found, asbestos-using plants present a serious risk to the worker health and this risk must be eliminated.”

The lawmakers filed the bill in May and it had one Senate committee hearing in June. Since the ProPublica report was published in collaboration with NPR last Thursday, three House members have signed on to co-sponsor the bill.

Unlike dozens of other countries, the United States has never fully banned asbestos. The EPA made an attempt to do so in 1989, but it was overturned in federal court in 1991, and efforts by lawmakers to outlaw the carcinogen have repeatedly fallen short. Meanwhile, the chemical industry has continued to import hundreds of tons of asbestos — more than 200,000 pounds — every year for use in chlorine production plants.

The industry has long fought against a ban by saying its workers were well protected by strict safety measures and strong workplace safety regulations. Public health organizations and lawmakers had suspected that those safety claims were exaggerated, but for years were unable to assess the conditions inside these plants.

The ProPublica investigation found that safety standards were routinely disregarded at what was once America’s longest-standing chlorine plant. Workers at the OxyChem Niagara Falls plant said asbestos would splatter on the ceilings and walls, roll across the floor like tumbleweeds and stick to workers’ clothes. Windows and doors were left open, allowing asbestos dust to escape. The company’s own industrial hygiene monitoring showed their workers were repeatedly exposed to unsafe levels. Federal workplace regulators had also stopped conducting regular unannounced inspections at the plant; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration included the Niagara Falls site and others like it in a special program for “exemplary” workplaces.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting, OxyChem said the health and safety of its workers is its top priority. The company said the workers’ accounts from Niagara Falls were inaccurate, but wouldn’t provide specifics on what was incorrect. The plant closed last year for unrelated reasons. Eight other plants in the U.S. still use asbestos.

“It’s devastating to see at every step of the way where worker safety wasn’t protected: by the companies, and by the EPA and OSHA during past administrations,” said Merkley.

Asbestos is a toxic mineral that can cause serious illnesses like scarring of the lungs, called asbestosis, and mesothelioma, a vicious cancer that kills most victims within a few years. The government’s inability to ban asbestos has been cited as one of the greatest failures of the U.S. chemical regulatory system. “The system was so complex, it was so burdensome that our country hasn’t even been able to uphold a ban on asbestos — a known carcinogen that kills as many as 10,000 Americans every year,” President Barack Obama said in 2016 on the day he signed legislation meant to fix these problems.

Later that year, the EPA began the formal process of re-evaluating the risks associated with asbestos. It took five years, and in 2020, the agency determined chlorine workers were at “unreasonable risk” from their exposure to asbestos.

In April, the EPA proposed a new asbestos ban. The rule needs to be finalized before it goes into effect, and the EPA has said that it is planning to be done with that process by November 2023. In that time, EPA will consider industry arguments against a ban, including claims that workers face little risk of exposure. The chemical companies have also argued the ban could disrupt the country’s supply of chlorine used to clean drinking water, even though public health advocates say only a small portion of chlorine from asbestos-reliant plants is used for that purpose. Twelve Republican attorneys general have backed the companies and said an asbestos ban would place a “heavy and unreasonable burden” on the industry.

Two key trade associations, the American Chemistry Council and The Chlorine Institute, said in statements this week that they continue to believe asbestos is used safely in the chlorine industry.

Michal Freedoff, the official in charge of chemical regulation at EPA, told ProPublica she could not comment on the final rule-making process but said the agency would not be backing down on the science.

The agency has already extended the original deadlines for evaluating and regulating asbestos. The evaluation was supposed to be complete three years after it started in 2016, and the regulations should have been finalized within two years after that. Lawmakers and public health advocates worry, given the chemical industry’s influence, that there will be even further delays or a new ban will be held up in court. (In response, the EPA pointed out that despite an increased workload, its budget for chemical regulation has remained flat for six years. It also said the Trump administration missed deadlines for nine out of the first 10 chemicals, including asbestos, that were to be regulated under the new 2016 law.)

Organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund are calling for the EPA to expedite its ban, especially given the findings in the ProPublica investigation. The “reporting underscores the need to take action to ban chrysotile asbestos, particularly to protect workers,” said Maria Doa, senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Given the strong, well-established science on the unreasonable risks posed by chrysotile asbestos, we reiterate our call for EPA to expedite its final decision to ban chrysotile asbestos and to require rapid implementation of the ban.”

Merkley and Bonamici, along with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, are instead pushing Congress to write a ban into law, which would accelerate the process and make it harder for the industry to overturn it in court. The bill would ban all six known types of asbestos, whereas the EPA rule would only ban the one type primarily used in the U.S.

ProPublica reached out to Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the chairs of the committees where the bill was filed. Carper said he remains “committed to working with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, as well as advocates and industry stakeholders” on the proposal. Pallone, however, said he believed the EPA will act on asbestos. “I’m confident the Biden Administration takes this public health threat as seriously as I do, and look forward to continuing to work with them to get asbestos banned once and for all,” he said in a statement. The minority leaders of the committees, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., did not respond to questions or provide comment on the conditions at the Niagara Falls plant.

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

by Justin Elliott, Megan O’Matz and Doris Burke

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Much of the cardboard and paper goods strewn about our homes — the mail-order boxes and grocery store bags — are sold by a single private company, with its name, Uline, stamped on the bottom. Few Americans know that a multibillion-dollar fortune made on those ubiquitous products is now fueling election deniers and other far-right candidates across the country.

Dick and Liz Uihlein of Illinois are the largest contributors to Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and was linked to a prominent antisemite, and have given to Jim Marchant, the Nevada Secretary of State nominee who says he opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. They are major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica, aims to “get on God’s side of the issues and stay there” and “punish leftists.”

Flush with profits from their shipping supply company, the Uihleins have emerged as the No. 1 federal campaign donors for Republicans ahead of the November elections, and the No. 2 donors overall behind liberal financier George Soros. The couple has spent at least $121 million on state and federal politics in the last two years alone, fighting taxes, unions, abortion rights and marijuana legalization.

From Minor to Major Donors

Modest donors a decade ago, the Uihleins have emerged as the top donor to federal Republican causes this cycle.

(Source: OpenSecrets)

Uline’s core business — selling boxes — is so boring there’s an entire Simpsons bit devoted to its dullness. But tax records obtained by ProPublica show the company, which is privately held and does not publicly disclose financial results, has experienced an astonishing boom.

The Uihleins, who make the vast majority of their money from the company, reported around $18 million in income in 2002, according to the records. That rocketed fortyfold, to $712 million, in 2018. Thanks to the pandemic-induced online shopping surge, Uline has grown even more since.

Uline Up (Source: Data obtained by ProPublica)

While the Uihleins rarely speak to the press — they didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story — they have become well known in political circles. But the explosion of the Uihleins’ wealth as well as the roots of their politics have not been well understood.

The German-American clan made their original fortune in the 19th century as owners of the Milwaukee brewery Schlitz. Family members were staples of the Chicago Tribune society pages. In 1917, Dick’s grandfather was identified as a millionaire in a Chicago Tribune humor item about how the wealthy man had fired an unqualified chauffeur.

When Dick and Liz Uihlein donated millions in recent years to the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action, they were following in a family tradition. Edgar J. Uihlein of Chicago was among the handful of largest donors to the original America First Committee, the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s group that opposed the United States’ entry into World War II. (It’s unclear whether that was Edgar Sr., Dick’s grandfather, or Edgar Jr., his father, who had just graduated from college.) While America First drew supporters from across the political spectrum, it was most associated with rightists. Uihlein’s donation was disclosed in 1941. Later that year, Lindbergh gave an openly antisemitic speech assailing Jewish influence.

When Edgar Uihlein Sr. died in 1956, his estate was valued at $4.8 million — more than $50 million in today’s dollars — and the money was left in a trust for his heirs, newspapers reported at the time.

Dick’s father, Edgar Uihlein Jr., who had started a plastics company after serving in the Navy during World War II, established himself as an important funder of far-right political groups in the 1960s.

A document from 1963 identifies Edgar Uihlein Jr. as on the National Finance Committee of the John Birch Society. Founded a few years earlier, the group quickly became a significant force to the right of the Republican Party, known for its obsessively anti-communist politics. The Birchers combined hostility to New Deal social programs with lurid conspiracies, famously campaigning against “the horrors of fluoridation,” a supposed Red plot.

Edgar J. Uihlein was listed as a member of the John Birch Society’s National Finance Committee in a July 1963 bulletin.

The group fiercely opposed civil rights. An entry in one 1963 Birch newsletter railed against the upcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King would give his “I Have a Dream” speech: “the only good Americans who should have anything to do with this Communist-instigated mob in any way, or pay any attention to it in Washington, are the police required to maintain law and order.”

An excerpt from an August 1963 bulletin of the John Birch Society

Edgar Uihlein Jr. supported politicians who embraced segregation. In early 1962, he sponsored a speech that brought to Chicago a former U.S. Army general named Edwin Walker. Walker toured the country attacking supposed communist conspiracies and civil rights, while celebrating the Southern defeat of Reconstruction, which he labeled “the tyranny within our own white race.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which tracked far-right figures in the period, has archives showing Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s involvement with several other groups and campaigns, including a $1,000 contribution to the presidential campaign of segregationist George Wallace in 1968. It’s not clear when, if ever, Uihlein’s association with the John Birch Society ended. As late as 1977, the founder of the group wrote a long letter to him asking for money.

Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the same sort of blue-blood education (Phillips Andover, Stanford) as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton). Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, Dick Uihlein didn’t waver: He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967, joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics. He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.

In one of the only interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father, who often went by Ed. At the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled, “My father would talk about the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.” Dick said that same year that “my father shared many of the same values that I have, conservative values.”

Dick Uihlein said he shared his father’s values in court testimony in 2018.

Dick and Liz Uihlein continue to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005. Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of millions of dollars to right-wing institutions. Among the recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the Federalist Society and think tanks that have pushed misleading claims about the 2020 election, such as the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Foundation for Government Accountability, as the Daily Beast reported.

Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer, sent out to millions of homes and businesses, was a long tribute to the “wise” Edgar Uihlein Jr.

“Father Uihlein, the head of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under a picture of her husband and father-in-law, recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, issues of the day, fishing muskies and, always, politics were discussed.”

She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness: “Living your life and raising your kids were easier in an easier time. There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media. We, like so many families, were raised with a sharp moral compass. The rules were the rules, but it was OK.”

Liz Uihlein wrote a tribute to Edgar Uihlein Jr. in a recent edition of the Uline catalog. Dick Uihlein is sitting on the far right next to his father.

The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era. Dick Uihlein is a major funder of the American Principles Project, which runs ads attacking what it calls “transgender ideology,” abortion and the teaching of “critical race theory.”

Last year, Uihlein weighed in on recalling four school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee because of their support for COVID-19 safety protocols and “equity” training for teachers. More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent more than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that includes information about gender identity and same-sex couples.

The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included in the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.

For all the Uihleins’ dismay at the disorder they see consuming the country, there is one domain where they can exert near total control. Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the company is run.

For new staffers, it begins with the dress code in the employee handbook: Women are not permitted to wear pants except as part of a pantsuit or on Fridays; hose or stockings must be worn except during the warmer months; dresses “that are too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.

“DRESS CODE VIOLATIONS ARE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND MAY RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION UP TO AND INCLUDING TERMINATION,” the handbook warns.

(Excerpts from Uline’s employee handbook)

The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an employee’s scheduled start time. Just four personal items are allowed on employees’ desks, with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches. One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child. “Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.

The Uihleins have enlisted company employees to manage their vast personal real estate holdings and maintain their exacting standards, records obtained by ProPublica show. While the Uihleins’ primary home is in Lake Forest, Illinois, they also have several waterfront properties in Florida. In one case, a Uline staffer emailed an official in Everglades City to complain after surveillance footage showed a local man “peeing off Dick’s dock.”

The family’s management style has worked well for the company. Founded in 1980 when Dick and Liz Uihlein saw a gap in the market and borrowed money from Dick’s father to launch a shipping supply distributor, Uline has grown to a network of 12 vast warehouses around the country as well as in Canada and Mexico. Uline’s signature marketing product, its Sears-style catalog, now runs over 800 pages, offering endless varieties of paper bags, packing tape, foaming hand soap, metal racks and more.

Liz Uihlein runs day-to-day operations from the company’s Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin headquarters, right over the Illinois border. Her obsessive focus on next-day shipping and customer service — “We answer the phones faster than 911,” a company saying goes — have powered Uline’s expansion.

Growth accelerated with the online shopping boom that relies on Uline’s specialty, cardboard boxes, which it carries in more than 1,700 sizes. “It’s weird to develop a love of corrugated boxes and shipping supplies, but I really enjoy” it, Liz Uihlein told a Milwaukee business newspaper.

Uline is now so dominant that its customers range from high-end firms like Tesla and Gucci to countless small merchants on Etsy to huge municipal governments. The New York City Department of Education and other agencies, for example, collectively spend more than half a million dollars per year with Uline.

Unlike at other corporate workplaces where discussing politics is tacitly discouraged, the Uihleins lean in to theirs. Employees gathered at the major Uline distribution center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for a company party in 2019 were bemused when the entertainment hired by the company emerged on stage: a Donald Trump impersonator, wearing a red MAGA hat. The company regularly hosts “Lunch & Learn” sessions at its headquarters with figures such as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, as the Guardian reported.

An excerpt from a 2020 email sent to Uline employees for a talk on “Why Freedom Is Better Than Socialism”

In 2018, when the New York Times published a profile labeling the Uihleins “The Most Powerful Conservative Couple You’ve Never Heard Of,” the company began to get calls from angry liberal customers canceling their accounts, a former sales staffer recalled. A website, Refuse Uline, was launched that lists alternatives to the company. But as the company’s only shareholders, the Uihleins only have to answer to themselves.

When COVID-19 hit, as Liz Uihlein campaigned against shutdowns and required workers to return to the office before vaccines were available, demand for Uline’s shipping and cleaning supplies surged. In 2020, as other businesses shuttered, sales at Uline shot up 14% to $6.5 billion, according to an internal report obtained by ProPublica. Stung by a worker shortage, Uihlein emailed Wisconsin’s Democratic governor in July 2021 urging him to “get government out of the way” by immediately cutting people off of expanded federal unemployment benefits that had helped people weather the pandemic. Uline needed to fill 500 jobs, she noted in the email, which ProPublica obtained via a public records request. The governor did not oblige.

It’s not clear when the Uihleins, who are both 77, will retire. But the next generation is in place. The couple’s adult children are executives at the company, and they have begun to give money to federal candidates — all conservatives. Dick and Liz Uihlein, meanwhile, have been taking steps to preserve their multibillion-dollar empire for their descendants by shielding it from the hated estate tax.

Over the years, they have gradually transferred the shares of Uline into a so-called “dynasty trust,” which now appears to hold a majority of the company, according to the tax records and business documents filed in Florida. Bob Lord, a lawyer at tax reform group Patriotic Millionaires, said dynasty trusts are typically designed to avoid estate and other transfer taxes for ultrarich families.

“The goal is for the company to remain in the family for possibly hundreds of years,” he said. “And the wealth generated by the company will accumulate untouched by estate tax.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Do you have information about Uline or Dick and Liz Uihlein that we should know? Reporter Justin Elliott can be reached via email at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at (774) 826-6240.

Andy Kroll contributed reporting.

by Perla Trevizo and Marilyn W. Thompson

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

Days after being elected Texas governor in 2014, Greg Abbott called a staff meeting to discuss his vision for leading the state.

“Our number-one priority as public servants is to follow the law,” Abbott, who served as Texas attorney general before he was elected, told staffers, according to his autobiography. Adhering to the law was “a way to ignore the pressure of politics, polls, money and lobbying.”

The Republican governor-elect said he rejected the path of Democratic President Barack Obama, whom he had sued 34 times as attorney general. Abbott claimed that Obama had usurped Congress’ power by using executive orders, including one to protect from deportation young people born in other countries and brought to the United States as children.

Now, nearly eight years into his governorship, Abbott’s actions belie his words. He has consolidated power like no Texas governor in recent history, at times circumventing the GOP-controlled state Legislature and overriding local officials.

The governor used the pandemic to block judges from ordering the release of some prisoners who couldn’t post cash bail and unilaterally defunded the legislative branch because lawmakers had failed to approve some of his top priorities. He also used his disaster authority to push Texas further than any other state on immigration and was the first to send thousands of immigrants by bus to Democratic strongholds.

Abbott’s executive measures have solidified his conservative base and dramatically raised his national profile. He is leading Democrat Beto O’Rourke in polls ahead of the Nov. 8 election and is mentioned as a potential 2024 GOP presidential contender. But his moves have also brought fierce criticism from some civil liberties groups, legal experts and even members of his own party, who have said his actions overstep the clearly defined limits of his office.

“Abbott would make the argument that Obama had a power grab, that he was trying to create an imperial presidency by consolidating power. That’s exactly what Abbott is doing at the state level,” said Jon Taylor, chair of the political science and geography department at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

At least 34 lawsuits have been filed in the past two years challenging Abbott’s executive actions, which became bolder since the start of the pandemic. Abbott used his expanded power at first to require safety measures against COVID-19, similar to what other governors did. But after pushback from his conservative base, he later forbade local governments and businesses from imposing mask and vaccine mandates. He also forced through Republican priorities, including an order that indirectly took aim at abortions by postponing surgeries and procedures that were not medically necessary.

Lower courts have occasionally ruled against Abbott, but Texas’ all-Republican highest court has sided with the governor, dismissing many of the cases on procedural grounds. Other challenges to Abbott’s use of executive power are still pending. In no case have the governor’s actions been permanently halted.

Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. In responding to the lawsuits, his legal team has defended his actions as allowed under the Texas Disaster Act of 1975, which gives the governor expansive powers.

Several of Abbott’s allies also declined to comment or didn’t return phone calls. Carlos Cascos, a former secretary of state under Abbott, said that in the end, it is up to the courts to decide whether the governor’s actions are unconstitutional.

“Until there’s some final judgment, the governor can do it,” Cascos, also a Republican, said. “If people want to change the rules or laws, that’s fine, but you change them by going through a process.”

Legal experts concede that Abbott has been successful so far, but they insist his moves exceed his constitutional authority.

“I’m not sure any other governor in recent Texas history has so blatantly violated the law with full awareness by the Supreme Court, and he’s been successful at every turn when he had no power to exercise it. It’s amazing,” said Ron Beal, a former Baylor University law professor who has written widely on administrative law and filed legal briefs challenging Abbott’s power. Although Texas Supreme Court justices are elected, Abbott has appointed five of the nine members of the state’s highest court when there have been vacancies.

Some Republicans also fault the governor’s actions. Nowhere was that more pronounced than when Abbott vetoed the Legislature’s budget last year after Democrats fled the state Capitol to thwart passage of one of the strictest voting bills in the country. The governor contended that “funding should not be provided for those who quit their job early.”

The move, which spurred a lawsuit from Democratic lawmakers, would have halted pay for about 2,100 state employees who were caught in the crosshairs.

Former state lawmakers, including two previous House speakers — Joe Straus, a Republican, and Pete Laney, a Democrat — as well as former Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff, weighed in on the dispute, filing a brief with the state’s Supreme Court calling the governor’s action unconstitutional and “an attempt to intimidate members of the Legislature and circumvent democracy.”

In response to the lawsuit, state Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Abbott used his constitutional authority to veto the Legislature’s budget and that the courts didn’t have a role to play in disputes between political branches.

The Supreme Court agreed, saying it was not a matter for the judicial branch to decide. In the end, lawmakers passed a bill that restored the funding that Abbott had vetoed. Staffers didn’t lose a paycheck.

“It was a terrible thing to do, to threaten those people who do all that work, and threaten not to pay them while the governor and the members of Legislature were still going to get paid. How cynical is that?” said Kel Seliger, an outgoing Republican state senator from Amarillo who has split with his party’s leadership on various issues as it has shifted further right.

Weak Governor?

Abbott has taken advantage of emergency orders and disaster declarations like no other Texas governor in recent history. (Miguel Gutierrez/Pool via The Texas Tribune)

Research groups consistently rank Texas as a “weak governor” state because its constitution limits what the governor can do without legislative authorization. Executive officers such as the lieutenant governor and the attorney general are also independently elected, not appointed by the governor, further diluting the power of the office.

“The way the constitution is designed, unless it’s specified in the constitution, you don’t have that power. Period. And that’s why I think you can look at a whole variety of his actions as violating the constitution. He just doesn’t have it. He asserts it, and he gets away with it,” said James Harrington, a former constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who founded the Texas Civil Rights Project. Harrington initially filed a brief defending Abbott’s early use of pandemic-related executive orders limiting crowd sizes and the types of businesses allowed to remain open, but he said the governor’s later orders fell outside of the bounds of the law.

The weak-governor structure was created by the framers in 1876 who believed that Edmund Jackson Davis, a former Union general who led Texas following the Civil War, abused his powers as governor. A Republican who supported the rights of freed people, Davis disbanded the Texas Rangers and created a state police force that he used, at times, to enforce martial law to protect the civil rights of African Americans. He also expanded the size of government, appointing more than 9,000 state, county and local officials, which left a very small number of elected positions.

Currently, the governor’s office accrues power largely through vetoes and appointments. While the Legislature can override a veto, governors often issue them after the legislative session ends. The governor is the only one who can call lawmakers back.

During a typical four-year term, a governor makes about 1,500 appointments to the courts and hundreds of agencies and boards covering everything from economic development to criminal justice. The longer governors serve, the more loyalty they can build through appointments.

Abbott’s predecessor, Republican former Gov. Rick Perry, set the stage for building power through appointments. Over 14 years, Perry, a former state representative who became Texas’ longest-serving governor, positioned former employees, donors and supporters in every state agency.

Perry could not be reached for comment through a representative.

In contrast to his predecessor, Abbott, a jurist with no legislative experience, found other avenues to interpret and stretch the law. Abbott has benefited from appointments and vetoes, but he has also taken advantage of emergency orders and disaster declarations like no other governor in recent state history.

Disaster declarations are generally used for natural calamities such as hurricanes and droughts and are useful legally for governors who could face legislative gridlock or state agency inaction if going through normal channels. Abbott’s use of such tools has grown even as his party holds a majority in the state Legislature.

In his eight years as governor, Abbott has issued at least 42 executive orders. Perry signed 80 orders during his 14-year tenure, though they rarely brought controversy. He once required human papillomavirus vaccines for girls but backtracked after pushback from the Legislature.

“Rick Perry experimented with and developed a number of tools that former governors had,” said Cal Jillson, professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. “That he sharpened appointments would be one of those, executive orders would be another of those, the use of the bully pulpit would be a third. And Abbott went to school on that.”

Aiding Abbott in his push to strengthen executive power have been what is essentially a Republican-controlled state with no term limits for officeholders, a Legislature that meets every two years and innate fundraising skills that have helped him draw about $282 million (adjusted for inflation) in campaign contributions in the decade since he first ran for governor. He has used some of that haul to oppose candidates for office, including those in his own party, who have crossed him.

“It’s surprising that even the legislative leadership in the Republican Party has acquiesced to the degree they have because the powers that Abbott has accrued have to come from somewhere else, and it’s coming from them,” said Glenn Smith, an Austin-based Democratic strategist.

Last year, state lawmakers filed 13 bills aiming to curb the governor’s powers under the state’s disaster act, including Republican proposals that would require the Legislature’s permission to extend executive orders, which the governor now does every 30 days.

For instance, in 2019 Abbott issued an executive order to extend the state’s plumbing board after it was on track to shut down because of legislative inaction. He was able to do so by using his power under a disaster declaration that he first issued when Hurricane Harvey pummeled the state in 2017. He continued to renew the disaster declaration for nearly four years.

Abbott similarly continues to renew his 2020 COVID-19 disaster declaration even as he downplays the severity of the pandemic.

During the last legislative session, the only measure that passed — and was signed by Abbott — is a bill that removed the governor’s authority to restrict the sale, dispensing or transportation of firearms during a declared disaster.

“He governs like a judge, and that’s where the autocratic side comes out,” said state Rep. Lyle Larson, a Republican lawmaker whom Abbott tried to oust in 2018 after he pushed a measure that would make the governor wait a year before appointing to boards anyone who donated more than $2,500 to his campaign. The San Antonio lawmaker, who defeated Abbott’s preferred candidate at the time, has decided not to seek reelection.

Methodically Creating a Powerhouse

Over the years, Abbott continued to insert himself in decision-making that had previously not been in the purview of the governor’s office. (Laura Skelding for The Texas Tribune)

Abbott’s tenacity at building the power of the office can be traced back to his recovery after an oak tree fell on him while he was jogging at age 26, paralyzing him from the waist down, said Austin-based Republican consultant and lobbyist Bill Miller.

“He’s had setbacks in life that he’s overcome with tremendous success, and you don’t achieve that unless you’re persevering and a tough individual, and he’s both in the extreme,” Miller said.

At 32, Abbott was elected as a Harris County district judge, then was plucked from the bench by former Gov. George W. Bush, who elevated him to fill a vacancy on the Texas Supreme Court, a recommendation of Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove. Abbott ran for state attorney general and served 12 years before his election as governor in 2014.

He began testing the limits of his executive power quickly after his election.

In June 2015, six months into his first term, Abbott analyzed the state budget and vetoed more than $200 million in legislative directives that provided specific instructions to agencies on how certain funds should be used.

The move eliminated funding for various projects, including water conservation education grants and a planned museum in Corpus Christi. Abbott called some of the projects “unnecessary state debt and spending.”

The head of the Legislative Budget Board at the time argued that the governor had overstepped his authority because while he could veto line-item appropriations, he could not override the Legislature’s instructions to state agencies.

“We were just kind of flabbergasted. In all of your 150-plus years of precedent in state government, this had never been seen before,” said a longtime capitol attorney who asked to not be identified for fear of retribution. “It was kind of shocking to me that he was an attorney, was the attorney general, was on the (Texas) Supreme Court and, in my opinion, has such little value for the Texas Constitution and disrespect for the separation of powers. Such disrespect for a coequal branch of government.”

Over the years, Abbott continued to insert himself in decision-making that had previously not been in the purview of the governor’s office. His actions drew little public scrutiny because they involved procedural matters.

For instance, state agencies must typically seek public comment before publishing final regulations in areas such as the environment and education. But Abbott wanted to review proposed regulations before their public release. In 2018, his office directed agencies to first run them past the governor.

Citing a 1981 executive order by Ronald Reagan, Abbott’s chief of staff wrote that presidential review of proposed regulations helped to “coordinate policy among agencies, eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies, and provide a dispassionate ‘second opinion’ on the costs and benefits of proposed agency actions.”

But insisting on a review of agency proposals could give his office influence over matters that should not be left to the executive branch, critics said. For example, Abbott’s office could suggest softening regulations for emissions, which could be favorable to the oil and gas industry. While agency leaders do not have to comply, the boards and commissions overseeing them are often appointed by the governor.

Byron Cook, a Republican former state lawmaker from Corsicana, criticized Abbott’s request at the time and continues to believe that the governor overstepped his authority. “I think it’s a dangerous precedent, and I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the people in the state because it circumvents the legislative process,” Cook said in a recent interview.

At the time, Abbott’s office defended his line-item veto and his request to review agency rules as measures that were within his constitutional authority.

It’s unclear how much influence Abbott has wielded over that process in the past six years because the governor’s office is fighting the release of records to ProPublica and the Tribune that would show its interactions with state agencies.

While some lawmakers like Cook openly resisted Abbott’s push to grow the powers of the executive branch, Perry and Abbott have faced limited pushback because few have wanted to cross them, several former and current lawmakers told ProPublica and the Tribune.

“Somebody’s got to push back, but pushing back very often brings retribution, and so people are very careful,” said Seliger, who filed a bill in one of last year’s special legislative sessions aimed at removing the governor’s line-item veto power.

The measure was mostly symbolic because only Abbott has the power to decide what topics will be addressed in a special session — and Seliger’s bill was not among them.

Pushing an Agenda

Abbott declared a public emergency in March 2020 and issued executive orders to deal with pandemic safety. Legal challenges continued to mount as he asserted his disaster authority to control local government responses to the crisis and to impose his policy priorities. (Miguel Gutierrez Jr. for The Texas Tribune)

As the pandemic hit Texas, Abbott reacted like most other governors struggling with an unprecedented public health crisis. He declared a public emergency on March 13, 2020, and issued a string of executive orders to deal with pandemic safety.

Abbott initially faced at least 10 lawsuits from business owners and conservative activists insisting his restrictions on businesses and crowd control violated the constitution. Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a professor of state and federal constitutional law at South Texas College of Law Houston, said many of Abbott’s early actions were allowed under the disaster act’s sweeping provisions.

Legal challenges mounted as Abbott, in response to criticism from conservative groups and lawmakers, shifted course and asserted his disaster authority to control local government responses to the crisis and to impose his policy priorities. Rhodes pointed to an order forbidding employers from imposing vaccine mandates on employees. He said Abbott pushed “beyond the scope of his authority” and against federal vaccine mandates.

A string of legal actions filed by local governments and school districts in state and federal courts alleged that Abbott has tried to usurp the power of local entities, including the courts, by issuing orders that prohibited them from taking their own measures to deal with rising infection rates. Abbott’s legal team has defended the orders as within the scope of his expansive powers under the disaster act.

Two Texas parents who signed on as intervenors in a lawsuit against Abbott brought by La Joya and other independent school districts — Shanetra Miles-Fowler, a mother of three in Manor, and Elias Ponvert, a father of four in Pflugerville — told ProPublica and the Tribune that they saw Abbott’s order as political.

A lower-court order delayed implementation of Abbott’s prohibition against local governments imposing mask and vaccination mandates. The timing allowed parents to get through “the most dangerous months of the COVID pandemic,” said attorney Mike Siegel, who represented parents in the La Joya lawsuit. “Our fight likely saved the lives of students and staff who were facing a terrible choice of missing school or risking infection.” The masking cases are still pending at the Texas Supreme Court.

Abbott also used his disaster emergency powers to block judges from releasing prisoners who had not posted pretrial bail, prompting a lawsuit from 16 county judges and legal groups who argued that he had exceeded his constitutional powers. Abbott’s order also restricted the release of some charged with misdemeanors on time served with good behavior. His order said the disaster act gave him broad authority to control entrance and exit into facilities and the “occupancy of premises.”

In a court filing, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argued that Abbott’s executive order “violates the separation of powers, interferes with judicial independence, violates equal protection and due process of law, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Abbott had been trying unsuccessfully since 2017 to make it harder for those accused of violent crimes, or any prior offenses involving threats of violence, to get out of jail without posting cash bonds. When COVID-19 struck, some counties began releasing prisoners to try to reduce jail populations. In Harris County, where Abbott had once served as a judge, the jail was overflowing, and a federal judge in Houston had ordered the county to begin releasing about 250 prisoners per day.

Elizabeth Rossi, an attorney with the Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit group that has represented plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Harris County challenging its felony bail practices, said Abbott’s “heartless and cruel” order impacted tens of thousands of prisoners held in Texas jails. “The human effects were really visceral,” she said.

One inmate, Preston Chaney, 64, died of COVID-19 while awaiting trial in the Harris County jail for three months, unable to post a small bond on charges that he stole lawn equipment and frozen meat.

Maurice Wilson, a 38-year-old with diabetes who served time in Harris County on drug possession charges, said he was terrified by the spread of COVID-19 as he sat in jail on a $10,000 bond. He was one of the many prohibited from release under Abbott’s order because of a prior misdemeanor assault conviction.

The Texas Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the Harris County judges and other plaintiffs lacked standing because they had not suffered injury and overturned a temporary restraining order that had halted enforcement of Abbott’s order. Abbott finally got a bail-reform package through the Legislature and signed it into law in September 2021. It formalized some aspects of his executive order.

What Abbott has tried to do is “make himself the chief prosecutor, the chief lawmaker and, with bail, the chief judge,” said Jessica Brand, a lawyer who represented a law enforcement group in the case. “We do not live in a kingdom, however, and such behavior is totally inconsistent with the framework of government this state has adopted.”

Power Concentration

Abbott, flanked by top Republicans at a press conference in June 2021, detailed a plan for Texas to build its own border wall. (Sophie Park for The Texas Tribune)

Abbott’s power consolidation came to a head last year as his administration embarked on the state’s most ambitious and costly border initiative to date.

On May 31, 2021, about four months into President Joe Biden’s term, Abbott became the first governor in recent history to issue a border disaster declaration, which he said was needed because the federal government’s inaction was causing a “dramatic increase” in the number of people crossing into the state. The disaster declaration gave the governor more flexibility to shift funds, increase penalties for some state trespassing charges against immigrants and suspend rules, including those governing state contracts.

Abbott had already succeeded in securing more than $1 billion for border security during the Legislative session for the deployment of Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard members under Operation Lone Star.

The governor launched the initiative in March of that year, contending it was necessary to stem the smuggling of drugs and people into the country through Texas. Under the disaster declaration that Abbott used to bolster his authority over the operation, immigrants charged with criminal trespassing for crossing the border through private property could be punished by up to a year in jail. He could also use state funds to build barriers.

In August, Abbott used his power to reconvene lawmakers for a special session where they again increased funding for border security by an additional $2 billion. Over the next few months, the governor continued to deploy National Guard members to the border with no end date for their mission.

As costs ballooned, Abbott chose not to bring lawmakers back for another special session. Instead, with help from a handful of Republican lawmakers and some state agency leaders, Abbott dipped at least twice into other agencies’ coffers to shift another nearly $1 billion to support an operation that has been plagued with problems since it began.

An investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project found that the state’s reported success included arrests unrelated to the border or immigration and counted drug seizures from across Texas, including those made by troopers who were not directly assigned to Operation Lone Star. Reporting by the Tribune and Army Times also exposed poor working conditions, pay delays and suicides among National Guard members deployed as part of the operation. And the Department of Justice is investigating potential civil rights violations related to Abbott’s directive to prosecute immigrants for trespassing. A spokesperson for the DOJ said she didn’t have any information to provide on the investigation.

Abbott’s office has previously said the arrests and prosecutions “are fully constitutional.”

Still, Abbott continues to expand the scope of the operation with no end in sight.

In April, the governor used the powers he had tested and amassed to announce his latest step under the umbrella of Operation Lone Star: Texas would transport migrants arriving at the border to Washington, D.C., later expanding the initiative to New York and Chicago. Once again, he used the powers of the disaster declaration and tasked the state’s emergency agency with carrying out the measure.

Since then, more than 12,500 people have been bused at a cost of about $14 million, according to state records. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, also Republicans, followed Abbott’s lead with their own initiatives. A Texas county sheriff is conducting a criminal investigation into the treatment of immigrants, and the D.C. attorney general is examining immigrant busing into Washington by Texas and Arizona. All of the governors have defended their actions as legal.

“I can’t remember that the governor has ever used state powers for this type of militarized border enforcement,” said Barbara Hines, founder and former director of the University of Texas Law School Immigration Clinic.

“What he’s doing under the guise of emergencies, disasters, invasions, whatever misnomer Abbott wants to give it to enforce federal immigration law,” she added, “I think that’s illegal.”

Lexi Churchill contributed research.

by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi

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Theresa Opalinski was warming up her border collies for their agility training one day in 2011 when she couldn’t catch her breath. Her husband, Michael, suggested they go to urgent care, and a few days later, a specialist drained more than a liter of fluid from her left lung. After ping-ponging between local hospitals, she underwent an exploratory surgery, which confirmed she had mesothelioma.

The diagnosis puzzled them. Asbestos exposure is the only known cause of the vicious cancer, which kills most people who get it within a few years. Because cases often involve occupational exposure in industries like shipbuilding and construction — and because it can take decades for the cancer to develop — mesothelioma is sometimes thought of as an old man’s disease. Theresa was just 53 and held a master’s in public administration. She had been a congressional aide, she’d managed a nonprofit, she’d worked in marketing. Never with asbestos.

Far from her mind was the fact that she and Michael had grown up a mile away from a plant in North Tonawanda, New York, that used a type of asbestos that is blue in color to make industrial plastics. The plant’s owner, OxyChem, closed and demolished the facility in the 1990s. But the company has since faced at least 10 lawsuits alleging that the plant released so much asbestos into the environment that residents of the surrounding neighborhood developed mesothelioma and other ailments associated with the toxic substance.

The blue dust settled onto windowsills and on a Little League field and atop fresh snow, lawsuits allege and residents recall. It got stuck in workers’ hair and on their clothes and wound up on the seats of their cars and inside their homes. One woman, married to a plant employee, died after years of washing her husband’s asbestos-soiled uniform, her family said.

OxyChem declined to comment on the lawsuits involving its plastics plant. Most of the cases have been settled out of court, records show. Two are pending. In some of the cases, OxyChem said it was not responsible for the plaintiff’s injuries. In at least one, the company said the lawsuit had not been filed by the legally required deadline.

The latest suits, filed earlier this year, come as the company is forced to reckon with its other uses of asbestos — and contemplate a future without it. Unlike some 60 other countries, the United States hasn’t banned asbestos. OxyChem is one of two chemical companies that import and use the potent carcinogen to make chlorine. For decades, it has maintained that the workers in its chlorine plants face no threat of exposure; in recent months, it has used that argument to fight a proposed federal ban on the substance.

But last week, ProPublica reported that asbestos accumulated in a number of areas inside and around OxyChem’s chlorine plant in Niagara Falls, New York, and that employees worked amid the dust until the plant closed late last year. They often went without protective suits or masks in the building where asbestos was removed from equipment, they said. “We were constantly swimming in this stuff,” one former employee said.

Though the two OxyChem plants that have come under scrutiny used different types of asbestos for different industrial processes, there are striking similarities between the facilities, which are 10 miles apart. Experts say both situations speak to OxyChem’s poor track record of containing asbestos in its plants, and they both illustrate the carcinogen’s long tail and broad impact.

Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral known for its strength, durability and ability to resist heat. It was once used widely in industrial operations and construction. But its tiny fibers can also do serious damage. Once inhaled, they can settle into the lungs, abdomen and other parts of the body, where they can cause cancer and other deadly conditions.

The North Tonawanda plant was built in the 1920s, state Department of Environmental Conservation records show. It was acquired by Hooker Chemical in the 1950s, then by Occidental Petroleum, OxyChem’s parent company, in the 1960s.

The asbestos used at the plant sickened workers, some of whom went on to sue the asbestos companies that sold the material, court records and news clips show. The asbestos use also had a profound effect on the surrounding community, the lawsuits against OxyChem allege. When the plant got too dusty, the workers used air hoses to remove fibers from the facility, according to the lawsuits.

One of the plaintiffs, James Urban, played baseball on a Little League field that was regularly contaminated by dust from the plant in the late 1960s, according to his lawsuit. Nearly 30 years later, doctors found fluid between the layers of tissue lining his lungs, a condition known as a pleural effusion that can be caused by asbestos exposure. Urban declined to comment when reached at home by ProPublica.

Michael Opalinski used to clean a fine blue dust off the windowsills of his home when he was growing up in North Tonawanda in the 1960s and ’70s, he told ProPublica. He sometimes saw tiny blue feathers atop a fresh snowfall. He recalled at least two explosions at the plant that expelled clouds of dust into the air.

Paul Richards worked at the plant from 1962 to 1980, he said. One of his jobs was to empty 100-pound bags of asbestos and stomp the material through a grate in the floor. After a shift, asbestos would cover his face, he said. It would slip underneath his collar and inside his pockets.

Jean Richards (Courtesy of Amy Shuler)

At home, Paul’s wife, Jean, would take his dirty uniforms into the basement, shake them out and launder them. Then one day, more than a decade after Paul had left the plant, Jean was diagnosed with lung cancer. “That’s how she got sick,” he said recently. “Just from washing my clothes.” Jean battled the cancer for years, her daughter, Amy Shuler, said, undergoing chemotherapy and other treatments, often feeling too sick to eat or drink.

When Jean died in 2005 at age 62, Paul lost his high school sweetheart and longtime hunting and fishing partner. Amy lost the mother who doted on her and took her shopping and then out to lunch each Saturday. “I lost my best friend, all because my dad had worked with asbestos and mom would breathe in the dust when she would shake his clothing out before putting it in the wash,” Amy said. “No one told us of the dangers.”

For Theresa Opalinski, treatment was grueling: a surgery to remove part of the lining of her lungs, four rounds of chemotherapy. She lost weight, grew weak. The disease, Michael said, was like “putting on a cement overcoat.” “It forms a hard shell [around the lungs], to the point where you can’t breathe.” Later, Theresa participated in phase 1 trials of experimental therapies at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She pushed through them not because she expected to beat the cancer herself, but so that one day, someone else might, her husband said. She died in 2016 at age 58.

Michael Opalinksi (Rich-Joseph Facun, special to ProPublica)

Michael, who had seen a local law firm’s billboard seeking North Tonawanda residents diagnosed with mesothelioma, didn’t call until after Theresa died, he said. He told ProPublica he couldn’t say much about the lawsuit he filed against OxyChem in 2017. Records show it was settled out of court.

The Opalinskis had plans to retire early, travel the world, take the dogs to national agility competitions. Everything is different now. In 2020, he left the city where he and Theresa grew up and moved to the countryside. His new house has a big yard for the dogs. He wishes Theresa had lived to see it. He thinks about her when he’s on the back porch, listening to the wind blow through the leaves. She loved being outside, especially in the summer. “It’s tough that you can’t share it with her,” he said.

He still struggles to make sense of it: the diagnosis, her loss, how it could have happened in the first place. Even in the 1960s when Theresa was likely exposed, asbestos was a known carcinogen. “If what you are producing is very harmful and you’ve known it since the 1950s,” he asked, “why would you do it?”

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

by Jake Pearson

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In the spring of 2020, George Floyd’s caught-on-camera murder by a Minneapolis police officer prompted massive social justice protests across the country. Millions of people marched for law enforcement reform — even Sen. Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and onetime GOP presidential nominee. Activists pressed policymakers to “defund the police.”

Amid the pressure, elected officials pledged sweeping changes to how officers operate and how they’re overseen.

But two and a half years later, with violent crime increasing across the country, that momentum has seemingly stalled. In Washington, support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have created a national police misconduct registry among other measures, withered while lawmakers passed bipartisan legislation to invest in the police. A recent House bill would award local police departments $60 million annually for five years, with few of the kinds of accountability measures for cops that progressives had advocated.

Meanwhile, in New York City, home to the nation’s largest police force, Mayor Eric Adams pledged to recruit officers with the right temperament for the job, weeding out overly aggressive cops while taking on violent criminals. He has since staked his mayoralty on combating crime, empowering the police to pursue a range of functions, from sweeping homeless encampments to relaunching a controversial plainclothes anti-crime unit, which had only recently been disbanded over criticisms that it disproportionately targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers and was involved in many police killings.

To make sense of these shifts, I called Elizabeth Glazer, one of New York’s leading experts on criminal justice. For more than two decades, she’s been working in law enforcement and policymaking circles, first as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where she leveraged federal racketeering laws to put shooters and their enablers behind bars, then as a government official, including the deputy secretary for public safety under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Most recently, she served as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice during the Bill de Blasio administration.

This year, Glazer founded Vital City, a nonprofit dedicated to offering practical solutions to public safety problems. The endeavor is something of a call for a rebirth of civic mindedness, drawing on research that shows how communities can both be safer and feel safer if the whole of city government — not just the police — acts, including cleaning up vacant lots, turning on street lights and employing young people during the summer.

We discussed police reform post-Floyd, the role of the cops and the shifting narrative around public safety amid rising levels of crime. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

From your perch, what does the legislative inaction around the police reform agenda say about the ground-level movement that was spurred by Floyd’s murder? What happened?

Two things happened: One, there’s a kind of built-in conservatism about the importance of maintaining the police. As a country, we are afraid to change policing because we are so firmly attached to the view that it is only the police that can keep us safe.

The second thing is, the movement coincided with rocketing rates of increase in shootings. Suddenly, scary violence really erupted in ways we hadn’t seen in many years. And our reflex when crime happens is, “Call the police,” not, “Make sure you have enough summer youth employment.” That bolstered the reluctance to make changes.

But I think the other thing is that “defund the police” was really a lost opportunity. It sort of had this toxic messaging. So it was viewed as an existential threat to police departments. But in fact, it might’ve been an enormous opportunity if police departments didn’t view it that way. It could have been a chance for them to begin to reshape their roles in a way that focused on their core strengths and to begin to give back to other professionals the responsibility to deal with the homeless, those with mental illness and all these other areas where their authority had kind of expanded into.

I’ve always thought that some of the reformers and even the police union would have some common ground, especially when it comes to defining what the job of the cop is.

In fact, cops have often said: “We don’t want to be social workers. That’s not our job.” So it does seem like there’s an opportunity. But we don’t start from that point because I think there’s a sense from the profession that they are under attack and underappreciated. And if you say, ‘Do less,’ it feels like yet a further attack, as opposed to, ‘How can we support you to do what you do best?’ What’s happened is that the police department, as it accretes more and more functions, occupies a very prominent role among the city agencies. But actually we’re a civilian government, we have civilian heads whose job, really, is to ensure the police are part of an integrated civic approach, ensuring that communities thrive.

You’ve been making this argument for years. Why should policymakers listen today?

The police are great at solving crimes. And that is something that only they can do, and, really, that is what they should do.

But the line between who is police and who is government more broadly has become more and more blurred, so what you see is police really taking over all kinds of civic services. In New York City, the Police Department is funded to the tune of millions of dollars to construct community centers and do community programming. They have an employment program. They do graffiti removal. They do mentoring. They have a beekeeper. All of these are civic services. Why are the police doing it?

We seem to have gotten into this strange Rube Goldberg situation, in which the police, as a stated matter, are saying, “We’re doing it in order to build trust with the community.” But it’s really a backward way of doing it and ultimately, I think, ineffective because it is hard to make friends when it is an unequal relationship. It is hard to say: “Play basketball with me. By the way, I have a gun.” Or, “By the way, on another day I may be arresting you and your friends.” It’s just the way things are constructed. But the police can build respect by solving cases. And I think neighborhoods rely upon them, and have respect for them, when they do that job they can do so excellently.

In 1999, you wrote a piece for National Affairs that argued law enforcement needed to take a broader approach to crime reduction instead of focusing on arrests and one-off prosecutions. Today, 23 years later, do you feel as though the more things have changed, the more they are the same?

I think the frustration I was expressing then was that there didn’t seem to be a connection between going back in and arresting people over and over again and saying, “OK, well now a bunch of people who have been killing other people in the neighborhood have been arrested. Before another group steps in to fill the void, is there something else that can be done?” Who has that panoramic view?

A civilian needs to be the one who has that panoramic view, that civilian being the mayor, who oversees all the different services that are produced for the benefit of a city’s citizens and weaves them together toward one goal, which is supporting the well-being of New Yorkers. The police are an important part of that, but they are not the most important part, and they are not the point of the spear. They are a civic service that needs to be coordinated and synchronized with all these other efforts, focused on neighborhoods in need and working alongside their colleagues in housing, parks, employment and all the other things that keep us safe.

At the same time, when you think about this service of last resort, meaning the criminal justice system, it’s much more than just the city. Somebody also needs to coordinate that, and it needs to be someone who has enough gravitas and connections to have players who do not report to them be willing to think together and act together for a common goal.

Is there any recognition in the Adams administration that maybe the police don’t need to be as omnipresent in every aspect of city life? Or is that point lost on them?

I mean, certainly the mayor’s campaign rhetoric was very much about dealing with upstream issues. He famously quoted Bishop [Desmond] Tutu about making sure people don’t “fall into the river.” And he’s been a big proponent on summer youth employment. The difficulty is, it’s unclear what the plan is and how it all fits together. And then, even to the extent that one thing or another is announced, how are those things doing? And do they connect to anything else that’s being done?

How do you advise policymakers who are navigating the new terrain here when politicians weaponize crime stats for political ends? Yes, crime is up, but in truth there are some neighborhoods that are feeling it disproportionately.

Crime is now and always has been highly, highly concentrated, particularly violent crime. If you look at the neighborhoods that suffered the most number of shootings today and 30 years ago, they’re almost identical. Many fewer shootings now, but still, they lead the city. And right across the board, every social distress is borne in these neighborhoods, including poor health outcomes and high unemployment. So we’re seeing the durability of place.

There are community groups who have the slogan, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And in fact they’re exactly right. Our problem is it doesn’t feel like immediate action. One of the great attractions, I think, for elected officials and for residents of sending in the police is it feels like something is being done. We’ve seen over and over again; that can’t be the only answer. And we have such incredibly good evidence about what else stops crime right now, not in 20 years, but right now. Turning on the lights reduces crime. Summer youth employment reduces crime.

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

Election coverage often focuses on competition between rival candidates while downplaying policies and platforms. But knowing how to decipher these “horse race” stories can help you understand what’s at stake for you and can inform your political participation.

Think about it this way: The campaigns themselves are constantly watching certain signals — polls, fundraising totals, public opinion — to understand what’s going on in their races. They adjust their tactics accordingly. You have the power to adjust your actions, too. Here are a few questions to ask.

How Competitive Is Your Congressional District?

Today, we’re going to focus on your district’s candidates for the House of Representatives using a tool called the Cook Political Report.

The Cook Political Report is a nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes federal campaigns and elections to weigh the likelihood that your current representative will be able to hang onto their seat compared to the chances of a challenger defeating them. Its authors watch polls, track fundraising and outside spending, and talk to the campaigns and candidates. Then they assign a rating to the competitiveness of each race:

• Solid (Republican or Democrat): These races are not considered competitive and are not likely to become so.
• Likely (Republican or Democrat): These races are not considered competitive at this point, but they could tighten up.
• Lean (Republican or Democrat): These are considered competitive races, but one party has an advantage.
• Toss-Up: These are the most competitive; either party has a good chance of winning.

These ratings update often, though, based on what’s happening on the campaign trail. Want to know if the outlook in your district changes? You can check the Cook Political Report site.

Where Does the Campaign Money Come From?

Political organizations and nonprofit committees have spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing elections, so candidates’ campaign finances are another illuminating metric. Where did they get all that money, and how are they spending it?

One number that can help you determine the strength of a campaign is the percentage of funds raised from PACs, or political action committees. A PAC is a collection of individuals who have pooled their money to donate to candidates. The best-funded PACs are corporations and interest groups — the NRA, Planned Parenthood and labor unions all have PACs — but they can also be funded by civically engaged folks who aren’t political operators.

A reliance on PACs, versus individual donors, can tell you something about how much the candidate is benefitting from institutional support versus grassroots support. A higher percentage of funds from PACs means a candidate’s donor money comes mostly in fairly large checks, as opposed to donations from individuals. A higher percentage of individual donations, on the other hand, is a sign of grassroots enthusiasm about the campaign.

Federal candidates have to file data about their fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Commission, the agency that enforces campaign finance law, on a regular schedule. This makes it easier to peek inside this universe.

Most campaigns file quarterly reports on April 15, July 15, Oct. 15 and Jan. 15. So the numbers here will give you a snapshot of money raised and spent within a three-month window. To start, we’ll look specifically at campaign fundraising.

Campaigns need money to get their messages out; it’s expensive to buy advertising and organize rallies, town halls and other campaign activities. Most political fundraising amounts sound like a LOT of money to me — and probably to you, too. For example, according to OpenSecrets, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into Pennsylvania’s senate race so far. So how do you know what those numbers mean?

That’s where the rankings come in handy: More competitive races typically attract more money. You can also look at the money gap between two candidates. If a candidate is at the lower end of the fundraising scale, particularly against a well-funded competitor, that usually indicates their chances are not great. But there are exceptions. In 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in her primary despite a huge gap in fundraising. In 2020, Rep. Cori Bush defeated the 20-year (and highly funded) incumbent congressman William Lacy Clay in a major upset. So if your candidate of choice is outspent, don’t count them out.

Check on Your Local Races

There’s only so much that ProPublica can track with our data on federal candidates, but the League of Women Voters has a trove of information about candidates all the way down your ballot. The league is nonpartisan and works to arm citizens with the information they need to confidently vote.

For its VOTE411.org project, the league reached out to every candidate running for local and state office and asked each one a set of identical questions, like:

• What experiences qualify you to represent the citizens living in your district?
• What would be your top three priorities if elected?
• How will you work to increase job opportunities for your constituents?

Usually, the majority of candidates actually answer these questions in their own words because the league is such a well-known and respected resource for voters. This year, though, more and more Republican candidates are refusing to participate in league activities because they claim it is biased against Republicans, as our reporter Megan O’Matz reported early this election season. That said, the Vote411 voter guides can still help you learn about candidates and their positions, as well as any ballot measures in your area.

Another resource, Ballotpedia, also has a tool to help you understand what you’re voting for, especially on the local level. Put in your address and get information on every candidate and ballot initiative you’ll have a say on at the polls.

by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City

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

A New Jersey judge this week threw out an eviction complaint filed against an Atlantic City woman who told journalists that her landlord had failed to address unsafe conditions in the home. The property owner, Michael Scanlon Sr., began eviction proceedings against the woman shortly after a reporter for The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica visited the property in August.

The news organizations were looking at Scanlon’s properties as part of an investigation into a New Jersey agency that paid him more than $1.1 million for three Atlantic City rooming houses, forcing out the residents who lived in them.

Tenants said they had just six weeks’ notice to vacate the rooming houses, including 108 Albion Place. With few affordable options, two residents at that address took the landlord up on an offer to relocate to another of his rental properties, a Westside rowhome, in June 2021.

But the women, Nada Gilbert and Nikki Knight, said conditions in their new home were bad: A persistent leak caused Knight’s bedroom ceiling to bulge overhead and damaged her mattress, and a sagging porch roof was being held up by makeshift pillars. The women, in response, began withholding rent earlier this year, leading the landlord to try to remove them.

Atlantic City Superior Court Judge James P. McGee on Wednesday dismissed the case against Gilbert, citing the landlord’s failure to appear at the hearing that morning.

The women had ended up living there after being forced to move from Albion Place as part of the Vacant Rooming House Conversion Project, which the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority launched in winter 2020. Officials said the initiative would “protect Atlantic City residents by providing improved housing conditions and revitalize numerous properties.” Its leaders variously said the project, which involved CRDA acquiring empty rooming houses, would reduce blight, improve the city’s housing stock and expand affordable housing.

But the news organizations’ investigation found CRDA has fallen well short of those goals while displacing dozens of low-income residents in the process, including Gilbert and Knight.

Scanlon Sr. did not respond to requests for comment about his legal conflict with the two women, but his son Michael Scanlon Jr. said a “miscommunication” preceded the eviction filing. “It was more my fault,” Scanlon Jr. said. He had previously told the news organizations that the tenants had had more than six weeks’ notice to move but did not provide documentation to support that.

He blames the leak on the neighboring vacant home but said he and his father have come to an agreement with the tenants. The women’s outstanding rent balance will be forgiven, and the remaining repairs and additional cosmetic updates will be made, according to Scanlon Jr., who also said he expects to take full ownership of the rental property in the next few weeks. Gilbert confirmed the details but said she has not yet signed any documents outlining the terms.

Meanwhile, the three properties that Scanlon Sr. sold to CRDA are boarded up with no signs of construction. After owning the three properties, which were all within about a block of the beach, for roughly a year, CRDA last month sold them for $150,000 to a hotel developer, who now has until September 2023 to start building.

Asked whether CRDA discussed relocation efforts with landlords in the program, agency leaders said no. “That was solely on the owners to deal with that,” said Lance Landgraf, CRDA director of planning and development, in an interview last month. “Our direction to them was: ‘We will not buy this with anybody in it.’ That’s as far as I went with it.”

CRDA was set up almost 40 years ago to use casino tax revenue to address “the pressing social and economic needs” of Atlantic City residents. But Landgraf said the agency has limited funds to service a variety of goals, which, under the law, also include redevelopment. And he stood by the rooming house project as a critical component of economic development. “We needed to get those properties cleaned up and changed into a better, more viable use in the community that would promote development, not restrict it,” Landgraf said.

However, critics say the state agency had other options besides closing the rooming house down and question how CRDA is using its power. In response to the investigation’s findings, one of the authors of the original legislation establishing CRDA, David Sciarra, said the rooming house outcomes “should be a wake-up call to legislators in Trenton.”

“They need to do some serious oversight to make sure that CRDA is operating in the best interests of all residents of Atlantic City and not just an investment arm of the casino industry,” he said.

by Megan O’Matz, photography by David Kasnic for ProPublica

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

Note: In September, ProPublica’s Megan O’Matz joined up with photographer David Kasnic for three days, attending two Republican events and an activist’s court hearing to report for a story on how Wisconsin’s political environment is being transformed. Kasnic has been photographing Wisconsin’s political scene for years while O’Matz moved to the state in 2021.

Our excursion together began at a Constitution Day celebration at a community park in New Berlin, Wisconsin. The next day we were in Waukesha for a “meat-and-greet” event of food and politics at the county’s Republican Party headquarters.

Kasnic then went to Racine for a court hearing on a criminal case involving Harry Wait, a conservative activist. Wait has admitted publicly to having absentee ballots in the names of two elected officials sent to his home; he said the move was intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of a state government website. He was in court for a preliminary hearing on fraud charges. Wait, defending his actions, has said the state was operating a “rogue system.” A judge has entered a not guilty plea on Wait’s behalf, court records show.

I talked to Kasnic about how we approached this assignment; our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Day One: Constitution Day Celebration, New Berlin Linda Balistreri, a member of We the People Waukesha, greets attendees at the group’s Constitution Day event. Kasnic: What was the inspiration behind the story?

O’Matz: In Wisconsin, it seems that Election Day 2020 never ended. Even though Donald Trump lost the state, his supporters haven’t given up and are revising the rules governing how elections are run. We wanted to try to connect with voters, to hear their thoughts and meet them wherever they are — in parks and courthouses and even dive bars. The folks who believe the election was not fair, despite having no evidence of widespread fraud, have had some success in the courts. They’ve won rulings that tighten controls on absentee balloting and increase the likelihood that more of those ballots will be thrown out because of technicalities. Reading about the minutiae of election law, though, can be ponderous, and we needed a photographer to help us show the people and the passion behind all this activity. That’s where you came in, David.

The event included speeches and a buffet table. O’Matz: Folks on the right of the political spectrum can be hostile to traditional media outlets. How were you first received at the Constitution Day celebration, which commemorates the Sept. 17, 1787, signing of the U.S. Constitution, and which was hosted by a conservative group, We the People? How did you make people feel comfortable with us being at the event?

Kasnic: A lot of this stuff comes down to when you shake people’s hands, or you look people in the eye, and you’re sincere with them — a lot of the guard drops down and you simultaneously realize that we’re human beings and we’re just connecting. I think they can assume that I probably share some different beliefs than they do. But I don’t think that means that we can’t interact and be curious human beings with each other and be interested in one another’s thoughts and ideas. I grew up in a rural community, somewhat rural, in the Pacific Northwest, not really near any big town. My dad always says, “blue state, red towns” and it’s pretty accurate.

Attendees stand for the national anthem. Wisconsin attorney Dan Kelly, who is running for a 2023 seat on the state Supreme Court, speaks at the Constitution Day gathering. O’Matz: Do you approach your work differently than a breaking news photographer does? You told me you think of yourself as photographing slices of history. Can you explain what you meant?

Kasnic: That’s ideally what I’m doing. What I’m really trying to do is just point my camera toward the outside world. A lot of what I’m interested in can be tied into contemporary news topics. I don’t have a traditional photojournalist approach to many of these political events, even though I do have training in photojournalism. I go to these situations and I think about how the pictures can exist five, 10, 20 years from now, 30 years from now.

Craig Dedo (first image) attended in a MAGA hat and Maxine Learned, of We the People Waukesha, hosted a Constitution and Bill of Rights trivia game while dressed as a Founding Father. O’Matz: In New Berlin, I talked to a petite lady who gave her name as Mad Max and was dressed as a Founding Father: all in green with a jacket and a jabot and USA earrings. She joked that people were asking her if she was from “The Wizard of Oz.” What interesting conversations did you have?

Kasnic: The guy who was running the DJ booth. I just had a really good conversation with him and his wife. It’s kind of like talking to a really good friend’s mom and dad. I talked to him again this past Saturday at another event and he’s wearing a We the People of Waukesha shirt and underneath it says, “are pissed off.” So it’s “We the People of Waukesha are pissed off,” and “pissed off” is in a different font. I don’t really feel that type of energy from him. He’s just a real sweet guy, but obviously he might have some political beliefs that many folks in this country do find problematic. And I just think that nuance and that dynamic fascinates me.

Matt acts as DJ for We the People, playing music in between speakers and running sound for speeches. (Krasnic didn’t ask Matt for his last name; many people at the event were reluctant to provide that information.)

Day Two: “Meat-and-Greet” at the Republican Party of Waukesha County Headquarters A volunteer and a dog outside the meat-and-greet, where some attendees were screened by dogs. O’Matz: What was the scene where you shot the photo of the woman with the dog in Waukesha at the “meat-and-greet”? What about it caught your eye?

Kasnic: The dog’s name is Justice. It’s a “bomb-sniffing” dog, but it’s terrified of how many people are coming in and out. And then on the right end of the picture frame is a Trump-Pence sign. And so there’s these really interesting things happening, like America. There’s something nuanced about it.

Inside the county GOP headquarters O’Matz: You felt this event was not as valuable visually as the Constitution Day celebration. Why? It’s so colorful, and I love the sign on the table that reads, “Believe In: ‘In God We Trust,’ The Bill of Rights” etc.

Kasnic: If you’re being sent there for an assignment, you want to photograph the people who are speaking and you want to photograph a lot of people in the crowd and you want to kind of get the people in the back standing on the stairs because there’s nowhere else to sit. I looked at it like, “Maybe I don’t need to do that here.” There’s so many different walks of life, there’s so many different kinds of individuals that all kind of share the same beliefs. So they’re similar, but they look kind of different. There’s a guy with headphones. And then there’s a poster board of Trump in the background that gives a “Where’s Waldo?” effect to the photograph.

Scenes from the meat-and-greet

Day Three: Activist Harry Wait’s Hearing, Racine Harry Wait’s supporters gather outside the Racine County Courthouse on one of his hearing dates. Some are carrying signs for Wait’s group, H.O.T. Government, which stands for “honest, open, transparent.” Wait and his supporters walk into the courthouse for the hearing. O’Matz: You seem really chill about having difficult conversations in these kinds of settings, where minds don’t get changed and where you still need access to do your work.

Kasnic: I’m a white guy and I’m cisgender. So I understand how my ability to go inside some of these spaces is a bit easier than it would be for other folks. Let’s say I was a Black or Latinx photographer: I’d probably have a different encounter with these people because some of the things that they’re saying about the world would impact me drastically differently.

First image: Wait’s attorney at the time, Michael Gableman, is an election denier who led a taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 vote in Wisconsin that was called a “charade” by a Republican state senator. Gableman, who remained steadfast in his views on election fraud, has not responded previously to requests for comment from ProPublica. Wait’s supporters protest a gag order — a rule issued by a judge forbidding people involved in a case from talking about it publicly. O’Matz: I notice in the picture below, you were focused not so much on Wait but on the crowd of media, why?

Kasnic: It’s interesting, the media scrum — to kind of step back and observe from a little bit of a distance. You look at a guy like Harry Wait and if you don’t live in Wisconsin, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him before. So I felt it important to step back and show that this person is under a microscope of sorts. It’s important to move your feet and see where your feet can take you for a different perspective.

Wait outside the Racine County Courthouse after the hearing Kasnic: What photo do you think was most evocative of what we observed during our time together?

O’Matz: Probably the photo from the Constitution Day picnic, where people are standing with their hands or hats over their hearts. At times you really get this sense of fellowship, of connecting with others who share your beliefs. After all, they took time during a beautiful Saturday afternoon to talk about the Constitution, rather than, say, watch college football.

by Heather Vogell

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Renters filed a lawsuit this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation’s biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law.

The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both.

The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

In an email, a RealPage representative said that the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

The nine property managers named in the lawsuit did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

They included some of the nation’s largest landlords, such as Greystar, Lincoln Property Company, Equity Residential, Mid-America Apartment Communities and FPI Management — which together manage hundreds of thousands of apartments.

Four of the five renters named in the suit were Greystar tenants. A fifth rented from Security Properties. Their apartments were located in San Diego, San Francisco and two Washington state cities, Redmond and Everett.

The lawsuit accused the property managers and RealPage of forming “a cartel to artificially inflate the price of and artificially decrease the supply and output of multifamily residential real estate leases from competitive levels.”

RealPage’s software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals — not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica.

ProPublica’s investigation found that the software’s design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country’s biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing — potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings.

RealPage told ProPublica that the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

The lawsuit said that RealPage’s software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers “thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the ‘heads in the beds’) to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher,” it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid “a race to the bottom” on rents, the lawsuit said.

RealPage brags that clients — who agree to provide RealPage real-time access to sensitive and nonpublic data — experience “rental rate improvements, year over year, between 5% and 12% in every market,” the lawsuit said.

RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed by four law firms and a nonprofit, Justice Catalyst Law, dedicated to developing cases and legal strategies that advance economic and social justice. Gary Smith Jr., one of the lawyers involved, said the investigation into the case had been going on for more than a year.

“Today’s lawsuit plausibly alleges that Lessors of rental units have coordinated to drive rents up to unprecedented levels, exacerbating the nation’s affordable housing crisis,” Smith said in a media release.

RealPage counts some of the largest property managers in the country among its clients. Many favor cities where rent has been rising rapidly, according to a ProPublica analysis of five of the country’s top 10 property managers as of 2020. All five use RealPage pricing software in at least some buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas such as Denver; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta and Seattle, where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019.

Greystar and FPI Management each control hundreds of buildings in metro areas where rents have risen steeply in recent years. And Equity Residential, Lincoln Property Company and Mid-America Apartment Communities each manage dozens of buildings in high-growth markets.

RealPage’s clients may gravitate toward high rent-growth markets for several reasons. For instance, tenants in those areas will bear more rent hikes and so offer an opportunity to landlords to make more money.

But, RealPage says its software, formerly known as YieldStar, steers pricing that beats the market in areas where it operates.

“Find out how YieldStar can help you outperform the market 3% to 7%,” RealPage urges potential clients on its website.

Haru Coryne and Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

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It’s time to talk about misinformation. You already know it’s all around us, but understanding how to spot it and defend against it is one of the most important parts of being an informed and active voter.

What Is the Difference Between Disinformation and Misinformation?

• Disinformation is false information that is deliberately created and shared by people to knowingly cause harm — like, say, Russian actors trying to meddle in a U.S. election.

• Misinformation is also false information, but the people sharing it don’t realize it’s fraudulent — like, say, your uncle sharing a questionable meme on Facebook. Systematic disinformation campaigns can become misinformation when users go on to accept and share false messages without knowing it.

Top Trends in Misinformation and Disinformation in the 2022 Midterm Elections

As the COVID-19 pandemic first swept across the country in 2020, state and national election administrators scrambled to change rules to make voting as safe and accessible as possible. Voting by mail exploded. Early voting took off. In the fast-paced environment, misinformation flourished.

After the vote, lies about a stolen election spread like wildfire. When rules change quickly, it can be genuinely difficult to keep up with what is and isn’t allowed — and people who spread lies count on that.

The misinformation and disinformation leading up to the midterms falls into two broad categories, lies about elections themselves and lies about candidates’ and party’s platforms:

• Lies about voter fraud and election integrity continue to spread, even though voter fraud is extremely rare. Conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, fraudulent votes, stuffed ballot boxes and more have led to confused voters inundating election officials with misinformed questions, according to a New York Times review of 2022 misinformation trends and consequences. These lies are thriving on platforms like TikTok, and the Brookings Institution reports that increasingly sophisticated misinformation and disinformation campaigns on social media platforms can suppress voting rights. A House Committee on Oversight and Reform report this year said that election officials are working hard to address misinformation and disinformation but need more resources and funding to do so effectively.

• Distortions about actual policy positions of candidates and parties spread, too. This is a tale as old as time. As long as there have been elections, folks have lied to voters and misled them about their opponents in order to get elected. Experts especially fear that Spanish-language misinformation and disinformation could sway Latino voters in the 2022 midterms.

How Can I Tell If Something Is Fake News?

Here are some tips and tools that can help you assess content online.

Do some research. There are a number of reliable places for you to fact-check things you see on- and offline. Some are standalone projects, like:

• Snopes
• FactCheck.org
• PolitiFact

While others are directly associated with trustworthy news sources, like:

• AP Fact Check
• Fact Checker from The Washington Post

ProPublica also runs the Politwoops database, which lets you look up U.S. politicians’ deleted tweets.

Consider the publication. If you see an inflammatory political article from a news site you’ve never heard of before, these are some of the things you can look for to tell whether or not the site is legit:

• Does it have an about us page?
• Does it have a mailing address at the bottom?
• Does it have a Wikipedia page?

Run a reverse image search. If you see a photo online of a ballot box in the back of a random van or an image claiming to be proof of voter fraud, go to images.google.com, click the camera icon and paste in the image link or upload the photo. This should give you information on where else the image has been posted.

Practice emotional skepticism. You are more likely to believe a false story that confirms your beliefs about the world than a false story that doesn’t. This may sound obvious to you, but many folks are susceptible to fabricated content because of our biases, and false content usually tries to play to our emotions.

Misinformation especially flourishes during elections. In past elections, ProPublica and its partners found:

• Numerous Facebook accounts sharing “outright lies” about voting by mail.

• An image circulating on Twitter appearing to show an immigration officer arresting someone in line to vote, which was determined to be a hoax.

• A YouTube video compilation claiming to show Democrats stuffing ballot boxes — videos that were all actually filmed in Russia.

• Tweets that promote wrong information about the voting process, such as nonexistent voter ID requirements.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions has created a checklist for identifying fake news. Keep it handy as the election nears and wild claims start to flow freely.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions misinformation checklist. (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Misinformation and Disinformation Thrive During Confusion, Like When States Change Voting Laws

According to a report by First Draft and the Brennan Center for Justice, more than half of all U.S. states passed laws to restrict or expand voting access since the beginning of 2021, including “laws that limit mail voting access, shrink drop box numbers, create harsher voter ID requirements and eliminate same-day voting registration.” The risks here, according to the report, are that voters could mistakenly believe the laws respond to voter fraud risks that don’t actually exist and that new rules and unfamiliar conditions create a window for bad actors to sow confusion.

On an individual level, the best defense against this is to educate yourself about your state’s voting rules. The news outlet FiveThirtyEight has compiled an excellent resource to help you understand how election law has changed in your state and specifically if voting is becoming harder there.

What Are the Different Types of Misinformation and Disinformation?

In 2018, First Draft News, an organization of social newsgathering and verification specialists, classified seven distinct types of misinformation and disinformation swirling around our information ecosystem, from satire or parody to fabricated or manipulated content:

First Draft’s 2018 graphic guide defines different types of misinformation. (Claire Wardle)

by Alec MacGillis

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Tim Ryan is a “crazy, lying fraud.” That’s how J.D. Vance, the bestselling memoirist turned Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, opened his remarks at a September rally alongside Donald Trump in the middle of the congressional district Ryan has represented for two decades.

Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passion, outside of politics, is yoga and mindfulness practice.

“We have to love each other, we have to care about each other, we have to see the best in each other, we have to forgive each other,” he declared when he won the Democratic Senate primary in May.

He isn’t just preaching kindness and forgiveness. For years, he has warned his fellow Democrats that their embrace of free trade and globalization would cost them districts like the one he represents in the Mahoning River Valley — and lobbied them to prioritize domestic manufacturing, which, he argued, could repair some of the damage.

His efforts went nowhere. Ryan failed in his bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader in 2016. His presidential run in 2020 ended with barely a trace. And his opponent, Vance, was expected to coast to victory this year in a state that Trump carried twice by 8 points.

But things haven’t gone as predicted. Ryan is running close enough in the polls that a political action committee aligned with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, has had to commit $28 million to keep the seat (now held by Rob Portman, who is retiring), and Vance has had to ratchet up his rhetorical attacks against this “weak, fake congressman.”

After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party toward a path to recovery in the Midwest. On the campaign trail, he has embraced a unifying tone that stands out from the crassness and divisiveness that Trump and his imitators have wrought. A significant number of what he calls the “exhausted majority” of voters have responded gratefully.

And his core message — a demand for more aggressive government intervention to arrest regional decline — is not only resonating with voters but, crucially, breaking through with the Democratic leaders who presided over that decline for years. The Democrats have passed a burst of legislation that will pave the way for two new Intel chip plants in the Columbus exurbs, spur investment in new electric vehicle ventures in Ryan’s district and benefit solar-panel factories around Toledo, giving him, at long last, concrete examples to cite of his party rebuilding the manufacturing base in which the region took such pride.

In short, the party is doing much more of what Ryan has long said would save its political fortunes in the Midwest. The problem for him — and also for them — is that it may have come too late.

Tim Ryan was not always so alone in Congress. Manufacturing regions of the Northeast and Midwest used to produce many other Democrats like him, often with white-ethnic Catholic, working-class backgrounds and strong ties to organized labor. (Ryan’s family is Irish and Italian, and both his grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the steel mills.) One particularly notorious example of the type was James Traficant, who represented the Mahoning Valley in highly eccentric fashion and‌ served seven years in prison after a 2002 conviction on charges that included soliciting bribes and racketeering‌‌. That le‌‌ft his young former staff member — Tim Ryan — to win the seat at age 29.

A few stalwarts remain: Marcy Kaptur, whose mother was a union organizer at a spark plug plant, will likely hold her Toledo-area House seat after her MAGA opponent lied about his military record. And Sherrod Brown, whose upbringing in hard-hit Mansfield and generally disheveled affect has lent authenticity to his own progressive populism (never mind the fact that he’s a doctor’s son and has a Yale degree), has survived two Senate reelections thanks to his personal appeal and weak opponents.

But nearly all the rest have vanished. Many of them fell victim to the Democratic wipeout in 2010. Others succumbed to the extreme Republican gerrymandering that followed. But central to their disappearance was the economic decline of the communities they represented, which was on a scale that remains hard for many in more prosperous pockets of the country to grasp.

In the first decade of this century, after Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and ushered China into the World Trade Organization in 2000, so many manufacturing businesses closed in Ohio — about 3,500, nearly a fifth of the total — that its industrial electricity consumption fell by more than a quarter. Ryan’s district was among the most ravaged. By 2010, the population of Youngstown had fallen 60% from its 1930 peak, and it ranked among the poorest cities in the country.

For the Democrats representing these devastated areas, the fallout was enormous. “We were always supposed to be the party of working people, and so those rank-and-file union members kept getting crushed, and jobs kept leaving, and their unions and the Democrats weren’t able to do anything for them,” said Ryan, when I met with him in August, after an event he held at a substance abuse treatment program in Zanesville. Democratic candidates were also putting their attention elsewhere, on social issues, and voters noticed.

Ryan is determined not to make the same mistake. “You want culture wars?” he asks in one TV ad, while throwing darts in a bar. “I’m not your guy. You want a fighter for Ohio? I’m all in.”

In the 2000s, as Ryan saw his band of like-minded Democrats dwindle, he started looking for answers, and he found some of them at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a small advocacy group founded in 2007 to promote American manufacturing and agriculture.

The group’s theory is fairly straightforward: The “free trade” that has been so ruinous to manufacturing regions like the Mahoning Valley has been anything but free, given all the various forms of support that other nations provide their own industries. The group has been lobbying members of both parties to consider explicit support for U.S. producers, whether in the form of tariffs or subsidies, even if it means brushing up against World Trade Organization rules.

For years, the Coalition for a Prosperous America and its allies in Congress ran up against free-trade orthodoxy. But growing alarm over climate change, the breakdown of global supply chains during the pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine have brought a stunning turnaround. The Inflation Reduction Act includes many of the kinds of policies that Ryan and CPA have championed, including refundable tax credits for solar-panel production, a 15% alternative minimum tax for corporations and requirements that electric vehicles have North American-made parts to qualify for consumer tax credits. This month, the Biden administration announced major new tech-export controls aimed at China, with the U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, declaring that free trade “cannot come at the cost of further weakening our supply chains.”

It’s a vindication for Ryan and his former House allies, such as Tom Perriello, who represented south-central Virginia between 2009 and 2011.

“The elite echo chamber assumed away all the human costs” of globalization, said Perriello, instead of realizing industries needed to be helped to save middle-class jobs.

Still, the shift has come only after tremendous economic losses for places like the Mahoning Valley and political losses for the Democrats. In the 2020 presidential election, Democrats lost white voters without college degrees by 26 percentage points nationwide, and their margins among working-class Black and Hispanic voters shrank, too. They lost Mahoning County, once a Democratic stronghold, for the first time since 1972.

“For the most part, people lost jobs here and Washington wasn’t doing anything for them,” said David Betras, the former chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party. “And then Trump came along and he said, ‘Hey, they screwed you.’ People thought: ‘At least he sees me. He’s giving me water.’” It might be contaminated water, as Betras noted, “but at least it’s water.”

Ryan’s attempt to point his party in a different direction in the Midwest is still running up against resistance, even as he has drawn close to Vance in the polls. The first ad released by Ryan’s campaign, in April, is Exhibit A.

Wearing an untucked shirt, he delivers a barrage against the threat presented by China: “It is us versus China and instead of taking them on, Washington’s wasting our time on stupid fights. … China is out-manufacturing us left and right. … America can never be dependent on Communist China. … It is time for us to fight back. … We need to build things in Ohio by Ohio workers.”

By the standards of the Ohio Senate race of 2022, it was pretty mild stuff. At an April rally with Trump, after completing his extreme pivot from Trump critic to acolyte, Vance lashed out at “corrupt scumbags who take their marching orders from the Communist Chinese.” But the Ryan ad nonetheless got opprobrium from Asian Americans, who said it risked fueling anti-Asian sentiment.

Irene Lin, a Democratic strategist based in Ohio, found that remarkable. “It’s so weird that he runs an ad attacking China, and people say, ‘You sound like Trump.’ Tim’s been attacking China for decades! Trump co-opted it from us and we need to take it back, because Trump is a complete fraud on this.”

Still, the episode underscored Ryan’s conundrum: how to match Trump and Vance when it comes to the decline of Ohio manufacturing without offending allies within the liberal Democratic coalition.

When I asked Ryan in Zanesville how he would distinguish his own views from those of Vance, he insisted it would not be difficult. For one thing, he noted, Vance has attacked a core element of the industrial policy that Ryan sees as key to reviving Ohio: electric vehicle subsidies. At the Mahoning rallies, Vance ridiculed them as giveaways for the elites, which, as Ryan sees it, overlooks the hundreds of workers who now have jobs at the old Lordstown General Motors plant in the Mahoning Valley, building electric cars, trucks and tractors as part of a new venture led by the Taiwanese company Foxconn, and at a large battery plant across the street.

“He’s worried about losing the internal-combustion auto jobs — dude, where’ve you been?” Ryan asked. “Those jobs are going. That factory was empty.”

Less than two months after Ryan’s anti-culture war ad, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling on abortion, bolstering Democrats’ prospects with moderate voters of the sort who help decide elections in places like suburban Columbus — and making it harder for Ryan to avoid hot-button social issues. He calls the ruling “the largest governmental overreach into personal lives in my lifetime,” but his continued focus on economic issues shows that he believes that’s not enough to win an election. Recent polls suggest he may be right.

Ryan was in the Columbus suburbs on the evening after we spoke in Zanesville, but he was there to discuss the China ad, not abortion. At an event hosted by local Asian American associations, a few women told Ryan how hurtful they had found the ad. He answered in a conciliatory tone but did not apologize.

The ad, he said, was directed at the Chinese government, not Asian or Asian American people, and the things in it needed saying. “I got nothing but love in my heart. I have no hate in my heart,” he said, but the United States needed to rise to meet China’s aggressive trade policies. In Youngstown, Chinese steel would “land on our shore so subsidized, that it was the same price as the raw material cost for an American company before they even turn the lights on. That is what they have been doing.”

“That is not in your ad,” said one of the women. “You need to put those things in your ad.”

“I just want to make a point,” Ryan said. “One is, I love you. Two is, I will always defend you and never let anyone try to hurt you, never. Not on my watch. But we have got to absolutely and decisively defeat China economically. And if we don’t do that, you’re going to have these countries dictating the rules of the road for the entire world and continuing to try to displace and weaken the United States.”

Watching Ryan, I was struck by what a delicate balancing act he was trying to pull off. He was, on the one hand, the last of a breed, a son of steel country with two public college degrees (Bowling Green State University and the University of New Hampshire) in a party increasingly dominated by professionals with elite degrees.

But he was trying to adapt to today’s liberal coalition, too, with his soft-edged rhetoric and, yes, the mindfulness stuff, which Vance has lampooned. (“You know Tim Ryan has not one but two books on yoga and meditation?” he said at the September rally with Trump.)

There were other models on the ballot this fall for how Democrats might seek to win in the Midwest: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan running for reelection on abortion rights, John Fetterman running for Senate in Pennsylvania on his unique brand of postindustrial authenticity, Mandela Barnes running for Senate in Wisconsin as an avatar of youthful diversity.

But Ryan’s bid may have the most riding on it, because it is based on substantive disagreements within the party about how to rebuild the middle class and the middle of the country. For years, too many leading Democrats stood by as the wrenching transformation of the economy devastated communities, while accruing benefits to a small set of highly prosperous cities, mostly on the coasts, that became the party’s gravitational center. It was so easy to disregard far-off desolation — or to take only passing note of it, counting the dollar stores as one happened to traverse areas of decline — until Trump’s victory brought it to the fore.

With its belated embrace of the industrial policy advocated by Ryan, the Democratic Party seems finally to be reckoning with this failure. It means grappling with regional decline, because not everyone can relocate to prosperous hubs, and even if they did, it wouldn’t necessarily help the Democrats in a political system that favors the geographic dispersal of party voters.

It means recognizing the emotional power of made-in-America patriotism, which can serve to neuter the uglier aspects of the opposition’s anti-immigrant appeals. And it means transcending the culture-war incitements offered up by the likes of Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

The approach may well fall short this time in Ohio, because Ryan’s party has let so much terrain slip out of its hands. But even so, it showed what might have been, all along, and might yet be again, if a region can begin to recover, and the resentment can begin to recede.

by Kavitha Surana

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Join us Oct. 27 for a live virtual event, “Post-Roe: Access and Equity.”

Last month, an Australian traveler who’d been briefly detained at an airport by U.S. Customs and Border Protection provided several news organizations with a recording, which she said showed that while she was in custody, an agency official asked her several times whether she was pregnant or had recently had an abortion.

In the six-minute audio, a CBP representative, who appeared to be reading from a script, explained to the 32-year-old traveler, Madolline Gourley, that the agency is required to collect medical information of people they detain. For women of childbearing age, the agent said, that includes whether they’re pregnant, postpartum or have recently experienced “termination of pregnancy.” In sharing the audio with ProPublica, Gourley wrote in an email, “I think a lot of your readers will be shocked to hear CBP confirms it is OK to ask detained travelers about their pregnancy and abortion status.”

The audio and Gourley’s allegations set off a brief but blistering media storm because they came at a time when new abortion bans are taking effect in more than a dozen states, including Texas and Arizona along the border. Several news outlets published stories echoing Gourley’s outrage that border officials, who work for an agency with a track record of abuses against immigrants, might use such information to deny entry to asylum-seekers or tourists.

But among immigrant advocates, the allegations lent new urgency to long-standing concerns that have less to do with what happens when border agents question immigrants about their health conditions, and more with what happens when they don’t — or when they ignore pleas for help.

The advocates’ larger concern is about CBP facilities, particularly those on the U.S.-Mexico border — overcrowded holding cells known as hieleras, or iceboxes, because they are kept at freezing temperatures. They’re designed to process immigrants and asylum-seekers, not to hold them for extended periods. On Thursday, a coalition of 83 advocacy organizations and 51 medical professionals led by the American Civil Liberties Union issued a new demand that CBP adopt a policy to limit the time pregnant, postpartum and nursing individuals and infants spend in detention to less than 12 hours, absent exceptional circumstances.

“There’s simply no way for people to obtain adequate reproductive health care in CBP custody,” said Esmeralda Flores, senior policy advocate at the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, which is part of the coalition. “We’re talking about facilities that are notorious for degrading conditions and medical neglect across the board.”

The advocates point to a report last year by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General that found that up to 274 babies may have been born between 2016 and 2020 while in the custody of the Border Patrol, whose agents aren’t trained and whose facilities are not equipped for such emergencies. In one case, a pregnant Guatemalan woman gave birth in her pants while leaning on a trash can after agents took her to a Border Patrol station instead of the hospital. She and her infant were kept in a holding cell without a crib overnight.

The report found other instances when newborns were held overnight or for days in inadequate facilities. It said that CBP relied on women to self-report their pregnancies and that it failed to regularly collect data tracking pregnancies and childbirths in custody.

In response to the report, CBP issued guidelines in 2021 that required agents to identify, document and tend to the health needs of women and infants in custody. The agency insists that questions like the ones posed to Gourley are not part of a political agenda but intended to make sure detainees get appropriate medical care and accommodations. CBP spokesperson Jaime Ruiz said in an email to ProPublica he would not comment on Gourley’s case. However, he said that while agents are required to ask about “pregnancy loss,” including miscarriages and stillbirths, they “don’t use the word abortion, nor ask about it.”

He added that answers are voluntary and such questions are not meant to be “an intrusion into someone’s privacy or rights. It is for the well-being of those in our temporary custody — their health is our priority.”

Advocates assert that even with the guidelines, agents do not always ask immigrants those questions. And even when they do, the advocates say, there’s no way for pregnant immigrants or infants to get appropriate care in CBP sites because agents and facilities are not equipped to provide it. In their view, the only way to minimize the harm that happens to pregnant immigrants and infants in CBP custody is to reduce the time they spend there. Without a firm policy, they say, the issues will continue.

In their Thursday letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus, advocates pointed to a case from last March: A mother from Nicaragua told the ACLU that while she was in CBP custody, her 6-month-old son went four days without medical attention for pneumonia, despite repeated requests. She reported that agents yelled at her when she tried to breastfeed her baby. Though the new guidelines for families with infants require a medical intake process, welfare checks every 15 minutes and offering snacks, she told the ACLU that none of that happened.

“Each day that passes without such a policy places more families at risk,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney at UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

CBP did not respond to questions about whether the agency is considering an expedited release mandate for pregnant immigrants and infants or the examples in the coalition’s letter. Their current guidelines say “generally” no one should be held longer than 72 hours and that “every effort must be made to hold detainees for the least amount of time required.” But with the enormous number of people they process, agents have acknowledged difficulty upholding those standards.

In Gourley’s case, she was detained at Los Angeles International Airport because agents suspected she had worked as a cat-sitter in exchange for housing, in violation of the visa-waiver program, which doesn’t permit compensation. She said she was surprised when during her detention, an agent twice pressed her about whether she’d had an abortion and she filed a complaint after she was deported to Australia. Months later, she said, she received a phone call from a CBP official who investigated her case. She recorded the call and shared it with the media, sounding an alarm that brought attention to cases that often don’t get enough of it.

Referring to Gourley, Dana Sussman, the acting director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said: “I think what’s remarkable here, and important to recognize, is this person appears to be coming from a well-resourced, privileged position and she feels safe enough generating her own outrage to speak publicly about this. That’s very different than the way many folks arrive in this country.”

Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You.

by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, photography by Rich-Joseph Facun, graphics by Haisam Hussein

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Henry Saenz remembers when he first learned what even the tiniest bit of asbestos could do to his body. He was working at a chemical plant where employees used the mineral to make chlorine, and his coworkers warned him about what could happen each time he took a breath: Tiny fibers, invisible to the eye, could enter his nose and mouth and settle into his lungs, his abdomen, the lining of his heart. They could linger there for decades. Then, one day, he might develop asbestosis, a chronic disease that makes the lungs harden, or mesothelioma, a vicious cancer that ends the lives of most who have it within a few years.

By then, in the early 1990s, the dangers of asbestos were already irrefutable. The United States had prohibited its use in pipe insulation and branded it so risky that remediators had to wear hazmat suits to remove it. But unlike dozens of other countries that banned the potent carcinogen outright, the United States never did. To this day, the U.S. allows hundreds of tons of asbestos to flow in each year from Brazil, primarily for the benefit of two major chemical companies, OxyChem and Olin Corp. The companies say asbestos is integral to chlorine production at several aging plants and have made a compelling argument to keep it legal: Unlike in the horrific tales of the past, their current protocols for handling asbestos are so stringent that workers face little threat of exposure.

But at OxyChem’s plant in Niagara Falls, New York, where Saenz worked for nearly three decades, the reality was far different, more than a dozen former workers told ProPublica. There, they said, asbestos dust hung in the air, collected on the beams and light fixtures and built up until it was inches thick. Workers tramped in and out of it all day, often without protective suits or masks, and carried it around on their coveralls and boots. They implored the plant’s managers to address the conditions, they said, but the dangers remained until the plant closed in late 2021 for unrelated reasons.

It was hard for Saenz to reconcile the science that he understood — and that he believed OxyChem and government leaders understood — with what he saw at the plant every day. He did his best not to inhale the asbestos, but after a short time, he came to believe there was no way the killer substance was not already inside him, waiting, perhaps 30 or 40 or even 50 years, to strike.

Now, too late for Saenz, the Environmental Protection Agency appears poised to finally outlaw asbestos in a test case with huge implications. If the agency fails to ban a substance so widely established as harmful, scientists and public health experts argue, it would raise serious doubts about the EPA’s ability to protect the public from any toxic chemicals.

To fight the proposed ban, the chemical companies have returned to a well-worn strategy and marshaled political heavyweights, including the attorneys general of 12 Republican-led states who say it would place a “heavy and unreasonable burden” on industry.

Lost in the battle is the story of what happened in the decades during which the U.S. failed to act. It’s not just a tale of workers in hardscrabble company towns who were sacrificed to the bottom line of industry, but one of federal agencies cowed again and again by the well-financed lawyers and lobbyists of the companies they are supposed to oversee.

It’s the quintessential story of American chemical regulation.

OxyChem’s Niagara Falls facility, the longest-standing asbestos-reliant chlorine plant in America

For decades, the EPA and Congress accepted the chlorine companies’ argument that asbestos workers were safe enough, and regulators left the carcinogen on the list of dangerous chemicals that other countries ban but the U.S. still allows. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration even let OxyChem and Olin into a special program that limited the frequency of inspections at many of their plants. Along the way, the two companies proved that they didn’t need asbestos to make chlorine: They built some modern facilities elsewhere that didn’t use it. But they balked at the cost of upgrading the older facilities where it was still in use — even as they earned billions of dollars from chemical sales and raked in record profits this year.

OxyChem, owned by one of the country’s largest energy companies, Occidental Petroleum, declined requests for an interview. After ProPublica sent a summary of its reporting, company officials said the accounts from the Niagara Falls plant were “inaccurate” but declined to say what specifically was incorrect. In a statement, the company said it complies with federal regulations on asbestos and that workers who handle it are “trained, work in restricted areas of our plant, protected by personal protective equipment and are offered annual medical examinations.” The company also said it authorizes employees to stop work if they feel unsafe. “The health and safety of every plant worker and the people in our surrounding communities is our top priority,” the company said.

Olin did not respond to calls and emails sent over the course of a month.

It has been easy to minimize the toll asbestos takes on workers. Workers’ compensation cases are often confidential, and employees may fear speaking out and jeopardizing their livelihood. ProPublica reporters, however, found a unique opportunity to explore what it was really like to work at an asbestos-reliant plant after America’s longest-standing facility, the one run by OxyChem in Niagara Falls, shuttered last November. With their jobs no longer on the line, Saenz and 17 other former workers, some with institutional knowledge dating back to the 1960s and others with memories less than a year old, said they felt free to talk. They agreed to hours of interviews and dug through their homes for documentation to reconstruct their work lives in the decades they spent at the plant.

Former OxyChem worker Mike Spacone shows a photo of himself sweeping near boilers at the plant in 1982.

What they recounted — ever-present asbestos dust with scant protection — stunned six experts in industrial hygiene and occupational health who were consulted by ProPublica.

“Totally unacceptable,” said Rachael Jones, professor and chair of the Environmental Health Sciences Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Fraught with danger,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a public health physician trained in occupational medicine and epidemiology who leads Boston College’s program for Global Public Health and the Common Good.

“It sounds like something that maybe would happen in the 1940s or the 1950s,” said Celeste Monforton, a lecturer in public health at Texas State University who studies occupational health and safety practices.

“It’s just so counter to everything that they put in the record about using [asbestos] safely,” Monforton said.

For more than a century, OxyChem’s plant on the Niagara River, just 3 miles upstream from the world-renowned falls, was a small city unto itself. It buzzed with workers day and night, and, in its heyday, had its own cafeteria, credit union and health clinic. A job there carried a certain cachet. Workers could make six figures, even without college degrees. But the plant had a dark legacy. Its previous owner, Hooker Chemical, had buried toxic waste in an unfinished aqueduct called Love Canal, then turned the property over to the city for development in the 1950s. After contaminated groundwater sickened the people who lived there, it became known as one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

Unlike many of the other workers who grew up in the shadow of the plant, following their fathers and uncles into jobs there, Saenz was originally from Northern California. But he fell in love with a woman from Niagara Falls and moved there to start a family with her, working at a hotel, delivering flowers and tending bar — anything to put food on the table, he said — before deciding OxyChem was the job he wanted to stay in.

Henry Saenz, left, and his son Henry Jr. The falls, which are within sight of the docks used by the plant on the Niagara River Some homes in Niagara Falls abut OxyChem’s property line.

He was hired in 1989 and soon after got a crash course in chemistry. A jolt of electricity, he learned, could turn a tank of salt water into three substances: chlorine, caustic soda and hydrogen. The chlorine could be sold for disinfecting water, the caustic soda for making paper, soap and aspirin. There was, however, a real danger: If the chemicals mixed, the tank could turn into a bomb. So each tank had a thick, metal screen inside to keep the chemicals apart.

The screen was coated with a layer of impenetrable asbestos. OxyChem used chrysotile, or white asbestos, the most common type. It showed up on trains in oversized bags that looked like pillows stuffed with down feathers. At OxyChem, there were about 200 tanks, called cells, each the size of a dining room table and containing a metal screen. When a screen needed to be recoated, a special team of workers removed it and brought it to the cavernous cell-maintenance building. There, they blasted it with a high-pressure water cannon until the old asbestos fell off. Then, they dipped the clean screen into a wet mixture containing new asbestos and cooked it in an oven until the asbestos hardened. They worked on one or two screens each day.

The asbestos job was one of the most hazardous at the plant, requiring special training. But it also provided a rare benefit. Unlike most positions, which forced workers to take afternoon and midnight shifts, the asbestos job was days only. Saenz, who initially worked in a different department, waited years for an opening on the team, eager to spend more time with his growing family. After his fourth child was born, a spot opened up.

A sign for JD’s Restaurant and Lounge, where the asbestos team often met after shifts

The team was a small fraternity of eight or so men who ate lunch together in a special trailer. Some days, when their shift ended at 2 p.m., they would meet at JD’s, a dive bar near the plant. Other days, it was the wing joint down the street or the bar in Terry Cheetham’s basement. Cheetham was the big brother of the group; the guys called him Soupie. Reserved and shaggy-haired, garrulous only with a beer in hand, he’d dropped out of high school after his father’s death and gone to work for OxyChem. He wanted to help his mom support their family. Soon after Saenz joined the team, Cheetham tapped him on the shoulder. “We’re going for a ride after work,” he said. Later, they pulled up outside the local liquor store. As the new guy, Saenz had to carry the keg.

The guys raised their kids together, helped each other’s families through difficult times. At the plant, they always had each other’s backs. Certain hazards, like fires, were hard to miss. Others, like chlorine leaks, were more subtle. Then, there was the asbestos. As Saenz spent more time on the job, he began noticing just how much of it surrounded him.

Federal workplace safety standards require keeping asbestos fibers wet to prevent them from going airborne, having workers wear protective equipment and containing the asbestos inside certain areas. OxyChem had rules in place to meet those standards. But protocols failed to match reality at the Niagara Falls plant, according to more than a dozen workers.

Water-blasting the screens was like washing a car with a high-powered hose. Asbestos splattered everywhere. It wasn’t a problem when the asbestos was wet. But it would dry overnight, and the next morning, it would be stuck to the ceiling and the walls. Clumps would roll across the floor like tiny tumbleweeds. Floating particles would catch the light when the sun poured in. There was so much asbestos in the cell-maintenance building that it was impossible to keep it all wet, said Robert Cheff, who worked at the plant from 1981 to 2007. “We were constantly swimming in this stuff.”

Cheff A coat issued to Saenz hangs in his basement.

Workers wore protective gear for certain tasks, like pressure washing and screen dipping. But they went into the building to carry out other tasks without special suits or anything protecting their faces, despite company requirements. One worker said managers enforced those rules. But a dozen others interviewed by ProPublica recalled that the bosses looked the other way. Suiting up was impractical, those workers said. It took time away from the tasks that needed to get done and was uncomfortable, especially on hot days, when the temperature inside could reach 100 degrees.

In the summer, the windows and doors were left open to keep the workers from overheating, allowing asbestos to escape outside. Wet asbestos splashed on their uniforms, coats, helmets and boots. One guy seemed to always have some on his mustache. It would dry and flake off their clothes wherever they went, they said. Saenz remembered walking into safety meetings in the administrative building with asbestos drying on his coveralls. The guys carried so much asbestos into the trailer where they ate lunch and took breaks that it needed to be replaced, former union leaders said.

Workers used pressure washers to blast asbestos off large screens called diaphragms, splattering asbestos everywhere.

Their uniforms sat in the laundry, caked with dry asbestos. When the union raised the problem in 2010, managers responded by giving the team its own hamper with a lid to contain the asbestos, said longtime union officer Mike Spacone. Only after union leaders threatened to call federal authorities did the company give the team its own laundry facilities, Spacone said.

On occasion, workers who handled asbestos would leave without showering in the plant’s locker room or wear their work clothes home. “My kids played sports,” recalled Dave Helbig, an employee from 1980 through 2021. “Sometimes I had to leave to get to their games.”

The company would have known employees were being exposed; workers with a high risk of exposure sometimes clipped a small monitor to their bodies to measure the amount of asbestos in the air around them. At least five times in 2001 and 2002, the levels around team member Patrick Nowak exceeded OSHA’s exposure limit, his company records show. “I failed so many times, they quit testing me,” he said. The records do not indicate if Nowak was wearing a protective mask known as a respirator, as some other employees’ records do.

Tony Garfalo wore a monitor seven times in 2001, and, on four occasions, the results exceeded OSHA’s limit, his records show. Once, the asbestos level was more than five times the allowable limit. The records say he was wearing a half-face respirator. Garfalo said his bosses promised to address the situation, but “nothing changed.”

How Workers Said They Were Exposed to Asbestos at the OxyChem Plant

He and the others knew all too well the damage asbestos could cause. Garfalo said his father, who worked the asbestos job at the plant, developed asbestosis. Employees in other departments got sick from a type of asbestos-containing pipe covering that once insulated the plant, longtime employees said and court records show. Cheff said his uncle died from asbestosis at 59. A millwright named Teddy Skiba was diagnosed with mesothelioma and later died.

In addition to those signature diseases, which are rare even among asbestos workers, the tiny strands can harm the body in other ways. They can put people at increased risk of heart disease by scarring the lungs, forcing the heart to work harder to pump blood through them to pick up oxygen. Some scientific evidence suggests an association between asbestos exposure and stroke. And battling all kinds of illnesses with damaged lungs can weaken the body’s ability to fight them; that damage can mean the difference between life and death.

One retired member of the team, Umberto Bernardone, died from an aneurysm in 2004 at age 77. He had long had trouble breathing, said his son, Mario, who also worked at the plant. X-rays showed that asbestosis had scarred his lungs. “The asbestos was with him all the time,” Mario said.

Not long after, another retired team member, Salvatore “Buddy” Vilardo, died from a blood clot, his son said. He was 62.

Asbestos Wreaks Havoc on the Body

Cheetham, the group’s big brother, had just retired when he fell ill in 2004. A doctor in Buffalo said it was cancer. Cheetham told his daughter Keri that he was certain the asbestos was responsible and asked her to consult a lawyer after he died. When the guys found out he was sick, they showed up at his house. They found their friend in a bed in his living room, under the care of a hospice nurse, struggling to breathe.

Cheetham died five months before his 56th birthday. His autopsy surprised his family — it wasn’t asbestos after all; an aggressive form of skin cancer had killed him. His former co-workers weren’t told about the autopsy. For years, they believed his cancer had been brought on by asbestos exposure. The memory of Cheetham’s last gasps haunted the guys like a ghost, a harbinger of what their own futures might hold.

A photograph of Terry Cheetham that was kept by his ex-wife, Peggy.

Elsewhere in the world, governments were taking action to protect their people. Saudi Arabia banned asbestos in 1998, Chile and Argentina did so in 2001, Australia in 2003. By 2005, asbestos was outlawed across the European Union. “It was a no-brainer,” said Tatiana Santos, head of chemical policy at the European Environmental Bureau, a network of environmental citizens’ groups.

America’s EPA could have banned asbestos. Congress could have banned it. But over and over, they crumpled in the face of pressure from OxyChem and its peers in the chlorine industry.

The EPA tried to enact a ban in the late 1980s, but the companies got ahead of it. Records from the time show corporations testified that removing asbestos from chlorine plants would not yield significant health benefits because workers were only minimally exposed; they also argued it would require “scrapping large amounts of capital equipment” and thus would “not be economically feasible.”

Under federal law at the time, the EPA was obligated to regulate asbestos in the way that was “least burdensome” to industry. That forced the EPA to make a cold calculation: Banning asbestos in chlorine plants would prevent “relatively few cancer cases” but increase the companies’ costs. So when the agency enacted an asbestos ban in 1989, it carved out an exemption for the mineral’s use in the chlorine industry.

The EPA made it clear that the companies should begin using alternatives to asbestos screens; in fact, according to company records made public through litigation and published as part of Columbia University and the City University of New York’s Toxic Docs project, OxyChem had already developed screens that didn’t need an asbestos coating. Still, the companies celebrated their immunity from regulation.

“WE HAVE A WIN,” a lobbyist declared in an internal communication included in the Toxic Docs project.

An industry lobbyist’s reaction to an EPA rule that did not ban using asbestos in chlorine manufacturing (Via the Toxic Docs project by Columbia University and the City University of New York)

In the end, asbestos was never banned. The asbestos industry challenged the ban in court, and in 1991, a panel of federal judges deemed the rule too onerous and overturned it. The decision was a stinging blow to the EPA, several current and former employees told ProPublica. “I still remember the shock on the managers’ faces,” said Greg Schweer, an EPA veteran who ran its new-chemicals management branch before he retired in 2020. The office “was full of energized people wanting to make their mark. But things changed after that.” The agency shelved efforts to regulate other dangerous substances and wouldn’t attempt a similar chemical ban for 28 years.

Most industries stopped using asbestos anyway, a phenomenon experts largely attribute to a wave of lawsuits from people with asbestos-related diseases. But the chlorine industry kept using its asbestos screens. It continued importing hundreds of tons of the substance every year, more than the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

In 2002, Sen. Patty Murray a Democrat from Washington, tried to get a ban through Congress. She tried again in 2003 and again in 2007. That year, with Democrats in control of the Senate and House, her effort found some traction. OxyChem was keenly aware how much an asbestos ban would hurt its bottom line. Chlorine and caustic soda were the focus of its chemical operation, financial statements show, driving more than $4 billion in annual sales. Most of OxyChem’s plants still used asbestos; if they had to close, production would tumble.

Occidental Petroleum, OxyChem’s owner, was a force on Capitol Hill, with lobbyists that spent millions influencing policy and a political action committee that pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns each election cycle. OxyChem was also a member of the American Chemistry Council, an influential trade organization that made campaign contributions of its own.

The industry had an ally in then-Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana; at the time, at least a quarter of the 16 asbestos-dependent plants in the country were located in the Republican senator’s home state, records show. At a hearing in June 2007, Vitter echoed the chlorine industry’s standby talking point, that its manufacturing process involved “minimal to no release of asbestos and absolutely no worker exposure.”

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“Now, if this were harming people or potentially killing people, that would be the end of the argument, we should outlaw it,” he added. “But there is no known case of asbestos-related disease from the chlor-alkali industry using this technology.”

Then-Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat in favor of the ban, pushed back, saying the chlorine manufacturing process was “not as clean as one would think.” But to build support for the bill, proponents ultimately agreed to exclude products that might contain trace levels of asbestos, such as crushed stone, as well as the asbestos used in the chlorine industry.

The bill passed out of the Senate on a unanimous vote. But many of the public health advocates who championed the initial measure opposed the watered-down version, saying it had been practically gutted, and it failed to find support in the House. Vitter, who later went on to lobby for the American Chemistry Council, did not respond to requests for an interview.

In the 15 years that followed, congressional attempts to ban asbestos would continue to fall short.

The bar at JD’s

Yet another federal entity had the power to protect the OxyChem workers. There was once a time when OSHA inspectors visited the Niagara Falls plant about every year. That ended in 1996, when the plant won coveted admission into an OSHA program that exempted it from such scrutiny.

The Star Program, created during the Reagan administration as part of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs, allows plants that can prove they are model facilities to avoid random inspections. The theory behind the program is that motivating companies to adhere to best practices on their own is more effective than having underfunded government inspectors punish them.

At the Niagara Falls plant, former union leaders believed the program would protect jobs and make the facility safer, they told ProPublica. They worked with management on the application — a monthslong process that entailed updating the plant’s safety practices and submitting to a rigorous inspection. But what actually changed, the union leaders said, was that OSHA inspectors came far less frequently and announced their visits well in advance. When OSHA came to re-evaluate the plant, usually every three to five years, management spent months preparing, said Spacone, the union officer. “They would clean the hell out of the place. Everything would be spotless.” Work in certain areas came to a halt. Plant representatives tried to limit what the evaluators saw.

Spacone Engineering and safety offices were housed in a red brick building next to OxyChem’s main gate. The building where OxyChem produced caustic soda, which drove billions in annual sales, alongside chlorine.

Even still, in 2011, evaluators found asbestos “scattered in certain areas of the floor” and covering much of the mechanical equipment, records show. “This contamination can spread easily when dry,” they wrote in a report. “Appropriate clean up procedures must be instituted to prevent airborne asbestos.” The evaluators did not give the plant an official citation. In the end, they applauded the plant’s “commitment to safety and health” and recommended it for continued participation in the program.

Three years later, evaluators identified another issue related to hygiene: Although the plant tested the air for hazards like asbestos, it wasn’t using the data to spot problems. What’s more, the person in charge of the program wasn’t properly trained. OSHA let the plant remain in the program on the condition that it fixed the problems within a year. The plant updated its software and the department leader took a 56-hour course, records show.

Apart from the re-evaluation visits, OSHA made just two other trips to the plant between 1996 and 2021, records show. Only one included a full inspection. On that visit, inspectors cited the plant for failing to protect workers from falls. The other visit did not result in any citations.

With OSHA largely out of the picture, the plant’s managers became more lax about safety, Spacone said. “I started thinking [that joining the Star Program] was a mistake,” he said. Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff and senior policy adviser at OSHA during the Obama administration, said that, in her experience, it was possible for plants to stay in the program long after their commitment to safety had lapsed. “Once they’re in, they’re in,” she said. “In most cases, it is a total ruse.”

OSHA declined to make an official available for an on-the-record interview or comment on ProPublica’s findings at the Niagara Falls plant. A Department of Labor spokesperson said that plants can be terminated from the program and that unions can withdraw their support.

In the absence of government intervention, union leaders tried to tackle the asbestos problem themselves, four former union presidents told ProPublica. The union repeatedly asked management to expand the asbestos team and have certain people dedicated to cleaning. Plant leaders refused, they said. “It was a never-ending battle,” said Vincent Ferlito, one of the former presidents. “It always came back to the same thing: money.”

Fed up with the mess, Garfalo grabbed a roll of red caution tape one day in 2007 and wrapped it around the asbestos-soiled building where his team worked, to the amazement of his colleagues. He barricaded each doorway, then hung as many danger signs as he could find. The protest prompted his managers to hire professionals for a one-time clean, but they also warned him to never do it again, he said.

By 2011, a year after he’d retired, Garfalo couldn’t ignore a lingering cough that would occasionally startle him out of sleep. His doctor couldn’t tell whether his breathing difficulties were caused by asbestos or his smoking habit, but said that smokers who are exposed to the substance have an even higher risk of serious illness. Garfalo’s mind traveled back to a day, a dozen years earlier, when he climbed atop the cell-maintenance building to fix a fan, only to discover that the entire roof was coated in asbestos. Train cars parked beside the building were covered, too. He thought about the homes less than a half-mile away and wondered how far the fibers had traveled.

Garfalo

In August 2021, OxyChem announced it was closing the Niagara Falls plant, blaming “unfavorable regional market conditions” and rising rail costs in New York state. Over time, its workforce had dwindled from more than 1,300 to about 150. OxyChem’s chlorine operation was now mostly in Gulf Coast states with lower taxes and less regulation.

And a law that had once protected it from “burdensome” environmental rules had changed.

In 2016, Congress had updated the Toxic Substances Control Act, removing the requirement that the EPA choose regulations that burdened industry as little as possible. Though the change gave the agency another chance to ban asbestos, it wasn’t going to happen during the Trump administration; the former president once alleged that the movement against asbestos was “led by the mob” and had his face featured on the packaging of Russian-produced asbestos. Under the Biden administration, however, the EPA determined that all workers in asbestos-dependent chlorine plants faced an “unreasonable risk” of getting sick from it, citing a review of the companies’ own exposure-monitoring data. This April, EPA Administrator Michael Regan proposed a ban for the first time in more than three decades.

It could be eight months or more before the rule is finalized. Two trade associations, the American Chemistry Council and the Chlorine Institute, are imploring the EPA to reconsider. They are once again arguing that the companies use asbestos safely — and they’ve turned to industry-friendly scientists and consulting firms to accuse the EPA of overestimating the risk to workers.

When given a summary of ProPublica’s reporting on the Niagara Falls plant and asked to respond, Chlorine Institute Vice President Robyn Brooks said her organization had no knowledge of the situation and referred reporters to OxyChem. The American Chemistry Council pointed to the plant’s participation in the Star program as proof of its “record of performance.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., speaks this summer at a hearing to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban asbestos. (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

The industry groups have also made the case that a ban would jeopardize the country’s supply of chlorine and could even create a drinking water shortage. But the EPA and public health advocates contest those claims. They point out that only a small fraction of the chlorine produced by asbestos-dependent plants is used to clean drinking water and that OxyChem and Olin have voluntarily closed or reduced capacity at several of those plants in recent years without catastrophically disrupting the supply chain. In fact, OxyChem told investors in August that its plans to upgrade the asbestos-reliant technology at its largest chlorine facility next year would have “no impact on customers,” a transcript shows. For at least eight years, the company has been slowly upgrading some plants to a newer technology that uses a polymer membrane to separate the chemicals; it built a completely asbestos-free plant in 2014.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has come to the companies’ defense, saying asbestos is “tightly regulated” and “used safely every day” in the chlor-alkali industry. So have 12 Republican attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas and Jeff Landry of Louisiana. In a letter, they questioned whether the EPA has the authority to pursue a ban, signaling a readiness to take the agency to court like the asbestos industry did in 1989. (The Chamber and most of the attorneys general declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica. A spokesperson for Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson called the situation at the Niagara Falls plant “very concerning” and said that it would be “completely misleading” to suggest that the letter implied approval of such circumstances.)

Industry leaders are confident they will prevail. “We’ve been engaged in this activity for quite a while and have pushed back on it,” Olin CEO Scott Sutton told shareholders on a July 29 earnings call. “I think you’re not likely to see a final rule come out that is as proposed.”

Michal Freedhoff, the EPA’s top chemical regulator, said she could not comment on what the final rule-making decision would be. But she said the agency was not backing down on the science and that ProPublica’s reporting underscores the need for decisive action.

Given the potential for litigation, lawmakers are renewing their effort to pass a law banning asbestos, which would be more difficult to challenge in court. “It is a brutal and painful fight,” said Linda Reinstein, a leading advocate who co-founded the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization after her husband, Alan, died of mesothelioma in 2006. “We’re not going away.”

Hanging in the balance is the health of hundreds of workers at the eight remaining asbestos-dependent chlorine plants in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Kansas. ProPublica reached out to current and former employees at those facilities. At the OxyChem plant in Wichita, union president Keith Peacock said he was comfortable with the way asbestos was handled. “I don’t know of anyone who sees this as a health issue,” he said. “There are rules in place for it and everyone adheres to those safety guidelines.” But Chris Murphy, a former union president at Olin’s plant in Alabama, said the conditions there mirrored the ones described by the workers in Niagara Falls. He said he himself had seen asbestos caked on beams and cranes in recent years and been told to remove it with a putty knife. “There ain’t nothing to it,” he remembered his managers saying. “You’ll be all right. It ain’t that bad.” He wasn’t told to wear protective gear, he said, so he didn’t.

The former OxyChem workers who still live in Niagara Falls gather once a month to reminisce over Buffalo wings and beef piled high on salty kummelweck rolls. They can only wait and see if they develop symptoms as they enter the post-exposure time frame in which asbestos-related disease is commonly diagnosed.

Saenz left the plant with a bad back in 2016. Now a 64-year-old grandfather of two, he’s been having lung trouble and considering X-rays to see if there are signs of asbestos-related damage. “I’m wondering if I’m not headed down that road,” he said.

He sees the burden he now carries as a tradeoff for the lifestyle he was once afforded. “It was a great place to work. I was able to raise four children and buy a house and live the American dream.” He even gave his son Henry Jr. his blessing to start a job at OxyChem in 2013, so long as he stayed far away from asbestos. Saenz now wonders how much more time he has left with his family.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said. “It’s a price you pay, I guess.”

Saenz with his two young sons on a tour of the OxyChem plant in the early 2000s. Henry Jr., right, later took a job there.

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

Reporting was contributed by Sarah Boden of NPR, and by Bernice Yeung and Danielle Ivory. Derek Willis contributed data analysis.

Art direction and visual editing by Jillian Kumagai. Design and development by Lena V. Groeger and Jillian Kumagai.

by Maya Miller, Neil Bedi and Kathleen McGrory

Workplaces use thousands of dangerous chemicals in manufacturing, production and construction. Many of these substances have been banned or restricted in other countries but are still allowed here in the United States.

Our latest investigation into the continued use of raw asbestos in the U.S. showed that OxyChem exposed workers to unsafe levels of the carcinogen for decades. Workers asked for additional protection, but the company and federal government agencies looked the other way, even as dozens of other countries banned asbestos. (OxyChem said the accounts from the Niagara Falls plant were inaccurate, but declined to say what specifically was incorrect. The company said it complies with federal regulations and prioritizes the health and safety of its workers.)

Now, we’re looking into other chemicals that may be hurting workers, their families or people who live near similar manufacturing plants. Some have slow effects and can cause cancers or other diseases after many years. Others are immediately toxic and can lead to death and injuries. We want to hear from people who have worked with these chemicals and people who may have been hurt by them.

We’re especially interested in:

• Asbestos, a silicate mineral.
• Methylene chloride, also called dichloromethane, a chemical used in paint thinners and manufacturing.
• Trichloroethylene (TCE), a metal degreaser used in manufacturing plants.
• 1-Bromopropane, a chemical used in manufacturing, dry cleaning and other applications.
• Dibutyl phthalate, a plasticizer used in adhesives, paints, furniture and more.
• Tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP), a flame retardant used in manufacturing.

If you know about harmful working conditions, community exposure to these chemicals, or other problems we should investigate, please fill out the brief questionnaire below. We’re also interested in speaking to people who have worn exposure-monitoring devices at their workplaces and would be willing to share the results of those tests.

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by Asia Fields and Kengo Tsutsumi

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting on voting barriers, readers have reached out asking how they can help.

Our reporters found that voting is a modern-day literacy test in many ways for the 48 million Americans who have trouble reading. Voters must navigate confusing ballots and registration processes, as well as attempts by some states to make voting more difficult, such as by putting restrictions on the assistance people can recieve. Misinformation and false claims about voting fraud have exacerbated the issue.

“We’ve seen that voters who need language assistance or who are disabled and need assistance are challenged with the assumption that they are not eligible and as a result, their votes are not legitimate,” said Marcia Johnson-Blanco, co-director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s Voting Rights Project.

There is no requirement that people be able to read or speak English in order to vote. The Voting Rights Act makes clear that people with disabilities and those who cannot read or write have the right to receive assistance casting a ballot.

Here are some ways you can help spread factual information about voting rights and resources ahead of the midterms.

Remember: Election Day is Nov. 8, and deadlines for voter registration and absentee ballot requests are quickly approaching in some states. Make sure to check the deadlines and procedures for your state.

Make sure your neighbors know about their rights and resources

We created an easy-to-read guide to voting that you can share with anyone who might find it useful. It’s available in multiple languages: English, Spanish, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali. (You can also check what languages are commonly spoken by voting-age citizens in your area.)

You can find a printable version on our website, in case you’d like to distribute copies in your community. You can also request physical copies through the form below.

Our guide includes numbers for voter hotlines in multiple languages. People can call if they need help checking their registration, finding a polling place or learning about state requirements. The hotlines are also available if voters need information on language assistance or if they encounter any issues.

These hotlines are run by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in conjunction with the NALEO Educational Fund, APIAVote and the Arab American Institute. All are nonpartisan, meaning they seek to provide voters with information about their rights rather than trying to get them to vote a certain way.

To contact the hotlines:

• English speakers can call or text 866-687-8683.

• Spanish speakers can call 888-839-8682 or text GOVOTE to 97779.

• Bangla, Cantonese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog or Vietnamese speakers can call 888-274-8683.

• Arabic speakers can call 844-925-5287.

You can help people navigate the voting process

It can be challenging to navigate elections, as there are different processes depending on where you live. Fortunately, there are resources like this website run by the federal government that lists official sources of information about voting by state.

Vote.org, another nonpartisan organization, has simple tools you can use to help someone check their registration status and register to vote. They also have a tool voters can use to request an absentee ballot, find their polling place and check if they need to bring ID.

If you know people who might benefit from voting early or via mail (also known as absentee voting), make sure they know the process in their area, as well as the deadline to request an absentee ballot. If you’d like to help someone request or turn in an absentee ballot, review your state’s specific laws, as some places have strict rules around who can help.

You can help your family, friends and neighbors vote

People who cannot read or write in English, or those with a disability, can select someone to help them vote, as long as it isn’t a representative from their employer or union.

If you help someone vote in person, let an election worker know when you sign in. They may have the person you’re helping sign a form attesting to their need for assistance. Voting locations are also required to have accessible machines available for people with disabilities. And some jurisdictions are required to provide election materials in languages commonly spoken in the area.

If you help someone vote, remember: You can read the ballot to them or translate it. However, you are not allowed to tell them whom to vote for or to look at the ballot unless asked.

Some states have tried to make it harder in recent years for people to help voters. For example, Texas prohibited voters’ assistants from answering their questions, but that prohibition was later struck down by a federal judge. If you’re not sure about the laws in your state, you can ask your local election officials or call the election protection hotlines.

Tell journalists what you’re seeing

Our reporters want to know if you or someone you know experiences accessibility issues when voting or if the right to voting assistance is challenged. We’ll use this information to help fuel our future reporting, although we’ll contact you before sharing details about your experience.

You can leave a message for ProPublica at 212-379-5781, email literacy@propublica.org or fill out an online tip form.

You can volunteer or become a poll worker

Some jurisdictions are still recruiting poll workers. You can find more information on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s website.

The nonpartisan election protection hotlines are staffed by volunteers and will run through Election Day. Some are still looking for volunteers. You can sign up for shifts answering hotlines in the following languages: English, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Bangla, Hindi or Urdu, Korean and Vietnamese. You don’t need to have legal experience to sign up, and training is provided.

Get involved in your community

ProPublica held a virtual panel about literacy with advocates for voting accessibility. Based on reader-submitted questions, we asked the panelists what advice they have for people who want to help.

Faye Combs, a literacy and voting advocate in California who learned to read as an adult, recommended getting involved with literacy programs through public libraries. She also highlighted the need to focus on accessibility for voters with disabilities.

Olivia Coley-Pearson, a city commissioner in Douglas, Georgia, who faced charges for helping people vote, said people should become familiar with the laws in their state. She recommended letting neighbors know if you can offer rides or other support. She also highlighted the need for compassion, as having trouble reading can be stigmatized.

“Let them know that you care and it’s OK. Most of all, that it’s OK to soften that level of shame or embarrassment,” Coley-Pearson said.

by Lisa Song, ProPublica, and Lylla Younes, Grist

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

Louisiana must examine how polluters imperil the health of Black residents, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a letter it sent last week to state regulators in response to civil rights complaints about air pollution in the region known as Cancer Alley.

Black residents in southeastern Louisiana bear a disproportionate cancer risk from industrial air pollution, the agency found, with children at one predominantly Black elementary school having been exposed to a dangerous carcinogen at levels 11 times what the EPA considers acceptable.

ProPublica reported last year that the EPA does a poor job of regulating the combined risk from multiple sources of industrial air pollution. In parts of Cancer Alley, ProPublica estimated lifetime cancer risk is up to 47 times what the EPA deems acceptable.

The EPA letter urged Louisiana’s environmental and health agencies to analyze cumulative impacts for residents near a synthetic rubber plant owned by Denka Performance Elastomer in St. John the Baptist Parish and a proposed Formosa plastics facility in St. James Parish.

Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert who advises communities in the area, said ProPublica’s reporting “confirmed the importance of cumulative risk and made it a focus that could not be ignored.”

“What’s remarkable is that EPA, for the first time in a long time, is speaking the truth around environmental racism and willing to put civil rights enforcement tools out there,” said Monique Harden, assistant director of law and public policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Federal civil rights protections predate the EPA, but they haven’t been enforced, she said: “There’s nothing new to any of this except that we have leadership at the EPA” that “wants to do something about it.”

The EPA urged state regulators to move students out of St. John the Baptist Parish’s Fifth Ward Elementary School, where air monitoring found high levels of chloroprene, a potent carcinogen. The letter, which summarizes the agency’s initial findings, cites years of data, studies and state policies to show how Black residents are disproportionately harmed by air pollution and how those disparities are baked into the region’s history. It explains how between the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the Louisiana Department of Health, state officials have dismissed residents’ concerns about air quality, underplayed the dangers of chloroprene, conducted flawed health studies and mischaracterized air monitoring data.

“We take these concerns very seriously and are committed to health equity — which is why we are fully cooperating with the EPA’s investigation into Denka,” the state health department said in a statement.

In an email, an LDEQ spokesperson said the agency is “committed to working with EPA” and remains “confident that we are implementing our air permitting program in a manner that is fully consistent with” federal and state laws.

Local activists have fought for environmental protections for decades. Robert Taylor, executive director of Concerned Citizens of St. John, said he founded his organization after attending a 2016 EPA meeting that revealed chloroprene concentrations at the school. “I went from fear to anger to shock,” he said, that “the government was allowing people to do this.”

The public school is about 1,500 feet from the Denka facility, which produces neoprene, a form of synthetic rubber used to manufacture wetsuits. DuPont began making neoprene at the site in 1969 and sold the neoprene operation to Denka in 2015. It is the nation’s only industrial site that emits chloroprene.

EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan visited the nearby school last fall as part of his “Journey to Justice” trip that was announced two days after ProPublica’s investigation into pollution hot spots. He later sent a letter to Denka and DuPont that stated, “As a parent, I remain extremely concerned” about the “health and well-being of the students.” Three-quarters of Fifth Ward Elementary’s students are Black.

A DuPont spokesperson declined to comment on EPA’s letter to Louisiana regulators but shared a response it sent to Regan in March in response to his letter about the school. In its response, DuPont said that Denka, not DuPont, operates the neoprene facility, and that tens of thousands of residents have worked at DuPont’s adjoining facility. The workers’ children have attended Fifth Ward Elementary, the company said, and “we care deeply about its success.”

DuPont is “committed to continue to work with Denka,” regulators and the community “to maintain the strong ties and supporting efforts needed to keep St. John Parish a safe and great place to work and live,” the company added.

In 2010, the EPA released a report classifying chloroprene as a “likely human carcinogen.” Chloroprene is a mutagen, meaning it causes cancer by attacking and mutating DNA. Mutagens are particularly dangerous for children and infants, whose cells divide much more rapidly than those of adults.

Recent air monitoring data from Denka, collected about 1,000 feet from the school, showed average concentrations 11 times what EPA considers acceptable, according to the agency’s letter. At times over the past few years, air samples collected by the EPA on school grounds showed concentrations as high as 83 times the acceptable guideline.

Jim Harris, a spokesperson for Denka, said in a written statement that the EPA’s chloroprene limit is “based on a faulty and outdated exposure model.”

The company asked the EPA to revise its chloroprene guidelines last year, arguing that the model used was not “sufficiently rigorous.” The EPA refuted Denka’s conclusions this spring, stating that the company did not identify any errors with the agency’s analysis.

"There is simply no evidence of increased levels of health impacts near” the plant, Harris wrote. “Data compiled by the Louisiana Tumor registry (LTR) have repeatedly shown for decades there are no widespread elevated rates of cancer in the parish or in the census tracts neighboring the facility compared with state averages.”

Kim Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, argued that the registry’s census-tract-level data obscures health effects in the communities closest to industrial facilities. The tumor registry, too, has said that its data should not be used to represent cancer rates in smaller populations, such as neighborhoods near industrial fence lines.

“The cancer rates Denka cited are not specific to the people who have been most exposed to chloroprene,” Terrell said.

Harris, the Denka spokesperson, said the company has “invested over $35 million to reduce its emissions by over 85 percent” since purchasing the facility in 2015 and conducted community air monitoring that showed similar reductions.

The EPA’s letter acknowledged the reduced concentrations, which resulted from an enforcement order from LDEQ. “There is no question, however,” the EPA wrote, “that elevated cancer risk for residents of all ages and school children still exists and has existed as a result of breathing air polluted with chloroprene and that this risk has impacted and currently impacts Black residents disproportionately.”

Taylor, the community advocate, said the letter indicates the agency is “considering our humanity” and “doing what we consider is the right thing.” For too long, he said, residents have operated under the assumption that “our government has abandoned us — we are just sacrifice zones.”

A lifelong resident of St. John the Baptist Parish, Taylor recalled how his children used to run into the house to escape fumes that made their chests hurt. He lives five blocks from the Denka plant, close enough to hear announcements from the company’s loudspeakers. He has grandkids and great-grandkids who attended local schools, including a Catholic school next door to Fifth Ward Elementary.

The EPA letter is a response to civil rights complaints filed on behalf of Taylor’s organization, the Sierra Club and other groups. The complaints cite Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans the federal government from funding state agencies whose policies or actions discriminate based on race.

The act prohibits both intentional discrimination and disparate impact regardless of intent, said Deena Tumeh, an associate attorney at Earthjustice who helped file the complaints for Taylor’s group. The EPA’s letter noted that 93% of the residents within a mile of the Denka plant are Black, and the Formosa plant is slated for a census tract where 90% of the population is Black, compared to 50% in the overall parish. These demographic patterns can be traced back to the Reconstruction era, the letter said, as freed Black families were able to purchase small parcels of land near plantations. Over time, the plantations were replaced by large petrochemical facilities, while the descendants of those families continued to live in rural, unincorporated towns that became “fence line” communities.

Last month, a judge blocked progress on the Formosa plant by withdrawing its air permits. The judge’s decision cited the fact that state regulators failed to assess cumulative impacts from multiple sources, even though the location suffers from significant existing toxic air pollution that would be exacerbated by the proposed facility’s emissions. LDEQ has appealed the decision. Formosa didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“For years, Title VI letters went to a closet and died,” but this EPA is talking to people and investigating seriously, said Darryl Malek-Wiley, a senior organizing representative at the Sierra Club.

Malek-Wiley, who helped popularize the term “Cancer Alley” in the 1980s, said the real test of the EPA’s dedication to equity will come once it negotiates specific terms with the two Louisiana agencies. Tumeh said the agreement could include the recommendations from the EPA’s letter, as well as additional requirements. That process could take months.

by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden

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

Investigating cybercrime was supposed to be the FBI’s third-highest priority, behind terrorism and counterintelligence. Yet, in 2015, FBI Director James Comey realized that his Cyber Division faced a brain drain that was hamstringing its investigations.

Retention in the division had been a chronic problem, but in the spring of that year, it became acute. About a dozen young and midcareer cyber agents had given notice or were considering leaving, attracted by more lucrative jobs outside government. As the resignations piled up, Comey received an unsolicited email from Andre McGregor, one of the cyber agents who had quit. In his email, the young agent suggested ways to improve the Cyber Division. Comey routinely broadcast his open-door policy, but senior staff members were nevertheless aghast when they heard an agent with just six years’ experience in the bureau had actually taken him up on it. To their consternation, Comey took McGregor’s email and the other cyber agents’ departures seriously. “I want to meet these guys,” he said. He invited the agents to Washington from field offices nationwide for a private lunch. As news of the meeting circulated throughout headquarters, across divisions and into the field, senior staff openly scorned the cyber agents, dubbing them “the 12 Angry Men,” “the Dirty Dozen” or just “these assholes.” To the old-schoolers — including some who had risked their lives in service to the bureau — the cyber agents were spoiled prima donnas, not real FBI.

The cyber agents were as stunned as anyone to have an audience with Comey. Despite their extensive training in interrogation at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, many were anxious about what the director might ask them. “As an agent, you never meet the director,” said Milan Patel, an agent who attended the lunch. “You know the director, because he’s famous. But the director doesn’t know you.”

You also rarely, if ever, go to the J. Edgar Hoover Building’s seventh floor, where the executive offices are. But that day, the cyber agents — all men, mostly in their mid-30s, in suits, ties and fresh haircuts — strode single file down the seventh-floor hall to Comey’s private conference room. Stiffly, nervously, they stood waiting. Then Comey came in, shirt sleeves rolled up and bag lunch in hand.

“Have a seat, guys,” he told them. “Take off your coats. Get comfortable. Tell me who you are, where you live and why you’re leaving. I want to understand if you are happy and leaving, or disappointed and leaving.”

Around the room, everyone took a turn answering. Each agent professed to be happy, describing his admiration for the bureau’s mission.

“Well, that’s a good start,” Comey said.

Then sincerity prevailed. For the next hour, as they ate their lunches, the agents unloaded.

They told Comey that their skills were either disregarded or misunderstood by other agents and supervisors across the bureau. The FBI had cliques reminiscent of high school, and the cyber agents were derisively called the Geek Squad.

“What do you need a gun for?” SWAT team jocks would say. Or, from a senior leader, alluding to the physical fitness tests all agents were required to pass, “Do you have to do pushups with a keyboard in your backpack?” The jabs — which eroded an already tenuous sense of belonging — testified to the widespread belief that cyber agents played a less important role than others in the bureau.

At the meeting, the men also registered their opposition to some of the FBI’s ingrained cultural expectations, including the mantra that agents should be capable of doing “any job, anywhere.” Comey had embraced that credo, making it known during his tenure that he wanted everyone in the FBI to have computer skills. But the cyber agents believed this outlook was misguided. Although traditional skills, from source cultivation to undercover stings, were applicable to cybercrime cases, it was not feasible to turn someone with no interest or aptitude in computer science into a first-rate cyber investigator. The placement of nontechnical agents on cyber squads — a practice that dated to the 1990s — also led to a problem that the agents referred to as “reeducation fatigue.” They were constantly forced to put their investigations on hold to train newcomers, both supervisors and other cyber agents, who arrived with little or no technical expertise.

Other issues were personal. To be promoted, the FBI typically required agents to relocate. This transient lifestyle caused family heartache for agents across the bureau. One cyber agent lamented the lack of career opportunities for his spouse, a businesswoman, in far-flung offices like Wichita. The agents told Comey they didn’t have to deal with “the shuffle” around the country for professional advancement because their skills were immediately transferable to the private sector and in high demand. They had offers for high-profile jobs paying multiples of their FBI salaries. Unlike private employers worried about staying competitive, the FBI wasn’t about to disrupt its rigid pay scale to keep its top cyber agents. Feeling they had nothing to lose, the agents recommended changes. They told Comey that the FBI could improve retention by centralizing cyber agents in Washington instead of assigning them to the 56 field offices around the country. That made sense because, unlike investigating physical crimes like bank robbery, they didn’t necessarily need to be near the scene to collect evidence. Plus, suspects were often abroad.

Most important, they wanted the bureau’s respect.

Comey listened, asked questions and took notes. Then he led them to his private office. They glanced around, most of them knowing they were unlikely to be granted such access to power again. Comey’s desk featured framed photos of his wife and children, and the carpet was emblazoned with the FBI’s seal. The agents had such respect for the bureau that they huddled close so that no one had to step on any part of the seal.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the office was the whiteboard that sprawled across one of the walls. On it was an organizational chart of the bureau’s leadership with magnets featuring the names and headshots of FBI executives and special agents in charge of field offices. Many were terrorism experts who had risen through the hierarchy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Comey was sympathetic to his visitors and recognized the importance of cyber expertise to the FBI’s future. At the same time, he wasn’t going to overhaul the bureau and alienate the powerful old guard to please a group of short-timers.

“Look, I know we’ve got a problem with leadership here,” Comey told the cyber agents as they studied the whiteboard, according to agents who were there. “I want to fix it, but I don’t have enough time to fix it. I’m only here for a limited amount of time; it’s going to take another generation to fix some of these cultural issues.” But the agents knew the FBI couldn’t afford to wait another generation to confront escalating cyberthreats like ransomware. Ransomware is the unholy marriage of hacking and cryptography. Typically, the attackers capitalize on a cybersecurity flaw or get an unsuspecting person to open an attachment or click a link. Once inside a computer system, ransomware encrypts the files, rendering them inaccessible without the right decryption key — the string of characters that can unlock the information — for which a ransom is demanded.

Although attacks were becoming more sophisticated, bureau officials told counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security and elsewhere in the federal government that ransomware wasn’t a priority because both the damages and the chances of catching suspects were too small. Instead of aggressively mobilizing against the threat, the FBI took the lead in compiling a “best practices” document that warned the public about ransomware, urged prevention and discouraged payments to hackers. Through an intermediary, Comey, fired from his FBI position by then-President Donald Trump in 2017, declined to comment on the meeting. The FBI acknowledged but did not respond to written questions.

To FBI leadership, ransomware was an “ankle-biter crime,” said an agent who attended the meeting with Comey.

“They viewed it as a Geek Squad thing, and therefore they viewed it as not important,” he said.

Many of the issues the FBI cyber agents raised during their meeting with Comey were nothing new. In fact, the bureau’s inertia in tackling cybercrime dated all the way back to a case involving the first documented state-sponsored computer intrusion.

In 1986, Cliff Stoll was working as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory when his boss asked him to resolve a 75-cent shortfall in the accounting system the lab used for charging for computing power. Stoll traced the error to an unauthorized user and ultimately unraveled a sprawling intrusion into computer systems of the U.S. government and military. Eventually, the trail led to German hackers paid by the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, the KGB. Stoll immortalized his crusade in the 1989 book “The Cuckoo’s Egg.” In the course of his investigation, he tried seven times to get the attention of the FBI but was rebuffed each time.

“Look, kid, did you lose more than a half million dollars?” the FBI asked him.

“Uh, no,” Stoll replied.

“Any classified information?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then go away, kid.”

Stoll later spoke with an Air Force investigator who summed up the FBI’s position: “Computer crimes aren’t easy — not like kidnapping or bank robbery, where there’s witnesses and obvious losses. Don’t blame them for shying away from a tough case with no clear solution.”

It wasn’t until almost a decade later that the federal government took its first significant step to organize against cyberthreats. After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Clinton administration called together a dozen officials from across the government to assess the vulnerability of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Since essential services such as health care and banking were moving online, the committee quickly turned its attention from physical threats, like Timothy McVeigh’s infamous Ryder truck, to computer-based ones.

The group helped establish what became known as the National Infrastructure Protection Center in 1998. With representatives from the FBI, the Secret Service, intelligence agencies and other federal departments, the NIPC was tasked with preventing and investigating computer intrusions. The FBI was selected to oversee the NIPC because it had the broadest legal authority to investigate crime.

Turf battles broke out immediately. The National Security Agency and the Pentagon were indignant about reporting to the FBI about sophisticated computer crimes that they believed the bureau was incapable of handling, said Michael Vatis, then a deputy U.S. attorney general who led the effort to launch the center.

“They said: ‘Oh, no, no, no. It can’t be the FBI,’” Vatis recalled. “‘All they know how to do is surround a crime scene with yellow tape and take down bad guys. And they’re notorious for not sharing information.’”

Meanwhile, infighting over resources roiled the FBI. “You had a lot of old-line people arguing about whether cybercrime was real and serious,” Vatis said. “People who came up through organized crime, or Russian counterintelligence. They were like: ‘This is just a nuisance from teenagers. It’s not real.’”

At the time, only a couple of dozen FBI agents had any experience or interest in investigating computer crime. There weren’t nearly enough tech-literate agents to fill the scores of new job openings in the NIPC. Needing warm bodies, the FBI summoned volunteers from within its ranks, regardless of background. Among them was the New Orleans-based agent Stacy Arruda. During her first squad meeting in 1999, as her supervisor talked about “Unix this, and Linux that,” she realized she was in over her head.

“Arruda, do you have any idea what I’m talking about?” the supervisor asked her.

“Nope.”

“Why are you nodding and smiling?”

“I don’t want to look stupid.”

It was an easy admission because most of the new NIPC agents were similarly uninformed about the world they would be investigating.

When the bureau ran out of volunteers to join the NIPC, agents were “volun-told” to join, Arruda said. That’s what happened to Scott Augenbaum. He said he was assigned to the NIPC because he was the only agent in his Syracuse, New York, office “who had any bit of a technology background,” meaning he “could take a laptop connected to a telephone jack and get online.” He was disappointed by the assignment because it was “not the cool and fun and sexy job to have within the FBI.” His friends in the bureau teased him. “They told me, ‘This cyber thing is going to hurt your career.’”

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller created the bureau’s Cyber Division to fight computer-based crime. The division took over the NIPC’s investigative work, while prevention efforts moved to the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in November 2002. The DHS, however, put the computer crime prevention mission on hold for years as it focused instead on deterring physical attacks.

To ramp up the new division, the FBI put a cyber squad in each field office and launched a training program to help existing agents switch tracks. It also benefited from the “patriot effect,” as talented computer experts who felt a call to service applied. Among them were Milan Patel and Anthony Ferrante, two of the agents who would attend the meeting with Comey.

Fresh out of college, Ferrante was working as a consultant at Ernst & Young on 9/11. From his office in a Midtown skyscraper, he watched the towers fall. In the days that followed, he resolved to use his computer skills to fight terrorism. While pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Fordham University, he met with an FBI recruiter who was trying to hire digital experts for the new Cyber Division. The recruiter asked Ferrante what languages he knew.

“HTML, JavaScript, C++, Business Basic,” he answered.

“What are those?” the perplexed recruiter responded. “I mean, Russian, Spanish, French.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Ferrante felt misunderstood by the bureau. When he arrived at Quantico in 2004, he found himself in a firearms class of about 40 new agents-in-training. There, the instructor asked: “Who here has never shot a gun?”

With his gaze cast downward as he concentrated on taking notes, Ferrante raised his hand. The room became silent. He looked around and saw he was the only one. Everyone stared.

“What’s your background?” the instructor asked.

“I’m a computer hacker,” Ferrante said.

On a campus that recruits jokingly referred to as “college with guns,” his answer was not well received. The instructor shook his head, rolled his eyes and moved on.

Patel arrived at the FBI Academy in 2003 with a college degree in computer science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. From Quantico, he was assigned to a cyber squad in New York, where his new boss didn’t quite know what to do with him. The supervisor handed him a beeper, a Rand McNally map and the keys to a 1993 Ford Aerostar van that “looked like it was bombed out in Baghdad,” Patel said. Another agent set him up with a computer running a long-outdated version of Windows.

“Oh my God, this is like the Stone Age,” he thought. As time went on, Patel discovered how cumbersome it was to brief supervisors about cyber cases. Since many of them knew little about computers, he had to write reports that he considered “borderline childish.”

“You had to try to relate computers to cars,” he said. “You’re speaking a foreign language to them, yet they’re in charge, making decisions over the health of what you do.”

Patel realized that most of his Cyber Division colleagues, like Arruda and Augenbaum, didn’t have a technical background. The bureau tried to turn traditional law enforcement officers into tech specialists while passing over computer scientists who could not meet its qualifications to become agents. “Is the person who can do 15 pull-ups and run 2 miles around the track in under 16 minutes the same guy that you want decrypting ransomware?” Patel said. “Typically people who write code and enjoy the passion of figuring out malware, they’re not in a gym cranking out squats.”

Some agents ended up in the Cyber Division because it had openings when they graduated from Quantico, or because it was a stop on the way to a promotion. In a popular move, many senior agents and supervisors pursued a final assignment in the division before becoming eligible for retirement at age 50, knowing it made them more attractive to private-sector employers for their post-FBI careers.

“On a bureau cyber squad, you typically have one or two people, if you’re lucky, who can decrypt and do network traffic analysis and programming and the really hard work,” Patel said. “And you’ve got two or three people who know how to investigate cybercrime and have a computer science degree. And the rest — half of the team — are in the cyber program, but they don’t really know anything about cyber.” Some of those agents made successful cases anyway, but they were the exception.

Despite the internal headwinds, Patel worked on some of the bureau’s marquee cybercrime cases. He led the investigation into Silk Road, the black-market bazaar where illegal goods and services were anonymously bought and sold. As part of a sprawling investigation into the dark web marketplace, law enforcement located six of Silk Road’s servers scattered across the globe and compromised the site before shutting it down in October 2013. Ross Ulbricht, of San Francisco, was later found guilty on narcotics and hacking charges for his role in creating and operating the site. He is serving two life sentences plus 40 years in prison. Patel was nominated for the FBI Director’s Award for Investigative Excellence; he became a Cyber Division unit chief, advising on technology strategy. Then, shortly after the Dirty Dozen meeting with Comey, he left the FBI for a higher-paying job in the private sector.

Ferrante was selected for the FBI’s Cyber Action Team, which deployed in response to the most critical cyber incidents globally. As a supervisory special agent, he became chief of staff of the FBI’s Cyber Division. After the meeting with Comey, Ferrante remained in the FBI for another two years. He left in 2017 to become global head of cybersecurity for FTI Consulting, where he worked with companies victimized by ransomware.

He kept tabs on the bureau’s public actions in fighting the crime. Despite occasional successes, he said in 2021 that he was disappointed by the small number of ransomware-related indictments in the years that followed Comey’s 2015 gathering.

“They would work cases, but those cases would just spin, spin, spin,” Ferrante said. “No, they’re not taking it seriously, so of course it’s out of control now because it’s gone unchecked for so many years. … Nobody understood it — nobody within the FBI, and nobody within the Department of Justice. Because they didn’t understand it, they didn’t put proper resources behind it. And because they didn’t put proper resources behind it, the cases that were worked never got any legs or never got the attention they deserved.”

By 2012, FBI leadership recognized that most crimes involved some technical element: the use of email or cellphones, for example. So that year, it began to prioritize hiring non-agent computer scientists to help on cases. These civilian cyber experts, who worked in field offices around the country, did not carry weapons and were not required to pass regular physical fitness tests. But respect for the non-gun-carrying technical experts was lacking. This widespread condescension was reflected in a nickname that Stacy Arruda, the early NIPC agent who went on to a career as a supervisor in the Cyber Division, had for them: dolphins.

“Someone who is highly intelligent and can’t communicate with humans,” said Arruda, who retired from the FBI in 2018. “When we would travel, we would bring our dolphins with us. And when the other party started squeaking, we would have our dolphins squeak right back at them.”

If agents like Patel and Ferrante had a hard time winning the institutional respect of the FBI, it seemed almost impossible for the dolphins to do so. They worked on technical aspects of all types of cases, not just cyber ones. Yet, despite the critical role they played in investigating cyber cases — sometimes as the sole person in a field office who understood the technical underpinnings of a case — these civilian computer scientists were often regarded as agents’ support staff and treated as second-class citizens.

Randy Pargman took a circuitous route to becoming the Seattle field office’s dolphin. As a kid in California, Pargman regularly hung out with his grandma, who was interested in technology. She bought magazines that contained basic code and helped Pargman copy it onto their Atari video game console. It was his introduction to computer programming. Later, as a teenager, Pargman was drawn to a booth of ham radio enthusiasts at a county fair and soon began saving up to buy his own $300 radio. It was the early 1990s, before most home users were online, so Pargman was thrilled when he used the radio to access pages from a library in Japan and send primitive emails.

After high school, Pargman put his radio skills to work when he became a Washington State Patrol dispatcher. Although it wasn’t a part of the job description, he created one computer program to improve the dispatch system’s efficiency and another to automate the state’s process for investigating fraud in vehicle registrations. The experience led him to study computer science at Mississippi State. In the summer of 2000, while still in college, Pargman completed an FBI internship, an experience that left him with a deep appreciation for the bureau’s mission. So, following brief stints working for the Department of Defense and as a private sector software engineer once he graduated, he applied to become an agent. He was hired in 2004, around the same time as Patel and Ferrante.

Like those two agents, Pargman was shocked by the digital Stone Age he found himself in upon arriving. At the FBI Academy, a computer instructor gave lessons on typing interviews and reports on WordPerfect, the word processing platform whose popularity had peaked in the late 1980s. To Pargman, even more outrageous than the FBI’s use of WordPerfect was the notion that agents would need instruction on such a basic program. The first week of class, the instructor delivered another surprise.

“OK, who are the IT nerds in here?” he asked.

After Pargman and a classmate raised their hands, the instructor addressed them directly.

“You’re not going to be working on cybercrimes. You’re going to be working on whatever the bureau needs you to do.”

The other tech-savvy recruit later confided to Pargman that he was dropping out of the FBI Academy to return to private industry. “This is not what I thought it was going to be,” he said.

Pargman was similarly torn. He believed in the FBI’s mission but wanted to work solely on cybercrime. Like Ferrante, he didn’t have experience with guns, and he was unsure about how he would handle that aspect of the job. He faced a reckoning when an FBI speaker led a sobering session about the toughest aspects of working for the bureau, from deadly force scenarios to the higher-than-average rates of suicide and divorce among agents.

After consulting with FBI counselors and a bureau chaplain, Pargman decided he didn’t want to become an agent. Instead, he stayed in the FBI as a civilian, working as a software developer at the FBI Academy. Eight years later, when the FBI launched the computer science track, Pargman eagerly applied. He became the Seattle field office’s dedicated computer scientist in October 2012.

“This is why I had gotten into the FBI to begin with,” Pargman said. “I can concentrate just on cybercrime investigations and not have to deal with the whole badge and gun.”

Once Pargman got to Seattle, he began to dream big. His vision: The FBI could model its Cyber Division after one of the world’s most successful computer crime-fighting law enforcement organizations, the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit. He knew how traditional and hidebound the bureau was, how different from the HTCU and its innovative culture. But, ever idealistic, he hoped that the HTCU’s remarkable track record would persuade the FBI to adopt elements of the Dutch approach.

Pargman had long been familiar with the HTCU’s reputation for arresting hackers and disrupting their infrastructure. When he met a Dutch officer through an FBI program for midcareer professionals, he asked her the secret to the HTCU’s success. Her response was straightforward: the HTCU was effective because it paired each traditional police officer with a computer scientist, partnerships that had been a founding priority of the unit. While the HTCU computer scientists weren’t required to pass police exams, meet physical fitness requirements, or handle weapons, they nonetheless were entitled to the same rank and promotions as their traditional counterparts. They also were not obligated to pivot to noncomputer work during their police careers.

The density of computer science experts in the HTCU astounded Pargman, who thought it was brilliant. He suggested the Dutch approach to managers in the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, which oversaw the new computer science track. They laughed.

“We can’t get funding for that many computer scientists,” one contact told him. “That would be crazy.”

Pargman acknowledged that, since the FBI’s Cyber Division was much larger than the Dutch Police’s HTCU, establishing a one-to-one partnership was a stretch. Yet the FBI’s setup all but ensured that its drastically outnumbered computer scientists would not find a collective voice, as the tech experts had done in the HTCU. As Pargman dug into cyber investigations in Seattle, he learned that the bureau’s staffing imbalance was straining its cyber experts, both civilian computer scientists and technically advanced agents like Patel and Ferrante.

Many of the cyber agents Pargman worked with in Seattle had prior careers as accountants, attorneys or police officers. To get acquainted with the digital world, they took crash courses offered by the SANS Institute, the bureau’s contractor for cybersecurity training; popular offerings included Introduction to Cyber Security and Security Essentials Bootcamp. From an institutional perspective, learning on the job to investigate computer crime was no different from learning on the job to investigate white-collar or gang crime. But FBI leadership didn’t take into account something that early leaders in the Dutch HTCU knew from the unit’s start: It’s not easy to teach advanced computer skills to someone who has no technical background.

Cyber agents routinely came to Pargman with basic tasks such as analyzing email headers, the technical details stored within messages that can contain helpful clues.

“This is easy, you need to learn how to do this,” Pargman told one agent. He produced the IP address from the headers.

“What does that mean?” the agent responded. “What is this IP address?”

Pargman had to make the time to help because, if he didn’t, the agent might do something embarrassing, like attempt to subpoena publicly available information “because they just didn’t know any better.”

In the FBI, investigations into specific ransomware strains were organized by field office. For example, Springfield, Illinois, investigated complaints involving a strain called Rapid, while Anchorage, Alaska, investigated those related to Russia-based Ryuk, one of the first ransomware gangs to routinely demand six-figure payments and to carefully select and research its targets. From time to time, Pargman learned of victim complaints to the Seattle office about emerging ransomware strains. Since cases weren’t assigned directly to computer scientists, he pushed the agents to take them on. “Oh boy, here’s one that nobody is working,” he told one colleague.

“Let’s jump on this.”

“That sounds amazing,” the agent responded. “But I’ll be so busy with that case that I won’t get to do anything else.”

In the early days of ransomware, when hackers demanded no more than a few hundred dollars, the FBI was uninterested because the damages were small — not unlike Cliff Stoll’s dilemma at Berkeley. Later, once losses grew to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, agents had other reasons to want to avoid investigating ransomware. In the FBI, prestige springs from being a successful “trial agent,” working on cases that result in indictments and convictions that make the news. But ransomware cases, even with the enthusiastic support of a computer scientist like Pargman, were long and complex, with a low likelihood of arrest.

The fact that most ransomware hackers were outside the United States made the investigative process challenging from the start. To collect evidence from abroad, agents needed to coordinate with federal prosecutors, FBI legal attachés and international law enforcement agencies through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process. Seemingly straightforward tasks, such as obtaining an image of a suspicious server, could take months. And if the server was in a hostile country such as Iran or North Korea, the agents were out of luck. Aware of this international labyrinth, even some federal prosecutors discouraged agents from pursuing complex cyber investigations.

During Pargman’s time as Seattle’s computer scientist, the field office took on a number of technically sophisticated cases. He was especially proud of one that led to the Justice Department’s indictment, unsealed in 2018, of hackers accused in the notorious Fin7 attacks. They breached more than 100 U.S. companies and led to the theft of more than 15 million customer credit card records. But during his seven years in Seattle, the office never got a handle on ransomware.

“If you spend all of your time chasing ransomware, and for years you never make a single arrest of anybody, you’re seen as a failure,” Pargman said. “Even if you’re doing a ton of good in the world, like sharing information and helping protect people, you’re still a failure as an investigator because you haven’t arrested anybody.” Despite its own inaction, the FBI feuded with the other federal agency responsible for investigating ransomware: the Secret Service. Although the Secret Service has been guarding presidents since 1894, its lesser-known mission of combating financial crimes dates back even longer — to the day in April 1865 that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Before heading to Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln signed legislation creating the agency and giving it the mandate to fight counterfeit currency. As financial crime evolved and moved online, the Secret Service and the FBI squabbled over cases. Although it, too, had a federal mandate to fight computer crime, the Secret Service was sometimes bigfooted by the FBI, said Mark Grantz, who was a supervisory special agent for the Secret Service in Washington.

“They’d say: ‘Yeah, we’ve got a case on that already. We were looking at him five years ago. Give us everything you’ve got and we’ll go from there.’ That was their M.O.,” Grantz said. It left him wondering: “You haven’t touched that case in five years, why are you asking me for my case file?”

Grantz led an investigation into a ransomware attack in January 2017, eight days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The strike disabled computers linked to 126 street cameras in a video surveillance system monitoring public spaces across Washington, D.C., including along the presidential parade route. Instead of paying the five-figure ransom, the district scrambled to wipe and restart the cameras, which were back online three days before the swearing-in. Assisted by other law enforcement organizations, the Secret Service traced the hack to two Romanians, who were arrested in Europe, extradited to the United States and found guilty on wire fraud charges — an uncommon U.S. law enforcement success against ransomware operators.

Other Secret Service investigations sometimes stalled because agents had to rotate away for protective detail. “That’s where it gets frustrating,” Grantz said. “You’d train someone. They’d do digital forensics for five years. They’d get really good at it. And then you’d send them off to do presidential detail.”

Randy Pargman also grew frustrated by the FBI’s reluctance to engage meaningfully with private-sector cybersecurity researchers like the Ransomware Hunting Team. An elite, invitation-only group of tech wizards in seven countries, the team has uncovered keys to hundreds of ransomware strains, saving millions of individuals, businesses, schools and other victims from paying billions of dollars in ransom. When the FBI did connect with experts in the private sector, sensitive information typically flowed only in one direction — to the bureau.

Following large cyberattacks against U.S. targets, the FBI routinely affirmed its commitment to public-private partnerships to help prevent and gather intelligence on such strikes. But some agents believed the rhetoric was hollow, comparing it to public officials’ offering “thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings. The reality was that many people in the FBI had a deep distrust of private-sector researchers.

“There’s this feeling among most agents that if they share even a little bit of information with somebody in the private sector, that information will get out, broadcast over the internet — and the bad guys will definitely read it, and it will destroy the whole case,” Pargman said.

Even though he couldn’t work on ransomware cases, Pargman found ways to feel fulfilled in his job, including by helping organizations defend themselves against impending cyber intrusions. He examined malware command-and-control servers obtained through the MLAT process, then alerted potential victims to imminent attacks. “That was a really good feeling because we stopped a ton of those intrusions,” he said. FBI leadership rewarded his efforts: Pargman earned both the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence in Technical Advancement and the FBI Medal of Excellence.

But he grew tired of his subordinate role as an “agent helper,” and he thought about how things would be different if the FBI were more like the Dutch HTCU. In the bureau, he couldn’t be promoted since Cyber Division leadership roles were open only to agents. And while agents could retire at 50 with full pensions, he had to wait until age 62, and would receive less money. In 2019, Pargman resigned from the FBI, telling his supervisor he wanted to be in a role where he could enact changes rather than just suggest them.

“I love working for the FBI,” he told his supervisor. “It’s very meaningful and fulfilling. But there is no leadership spot for me to go to, only because I’m not an agent. So you cannot be upset that I’m going to get a job where I can be a leader, and make changes, and create a team to do big things.”

When it came to ransomware, the FBI didn’t have a lengthy roster of achievements to boast about. It would not be until after the May 2021 attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which shuttered gas stations across the Southeast, that the FBI would prioritize the ransomware threat and embrace assistance from private researchers like the Ransomware Hunting Team. But even with its new emphasis on ransomware, the FBI didn’t undertake fundamental reforms to expand its roster of cyber experts. It still wanted its cyber agents to be athletic college graduates with relevant job experience, who also had to be willing to shoot a gun, relocate their families and pivot away from investigating cybercrime as needed.

The bureau’s reluctance to adapt disappointed some former agents. “I think the next generation of cyber people in the bureau should be the type of people who want to be cyber first, and not agents at all,” said Patel, one of the agents who attended the 2015 meeting with Comey. “The bureau needs expertly trained technical programmers, cybersecurity engineers, that know how to write code, compile, dissect and investigate — and it has nothing to do with carrying a gun.”

Excerpted from “The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime” by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2022 by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. All rights reserved.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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With the 2022 midterms less than a month away, election administrators in Texas and elsewhere continue to face a level of harassment and threats that experts say had never been experienced before the November 2020 presidential election.

In August, the entire staff of the elections office in Gillespie County, about 80 miles west of Austin, resigned, citing threats, “dangerous misinformation” and a lack of resources. The same month, Bexar County elections administrator Jacque Callanen told KSAT, a San Antonio news station, that her department was confronting similar challenges.

“We’re under attack,” Callanen said.“Threats, meanness, ugliness.” She added that staff members were drowning in frivolous open-records requests for mail ballots and applications. Texas is one of several states targeted by right-wing activists who are seeking to throw out voter registrations and ballots, according to The New York Times.

Last month, angry activists disrupted a routine event in which officials publicly test voting equipment outside of Austin, swarming the Hays County elections administrator and Texas Secretary of State John Scott, a Republican, while alleging unproven election law violations.

The instances follow reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which last year detailed the case of Michele Carew, an elections administrator in Hood County, a staunchly Republican area an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Then-President Donald Trump received 81% of the vote in Hood County in 2020. But Trump loyalists mounted a monthslong effort to oust Carew, a Republican, alleging disloyalty and liberal bias. Carew defended herself from the attacks, surviving a motion to terminate her, before resigning from the position in October 2021.

Elections officials like Carew are increasingly feeling pressure to prioritize partisan interests over a fair democratic elections process, according to a study released last year by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice and the Bipartisan Policy Center. The study, which interviewed more than three dozen elections administrators, found that 78% believe misinformation and disinformation spread on social media has made their jobs harder, with more than half saying the position has become more dangerous.

In Texas, about one-third of election administrators have left their jobs in the past two years, according to surveys conducted this year by the secretary of state’s office. State officials said data prior to 2020 is less reliable, making it difficult to compare the rates over time.

The levels of distrust that have come to dominate the political landscape in Texas, a state that Trump carried with relative ease, should be cause for concern, says David Becker, the founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit focused on ensuring accessible and secure elections for all eligible voters. He previously directed the elections program at Pew Charitable Trusts, where he led development of the Electronic Registration Information Center, which has helped 33 states, some led by Democrats and others by Republicans, update millions of out-of-date voter records. Before that, Becker helped oversee voting rights enforcement for the Department of Justice under Presidents Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican.

I recently sat down with Becker, the coauthor of the book “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” to talk about the realities facing elections administrators in Texas and across the country ahead of the 2022 midterms.

When we talked a year ago about Michele Carew, you said Texas’ new voting restrictions, a push by GOP activists to seize control of local party precincts and efforts to delegitimize the elections process in places like Hood County could have a chilling effect that drives out a generation of independent elections administrators. Do you feel like that is coming to fruition?

I think the risk definitely is still there. It is very difficult to get hard quantitative data on this, mainly because the definition of an election administrator is not always consistent across the states. We won’t really get a good sense of that until after the [2022] election.

What I do know is, on a state-by-state basis, I’ve heard pretty good evidence that states like California, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and several other states are seeing unprecedented departures of chief county election officials. In some cases, somewhere in the range of around 30% or 45% are leaving in a two-year period. That’s very, very high. I know from talking to election officials privately that many of them are considering whether or not they can stay in these jobs, because the harassment is so great.

Being an election official is not a path to fame and fortune. People don’t become election officials because they see something in it for them. In fact, if you ask most election officials how they got into being an election official, they’ll tell you it was by accident. They applied for a job, and it just looked like a pretty good job. And they stayed because they found a calling. That’s true of conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats and everything in between.

The best-case scenario for election officials on the Wednesday after an election is anonymity. No one’s talking about the election because everything went smoothly and everyone’s moved on.

We’ve been in a position where election officials actually achieved probably the greatest success in American democratic process in history [in 2020]. They somehow managed the highest turnout we’ve ever had, during a global pandemic, and withstood incredible scrutiny. And, despite that success, the exact opposite has been spread about them. They are suffering an enormous amount of stress and harassment and abuse, and in some cases threats. So it’s normal for them to ask, “Should I keep doing this? Can I do this to my family?”

We are seeing candidates who have denied the outcome of the 2020 election now running for secretary of state, attorney general and election management positions at the county and precinct level around the country. Are you concerned about what this could mean for elections in the future?

I think it’s important to assess where the risks actually are. It is difficult — not impossible, but difficult — to anoint the loser of an election as the winner. We saw that in 2020. Even under enormous stress, with the White House itself being behind a lot of it, the courts have held up.

We have a lot of paper ballots, we have a lot of transparency, and so there’s a lot of evidence. So it’s very hard to anoint the loser as the winner.

I don’t want to say I’m completely sanguine about that not happening, but I think it’s a lower concern for me than the concern of the rhetoric being used by someone in a position of power, as we saw with former President Trump.

If you have someone in a position of power who is spreading lies about an election, who’s trying to create an incendiary environment where the supporters of a losing candidate are going to get more upset, we could see a lot of little Jan. 6s all over the place. (This refers to the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.)

You write in your book that election denialism and skepticism have only grown among some Republicans since 2020, despite evidence that the presidential election was not marred by widespread fraud. Why do you believe the sentiment increased?

This is about the outcome being dissatisfying to some, and then looking for some reason to distrust the process. Because there’s no other way to explain it other than the fact that the losing presidential candidate got 7 million fewer votes than the winning presidential candidate, which is in fact what did happen.

We are almost exactly 700 days since the November 2020 election, and the losing presidential candidate has had an opportunity to present and find as much evidence as possible. He had over 60 courts to do that in, including in front of judges appointed by himself. He has had months and months to collect evidence. In 700 days, they’ve gotten nothing. Literally, not a shred of evidence has been demonstrated to indicate the outcome was wrong.

Nevertheless, the doubts have persisted, if not grown. I think it comes from the fact that there is kind of a warped incentive structure where the losing presidential candidate is getting rich off of spreading the lies, so he’s going to keep doing it. And then the ecosystem of grifters that surround him are also getting rich; they’re lining their pockets with small donations from people who are sincerely disappointed about the outcome of the election.

I think that’s a really key point here. Seventy-four million people voted for the loser. Not all of them are insurrectionists. Not all of them are bad Americans. In fact, the vast majority of them are good Americans who just wanted a different outcome in the election.

Who among us hasn’t suffered a bitter electoral disappointment in the last decade? But they have been targeted and taken advantage of, exploited because they live largely in media silos where they’re only hearing the echo chamber that the election was stolen because that comforts them, and the grifters know that. And so they know they can keep them bitter and angry and divided and donating.

As long as that incentive structure continues, I think the lies are going to persist. We now live in a country where, for many, a secure election is defined only as an election in which my candidate has won. That’s ridiculous. We need to change that incentive structure so that people stop exploiting their own supporters in order to make a buck.

Given some of the nationwide turnover in election administrators, what’s your level of optimism that the 2022 midterms will be carried out without major issues?

I’m very worried, but I’m not pessimistic, if that makes sense. I don’t think we’re inevitably heading towards conflict. I don’t think we’re heading inevitably towards political violence. But all of the ingredients are there. The gasoline has been poured. The question is, is there going to be a spark? And if there is going to be a spark, are there going to be enough of us who will act as firemen?

Where I find optimism is in institutions that have withheld so far, like the judiciary. I also find the most inspiration from election officials and others who have stood for a sense of duty to the Constitution.

But make no mistake: We are in a precarious moment. And that precarious moment is not going to wait for November 2024. We are in the middle of it right now. What happens in November and December of 2022 could show what path we’re on.