ProPublica

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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ProPublica and Documented obtained more than 14 hours of never-before-published videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which are intended to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees “to be ready on day one.”

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation and its allies for a future conservative presidential administration, has lost its director. In recent weeks, it faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has tried to distance itself from the effort.

But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy remains on track. Video trainings like these are one of the “four pillars” of that plan, says Spencer Chretien, the associate director of Project 2025, in “Political Appointees & The Federal Workforce.”

For transparency, we are publishing the videos as we obtained them.

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

Conservative Principles

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Conserving America,” Matthew Spalding, a vice president at Hillsdale College, sets out the landscape for the Presidential Administration Academy by talking about common conservative principles.

Hillsdale College is a small, Christian liberal arts school in Michigan known both for its great books curriculum, which is centered on reading the classics of the Western canon, and for having been a feeder of staffers for the Trump administration.

The History of the Conservative Movement

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “The History of the Conservative Movement,” Christopher Malagisi, the executive director of outreach for Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus, gives a history that spans from the early-20th century Progressive Era to the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater and the “Reagan revolution.”

Appointees and Policymaking

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Why Your Service Matters: How Presidential Appointees at All Levels Impact Policy,” three Heritage Foundation experts discuss the role that political appointees play in making policy.

They talk about the importance of planning ahead to “hit the ground running” and call the first 100 days of an administration a “honeymoon period” for policy implementation.

Appointees and the Federal Workforce

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Political Appointees & The Federal Workforce,” Chretien discusses the critical role that he says political appointees play in carrying out the vision of a conservative administration.

Chretien served in the Trump administration as special assistant to the president and associate director of presidential personnel.

Presidential Transitions and Appointee Hiring

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Presidential Transitions & Appointee Hiring: What You Need To Know,” Ed Corrigan and Rick Dearborn outline how an aspiring political appointee can get a foot in the door during a presidential transition.

Dearborn is a former White House deputy chief of staff in the Trump administration, as well as executive director of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016.

Corrigan has had a long career as a Senate staffer. He was part of Trump’s transition team and is now the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a prominent think tank based in Washington.

Federal Background Checks and Security Clearances

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Deep Dive on The Federal Background Investigation & Security Clearance Process,” Kirk gives an overview of the federal government’s background check process, including what disqualifies an individual, like substance abuse issues, and what does not.

Kirk, an associate director of Project 2025, served in the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration.

What It’s Like to Serve as an Appointee

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Bethany Kozma, who was the deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, talks with six other former Trump administration staffers about what it’s like to serve as a political appointee in the federal government.

Time Management for Appointees

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Time Management for Political Appointees,” Katie Sullivan explains how political appointees can maximize their time in government by vetting whom they meet with and not allowing career civil servants to fill their calendar with meetings.

Sullivan is the former acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Justice Programs, a grant-making agency inside the Justice Department.

The Art of Professionalism

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “The Art of Professionalism,” Chris Hayes and Leavitt discuss tenets of how to act with professionalism while serving in government.

Hayes worked for the Leadership Institute, a think tank that offers leadership and management resources for the conservative movement.

Leavitt worked in the Trump White House press office and is now a spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Staffing an Office

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “How to Staff Your Principal,” Jeff Small discusses the day-to-day work of serving closely with a senior government official like a cabinet secretary.

Small is a former senior adviser to the interior secretary and a chief of staff to Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.

Left-Wing Code Words and Biased Language

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” Sullivan and Kozma discuss supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out.

How to Work With the Media

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “How to Work With the Media,” Alexei Woltornist talks about how political appointees should navigate the modern media environment, including bypassing mainstream news sources and focusing on conservative outlets because those are the only ones conservative voters trust.

Woltornist is a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Government Oversight and Investigations

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Oversight & Investigations,” Mike Howell, Tom Jones and Michael Ding explain what government oversight entails, the ins and outs of public-records laws and how political appointees should think about when and when not to put sensitive communications in writing.

Howell is the executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

Jones runs the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative investigations group.

Ding is a lawyer for America First Legal, which is aligned with Trump.

The Federal Budget Process

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “The Federal Budget Process,” Michael Duffey explains key budgetary policies, such as the difference between appropriations and authorization bills and discretionary versus mandatory spending.

Duffey served in the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration.

The Administrative State

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “The Administrative State: What it is & How to Address the Problem,” Paul Ray explains what the so-called administrative state does and how a conservative administration could use its authority to rein in government regulation.

Ray is a former Trump administration lawyer who served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Trump administration.

Federal Regulatory Process

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “How to Promulgate a Rule,” David Burton discusses how the federal government’s regulatory process works and the role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Burton is a senior fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Lessons Learned From Trump Administration About Passing New Regulations

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Taking the Reins: How Conservatives Can Win the Regulations Game,” Roger Severino talks about what lessons conservatives learned about passing new rules during the Trump presidency and how to be more effective in a future conservative administration.

Severino is a vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration.

Executive Orders

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Executive Order Drafting & Implementation,” Steven G. Bradbury explains the process of writing and carrying out executive orders, drawing on experience from the Trump presidency.

Bradbury is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former counsel in the Department of Transportation during the Trump administration.

Advancing the President’s Agenda

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Advancing the President’s Agenda as a Political Executive,” Donald J. Devine and James Bacon discuss different strategies for promoting the president’s policies as a high-ranking political appointee.

Devine is the former director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Ronald Reagan.

Bacon is a former special assistant to the Presidential Personnel Office, serving during the Trump administration.

Navigating Policymaking

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “How to Get Your Policy Through the Agency,” Dan Huff talks about how to navigate the policymaking process in the executive branch.

Huff is a former legal adviser in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, serving during the Trump administration.

Working With Congress

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Congressional Relations: How to work with Members,” Hugh Fike and James Braid talk about what executive branch political appointees should know and expect about working with congressional offices and elected officials.

Fike and Braid both formerly worked on legislative affairs in the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration.

Coalition Building

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Building Winning Coalitions to Advance Policy,” Paul Teller and Sarah Makin discuss what strategies political appointees can use to work with pro-life, gun-rights and other outside advocacy groups to pass policies.

Teller is a former special assistant to the president and a senior aide in the Office of the Vice President, serving during the Trump administration.

Makin is a former deputy assistant to the president and former director of outreach in the Office of the Vice President, serving during the Trump administration.

Social Media Messaging

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In “Best Practices in Social Media to Advance Policy,” Ben Friedmann explains how political appointees can most effectively use social media to promote conservative policies and messages.

Friedmann is a former deputy assistant secretary for digital strategy in the U.S. State Department.

Videos prepared by Lisa Riordan Seville, Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Chris Morran.

by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

This article was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Sexual assault is not health care, and it isn’t covered by Utah’s medical malpractice law, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. The decision revives a lawsuit filed by 94 women who allege their OB-GYN sexually abused them during exams or while he delivered their babies.

In 2022, the group of women sued Dr. David Broadbent and two hospitals where he had worked, wanting to seek civil damages. But a judge dismissed their case because he decided they had filed it incorrectly as a civil sexual assault claim rather than a medical malpractice case. The women had all been seeking health care, Judge Robert Lunnen wrote, and Broadbent was providing that when the alleged assaults happened.

The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica covered the decision, speaking with women about the lower court ruling that made it harder for them to sue the doctor for his alleged actions. After that story ran, the state Legislature voted to reform medical malpractice law to exclude sexual assault. But the new law didn’t apply retroactively; the women still had no way to sue.

So they took their case to the Utah Supreme Court, where their attorneys argued that the lower court judge had made an error in his decision. The high court agreed. Broadbent’s alleged conduct, it found, was not a part of the women’s health care — and therefore, not covered by Utah’s medical malpractice laws.

“Here, the [women] do not allege they were injured by any health care that Broadbent may have provided them,” Justice Paige Petersen wrote in the unanimous ruling. “Rather, they allege that he abused his position as their doctor to sexually assault them under the pretense of providing health care.”

“The point of their claims is that his actions were not really health care at all,” Petersen added.

Stephanie Mateer was the first woman who spoke out publicly about Broadbent, detailing her experience on the “Mormon Stories” podcast in 2021. In the episode, she described what she said was the painful way the doctor examined her, how it left her feeling traumatized and how she discovered online reviews that echoed her experience.

She said on Thursday that she cried “tears of relief” when she read the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling, and that she hopes it gives other alleged victims the courage to speak up and to seek their own justice.

Adam Sorenson, an attorney for the women who sued, noted on Thursday that it’s been almost two years since Lunnen threw out their case — which he said was a “sad and disappointing day.”

“But the Utah Supreme Court’s decision today affirms everything these women have said from the beginning, and tells every person in Utah that sexual abuse by a health care provider never has been, and never will be, ‘health care,’” he said.

“It is difficult to describe how good it is to hear that from our highest court,” he continued, “but any joy I feel is nothing compared to the women who suffered sexual abuse, [who] were told it was just health care, have fought for three years, and can now say that the law in Utah is on their side on this important issue.”

For the women who sued, having their case characterized as malpractice reduced the time they had to sue to two years and limited the amount of money they could receive for pain and suffering.

With the Utah Supreme Court’s decision, the case now returns to Lunnen’s courtroom. Their suit alleges that Broadbent inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums, without warning or explanation, and hurt them. Some said he used his bare hand — instead of using a speculum or wearing gloves — during exams. One alleged that he had an erection while he was touching her.

An attorney for Broadbent has denied these women’s allegations, saying they are “without merit.” The OB-GYN agreed last year to stop practicing medicine while police and prosecutors investigate.

He was charged in June in 4th District Court with one count of forcible sexual abuse, and prosecutors say their investigation is continuing. Broadbent is expected to make his first court appearance Monday.

Broadbent’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Neither Utah Valley Hospital nor Mountainstar Health, which owns Timpanogos Hospital, reacted to the ruling in statements released Thursday. Both hospitals are named as defendants in the lawsuit, and both emphasized that Broadbent had privileges to practice at their facilities but was not an employee.

by Seth Freed Wessler

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

A development company abruptly halted plans for a sprawling grain export facility in Louisiana this week after a three-year campaign led by members of a Black community who said it would have ripped through rural neighborhoods, old plantation tracts and important historic sites. At the start of a meeting on Tuesday, Greenfield LLC announced that it was “ceasing all plans” to construct the $400 million, milelong development in the middle of the town of Wallace in St. John the Baptist Parish.

After a company spokesperson made the announcement in a small Wallace church, community members seated in the pews burst into jubilant cheers.

“It is an unbelievable victory, and it shows what happens when communities fight,” said Joy Banner, a Wallace resident who has led resistance to the facility as the co-founder, along with her sister Jo Banner, of a group called the Descendants Project. “The erasure of the Black communities didn’t work.”

The proposed Greenfield development, which would have been one of the country’s largest grain facilities, was the subject of a May 2022 ProPublica investigation that revealed how a whistleblower had issued a complaint to state authorities about the project — including evidence that consultants involved with it had buried her findings. An archaeological report she’d drafted on behalf of Greenfield — concluding that the development would harm Wallace and nearby historic sites including several plantations and an old cemetery — was gutted to exclude any mention of that harm.

The consulting firm that issued the report previously told ProPublica that it’s not uncommon for the firm to change drafts of reports after clients review them and that it “was not required by Greenfield or anyone else for that matter to make changes” the firm does not support. Greenfield did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about its consultants removing the findings from the report.

The report was part of a federal Army Corps of Engineers permitting process that requires developers to consider the impacts of their projects on communities and cultural and historic sites.

Several federal agencies raised concerns about the project. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which is the lead federal agency overseeing preservation policies, wrote in a June 2022 letter, prompted by ProPublica’s reporting, that the area around Wallace should be considered for protected historic designation. “The significance of an historic district located in or encompassing the community of Wallace would be inextricably linked to the community’s living, ongoing experience of the district and their sense of place in the larger landscape,” the letter to the Corps said.

Months later, the Corps rejected the archaeological report as “insufficient.” The agency concluded instead that the development would likely harm historic plantations, including the Whitney Plantation, a nationally recognized memorial to the enslaved, as well as nearby communities and historic burial grounds. The Corps ordered Greenfield to conduct a new study. But when Greenfield submitted the revised assessment, the Corps responded with a letter stating that “the report just doesn’t demonstrate adequate engagement” with the mostly Black communities impacted by development.

In May 2023, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the country’s leading preservation nonprofit, designated the 11-mile stretch of the Mississippi River around Wallace as one of the country’s most endangered historic places. The group called it “an intact cultural landscape in an area otherwise oversaturated with heavy industry.” Not long after, the National Park Service launched a yearlong process to consider designating the stretch of land as a national historic landmark district, which can help protect the area from development. That process is likely to conclude this summer. Last August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services chimed in with a letter of its own, urging the Corps to consider likely “environmental burdens and health inequities” that the grain facility could contribute to.

The area around the former plantation land where Greenfield planned its development is home not just to the Whitney Plantation museum and memorial but also another standing plantation, historic burial sites and communities whose residents trace their ancestry directly to people enslaved on the land. Wallace, where the Banners live, was founded by Black Civil War soldiers who fought against the Confederacy and by people who’d been enslaved nearby. The facility, a massive system of conveyors and 54 silos that would transport and store grain to be delivered around the world, would have been erected directly adjacent to Wallace homes.

Erin Edwards, the consultant-turned-whistleblower who drafted the initial cultural resources report, resigned from the consulting firm after her draft was radically edited.

“I wrote a report that brought up the challenges they would face building there, and the impacts it would have, and they completely ignored it,” Edwards told ProPublica this week. “But you cannot hide or deny that much history. And you cannot deny that there are people and communities who are connected to and love this place and want to save it.”

Greenfield said in a statement that the extended timeline of the Corps’ consultation process for the permit led to the company’s decision to terminate the project. “We did everything in our power to keep this project on track. The Army Corp of Engineers has chosen to repeatedly delay this project by catering to special interests,” Greenfield said in a statement. “Today, sadly, we are no closer to a resolution than we were when we began this process.”

The Corps said the process is necessary to ensure compliance with the law. “Greenfield Louisiana LLC has proposed a project in a setting with many cultural resources and adjacent to a community with Environmental Justice concerns,” the Corps said in a statement. “The potential impacts to these resources require specific efforts under applicable laws and regulations.”

Wallace lies in a stretch of communities along the Mississippi River in Louisiana often referred to as Cancer Alley because of the high concentration of pollution-emitting industrial sites. For generations, communities have fought harmful development projects but have usually lost, and one petrochemical plant or industrial facility after another has been erected.

Wallace has been an exception to this steady expansion. In 1992, a coalition of community and civil rights groups and environmental advocates fought off plans by the Taiwan-based plastic company Formosa to build a rayon plant on the same plot of land Greenfield later purchased. The plant, which the company said would be a boon to the local economy, was expected to produce dangerous levels of toxic industrial pollution.

Instead, for the next two decades, the land was used to grow sugar cane. Then, in 2021, Greenfield launched its plans to develop the land for industrial use. The company said it would provide hundreds of needed jobs, and it soon began pounding massive metal test beams into the fields around Wallace. Nearby residents claimed at the time that the developer was acting as if the project was a foregone conclusion.

“This community has had to fend off two major corporations over the course of two generations that would have wiped Wallace off the map,” said Pam Spees, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Descendants Project. “That they have succeeded in spite of the massive challenges, power imbalances and the divide-and-conquer tactics used by these corporations and their local government counterparts is a testament to the resilience, dedication and love of the Banners and others who stood and fought for Wallace, and the brightest hopes of their ancestors who founded it.”

Joy Banner said the communities in her region would be served best by a responsible, community-driven tourism effort that would preserve and maintain memorial sites centered on the history of slavery and Black struggle. This year, the group announced that it had acquired the Woodland Plantation, across the river from Wallace. The plantation was the site of the 1811 German Coast uprising, in which hundreds of enslaved people, inspired in part by the Haitian Revolution, took up arms and planned to seize New Orleans as a free territory. U.S. officials and militias killed close to 100 of those involved in the uprising.

“We are in an area that’s layered with cultural and historical resources and with history that matters to us,” Banner said. “The narrative that there’s nothing here is over. What we made clear is that we already have value here.”

Greenfield has yet to formally withdraw its Corps permit application, and the Corps said it is waiting for that official notice before it considers the project dead. Greenfield still controls the property it purchased for $40 million, which St. John the Baptist Parish last year redesignated for industrial use. (The Descendants Project is suing the parish over that designation. Greenfield has intervened to defend it.)

Ultimately, Banner said, “our vision is that we get to sit together and envision our future, to determine what we want to do in our community, instead of having to settle for people telling us what we need.”

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, photography by Julia Rendleman

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

CAIRO, Ill. — More than 100 people congregated in the parking lot of Rise Community Market on its opening day a little over a year ago. As they listened to celebratory speeches, the audience erupted into joyful exclamations: “Mercy!” “Wonderful!” “Wow!” “All right!” Colorful homemade signs raised by local leaders beckoned the crowd to join in: “We!” “Are!” “No!” “Longer!” “A!” “Food!” “Desert!”

For most American cities, the opening of a new grocery store barely warrants a mention. But in Cairo, the government seat of Illinois’ poorest county and the fastest-shrinking one in America, business openings are rare. And for residents who for years had to travel long distances to buy food, it was a magical moment.

“Access to healthy foods and fresh produce is not just about groceries. It’s about justice,” declared Juliana Stratton, Illinois’ lieutenant governor, to the cheering crowd that gathered in Illinois’ southernmost city.

Cairo, she said, had set the stage for what was to come as Illinois embarked on its new grocery store initiative — a $30 million endeavor to build and sustain new food businesses in distressed small towns and urban neighborhoods. Stratton had assisted Cairo leaders in securing state funds from another source because Rise came before the launch of the grocery program, and she told the crowd it would serve as a beacon: “I want you to know, Cairo, Illinois, this is only the beginning, and you are leading the way.”

Within months, however, the store fell on hard times. Rise struggled to compete with national chains on pricing and then faced additional challenges when a walk-in cooler broke a few months later, making it impossible to keep perishables on the shelves between orders. Although sales were initially strong, they slumped as residents fell back into old shopping patterns, patronizing the two nearby Dollar General stores or traveling to Walmart and other supermarkets at least 30 miles outside of town. As fewer customers came in, the store had less money to restock its most popular items. Shelves grew emptier.

Clarissa Dossie, a cashier at Rise since its opening, said that during the worst months, people would come in, look around and say, “Dang, where the groceries at?”

By December, six months after it opened, Rise was in peril.

Clarissa Dossie, 32, checks out a customer using a gift certificate in November. In early February, shelves were nearly empty. Without enough revenue to stock the shelves, managers were in a tough spot.

Over the past decade, state and federal governments have invested millions of dollars in creating grocery stores in food deserts — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as any low-income urban neighborhoods without a grocery store within a mile, and any rural communities without one within 10 miles. These programs continue to expand.

Established in 2011 during Barack Obama’s presidency, the Healthy Food Financing Initiative marked the federal government’s first coordinated effort to tackle the grocery gap. Since then, Congress has allocated an average of $28 million annually across three federal agencies responsible for its administration. Then in 2021, the program received an unprecedented funding surge to $183 million, boosted by federal pandemic recovery funds to the USDA.

In addition to Illinois, numerous states, including Pennsylvania, New York, California, Ohio, Minnesota and Kansas, have implemented programs of their own, as have several municipalities, including New Orleans and Houston.

The concept appears straightforward: Use government funds to help build stores, shorten the trek for fresh food, and in the process, make people healthier and bolster the local economy. In distressed communities, grocery stores have been shown to anchor business development, help grow the tax base and even boost home values, according to one study of Pennsylvania’s program. The converse is also true: “Without the grocery store, communities just have a really hard time succeeding economically,” said Christopher Jones, a senior vice president with the National Grocers Association.

But the way Rise Community Market has struggled in Cairo illustrates how these programs fall short. Because what happens after a store opens is just as important — and despite the up-front financial investments, that hasn’t been solved at all.

When Subsidies Aren’t Enough

Many stores that receive subsidies shutter their doors soon after opening or fail to open at all. Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica examined 24 stores across 18 states, each of them either newly established, preparing to open or less than five years old when they received funding through the federal USDA Healthy Food Financing Initiative in 2020 and 2021. As of June, five of these stores had already ceased operations; another six have yet to open, citing a variety of challenges including difficulties finding a suitable location and limited access to capital.

Illinois’ record is similarly disappointing. In 2018, Illinois officials highlighted the opening of six grocery stores that had received startup funds over several years from a $13.5 million grocery initiative of former Gov. Pat Quinn’s. Four of them have closed.

Despite the expansion of USDA’s program, the federal agency has not studied how long the grocery stores it helps to open actually stay in business or why some of them close. Illinois never did a comprehensive review of its prior program either but as part of its new effort has funded a study of what’s causing food deserts, including the challenges facing independent grocers.

Emerging stores struggle for many reasons. Food deserts are, by definition, areas with depressed economies and often declining populations, but certain problems repeatedly bubble to the top.

“The main concern with them is prices,” said Dossie, explaining why some Cairo residents haven’t done much shopping at Rise. The 32-year-old mother of five was unemployed before she became one of the store’s first employees. She shops there to support Rise and because she doesn’t have a car, but she wishes it could offer discounts like chain grocers. “I know, me personally, I have a big family and I need to be able to get bulk for a cheaper amount.”

Her concerns are backed up by an emerging body of academic research suggesting that the conventional wisdom about how to overcome food deserts — building stores in underserved areas — overlooks the fact that prices matter as much as proximity. For all the benefits the opening of a store can bring to a community, if it can’t compete on pricing, it will struggle to survive.

However, it’s exceedingly difficult for independent stores to compete on pricing because they must pay more than national chains to stock their shelves. Although the price differences for shoppers may be only nominal for most individual items, they can add up on a full cart.

Until 40 years ago, the federal government actively tried to help with this: Competition regulators rigorously monitored mergers and enforced the Robinson-Patman Act, a 1930s-era law intended to prevent suppliers from offering better pricing to big retailers than to independent stores. By the 1980s, however, some economists argued that allowing big retailers to expand and negotiate favorable deals would bring lower prices for all. The Robinson-Patman Act, and an underlying desire to protect small businesses, remained popular with the public, so Congress never moved to repeal it, but regulators increasingly stopped enforcing it. This era gave rise to a rash of consolidations and a huge building boom by the likes of Walmart and Kroger. And as the power of retail chains grew, more small businesses folded.

A 2023 USDA report shows that four grocery chains now capture a third of U.S. food sales, marking a major shift in how people buy their food. Rural areas have even fewer choices. In more than 200 regional markets, most of them across the Midwest and South, Walmart and Sam’s Club claim at least 50% of grocery sales, according to an analysis by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for reversing corporate concentration to strengthen communities. Walmart-owned stores claim 60% of grocery sales in the three-county market that includes Cairo.

Cairo sits between the Ohio River, left, and the Mississippi, right, at the southernmost tip of Illinois.

Places like Cairo, population 1,600, have paid the price: Its residents have spent more money on gas and rides, or settled for less nutritious options at dollar stores. About 17% of Cairo families don’t have a car, according to USDA’s food atlas. The town saw little economic benefit from the estimated $6.4 million annually Cairo spent in recent years on groceries, most purchased out of state. (Cairo is a short drive from both Missouri and Kentucky.)

Now, the pendulum appears to be swinging back amid the shock of rising grocery prices. In a 2021 speech, President Joe Biden declared, “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power. … I believe the experiment failed.” Biden has appointed anti-monopoly advocates, including Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who contend that lax enforcement has proven harmful to small businesses, workers, communities and consumers paying higher prices in places where most competitors have been driven out.

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said government funding for grocery stores is important to overcoming high startup costs, but without broader solutions to keep these stores open, “we’re throwing money away.”

“We have to level the playing field,” Mitchell said. “If we don’t have the enforcement of fair competition, these stores are going to be squeezed out the same way that many independent grocery stores have been squeezed out.”

First image: Theresa Delsoin, left, a member of the co-op-style grocery, checks out with store employee Gita Martin. Delsoin has changed her shopping habits to support the store. Second image: The 83-year-old prepares salmon croquettes with groceries she purchased at Rise Community Market. She said the store “is important because it belongs to us.” “Lettuce, Oh My Goodness”

It was the arrival of fresh produce that marked a turning point for Steven Tarver, a longtime resident of Cairo.

“We started getting beautiful things — lettuce, oh my goodness,” said Tarver, a friendly community organizer with diamond-studded ears and a hint of a swagger, who helped lead efforts early on to culminate community support behind the idea of opening a co-op.

“Can you imagine at home on a Tuesday, with your skillet going good and that ground beef getting all brown and then you skim all that and you put your McCormick’s in there. And then you got your cheese already sitting over there and you got some salsa and you look in the vegetable box and there’s no lettuce.

“And you think, ‘Man, I can’t go around the corner. I gotta go to Walmart — 35 miles away.’”

Rise board member Steven Tarver facilitates a community engagement forum on housing and other social issues at Cairo’s Junior/Senior High School in April.

Tarver’s obsession with the lettuce became an inside joke among his neighbors who joined him in developing the store. But for him, it was about way more than tacos. The lettuce symbolized a chance for better health in a county where premature deaths are far more common as in other parts of Illinois. And it served as a salve for the despair that had gripped the town for years.

“Now,” he says, “I am lettuce full. I buy lettuce when I don’t need it. Because this has been a hot commodity in my world.”

More than 3 million Illinoisans — more than a quarter of the state’s population — live in food deserts. People of color are far more likely to live far from a traditional grocery store — the result of complex and sometimes racist practices, including unfair lending and persistent financial neglect from both public and private sectors. That’s why some advocates resist the “food desert” phrase: They say the situation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but the result of deliberate policies; they call it “food apartheid."

Many of those dynamics were at play in Cairo, positioned at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and, at one time, a thriving transportation hub. It drew people from across the region to its entertainment venues and retail shops, including dozens of food markets— one on nearly every corner.

Yet the town’s fortunes dwindled as river ports were replaced by trains and then interstates elsewhere. The Civil Rights era inflicted particularly severe wounds upon Cairo’s Black community as white business owners, refusing integration, abandoned the town.

Like much of rural America, Cairo continued to shrink. But it managed to hang on to a grocery store until 2015, when its last independent store, Wonder Market, closed its doors in the middle of town, not far from where Rise is today.

Work crews were invited to harvest what they could from the remains of Wonder Market, Cairo’s last independent grocery store, which closed in 2015, to be used in the new co-op grocery store. Because the store had limited startup funds, it relied on used and borrowed equipment and some donated labor. The sun sets over Rise Community Market. Second image: The store’s grand opening was in 2023.

Then, in the second half of the decade, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development stepped in and demolished several public housing complexes, displacing hundreds of people. Speaking to a congressional panel in 2017, then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson described the community as “dying.”

The negativity infuriated people like Tarver. It also fueled them. They courted housing developers and prospective business owners to invest in the town. Some made commitments — one even posted a sign announcing plans for a new grocery store. But all the deals eventually fell through or were short-lived.

When hope of a grocery store evaporated, U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office reached out to Dollar General on behalf of Cairo officials in 2018 to request the addition of produce at its stores. A corporate spokesperson said that Dollar General informed Duckworth’s office at the time that it did not have plans to add produce to either store but would keep the request in mind for the future. Town officials said they didn’t hear anything more from Dollar General in the years that followed.

Finally, in late 2021, a team of rural development experts from the University of Illinois Extension and Western Illinois University suggested they could build a cooperative grocery store, a local ownership model that some distressed towns are trying out.

By then, it felt urgent. The town needed a lifeline.

After 18 months of planning, in June 2023, the store opened — with balloons, signs and cheers. The team had raised $750,000 in private donations and government grants to support the store, including $186,000 in state funding from a program to help disadvantaged communities, funded by marijuana sales.

For Tarver, it was also validation that their efforts had paid off and could again.

“It means a lot because it was going to be able to show others that’s been talking and downplaying Cairo and saying that ‘we don’t have’ and ‘we can’t do’ that we can if we’re given the opportunity,” Tarver said. “Now, we could talk about housing, we could talk about a hospital, we could talk about other things and meet some voids.”

The Downturn

The frustrations started immediately.

Just before the grand opening of Rise, the two Dollar Generals that had rebuffed requests to add fresh foods to their shelves reopened after renovations, stocked with expanded freezer and refrigerator sections. One of the stores even added an entire row of fresh produce.

A Dollar General spokesperson said in a statement this week that the company made the decision to remodel its two Cairo stores in the fall of 2022 as part of an ongoing, nationwide store improvement program. “We were unaware of any planned grocery co-op when those decisions were made,” the company said.

Robert Edwards, Rise’s manager, said over the last year he’s done his best to keep prices competitive. He even goes into Dollar General and the out-of-state Walmart people most frequent to check what competitors are offering. He works with a wholesaler out of Indiana that purchases in bulk for multiple independent stores, an attempt to leverage the lowest prices they can.

But there are some deals that the store just can’t afford to match. “There are things I can go to Walmart and buy cheaper than I can get from my wholesaler,” Edwards said, though supplier contracts don’t allow him to do that.

He also said some suppliers simply won’t mess with a small store. For months, Edwards watched in frustration from the parking lot as a Frito-Lay truck made deliveries at the Dollar Generals just to the north and south of Rise while it refused to stop at the co-op.

He and others stress to residents that the spending at the co-op benefits the community and that the cost of gas to travel 30 miles makes up much of the difference in prices. But the reality is that people, especially large families, are continuing to leave town for most of their shopping.

Rise manager Robert Edwards sits at the Rise cafe, which closed in October because of low sales; it later reopened as a deli, which costs less to run. Edwards closes up after receiving a weekly shipment of groceries.

The store experienced other problems as well. Eager to fill a void in this one-restaurant town, the co-op board members opened an adjacent cafe that sold hot pizza, fried chicken and sides. But it didn’t bring in customers like they’d hoped and bled thousands of dollars instead, forcing its closure in October. It also drained what savings the store had.

Around the same time, the walk-in cooler that the store had purchased secondhand to save money broke, taking with it about $2,000 worth of meat, produce and dairy products it contained. Without the cooler, the store could keep only about 16 gallons of milk on its shelves — a major issue since milk is a key product that brings people into grocery stores.

The store leadership started a GoFundMe, but it raised only about $1,600, a fraction of the $55,000 sought to help replace the cooler and other equipment as well as to restock the store.

Rise was on the brink of closure as bills went unpaid and food orders were skipped. During a reporter’s visit in late December, there was very little fresh meat or produce on the shelves: a few pieces of chicken in the meat cabinet, a handful of brown bananas in the produce section, gallons of milk set to expire in the next day or two. And only a few heads of wilting lettuce. People began to lose confidence in the store, driving more customers away.

Workers and community leaders pleaded with people to do what shopping they could there. Theresa Delsoin, an 83-year-old author, teacher and retired Peace Corps volunteer, wanted to set an example: She spent more than $500 at the store between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“I could go on Amazon and buy a jar of honey from anywhere in the world. But I don’t. Because I want to support our store,” she said as she prepared salmon croquettes and a few side dishes in her home from food purchased at Rise.

Dossie, the clerk, said people told her she should start looking for a new job. She told them she wasn’t giving up and that they shouldn’t either: “I’m not jumping ship because we hit a rough patch.”

The store tried to entice people in with coupons and special deals. It brought Santa in for the kids. But not enough people were filling up carts. Grocery stores bank on the holidays to carry them through the slower months that tend to follow. That clearly wasn’t going to happen at Rise.

A few days before Christmas, Edwards sat in his office at the back of the store and wondered how he’d make payroll for his seven employees. In the end, he delayed his own paycheck so that others could receive theirs on time.

Crucial Stores, Hard Answers

State Rep. Mary Beth Canty, who lives near Chicago and sponsored the bill that became Illinois’ grocery initiative, has seen evidence that the investment might not be effective on its own. Last year, to research solutions to food deserts, Canty visited a small supermarket in the tiny town of Winchester, about 50 miles west of the state capital in Springfield, that had been hailed as a success story.

John Paul Coonrod, the store’s board president and chair, said he told Canty during her visit that the state’s initiative amounted to a “drop in the bucket” for what small grocers need to survive.

Great Scott! Community Market did well at first, but it later lost customers to a Walmart and then a new Dollar General that included a grocery market. It was hard to compete, and the store closed just a few months after Canty’s visit — five years after it opened.

First image: A Dollar General at the edge of Cairo’s city limits began selling fresh fruits, vegetables and meats the same month Rise Community Market opened. Second image: Some Cairo residents opt for the one-hour round-trip drive to a Walmart Supercenter in Sikeston, Missouri.

John Shadowens, an economic development educator at the University of Illinois Extension, is part of the state-funded group surveying grocery stores across Illinois to identify their main obstacles to staying in business. At seven forums in recent months, Shadowens heard store owners voice consistent concerns about increasing costs of supplies, utilities and labor due to Illinois’ rising minimum wage. However, their primary obstacle, he noted, is their inability to procure food at prices that are competitive enough to attract the customers they need to stay in business.

There aren’t any easy answers. The renewed push for more aggressive antitrust action on grocery pricing remains a contentious proposal. And even if it’s successful, it’s not a fast-acting solution.

A USDA Rural Development spokesperson said the Healthy Food Financing Initiative is helping; in addition to new stores, it has funded farmers markets, delivery services and community groups. For instance, the program recently awarded $1 million to a partnership in southern Illinois working to improve grocery stores’ access to low-cost loans.

Illinois’ new program has partnered with university experts to assist startups and focuses solely on small, independent stores, unlike the previous one, which also supported the development of discount chain Save A Lot stores, an Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity spokesperson said.

And for the first time, government-owned stores in Illinois are eligible to apply for state aid. Chicago is the first major city in the nation to consider this option, though underwriting losses with taxpayer funds is controversial.

Reflecting on discussions with grocery store operators during the research team’s travels to various locations across Illinois, Shadowens said he remains hopeful, though he finds it increasingly hard to do so: “We have hours behind the windshield to talk about this: Are we truly helping, or are we providing an autopsy on a patient that’s just not dead yet?”

For now, Cairo’s store is hanging on. In June, the festive balloon arch that punctuated the store’s opening reappeared to mark its one-year anniversary. Edwards, the store manager, said at the member meeting that followed that Rise had received the second half of a philanthropic grant earlier this year, allowing the store to pay off debt, resume regular food shipments and replenish its shelves.

There have been other changes as well. For instance, to replace the shuttered cafe, which required a cook and clerk, the store opened a made-to-order deli at the beginning of the year, which has been more popular among the lunchtime crowd and requires only one employee. In March, after months of waiting, the store was approved to accept government food benefits given to low-income pregnant women and families with young children, commonly known as WIC, which has boosted sales by more than $1,500 monthly.

Edwards talks to co-op members at a meeting during the one-year anniversary celebration of the grocery store in June. “I work for you. Each and every one of you are an owner,” he said, encouraging the group to provide feedback on what he keeps in stock.

But sales remain well below where they need to be for the store’s long-term sustainability. It takes about $70,000 a month in sales to break even; Rise has averaged less than half of that in the first six months of this year. When you add up the money spent by Cairo citizens everywhere they shop, they’re spending an estimated $530,000 monthly on groceries, based on sales data for recent years. (This estimate is derived from overall sales data in a three-county region, adjusted for Cairo.) That means that they are spending only about 5% at Rise, when they’d need to spend at least 13%.

Edwards said he’s hopeful the store can reach that point within another year because he understands its importance goes beyond the critical food it provides. It’s also a job and economy creator, a hub of community life and a beacon of hope. It’s crucial to the identity of a place teetering on the brink. In the first few months it was open, Rise hosted a wedding reception, food tasting event, health care expo, a pumpkin carving contest and, for several Wednesdays, a mobile food pantry organized by a local nonprofit. He gave away just-expired food to people stretched out in a line in the store’s parking lot.

“Kroger would never let a food pantry set out in their parking lot giving out free food because it’s going to hurt their sales. It did hurt sales on those days,” Edwards said. “But we’re here to serve the community.”

Charmaine Crismon, an employee at Rise Community Market, delivers milk to a mobile food pantry operating from a van in the store’s parking lot in September. Arrowleaf, a local nonprofit, used the parking lot while its nearby food pantry underwent renovations. Bre’Anna Puckett and her children attend the one-year anniversary celebration for Rise Community Market on June 17. Rise Community Market board member Steven Tarver does some dinnertime shopping in December.

Alex Abbeduto, formerly of Capitol News Illinois, contributed reporting. Photo editing by Peter DiCampo.

by Jake Pearson

When a New York judge appointed Yvonne Murphy to take over the care of Martin Chorost in late 2011, the 63-year-old had diabetes, dementia and a constellation of other maladies. He also had assets worth more than $800,000, which were put at his guardian’s disposal.

Murphy immediately tapped them to hire Beacon Eldercare, which billed itself as “the leading health care assistance firm in Queens,” to provide him with round-the-clock aides.

As it turned out, it was also Murphy’s own private business.

Over the ensuing years, Murphy transferred between $80,000 and $100,000 annually from Chorost’s accounts to Beacon while, separately, she collected tens of thousands of dollars from him in guardianship fees. Before long, the arrangement sparked a complaint from the court examiner charged with reviewing Murphy’s work.

“I believe that the dual roles of guardian and CEO of the agency creates the possibility and potential for a conflict of interest to exist,” the court examiner wrote in June 2015. A court clerk underlined the words “conflict of interest” and drew a star in the margin next to them.

In fact, legal experts told ProPublica, the arrangement was a clear and flagrant violation of New York law, which bars guardians from providing for-profit services like health care or day care to their wards.

But Queens Supreme Court Justice Lee Mayersohn permitted the apparent conflict for years. By the time Chorost died in April 2019, Murphy had transferred more than half his life’s savings — $417,697 in all — to her company. Even then, Beacon sought more, billing his estate for an additional $50,890 in unpaid fees.

I believe that the dual roles of guardian and CEO of the agency creates the possibility and potential for a conflict of interest to exist.

—Court examiner

The examiner in Chorost’s case wasn’t the only one to raise alarms. Over the years, various officials — including a lawyer, a fellow guardian and even a judge — flagged Murphy’s use of Beacon in other cases, with some of them warning that she could be abusing her court-appointed position to enrich herself at the expense of her wards. But in each case, the judge overseeing the guardianship downplayed or overrode the concern.

Those decisions facilitated a lucrative — and potentially illegal — commercial pipeline for one of the court’s most popular guardians, who, over the course of a decade, controlled the money and health care of more than 100 incapacitated people, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Earlier this year, the news organization reported that New York’s guardianship system is failing to protect the elderly and ailing people entrusted to its care. Part of the problem is lax oversight, with court examiners taking years to review the work of the guardians they are tasked with overseeing. Those delays can result in dangerous gaps in information for judges charged with making sensitive decisions about the financial and physical welfare of wards — some of whom, ProPublica found, have ended up living in squalor, including one woman who endured bedbugs, rats and no heat for years. Another died without her guardian noticing, her corpse eventually discovered by a utility worker.

But Murphy’s story illustrates just how culpable judges themselves can be in the system’s breakdown, permitting financial arrangements that experts said were unequivocally improper — even in cases when examiners point out potential problems. Lawyers, advocates and researchers alike say this laissez-faire judicial culture is the product of crushing caseloads, sparse resources and a shallow pool of guardians willing to take the most challenging cases. In New York City, there are just over a dozen judges who handle the 17,411 people in guardianships, data provided by the courts show.

“The easiest way to reduce the workload is not to look for problems,” said Nina Kohn, a guardianship expert at Syracuse University College of Law. “The second-easiest way is when you see problems, to ignore them.”

ProPublica reviewed three years of Beacon’s client lists, which were disclosed in a lawsuit, and discovered that in at least 20 instances, Murphy referred a ward under her care to her own agency. In a dozen cases, she did so as the person’s guardian. In the other eight, she acted in a different role, as a court-appointed care coordinator. That total is almost certainly an undercount since Murphy served in the guardianship system for more than 15 years. Nevertheless, the data gives a clear snapshot of just how profitable the dynamic was for Murphy’s business. In those three years alone, wards accounted for $1.5 million in Beacon revenue, about a quarter of the company’s income, the records show.

Murphy’s problematic conduct did not stop there, though.

Last month, a judge ruled that Murphy had “violated her fiduciary duty” to a wealthy Manhattan woman “in ways that shock the conscience” and barred her from serving as a professional guardian. The searing decision followed years of investigations into whether Murphy steered millions in investments and real estate for her own benefit.

Murphy, who in court records has denied any wrongdoing, did not respond to numerous requests for comment. She’s been similarly unresponsive to legal filings in multiple civil cases, records show. She sold Beacon last April, records show, and her own family and lawyers have said they’ve been unable to reach her since then. As a result, at least three attorneys have stopped representing her, and one said in court in June that “Ms. Murphy has dropped out of sight.”

None of the judges featured in this story would address why they allowed Murphy to use her court-appointed role as guardian to employ her own private business, in apparent violation of state law. Neither would the state Office of Court Administration, which runs the court system.

Courts spokesperson Al Baker said in a statement that “one of the highest priorities of the New York State Unified Court System remains combating abuse of elders and other incapacitated persons, particularly through a more vigorous and responsive guardianship system.”

A guardian is not appointed to engage in self-dealing.

—Rebekah Diller, a guardianship expert at Cardozo School of Law

Baker said the court system “is keenly aware of the structural problems it confronts, such as gaps in the numbers of qualified guardians and other professionals that are available.” Those problems have been the subject of ProPublica’s ongoing reporting.

“These issues cannot be addressed by the court system alone,” Baker said, “but require the participation of our partners in the other branches of government.” Just this year, the state Legislature rejected a modest request for $5 million to bolster the pool of guardians.

Advocates for reforming New York’s beleaguered system said that judges don’t have to wait for structural reforms to protect vulnerable wards from guardians who are leveraging their court-appointed position for personal gain.

“It shouldn’t be a question,” said Rebekah Diller, a guardianship expert at Cardozo School of Law. “A guardian is not appointed to engage in self-dealing.”

A Conflict of Interest?

Almost from the outset, there were signs that Murphy was commingling her private business with her work as a court-appointed guardian.

Just four months after forming Beacon Eldercare in January 2006, court records show she took the daylong course required to become certified as a guardian. By 2015, she was receiving dozens of appointments a year, putting her on track to become one of the system’s most prolific practitioners.

One longtime friend credited that success to Murphy’s networking skills. Sophisticated, confident and well dressed, she made frequent appearances on podcasts, in courthouses and at senior centers, where she marketed herself and her business. And with advanced degrees in social work and forensic psychology, she was able to use her years working in hospitals and a nursing home to capitalize on the business of aging, according to court records.

At Beacon, Murphy stored her wards’ paperwork at the company’s headquarters, where employees accessed the files and corresponded with county clerks and judges, court records show. Even the email address Murphy listed in the court system’s directory — guardianship@beaconeldercare.com — noted the symbiotic relationship.

In a 2020 deposition, Murphy testified, “Most certainly when I’m in court I never ever represent that Yvonne Murphy is the same as Beacon Elder Care being appointed.”

The distinction matters since the state’s guardianship statute bars guardians from being the provider of health care, day care, educational or residential services to their wards “whether direct or indirect” unless the court finds that no one else is “available or willing to act” in either capacity.

In the Chorost case, the examiner’s concerns went to a core question: Can a guardian who is referring wards to her own business be trusted to independently assess the care that business provides — or the bills it submits?

Avoiding the Question

The case was not the first in which ProPublica found someone raising that question.

The daughter of an elderly Queens pastor named Thomas Burns had flagged a similar conflict to Mayersohn a year beforehand.

The way you run your business operation leaves me thinking that maybe the Judge handling Pastor Burns’ case should have Beacon Elder Care, Inc. investigated.

—A parishioner writing about Thomas Burns, whose guardian was Yvonne Murphy, CEO of Beacon Eldercare

The judge had appointed Murphy to be a guardian to Burns, who was 90 and had dementia, because his family and friends couldn’t agree on how to best care for him and manage his money. In an affidavit, Murphy sought court approval to hire home health aides supplied by her own company.

Mayersohn approved the request and Murphy then transferred more than $120,000 from Burns’ accounts to Beacon over the next two years — all while collecting nearly $6,700 in guardianship fees — an arrangement Burns’ daughter challenged.

“This dual interest is a conflict,” her attorney wrote in a 2014 motion.

Separately, a parishioner of Burns’ congregation wrote to Murphy and Mayersohn in the summer of 2014 questioning the quality of his care. “The way you run your business operation leaves me thinking that maybe the Judge handling Pastor Burns’ case should have Beacon Elder Care, Inc. investigated,” the congregant wrote.

But Mayersohn, who had been on the bench for a decade at that point, permitted the setup, and there’s no record in Burns’ case file that he addressed the question of Murphy’s dual interests.

The judge also allowed the apparent conflict to persist in Chorost’s case after an examiner flagged Murphy’s use of Beacon in the summer of 2015. Murphy told the official that she conducted “yearly periodic random phone calls to check industry wide rates” and that Beacon’s fees were reasonable.

There’s no record of the judge addressing the examiner’s legal concerns. After a conference in 2015, Mayersohn ordered a health care provider to evaluate “the appropriateness of the services being provided.” That review eventually found that Beacon’s services were “appropriate and beneficial,” the examiner later told the court.

All these people who were supposed to be overseeing things obviously passed the buck and didn’t do their job.

—Barbara Pace, sister of a man for whom Murphy acted as guardian

Barbara Pace, Chorost’s sister, said she had long suspected Murphy was only interested in drawing compensation out of her brother. Murphy, she said, hadn’t even kept up with Chorost’s taxes, resulting in penalties and a federal lien.

“He had a lot of money and ended up with nothing,” said Pace, who lives in Florida. “All these people who were supposed to be overseeing things obviously passed the buck and didn’t do their job.”

Diller, the guardianship expert at Cardozo School of Law, said that for Mayersohn to allow Murphy to act as guardian and care provider simultaneously, he was required to have made a formal finding that no one else was available for either role.

But there’s no such finding in either case, the records show. After the 2015 conference to discuss Murphy’s use of Beacon, Mayersohn appointed her to 11 more guardianships.

A Soft Touch From the Bench

Not all judges avoided the question of Murphy’s apparent conflict of interest.

In 2015, as Mayersohn approved the Beacon payments in Queens, a different judge took issue with them in Nassau County on Long Island. And his handling of the matter suggests that even the barest judicial action could have curtailed Murphy’s use of her own company.

Murphy asked Judge Gary Knobel to approve a $20,656 payment to Beacon for six weeks of home health aides for a blind 19-year-old with “no cognitive abilities of significance,” according to the young woman’s case file.

In a filing, Murphy said the use of her company had been “discussed in chambers at the previous status conference.”

But when Knobel approved the payment, he included a caveat, writing that any future request “shall specifically disclose to the Court any compensation she received or will be receiving as a result of services rendered by” Beacon.

Knobel, a former law clerk who was elected to the bench in 2005, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. But after his decision, payments to Beacon stopped.

“We Will Get Someone Who Is Honest”

Despite the various red flags, judges across New York and Long Island continued to entrust Murphy with the care of vulnerable New Yorkers for years, and she touted these relationships on Beacon Eldercare’s website, listing a number of judges by name, including Mayersohn and Knobel.

Sometimes they appointed her as a guardian and at other times the judges asked her to serve instead in a position known as a geriatric care manager for elderly wards. In both capacities, Murphy was considered a fiduciary, meaning she was required to act for the benefit of the client and not herself. But geriatric care managers, who assess the needs of elderly patients and can also arrange for their services, aren’t licensed or otherwise regulated by the state, and they are not subject to any explicit conflict-of-interest rules.

For Murphy and Beacon, the position proved fruitful.

Consider the case of Alvaro Guevara, a 74-year-old Colombian immigrant who faced “deteriorating physical and other conditions,” according to one of his guardians. In 2015, they appeared in court with their ward to request more control over his health care given the apparent decline.

Supreme Court Judge Bernice Siegal said she would appoint a geriatric care manager to assess Guevara’s needs — and hire home health aides if necessary. Guevara, who had about $305,000 left from a legal settlement, had a request regarding his future caretakers.

“I need somebody who is honest,” he told the judge.

“We will get someone who is honest, and if they are not honest, you will get everything back,” Siegal replied.

Murphy got the appointment, and she enlisted Beacon to provide Guevara services.

For more than two years, Murphy’s company drew on his account, providing 24-hour home care at the cost of roughly $7,500 per month, records show. His guardians sought to defray the fees by moving their ward’s brother in to help out and, eventually, by seeking court authority to send Guevara back to Colombia where his dollar would stretch further and where he could live with family.

But by January 2018, with only about $50,000 left to his name, Guevara refused to move after “representatives of Beacon Eldercare met with and convinced Mr. Guevara and his brother” that applying for public assistance was a better course of action, Christopher Owen, one of his guardians, wrote in a motion. “In my opinion, the foregoing advise was irresponsible and not in Mr. Guevara’s best interest,” he wrote.

There’s no record in Guevara’s case file that Siegal questioned Murphy’s dual roles. And records show that even the judge conflated them: A month after Owen’s motion, she issued an order that listed the geriatric care manager as “Beacon Eldercare,” not Murphy.

Siegal, a longtime guardianship judge, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

In all, roughly $180,000 of Guevara’s money went to Beacon. By 2019, with Guevara unable to afford rent from his $300 monthly Social Security check and with only $20,000 left in the bank, his guardians moved him into a Queens assisted living facility. That year Beacon didn’t collect from Guevara, but Murphy did, receiving $4,950 in fees from the ward for her services, which included putting together his Medicaid application.

Multimillion-Dollar Deal Raises Suspicion

Murphy’s lucrative run as a favored court appointee officially came to an end last month, when a judge ruled that she had taken advantage of a wealthy ward named Theresa Hastings.

Hastings had ended up in guardianship in 2016 after falling in her apartment, and she and her late husband, Ingo Grezinger, had extensive real estate holdings across New Jersey and New York, including a row of four abandoned brownstones in Harlem.

One of Murphy’s first acts as Hastings’ guardian was moving her into a Queens nursing home, court records show. She then set about marshaling her ward’s assets, including nearly $6 million in holdings from Grezinger’s estate.

But as Murphy took hold of a sizable real estate and investment portfolio, she failed to file the statutorily required reports to the court detailing her ward’s finances and well-being. During that time, judges still approved Murphy’s requests to sell some of Grezinger’s properties, including the four Harlem brownstones.

“[Murphy] consistently involved herself in business dealings using Ms. Hastings’s assets that were clear conflicts of interest and a gross dereliction of her duties.”

—Supreme Court Justice Carol Sharpe, writing about Theresa Hastings, a wealthy ward of Murphy’s

Murphy then helped a Beacon business associate, Patrick Toussaint, acquire those four buildings, according to the recent court ruling. Toussaint testified that Murphy told him about the properties and she negotiated the price with him, the judge wrote. A company Toussaint controlled purchased the townhouses for about $3 million — then sold them months later for nearly $8 million.

In her decision, the judge noted that Toussaint loaned Murphy $200,000 after the deal closed, money that he said she never repaid.

Reached by phone, Toussaint declined to comment.

It wasn’t until September 2019, nearly a year and a half after Hastings died, that Murphy finally filed a report detailing her ward’s finances to the court.

These and other actions worried the court examiner tasked with reviewing Murphy’s guardianship work. The examiner, Alison Arden Besunder, wrote in a December 2019 preliminary report that Murphy had “repeatedly failed to comply” with the law and had “continued to thwart her fiduciary obligations as Guardian.”

In Murphy’s defense, her then-lawyer said Besunder had “grossly mischaracterized” her client’s conduct and wrote that sanctioning her in a case in which she obtained “no financial benefit or personal gain would have a chilling effect on the willingness” of people like Murphy to serve as professional guardians. Murphy took most of the guardianships she was appointed to “out of her compassion for the elderly or incapacitated population,” as well as “her understanding of the Court’s dire need for eligible” professional guardians, her lawyer, Jessica Reznak, wrote in a March 2020 filing.

But the judge was unpersuaded. In a decision issued in July, five years after the investigation began, Supreme Court Justice Carol Sharpe ruled that Murphy’s testimony hadn’t been credible and that she’d “consistently involved herself in business dealings using Ms. Hastings’s assets that were clear conflicts of interest and a gross dereliction of her duties.”

Sixteen years after Murphy became a guardian, Sharpe banned her from serving in that role, removed her from all the cases she’d been assigned to and charged her “for any financial incentives she received” from the estates of Hastings and her husband.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is also probing the matter, as is the public administrator’s office, the city agency that settles the affairs of people who die without wills. Attorneys for the agency have said in court records that they still need to account for how Murphy handled Grezinger’s assets, including the Harlem brownstones.

But they’ll likely have to piece it all together without questioning Murphy directly. With her actions as a court-appointed fiduciary under the microscope, a government attorney recently wrote that the onetime guardian “appears to have intentionally and voluntarily absented herself from the jurisdiction.”

Sophie Chou contributed data analysis.

by Anjeanette Damon

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

The summer heat collected inside a fire station in Reno, the nation’s fastest-warming city, where Nevada’s governor and key local government leaders had gathered in July 2021. They were there to announce what they called a “groundbreaking” step to address climate change through a “landmark partnership” with a little-known green tech company.

“We get to be the city, the county and the state that lead the way into a new day and a new era,” Bob Lucey, then-Washoe County Commission chairperson, told the small crowd of reporters, lobbyists and government officials.

“This is how we fight climate change and protect our state,” proclaimed then-Gov. Steve Sisolak, who’d set a goal of nearly halving the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

The governments they led had each given the company, then called Ledger8760 and now known as NZero, contracts on the promise it could provide real-time tracking of carbon emissions from scores of buildings, hundreds of vehicles and the travel of thousands of employees. Such information would allow hour-by-hour decision making to reduce their carbon footprints and move toward their climate goals, according to NZero’s pitch.

It was a bold claim for a company with no track record working with governments and without a scientist or climate expert among its founders or lead employees.

But what NZero’s executive team did have — and what gave it an edge in convincing a state, county and city to bet taxpayer dollars on the company — was a history of helping powerful people get what they want. As lobbyists, well-liked in political circles for their jovial personalities and straightforward deal-making, they had helped Uber battle an intractable taxi lobby and gain entrance to the Nevada market; Tesla win what was at the time the largest tax incentive package in state history; and the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders secure $750 million in public financing to build a stadium. They’ve represented clients before the Reno City Council and Washoe County Commission and lobbied the Legislature on behalf of the city.

Now, Josh Griffin, NZero co-founder, decided to use those skills to grow his own business.

Beginning in late 2020, Griffin leaned on relationships with government officials to pitch them his new company, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. Over the next three years, he won contracts worth $5.7 million — funds that critics say would have been better used to make actual efficiency upgrades or invest in green power generation. In fact, Griffin convinced government officials, including the administrations of two governors from different political parties, to pay his company more and more money despite NZero’s struggles to deliver on its promise to provide real-time emissions data to make real-time decisions.

Washoe County went months without receiving data tracking electricity usage. A state of Nevada pilot project never delivered real-time data, and a larger project with the state encountered repeated delays. Only the city of Reno realized a working platform with uninterrupted and usable data.

“Their software didn’t do what they said it was going to do,” said Robin Yochum, a former programs manager at the Governor’s Office of Energy, who questioned the contract from the beginning. The statistics that NZero provided to the state during the pilot project were months old because of issues getting data in regular intervals from utilities, she said. The historic data had to be input by hand and wasn’t much better than information the state already had.

“They figured out how to get money from the government and put it into their company, and what did we get for it? Nothing,” Yochum said.

They figured out how to get money from the government and put it into their company, and what did we get for it? Nothing.

—Robin Yochum, a former programs manager at the Nevada Governor’s Office of Energy

Documents obtained by ProPublica show the local and state governments rushed to hire NZero without fully vetting the company against other competitors. A Reno spokesperson said the city tried to find similar companies but couldn’t. A Washoe County spokesperson said officials believed they were “investing in an innovative approach.” The state considered no other companies before hiring NZero for the pilot project.

Yochum, who had seen a past effort by the state to implement a similar platform fail, continued to voice her suspicions about NZero’s promises. She also didn’t think its technology would be the best way to meet the state’s ambitious climate objectives.

“The bottom line is the state needs money to be able to implement retrofits and efficiency measures to make buildings compatible with climate goals,” she said. “You should put your money into upgrading them first.”

NZero’s head of marketing, Kevin Nabipour, said in a written statement that ProPublica’s reporting “portrays a customer experience that is a stark contrast from the one we know and experience routinely with a satisfied group of engaged public sector professionals.”

In an interview with ProPublica, Griffin acknowledged NZero didn’t deliver what it initially promised. Rather than real-time data, the governments got delayed data. But it still benefited his customers, he argued.

“I know we delivered real value,” Griffin said, “even though it was incongruent with when we said we would deliver information and when they received it. It doesn’t mean at all it wasn’t valuable.”

Governments should invest in understanding their emission patterns before putting money toward improvements, he argued. Although his company provided older data, it could still be useful in judging the effectiveness of proposed efficiency projects, he said. “How do you know which one reduces the emissions the most? We’re guiding those decisions,” he said.

As of July, three years after contracting with NZero, the state of Nevada has not used the data to make efficiency upgrades, while Reno relied on the data to help implement a lighting project and Washoe County used the data to help prioritize its capital improvement projects.

Why Track Carbon Emissions?

ProPublica this year is investigating the effectiveness of government and industry efforts to combat the climate crisis and reduce their environmental impact.

Measuring emissions is a key tenet in international treaties aimed at preventing catastrophic climate change by reducing global carbon output. Such tracking is generally done at the city, state or national level through estimates of how much carbon is emitted in a geographical area over a year.

On the corporate side, publicly traded companies began looking for ways to measure their emissions to appeal to environmentally minded consumers and shareholders, and get a jump on expected federal regulations that could require it. This drove a surge in startup companies offering similar platforms.

New ways of monitoring carbon output were being developed, including sensors, smart meters and complicated models to estimate emissions. And although several internationally respected climate agencies had developed standards, there wasn’t an agreed-upon best method.

“It’s all unregulated,” said Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and senior fellow with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “There are various private industry standards, but they’re voluntary.”

Griffin and his lobbying partner Matt Griffin, who is not related to Josh, started NZero in 2017 with their friend Josh Weber, a lawyer specializing in electric utility regulations. They believed large-scale energy consumers — particularly the casinos and data centers they represented as lobbyists — should have better electricity consumption data, Josh Griffin said. They should know whether the electrons powering their slot machines, for example, had been generated by a solar or a coal-fired plant. (Around this time, Josh Griffin and Weber ran an ultimately unsuccessful ballot initiative to end the electric utility’s monopoly in Nevada and give consumers a choice of where to buy power. Griffin said the ballot initiative and the founding of NZero were unrelated.)

Utilities had data on exactly where consumers’ electricity was coming from but didn’t readily share it, Griffin said. Nor did consumers know how many pounds of carbon were produced generating the power they used. Griffin said they developed their platform to provide that.

For more than a decade, Nevada governments had conducted periodic greenhouse gas inventories for their jurisdictions, estimating annual emissions from all the sources within their geographic boundaries. NZero offered something different: tracking emissions generated from actual government operations — how much carbon was emitted when, for example, the city’s street lights were on or when the heater ran at city hall.

Griffin argued his platform was perfect for governments because elected leaders had promised to reduce carbon emissions. The Sisolak administration, for example, set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. Officials could “lead by example,” proving to private industry that accountability was possible through accurate data, Griffin said.

To calculate these emissions, however, NZero needed access to data on energy consumption from each government building, including natural gas, electricity and water. But the availability of the data was hit or miss for each address depending on the service provider, what kind of meters were in place and whether the utility was willing to share it.

“There’s nothing you can do if they don’t want to give you the data,” said Connor Taylor, a senior analyst with Verdantix, which sells buyer’s guides on carbon tracking software. “It’s not like anyone’s legally obligated to do it. So it really hinges on the strength of that relationship.”

There’s nothing you can do if they don’t want to give you the data.”

—Connor Taylor, a senior analyst with Verdantix

It turned out real-time data wasn’t available from Southwest Gas, southern Nevada’s largest natural gas provider, and NV Energy, the state’s primary electricity provider, didn’t want to share customer data with NZero.

What Went Wrong

Reno avoided significant problems with NZero’s platform because the city collected the data from NV Energy itself and passed it to NZero for analysis. The city said it didn’t have examples of efficiency projects undertaken because of the data but has used the information to measure how effective some of its projects have been. A spokesperson said it has been “critical for our sustainability goals.”

Early on, NZero was able to tap into Washoe County’s electricity and natural gas usage data from NV Energy, which gave the county a working platform. But it showed information that was a month old, not real-time. Brian Beffort, Washoe County’s sustainability manager, said although NZero didn’t deliver data in real time as promised, the platform has proven essential for tracking progress toward the county’s emissions goals. “Without it I would be shadow boxing,” he said.

When NV Energy cut off the feed, the county lost access to even its month-old data for nearly a year. But NZero continued to collect its $6,000 monthly fee for providing it. Beffort said he didn’t immediately notice the outage and didn’t think it would be fair to penalize NZero for the utility’s actions. The county is working on a fix, but as of July, that process wasn’t yet finalized.

“To be clear, that’s on NV Energy, not NZero,” Beffort said.

The state had a similar problem. Unlike the city or the county, Nevada signed a contract for what was supposed to be a small pilot program. NZero would track real-time emissions from just five state buildings, rather than government-wide operations.

It was Yochum’s job to run the pilot project. Six months into the yearlong contract, NZero was still trying to wrangle data from Southwest Gas. And soon after it settled on a method for inputting historic data for both electricity and gas, NV Energy decided that sending data to third parties violated customer privacy and cut it off entirely.

The real-time data to make on-the-spot decisions about energy usage never materialized, Yochum said.

An NV Energy spokesperson said that in order to protect its “customers’ sensitive data,” the utility “no longer provides data directly to third-party vendors on behalf of customers.”

Influence vs. Research

Governments should carefully vet whether a company offering carbon tracking technology can access data from utilities before signing a contract, Taylor said.

With NZero, the governments tailored their solicitation letters directly to what NZero said it was offering. Yochum said she was told to do so and to structure the contract to avoid a lengthy and competitive process. At the time, contracts valued at less than $25,000 could be approved without a public vote by elected officials.

Although Yochum wouldn’t comment on who told her to do these things, her emails from the time shed light on where the pressure was coming from: “This is a priority for the Governor’s Office,” Yochum wrote in a June 2021 email urging the state’s budget office to expedite the contract.

In a June 2021 email, Robin Yochum, a former programs manager at the Nevada Governor’s Office of Energy, informed the state’s budget office that the NZero contract was a priority for the governor’s office. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)

In Yochum’s mind, the pilot project had failed and she expected to move on from NZero, which she described as a good company but not right for the state’s needs. But one month after Yochum wrote a memo detailing where the company’s pilot project had fallen short, NZero submitted a glossy 15-page proposal for nearly $13 million in American Rescue Plan funding for an “expanded partnership” with the state.

Emails obtained by ProPublica show Josh Griffin stepped up his lobbying of the administration, working both the governor’s new energy adviser and his chief of staff, Yvanna Cancela, who explored how to get NZero a $5 million contract without a competitive process. One way would be for NZero to offer its services through an existing state contractor. NZero then signed a partnership agreement with Deloitte Consulting.

When Yochum learned of the effort to avoid a competitive process, she objected.

“I was told, ‘We have to do this. The governor’s office wants to do it, we are going to do it,’” Yochum said.

I was told, ‘We have to do this. The governor’s office wants to do it, we are going to do it.’

—Robin Yochum, a former programs manager at the Nevada Governor’s Office of Energy

Yochum wasn’t the only skeptical state employee. A purchasing official pointed to significant delays in the pilot project and warned that Cancela’s close communication with NZero could “create an appearance of impropriety in a future solicitation,” wrote Gideon Davis, one purchasing officer.

Another argued it might not be the best use of $5 million if the goal were to reduce carbon emissions. The director of the Nevada Department of Administration, Laura Freed, sent a lengthy email with a half-dozen alternative sustainability projects, including prioritizing the purchase of electric vehicles, upgrading state-owned building metering for gas and electricity, and requiring zero-energy use building plans for new buildings. The proposal appeared to go nowhere.

The state has known for years where it needs to make energy improvements. In 2009, the public works department created a list of nearly 2,000 energy efficiency projects, some as simple as changing out fluorescent light bulbs. Fifteen years later, the state is still working to fund those projects. In 2021, public works was awarded $9.4 million for a handful of projects, including changing light bulbs listed as a priority in 2009. Last year, no money went toward the listed projects.

“If I had $5 million to spend to pursue things that would meaningfully advance the state of Nevada’s climate leadership, there are other things I would spend it on, such as energy efficiency upgrades to state buildings,” said one former state employee involved in the project, who asked not to be named because they feared it could hurt their current employment. “That’s the bread and butter. We know the problem buildings. We know the aging infrastructure. We got the backlog of deferred maintenance. You can do some good with $5 million just improving infrastructure.”

The governor’s office ignored the concerns about NZero. Yochum’s frustration over it, in part, led her to resign from the state in March 2023.

Cancela acquiesced when the purchasing department said a competitive process would be required. She told ProPublica she was in charge of pursuing the governor’s priorities and, after consulting with state energy and finance experts, she had determined NZero’s concept “had merit,” but “the appropriate path forward was a competitive bidding process.” The emails also show she was unfamiliar with government purchasing rules and sought guidance.

The request for proposals went out in October 2022. Three companies answered. And in December, NZero, the company that had convinced the state such a project was needed in the first place, was declared the bid winner.

Josh Griffin said he didn’t do anything inappropriate by looking for a way to avoid competition. When he was told the contract had to go out to bid, he stopped lobbying, he said.

“We weren’t trying to lobby our way through it,” he said.

Matt Griffin, who worked as the company’s legal counsel for three years and was listed on early incorporation documents along with other members of the Griffins’ lobbying firm, said he didn’t want to comment. Josh Weber, who is now the company’s CEO, said he wasn’t involved with the company during the negotiations or implementation of the state contract.

Deals Under a New Governor

As the final details of the $5 million contract were being negotiated, Sisolak lost his bid for reelection. When Gov. Joe Lombardo took office in 2023, he abandoned Sisolak’s climate strategy, which NZero had used to justify its proposal. Lombardo’s energy plan focused more on electricity generation (prioritizing natural gas) and transmission than climate action. That signaled a move away from emission tracking.

But the change from a Democratic to a Republican administration didn’t change NZero’s fortunes. As the contract was being negotiated, NZero was lobbying the new administration, in apparent violation of state laws governing the competitive bid process.

“It has come to my attention that employees or representatives of the intended vendor, NZero, have communicated directly with you or others at the state regarding the final stages of this contract,” Davis, the state purchasing officer handling the contract, wrote to Lombardo’s new energy director, Dwayne McClinton. A spokesperson for the governor’s office said Davis wrote to McClinton, who had been on the job only three weeks, to “ensure compliance.” Josh Griffin said he didn’t know to which communication Davis was referring but didn’t believe the bidding restrictions on communication applied during the time the contract was being negotiated.

Jeanne Stoneman, Lombardo’s deputy director of energy, said the administration moved forward with the contract because it saw the potential to help reduce the state’s energy consumption — and energy bills — as well as its carbon footprint. (Stoneman left her position with the state in June.)

Griffin said by the time the contract was signed, NZero had a work-around for getting data from NV Energy. The fix, he said, was for the state to give NZero login information to all of its electricity accounts, which the company promised to keep confidential. (In one email obtained by ProPublica, an NZero staffer advised the Nevada National Guard to turn off two-factor authentication so the company could get into the account.)

Still, the project was plagued by delays and skeptical state employees.

“I did not recall the program providing us with any more detailed information above what we already generate ourselves,” the energy manager for state public works wrote to his supervisor when the energy office tried to schedule a “project kickoff meeting” with Team NZero, as the new partnership with Deloitte was called. Another brought up “serious security concerns” about sharing account login credentials with a third party.

Last November, when the project was supposed to be wrapping up, it had barely begun.

Although the Team NZero project was suffering from severe delays at the end of last year, documents show the team began to resolve the problems in January. In some cases, the resolution was simply to not include entire departments that had been difficult to communicate with. McClinton said in a June interview that energy use in 95% of state buildings is now being tracked in real time.

NZero delivered its capital planning report to the state in April, about a month late and without the data from the departments that didn’t participate. Because of the delays, Team NZero did not close out the project until July, three months after the contract ended. McClinton said that “no decisions or improvements have been made based off the data yet.”

Lombardo’s spokesperson blamed the project delays on difficulty finding a secure way for NZero to access the state’s utility accounts.

“Ultimately, the state was able to provide nZero with limited access to accounts without control features, which ensured minimal external access,” she said.

Deloitte did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite Team NZero’s project delays, Josh Griffin didn’t stop pushing for even more money. During the legislative session in early 2023, Griffin lobbied the Lombardo administration for another $11 million to be included in the governor’s proposed budget. When the administration denied the request, the company turned to the Legislature. In the final hours of the session, lawmakers passed an emergency bill introduced by Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro that allocated $11 million to, among other things, track electrical energy consumption in “near real-time.”

“The Governor’s office indicated at the time that they were fully supportive of allocating funding to allow them to keep the program going, and we were happy to find an area of bipartisan cooperation on promoting more climate-friendly government practices,” Cannizzaro’s spokesperson said in a written statement.

To assuage the concerns of skeptical lawmakers, Cannizzaro had assured them that money from the bill would be subject to a competitive bid process. McClinton echoed that in an interview with ProPublica.

But in March, McClinton’s office made another move that would have skirted the competitive process. At the direction of the governor’s office, it attempted to funnel an additional $8.87 million to NZero by amending the contract without putting it out to bid, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. Again, an administration employee flagged the “enormous amount” as inappropriate for a contract amendment, and purchasing officers halted it.

A spokesperson for McClinton said despite the go-ahead on the amendment from his department’s lawyers, he continued to look for other possible vendors and discovered another company was already tracking vehicle emissions for the state. That company was provided more funding to expand its services, and the effort to amend NZero’s contract was dropped. McClinton said his office may still open a bidding process for remaining funds from Cannizzaro’s bill and NZero would be welcome to compete.

Meanwhile, the NZero board has replaced the company’s CEO with Weber, one of the co-founders, and both Josh Griffin and Matt Griffin resigned earlier this year. The company has lost about a third of its employees, according to a LinkedIn estimate. The restructure was unrelated to the Nevada contract, Weber said. He added he’s excited about the company’s future as it refocuses on new tools to help its customers “optimize their efforts to reduce impact on the planet.”

by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main

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.

Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry touts its altruism and environmental stewardship by pointing to a voluntary levy that companies pay on their production, which is then used to clean up orphan wells that have been left to the state.

But some of Oklahoma’s biggest oil companies have opted out of the fund, forcing the state to return millions of dollars that would have otherwise gone to restoring land scarred by discarded drilling infrastructure and contaminated by leaks and spills, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main analysis.

The list of companies that received such refunds includes some of the Oklahoma oil industry’s household names, such as Ovintiv and Chesapeake Energy Corp. It also includes the two richest people in the state: Harold Hamm, a pioneer in fracking technology and the founder of the multibillion-dollar Continental Resources, and George Kaiser, whose success as head of his family’s oil company helped him buy the Bank of Oklahoma.

All told, dozens of oil companies received refunds worth about $11 million over the past seven years, ProPublica and Capital & Main found. Put another way, for every $100 the state brought in via this funding mechanism, it sent $8.58 back to oil companies.

The Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, created by the Legislature in 1993, collects a 0.1% assessment on oil and gas production that functions like a tax on the state’s largest industry. The roughly $163 million collected — after refunds — since the levy’s inception has funded the restoration of more than 20,000 sites.

If the board had not had to issue the millions of dollars in refunds, it could have restored an additional 1,500 orphan well sites, according to the board’s average cleanup bill. Until they are plugged, these wells can leak a litany of pollutants, from toxic gasses to salty wastewater, presenting an environmental crisis across Oklahoma.

ProPublica and Capital & Main reached out to all 76 companies that requested refunds in the past seven years as well as to the main in-state trade groups, the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance and the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma. The Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma, Hamm’s Continental Resources, Kaiser’s Kaiser-Francis Oil Co., Chesapeake Energy and Ovintiv did not respond to requests for comment.

Only two oil producers answered questions: one said she requested refunds to cut down on contact with regulators, while the other dismissed concerns about the refunds, stating that “it’s not that much money.”

Zack Taylor, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, wrote in an email that the board “has done very important work cleaning up abandoned well sites all over Oklahoma.” But, he added, “We believe it should be an opt in program so the smaller producers and royalty owners could agree up front whether or not to participate.”

In addition to paying for orphan well site cleanup, the Energy Resources Board’s levy funds pro-fossil fuel marketing campaigns that range from K-12 curricula promoting the industry in classrooms to programming with Mike Rowe, the reality television star known for the show “Dirty Jobs.”

Mindy Stitt, the Energy Resources Board’s executive director, said the state’s oil companies “exemplify what it means to be a good neighbor.”

“They contribute millions of dollars to our programs, even if they must request a refund some years, making significant impacts across our state,” she said.

Oklahoma’s Orphan Well Epidemic

Farmers chat near a well on a farm in south-central Oklahoma. (Mark Olalde/ProPublica)

Not everyone sees it that way.

Don Scott has worked his farm in south-central Oklahoma for years, harvesting hay while carefully avoiding an orphan well that scars one of his fields. The green pump jack stood inoperable on a recent visit to the farm, rust eating through the metal. Salt contamination had turned the soil an unnatural white, the dirt cracking at the base of the well.

The well occupies otherwise productive land and could leak more pollutants into the environment. “And that ain’t counting the aggravation of having to work around it,” said Scott, whose father and grandfather worked in the oil fields and who now laments the state’s orphan well epidemic.

More than 18,000 wells have already been labeled as orphans by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s main oil regulatory body. That number is likely to swell, as the state has more than a quarter-million unplugged wells — some active, some already idle — according to data from energy software firm Enverus.

But the money available for cleanup pales in comparison to the task. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission collects its own tax, which has generated only a several-million-dollar orphan well fund. The state quickly exhausted federal money it received from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to plug wells. And drillers have set aside only 0.6% of the projected cleanup cost via financial instruments called bonds, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main analysis of state data.

This leaves the Energy Resources Board and its voluntary cleanup fund as an important tool in Oklahoma’s struggle to address its unplugged wells.

If the Energy Resources Board fund continues to be voluntary in a state that’s already slow to impose regulations on its most lucrative industry, critics say, then companies should at least be required to set aside enough money to plug their own wells.

“Local industry also has a part to play in funding remediation,” said Kara Joy McKee, director of the Sierra Club’s Oklahoma chapter. “It should be a general obligation of the industry that has received so much wealth from the resources of this state.”

Big Oil, Big Refunds

Some of the state’s major oil producers top the list of companies that requested refunds.

Continental Resources received nearly $1.6 million in refunds over the seven years for which the Energy Resources Board maintains data, while Kaiser-Francis Oil took in about $490,000.

Ovintiv, an $11 billion oil company, was by far the largest recipient, as its subsidiaries and related entities got more than $3.8 million back.

Next on the list, a partnership between large driller Mach Resources and private equity firm Bayou City Energy Management received more than $2.1 million in refunds. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

The Oklahoma City-headquartered Chesapeake Energy, valued at $10 billion, also appeared on the list, getting a more than $400,000 refund.

And companies belonging to the McCasland family, longtime Oklahoma oil producers, filed dozens of requests totalling several hundred-thousand dollars in refunds. One of the family’s companies, Twin D Energy, repeatedly pursued the refund, even when it stood to only get back amounts as low as $2.57, $3.47 and $3.71 in a given year. Tom McCasland III, the president of the family’s companies, said they only request refunds for their own portion of oil production, not for other working interest owners.

“It Ought to Be There Permanently”

Oklahoma has a sunset law that sets the date by which the state must dissolve or renew certain government agencies, and the Energy Resources Board is facing the chopping block. In 2023, its sunset date was pushed back to 2025 to give lawmakers time to decide what to do with the agency. But several bills proposed in this year’s and last year’s legislative session to extend or update the board’s mandate failed.

Instead, the state’s oil trade groups have entered negotiations to draft their own language destined for the Legislature. Some of their ideas threaten to further undermine funding for the board’s cleanup work.

On one hand, the trade groups are discussing provisions to allow the board to plug wells instead of only cleaning up surface contamination. But some oil companies are also aiming to make it easier to avoid paying the assessment that funds the board’s work, potentially only collecting money from drillers who opt in.

“There are people that don’t feel that it is really refundable,” said McCasland, who serves as the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance’s chairman in addition to his work with his family’s oil companies. As a result, the negotiations have included discussions about the ease of getting the money back.

Every dollar refunded is one less dollar spent cleaning up the industry’s orphan wells, so landowners like Scott, the farmer with an orphan well on his land, might have to continue waiting to see old, leaking infrastructure removed from their property.

The Energy Resources Board is a “good thing,” Scott said, and it has begun cleanup on his land. So he expressed frustration upon learning that oil companies regularly ask the board for refunds.

“Once it’s paid in,” he said, “it ought to be there permanently.”

by Doug Bock Clark

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

Until Monday, a new online portal run by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office contained what experts describe as a serious security vulnerability that would have allowed anyone to submit a voter cancellation request for any Georgian. All that was required was a name, date of birth and county of residence — information easily discoverable for many people online.

The flaw was brought to the attention of ProPublica and Atlanta News First over the weekend by a cybersecurity researcher, Jason Parker. Parker, who uses they/them pronouns, said that after discovering it, they attempted to contact the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. The office said it had no records of Parker’s attempts to reach out.

“It’s a terrible vulnerability to leave open, and it’s essential to be fixed,” Parker said.

The issue Parker exposed was “as bad as any voter cancellation bug could be” and “incredibly sloppy coding,” said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at the cybersecurity firm Silent Push, who reviewed the flaw at the request of ProPublica. “It’s shocking to have one of these bugs occur on a serious website.” Edwards said that even a basic penetration test, in which outside experts vet the security of a website before its launch, “should have picked this up.”

ProPublica and Atlanta News First jointly alerted the Secretary of State’s Office to the vulnerability and held the publication of their articles until it was fixed.

“We have updated the process to include an error message letting the individual know their submission is incomplete and will not be processed,” Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, said in a statement from the Secretary of State’s Office.

In the days after the portal launched last Monday, The Associated Press and The Current each reported the existence of separate security vulnerabilities that exposed voters’ sensitive personal information, including the last four digits of their Social Security number and their full driver’s license number. The Secretary of State’s Office told the news organizations that it quickly fixed the portal. Democrats warned that the system could be abused, as right-wing activists have been challenging tens of thousands of voter registrations in a different process that a 2021 state law expanded. Over the weekend, ProPublica reported that users of the portal had unsuccessfully attempted to cancel the voter registrations of two prominent Republican officials, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The flaw found by Parker was different from the two previously reported ones. This one would allow any user of the portal to bypass the screen that requires a driver’s license number and submit the cancellation request without it.

The Secretary of State “needs to consider this an all-hands-on-deck” moment “and hire multiple testing and security firms and stop relying on the public’s goodwill and pro bono security researchers to test the quality of their website,” Edwards said. “At this point, we should assume there are other subtle bugs that could have potentially serious impact.” Edwards said that it would have been easy for a malicious actor to automate cancellation requests to get around security measures built into the website and submit thousands of them.

In a video shared with ProPublica, Parker, who is moving from Georgia to another state, demonstrated how the registration cancellation tool could be exploited in roughly a minute. First, they entered their name, date of birth and county of residence to get past the website’s initial screening page. When the portal asked them for a driver’s license number, Parker right-clicked to inspect the browser’s HTML code — a basic option available to anyone — and deleted a few lines of code requiring them to submit their driver’s license number. Parker then hit submit. A window popped up stating that “Your cancellation request has been successfully submitted” and that county election workers would process the request within a week.

Parker said it took them less than two hours of poking around the website to find the vulnerability.

“Incomplete paper and online applications will not be accepted,” Evans said in the statement. (Parker’s cancellation request would have lacked a driver’s license number.) The Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to individual questions about what testing the portal underwent before launch, the system’s security procedures, what happened to Parker’s cancellation request and how the public could be sure of the portal’s security given the recent disclosures of security flaws.

Cybersecurity Researcher Shows Flaw With Georgia’s Voter Registration Cancellation Website

“The Secretary of State’s Office needs to do better,” said Marisa Pyle, the senior democracy defense manager for Georgia with All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy organization. “The state needs to be really intentional about how it rolls out these things. It needs to make sure they’re secure and provide their rationale for making them.”

Jake Braun, the author of a book on cybersecurity flaws in election systems and lecturer at the University of Chicago, said that there is a long history of elections-related websites suffering from easily exploitable security failures, including Russians hacking election infrastructure during the 2016 election and public-interest competitions in which participants breached replicas of state election websites in minutes. Online elections infrastructure, he said, “needs more standards and better standards.”

Edwards said that the portal’s vulnerability-plagued rollout showed the necessity of improving the vetting process.

“Georgia should step up and pass a law saying all new websites in which the public interacts with government documents should have an outside review,” Edwards said. The public “should expect” officials “did some due diligence.”

Do you have any information about the Georgia voter registration cancellation portal, voter challenges or anything voter-related that we should know? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark by email at doug.clark@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

by Lexi Churchill

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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.

Texas lawmakers nearly three years ago promised changes to prevent the devastation from a deadly winter storm from happening again. But the damage caused by Hurricane Beryl last month shows that much remains the same, particularly when it comes to preventing carbon monoxide poisoning.

Roughly 400 Texans landed in emergency rooms for CO poisoning after Hurricane Beryl pummeled the state on July 8, marking the highest numbers since the 2021 winter storm, state data shows. Two people died of CO poisoning in Harris County, according to Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief W. Nim Kidd. (The county Medical Examiner’s Office has not yet confirmed the deaths.)

Debbie Wells, 72, her husband and her daughter were among the hundreds poisoned. The family used a portable generator to keep the air conditioning on to combat the brutal summer heat.

First image: Hare, Turman and Wells were all poisoned by carbon monoxide from a portable generator after Hurricane Beryl. Second image: The generator the family used to power their air conditioner during the outage. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Though generators have been linked to deaths after nearly every major power outage, including 10 fatalities in Texas during the 2021 winter storm and power grid failure, Wells was not worried.

Her family had routinely used the generator when the power was out, including during the 2021 freeze, which resulted in the worst carbon monoxide poisoning event in recent history. They always kept the device at a safe distance to prevent the colorless, odorless gas from seeping inside. On July 11, however, they moved it a few feet closer to their home in Cleveland, Texas, placing it under the porch in anticipation of rain from the hurricane.

Early the next day, Wells and her husband woke up feeling disoriented and weak. She called her daughter, Jenny Hare, who lives in a trailer house attached to their home. Hare went to check on them and managed to call 911 before passing out on the living room floor.

Emergency responders took the family to Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, where they were given treatment reserved for the most severely poisoned patients, according to Dr. Joseph Nevarez, the medical director of the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine, Wound and Lymphedema Care at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center.

The family did not have a CO detector. Nothing in state law required them to. At the time of the 2021 winter storm, Texas was one of six states with no statewide requirement for CO detectors in homes. State lawmakers later updated building codes to require them in new and renovated homes starting in 2022 but allowed cities to opt out. Though more than half of states require the alarms in some or all existing residences, Texas does not, excluding millions of homes and apartments.

“I think it’s important for everybody to understand that we’re not stupid. We did a stupid thing. We got careless, and it only takes one time,” Wells said. “And if we had the detector, it would have been a different story.”

Wells’ nephew brought her a CO detector after the family was released from the hospital that day. They have since purchased two more.

The family did not have a carbon monoxide detector at the time. It now has three. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Gov. Greg Abbott, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the top Republican state leaders, did not respond to questions about whether they planned to take steps to prevent future poisonings.

Regulations that only require CO detectors in certain types of homes do not go far enough, according to Nevarez, who supports legislation that would mandate detectors anywhere people sleep.

“If safety belts save lives but you said only this portion of the population needs them, that doesn’t make sense,” Nevarez said. “So again, why are we leaving so many Texans at risk for something that’s relatively inexpensive?”

Measures to prevent CO poisoning have also been slow at the federal level and in the county that was most hard hit during the two major outages.

In Harris County, the fire marshal submitted a proposal to County Judge Lina Hidalgo in December 2021 that would ban certain appliances such as grills and heaters from patios and balconies in multifamily residences and apartments. But the proposal did not go anywhere, according to a fire marshal spokesperson, who said the department continues to review possible regulation changes to help prevent CO poisonings. Hidalgo’s office did not respond to questions.

At the federal level, the Consumer Product Safety Commission advanced a proposal in April 2023 to make portable generators safer by requiring the devices to emit lower levels of carbon monoxide and automatically switch off when the gas reaches a certain level. The commission, however, did not provide a timeline for when the regulations will be finalized.

CO poisonings caused by widespread power outages are growing more common as climate change contributes to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, according to scientists.

“Whether you want to blame it on this, that or the other, I don’t care. The world is changing. The climate is changing,” said Dr. David Persse, Houston’s chief medical officer. He added that the state Legislature must continue to strengthen the reliability of the electric grid while also employing back up measures such as requiring CO detectors to ensure residents who turn to alternative power sources like generators stay safe.

“I think with what’s happened here in the last couple of years, it’s undeniable that we need to do something different and so now is the time to take action,” Persse said. “Now is our opportunity to get ahead of this, because this is certainly going to happen again, and we need to better prepare for the next time around.”

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Perla Trevizo contributed reporting.

by Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times, photography by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Times

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

In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia, Washington, to press for a tax break for data centers.

Turning it down, supporters argued, would mean rejecting high-paying, long-term and environmentally friendly jobs in distressed parts of rural Washington. Owners of data centers — gargantuan facilities filled with computer servers that power the internet — were scouting Washington and other states for new homes.

“In the end,” then-state Sen. Rodney Tom, a Democrat from the Seattle suburbs who advocated for the tax break, told his Senate colleagues, “we get the clean jobs that all the states are competing with, as far as the jobs it takes to run these things long term.”

State lawmakers nearly unanimously passed the special exemption and have kept the benefits flowing to the industry ever since. But the tax break has strayed from its original promises, and the state failed to fully scrutinize whether the sacrifices were worth it, a deep examination of legislative archives, public tax disclosures and utility data by The Seattle Times and ProPublica revealed.

The data center industry’s demand for electricity is growing so much that it could threaten Washington’s efforts to transition to a carbon-free power grid, the news organizations recently reported.

The original premise for Washington’s data center tax incentive was to bring high-tech, green jobs to rural communities such as Quincy, in Grant County, where an alfalfa field is being prepared for planting. But the tax break can now apply to data centers in downtown Seattle as well as those in rural areas.

The tax break’s requirement for how many people a company must hire was quickly weakened.

And a modest program for a budding industry in struggling rural areas became one of the biggest corporate tax giveaways in Washington, available even to tech companies in downtown Seattle.

Today, state revenue officials aren’t allowed to say how many high-paying tech jobs Washington actually got. That’s because lawmakers kept the information walled off from the public under the state’s taxpayer confidentiality laws. Other states with generous tax relief for the industry have demanded more transparency and accountability.

The only state audit ever released publicly, seven years ago, found that based on the number of tax break recipients at the time, data centers could eventually meet the jobs requirement by collectively hiring as few as 260 workers. The average annual cost to the state at that time was projected to be $53.3 million between 2015 and 2019.

This tax exemption now eclipses the combined total of what the state gives all of its waning aerospace programs, including Boeing’s, taking away more than $117 million in 2023, according to information companies provided the state Department of Revenue. The cumulative total since 2018 is more than $474 million.

More than 65% of the savings since 2018 have gone to Washington-based Microsoft, a company with reported net earnings of $72.4 billion last year.

The company said in an emailed statement that the data center tax break from which it benefits “aligns with the intentions of lawmakers.”

“Data center investment in rural areas of the state creates jobs, stimulates growth of supporting industries, and contributes to property tax revenue,” the statement said.

Construction was underway this spring on a huge CyrusOne data center in Quincy.

Proponents of the tax break, including building trades unions, maintain that the data center industry generated new property tax revenues for rural counties and created enough work for thousands of electricians and builders to boost the entire region’s economy. Washington ranked 10th in the country for the number of data centers in each state as of July, according to data center research firm Baxtel.

But critics question whether the industry needed the tax break to land in Central Washington, given the industry’s thirst for the cheap electricity that the region offers. Others have asked whether data centers produced enough jobs to make the investment worthwhile. State committees charged with overseeing tax programs conducted just the one audit seven years ago, rendering many of those questions unanswerable.

Meanwhile, the industry is expected to grow with the adoption of artificial intelligence, creating more opportunities for the size of the state’s tax exemption to increase.

Former Sen. Phil Rockefeller, D-Bainbridge Island, one of the few lawmakers to vote against the original data center tax break, told The Times and ProPublica that it’s very difficult to end tax breaks in Washington state once they begin. The arguments from lobbyists are too hard for lawmakers to ignore.

“There’s always going to be a professional cadre of lobbyists who will come forward and say, ‘You’re going after us, you’re discriminating against us, or you’re going to damage your relationship with us and we may go somewhere else,’” Rockefeller said.

Washington’s Data Center Tax Break Has Grown Dramatically in Recent Years

Washington’s data center tax break was one of the largest corporate tax exemptions in the state in 2023. In 2022, lawmakers opened the tax break to data center companies in urban areas.

(Source: Annual tax performance report data published by the Washington Department of Revenue) Job Promises

Early on, Washington leaders listened to the argument from data center companies and their supporters that giant server warehouses could deliver high-tech, high-paying jobs — and that without a tax break, those jobs would never materialize.

It began with then-Gov. Christine Gregoire, who in 2008 proposed to give rural data centers a 50% rebate on Washington’s sales tax when purchasing replacement server equipment. Gregoire recently told The Seattle Times and ProPublica that she was concerned about unemployment in Central Washington.

Yahoo and Microsoft had halted construction on expansions to their Central Washington data centers after the state’s attorney general and revenue officials determined they didn’t qualify for the state’s rural manufacturing tax deferral program. Yahoo told Washington lawmakers that refusing to offer the company a tax break could cause the company to move its data centers to Oregon, which does not have a sales tax.

Microsoft, which owns this data center in Quincy, is the largest beneficiary of the data center tax break, according to preliminary 2023 data from the Washington Department of Revenue.

Microsoft lobbyist DeLee Shoemaker, who just five years earlier was a top aide to then-Washington Gov. Gary Locke, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the state was “no longer competitive” for the data center industry.

Cindi Holmstrom, then the director of the state’s Department of Revenue and a Gregoire appointee, told lawmakers that the governor’s proposed tax relief for data centers would bring “high-level information technology services and research and development jobs throughout Washington state.”

(Two years later, Holmstrom became a lobbyist whose clients included Microsoft.) Holmstrom and Shoemaker did not respond to requests for comment.

While the Great Recession tanked state revenues, slowing the effort to reduce taxes on data center owners, Microsoft in 2009 made good on its implied threat to relocate. It announced it was moving its Azure servers out of state, citing “local tax laws.” The next year, lawmakers’ hesitation evaporated. They passed a rural data center tax break with only six voting against it.

Then-Sen. Linda Evans Parlette, R-Wenatchee, one of the bill’s sponsors, emailed lobbyist Rob Makin, who represented Sabey Corp., a Seattle-area real estate development company that evolved into building and leasing data centers. She asked him what to put in a celebratory press release.

Construction vehicles on a plot next to the new Quincy High School and football field on March 7

The first among many upsides, Makin responded, was an “immediate stimulus of jobs.”

“Every citizen in Central Washington will benefit from this legislation whether you are a techno geek or not,” he wrote. Makin did not respond to a request for comment. Parlette said in a recent interview that she didn’t think the tax break brought in as many jobs as people expected at the time.

The jobs argument came back routinely over the years as lobbyists returned to Olympia to seek expansions of the tax break. Lawmakers repeatedly acquiesced, even as the Washington Supreme Court held them in contempt — later fining them $100,000 a day — for failing to fund public schools.

House Finance Committee Chair April Berg, D-Mill Creek, who joined the Legislature in 2021 and later sponsored an expansion of the data center tax cut, said the message she heard about the data center industry was clear.

“It was definitely thought that if we did not have this particular exemption, we would not have this industry any longer in our state,” Berg said in an interview with The Times and ProPublica. “So we had to make a conscious decision to say yes to this industry, which included this tax break.”

But it’s unclear how essential the tax break was to landing data centers in Central Washington. In 2011 and 2012, several tech companies expanded or built new data centers in Oregon while Washington’s data center tax cut briefly lapsed.

A badge or permission from security is required to enter the gated parking lot at the Yahoo data center in Quincy.

On the other hand, Microsoft and Yahoo had plenty of reasons other than tax breaks to locate in Central Washington, including the region’s clean, low-cost hydropower. Tech companies have also built data centers in Silicon Valley despite California’s lack of tax incentives to do so.

Washington’s Top Five Data Center Tax Break Recipients

Microsoft led the way with more than $300 million in total taxes exempted from 2018 to 2023.

(Note: Vantage includes Vantage Data Centers WA13, Vantage Data Centers Management Co. and Vantage Data Centers WA MIDCO; Sabey includes Intergate.Quincy VI, Intergate.Columbia II, Intergate.Quincy and Intergate.Quincy II. Source: Annual tax performance report data published by the Washington Department of Revenue)

Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, a left-leaning think tank that has watchdogged data center tax breaks, said tax breaks are “pocket lint” in the true calculus of siting data centers.

“If you've got cheap hydropower, you’re going to get a lot of data centers,” LeRoy said. “Nobody had to abate anything to get those deals.”

Broader Eligibility, Lower Expectations

After accepting the industry’s case that the tax break would create good jobs in 2010, the Legislature almost immediately began loosening the law’s requirements for job creation.

The original bill required each data center to create at least 35 permanent positions at 150% of the surrounding area’s average personal income.

A second bill, approved just a month after lawmakers passed the first tax break, gave recipients the choice between creating 35 jobs or just three positions per 20,000 square feet of server farm space, whichever was less. While some of the data centers in Grant County were around 500,000 square feet — larger than three typical Costco warehouses — data centers can be much smaller.

The new legislation allowed data centers to count security and maintenance contractors toward the employee total. Another new provision: Data center building owners and companies that rented space from them could each claim a tax break as long as the building as a whole met the hiring requirements, even if only one of them created new jobs. There were no public hearings before it was approved.

Lawmakers passed another expansion in 2012. Then, in 2015, lawmakers further broadened the tax break, again without public hearings, while rejecting a bill to increase data centers’ employment requirements.

As lawmakers dialed back their jobs expectations, they formally declared a different measure of success for the corporate tax cut. Now, the Legislature would continue the incentive as long as the data center industry added new revenue — any new revenue — to rural property tax rolls.

The property tax was “almost a meaningless standard” to apply to the tax break, said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a think tank that has advocated for higher corporate tax rates. Job creation is a better measure, he said.

“Because virtually anything you create, it’s going to add value to the property tax base,” Gardner said. “You build an outhouse, that’s got some value.”

Priest Rapids Dam and powerhouse are run by the Grant County Public Utility District near Mattawa. “If you’ve got cheap hydropower, you’re going to get a lot of data centers,” said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First.

The tax break continued to drift from its original sales pitch. In 2022, lawmakers moved beyond their original claim that the tax cut was needed to provide rural jobs. They added new incentives for data centers in the Seattle metro area — which already had many data centers — and extended the existing tax break to 2048. New projects were required to pay employees only 125% of the area average income, lower than the previous 150%.

Despite the tax break’s limited job creation requirements, trade unions supported the 2022 bill because it included a major win for their members — requiring data center construction contractors to have labor agreements covering issues such as wages and working conditions.

“We were adamant moving forward, corporate tax breaks like that would be attached to something for the citizens of the state,” said Mark Riker, executive secretary of the Washington State Building and Construction Trades Council.

More than 500 electricians are employed by data centers in the central and northeastern parts of the state, and the industry in the same region supports 350 to 400 apprentices in training as of May, according to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 191, which testified for extending the tax break.

John Traynor, legislative director at the Washington State Labor Council, said he spent months working as an electrician at Microsoft’s data center campus in Quincy.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing,” Traynor said of the tax break. “These jobs wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be those training opportunities. They’d be done somewhere else with worse environmental standards and worse labor standards.”

Many conservatives opposed the 2022 law because of the labor requirement. But with labor and business on board with the bill in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, all but one Democrat voted yes and it easily passed.

Reuven Carlyle, a former state senator who was critical of the tax break’s gradual expansion but voted for the 2022 legislation, said in an interview he chose to not “throw an elbow” to his fellow Democrats while he was pushing a climate-related transportation package. He said the data centers tax break in its current form would never have passed back in 2010.

“These lobbyists were very strategic, very methodical, very organized,” Carlyle said. “All of a sudden, bills got weaker and weaker in terms of accountability.”

Nonsensical Job Numbers

While lawmakers created and then loosened staffing requirements for data center tax break recipients, they did nothing to ensure the public could see how many jobs were created at individual facilities.

In fact, state law expressly barred Washington’s Department of Revenue from disclosing any information used to determine tax break eligibility — not only for the data centers, but for some other industries receiving tax cuts, too. As a result, the agency’s public disclosures on the number of data center jobs can seem nonsensical.

The department’s annual tax disclosure report for 2022, for example, attributed 108,320 jobs to the 22 companies that received the data center tax incentive.

The figure is striking because aside from construction and electrician jobs, data centers employ relatively few people on a permanent basis. Overseeing the servers doesn’t take much labor compared with other large industrial outfits, and the facilities are easy to distinguish from other hulking manufacturing buildings because of their small or mostly empty parking lots.

The explanation behind the Revenue Department’s seemingly enormous jobs number comes two pages later in its report: The agency counts the entire Washington workforces of companies getting tax breaks. In 2022, the Revenue Department counted in its data center job tally all 70,379 Washington employees of Microsoft. Every programmer, office assistant and executive in the company’s sprawling Redmond campus was included.

To get more precise statistics, The Seattle Times and ProPublica went to the company itself.

Microsoft told the news organizations that as of July, it employed 417 people in its Washington data centers. In 2023, Microsoft avoided paying nearly $68.4 million in taxes for those data centers, according to preliminary data from the Department of Revenue. Assuming Microsoft’s savings remained about the same, that would amount to about $164,000 per job from just one year of the tax break.

In some cases, data center companies reported zero statewide employees but received the tax break anyway, according to the limited information available on the Revenue Department’s website.

A subsidiary of T-Mobile has avoided paying $5.8 million under the tax break program since 2017 but showed zero employees statewide in the revenue department’s public disclosures, which are drawn from reports filed by companies.

Washington’s legislative auditor said in 2017 that it was “too early to tell” if tax break recipients would hit minimum hiring thresholds. The state has not conducted a full review since. Data centers are often notable for their small or mostly empty parking lots, such as at this facility in Quincy.

A T-Mobile spokesperson told The Seattle Times and ProPublica that the company was confident it was in compliance with state law. While the disclosures report employees of “one legal entity within our organization,” the company said, T-Mobile does have employees and contractors working in its Washington data center. The spokesperson did not specify how many.

The Revenue Department said it has reviewed hiring by 26 tax break recipients but declined to name them or say whether any fell short.

Some other states with data center tax incentives do release site-specific job information. Illinois, which gave away more than $653.5 million to data centers in 2023, reports annually on the number of jobs each data center has created. Nevada publishes the same information as Illinois every two years.

But Washington lawmakers twice — in 2009 and 2017 — rejected proposals to do something similar.

State Sen. Karen Keiser, a longtime member of the state Senate Ways and Means Committee, said she didn’t know that the Revenue Department does not share site-specific employment information.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Keiser, D-Des Moines.

After an interview with The Seattle Times and ProPublica, Keiser emailed the Revenue Department to ask for site-specific job numbers and was denied.

Washington tax law does allow some elected leaders to view the detailed numbers in the course of their work on tax issues, under strict confidentiality, including: the governor (or a member of the governor’s office), and the chairpersons of the House Finance Committee and Senate Ways and Means Committee.

The governor’s office did not have a record of reaching out to revenue officials about this. Among the committee chairs who have served since 2017, three said they hadn’t checked with the Revenue Department for the jobs information, two didn’t respond to questions and one did not remember.

Postponed Auditing

Even the state watchdogs responsible for auditing tax breaks have not kept close tabs on the rapidly growing tax cut.

Lawmakers have ordered five-year reviews of another major tax break recipient: the aerospace industry. But with data centers, the Legislature opted to leave scheduling up to its Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee and the Citizen Commission for Performance Measurement of Tax Preferences.

Those committees published their first and only attempt at analyzing the data centers tax break in 2017.

They found that the data centers, with their enormous square footage, increased the property tax revenue in Grant and Douglas counties by $17.7 million, even as the counties lost $12.1 million in exempted local sales taxes. Whether or not taxpayers came out ahead depended on how badly the tax exemption was needed for companies to locate in these counties, the auditors said.

A worker on Steven Bierlink’s farm sprays mineral oil on an apple orchard in Quincy. Data centers, which can be seen on the distant horizon, have acquired land closer and closer to the farm.

Since then, data centers have grown to account for more than 25% of the tax base in Grant County. The assessed value has helped the farming community of Quincy, at the heart of the state’s data center boom, to build a new $80 million high school, city hall, library and police station. It is in the midst of a $55 million project for a new hospital.

But when it came to data center jobs, the main justification for the original tax break, the legislative auditor, who oversees the research of the legislative audit committee’s staff, said in 2017 it was “too early to tell” whether recipients would hit the minimum job number required of them — which was an overall total of 260 positions at the time. Data center companies had a six-year deadline to fulfill hiring requirements, and the earliest tax break recipients would just be hitting the deadline at the time of the study.

As of the date of the audit, its authors estimated the state was spending about $205,000 per job through forgone tax revenue.

The state has not conducted a full review in the seven years since then. In 2022, the Washington Technology Industry Association, a tech lobbying group, estimated that data centers had created 760 full-time jobs statewide over the previous four years. But Grant County remained on the state’s “distressed areas” list in 2023, with an unemployment rate of 5.9%, compared with 4.5% statewide.

The 2017 review came with a warning: The Legislature, the citizens commission wrote, “should periodically evaluate” whether data center benefits “really exceed the cost of the tax incentives” over the long term.

Grant Forsyth, the chief economist for private utility Avista and chair of the citizen commission that wrote the admonition, said the audit in 2017 had found the industry in general sustains few full-time, permanent jobs after they’re built.

“It was this notion that if we were going to continue this tax break, we would have to be with the understanding that it wasn’t necessarily going to be a big job creator,” Forsyth said in an interview.

Despite the 2017 warning, the legislative audit committee’s staff and the citizen commission canceled a review last year of the rural data centers tax break and recently said an audit might not take place until 2034. The urban program will be evaluated in 2026.

Asked about the decision to postpone the review, Washington state Legislative Auditor Eric Thomas said the Legislature’s expansion of the tax break in 2022 meant new data needed to be collected. He said his team’s size limits what it can take on each year.

“We don’t have the capacity to review every [tax] preference,” Thomas said. “I mean, just, we don’t.”

Virginia, the largest data center market in the U.S., has taken a different approach. The state resolved last year to conduct an in-depth, cost-benefit analysis of its data center industry and tax break. The decision followed a 2019 audit that, despite concluding it was reasonable for the state to continue the tax break, found only “moderate” economic benefit.

Washington state Sen. Bob Hasegawa, D-Tukwila, a longtime skeptic of the state’s corporate tax breaks, said without a specific disclosure required by state law, such tax preferences lie under a “veil of secrecy.”

Hasegawa, who proposed limiting the original version of the tax cut but voted in favor of its latest expansion, has tried to add transparency and clawback measures for various state tax breaks, with little success. The state passed so many new tax incentives — about 176 since 2013 — that it’s difficult to make sure they all have adequate oversight standards, he said.

“If we’re going to allow these companies or corporations to take advantage of these tax incentives, you’re supposed to incentivize something,” Hasegawa said. “We need to know it actually accomplished its goal and created jobs and elevated folks’ standard of living in our area.”

Eli Sanders contributed research while a student with the Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law, and Miyoko Wolf of The Seattle Times contributed research.

Correction

Aug. 6, 2024: This story originally mischaracterized which elected officials may view detailed job numbers related to a Washington tax break. Beyond the governor and chairpersons of the House Finance and Senate Ways and Means committees, the list includes the chairpersons of certain other legislative committees and the attorney general. The article has also been updated to clarify which state law establishes this list.

by Doug Bock Clark

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On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts — including unsuccessful efforts to cancel the registrations of two prominent Republicans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The confirmation of the attempts to misuse the portal follows separate discoveries by The Associated Press and The Current that the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters’ dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers — the exact information needed to cancel others’ voter registrations.

Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office, said the state had been monitoring cancellation requests for abuse and that’s how it spotted the ones targeting Greene’s and Raffensperger’s registrations.

He said that additional protections for less high-profile voters include warnings on the portal that abusing it could be a felony, features built into the website to prevent a single user from submitting multiple cancellations, reviews of requests by county election workers and a postcard that alerts voters whose registration is canceled. He said those safeguards make it extremely difficult to successfully cancel someone else’s voter registration. “Can this site be used to cancel a legitimate voter’s registration?” Hassinger said. “Yes, in the same sense that it is possible to win a lottery without buying a ticket. The wind could blow the winning ticket into your pocket. Not likely, but theoretically possible.”

Hassinger said that Raffensperger was unavailable for comment. Greene’s congressional office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Instead of apologizing and working to fix the problem, Brad Raffensperger is denying it exists,” said Max Flugrath, director of communications for Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. “If the secretary of state won’t do what it takes to protect Georgians and their voting access, advocates will do everything we can to ensure voters have the information needed to register, cast a ballot and have their vote count.”

The official X account for Georgia Senate Democrats posted that the voter registration cancellation portal “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.” In response, one commenter replied with the birthdays of Republican officials, including Greene and Raffensperger, noting: “​​Lots of people have their birthday in the public domain.” One user posted, “Overwhelm them with cancelled well-known Republican's registrations!”

To start the cancellation process on the portal, all users need is a voter’s name, date of birth and county of residence. To finalize the cancellation request, they also must provide the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their full driver’s license number. There’s also an option to fill out a form with that information and print and send it to the voter’s county election office or the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. Hassinger said that election workers would not approve any paper request that lacked a Social Security number or driver’s license number.

The portal warns users that impersonating someone to cancel a voter registration is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Hassinger said the Secretary of State’s Office was consulting with in-house legal experts about whether to seek charges for the individuals who had attempted to cancel Raffensperger’s and Greene’s registrations.

According to Hassinger, information submitted to the portal is forwarded to the county election office where the voter is registered; workers there make the call about whether to approve the cancellation request. If they do, a postcard is sent to the voter’s address warning them that they will be removed unless the voter responds. A voter who missed the postcard and then tried to vote could still cast a provisional ballot, he said, which would still be counted once the voter attested that they had not intended for their registration to be canceled.

The July 29 launch of the portal came on the heels of legislation in 2021 and 2024 that has made it easier for Georgia residents to challenge voter registrations. Right-wing activists have challenged tens of thousands of voters in the state, though that process is different.

Hassinger said the cancellation website has built-in features that should prevent one user from submitting numerous cancellation requests. He also said the Secretary of State’s Office launched the site at the suggestion of its IT department, to make it easier and more secure for voters to cancel their registration when they move out of the state. He said the effort was independent of any of the provisions in the recent legislation or pressure from right-wing voter registration challengers.

The federally mandated process for election officials to remove inactive registrations takes years, with elections officials required to attempt to contact voters to verify that they have moved.

Hassinger said that the security measures of the site have proven effective, and because of that there have not been discussions about changing them. However, he said that there have been talks about improving software rollouts in the future, including potentially doing additional testing, bringing more coding in-house and increasing the budget for such work.

Hassinger also said the portal is more secure than the previous ways of canceling a voter’s registration, which required sensitive personal information to be sent via unencrypted emails or the mail, which could make tempting targets for identity thieves.

“We want to protect voters’ personally identifiable information,” Hassinger said. “That’s part of running secure elections, and that’s the job that we take very seriously.”

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

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

In the fall of 2022, Phoebe Petrovic, an investigative reporter at Wisconsin Watch and a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, noticed a pastor and his church appearing in local news coverage for their anti-LGBTQ+ protests. Looking closer revealed Pastor Matthew Trewhella’s startling history. And digging even deeper, she noticed an untold story: his broader influence on modern Republican politics. His rise helps illustrate the growing power of the Christian right in the Republican party. Here, Petrovic describes how she reported the story and what she learned.

What were the key takeaways from your reporting?

• A few decades ago, Trewhella was known as a militant anti-abortion activist. Today, he’s got a different reputation: thought leader on the far right, increasingly welcomed by Republicans.
• Trewhella helped to rehabilitate his reputation through his 2013 self-published book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” which uses a 16th-century Protestant doctrine to argue that government officials have a God-given right and duty to defy laws, policies or court opinions deemed “unjust or immoral” under “the law of God.”
• He’s preached this doctrine to county Republican parties and local groups across the country, even to the National Sheriffs’ Association, a preeminent law enforcement organization.
• His book has influenced Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions. At least 10 measures across the country refer to lesser magistrates. One of the earliest, issued in 2019, was authored by a county commissioner who has described reading Trewhella’s book as a “turning point” for him.
• A prominent booster of debunked election conspiracy claims is using Trewhella’s book to disrupt future elections.

How does Trewhella fit into the election? What does he say about his work?

• In the cast of characters who might influence the upcoming election, Trewhella is not rallying crowds the same way as Steve Bannon, the former Donald Trump strategist, or Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA. Trewhella is more behind the scenes, providing a religious justification for some far-right policies and causes.
• Trewhella says that he promotes nonviolence. But after an activist killed an abortion provider in 1993, he signed a document describing the murder of these doctors as “justifiable.”
• In a brief interview, I asked Trewhella about his reputational shift over the decades. He responded: “Most people will always only care about three things in life: me, myself and I. … It’s only because of their mundane, self-absorbed lives that they would think someone like me is an extremist. That’s my answer.”
• Trewhella did not respond to over a dozen attempts to set up a second interview. He did not answer written questions by email and refused a certified letter containing them.

What did experts tell you about Trewhella?

• Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, which studies threats to democracy and human rights, has tracked Trewhella for decades. Clarkson said, “All of those county commissioners and mayors and whatnot who are entertaining this stuff, they’re putting people’s lives and the entirety of civil order at risk by playing footsie with Matt Trewhella.”
• Another extremism researcher, Devin Burghart, said, “I think that the public needs to know that he’s a dangerous theocrat, who would fundamentally alter the United States in irreparable ways that would harm many, including women, people of color and the LGBTQ community.” Burghart is president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which tracks the far right.

What are some details that didn’t make it into the story?

• Trewhella has given sermons about violence, saying that pacifism is “heresy” and that “violence is a tool.” After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, he gave a sermon titled “A Gathering of Patriots” in which he said, “Tyrants must be confronted with force or violence at times because that is the only way to defeat them and to cause their harm and their injustice to others to stop.”
• Timothy Bachleitner, a member of Trewhella’s church, is the chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County. Reached by phone, Bachleitner said he received Trewhella’s blessing before seeking the position and that he has brought the doctrine of the lesser magistrates into his role.
• Trewhella is focused on counties. He organized a conference called “County before Country” with the goal of “expanding God’s Kingdom through Christian localism.”

This story took a lot of research. What else do you want to share about this subject?

Some Republican operatives in Wisconsin questioned why we were doing this story. They said Trewhella was old news from the ’90s. That’s not what our reporting showed. We found him cited by county commissioners, state lawmakers and former Trump administration officials, all in the past several years. In my home state of Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Waukesha County, the heart of the state’s Republican politics, has invited Trewhella to speak twice and promotes his teachings and book on its website, although its leaders downplayed the link when asked for comment.

“I just can’t imagine that they’d support this person,” said Bill Kruziki, a Republican former sheriff in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. “You can quote me on this: I think it’s a shame they do that.”

The reporting process itself was one of the most interesting I’ve had. One of my first steps entailed sending records requests to local officials who served in areas where Trewhella had given presentations. Within days, Trewhella had obtained a copy of the request and shared it on his social media profile and email newsletter, writing, “The wicked are trembling!”

And in the final stages of the reporting, I requested an interview with Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, who cited Trewhella when defending his calls to ignore federal law that violated “God’s word.” An aide denied my request and included in his email “a brief gospel exhortation,” urging me and my readers “to turn from sin, run to Christ, trust Him, and enjoy fellowship with him forever.”

by Alec MacGillis

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

In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank a few blocks from the Capitol. Their aim was ambitious and farsighted: to start building the next Republican administration, two years before a Republican president might again take office.

The group’s leaders originally cast the initiative as candidate-agnostic, intended to assist the 2024 Republican nominee, whoever that might be. But there was no real doubt who the envisioned beneficiary was. The team included several former members of the Trump administration, and the whole effort was geared to address a perceived shortcoming of that White House: its failure to fill enough key government positions with Trump loyalists. So few had expected Trump to win in 2016 that hiring had been left mostly to GOP veterans, who brought in establishment figures and never managed to fill some slots at all, leaving the president exposed to the bureaucratic resistance that his acolytes believe undermined him at every step: the dreaded “deep state.”

They were determined not to let this happen again. This time, Trump would take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Thus the name of this new effort at Heritage, Project 2025. It would consist of four “pillars”: an 887-page policy plan, a database of conservatives willing to serve in the administration, training seminars for potential new appointees on the functions of government and a battle plan for each agency.

In recent months, Project 2025 has gotten attention for some of the more radical proposals in its policy plan — such as reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Their attacks were so effective that Trump has publicly disavowed the effort (while selecting a running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is closely allied with Heritage).

This week, as Project 2025 faced denunciations from the Trump campaign, the project’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role. Trump’s campaign co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said in a statement that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed, and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.” For Dans, it was a sudden end — or at least a pause — in a remarkable ascent from obscurity.

But then again, his resignation was at least partly symbolic: The work of Project 2025 is largely done. Under Dans, the project has assembled a database of more than 10,000 names — job candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump’s cause — who will be ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. Project 2025 has delivered a toolkit, ready for use, to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first.

The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.

This was the mission that brought people together at Heritage for those three days, with the task of designing the personnel database that would populate the next administration, all under the supervision of Dans, a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a slow, jut-chinned way of speaking and traces of a Baltimore accent.

Not long ago, Dans, 55, would have seemed an unlikely person for the role. The son of a liberal Johns Hopkins University professor, Dans was a New York lawyer who before Trump’s election had never served in government. For years following that election, he had tried and failed to find a place in the administration, seemingly in spite of a celebrity connection: His wife was a fitness coach for Karlie Kloss, the supermodel sister-in-law of Jared Kushner. Finally, in 2019, Dans got in the door, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Some four years later, here he was, hoping to build the next administration. Dans envisioned the personnel database that he wanted to create as a “conservative LinkedIn.” To help explain it, he displayed sketches he had made. They depicted the online file for a sample applicant — “Betsy Ross.” One page would show her occupation, which of the conservative organizations supporting Project 2025 had suggested her and which agencies she was being considered for. Another would show the findings of an internal review of her application, her progress on the training sessions (one of which Dans called “Deep State 101”) and any “red flags.” Yet another would show additional vetting: a “webcrawl” report; her performance on the Project 2025 questionnaire, which would ask detailed questions about ideological and policy beliefs; and more. The database would allow administration officials to search for candidates of a certain profile to fit a certain role.

Dans’ sketches (Obtained by ProPublica)

This was what Dans wanted the Heritage staffers gathered in the room and the tech engineers they’d contracted from Oracle to build: the engine of Trump 2.0. It would be a personnel machine not only far beyond what the first Trump administration had at its disposal, but beyond what any other administration had enjoyed, either. According to one person in attendance, the database would take several months to build and would cost upward of $2 million. It would reach outside the usual channels to draw in MAGA believers from across the country. And Dans was at the helm. “There was no one who had a better idea of it than he did,” the person in attendance told me. “He was driving the whole thing.”

As the database development progressed in the months that followed, Dans stressed a detail that made it even more far-reaching. He did not want the positions being filled to be limited to the 4,000 or so slots that are reserved for political appointments. He also wanted it to suggest people for roles that are currently assigned to career employees, in keeping with the plans for Schedule F.

Propelling the project has been a worldview that can be easily overlooked amid Trump’s talk about restoring the halcyon days of his first term. The people preparing for his return to the White House emphatically do not view his first term as a success. Rather, they view it as a missed opportunity to implement the MAGA vision. For Dans, Trump’s first term was an object lesson in how difficult it could be to reach Trump’s goals without a captive bureaucracy.

The former president’s supporters are determined that a second Trump administration would be much more organized than the first, stocked with foot soldiers who are both loyal and capable of moving policy forward. Dans declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond on the record to a detailed list of questions, but he has been laying out his thinking in interviews with conservative media outlets. “We’re going to get this done right on the next go-round,” he told Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, on her podcast last winter. And in essence, that will mean cleaning house, he said. “If a person can’t get in and fire people right away, what good is political management?”

Dans in his office at the Heritage Foundation (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

Paul Dans was raised, in the 1970s and ’80s, in a family that embodied liberal idealism. Peter Dans was a professor of medicine who had enlisted in the Public Health Service; started an STD clinic and a migrant health clinic while on faculty at the University of Colorado; and served in the office of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who founded Earth Day. Paul’s mom, Colette Lizotte, was a French teacher who had previously worked as a chemist at the National Institutes of Health.

The family lived in a hilly, verdant stretch north of Baltimore. Paul and his twin brother, Tom, hung out with the other smart kids at Dulaney High School; they played sports and were on the debate team. “Both were very bright kids, very well behaved,” recalled Phil Sporer, who attended school with them from early on. “The Dans boys were everybody’s perfect child.”

The first hints of Dans’ political orientation emerged in college. He went to MIT, where he majored in economics, joined a frat, played on the lacrosse team and, as classmate Juan Latasa told me, stood apart from the “political correctness” that was rising at elite campuses around 1990. “It wasn’t always easy for such students. It was a very liberal place,” Latasa said. “It was tough.”

Dans stayed on at MIT to get his master’s in city planning. His thesis on the redevelopment of industrial parks, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, showed him still wrestling with competing impulses. There was Reagan-style optimism: “The myriad crises which America must grapple with in coming years pale in magnitude to the nation’s gifted legacy.” But there was also a hint of resigned declinism, with Dans addressing an “age of diminished expectations.”

At the University of Virginia School of Law, which Dans attended next, his transformation became explicit: He joined the campus branch of the Federalist Society, the conservative network founded by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago in the 1980s, and he rose to become chapter president. “I was always attracted with the Federalist Society message about how some daring students stood up at Yale Law School and challenged the hegemony there and really was trying to speak truth to power,” he told hosts Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim last year on “Moment of Truth,” a podcast produced by American Moment, a conservative organization now aligned with Project 2025.

Still, Dans left little mark on his law school classmates, perhaps partly because he took a year off to study in Paris. I reached out to a couple dozen of his peers, and an email from a lawyer in Dallas was representative: “I wish I could help but I do not remember any details about Paul Dans.”

Dans’ fixation on the federal bureaucracy began at home. The idealism of the 1960s brought his parents to Washington, where they met while working at the National Institutes of Health. “They had basically come up through the JFK, Kennedy-esque, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’” era, he told Sharma and Solheim.

Dans didn’t seriously consider following his parents into public service — law school debt precluded that option, he said — but he would ultimately become wrapped up in a debate that had first inspired them. They went to Washington during the federal government’s great post-World War II expansion, when the ranks of career employees began swelling and when more job protections started accruing to them, sparking a decadeslong argument that has carried on to this day. To federal employee unions and other defenders of the bureaucracy, such protections were in the spirit of the Pendleton Act, the 1883 law that created the modern federal workforce, along with mechanisms for employment based on merit. But to many conservative critics, and some good-government liberals, the job protections that federal workers gained in the 1960s undermined the “merit based” nature of the civil service by making it difficult to remove ineffectual workers.

After law school, Dans chose a different meritocracy, joining a wave of young attorneys in the New York corporate legal world in the late ’90s. But Dans stood out. He was much more conservative than most of his colleagues. He prided himself on being one of very few in his Upper West Side building to get the New York Post. He admired Donald Trump for bringing a “can-do spirit back … building on the skyline again.”

Some colleagues kept their distance, but not Julio Ramos, a fellow junior associate at the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. Dans kidded Ramos about his lefty politics and regaled him with talk of supply-side economics and Reagan. It was all very civil. “Even though he was from the right,” Ramos told me, “he didn’t have any hatred toward the left.”

Dans left after three years to become an associate at another large firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, and after two years there eventually landed at a less prestigious firm, where his cases included a lawsuit between Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty line and Costco over perfume labeling. By 2009, having not made partner anywhere, and two years into his marriage to Mary Helen Bowers, a former New York City Ballet dancer, Dans went into solo practice.

Dans has criticized the legal field for what he perceives to be anti-conservative discrimination. “We are, as a profession, really getting snowed under right now,” he said on the “Moment of Truth” podcast. “Republicans and conservatives have not stood up in the face of, kind of, cancel culture, and [these] Marxist, Saul Alinsky attacks.”

Even the moment he has often framed as his biggest triumph affirmed Dans’ alienation from liberal lawyers. In 2009, he was one of hundreds of attorneys hired to defend Chevron and its employees against a multibillion-dollar lawsuit for oil pollution in Ecuador. According to the journalist Michael Goldhaber, Dans was hired at $100 an hour — less than 5% of the top rate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which was leading Chevron’s defense.

As Dans later told Goldhaber, he had an epiphany: While watching the documentary film “Crude,” an exposé of Chevron in Ecuador that was done in collaboration with the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer on the case, Steven Donziger, Dans realized that the outtakes from the film should be subpoenaed, to see if the filmmaker captured any legal malfeasance by Donziger. Dans put the suggestion in a memo.

As it turned out, the subpoenaed outtakes did prove to be damning. Chevron sued Donziger in U.S. federal court, ultimately resulting in a ruling that the company did not have to pay the $9.5 billion judgment. Dans took full credit: “I came up with a theory that we could get documentary film outtakes, basically caught them doing their nefarious acts on video,” he told Martin on her podcast.

According to other lawyers on the case, the story is more complicated: Although Dans wrote a memo suggesting the outtakes be targeted, others started the push for subpoenas — and came up with the necessary legal basis for seeking the crucial outtakes — independently of Dans raising the idea.

When the Chevron case was over, Dans was back on his own, handling motley litigation, including a patent fight between two manufacturers of sheet-pile wall systems and a class action against Frito-Lay regarding its claims that some of its products were made with all-natural ingredients. The address for Dans’ solo practice was a mail drop at the New York City Bar Association.

Toward the end of the aughts, as President Barack Obama’s first term wore on, Dans’ conservatism began to take on a new shape. He spent a lot of time online. “I’m one of the people sitting at his kitchen counter, you know, on the bench there, on the stool kind of going, How can that be? That’s crazy,” he told Martin. “You’re clicking … you know, refreshing the Drudge Report like 100 times a day.”

One thing he clicked on was Trump’s conspiracist claims about Obama’s origins: “I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president, if you will,” he told Sharma and Solheim. Dans got excited when rumors spread in 2011 that Trump would be going to New Hampshire to announce a run for president. Alas, it didn’t happen.

Early in the 2016 primary season, Dans attended a dinner of the steering committee for the New York City Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. As he later recalled to Sharma and Solheim, someone asked whom people were supporting for president, and around the table it went: “I like Jeb.” “I like Marco.” “I like Jeb.”

Dans watched in bewilderment. Here were all these New York Republicans, and no one had yet mentioned the man who lived a few blocks away, who had decided to run for president this time. Finally, it was Dans’ turn. “Well, I like Trump, and I think he’s going to win,” he later told Sharma and Solheim. “I like him because I’m sick of losing.”

That fall, Dans headed to the Pittsburgh area to volunteer for Trump. He had worked on other campaigns, but none had ever felt like this. “There was no passion,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “We were hungry for a candidate who could really speak to Americans. … Donald Trump delivered.”

Trump’s appeal to Dans verged on the tribal: He came to see himself as “a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” as he told Sharma and Solheim, citing the working-class, ethnic Catholic roots of his ancestors — his paternal grandfather was born to Spanish immigrant parents and had been a merchant mariner, and his mother hailed from French Canadian mill workers in Rhode Island. Never mind that his father was a medical professor who had raised Dans in an affluent suburb.

When Trump won, Dans eagerly sent off his resume. “Next stop, you know, Department of Justice, right?” he said to Martin years later, recalling his confidence. But no. As he also told Sharma and Solheim, the response was “crickets.”

His explanation? He was too MAGA. “There were so many people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist,” he told Martin. He was advised to instead slip in “under the radar” as “just your milquetoast Republican appointee.” Watching his accounts of this disappointment, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Dans, whose affect in interviews can come off as both genial and awkward, like the chatty, perhaps too chatty, guy at the airport bar.

Finally, late in 2018, Dans came to Washington for a Federalist Society meeting and connected with James Bacon, a college student who was working as confidential assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. With Bacon’s help, and with the benefit of his master’s in city planning, Dans finally broke in, in July 2019, as a senior adviser in HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development.

Career staff at HUD didn’t know what to make of Dans. “We tried to figure out what his role was,” one of them told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He kind of wandered in,” the career employee said. “He was fairly disdainful of the career staff and did not have a lot of respect for why things were the way they were.” For Dans, his arrival was a “real baptism” in how the government actually works. “You don’t realize that the federal government is just an avalanche of money shooting out of various agencies,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “It’s trying to tame this spew of money and direct in the right way, is what you’re doing when you get to an agency.”

As Dans saw it, the career employees were the problem. They were biased against conservatives, and they disregarded changes sought by the duly elected administration. Dans also blamed fellow appointees, too many of whom were clueless about the actual work and thus willing to cede decision-making to career employees. “You came and you went to cocktail parties, and you had your birthday cakes around the office and, you know, maybe a couple of ribbon cuttings, and you got to go on a little international junket,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “And meanwhile, everything else is kind of going at the same level.”

By late 2019, the White House was coming to share Dans’ diagnosis. James Sherk, then a special assistant on the Domestic Policy Council, began compiling purported examples of what they viewed as deep-state obstinacy that Trump should have been able to discipline with dismissals, including anonymous reports about Environmental Protection Agency employees withholding information about legal cases from political appointees and about Department of Justice lawyers refusing to investigate discrimination against Asian Americans at Yale.

The ultimate example of perceived perfidy came in December 2019, when the House used the testimony of federal employees to approve two articles of impeachment against Trump: for using the levers of powers to pressure Ukraine into discrediting Biden and for obstructing Congress. This gave Trump and his remaining White House coterie new resolve to take more control of hiring.

Trump turned the Presidential Personnel Office over to John McEntee, his 29-year-old former personal assistant who had left the White House in 2018 after a background check found that he posed a security risk due to his frequent gambling. (McEntee, now an adviser for Project 2025, has declined to comment about the background check in the past.) McEntee recruited Bacon, the college student, to assist him in overhauling personnel, and, looking for someone to join in the effort, they settled on Paul Dans. The person who had barely made it into the administration had impressed them with his critiques of the status quo.

In February 2020, the White House installed Dans at Office of Personnel Management as “White House liaison and senior adviser to the director” — its eyes and ears there.

Dans, encouraged by McEntee, wasted no time. He quickly ordered the removal of the agency’s chief of staff, Jonathan Blyth, and asserted so much authority across the agency that its director, Dale Cabaniss, who had spent years as a Republican staff member in the Senate, decided to leave as well. Cabaniss was replaced by an interim director, Michael Rigas, but people at the agency told me that Dans was the de facto director for the remainder of the year; late in 2020, he was named chief of staff. (Rigas and Blyth did not respond to requests for comment; Cabaniss declined to comment on the record.) So total was the takeover of the personnel process that Dans’ colleagues took to referring to him, McEntee and their allies as “the coup group.”

One of Dans’ first assertions of authority came at a senior staff meeting after Cabaniss’ departure, amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to another Trump appointee, some 20 people were present in the conference room at OPM’s headquarters near the National Mall when the agency’s then-chief information officer, Clare Martorana, said that, like most other agencies, it would use Zoom for online meetings.

Dans erupted, declaring that Zoom, which was founded by a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., posed the risk of spying by China. Martorana took in his outburst with “a combination of anger, amusement and just dumbstruck awe,” the Trump appointee recalled. She then tried to explain that Zoom was on the government’s approved list of vendors and that many other agencies were using it. This did not mollify Dans.

As 2020 went on, Dans’ colleagues became accustomed to his insistent demands, which, coupled with his large frame, could make him an intimidating presence. Dans wanted to hire as many appointees as possible in the final year of Trump’s term in office, and he wanted the agency’s processes to move faster. “He would just throw bombs into senior staff meetings,” said the appointee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, “and they would say: ‘What are we supposed to do with this? He can’t be serious with this.’”

In October 2020, less than two weeks before the election, Trump signed an executive order creating Schedule F, the new category of career employees in key positions who would now be easier to remove.

Over at OPM, Dans was busy with a related effort, seeking to recategorize positions in the Senior Executive Service — higher-ranking managerial slots across the government that are mostly filled with career employees — into a general category that would allow the president to appoint more of them. He was also engaged in another aspect of the administration’s new emphasis on personnel: making sure that OPM appointees answered long ideological questionnaires and met for interviews with staffers to assess their fitness for staying on in a second Trump term.

Those who dealt with Dans at OPM told me that they tried to respond to his demands as best they could, but that he often grew agitated when told that OPM did not have the ability to do what he wanted. He seemed to take such explanations as a personal affront. “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” the appointee said.

Colleagues chalked up his outbursts to insecurity born of his not understanding how the government worked and being broadly out of his depth. “He reminded me of some of the people who show up at Republican conventions,” said a second Republican appointee at the agency, who, like the first, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Those people usually show up and then go home. They show up and are vocal, but they’re not like, ‘Now I’m going to go do the boring work of the sausage-making of government.’”

Donald Devine, who led OPM during the Reagan administration and whom the Trump administration had brought on as an adviser during this period, scoffs at such critiques. “If you do anything, people aren’t going to like it, and that’s why he’s so different,” Devine told me. “Most of the other people in the executive office of OPM weren’t doing much, so people didn’t care about them. He’s a serious person trying to do a serious job. You don’t see a lot of that, and that’s why I like him so much.”

Dans’ only problem, Devine said, was that he ran out of time. “The major things were going to be done the next term,” he said. “It was too late to do anything before they figured out how to run personnel.”

After the election, Dans stayed hard at work at OPM, even as other appointees started to vanish in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Since then, Dans has criticized prosecutions of those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “The unfortunate thing is it does send a message to people that you shouldn’t criticize the government,” he said in a C-SPAN interview last year.

A year and a half after arriving in Washington, Dans left for his new home in South Carolina, near his wife’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, while she was expecting their fourth child. “I went home kind of in this Cincinnatus sort of spirit: return to the farm. Our farm being in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in a subdivision,” he quipped to Sharma and Solheim.

But then he turned serious: “We’re ‘God, country and family.’ And now is the time to go put a little more emphasis on the God and family part of that. But we’ll be back for the country thing.”

With the 2024 election approaching, with Trump leading Biden and then Harris in most national polls and with Dans’ vision of reshaping the bureaucracy heavily influencing the Trump campaign, it finally seemed like Dans’ moment might actually be arriving. On Tuesday’s episode of the “War Room” podcast — founded by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who is now in prison — Dans sometimes sounded triumphant. “In order to take this back, the swamp isn’t going to drain itself,” he said. “We need outsiders coming in committed to doing this. … With Project 2025, we built a pathway to encourage folks to do this.”

But in that same “War Room” episode on Tuesday, Dans decried the “great disinformation campaign” underway against Project 2025, “almost a hoax.” He listed some of the mistruths that Democrats had voiced about the project’s proposals, including a claim by Harris that it would eliminate Social Security. “Just completely fallacious stuff,” he said. “It’s just one big bald-faced lie.”

It was plain that he was taking the attacks very personally, and with good reason. The Democrats’ campaign to turn Project 2025 into an albatross around Trump’s neck was succeeding, to the point where some sort of dramatic break was needed. Just hours after that episode aired came word that Dans would be stepping down. “We are extremely grateful for [Dans’] and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said.

In a note to Heritage staff, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Dans himself suggested that his mission was, essentially, complete. “The work of this project was due to wrap up with the nominating conventions of the political parties,” he wrote. “Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage.”

It was face-saving, but it was also largely true. The database was built; the training seminars had been taught. This time, the foot soldiers were ready to go, just waiting to be called on. “From the president’s lips to God’s ears that change is going to happen? It really happens below” the president, Dans said on “War Room.” “That’s the importance of recognizing: Personnel is really the cornerstone of the change.”

Disavowals or not, the logic of Project 2025 is embedded in the DNA of Trump’s plan to overhaul the government. Reinstating Schedule F is still a top-level agenda item. Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me that the agencies could end up defining the new employment category so broadly that it could encompass far more than 50,000 positions. “It will be a purge,” she said.

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, does not expect Trump to fire tens of thousands. Jettisoning just a couple of thousand, to make an example of them, may be enough. “They can fire 1,000 and put their heads on pikes, and then everyone else quickly falls into line,” he told me. “That way you have a terrified bureaucracy that still has institutional knowledge. That’s the more strategic way to use Schedule F, to scare the bejesus out of 49,000 people and force them into line.” Sherk, the author of Schedule F, suggested as much to me. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap the ability to implement your agenda. You use it to go after bad actors and rank incompetents.”

That would still leave the challenge of finding people to fill the 4,000 slots for appointees and however many hundreds or thousands of openings are created by firings. Many Republicans who served in the first Trump administration are leery of serving in a second. “The last administration was a joke, and they had a real problem recruiting,” a Washington attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against his firm, told me. “Who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people going to come forward, quality people? Not a fucking chance.”

This was precisely Dans’ mission with Project 2025: to find a whole new corps of people willing to come to the capital and do the work of implementing the Trump agenda that the usual D.C. fixtures refuse to do. How many will be suited to the task? “We have to recruit the talent to get to Washington,” Dans told Martin. “Ultimately, what Project 2025 is is a call to action for patriots to come serve in Washington.”

Will Dans himself be among that number? As Devine sees it, Dans’ current defenestration is political, and temporary. “Paul is too bright and intelligent not to,” he said. “They’ll pick him up somewhere.” Devine said that he’s spoken with Dans since his decision to resign. “He’s doing well,” Devine said. “He’s ready to go on to fight. The memorandum he sent [to Heritage colleagues] ends with that: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” Dans still sees himself as a field general for a new class of Trump bureaucrats, one that will come to power if Trump wins, whether the effort is called Project 2025 or not.

There is a paradox at the core of this. Dans was never looking for the proverbial farmers with pitchforks, because he is aware of how complex the work of the federal government is. Dans was looking for people who are both angry enough about the state of the country to want to commit four years to serving Donald Trump in Washington to fix it, and yet sufficiently versed in the mechanisms of government to be able to restrain it. “We need many more eyes and ears, many more technicians on the ground,” he told Sharma and Solheim.

It is idealistic, in its way, the conception of an aggrieved, underappreciated elite that is ready to be summoned to Washington. It sounds a lot like, well, Paul Dans. The question is, how many others like him have been out there all along, just waiting for this?

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Doris Burke contributed research.

by Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times

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

When lawmakers in Washington set out to expand a lucrative tax break for the state’s data center industry in 2022, they included what some considered an essential provision: a study of the energy-hungry industry’s impact on the state’s electrical grid.

Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed that provision but let the tax break expansion go forward. As The Seattle Times and ProPublica recently reported, the industry has continued to grow and now threatens Washington’s effort to eliminate carbon emissions from electricity generation.

Washington’s experience with addressing the power demand of data centers parallels the struggles playing out in other states around the country where the industry has rapidly grown and tax breaks are a factor.

Virginia, home to the nation’s largest data center market, once debated running data centers on carbon-emitting diesel generators during power shortages to keep the lights on in the area. (That plan faced significant public pushback from environmental groups, and an area utility is exploring other options.)

Dominion Energy, the utility that serves most of Virginia’s data centers, has said that it intends to meet state requirements to decarbonize the grid by 2045, but that the task would be more challenging with rising demands driven largely by data centers, Inside Climate News reported. The utility also has indicated that new natural gas plants will be needed.

Some Virginia lawmakers and the state’s Republican governor have proposed reversing or dramatically altering the clean energy goals.

A northern Virginia lawmaker instead proposed attaching strings to the state’s data center tax break. This year, he introduced legislation saying data centers would only qualify if they maximized energy efficiency and found renewable resources. The bill died in Virginia’s General Assembly. But the state authorized a study of the industry and how tax breaks impact the grid.

“If we’re going to have data centers, which we all know to be huge consumers of electricity, let’s require them to be as efficient as possible,” said state Delegate Richard “Rip” Sullivan Jr., the Democrat who sponsored the original bill. “Let’s require them to use as little energy as possible to do their job.”

Inslee’s 2022 veto of a study similar to Virginia’s cited the fact that Northwest power planners already include data centers in their estimates of regional demand. But supporters of the legislation said their goal was to obtain more precise answers about Washington-specific electricity needs.

Georgia lawmakers this year passed a bill to halt the state’s data center tax break until data center power use could be analyzed. In the meantime, according to media reports, the state’s largest utility said it would use fossil fuels to make up an energy shortfall caused in part by data centers. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp then vetoed the tax break pause in May.

Lawmakers in Connecticut and South Carolina have also debated policies to tackle data center power usage in the past year.

“Maybe we want to entice more of them to come. I just want to make sure that we understand the pros and the cons of that before we do it,” South Carolina’s Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said in May, according to the South Carolina Daily Gazette.

Countries such as Ireland, Singapore and the Netherlands have at times forced data centers to halt construction to limit strains on the power grid, according to a report by the nonprofit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The report’s recommendations for addressing data center power usage include encouraging the private sector to invest directly in renewables.

Sajjad Moazeni, a University of Washington professor who studies artificial intelligence and data center power consumption, said states should consider electricity impacts when formulating data center legislation. Moazeni’s recent research found that in just one day, ChatGPT, a popular artificial intelligence tool, used roughly as much power as 33,000 U.S. households use in a year.

“A policy can help both push companies to make these data centers more efficient and preserve a cleaner, better environment for us,” Moazeni said. “Policymakers need to consider a larger set of metrics on power usage and efficiency.”

Eli Sanders contributed research while a student with the Technology, Law and Public Policy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

Four years before a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, prompting nationwide demonstrations, hundreds of people marched in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to protest officers’ killing of Alton Sterling in front of a convenience store. Law enforcement responded in force: Officers armed with rifles, body armor and gas masks pushed protesters back and forcibly arrested about 200 people. Some were injured.

A group of 13 protesters and two journalists filed suit, alleging their constitutional rights were violated when they were arrested. Eventually, the city agreed to pay them $1.17 million. Photographs and videos taken by protesters, witnesses and journalists were critical in contradicting officers’ claims that protesters were the aggressors, said William Most, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

On Thursday, a Louisiana law will go into effect that will make it a misdemeanor for anyone, including journalists, to be within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer if the officer orders them back. The two independent journalists who sued, whose photos were used to support allegations against the police, said they wouldn’t have been able to capture those images if the law had been on the books during the protests.

Karen Savage was working for a news site focused on juvenile justice issues on the second day of the demonstrations in July 2016 when she photographed officers putting a Black man in a chokehold as they detained him. Cherri Foytlin, who was working for a small newspaper and a community media project, said she was within 4 feet when she photographed officers violently dragging a Black man off private property and arresting him.

Foytlin and Savage said they are hesitant to cover protests in Louisiana now that they could face criminal charges if they’re too close to an officer. “I was thinking about how far exactly 25 feet is, and, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be whatever the officer wants it to be,” Savage said. “And if it doesn’t get to court, it won’t matter because they will have accomplished what they wanted, which was to get the cameras away.”

On Wednesday, a coalition of media companies representing a couple dozen Louisiana news outlets, including Verite News, filed suit against Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, State Police Superintendent Robert Hodges and East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III, alleging the law violates the First Amendment.

In a statement provided Thursday, Murrill said the law ensures law enforcement officers can do their jobs without being threatened or impeded by others. She said she looks forward to “defending this reasonable response to documented interference with law enforcement.” State Police spokesperson Capt. Nick Manale declined to comment on the suit; a representative for Moore did not respond to a request for comment.

Police buffer laws, as they are commonly known, are relatively new; Louisiana is the fourth state to enact one. Although those states already prohibit interfering with police officers, supporters say buffer laws are necessary to protect police from distrustful, aggressive bystanders. And with advances in cellphone cameras, including zoom lenses, supporters say there’s no need to get close to officers in order to record their activities.

“There’s really nothing within a 25-feet span that someone couldn’t pick up on video,” Rep. Bryan Fontenot, R-Thibodaux, the sponsor of Louisiana’s bill and a former law enforcement officer, said during a legislative hearing this year. At the same time, he said, “that person can’t spit in my face when I’m making an arrest.” (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Foytlin disagreed. “You can’t even get an officer’s badge number at 25 feet. So there’s no way to hold anyone accountable.”

She and Savage said police targeted them during the Baton Rouge protests because they were taking photos of protesters being slammed to the ground, dragged across the pavement, choked and zip-tied by law enforcement officers. Both journalists were charged with obstructing public rights of way and resisting arrest. Prosecutors did not pursue those charges.

The journalists and protesters sued the city of Baton Rouge, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Louisiana State Police, claiming law enforcement officers had used excessive force when arresting them. The Sheriff’s Office was dismissed as a defendant because a judge concluded its deputies weren’t involved with those arrests. The State Police settled for an undisclosed amount in 2021. The suit against Baton Rouge went to trial in 2023; the city agreed to the million-dollar settlement the day before closing arguments.

Neither the Sheriff’s Office nor the Baton Rouge Police Department responded to requests for comment. The Louisiana State Police declined to comment on the lawsuit or protests.

Foytlin said she didn’t think the settlement would cause law enforcement agencies to change their tactics; now, she believes they’ll be emboldened by the buffer law to crack down more harshly on anyone trying to document officers’ actions.

“From what I saw in Baton Rouge, and what they were able to get away with, I have no doubt that in the future, the consequences of trying to use your free speech or to protest are going to be much harsher,” she said.

“You Can’t Tase a Child.” “Watch me.”

Given the inconsistent use of police body-worn cameras, said Nora Ahmed, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, often the only way people can guard against false charges and prove that officers used excessive force is to film them in close proximity. “In the absence of video or audio evidence,” she said, “it’s very difficult to convince anyone that the story occurred in any way different other than what the police report.”

Such video was critical in a lawsuit Ahmed handled in which a woman sued two sheriff’s deputies over her arrest in St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.

As De’Shaun Johnson filmed deputies who were arresting his mother in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, in 2020, Deputy Ryan Moring told him to “get back” several times and pointed a Taser at him. Johnson, then 14 years old, refused. A new state law allows officers to arrest people if they remain within 25 feet after an officer orders them back. (Courtesy of Teliah Perkins)

Watch video ➜

The May 2020 incident started with an anonymous complaint about someone riding a motorcycle without a helmet in a Slidell neighborhood, according to the lawsuit. Deputies Ryan Moring and Kyle Hart showed up at Teliah Perkins’ home, writing in an incident report that they saw Perkins ride a motorcycle without a helmet. In Perkins’ lawsuit, she denied doing so.

The conversation quickly became heated. Perkins accused the deputies of harassing her because she is Black; the deputies wrote in the incident report that she was “irate” and verbally attacked them.

Perkins called for her son De’Shaun Johnson, then 14, and her nephew, then 15, to come outside and record what was happening, according to the deputies’ incident report and the videos. When they did, at least one of the deputies ordered them to go back on the porch, which was more than 25 feet away.

The boys ignored the deputies and continued to film from about 6 feet away. As Hart forced Perkins to the ground, Moring approached Johnson, shoving him and telling him to move back, according to Perkins’ lawsuit and her son’s video. When Perkins screamed that she was being choked, Moring stood in front of Johnson to block his view, he later admitted in his deposition. Moring then pointed his Taser at the boy.

“You can’t tase a child,” Johnson said, according to the lawsuit and the son’s video.

“Watch me,” Moring responded.

Perkins was arrested for resisting a police officer with force or violence, battery of a police officer, having no proof of insurance and failing to wear a helmet. She was found guilty only on the resisting charge; the others were dropped. She sued the deputies in federal court, claiming they had violated her and her son’s rights. An appeals court dismissed Perkins’ claims against the deputies, but her son’s claim against Moring went to trial. In May, a jury found that Moring had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Johnson and awarded him $185,000, to be paid by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Ahmed said she believes the jury was swayed by videos of the incident, which showed “with clear granularity exactly what was transpiring.”

Moring denied in court that he intentionally harmed Johnson and has filed a notice of appeal. The deputies’ lawyer didn’t comment for this story.

Teliah Perkins and her son De’Shaun Johnson outside their home in Slidell, Louisiana (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

In an interview with Verite News and ProPublica, Perkins said she fears what could have happened had the new law been in effect. The boys could have been arrested when they refused to move back to the porch. And from there, she said, neither would have been able to see or hear what was happening to her.

Johnson, who is about to start his first year at Alabama State University, said the videos he and his cousin took that day are the only evidence of what actually happened. Without them, he said, no one would have believed a 14-year-old boy’s claim that a deputy had threatened to shock him with a Taser simply because he was recording with a cellphone.

After George Floyd’s Murder, a New Tool to Keep the Public at Bay

There were no police buffer laws when Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street in 2020. Seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier stood several feet away and recorded a video that showed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes, causing Floyd to lose consciousness and die. The video was critical in securing Chauvin’s conviction for second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison.

In this image from a police body camera, Darnella Frazier, third from right, records on her cellphone a video of then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd’s neck and back for several minutes in 2020. (Minneapolis Police Department via AP)

Floyd’s murder fueled protests across the country and efforts to rein in the police. New York City ended qualified immunity, a legal defense used to shield officers from civil liability. Many states restricted the types of force officers can use, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The video of Chauvin “really drew people’s attention to how powerful these recordings can be in inspiring protests and legislative action,” said Grayson Clary, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I think some legislators are now trying to claw back ground that they feel they lost.”

Arizona state Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican from outside Phoenix who authored the first of these bills in 2022, wrote in an op-ed that police officers asked him to introduce it because “there are groups hostile to the police that follow them around to videotape police incidents, and they get dangerously close to potentially violent encounters.”

Kavanagh’s bill, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Doug Ducey, prohibited people from filming police within 8 feet. But federal courts across the country have affirmed the right to film the police, and a federal judge struck down the law after a coalition of media outlets and associations sued the state.

Indiana was the next state to pass a similar law. It, like the two others enacted since, doesn’t mention filming and requires people to stay at least 25 feet from police. That’s based on a controversial theory, often cited to justify police shootings, that someone armed with a knife can cover 21 feet running toward an officer before the officer can fire their weapon.

Shortly after the law was enacted in April 2023, an independent journalist sued the city of South Bend after an officer pushed him 25 feet from a crime scene and another officer ordered him to move back another 25 feet. The journalist claimed in the lawsuit that it was impossible to observe the crime scene from that distance. The state denied in court that the journalist’s rights were violated.

In January, a federal judge dismissed the journalist’s suit, stating that officers have a right to perform their jobs “unimpeded.” The judge said 25 feet is a “modest distance … particularly in this day and age of sophisticated technology” and that “any effect on speech is minimal and incidental.” That case is under appeal.

A second lawsuit in Indiana, filed in December by a group of news organizations and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is pending. They are suing the state attorney general and the prosecutor and sheriff of Marion County, where Indianapolis is located, arguing that it is “essential for reporters to be within 25 feet of law enforcement in order to record them.” In a court filing, the defendants have argued that the law doesn’t infringe on reporters’ ability to record police activities.

Florida’s law went into effect in April. An early version of that bill specified that it did not apply to the act of peacefully recording, photographing or witnessing a first responder, which it called a “legitimate purpose.” That language was taken out of the bill before it was passed.

Rep. Angela Nixon, D-Jacksonville, proposed changing the bill’s name to “The I Don’t Want the World to See the Police Kill an Unarmed Innocent Man Like George Floyd Again, So I Want To Protect Bad Cops and Violate Free Speech Act.” Her amendment failed.

If these laws stand up to constitutional challenges, “we’re going to see more states go down this road,” said Clary of the Reporters Committee.

The effect of Louisiana’s law may be limited in New Orleans, where the police department has been under federal oversight since 2013 due to widespread abuses, including excessive use of force and racial discrimination. New Orleans Independent Police Monitor Stella Cziment said the law may violate a court-approved list of reforms, which states that police must allow people to “witness, observe, record, and/or comment” on officers’ actions, including arrests and uses of force. Another provision says officers cannot arrest anyone for being nearby or recording them except under certain conditions, including risks to the safety of officers or others.

In response to questions from Verite News and ProPublica, the New Orleans Police Department said it is revising its policies to account for the new law, and those policies could “restrict officers’ actions” more than the law does. The NOPD said the Department of Justice and a team of court-appointed monitors will review any changes; neither responded to requests for comment.

However, the Louisiana State Police, which recently sent a contingent of troopers to New Orleans under a directive from Gov. Jeff Landry, does not have to abide by the terms of the consent decree, according to a federal judge. As such, troopers are free to invoke the new law.

The State Police is being investigated by the Department of Justice following a 2021 Associated Press investigation that uncovered more than a dozen incidents over the past 10 years in which troopers beat Black men and sought to cover up their actions. The State Police didn’t respond to a request for comment on those incidents.

When asked how troopers are being trained to use the new law, Manale said only that they undergo regular training on how to engage with the public. The State Police, Manale said, “strives to ensure a safe environment for the public and our public safety professionals during all interactions.”

Drew Costley of Verite News contributed reporting.

Update, Aug. 1, 2024: This story was updated to include a comment from Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill about the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana’s buffer law.

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main, and Haru Coryne, ProPublica

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

The first complaint about illegal vacation rentals at 1940 Carmen Ave., a rent-controlled apartment building just blocks from Hollywood Boulevard, arrived at the Los Angeles Housing Department nearly a decade ago.

“This place is crazy,” a tenant reported in 2015, according to an inspector’s note, “luggage up and down, different people always in and out. Not safe.”

Inspectors cited the owner for changing the building’s use without a permit. They warned him again the next year. But after that, housing inspectors appeared to drop the matter, even as they ordered the owner to correct other building code violations. A few years later, in 2020, a tenant complained that 14 of the 21 units were listed on Airbnb.

LA’s zoning laws have long prohibited turning apartments into hotel rooms, with a few exceptions. But in 2018, the City Council handed inspectors a new enforcement tool, an ordinance that specifically outlawed using rent-controlled dwellings for short-term rentals.

The Housing Department opened a case against 1940 Carmen but referred it to the planning department — even though the planning department doesn’t have the ability to fine or otherwise penalize violators. Planning department officials said they found no evidence of short-term rentals.

However, Booking.com recently listed one-bedroom units in the building for about $160 a night. Asked about short-term rentals, 1940 Carmen owner Alexander Stein said, “I would rather not discuss it. Thank you for calling, though,” before hanging up.

In all, residents and neighbors have made nearly two dozen complaints. The building even found international fame after the singer Mon Laferte told Rolling Stone she named her 2021 album “1940 Carmen” for the Airbnb where she stayed in LA — and was nominated for a Grammy for it.

What happened at 1940 Carmen has played out in dozens of other buildings across Los Angeles. Landlords are using rent-controlled apartments as vacation rentals in apparent violation of the law, an investigation by Capital & Main and ProPublica has found. In some cases, entire apartment buildings with more than 30 units are listed as boutique hotels on sites like Hotels.com and Booking.com.

By analyzing city databases and combing through online listings, the news organizations found 63 rent-controlled buildings where a tourist could book a room this spring. The number is likely far higher because many vacation rental websites like Airbnb don’t list exact addresses.

The findings are “shocking but not surprising,” said City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is spearheading efforts to tighten home-sharing enforcement. “The enforcement system we have set up in the city of Los Angeles fails to meet the spirit of the ordinance.”

Last year, Capital & Main and ProPublica found similar issues with a smaller category of affordable housing, called residential hotels, which are supposed to be preserved for the poorest Angelenos. But the new reporting on rent-controlled apartments shows the bureaucratic dysfunction in the city’s housing and planning departments runs far deeper.

As with residential hotels, inspection records and complaints obtained under the California Public Records Act revealed that the city’s enforcement system is riddled with inefficiencies and shortcomings.

The enforcement crisis threatens LA’s ability to preserve affordable housing as the city faces a soaring housing market and near-record homelessness. Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on housing on her first day in office in 2022. About 650,000 units, 70% of the city’s rental inventory, are rent-controlled, meaning building owners can’t raise rents by more than roughly 4% each year until the tenant moves out.

Housing Department spokesperson Sharon Sandow didn’t answer specific questions about enforcement problems and noted that multiple agencies oversee short-term rentals. She said, “We will continue to work with our colleagues to ensure enforcement.” The planning department didn’t respond to questions about the city’s home-sharing enforcement policies and procedures, referring them to the Housing Department.

An Airbnb spokesperson said by email, “there is no place on Airbnb for Hosts who circumvent the City’s Home-Sharing Ordinance, and we will continue to work closely with the City staff to address Hosts who try to evade the rules.” Expedia Group, which owns Hotels.com, said it “evaluates our listings on a regular basis and works with our partners in Los Angeles” to ensure compliance. Booking.com didn’t respond to emails requesting comment.

The buildings range from the small 1920s-style Rosemary Speakeasy, featuring a $288-a-night tower apartment with a winding staircase and a jacuzzi-style tub, to the the Venice V Hotel on the famous beach boardwalk, which for $600 a night offers panoramic views from penthouse suites named for silent-film stars, like Charlie Chaplin, who once lived in the building, then known as the Venice Waldorf. Guests, the hotel’s website says, can even see the ocean from the shower.

First image: The Venice V Hotel on the historic Venice Beach boardwalk. Second image: Tourists return bicycles inside the lobby of the Venice V. (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

Venice V owner Carl Lambert said he’s done nothing wrong by converting the building. “Everyone has been treated fairly,” Lambert said. “I comply with the law.” The Rosemary owner Izzy Kerian said his is a commercial building and denied knowledge of its rent-controlled status. “Too many questions, ma’am,” Kerian said. “I don’t understand anything. I’m just the business owner.”

The unchecked conversions come as “home sharing,” in which residents rent out their houses, spare bedrooms and apartments as hotel rooms, has boomed across the world over the past decade. That has left cities from Dallas to Vienna to Tokyo struggling to craft regulations to keep the $100 billion industry from devouring the local housing supply. Several academic studies have found short-term rentals drive up rents for residents, fueling the push for stronger regulation.

Elected officials in LA are considering how to strengthen its rules. The timing is important, housing activists say, as the city prepares to host the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — each of which is expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city.

A Tangled Enforcement System

Since the home-sharing ordinance passed, the Housing Department has heralded it as a powerful tool that would stop rogue hotel operators from eating up rental units. The law prohibits unregistered properties from advertising, and owners can be fined $586 per violation and up to $5,869 for repeat violations. Vacation rental websites can also be fined for listings that violate the ordinance.

Recent enforcement has persuaded some property owners to return their buildings to residential use, Sandow said. In 2022, the city settled a lawsuit against Vrbo, accusing it of processing thousands of illegal bookings, for $150,000. A spokesperson for Vrbo’s owner, Expedia, said the company is working “to help drive a high rate of compliance with local laws.”

But the LA planning department told the City Council last year that administrative citations won’t deter apartment owners who turn entire buildings into de facto hotels. Instead, it argued, legal action must be taken against property owners or managers who do so.

The city “is either unable or unwilling to actually enforce” the ordinance, said Nancy Hanna, an attorney for Better Neighbors LA, a home-sharing watchdog group. (Hanna works for a law firm that is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

The planning department has an automated system that crawls the internet, scanning listings to flag potentially ineligible properties when their owners apply for permission to post their homes on Airbnb or other websites.

Granicus, the contractor that runs the system, will have received $6.3 million over six years when its current contract expires in 2025. The company has sent out more than 18,400 warning letters to potential violators for listing rentals without registration. But the planning department said that’s too many cases for city staff to handle, so it rarely follows up.

Instead, agency officials told a City Council committee that they rely only on constituent or council complaints to detect violators.

Indeed, many of the buildings found by Capital & Main and ProPublica had received computer-generated warning letters, meaning the city had a chance to stop their short-term rentals. But few were cited.

The city is also missing another opportunity to catch potential violators. The LA Office of Finance maintains a list of hotel businesses in the city so that it can collect its 14% bed tax. Using this list, Capital & Main and ProPublica found more than 100 additional rent-controlled buildings where owners or residents had registered to operate hotel rooms.

Those buildings have thousands of apartments, but there doesn’t appear to be a system to flag rent-controlled properties on this list. Not all are actively operating as short-term rentals, according to interviews with people on the list. It’s unclear how many do so, as the agency wouldn’t disclose which businesses had recently paid hotel taxes, and because many vacation rental websites mask their listings’ locations.

Meg Wynne, a finance office spokesperson, said her agency is “not a regulatory authority” and doesn’t have the power to determine whether people applying for hotel tax certificates “are legally allowed to perform that activity.”

Even when the housing and planning departments have heard repeated complaints about the same property, like 1940 Carmen, owners escaped enforcement, thanks in part to a convoluted system in which cases must pass through multiple departments.

One record provided by Better Neighbors LA shows that even city employees are sometimes confused. The planning department’s complaint line registered a 2020 call from a woman who identified herself as a Housing Department employee. “She would like to know how the process works so she can inform tenants as well,” a call log reads.

Inspection records show that in several cases, the Housing Department found online ads or in-person evidence of short-term rentals but didn’t enforce the ordinance. In other cases, inspectors failed to cite building owners who told them outright that they were running hotels.

Even when inspectors do cite building owners, enforcing the law is slow. One reason it takes so long is that there haven’t been enough hearing officers to handle appeals.

At a housing and homelessness committee hearing last fall, city planner Lance Sierra told the group that once a citation has been issued, it “takes between two to three years to complete.”

The chairperson, Raman, was incredulous. “Two to three years …?” she asked.

Some owners have used the long delays and bureaucratic confusion to their advantage. Many have ignored the city’s letters warning them to stop short-term rentals. Others advertise tourist rooms while their appeals are pending, or even after paying fines, with no repercussions.

The Fight Over the Venice V

Nowhere is the home-sharing problem more acute than Venice Beach, once an ethnically and economically diverse haven for bohemians and struggling artists where rents were cheap. Now, part of LA’s Silicon Beach — Snapchat was based there in the 2010s — Venice has more home-sharing registrations than any other community in the city, and housing costs have skyrocketed.

James Adams, who grew up there, blamed short-stay rentals for his family’s housing issues.

“We live on top of each other,” he said, opening the door to a bright one-bedroom apartment a block from the ocean that he shares with his wife and their two daughters, 3 and 7.

Kelly Adams and her husband, James, are trying to make their one-bedroom apartment in Venice Beach work for their family of four. (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

The living situation works for now because the kids are little enough to share beds with their parents, Adams said. The couple, both teachers, can barely afford the $3,000 monthly rent, but he said he wants to stay in Venice as long as he can.

That’s become increasingly difficult because of the conversion of buildings like the Venice V.

When its owner, Lambert, purchased the Venice Waldorf in 2015, it was among a handful of rent-controlled beachfront apartments still affordable to students, retirees and middle-income workers. But over a few years, he bought out nearly all of the former tenants, transforming it into a hotel.

When the renovated Venice V opened, in 2021, Condé Nast Traveler gushed about how guests can “relax in a plush king size bed and watch the sailboats breeze by outside the window, and stargaze through the vintage style standing telescope at night.”

Local activists were less enthusiastic. “Owner is a serial violator of illegal conversion of rent stabilized apartments to illegal hotels in Venice,” read a 2021 complaint to the Housing Department — one of 18 against the Venice V since 2014 related to short-term rentals or construction without permits, housing files show. Lambert had been cited by the city for other conversions in Venice, but in two cases a city agency or court ruled in his favor.

Before the home-sharing ordinance, some short-term rentals had been allowed at the building. But by 2020, when Lambert’s construction supervisor told an inspector that all but two rooms would be turned into hotel accommodations, they were not.

First image: Commissioners gather at a West LA Area Planning Commission hearing in March. Second image: Venice V owner Carl Lambert (seated, in blue shirt) listens as an attendee addresses the commission. (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

Lambert has become the target of residents’ ire over the community’s dwindling housing supply. “I’m the whipping boy,” he said. “All the vim and vinegar from a small group is leveled against me.” Lambert wouldn’t answer specific questions about his properties, saying, “I don’t want to be the subject of a witch hunt.”

In 2021, the Housing Department fined Lambert $4,000 for eight violations of the home-sharing ordinance at the Venice V. Lambert appealed, and two years later, his attorney demanded the city rescind the fines, arguing the home-sharing ordinance didn’t apply and contending the city had unfairly singled Lambert out for enforcement.

Lambert’s appeal has still not been heard. But last year, the fines were “withdrawn pending further investigation,” according to a Housing Department email obtained through a public records request. Sandow, citing the probe, wouldn’t say why the citations were withdrawn or what was being investigated.

Still, in a separate case, Lambert won city approval last year to expand the hotel with a restaurant and theater space. In a lengthy decision, a zoning administrator concluded that the building’s short-term rentals were illegal. But he tossed the issue out as irrelevant, saying that his job was to focus only on whether the restaurant and theater were appropriate uses.

Lambert confers with Elizabeth Peterson, a land use consultant, at the West LA Area Planning Commission hearing. (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

At an appeal hearing in March, Lambert predicted that he’d not only win but that the city would eventually come down on his side on the short-term rentals.

“It’s LA,” Lambert said. “And they have wrong opinions at times. Finally, as it goes up the chain, you get an affirmative answer.”

After five hours of testimony and deliberation, he got the answer he wanted on the restaurant and theater.

The City Council is expected to vote on recommendations to tighten the home-sharing ordinance later this year. The ideas include allowing individuals to sue violators, creating a home-sharing enforcement team made up of staff from different city departments and offering residents rewards for reporting neighbors who violate the ordinance.

“I think you have to make it so that if you violate the law, you are very likely to get a penalty,” Raman said. “Unless we do that, we are going to see continued flouting of the laws — because flouting of the laws is very, very lucrative.”

Mollie Simon and Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Eric Umansky

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

New York City lawmakers are calling for the police commissioner to be stripped of his power to short-circuit officer misconduct cases. And the Office of the Inspector General for the New York Police Department has begun an independent investigation into the commissioner’s use of the practice, known as “retention.”

The actions come in response to reporting by ProPublica last month that revealed how Commissioner Edward Caban has exercised this little-known authority to prevent dozens of cases of alleged abuse from getting a public hearing.

The commissioner instead has decided these cases in private, often ordering no discipline for the officers. Some episodes were so serious that New York’s police oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded the officers likely committed crimes. Victims were not told their cases had been set aside, and the decisions were only disclosed months later.

“The commissioner shouldn’t have the power of retention,” Councilmember Alexa Avilés said in an interview, citing ProPublica’s investigation, which was published in partnership with The New York Times.

Other lawmakers echoed that call. The commissioner’s ability to summarily end cases “should absolutely be repealed,” said Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, who is not related to the police commissioner.

The commissioner’s power comes from a memorandum of understanding that the City Council brokered in 2012. The agreement gave the CCRB the authority to prosecute misconduct cases in a departmental trial. But in a compromise with the NYPD, the memorandum also allowed the department to “retain” those cases.

“We said at the time that the memorandum of understanding was a bad idea,” said Christopher Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “We now know it creates problems. And it should be rescinded.”

Rolling back the commissioner’s power would not be easy. The NYPD would have to agree to revisit the memorandum of understanding, or, more ambitiously, City Council members would need to seek changes to the city law that grants the commissioner sole discretion over discipline.

“The council is limited by what it can do without the NYPD’s cooperation,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said. “But we’re at a point now that we need to push the envelope. I don’t think the commissioner should have the power of retention.”

Williams and Avilés co-sponsored NYPD transparency legislation last year that was met with stiff resistance from the mayor and the Police Department. The bill ultimately passed when the council overrode a mayoral veto. The lesson Avilés took from that: “When we try to legislate anything about the NYPD, we get furious pushback. It takes an enormous amount of political capital to push back against the mayor and NYPD.”

For his part, Caban has defended his use of retention, putting out a five-page statement in the wake of ProPublica’s investigation saying that his actions were “in compliance” with the memorandum of understanding. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams agreed, saying in a statement that “the Police commissioner continues to work within his bounds to ensure New Yorkers are both safe and policed fairly.”

Our reporting, however, found multiple instances where Caban’s actions seemingly violated the rules of the memorandum, which stipulates that retention can only be applied to officers with “no disciplinary history.”

Over the past year, Caban has on four occasions retained cases of officers who the CCRB had previously found engaged in misconduct, according to board records.

Meanwhile, civil rights groups are also taking issue with how the NYPD is handling discipline under Caban. On Monday, LatinoJustice filed a lawsuit against the department for failing to notify officers of the administrative charges against them in some cases. Without that formal step, a departmental trial cannot proceed.

ProPublica’s investigation found seven disciplinary cases that have been stymied since last summer because of such delays. One of them involved the man at the center of the lawsuit, William Harvin Sr. The CCRB found that he was repeatedly shocked with a Taser despite trying to back away from an officer. The board said the officer had engaged in misconduct and moved for a disciplinary trial in which prosecutors from the civilian board could present evidence and question the officer in a public forum.

Nearly a year later, the NYPD has yet to allow the case to move forward.

LatinoJustice’s suit argues that the NYPD’s failure to serve charges in Harvin’s case, as well as others, is “arbitrary and capricious.” It seeks a court order that would force the NYPD to notify officers and thus bring the cases to trial.

“The NYPD is doing everything it can to stymie the country’s largest civilian oversight agency,” said Andrew Case, supervising counsel at LatinoJustice. “It’s just bad government.”

The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment about the lawmakers’ calls, the city investigation or the lawsuit. The Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD declined to comment.

Commenting last week on a police killing in Illinois, Adams wrote: “I’ve spent my entire adult life fighting for public safety and police reform. I understand that public safety and justice must go hand-in-hand, and officers that abuse their badge must be held accountable.”

The mayor has said he supports Caban’s handling of officer discipline. On Tuesday, the Adams spokesperson said, “As mayor, he has committed to further reform of the NYPD’s internal case process — setting stricter timelines so that complaints are handled swiftly, and Commissioner Caban and his team are able to thoroughly review all allegations of misconduct and adjudicate accordingly.”

ProPublica’s investigation found that Caban, a close ally of Adams whom the mayor appointed to the position last year, has retained far more cases than his predecessors. Data from the CCRB showed he had prevented the cases of 54 officers from going to trial in his roughly one year in office. His predecessor, Keechant Sewell, did it eight times in her first year, even as she faced more disciplinary cases.

The news organization also found that in more than 30 other instances, Caban upended cases in which department lawyers and the officers themselves had already agreed to disciplinary action — the most times a commissioner has done so in at least a decade. For one officer, Caban rejected two plea deals.

In the month since the story was published, Caban has continued to sidetrack discipline cases. He has retained at least 11 cases over the past month. One of the officers whose case Caban has ended had been previously found to have engaged in misconduct.

Caban also recently overturned the plea deal that an officer had already agreed to for wrongly pointing his gun and threatening arrest. Caban changed the penalty from 20 lost vacation days to three.

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by Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski

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This month, former President Donald Trump’s media company announced it was making its first major purchase: technology to help stream TV on Truth Social, its Twitter-like platform.

There was a mystery at the center of the deal: One of the companies on the other side of the transaction, which went unmentioned in Trump Media’s press release but was named in securities filings, is an obscure entity called JedTec LLC. Based in a North Louisiana village, the company has virtually no public footprint and no website, and it is unknown to streaming technology experts.

Interviews and public records reveal that the man behind JedTec is Louisiana energy magnate James E. Davison. A major Republican donor, he is known for his immense influence in state and federal government, including personal friendships with past presidents, and for using his wealth to benefit people in politics.

The acquisition will put Trump’s company in a business relationship with someone with numerous interests before the federal government. Davison, for example, owns a major stake in Genesis Energy, a large oil pipeline and mining firm. A trade group representing Genesis and other publicly traded pipeline firms previously lobbied the Trump administration and lawmakers for a tax break and on environmental issues. Davison’s family also has a stake in a regional bank and owns a small defense contractor. And Davison could benefit if the 2017 Trump tax cut provisions, which expire after next year, are extended.

Davison also has a record of influence with the Trump White House, successfully leveraging connections there in 2019 to win a $17 million federal grant to build roads, according to one Louisiana official.

The streaming deal crystalizes the sort of conflicts that Trump’s business interests pose as he vies for a second term.

Before his first term, Trump rejected calls to divest from his business. Trump’s years in the White House were marred by controversy as political groups and foreign governments spent millions of dollars at his properties.

Get in Touch

Do you have any information about Trump Media or its partners that we should know? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217.

But his stake in Trump Media, created after he left office, has the potential to eclipse those concerns. His shares of the company, a meme stock that has soared despite the company generating almost no revenue, are valued at more than $3 billion. That makes up more than half of his estimated net worth. Ethics experts have warned that advertisers, vendors or investors who have political agendas could try to use Trump Media to curry favor.

The deal with Davison poses just that potential for undue influence, said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer.

It could give Davison access to a future president and an advantage in extracting favors from Trump, Canter said. “It puts them in a more favorable position to get their perspectives before the president or other members of his administration.”

The Trump Media deal suggests an ongoing business relationship between the companies: It calls for the full price — roughly $170 million in cash and shares, at the stock’s current value — to be paid out based on a series of milestones. It’s difficult to assess whether the price being paid by Trump Media is fair because the companies involved are little known in the industry and the filings don’t offer much detail about the technology and services they’ll be providing.

Filings don’t disclose what portion of the purchase price will go to JedTec, the Louisiana company involved in the deal. Business records show Davison as the person behind JedTec. And interviews and records show that Davison has a longtime relationship with one of Trump Media’s board members. But in a brief call with ProPublica, Davison denied he personally played a role in the sale, before hanging up.

“I’m not really involved with that,” he said. “I haven’t been part of it.”

Davison didn’t respond to follow-up questions sent in writing.

Trump hasn’t said whether he would divest from Trump Media & Technology Group if elected, but his spokesperson has said he would “follow ethics guidelines.”

A Trump Media spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions about the deal with Davison, saying that the company “believes its partners can deliver the best technology for TMTG’s platform, encompassing a unique, uncancellable tech delivery stack for streaming.”

The spokesperson also suggested that the company might take legal action in response to this article: “The assertions and insinuations in this story, including of any ethical improprieties whatsoever or any material omissions from TMTG’s disclosures, are false, defamatory and a textbook example of a fake news story that will land the left-wing shills at ProPublica in court.”

Davison turned down a job offer out of college, instead helping his father at his small trucking company in rural North Louisiana. Over the years, he transformed the company from a two-truck operation to one with hundreds of trucks, hundreds of employees and business lines across the energy industry, including petroleum storage, fuel procurement and refining operations that removed sulfur from sour gas streams.

As Davison’s business empire grew, so too did his political influence.

In Louisiana, he is known as a philanthropist for local institutions and is considered a political kingmaker. “Members of Congress, governors, state lawmakers, they’re sitting in front of him asking for his support, asking for his advice, asking if they should run or not,” said Rick Hohlt, former publisher of the Ruston Daily Leader, the newspaper for Davison’s hometown. “He’s a powerhouse.”

His influence extends beyond Louisiana. Davison, now 86, has counted presidents as friends, including both Bushes. He would “refer to presidents by their number,” one associate recalled. “‘I was spending time with 41 the other day.’” Davison helped lead fundraising efforts in the state for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2019, when Trump was president, the mayor of Ruston credited Davison’s influence with the White House for securing the $17 million federal grant to build roads in the city. “He is well connected in D.C. He knows everybody that’s a player,” the mayor, Ronny Walker, said in an interview with ProPublica, adding that he flew with Davison on the businessman’s private jet to Washington for lobbying trips.

Davison has donated an estimated $3 million to federal Republican candidates and causes in the last decade, including more than $90,000 to Trump committees for his previous two campaigns.

Davison’s connections to people in politics have sometimes raised ethical questions. Last year, after the state’s now-governor was questioned about not disclosing private flights provided by campaign donors, the state Republican Party disclosed several such trips, including from Davison. In 2014, a Louisiana congressman’s chief of staff was arrested for driving drunk. The aide was reportedly driving a Mercedes registered to one of Davison’s businesses.

Davison’s business interests are vast. In 2007, Genesis Energy, a Houston-based pipeline company, bought Davison’s trucking company and other businesses in a deal worth about $560 million. The Davison family got a large stake of Genesis as part of the deal, and both Davison and his son are on its board.

The trade group that represents publicly traded pipeline businesses including Davison’s lobbied during the Trump presidency on its signature tax legislation. The industry won a carveout in the 2017 legislation that allowed its investors to get a large tax break.

That tax break is set to expire after 2025, when Trump, if he wins the election, would be in his second term. Trump has promised to extend the tax law.

Genesis Energy’s agenda is not limited to taxes. Its operations are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and its fortunes can hinge on who’s in the White House. In a public filing, the company credited Trump with easing regulations related to the Clean Air Act, including on methane emissions for oil and gas companies. President Joe Biden, the company noted, restored those regulations.

When Trump Media announced the streaming TV deal July 3, the company said its plan is to host news shows and religious channels at risk of “cancellation.”

“We are rapidly pushing forward with our plans to launch a high-quality streaming service that we believe cannot be canceled by Big Tech,” CEO Devin Nunes said.

The deal announced by Trump Media involves a series of largely unknown small players. Trump Media’s disclosures about the deal describe a nesting doll of companies that leave many questions unanswered about its new business partners.

The sellers include a pair of Louisiana companies: Davison’s JedTec LLC along with another called WorldConnect IPTV Solutions.

The ultimate provider of the technology is a British firm called Perception Group, which has offices and engineers in Slovenia. The clients listed on its website are far less prominent than Trump’s social media site. They include a telecom in Slovenia, an entertainment service for crews on commercial ships and an Arabic-language streaming service in Sudan.

JedTec does not have any online footprint. Davison, in the brief phone interview with ProPublica, acknowledged he knew about the deal but said WorldConnect was behind it.

Industry experts said they had never heard of WorldConnect. The phone numbers listed on WorldConnect’s website are disconnected. The most recent press release was eight years old. One item from 2012 celebrated China Central Television, the Chinese government’s propaganda channel, launching on a streaming platform in the United Kingdom. WorldConnect listed just seven staffers on its website. (Hours after ProPublica sent the company and its executives questions, the company website was taken down entirely.)

Both its CEO, Dr. Jarrett Flood, and president, Von Boyett, are serial entrepreneurs.

In his biography, Flood describes himself as being “trained as a medical doctor and critical thinker.” Flood’s social media pages list other roles including owner of a medical center and Flood International Consulting Agency. (It’s not clear where Flood went to medical school, and searches in medical license databases for his name turn up no results.)

Boyett says in his biography he has decades of experience in multiple industries: petrochemicals; telecoms; medical equipment; and product sourcing. He cites working with Russian state energy giant Gazprom in the 1980s and brokering the Soviet Union’s first foreign TV programming deal.

Boyett and Flood are also named as executives in another company that lists just five employees but says on its website it is involved in a dizzying array of businesses, including purchasing power plants, medical technology, education and solar energy.

Boyett and Flood did not respond to requests for comment.

The Trump Media spokesperson said that the company had done “extensive beta testing and due diligence” for the deal.

A person familiar with the history of WorldConnect told ProPublica that the company entered into a joint venture with Davison in 2017 to buy the rights to sell Perception’s TV technology in the United States. Davison put up most of the money for the deal, the person said.

Both companies are private, so their finances and the details of their ownership are not public.

How Davison got involved in the Trump Media deal is unclear. But even before the deal was announced, he did have one clear link to the company.

Trump Media’s board is composed almost entirely of high-profile allies of the former president, including his son Donald Trump Jr. and former cabinet members in his administration such as Linda McMahon and Robert Lighthizer.

One board member who does not fit that profile is W. Kyle Green, a lawyer from the Ruston area with a much more modest background. According to his Trump Media biography, he runs his own small law firm. Previously, he served as Ruston’s city prosecutor for eight years “where he successfully prosecuted more than 20,000 criminal defendants.” (A longtime district attorney in the area told ProPublica that a tally of prosecutions that enormous in a city with a population of just over 20,000 likely included traffic tickets, which is in line with the kind of low-level issues that office handles.)

Green is Davison’s lawyer, Davison’s wife told ProPublica. He’s listed as the registered agent on state business filings for JedTec, and he did the legal paperwork to create the LLC in 2017. If Green has an ownership stake in JedTec, or plays a significant role in the company, Trump Media may have been required to disclose his connection in public filings. The company didn’t do this.

Green didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Trump Media’s streaming deal could close as early as this month. In filings, the company said it expects to pay up to 5.1 million shares of stock — about $150 million at current market value — plus $17.5 million in cash. Its payment to the companies involved will be staggered, with roughly half of the stock in the deal — more than 2 million shares — delivered only when the streaming software is implemented at greater and greater scales.

Do you have any information about Trump Media or its partners that we should know? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217.

by Vernal Coleman

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

Some call it an “auto sear.” Less formally, it’s also referred to as a “switch” or “button.” It’s made with metal or plastic and about the size of a thimble. The device can be purchased on the internet or made with a 3D printer for a few bucks. Once installed, it transforms a Glock semiautomatic into a small machine gun, allowing a shooter to empty an entire clip in seconds.

The city of Chicago is awash in them as it endures yet another violent summer. Desperate for solutions, it has once again turned to the courts.

Chicago sued Glock Inc., the international gunmaker’s United States subsidiary, and one of the nation’s largest gunmakers, last week in state court, accusing the company of manufacturing pistols with designs that encourage modification and failing to make changes that would protect the public. The suit also names two Chicago-area retailers, as well as Glock’s Austria-based parent company, which attorneys for the city say is integral to the company’s business decisions in the U.S.

Concurrently, the city dismissed a similar suit it had filed in federal court in March against Glock’s U.S. operator. Glock had rejected the city’s legal claims in that earlier suit, claiming that federal law protects it from the criminal actions of third parties.

City police in the last two years have recovered nearly 1,200 Glock pistols equipped with auto sear devices, all associated with a range of crimes, including homicides, according to city officials. One such killing occurred in a brazen daylight shootout along a residential street in 2021. Devlin Addison, 32, was one of three people shot as he and several others exchanged gunfire with a group huddled inside a home in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side.

Addison was hit several times and later died. Police investigators recovered two modified Glock pistols at the scene, court records show. Police recovered 70 shell casings at the scene and a Glock with the switch from beneath Addison’s body.

Chicago’s suit reflects not just concern over a stubborn public safety issue but also a shift in legal efforts against the gun industry. Cities, shooting survivors and the families of shooting victims are taking on the gun industry in new ways.

The claims in these newer lawsuits show plaintiffs are not trying to take on the whole of the industry but instead are “trying to find the right pathway within the law,” said Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.

For Chicago, the suit comes against a legal landscape shaped by industry-friendly legislation and after a succession of court failures.

Around 25 years ago, Chicago; New Orleans; Gary, Indiana; and several other cities separately sued gunmakers, claiming the industry’s policies led to the proliferation of illegally purchased guns, endangering residents.

But the industry fought back, and in 2005, amid intense lobbying by Second Amendment and gun industry advocates, Congress passed the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to reduce the legal threat. The act effectively preempts civil lawsuits against gun manufacturers over harm caused by third parties using their products.

In the decades since, the nation’s gun manufacturers have continually used the law, known as PLCAA, to beat back lawsuits by victims, cities and even states. Nearly all 23 lawsuits filed in that wave with Chicago’s were upended, some after years of legal wrangling.

Even when PLCAA failed to stop a lawsuit, other obstacles arose. The Illinois Supreme Court dismissed Chicago’s lawsuit in 2004, finding that the suit amounted to an attempt to regulate the gun industry, a matter the court ruled was better left to the state legislature.

In 2021, the city filed another lawsuit over gun violence, this one aimed at Westforth Sports, a notorious gun retailer the city accused of failing to take reasonable action to prevent illegal gun sales. Located in nearby Gary, the small gun shop was found to be the source of hundreds of firearms recovered by Chicago police during criminal investigations.

Chicago officials argued that negligence by Westforth led to illegal sales of guns intended for criminal use. In May 2023, a Cook County judge dismissed the lawsuit, citing jurisdictional issues. The city has appealed the decision. Westforth has since closed for business. Westforth’s longtime owner has not responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In a deposition for the case, he said he adhered to the letter of the law and worked hard to prevent illegal sales and keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Despite those setbacks, Chicago officials appear confident that their most recent lawsuit will have a different outcome. In part, that’s because it’s narrower in scope.

Instead of pursuing remedies against a wide range of companies over multiple allegations, it targets just one manufacturer over specific allegations of negligence and wrongdoing barred by a new Illinois law in 2023. The state’s Firearms Industry Responsibility Act restricts the way gun dealers and manufacturers can market and sell their products and subjects them to civil penalties for violations.

The act makes it easier to hold gunmakers accountable for how they design and market firearms, said Steve Kane, an attorney for the city. “That’s a big difference from where we were back in 2000,” he said.

Glock pistols are not the only firearms that can be converted to fire automatically. But attorneys for the city allege its designs make installing a particular type of switch easy, increasing its popularity among criminals. Glock did not respond to a request for comment.

Many Glock-style switch devices are equipped with “selectors” that allow a shooter to toggle between semiautomatic and fully automatic modes. (Image from amended complaint against Glock issued by the city of Chicago)

The city’s suit comes as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson faces scrutiny of his administration’s efforts to tamp down local gun violence. Nineteen people were shot and killed in Chicago over the recent Fourth of July holiday weekend. Johnson’s plan calls for providing funding for violence prevention and intervention programs across troubled areas of the city.

Bradly Johnson, chief community officer for BUILD, a Chicago civic group and partner in the city’s anti-violence efforts, said the reducing gun crime requires a broad strategy, including holding gunmakers accountable for how their products are misused, he said.

“Hopefully, the lawsuit will set a precedent for how we can start looking at their role in all of this,” he said.

Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation, which supports gun owners’ rights, said PLCAA remains a formidable law that will continue to protect the industry from “unreasonable” challenges. Yet he acknowledged that victories in several recent high-profile lawsuits have tested its strength.

That’s because strategies for navigating PLCAA have evolved since the law was established 20 years ago, as plaintiffs pursue legal arguments its backers hadn’t anticipated, Kraut said.

While it provides broad immunity, PLCAA is not absolute. A lawsuit brought against the industry can proceed if it meets one of six narrow exceptions built into the law. Among them: suits initiated by the United States attorney general, suits alleging an injury due to a defect in design, and suits alleging that a gunmaker knowingly broke state or federal law in selling or marketing its firearms.

Lawsuits based on those exceptions have resulted in millions of dollars in damages paid to victims of gun violence, including a settlement for families of victims in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 students and six educators dead.

Attorneys for the families argued Remington’s ads for its Bushmaster rifle, which was used in the killings, broke a Connecticut consumer protection law.

The company had run ads for the rifle invoking combat and hypermasculinity on websites and in magazines that appealed to troubled young men, some with slogans like, “Consider your man card reissued.”

The ads, the plaintiffs argued, violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, which bars unethical marketing that encourages illegal activities. Remington’s attorneys moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing it did not align with exceptions set by federal law.

The case wound through the Connecticut judicial system before landing at the state’s highest court. A panel of justices sided with the plaintiffs, allowing the suit to move forward on grounds it met exceptions to PLCAA, and paving the way for a 2022 settlement that saw the company pay the families $73 million.

More recently, survivors of a 2022 mass shooting in Highland Park, outside Chicago, have filed against Smith & Wesson, claiming that company misclassified the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack. They argued that the rifle qualifies as a “machine gun” and that by selling and advertising it as a semiautomatic firearm, Smith & Wesson violated the federal law that heavily restricts sales of automatic firearms. Attorneys for the company have countered, claiming the rifle’s classification is a question for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, not the courts. The case is ongoing.

Municipalities too have continued pursuing lawsuits against the industry, though with limited success.

Gary’s suit — the last surviving legal action from the wave of municipal suits filed more than two decades ago — is in jeopardy. In March, Indiana lawmakers passed a bill retroactively barring anyone other than the state attorney general from filing suit against the industry. Shepherded by the state legislature’s Republican majority, the bill was intended to upend the suit.

Lawyers for gun manufacturers and gun shops named in the suit immediately sought to have it dismissed following passage of the new law. An Indiana Superior Court judge could decide on that motion next month.

The suit alleged gunmakers were willfully ignoring signs of illegal gun sales. It survived, in part, because of evidence uncovered by police showing sloppy vetting of customers by area gun shops.

Using a strategy similar to Gary’s, the city of Philadelphia sued three area gun retailers last year, claiming they created a public nuisance by ignoring reasonable safeguards against illegal sales. The retailers responded with a variety of defenses, claiming that the city had not connected the sales to crimes and calling allegations that the shops are responsible for crimes committed using guns “baseless.” The lawsuit is awaiting trial.

And this year, the city of Baltimore targeted a critical legal shield for the gun industry. The city filed suit against ATF, claiming it too narrowly interprets a federal law that restricts disclosure of where guns recovered in police investigations were initially purchased. ATF has argued it has acted within the law. The city is seeking the data to better understand how illegal gun sales take place and the role played by licensed sellers.

As the legal battles over the scope of PLCAA have unfolded, state legislatures have also weighed in on the law’s scope. Since Congress approved the law, 32 states have passed laws further immunizing the gun industry from lawsuits in state courts, some by placing strict limitations on who can sue gunmakers.

Other states have taken steps to solidify residents’ ability to pursue lawsuits against the industry. Last year, seven states established laws affirming residents’ right to sue gunmakers. The two largest among them were California and Illinois.

Illinois’ 2023 law prohibits gunmakers and dealers from endangering public health or safety through unlawful or unreasonable business practices.

Chicago’s lawsuit alleges that the Glock pistols have become so synonymous with the conversion switch device that some homemade versions come printed with the company’s logo. Glock does not manufacture switch devices. (Images from amended complaint against Glock issued by the city of Chicago)

Alleging just such violations, Chicago’s expanded lawsuit names two suburban gun dealers. The retailers — Midwest Sporting Goods in Lyons and Eagle Sports Range in Oak Forest — “misrepresent” the Glock pistols by marketing them as safe products despite awareness they can be easily converted into unsafe and illegal automatic guns, the city claims.

Eagle Sports Range allegedly takes its marketing a step further, offering customers a “full auto experience” with demonstrations of Glock pistols modified into machine guns, according to the suit. “Eagle Sports Range customers can thus ‘demo’ a Modified Glock at the store’s range, purchase a semi-automatic Glock from the store’s inventory, and then easily and illegally modify their new Glock pistol at home with an auto sear purchased off the internet,” the suit states.

Both retailers are significant suppliers of guns recovered in Chicago as part of criminal investigations, according to attorneys for the city. They could not specify how many recovered modified Glocks were traced to the retailers. The owners of the retailers could not be reached for comment.

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Correction

July 30, 2024: This story originally misstated the name of the executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation. It is Adam Kraut, not Andrew Kraut.

by Craig Silverman

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Maryland Gov. Wes Moore recently signed the Gift Card Scams Prevention Act of 2024, creating the country’s first law aimed at curbing a rising form of gift card fraud called card draining.

Card draining is a scheme in which thieves remove gift cards from stores, capture their numeric codes or swap them out for counterfeit cards, and place the products back on display. When an unsuspecting customer loads money onto a tampered or counterfeit card, criminals access it online and steal the balance.

The Maryland law marks a milestone in the growing government effort to combat card draining, which escalated dramatically during the pandemic thanks to the ingenuity of Chinese organized crime rings. ProPublica recently reported that late last year, after a spate of consumer complaints and arrests, the Department of Homeland Security launched a task force to address card draining.

“We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billions of dollars, [and] that’s a substantial risk to our economy and to people’s confidence in their retail environment,” Adam Parks, a Homeland Security assistant special agent in charge, told ProPublica.

The Maryland law is the first in the nation to mandate secure packaging for most gift cards sold in person. The bill’s packaging requirements sparked industry pushback that at one point threatened the bill’s passage, according to Sen. Ben Kramer, the Maryland state senator who sponsored the legislation.

Here’s how the battle unfolded, who was involved and why the Maryland bill is poised to change gift card packaging nationwide.

The Card-Draining Boom

When big box retailers and pharmacies remained open during pandemic lockdowns, criminals saw that stores displayed hundreds of gift cards with little or no supervision. Crooks affiliated with Chinese organized crime began stealing unloaded cards and learned to remove and replace the security stickers and packaging that conceal card codes.

“It gave a lot of time and opportunity for people to figure out the flaws” in card security, said Jordan Hirschfield, who covers the prepaid card industry for Javelin Strategy & Research.

An estimated $570 billion is loaded onto gift and prepaid cards each year in the United States, Hirschfield said. While it’s difficult to know how much of that money has been stolen, even a 1% fraud rate would result in $5.7 billion in annual consumer losses, according to Hirschfield’s data.

One quarter of U.S. respondents said they had given or received a card with no balance, presumably because it had been stolen, according to a 2022 survey of about 2,000 adults by the AARP, the nonprofit advocacy group for people over age 50.

Hirschfield and law enforcement say that “open-loop” gift cards are particularly popular with draining gangs. Such cards use the Visa, Mastercard or American Express networks and can be spent at any business that accepts debit payments. They’re more versatile than “closed-loop” gift cards, which can be spent only at a single business, such as Target or Applebee’s.

Among other measures, Kramer’s bill required open- and closed-loop cards purchased in person to be sold in secure packaging that conceals their codes and shows signs of tampering when opened.

Citing a rise in consumer complaints and lawsuits, Kramer told ProPublica that the legislation was needed to protect consumers.

“This has been going on for several years now, and the industry was not addressing it,” Kramer said.

How Did the Industry React?

Kramer’s bill elicited almost instant industry pushback.

“Clearly all hell broke loose within the industry,” he told ProPublica. “At first everybody was just trying to discourage me from doing anything.”

Lobbyists from Walmart, Target and Home Depot contacted Kramer, as did companies that manufacture gift cards and stock them in retail stores, including Blackhawk Network. Kramer said that new card packaging would cost companies money to design and manufacture.

Eventually, many national retailers and manufacturers came together through the Maryland Retailers Alliance to advocate for amendments, including allowing businesses to forgo the new packaging rules if their closed-loop gift cards are stored in a secure location accessible only to employees.

Then a lobbyist for InComm Payments, a payments technology provider that manages gift card programs for major retailers, asked the committee to change the open-loop card requirements. The lobbyist proposed removing the bill’s reference to “secure packaging” and eliminating the requirement that open-loop cards conceal their activation codes. Along with managing card programs for partners including Walmart and CVS, InComm, via a subsidiary, sells its own popular line of Vanilla open-loop gift cards.

The company’s amendment would have gutted a major protection against card draining, according to Kramer. InComm “was trying to scuttle the bill,” he said.

InComm said its proposed changes were intended to give companies the flexibility to adapt card packaging in order to combat new fraud techniques. It added that it proposed removing the bill’s reference to secure packaging because the bill’s language “was not fully reflective of industry security best practices.”

“To be absolutely clear, all of our lobbying engagement related to the Maryland bill had the end-goal of empowering the industry to implement the most impactful secure packaging techniques that are in the best interest of consumers — now and in the future,” the company said in an emailed statement.

InComm’s proposed amendment kicked off what would become a key point of conflict: how to display activation codes.

A gift card’s activation code is scanned at the point of sale to turn on the card and load its cash balance. It’s different from a redemption code, PIN or CVV, which are used when a customer uses a card to make a purchase. InComm, the Maryland Retailers Alliance and Kramer all agreed that redemption data and related codes should be fully concealed. But InComm argued that activation codes didn’t need to be fully covered to prevent fraud.

An example of InComm’s split-barcode packaging design (InComm Payments)

InComm patented a type of packaging in 2017 that prints the activation code across both the packaging and the card. The company said in a statement to ProPublica that this method, which it calls split-barcode packaging, is more secure than fully covering an activation code.

“If attempts to tamper cause the card and external barcode to become misaligned by a fraction of a millimeter, it prevents the barcode from being scanned and activated,” the company said.

InComm declined to say what percentage of Vanilla cards use split barcode packaging but said that “every Vanilla Gift Card released in 2024 has new and innovative security enhancements included.”

InComm and Card Draining

The jockeying over the Maryland bill came as InComm is facing government scrutiny over card draining.

Last November, David Chiu, the city attorney of San Francisco, filed a suit against the company’s card division, InComm Financial Services, and three of its banking partners alleging that InComm has been aware of card draining for roughly a decade and showed negligence by not fixing Vanilla packaging and by failing to refund consumers.

“InComm is selling these prepaid gift cards that it knows are susceptible to rampant theft due to inadequate packaging and security,” Chiu told ProPublica and alleged in the complaint.

InComm Payments said it “vigorously denies the baseless claims” in the San Francisco city attorney's lawsuit. It filed a motion in May to dismiss the case, saying the California court lacked jurisdiction over the company, which is registered in South Dakota. Three of its banking partners similarly moved to dismiss the claims against them. A California Superior Court judge is slated to meet with attorneys in September.

The lawsuit caught the attention of a federal lawmaker, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. In December, he asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate InComm Financial Services, charging that its alleged “neglect and refusal to implement improved security features have unjustly harmed consumers.” (An FTC spokesperson said it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation” into InComm.)

“I remain concerned that fraudsters are continuing to take advantage of InComm’s lacking security features of their prepaid gift cards — ultimately inflicting financial harm on consumers across the country,” Blumenthal said in a statement to ProPublica.

The company said it is not currently the subject of a memorandum of understanding, consent decree, or cease-and-desist from any regulator. It declined to say whether it had been contacted by the FTC in the past year or if it is currently the subject of an investigation from a government body.

“InComm Payments has been at the forefront in developing innovative solutions to continuously combat emerging fraud threats over the past 30 years, and maintains that vigilance today by leveraging new technologies, packaging techniques, monitoring systems and other security practices to help protect consumers,” the company said.

The Maryland Bill Becomes Law

As Kramer’s gift card bill advanced through the Maryland legislature, another industry trade group, the Retail Gift Card Association, floated a new proposal: allow the state attorney general’s office to decide whether a company’s packaging was sufficiently secure.

Three days later, InComm proposed a new amendment to allow activation data to be revealed if the packaging “is more secure than it otherwise would be if the data were fully concealed.”

Both ideas resonated with state Del. C.T. Wilson, the chair of the House Economic Matters Committee, who examined InComm’s packaging design.

“It's not that I was totally convinced that the thing that they showed me was the silver bullet. It definitely wasn’t,” he said. “But what I did not want to do was stop people from looking for more ways to secure the system.”

Wilson incorporated language from InComm’s amendment and added oversight by the state attorney general’s office. The bill passed in April.

The new packaging rules take effect next June, so companies have a year to come into compliance. While the law applies only to cards sold in Maryland, it’s likely the packaging changes will be rolled out nationwide because companies prefer to use the same cards across all states, according to Kramer and Cailey Locklair, the president of the Maryland Retailers Alliance.

“It will change packaging nationally — it is not just a Maryland bill,” Locklair said. She predicted the new packaging will begin appearing in stores by the holidays, typically the peak time for card draining.

A Blackhawk spokesperson declined to comment on any packaging changes it plans to make but said the company “will comply with any and all legislative requirements.” InComm also declined to share details on potential packaging changes, saying it wanted to avoid aiding criminals. But it said its split-barcode packaging “fully complies with the Maryland law.”

“I think of a bill like this as the first domino” in combating gift card fraud, Kramer said, adding, “I think we ended up with a great consumer protection bill.”