ProPublica

by Eli Hager

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

On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”

Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.

It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.

DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.

The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”

In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”

For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.

The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.

They did none of these things.

Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.

Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.

Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.

By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.

Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely made front-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.

Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.

To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.

Leland Dudek, former acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, at home this summer after leaving the government. “I’m growing out my hair and dropping weight,” he said. “It helps when you live in a federal community where you’re hated.” (Rosen Morton for ProPublica)

Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)

At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”

Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.

In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.

After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.

In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.

But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)

Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.

In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.

Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)

Dudek, whose bookshelves are pictured, has long immersed himself in everything from the decline of the British Empire to the long-running bureaucratic inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”

Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”

DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.

Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.

In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.

Akash Bobba (via Gitlab profile)

Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”

Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.

Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedly said that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)

Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”

Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.

Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.

Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.

Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.

Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Cole Killian (via McGill Artificial Intelligence Society 2021-2022 Team Page)

Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.

“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.

Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”

Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.

The Social Security Administration building where DOGE initially operated. As hostility mounted toward the outsiders, Dudek — who was receiving death threats himself — moved the DOGE team to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned armed security to protect them. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)

Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”

But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)

This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.

But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.

“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”

“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scott Coulter (via LinkedIn profile)

One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.

But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”

Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.

Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.

In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.

DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.

When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.

Panicked Social Security beneficiaries flocked to Social Security field offices, like this one in Baltimore, as the agency’s policies on making claims by phone repeatedly zigzagged this spring. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)

Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.

Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.

Dudek said Katie Miller, who was DOGE’s spokesperson early on, would call to chastise him about anything the press reported that had caught the administration off guard. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.

“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”

“How dare you,” Miller said.

Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”

But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.

Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.

On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”

Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.

It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.

“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)

As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”

Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.

“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”

Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.

Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.

And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.

Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.

Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”

Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”

Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”

As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”

The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”

Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”

Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.

Frank Bisignano, in the oval office with President Donald Trump, was confirmed as commissioner of the Social Security Administration in May. He has presented a calmer public face than Dudek while embracing DOGE’s philosophy. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.

Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.

In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”

Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.

The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Colleen DeGuzman, The Texas Tribune

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

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

After the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, school leaders in Uvalde, Texas, initially planned to publicly defend district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, but officials instead chose to remain silent as investigations into police actions unfolded, newly released records show. Arredondo is now facing criminal charges over law enforcement’s delayed confrontation with the gunman.

The previously unreported details were revealed in over 25,000 pages of records the district has disclosed over the course of a week since Aug. 26 after a yearslong legal fight with news outlets, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which filed over 70 public information requests for the records in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The documents should have been published in early August when school leaders and Uvalde County originally released requested records following a settlement with the news organizations. Rob Decker, an attorney representing the school district, admitted at a board meeting Aug. 25 that his office made “an error on our side” by only releasing a fraction of the files. Board members, including Jesse Rizo, who lost his 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares in the shooting, grilled Decker about the firm’s oversight.

“When we use the word ‘error,’ that’s putting it really lightly,” Rizo said. “The word ‘negligent’ comes to mind.”

However, the district’s law firm may have again failed to disclose all of the requested information, according to Laura Prather, one of the attorneys representing the newsrooms in the records litigation. Prather sent a letter Friday demanding the district publish the remaining files, which could include details about the school maintenance issues with doors that failed to lock, Arredondo’s severance and additional communications among officials. Decker, the district’s lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

The school district’s repeated disclosure problems mirror the mistakes made by the city of Uvalde last year, when officials there did not include at least 50 body- and dashcam videos in their first records release. They scrambled to disclose all of them months later.

As the district’s law firm began trickling out records last week, another shooting made national headlines when two children were killed and another 21 kids and adults injured at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. The timing only further underscores the importance of releasing the Uvalde records as quickly as possible, said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

“A lot of times, governments will think that by stalling or trying to avoid the release of records, they can shirk responsibility and avoid the tough questions,” said Shannon. Doing so only makes it harder to stop similar tragedies from happening and hinders families’ ability to heal.

“Getting information sooner rather than later is the way to go,” she said, “and that’s not what we’ve seen surrounding the Uvalde shooting.”

Though news organizations had previously obtained from sources many of the records government agencies withheld, the newly released documents include undisclosed internal communications that offer deeper insight into the inner workings of the school district. Its leaders have rarely commented on the shooting publicly in the three years since it left 19 elementary students and two teachers dead.

Among the new revelations, the documents show the unraveling of the district’s support for Arredondo as details of the delayed law enforcement response were made public in the weeks after the shooting.

School leaders have long attributed their silence and refusal to release these records to the multiple local, state and federal investigations into the law enforcement response to the massacre. That included a criminal probe by the Uvalde district attorney that eventually led to child endangerment charges being filed against Arredondo and another school officer last year. Both have maintained their innocence ahead of the trial, scheduled for later this year.

Arredondo initially received the bulk of the blame for the response, though an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune later found that officers across state and local agencies wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and failed to take control of the response.

Three days after the tragedy, Steve McCraw, then head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, announced at a press conference that Arredondo was responsible for law enforcement’s failure to confront the gunman until 77 minutes after he’d entered the school.

Hours later, district spokesperson Anne Marie Espinoza emailed then-Superintendent Hal Harrell a press release that defended Arredondo, stating, in part, that his action isolating the shooter helped students and staff escape the building. The statement cautioned that the district could only provide limited information due to the ongoing investigations but said it was “appropriate timing to share these clarifying details.”

The school district, however, never published that version of the press release, allowing McCraw’s narrative to continue circulating undisputed. The internal communications released so far don’t explain why. None of the district’s leaders involved responded to the newsrooms’ questions in recent days.

The district instead published a press release the following Wednesday that made no mention of Arredondo but said the school would not comment on the shooting until all state and federal agencies completed their review.

Emails also show that during the week after McCraw’s press conference, the district’s law firm drafted paperwork to place Arredondo on administrative leave.

Harrell waited several more weeks before taking that action.

The documents reveal Arredondo was increasingly anxious to discuss his side of the story. In an email exchange with a reporter from The New York Times shortly after McCraw’s press conference, Arredondo wrote that he wished he could speak publicly: “It’s extremely difficult not to be able to respond right now.”

The police chief said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation at that point.

About two weeks later, as the investigations continued, Arredondo gave the Tribune an exclusive interview sharing his experience of the shooting response and maintaining that he was not the incident commander.

He told Harrell, the superintendent, the article was coming about two hours before publication.

The superintendent’s emails indicate he met with the district’s law firm the next day to discuss drafting an agreement for Arredondo that barred him from making any more public statements unless he received written permission from Harrell. The instructions emphasize that the district will remain silent about the shooting to “ensure the integrity of the pending investigations,” indicating public comments could be considered interference.

“Any failure to comply with these directives may result in adverse job action, up to and including termination of your employment,” stated the agreement.

On June 15, the police chief informed the superintendent that he needed time off to attend a hearing at the Texas Capitol the following Tuesday and to prep with his counsel the day before.

Arredondo testified behind closed doors for five hours in front of the state House committee tasked with investigating the shooting on June 21. The same day, McCraw provided a searing condemnation of the law enforcement response in a separate state Senate hearing that was open to the public. He claimed police could have stopped the shooter within three minutes had it not been for Arredondo’s indecisiveness.

The next day, Harrell placed Arredondo on administrative leave.

In a draft of the press release announcing Arredondo’s leave, then-Assistant Superintendent Beth Reavis suggested saying that district leaders had not received any information about the response ahead of the hearing.

“Yesterday, like you, I saw the released information for the first time,” she suggested to Harrell and the district’s attorney, then said they should add, “Something like ‘Pete’s on leave, blah blah blah’” in an email.

The district ultimately published a press release stating Harrell initially did not intend to make personnel decisions until after the investigations into the shooting were concluded, but due to the uncertainty of when they would be done, he decided to place Arredondo on leave.

Arredondo’s attorney, Paul Looney, said he wasn’t surprised when the district walked back its support for their police chief or when he found out from the news organizations that the district had drafted a letter requesting Arredondo’s leave weeks before giving it to him.

“It’s obvious that their initial reaction was the truth and then they decided to shelve the truth and join DPS on cover-your-ass politics and Pete was expendable,” Looney said. “The truth is that Pete did a good job that day.”

The majority of the documents disclosed in the latest batch were pulled from Harrell’s email inbox. In the hours and days after the tragedy, leaders and survivors of other school shootings offered support. But many parents, educators and law enforcement across the country called for him and the police force to resign.

Harrell often emailed himself to-do lists that included reminders like “funerals,” “security we can get done” and people he needed to call. The former superintendent received backlash during a June 9 press conference where he declined to answer questions about law enforcement investigations. The next day, he included “retirement plan” and “transition plan” on his emailed to-do list. Harrell, who did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests, retired later that year.

The latest batch of emails also raised additional questions. The release, for example, included a chart that showed 13 threats made to schools in the district that year, including one to Robb Elementary, but did not provide details on how leaders handled them or exactly when they occurred.

Once the school district completes its release of records, DPS will be the last agency sued by the newsrooms that continues to shield materials related to the shooting from disclosure. Prather, the newsrooms’ counsel, said the state law enforcement organization’s documents are especially important because the agency led the investigation into the shooting and maintains a 2-terabyte file with the most extensive accounting of the event.

The newsrooms won an initial ruling in 2023 and the judge ordered DPS to publish its records, but the agency appealed the decision. The appellate court has yet to make a ruling after oral arguments last October.

The state agency did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but it has long argued that publishing documentation of the shooting could interfere with ongoing investigations and eventual prosecutions.

“You’re talking about a situation where people have experienced the most horrible tragedy and loss they could possibly imagine and they already distrust those who are supposed to protect their children,” Prather said. “Then to further fight for three years to get answers about what happened that day and to have that information trickle out, only after you’ve been told by a court over and over to produce it … it’s like a death by a thousand cuts.”

Jessica Priest and Alex Nguyen of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

by Julia Rendleman for ProPublica, Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, and Lylee Gibbs, Saluki Local Reporting Lab

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 our stories in your inbox every week.

On a late July morning, Blake Gerard zips across his Southern Illinois rice farm on a four-wheeler, wearing his usual USA Rice shirt and shorts that hit above the knee. It’s the only rice farm in Illinois, a place where rice never grew before.

He carries rubber hip boots in his truck for when he needs to wade into the water to check or change its depth. The young rice has entered a crucial stage; it has taken root but is still tender and needs a shallow, steady blanket of water, which Gerard maintains with a system of cascading fields surrounded by levees and pumps. Two to 4 inches of water is ideal.

First image: Gerard races across a rice field with an electrical extension cord to run a conveyor belt that will put rice in a storage bin. Second image: Young rice requires between 2 and 4 inches of water to grow. Third image: Gerard holds soil from the thick, muddy ground that he calls “gumbo.” (First and second images: Julia Rendleman for ProPublica. Third image: Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica.)

For the parts of the fields he can’t reach in his truck, a drone does the seeing. This morning, it catches a patch where the water pools too deep, and he turns on a pump, moving water into a drainage ditch that flows into the nearby Mississippi River. “That whole corner would’ve gone under if I hadn’t seen it,” Gerard says.

This daily scramble across 2,500 acres of flat, muddy bottomlands is now routine for one of America’s northernmost commercial rice farmers. But it wasn’t always. Gerard’s story is both proof that change and innovation in farming are possible and evidence of how hard they are — and why so few have tried. The transition took decades. It was also expensive and largely unsupported by federal farm policy, which is heavily focused on corn and soybeans.

Corn, soy and wheat were the crops Gerard, now 55, was growing in the early 1990s when he took over his family farm near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. By then, the floods were already coming more often. Gerard’s grandfather remembered them in 1943 and 1973, but as Gerard began farming, they came every two years — in ’93, ’95 and ’97.

Gerard plants rice near the Mississippi River in spring 2024. The land is prone to flooding, which Gerard uses to his advantage to grow rice. He refers to rain as “free water.” (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

According to the latest National Climate Assessment, annual precipitation in the Midwest increased in some places by as much as 15% between 1992 and 2001. Importantly for farmers, the amount of precipitation on the days with the most rain has increased by 45% over the past 50 years.

“The most extreme heavy precipitation is increasing at a far faster rate than overall total seasonal or annual precipitation,” explained Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist. That increased intensity “has been a faster and larger change, and that has caused more impacts due to flooding and erosion.”

For Gerard, a fourth-generation crop farmer, only in his 20s, working the fields of the Mississippi River bottomlands in Alexander County, Illinois, there was no sense in fighting the water anymore.

“I could grow something that would grow in water,” he said. Or quit.

Climate change is shifting where rice can grow. Long considered a southern crop, it has crept north through the Missouri Bootheel, and with Gerard’s expanded operation, now has a foothold in Southern Illinois. It’s a crop that can thrive where others can’t, like along the riverbanks of flood-prone Alexander County.

But for many farmers, making the transition to a new crop is nearly impossible, as ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois reported this week. Although rice is a commodity crop and Gerard receives insurance subsidies and commodity supports, corn and soybeans dominate U.S. agriculture, especially in the Midwest, and that’s what federal subsidies are set up to support.

Federally backed insurance for those crops cushions the risk of climate change for growers, even in floodplains; ethanol policy props up demand; and the entire infrastructure — from grain bins to rail lines to river barges — helps move corn and soy from fields to market to overseas. Illinois is the second-largest corn exporter in the nation.

There’s also culture: Farmers tend to grow what their parents and grandparents did. Even the local experts — the folks at the nearby Farm Bureau offices and university extension programs — are largely trained in what’s always been done.

“Everything’s stacked against it,” said Jonathan Coppess, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture official and current farm policy expert at the University of Illinois. “Nobody says no, but the system doesn’t know how to say yes.”

And federal policy is moving deeper in that direction. President Donald Trump has scrubbed climate language from farm programs. Although the “Big, Beautiful Bill” signed in July provides additional funding for programs that could help with crop diversification, it largely reinforces the idea that crops should stay where they’ve always been.

ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois sought comment from the USDA on Aug. 20 about how it is responding to climate change and crop diversification. An agency spokesperson said the USDA was working on a response but did not provide it in time for publication or specify a day when it would respond.

This stretch of the country where Gerard did the seemingly impossible is an important testing ground. But it wasn’t easy. There were no mills to process what he grew, no market to sell it into, no roadmap to follow. Ultimately, it took 25 years and millions of dollars to make it work. Gerard shows what is possible, but also how improbable it is for the Corn Belt to diversify without the sustained effort of federal policy.

Gerard climbs up a grain bin as he prepares to use it for the first time after harvesting in 2024. Grain bins are one of the many investments Gerard has made to his rice farm during the past 25 years. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

In 1943, when the Mississippi tore away from its banks and charted a fierce and muddy course across America’s central farmlands, Gerard’s grandfather, Harold Gerard, had already fled the waters once.

He had been living on a tiny island in the middle of the river just north of Cairo, Illinois. Seeking dry land that would be amenable to the wheat, alfalfa, corn and cotton he was accustomed to growing, he moved his family about 30 miles north.

But even there, the water kept rising. Blake’s father took over the farm and put in a pump on his lowest field to take water away from the corn, but the water kept coming up.

“The water comes from under the ground here,” Blake Gerard said.

He was studying at Mississippi State when his father died in August 1990. Overwhelmed, he left school, came home and harvested the final crop his father had planted. But with floods coming more frequently, he worried that the government would get out of the crop insurance business, which helped keep him afloat. He briefly considered fish farming but worried about floods there too. Ultimately, Gerard realized he needed a crop that loved the thick, muddy ground he calls “gumbo.”

First image: A young Gerard stands in a field with his dad, Harold Lynn, during a time when his family farmed corn and soybeans. The photo was taken more than 40 years ago. Second image: Gerard stands at the top of the first relift pump installed by his dad to move water off their corn fields in 1988. (Courtesy of Blake Gerard)

Around that time, farm policy was changing: In 1996, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act — known as the “Freedom to Farm Act” — gave farmers flexibility in crop choice.

He looked south, to Arkansas and Missouri, for guidance, driving around, knocking on doors and asking farmers about a crop that wasn’t afraid of the water.

At one farm in the Missouri Bootheel, an older man listened to Gerard’s questions for an hour, then said, “You know what? I met your dad. You’re a lot like your dad. He came down here in the ’70s asking me the same questions.”

Gerard hadn’t known about his father’s early interest. But it led them both to the same place, where he found his answer: “I’ve got rice ground.”

In 1999, Gerard planted his first 40 acres of rice. The next season, he tripled his acreage. After that, Gerard started converting his fields “like crazy.” There were no government programs to help pay for the transition, and it was expensive.

The big effort was grading the land: flattening it and building embankments so water would cascade from one field into the next. At $1,000 per acre, Gerard would invest millions into turning his ground from soy to rice.

Gerard realizes the investment was one he could only have made when he was still young and unafraid of debt. “I had time to get it all paid for, but if you’re my age now, mid-50s, why do I want to borrow a quarter of a million dollars to do this and make all these changes and create more work for myself? It’s more work. Rice farming is way more work. Double, triple the work that corn and beans are.”

Gerard also had to invest heavily in farm equipment. He rattles off a list: power units, fuel tanks, turbines, pipes, the water control structures, and on and on. Gerard scratches his head when asked about his total investment — it’s too much to remember and too hard to keep track of, he said. What he knew for certain was that he was going to commit to rice.

Gerard, left, and his son Wyatt drive across their farm to collect gasoline for their combine. Wyatt, like his father, left college in his early 20s, before graduating, to return to farm the land. (Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica) From left: Gerard with his children, Wyatt and Dixie, and his wife, Shelly, in their kitchen after dinner (Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica)

This year, Gerard’s farm finally got some help: a Climate-Smart Commodities grant that would allow him to invest in things like soil moisture meters, pump automation and water monitors. Then in April, he received more news: The funding, considered a “climate” program, had been canceled by the Trump administration. Then in May, he was told the funding was back — under a different name.

But around the state, conditions for farming this year have continued to deteriorate. In May, the National Weather Service issued a dust storm warning for the first time ever for the city of Chicago. High winds brought loose topsoil across the state and into the city, limiting visibility and shocking meteorologists who had not documented a weather event of this kind in the city since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Researchers believe that the corn and soybean rotation that dominates Midwestern farming is at least partially to blame — replacing the grasses that gave the Prairie State its nickname with crop rotations that don’t hold the soil in place, and a steady stream of fertilizers and pesticides doesn’t help.

The dominance of soy and corn, with little variation, could have “possible long-term impacts” on “economic returns, communities, and the environment,” according to the website for Diverse Corn Belt, a USDA-funded project of researchers and scientists who collaborate with government agencies, farmers and conservation groups. They want to find ways to give farmers more crop options.

That’s especially pressing in places like Alexander County, a corner of the country that bridges different farming regions. “It’s one of the most difficult places to understand in U.S. agriculture,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor at the University of Iowa, who studies farm policy and is an investigator with Diverse Corn Belt. “But the system isn’t built for a place like this. The system is built for: you’re in Nebraska, you raise cattle; you’re in Iowa, you grow corn. All these places that are kind of funky at the margin — we don’t make policy for them.”

Diversifying crop rotations would help in the Midwest, but also in places with other climate-related woes, like increasingly dry Texas and storm-wracked Louisiana. Making such changes is not impossible, said Louisiana State University researcher Herry Utomo, who developed the rice strain grown by Gerard. Climate change is “coming anyway, so we have to be positive and respond to it appropriately,” he said. “With good planning, anticipation and understanding of the rate of change, we can respond.”

Louisiana State University researcher Herry Utomo, who developed the variety of rice grown by Gerard, jumps over a ditch after checking out a research field of rice in November 2024 in Louisiana. He believes farmers can respond to climate change with good planning. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

But Coppess, a former USDA official, said farm policy has never been great at planning for climate change.

“There’s nothing in farm policy that takes into account climate change. In fact, most arguments would be that it’s at best neutral and at worst counterproductive for climate change,” Coppess said.

And under Trump, research universities are losing funding and climate initiatives are being decimated.

For Gerard, his willingness to risk everything paid off. He had a banner year in 2024 — his most successful rice-farming year to date. He no longer wonders whether the “big river” or a deluge will take out his crop. While a range of factors — from weather to international markets — affect whether he makes money, his shift to rice has taken production volatility out of the equation and he rests easier.

First image: Gerard tracks Hurricane Francine as it makes landfall in Louisiana in September 2024. A hurricane, with heavy winds and lots of water, can be problematic close to harvest. Gerard’s farm escaped the heavy rain expected with that storm. Second image: Rice stalks bend under the weight of the grain before they are harvested in McClure, Illinois. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

He remembers one of his first harvests, late in the growing season, when the mature stalks of rice had begun to bend toward the ground under the weight of their own grain.

One farmer, he recalled, pulled over and laughed at the drooping stalks. To him, the field looked ruined — nothing like the stiff, proud stalks of wheat growing nearby.

“People said you can’t grow rice here,” Gerard said. “I had the crop growing in the field and they’re like, ‘You can’t grow rice, we’re in Illinois, they grow rice in Louisiana.’”

That was a quarter-century ago.

Gerard looks out over the horizon at the setting sun behind a cloud of smoke from a controlled burn of a harvested field in October 2024. Gerard burns the fields to get rid of plant debris in preparation for the next planting. (Lylee Gibbs/Saluki Local Reporting Lab for ProPublica)

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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

The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.

President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S. senator and a state attorney general.

Real estate experts say claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.

But if administration officials continue the campaign, mortgage records show there’s another place they could look: Trump’s own Cabinet.

Underscoring how common the practice is, ProPublica found that at least three of Trump’s Cabinet members call multiple homes their primary residences on mortgages. We discovered the loans while examining financial disclosure forms, county real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records.

In a flurry of interviews and rapid-fire posts on X, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has led the charge in accusing Trump opponents of mortgage fraud. “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” Pulte said last month.

A political donor to the president and heir to a housing company fortune, Pulte’s posts online tease big developments and criminal referrals, drawing reposts from Trump himself and promises of swift consequences. “Fraud will not be tolerated in President Trump’s housing market,” Pulte has warned.

Real estate experts told ProPublica that, in its bid to wrest control of the historically independent Fed and go after political enemies, the Trump administration has mischaracterized mortgage rules. Its justification for launching criminal investigations, they said, could also apply to the Trump Cabinet members.

All three Cabinet members denied wrongdoing. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said: “This is just another hit piece from a left-wing dark money group that constantly attempts to smear President Trump’s incredible Cabinet members. Unlike [Fed Gov.] Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who blatantly and intentionally committed mortgage fraud, Secretary DeRemer, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Zeldin own multiple residences, and they have followed the law and they are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”

“If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” said Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director. (Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms than for a second home or an investment property. That includes better interest rates and the ability to borrow more money.

The idea is that borrowers are more likely to pay back — and less likely to default on — a loan attached to the home they actually live in. That makes those loans less risky for lenders. Interest rates are typically a quarter- to a half-point lower for primary mortgages, according to Pulte. On the low end, that could save around $75 each month over the life of a 30-year, 5% interest, half-million-dollar loan — or a total of around $25,000.

Standard mortgage documents commonly include an occupancy clause that requires the borrower to use the property as their principal residence for at least a year. They also include a section where borrowers can check a box when the mortgage is for a second home.

Misrepresenting occupancy status is not rare, according to a widely cited 2023 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. In interviews, real estate lawyers said that mortgage lenders are typically well aware of their clients’ other loans and sometimes even encourage the primary-residence language for second homes.

They also pointed to a mundane reason that innocent mistakes are common: Homebuyers simply sign stacks of forms without reading them.

“Few consumers understand this issue, and if there is someone at fault here, it is likely the loan officer who likely advised them to sign up for this loan that obviously wasn’t for their primary residence,” said real estate lawyer Doug Miller. “Loan officers who are competing for business will often quote lower rates in order to get a customer’s business.”

Mortgage fraud is rarely prosecuted, according to real estate lawyers and federal sentencing data. Pulte has pointed to a case from 2016 in which a California woman was found guilty of obtaining multiple loans for condos that she falsely stated would be her primary residence. But that case had an added layer of fraud: The woman never intended to live in the homes. She was secretly being paid because she had good credit to act as a front for the true buyer of the properties, to whom they were later transferred. She later defaulted on the loans, causing more than half a million dollars in losses for the lenders.

Lawyers told ProPublica that determining ill intent would be key to prosecute. “Fraud requires the borrower to be aware that the borrower was making a false representation,” said Jon Goodman, an attorney focused on real estate at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein.

But Pulte has framed the issue in black-and-white terms: “Your second home is not your primary home,” he warned in one recent post on X.

By that standard, Trump’s labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer, could be in the wrong.

In her financial disclosure form, she listed two mortgages on personal residences, both obtained in 2021. Mortgage records show her home is in Happy Valley, a city near Portland where Chavez-DeRemer served as mayor before being elected to represent the area in the U.S. House.

She and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, who leads an anesthesia company in Portland, refinanced their longtime Oregon home in January 2021. Two months later, the couple bought a newly built house near a golf course in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

The pair had previously enjoyed vacationing in Arizona, according to news reports and social media posts. (In one incident that made the news, Chavez-DeRemer was briefly hospitalized after a golf cart accident on her way back from watching a Sonoran Desert sunset.)

The mortgage agreement for the Arizona property required them to occupy the home as their “principal residence” for at least a year, barring “extenuating circumstances” or the lender allowing them to violate the stipulation.

A spokesperson for Chavez-DeRemer said that the couple bought the Arizona home with the intent to retire there, but then Chavez-DeRemer decided to run for Congress representing her Oregon district and did not move.

“This is nothing more than a left-wing rag inventing a story just to attack the Trump Administration. It’s common for families to refinance then buy a home with future plans in mind — trying to spin that as some type of scandal is pure nonsense,” said spokesperson Courtney Parella.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a White House official said that although DeRemer opted to stay in Oregon, her husband “continued to move forward with the process of becoming” an Arizona resident. Political donation records list his home in Oregon as recently as late 2023.

Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, and his wife also have two primary-residence mortgages, obtained a few years apart.

In August 2021, the Duffys, who have nine children, purchased a large $2 million home in Far Hills, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Rachel Campos-Duffy works as a Fox News host.

They got a $1.6 million mortgage to purchase the property, and documents show it was a “principal residence” loan.

In February, after Duffy took the job in Trump’s cabinet, the couple bought another home, in Washington, D.C. Again, they got a principal-residence mortgage, this time for $1.76 million. Both Duffy and his wife are listed as borrowers on both mortgages, which came from the same bank.

It’s not clear where Sean Duffy lives most of the time, and a Department of Transportation spokesperson declined to answer questions about where Duffy and his wife each make their primary home. In late May, several months after they purchased the Washington home, “Fox & Friends Weekend” ran a segment in which Rachel Campos-Duffy cooked a “Make America Healthy Again” breakfast for host Steve Doocy. Sean Duffy and some of the couple’s children were also in the segment, and it was filmed in the New Jersey home.

From left: “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Steve Doocy with Rachel Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy in their home in Far Hills, New Jersey (Fox News)

Duffy’s spokesperson said in a statement that after being confirmed, “Sean purchased a home in Washington D.C. where he works full-time. The home in DC is not a rental, investment or vacation property. The same bank holds both mortgages and was fully informed of Secretary Duffy’s new employment location and need for a DC residence.”

A White House spokesperson said, “The bank, not the Secretary, determined and classified both mortgages as primary residences.”

Like the Duffys, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, and his wife also have two concurrent primary-residence mortgages.

One, obtained in 2007, is on a home in Shirley, New York, on Long Island, which Zeldin represented in Congress for several years. Last year, Zeldin and his wife obtained a second mortgage, for $712,500, on a property in Washington, D.C., a short walk from the EPA’s headquarters. Both are primary-residence mortgages.

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that Zeldin’s primary residence was previously on Long Island but is now in Washington. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about where his wife lives. “Administrator Zeldin followed ALL steps to complete the move in accordance with all laws, rules, and contracts, notifying his mortgage company, insurance company, and local government,” the spokesperson said. “EVERY ‘I’ was dotted and ‘t’ was crossed 1000% by the book without exception.”

The dual mortgages identified by ProPublica among Trump’s cabinet secretaries resemble the loans obtained by U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, whom Trump accused of mortgage fraud.

In May, Pulte referred Schiff to the Justice Department for taking out a primary-residence mortgage in Maryland, for a home he purchased in 2003 after being elected to the House, while also claiming his primary home was in Burbank, California, in the district he represented. Schiff and his wife refinanced the Maryland home several times as a primary residence, Pulte noted, until a 2020 refinance in which they reclassified it as a secondary home.

“Schiff appears to have falsified records in order to receive favorable loan terms,” Pulte concluded in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Representatives for Schiff called the allegations “transparently false” and said his lenders had “full knowledge of the senator’s year-round bicoastal work obligations” and “his use of two homes for that reason.” Schiff, according to his office, navigated the two mortgages in consultation with a House lawyer.

Pulte made similar allegations in a criminal referral about New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging she may have committed fraud by getting a primary-residence mortgage for a home in Virginia, even though her position required her to live in New York. Her lawyer has said James helped a family member buy the property and notified the mortgage broker at the time that it would not be her primary residence. James became one of Trump’s top political enemies after she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022. Representatives for James have called the fraud claims made against her politically motivated and false. (Pulte did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Pulte’s most consequential allegations thus far were made against Cook, a Federal Reserve governor. Trump has been going after Fed Chair Jerome Powell for months for not lowering interest rates, even raising the specter that he would take the unprecedented step of attempting to fire the chair. Pulte’s criminal referral against Cook presented Trump with another avenue for bending the traditionally independent Fed to his will, securing a majority of the Fed’s board by firing Cook, a move that Cook has sued to block.

Pulte pointed to mortgage records that show that within just a couple of weeks, Cook signed primary-residence mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia. Legal experts said the close proximity was a red flag but that much was still unknown, including Cook’s intent and what her lenders were told. Pulte also flagged a third property, in Massachusetts, that Cook represented as a second home in mortgage documents but as an investment property in subsequent financial disclosures. Investment properties can be hit with higher mortgage rates than second homes.

“3 strikes and you’re out,” he posted on X.

Cook’s lawyers have denied that she committed mortgage fraud but have not provided a detailed explanation of the context for the various mortgages. They argued in court this week that her loans cannot be legally used as grounds to terminate her.

The Justice Department has begun investigating all three Trump foes singled out in Pulte’s referrals, according to news reports. The department has issued subpoenas in Cook’s case, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

ProPublica’s review of mortgage agreements by Trump cabinet officials shows that some made clear to lenders they were purchasing second homes.

When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, got a mortgage for his home near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the agreement included a rider making it clear he would be using it as a second home.

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

Brandon Roberts and Steve Suo of ProPublica and Matthew Termine of Hunterbrook Media contributed research.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, Julia Rendleman for ProPublica and Lylee Gibbs, Saluki Local Reporting Lab

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 our stories in your inbox every week.

The seed tractor sank again, no surprise to Steve Williams. Everything sank out here on Dogtooth Bend in Southern Illinois since the floodwaters ran through five years earlier and dumped millions of tons of sand. The ground looked firm, but deep pockets of sticky mud lurked under the sun-cracked surface, pulling him under without warning.

He hit the gas. His wheels spun in place; sand flew. A few cuss words, too.

He called his daughter, Brandy Renshaw, working a nearby stretch of field in a giant green rig. She turned his way to pull him out; then she sank, too. Williams, in a faded plaid shirt, gray hair sprouting from under a John Deere hat, paced. Renshaw slammed the gearshift, rocked back and forth, and eventually clawed her way out.

It was June 2024, and both father and daughter knew the land they were trying to farm wasn’t going to yield much, even if they got the seeds in the ground. But this had become their routine: farming futile land just to keep from going under. For years now, they’d had one foot stuck in the mud, the other in government bureaucracy. They’d get angry — then laugh.

“What else could you do?” said Williams, 70. “We were left holding the bag.”

In these Mississippi River bottoms, federal farm policy became a trap. Farming is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in America. Each year, Congress allocates billions to keep crops in the ground, cushioning the blow from droughts, floods, fires and market swings — a safety net that dates to the 1930s, when the Depression and Dust Bowl put the nation’s food supply at risk.

But today, in some of the most flood- and drought-prone parts of the country, those programs can also keep people hanging on, even when it makes more sense to walk away. That’s increasingly clear along parts of the Mississippi River Valley and especially here in Alexander County, at the rural tip of Illinois. As the climate changes and as aging levees fail, the risk is becoming more predictable, the losses so frequent it is clear some land will no longer yield what it used to.

But the federal programs that support those changes — enacted first by President George H.W. Bush, then expanded by President Bill Clinton — have been small, slow and ineffective. After the 2019 flood — when the Mississippi River submerged the southernmost corner of Illinois for months, part of a widespread disaster across the Midwest — Congress allocated only about $217 million spread across 11 states to pay farmers to voluntarily retire their flood-ravaged fields.

Federal workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which ran the program, specifically urged farmers at Dogtooth Bend to sign up. The floods had come here repeatedly and had worsened since they busted through the 17-mile levee that protected Williams’ farmland three years earlier. So Williams signed up, along with about 30 others on Dogtooth Bend, finally ready to call mercy to the river. He offered up roughly 1,200 acres; the federal government offered to pay him about $3,200 an acre to put permanent easements on his land, which he could use for recreational purposes but never farm again.

Renshaw, left, and her father, Steve Williams, finish a day of planting soybeans this spring. (Julia Rendleman) An aerial image from November shows the damage to the Len Small Levee in Alexander County, Illinois. Without the levee intact, water flows onto the farms it was meant to protect. (Julia Rendleman)

At the time Williams applied, the program had been offered only one other time in the past decade to farmers along the Upper Mississippi River, despite billions in lost crops. And this time around, the pot — just 1% of the $19 billion disaster aid package — wasn’t big enough to help everyone who applied, especially along this corn- and soy-growing region. And even for those who were accepted, the agency in charge couldn’t keep up with the paperwork, making the process stretch on for years.

The process dragged through the rest of President Donald Trump’s first term and through most of President Joe Biden’s. And now these programs look even less certain as Trump and Republicans in Congress double down on the status quo: expanding crop insurance and farm income supports through the budget bill signed into law on July 4 while — in an effort to trim the federal workforce — gutting the staff responsible for responding to climate disasters, including those who manage permanent easements that pull troubled farmland out of production.

While farmers have struggled to access funds to help them get off flood-prone land, federal programs to keep their crops in the ground have long been the safer bet. Over the past three decades, Illinois has received $35 billion in farm support — more than any state but Texas and Iowa — mostly through insurance subsidies and price supports for growing corn and soybeans. Some of that bounty is grown on flood-prone ground along the Mississippi and other river bottoms.

“At some point in time, don’t you ask yourself: Is this really economically the best way to spend our taxpayer dollars,” said Dave Hiatt, an easement coordinator and biologist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, “or would it serve us better in the long run if we spent money to take that ground out of production?”

Hiatt is among the USDA employees on paid leave through September as part of the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the federal workforce.

ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois reached out to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service on Aug. 15 with a detailed list of questions about how it handled the Dogtooth Bend easements across multiple administrations as well as its priorities going forward. The agency said it was working on a response but did not provide it in time for publication or specify a day when it would respond.

While Williams waited for the buyout to go through, his bills didn’t stop. He still owed a mortgage to the bank, taxes to the county. That left him and Renshaw with a choice: Either do nothing and watch their farm operation go under, or do what they’d always done. Even when it didn’t make sense anymore, they had planted their fields to maintain their federally backed crop insurance. Keeping that crop insurance allowed them to access other agriculture subsidies and disaster aid.

So they mounted their tractors and rolled out to their nearly barren fields.

“You can’t afford to leave it,” Renshaw said. “So we planted what we could and insured everything we could. It was a nightmare.”

Renshaw posted on Instagram when her tractor was stuck in the mud in June 2024. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

It hadn’t always been like this. For decades, this Delta-like sliver of bottomland jutting into the Mississippi River at Illinois’ southern edge was “the garden spot of the county,” as Williams put it. He grew up farming alongside his dad and bought his first property on the peninsula in 1987.

At that point, the land on the flood-prone bend was still protected by the Len Small Levee, built in 1943 and named for an Illinois governor. The water broke through the first time in 1993, then again in 2011. But everyone recognized its days were numbered, and the state and federal government started paying people for their homes and businesses so they could move from harm’s way. That mitigated the risk, but it also meant that after floodwaters cut a nearly mile-wide hole in 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to cover the $16 million repair cost: With fewer people living there, the cost-benefit formula showed it wasn’t worth saving anymore.

Williams and the other farmers were devastated: When the levee was in place, Dogtooth Bend stayed relatively dry even when the Mississippi climbed well past flood stage — 33 feet at the nearby Thebes gauge. Since the breach, water spills into the peninsula every time the river nears that mark, and that happens often now, sometimes for weeks at a time.

As hopes of a levee repair fizzled, farmers were stranded. The federal easement program receives only sporadic funding, and typically only after a presidential disaster declaration, which Illinois didn’t get in 2016, despite widespread damage in Alexander County.

Predictably, Dogtooth Bend flooded again in 2017 and 2018.

Both years, from his office three hours away near Champaign, Hiatt and a small team of federal officials with the Natural Resources Conservation Service scrambled to come up with easement funds, even outside of a disaster declaration.

“We begged, we pleaded with headquarters,” Hiatt said. “We said, ‘We need these funds right now. These people have been this poorly impacted.’”

Flooding in Alexander County in 1993. The Len Small Levee breached for the first time that year, and again in 2011 and 2016. (Courtesy of The Southern)

Federal records show that after floods in both years, Hiatt and his colleagues in Illinois proposed buying out up to 11,500 acres owned by 40 or so landowners on Dogtooth Bend over time, starting with the most severely damaged. The first phase would cost $20 million and was projected to prevent $60 million in near-term damages. The proposal laid out a strong case: Roads were threatened; habitat was disappearing; land was becoming more and more degraded. Thousands of acres had already become unfarmable — and while the reports also weighed the option of restoring the land, they noted that the farmland would never be fully productive, and the costs to keep bailing out farmers would only grow.

By this point, Trump had taken office for the first time, bringing in new USDA leadership. In both 2017 and 2018, Hiatt said, agency leadership in Washington rejected the requests by him and his colleagues in Illinois to help move farmers off the land. This wasn’t unusual: According to one nonprofit’s report, over 25 years, 90% of landowners in the Upper Mississippi states who applied for funding were turned down.

Environmental groups support paying farmers to leave flood-prone land because floodwater that spreads across farm fields washes fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals into rivers, causing a range of down-river harms. But there’s an economic argument, too: A 2019 study in the science journal Nature Sustainability found that every $1 spent restoring floodplains by clearing them of development and farms can save at least $5 in future damages.

Despite this, the single largest agriculture program in the farm bill is intended to keep people on the land. That comes in the form of crop insurance premiums, an average of 60% of which are paid by the federal government.

In Alexander County, that is closer to 70%. More broadly, the costs of keeping people on their land there were spiraling upward: In addition to subsidies, there were millions more to clean up flood debris, shore up the levees, and fix roads and drainage systems. And still the floods kept coming.

Yet farmers were still planting. “They do the math,” said Silvia Secchi, a farm policy expert at the University of Iowa, about why farmers might keep investing in troubled land. “You and I would do the same math. If you want to stay in business, you do what makes you stay in business.”

For the father-daughter team of Williams and Renshaw, it was barely enough. “All the insurance did was keep people from going broke,” Williams said.

“You aren’t winning,” Renshaw added, “by any means.”

By the time the historic flood hit in 2019, the need to rescue the farmers at Dogtooth Bend was undeniable.

A house in Tamms that belonged to Brandy Renshaw’s uncle takes on floodwater in 2019. (Courtesy of Brandy Renshaw)

When the river finally pulled back, Williams no longer recognized the land he’d spent his life working. The levee breach had let the full force of the Mississippi pour through Dogtooth Bend for five months. It carved new channels, dumped dunes of sand and even sucked six barges off the main river and left two stranded in a field. People compared the scene to Mars. To the windswept dunes of “Lawrence of Arabia.” To Williams, it was “just a sickening feeling.”

Farmers in Alexander County claimed more than $7 million in crop insurance payouts that year — the highest on record. Roads were so mangled they had to be fully rebuilt. Trash and driftwood littered the peninsula. The damage made the case for a buyout harder to ignore.

If that case weren’t strong enough, the flood also put on display the benefits of letting the levee go. Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision not to fix it had hurt the nearby farmers, allowing the water to spread out in Dogtooth Bend may have helped relieve pressure on the levee system across the river in Missouri and downriver.

Williams and Renshaw had come to terms with what that meant. Their land had been sacrificed so others’ could be spared. When Williams signed up for the floodplain easement program in August 2019, he figured he’d never farm Dogtooth Bend again. By that point, only about 200 of their 1,200 acres could still grow a crop. “But do it right,” Renshaw said. Instead, they fell into a broken system that left them farming nearly useless land while they waited five years for the federal government to complete their easement paperwork.

Williams takes a call from Renshaw while he plants soybeans on his farm. (Julia Rendleman) A historic flood in 2019 broke through the Len Small Levee that protected Dogtooth Bend, sending six barges floating onto the land. Two remain in a field, seen here in November 2024. (Julia Rendleman) Piles of sand several feet deep remain on former farmland at Dogtooth Bend in May. (Julia Rendleman)

Williams knew the government moved slowly, but his first year’s wait seemed absurd. By year two, he’d nearly given up. By the summer of 2024, he was just plain disgusted. He checked in regularly with federal workers, calling the local officials he knew by name on their cellphones or popping into the local office in nearby Tamms. But the federal workers on the ground couldn’t tell him much other than his paperwork was still in process, under review with a federal official somewhere in another state thousands of miles from Dogtooth Bend. They were frustrated, too.

Danette Cross, who worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Alexander County until her retirement late last year, said most of the farmers knew her by name and often called her directly, expecting she’d have answers. But to get anything resolved, Cross had to run questions up a chain through a half-dozen people. “I’m not going to say the whole thing was a disaster — they closed on a lot of easements,” she said, “but nothing was timely.”

Hiatt, who had failed twice before to bring in funds for these farmers, tried again in 2019, this time banking their hopes on the emergency aid Congress had earmarked for the program. Hiatt said the Illinois team requested $24 million to buy out everyone who signed up at Dogtooth Bend. The payments are not full market value but allow farmers to invest in drier fields that would be less costly to the federal government in the long run.

But headquarters authorized just under $6 million, which it applied to the very worst fields. Williams’ land was hit hard, but it didn’t make the cut. That meant crop insurance and the other safety net farm bill programs would have to sustain him while he waited.

This wasn’t the only holdup. In 2018, Hiatt said, the agency had created a national team to handle land deals in an effort to improve efficiency. But he said it backfired.

“We were acquiring easements in 500 days” when the Illinois office handled the process on its own, he said. “Now we’ve got this specialized team — they’re taking 800. The math is not working there.”

The head of USDA’s Risk Management Agency, which oversees the crop insurance program, made a personal visit to the wreckage after the floodwaters receded in 2019. Martin Barbre, who led the agency for most of Trump’s first term, knew the area well. He grew up visiting his relatives nearby and himself farms just 100 miles away. In a recent interview, Barbre said he empathized with the farmers and wanted to ensure they got everything they were legally owed through crop insurance.

“I mean, you’ve farmed that ground your whole life. Your family’s owned it for, you know, probably for generations, and here it’s just gone,” Barbre said. He didn’t fault the farmers who kept planting while they waited for a federal buyout. “As long as they’re insured, they have the legal right to do that,” he said. “When I was administrator, I had a saying: ‘I want a producer to get every dime he’s got coming from the program — but not a penny more.’”

In 2020, the USDA leadership released additional funding to purchase easements on Dogtooth Bend. Williams bounced between the two programs. Each required new paperwork — and more time.

In 2021, at a meeting in Olive Branch, Hiatt faced frustrated farmers. “I took a beating,” he said. “And I was glad to take it, because it was poorly administered.”

Three more years passed, and no check had arrived for Williams. But the bills still did.

Although it could barely grow a thing, the county still taxed Williams’ land on Dogtooth Bend like it was prime ground — nearly $40,000 a year, according to Williams, calculated in part on farm productivity from across the state. That number would rise in each subsequent year, including on fields buried under 20 feet of sand. That’s because the rate wouldn’t change until the buyout went through and it was officially classified as conservation land.

Deer dart across a field at Dogtooth Bend in May as a storm approaches. As farms are returned to wetlands, local wildlife may benefit. (Julia Rendleman)

As one of the poorest and fastest-shrinking places in America, Alexander County — population 4,600 — leans on farmers like Williams to fund basic government services and keep teachers employed in a school district with just over 300 kids. Farming in Alexander County accounts for $1 in every $7 in the local economy. And as more people move out of the county, there are fewer left to shoulder the tax burden.

Sean Pecord, who farmed on Dogtooth Bend not far from Williams, was one of the first to sign up for the buyout program in 2019; his land was the worst hit. “There was nothing left of it to farm,” he said.

“They work at their own pace,” said Pecord, who along with his wife also runs the nearby Horseshoe Bar and Grill. “If they were operating on normal business terms, they’d be bankrupt in a year.”

Pecord received his payment in late 2023, about four years after he signed up. Williams was finally paid last September. “It’s not what they did,” Williams said of the federal government. “It’s how long they took to do it.”

G. Pang, who lives in nearby Missouri and owns land on Dogtooth Bend with her six siblings, said they’re still waiting to get paid — and for answers. She used to call Hiatt’s personal cellphone when she wanted a status update. But today, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has been hollowed out, with some 2,400 conservation staffers at home on paid leave through September under the terms of the federal buyout, according to a May report by Politico. Hiatt and his two federal colleagues who oversaw easement purchases in Illinois are among them, as are nearly half the staff of 30 who had been tasked with handling back-end easement paperwork as part of the agency’s national land team.

“Just going in there, taking a chainsaw, removing people and not knowing who you’re going to replace them with, you’re just creating a mess,” Pang said of staff cuts under Trump that have left her family in the dark.

Without the experienced staff, closing on these deals will take even longer, if it happens at all, Hiatt said.

“What’s happening now will never be reversed,” Hiatt said. “Once this is broken, which I don’t know if the break is complete yet, but it’s pretty fractured, I don’t think you can reset that bone.”

Several who joined the buyout were in their 70s and 80s. “They were devastated,” Renshaw recalled.

Williams’ health has deteriorated in the last few years. Macular degeneration has claimed much of his eyesight. Although he’s nearing retirement, he didn’t expect to go out like this.

Williams takes a lunch break with his family at his mother’s house on the farm in June. (Julia Rendleman)

One of the advertised benefits of the buyout program was that he could take the money and use it to buy farmland elsewhere. But by the time he had his check in hand and was ready to close on new land this year in Alexander County, prices had soared. That means the amount of money he agreed to when he signed on can no longer buy what he’d planned to use it for.

Williams is locked in to the 2020 rate, which is 50% lower than the maximum the government is paying today. If Williams had entered the program today, his land would be worth roughly $2 million more than he agreed to take.

“We could take two acres of that money and buy us an acre up here,” he said. “Now,” he said, “it takes at least three acres of that money to buy an acre up here.”

Part of him regrets signing the papers. The other part knows he didn’t have a choice.

“That monster is still down there,” he said of the river. “It will be back.”

In May, Williams looks across the land he farmed until late last year at Dogtooth Bend. (Julia Rendleman)

by Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News, and Mark Olalde, ProPublica

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

Hakim Dermish moved to the small South Texas town of Catarina in 2002 in search of a rural lifestyle on a budget. The property where he lived with his wife didn’t have electricity or sewer lines at first, but that didn’t bother him.

“Even if we lived in a cardboard box, no one could kick us out,” Dermish said.

Back then, Catarina was a sleepy place. A decade later, oil and gas drilling picked up, and he welcomed the financial opportunities it brought. Dermish launched businesses to support the industry, offering everything from guards for drill sites to housing for oil field workers.

The growth also brought flares — flames burning off excess natural gas — that blazed day and night at wells in the surrounding countryside. Initially enamored of the industry’s potential, Dermish now worried that its pollution endangered the health of the town’s 75 residents. He began lodging complaints with the state in 2023, asking it to push companies to control emissions.

Inspectors with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality investigated, finding only a handful of violations, some of which the companies addressed. But that did little to allay the concerns of Dermish and his neighbors, who continued to see flares light up the sky and to smell gas wafting over the community.

“Starting first thing in the morning, talk about the stench. Then you call the state and nothing happens,” Dermish said. “They do absolutely nothing.”

His neighbor Lupe Campos, who worked in the oil fields for more than three decades, lives three blocks from a flare. Toxic hydrogen sulfide escapes from nearby wells, giving the air the smell of “burnt rotten eggs,” Campos said. “It’s hard to bear.”

Lupe Campos (Christopher Lee for ProPublica)

While working to expand the nation’s oil and gas production, President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained that drilling in the U.S. is cleaner than in other countries due to tighter environmental oversight. To mark Earth Day, for example, the White House boasted in a statement that increased natural gas exports meant the U.S. would be “sharing cleaner energy with allies” and “reducing global emissions.”

But Texas, the heart of America’s oil and gas industry, tells a different story.

Texas regulators tout their efforts to curtail oil field emissions by requiring drillers to obtain permits to release or burn gas from their wells.

Yet a first-of-its-kind analysis of permit applications to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s main oil and gas regulator, reveals a rubber-stamp system that allows drillers to emit vast amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere. Over 40 months — from May 2021 to September 2024 — oil companies applied for more than 12,000 flaring and venting permits, while the Railroad Commission rejected just 53 of them, a 99.6% approval rate, according to the data.

Natural gas is composed mostly of climate-warming methane but also contains other gases such as hydrogen sulfide, which is deadly at high concentrations. Gas escapes as wells are drilled and before infrastructure is in place to capture it. It also can be intentionally released if pressure in the system poses a safety risk or if capturing and transporting it to be sold is not profitable. Typically, drillers burn the gas they don’t capture, converting the methane to carbon dioxide, a less potent greenhouse gas, in a process called flaring. Sometimes, they release the gas without burning it, in a process called venting.

The permit applications showed oil companies requested to flare or vent more than 195 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year, enough to power more than 3 million homes and generate millions of dollars of tax revenue had the gas been captured. Those emissions would have a climate-warming impact roughly equivalent to 27 gas-fired power plants operating year-round, even if the flares burned every molecule of methane released from the wells.

“It’s a gargantuan amount of emissions,” said Jack McDonald, senior analyst of energy policy and science for the environmental group Oilfield Witness. “Because so much of this gas is methane and so much of it is either incompletely combusted or not combusted at all through the venting process, we see a huge climate impact.”

Oilfield Witness gathered and studied the Railroad Commission data on exemptions to the state’s flaring rules and shared it with ProPublica and Inside Climate News. The news organizations verified the data, including by soliciting input from professors at universities in Texas.

Railroad Commission spokesperson R.J. DeSilva said in a statement that Texas has made “significant progress” in addressing methane emissions. Companies must provide evidence that flaring is necessary, and, when approving permits, the agency follows all applicable rules, he said. “If an application lacks sufficient justification, it is returned with comments for clarification.”

“I am proud of the progress that has been made to reduce the waste of our natural resources,” Jim Wright, chair of the Railroad Commission, said in a statement, adding that “there is always room for further improvement.”

Between May 2021 and September 2024, state regulators approved 280 permits to burn or vent natural gas in Dimmit County, which is home to the small town of Catarina and its 75 residents. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica)

The analysis likely overstates emissions, since the near-guarantee that regulators will approve a permit gives companies an incentive to request authorization for amounts larger than they intend to emit to ensure they’re in compliance. For example, operators in four Texas counties flared about 70% of the volume of gas that their permits allowed, according to a recent effort to compare the state’s flaring data to information collected via satellite. And the Railroad Commission sometimes approves flaring smaller volumes than requested, which is not captured in the data.

“The Texas oil and natural gas industry is committed to ongoing progress in reducing flaring and methane emissions while continuing to meet the ever-growing demand for reliable oil and natural gas across the globe,” Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, told ProPublica and Inside Climate News in a statement.

Residents of communities surrounded by flares and leaking wells, like Catarina, want the state and the industry to do more to control oil field emissions. The Railroad Commission approved eight flares within 5 miles of the town during the study period and 280 across surrounding Dimmit County, according to agency data.

The danger posed by the gas became impossible to ignore on March 27, as a 30-inch steel pipeline a half-mile from Catarina failed. The rupture blasted more than 23 million cubic feet of gas into the air, as much as is used in 365 homes in a year, according to data the company that owns the pipeline, Energy Transfer, reported to the Railroad Commission.

On March 27, a pipeline just outside Catarina failed, spewing a large volume of natural gas into the air. As his house shook, Hakim Dermish captured the aftermath on his cellphone. (Courtesy of Hakim Dermish)

Watch video ➜

Dermish recorded the chaos with his cellphone. “The house is shaking,” he says in the video as the escaping gas roars, its concussions jostling the camera.

Fearing for their safety, he and his wife evacuated, heading to a neighboring town for the day. After they returned home that evening, he called the sheriff to ask what had happened. During the conversation, Dermish could feel the gas causing him to slur his words. The next morning, Dermish noticed new gas flares, presumably lit to release pressure in the pipeline network by burning excess gas. A cellphone video he recorded shows a towering column of flame, taller than a nearby telephone pole, billowing and rippling.

“Have you ever seen ‘Lord of the Rings’? Do you remember the Fire of Mordor?” Dermish said in an interview. “That’s what we have here.”

An incident report submitted to the state by Energy Transfer attributed the pipeline failure to a technician’s errors. Without objection from the Railroad Commission, the pipeline was repaired and back in service three days later. The agency did not assess Energy Transfer with a violation or a fine.

Energy Transfer did not respond to a request for comment.

After more than two decades in Catarina, Dermish and his wife are planning to move away. “It’s just too dangerous,” he said.

Hakim Dermish has for years urged Texas oil and gas regulatory agencies to more closely monitor the flares near Catarina. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica) Is American Oil and Gas Cleaner?

While the Trump administration characterizes American oil and gas as cleaner than fossil fuels from other countries, it has rolled back rules regulating methane.

The Environmental Protection Agency has, under Trump, delayed implementing previously finalized rules that would’ve mandated that the industry monitor for methane leaks and address them. He and Republicans in Congress also repealed the country’s first-ever tax on methane. And in June, Trump revoked a Biden administration guidance document laying out how companies should comply with a law aimed at reducing methane leaks from pipelines.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

As the nation’s highest-producing oil and gas state, Texas is a key barometer of the U.S. regulatory environment and whether it has created a cleaner fossil fuel industry.

The Permian Basin — the country’s largest oil field, which straddles the Texas-New Mexico border — was estimated by a 2024 study to emit the second-most methane of any oil field in the world.

The industry disputes that finding, pointing to a June report from S&P Global Commodity Insights that found that the rate of methane emissions in the Permian Basin dropped 29% between 2023 and 2024. “Methane emissions management” is increasingly a part of the industry’s operations, Raoul LeBlanc, a vice president at S&P, said in a statement announcing the findings. However, S&P’s report acknowledged that satellite data showed a much more modest reduction of 4%, contradicting the company’s own data, which was collected by airplane.

“We can say confidently that there is no evidence that methane emissions from the Permian Basin are low,” said Steven Hamburg, who studies methane as the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief scientist.

Companies dispose of oil field waste in this growing dump in Catarina. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica) Texas’ Attempt to Rein In Flaring

In Texas, State Rule 32 prohibits flaring and venting gas at wells, except under a few specific conditions: while the well is being drilled, during the first 10 days after the well is completed and when necessary to ensure safety. Otherwise, drillers must seek an exception.

The Railroad Commission changed the application process for these exemptions in 2020 and issued new guidance in 2021. Operators would have to explain why they could not suspend drilling to avoid flaring and indicate that they had investigated all options for using the gas before flaring.

Oilfield Witness gathered all exemption requests since 2021, which showed the agency repeatedly approving permits that failed to comply with its guidelines. In many cases, oil companies asked to flare indefinitely or didn’t justify why they needed to flare, leaving blank the section of the application asking why the exemption was needed.

Capturing the gas requires an expensive system of pipelines, compressors and other infrastructure that can cost more than the gas is worth. In their permit applications, companies cite this reality, often listing financial considerations as the reason for seeking exemptions, Oilfield Witness found. These were nearly always approved, even though the agency wrote that finances were an insufficient explanation in a presentation on the permitting process.

“The Railroad Commission seems very interested in devolving decision-making processes to the companies themselves,” McDonald said.

The data also showed that nearly 90% of the approved permit applications were backdated, retroactively giving permission for flares that were already burning. Oil companies typically asked the Railroad Commission for permission to flare 10 days after they had already burned the gas.

A spokesperson said that when the commission revamped its guidelines in 2020, it allowed a longer period in which companies could file for a permit after they’d already started to flare. Even so, nearly 900 of the permits were applied for after the updated filing window and still accepted by the agency.

The Railroad Commission also approved more than 7,000 flares within areas where the gas reservoir being drilled was known to be high in hydrogen sulfide, increasing the likelihood that the toxic gas could escape into the air. Of those flares, 600 were within a mile of a residence, the agency’s data showed.

Minimizing flaring permits is “not a priority in any sense” for the Railroad Commission, said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “The priority is oil produced, and that means revenue for the state. Oil and gas is a priority, so who cares about the flaring?”

Overstating the Progress

The Railroad Commission and the state’s oil industry trumpet their work to reduce flaring. The agency points to state data showing flaring rates dropping dramatically, specifically since 2019. And the Texas Oil and Gas Association announced in early August that drillers in the Permian Basin “slashed methane emission intensity by more than half in just two years.”

But such claims are misleading, according to experts such as David DiCarlo, an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s petroleum engineering school. Using 2019 as a starting point leaves a false impression that there’s been a sharp decline, he said, as methane emissions that year were staggeringly high due to booming production and inadequate pipeline capacity to gather the gas.

DeSilva, the Railroad Commission’s spokesperson, defended using 2019 as the baseline because “about five years ago we began taking proactive steps to reduce flaring in Texas.”

Taking a longer view shows that a median of 2.2% of gas at Texas oil wells was flared or vented over the past decade, according to a ProPublica and Inside Climate News review of state data. (Flaring at gas wells is rare because those sites have the necessary pipeline infrastructure in place to collect the gas.) That figure hovered just north of 2% in the most recently available data, representing a much smaller drop than the state and industry claim. The industry still hasn’t built sufficient pipeline networks to capture gas at oil wells, so, as production rises, so does flaring and venting.

Not Much Recent Progress on Oil Well Flaring

The Texas oil industry and its regulators have celebrated a reduction in the burning of climate-warming gases at oil wells, a practice known as flaring. However, state data shows that, while the flaring rate is below its 2019 peak, it has stayed relatively constant for the past several years.

“They can’t get it below 2% because they keep drilling,” DiCarlo said. Since emissions are highest when a well is being drilled, overall emissions will remain high as long as the industry is drilling new wells. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”

Among the largest beneficiaries of the state’s lax permitting system was an oil company called Endeavor Energy Resources. More than half the approved permanent flaring exemptions went to Endeavor, which merged with the $40 billion Diamondback Energy in September 2024. Endeavor also applied for the longest flaring permit — 6,300 days, or more than 17 years. The Railroad Commission approved the permit without shortening its duration.

Diamondback Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

The industry has simultaneously claimed that it is addressing methane while bristling at oversight.

Natural gas, as seen through a specialized camera that captures infrared energy, streams out of a Diamondback Energy facility near Midland, Texas, in 2023. (Courtesy of Oilfield Witness)

Watch video ➜

Steven Pruett is the president and CEO of Elevation Resources, a Permian Basin oil company, and the immediate past chair of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, one of the industry’s main trade groups. His company saw a 2,408% increase in flaring immediately following new wells being drilled and a 692% increase in flaring overall in 2023, according to emails unearthed by environmental watchdog organization Fieldnotes and shared with ProPublica and Inside Climate News. In the email exchange with University of Texas faculty who were preparing a grant application for a federal methane-reduction program, Pruett blamed the increases on inadequate infrastructure to capture the gas.

Just weeks later, Pruett participated in a tour of the oil field alongside EPA staff, where he echoed the claim that the American oil and gas industry is cleaner than others and that drilling companies were complying with efforts to reduce emissions.

During his term at the helm of the national trade group, it spearheaded multiple lawsuits against the EPA over the government’s methane rules.

Pruett did not respond to a request for comment.

“A Constant Roar”

Those opposed to flaring face long odds in halting the practice, even in rare instances when the Railroad Commission hears objections.

Consider the experience of Tom Pohlman, then sheriff of Fisher County, who had a flare burning next to his home in the Texas Panhandle starting in October 2023. The driller responsible for it, Patton Exploration, solicited companies to extend a pipeline to the oil well to capture the gas and evaluated whether the gas could be used to mine bitcoin. But by July 2024, it still had no deal, so the company sought another permit to continue flaring up to 1 million cubic feet of gas per day for 18 months. “Patton is diligently pursuing every avenue possible to find a solution, but still needs more time,” the company wrote in its application.

When Pohlman learned that Patton Exploration had applied for a new permit, he and his neighbors urged the Railroad Commission to deny it.

“The sound that comes from the flame is a constant roar that we can hear throughout our property both day and night,” the neighbors wrote in their objection. “There is no peace and quiet since the day of its ignition.”

In September 2024, Pohlman became one of the few people to officially challenge a flaring permit in Texas, as he and Patton Exploration representatives went head-to-head in a hearing before a Railroad Commission administrative law judge.

“For approximately 20 of my residents in this area, it completely lights up their yard and everything else,” Pohlman said, telling the judge that the flare was 45 feet high. “I just need liveability for this neighborhood. We’ve had nothing but issues here.”

Patton Exploration’s lawyer, David Gross, acknowledged the neighbors’ frustrations but emphasized the importance of keeping the well pumping.

“You can’t produce the oil without producing the gas,” he told the judge. “It’s the public policy of Texas that the recoverable oil and gas in the state’s reservoirs be recovered because it is in the public interest.”

In January, the three elected members of the Railroad Commission voted unanimously to approve the permit and allow flaring for another 12 months.

A flare lights up the night sky in Catarina. (Christopher Lee for ProPublica)

by Vianna Davila, Liz Sharp and Myron Avant

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

ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, while ensuring equal opportunities for all. Each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2025; here are our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives. We are committed to removing barriers that have traditionally excluded qualified applicants, including people with disabilities, those from low-income backgrounds, veterans, people of color and women.

“For 10 years ProPublica has reported on its efforts to grow and diversify its staff. That important work continues,” ProPublica President Robin Sparkman said. “We are committed to covering a range of issues in our journalism. To do that effectively we need employees with varied perspectives and backgrounds.”

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 186 full-time employees at the start of 2024 to 193 in 2025.

We’ve added resources to the staff supporting this work, including hiring a talent acquisition manager who has worked to refine our hiring process to make the candidate experience more fair and consistent. We’ve created organizational partnerships to provide access to investigative journalism training and build community with journalists from a variety of backgrounds. We’ve fostered mentorships so that any employee can benefit from a colleague’s experiences and we spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of diverse religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts.

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

Our work in this area can also be seen in our journalism. Throughout 2024, we reported on the adverse effects of abortion restrictions on women, including those who died after their states banned the procedure. Our reporting resulted in new federal rules that went into effect last year that are aimed at speeding repatriations of Native American remains. Last February, the U.S. Department of Justice started working with a sheriff’s office in Wisconsin on a written policy on how to respond to incidents involving people with limited English proficiency; this followed our reporting on how a grammatical mistake in Spanish led sheriff’s deputies to wrongly blame a Nicaraguan dairy worker for his son’s death. Our reporting on systemic failings by the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat people with mental illnesses, including in cases in which veterans went on to kill themselves or others, resulted in commitments to increase staffing by the VA secretary.

We also partner with news organizations across the country. Last year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill into law that curtailed the controversial contract-for-deed real estate deals and included greater protections for buyers; his action followed a 2022 investigation by ProPublica and the Sahan Journal that revealed questionable real estate transactions that left members of Minnesota’s Somali and Hispanic immigrant communities at risk of losing their homes. Meanwhile in Virginia, the state’s legislature last year approved a statewide commission to investigate the role of public colleges and universities in displacing Black communities, following our reporting on the issue with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we collected aggregate data about our application and interview process. Out of 27 positions filled in 2024, 52% of the finalists identified as women and half identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Fifty-six percent of the people we hired identified as women and 37% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

At the start of 2025, the percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 63%.

For the seventh year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 52% of the staff.

About 2% of our staff identify as nonbinary or transgender.

Since 2022, we have collected demographic information about our board of directors. Of the 15 people on the board, 47% identified as women. About 67% of the directors identified as non-Hispanic white, compared to 64% last year.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here’s how our staff breaks down.

(Please note that the data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, in 2022 we began stating numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” The employee information is as of Jan. 1 of each year. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people, and that group does not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding. Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.)

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

Added new staff: Part of our goal in 2024 was to build capacity on the team that is responsible for hiring and supporting ProPublicans. We brought on a seasoned talent acquisition manager with over a decade of recruiting experience, including recent years at top news organizations. Their addition ensures our team has the capacity to fully support hiring managers while creating a thoughtful, well-structured recruiting experience for every candidate.

Strengthening fair and inclusive hiring: We’ve taken significant steps to make our hiring process even more fair, transparent and inclusive. By implementing structured interviews across the organization, we’re ensuring every candidate is evaluated consistently. We’ve also increased collaboration with hiring teams through more frequent consultations, ensuring we adhere to fair and nondiscriminatory hiring practices. On the candidate side, we’ve added more touchpoints and improved communication, so candidates are kept more up to date on the process of their applications.

Our Ongoing Efforts

ProPublica thinks about its efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism); recruiting talent and improving our hiring process; and inclusion and retention.

Building the Pipeline

Conference stipends: ProPublica partnered with Investigative Reporters & Editors to sponsor journalists to attend the annual IRE convention. We also sponsored a journalists of color mixer, open to everyone at the conference, which was attended by close to 100 people.

Emerging Reporters Program: The program provides financial assistance and mentorship to five students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible due to cost, so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field. The program is open to all and includes a $9,000 stipend, virtual programming and an all-expenses paid trip to an IRE conference on computer assisted reporting. This is the program’s ninth year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford.

Data Institute: In 2016, ProPublica journalists founded The Data Institute, a workshop for journalists on how to use data, design and code. ProPublica eventually started working with Open News, which coordinates student and instructor participation and provides support for project management and event planning. The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Journalism & Democracy now organize this in-person event. Last year a half dozen current and former ProPublicans served as trainers at the institute, which is focused on empowering people with data skills they can bring back to their own newsrooms.

Investigative Editor Training Program: ProPublica started an Investigative Editor Training Program in 2023 for journalists who want to learn how to manage, edit and elevate investigative projects that expose harm and create impact. The curriculum for the yearlong program was designed by ProPublica Managing Editor Ginger Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas. The program is open to all and tries to address the industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. We selected 10 people to attend a weeklong training at our New York office. Also included in the program were an additional four ProPublica staffers who aspire to become story editors. Participants heard from ProPublica editors on different aspects of the craft, from story selection and memos to managing the reporting and digging into the first draft. They were also paired with ProPublica senior staff as mentors and received additional virtual training for the remainder of the year. We offered this training again in 2025.

Recruiting and Hiring

Affinity conferences: Last summer, ProPublica recruiters and newsroom staff attended the country’s three largest affinity journalism conferences, sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. The newsroom sponsored the NABJ Investigative Task Force mixer and the Visual Task Force Moneta Sleet Photo Competition at the organization’s annual convention in Chicago.

Salary transparency and fairness: ProPublica is committed to paying its employees fairly and transparently and works to ensure that there is no improper discrimination in compensation. Since the fall of 2022, ProPublica has published salary ranges for all posted job openings, regardless of geography. Our staff recently formed a union, and future salary increases will be part of a collective bargaining agreement.

Interview pools: We strive for an interview pool that includes at least one qualified candidate from an underrepresented background. Interview pools are not capped and seek to include all equally qualified candidates.

Freelancer guide: ProPublica publishes a guide for freelancers interested in pitching an investigation to ProPublica. We designed the guide to formalize the pitch process and level the playing field for how freelance projects are presented and considered. Submissions will be reviewed by editors on a rotating basis. ProPublica will respond to anyone who completes the form, even if their proposal is not accepted.

LRN candidate outreach: Editors with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network continue to do personalized recruiting and offer office hours so local journalists can discuss their accountability work with a member of the team. LRN editors were also present at journalism conferences, including affinity group gatherings — where they met with interested applicants in an effort to help them with the project-development and application process. The program also regularly taps the talent team for leads of promising candidates. In addition, the team of editors regularly discusses the diversity of voices in the program and how to adapt our work to meet a range of needs.

Inclusion and Retention

Welcoming new hires and focusing on internal culture: Our inclusion subcommittee consists of about 30 ProPublicans who meet monthly to consider ways to make the newsroom more inclusive and fair, while building support for one another as colleagues. Mariam Elba and Megan O’Matz chair this subcommittee. The group created a tool to help staff identify training and development opportunities; fostered mentorships for new hires; and spearheaded the creation of a shared holiday calendar to promote greater awareness of various religious celebrations and avoid scheduling conflicts. An internal story club meets regularly to discuss particularly enjoyable stories, podcasts or books. The committee spearheaded the institution of voluntary breakout rooms after all-staff meetings, where staff are randomly assigned to groups who discuss a prompt created by the committee to spark conversation and build community. The committee works to improve communication, share knowledge and address challenges faced by a far-flung workforce.

Sensitivity subcommittee: Led by Colleen Barry, this group serves as a resource for editors and reporters to tap the collective brain trust of our newsroom when working on particularly sensitive stories about suicide, sexual abuse, child abuse, racial trauma and more. The committee maintains a Slack channel where anyone can share resources and where editors and reporters can solicit feedback on drafts or ask questions on how best to report on sensitive subjects. When a “sensitivity read” or the discussions during the editing and production of a story are particularly instructive, the subcommittee has shared those experiences at diversity committee meetings so any lessons can be more broadly applied.

ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program, organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song, that is open to all and matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions. Last year, more than 50 ProPublicans participated in this program, which was started in 2018.

Unconscious bias training: Since 2021, ProPublica has used Paradigm Reach to provide ongoing training for staff to create a workplace culture that is intentional, inclusive and high performing. The training is provided to all new staff.

Diversity Committee office hours: We have continued to offer a casual virtual hangout twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm or chat in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new positions, including fellowships, full-time and temporary roles.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

When a source first told me about the case of Lloyd Gray in late 2024, I jotted down these notes: two Black jurors, a swastika and Gov. Jeff Landry. That was an oversimplification of a deeply troubling issue, but it also got to the heart of a story published this week by ProPublica and Verite News that haunts Louisiana and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Gray was just 19 in 1980 when he was tried in a New Orleans courtroom on a charge of aggravated rape. After one day of testimony, the jury returned with a 10-2 split verdict. The 10 white jurors voted guilty and the only two Black jurors not guilty. If you’re a regular consumer of courtroom dramas, you might think a split verdict would mean a mistrial, and today it would. But back then in Louisiana, where nonunanimous juries were legal, it resulted in a life sentence for Gray.

Covering the criminal justice system in Louisiana often means familiarizing myself with things people in other parts of the country might find shocking. For instance, many might be surprised to learn that here, for more than 120 years, the state allowed people like Gray to be sent to prison for life even though two jurors voted not guilty. The only other state to do the same was Oregon.

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice was unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law meant to uphold white supremacy, but the decision only applied in cases going forward; the court left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. Louisiana refused to reconsider the convictions of more than 1,000 mostly Black men sent to prison for lengthy sentences by those split-jury verdicts.

Reporting here can often be a surreal experience. Even when you think you’ve reached a level of cynicism that can’t be breached, something new comes along that shocks your system. For me, that was the swastika.

While Gray’s former attorney was explaining the ins and outs of his case to me, he mentioned that at some point, someone had drawn the Nazi hate symbol on the cover of Gray’s case file. And sure enough, when Gray’s attorneys sent me the cover page of his file, there it was, in the upper right corner: a small doodle of a swastika.

It was hard to contemplate how, even as recently as the 1980s, someone would feel comfortable enough to draw such a disgraceful thing on a government document without fear of repercussion. The district attorney’s office does not dispute its existence or that a staff member might have drawn it, but it doesn’t know who or when.

A doodle of a swastika on the upper right corner of the cover of Gray’s file (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News. Highlight added by ProPublica.)

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections denied our request to interview Gray, either by phone or in person, so the only way to communicate with him for the story was via his attorneys. I provided them with questions, and they relayed his responses.

I wanted to know what his life was like before that fateful night in 1980 when he was accused of rape. He described a happy childhood, saying: “The beauty of it is we were loved. Me and my sister, my brother, we were loved.” But he also recalled witnessing his mother’s mistreatment at a gas station at a young age. “It opened my eyes to racism at its finest,” Gray said.

Gray’s attorneys contend that the swastika, along with the two Black jurors voting to acquit, among other issues, proves that his prosecution was tainted by racial bias and should be enough to, at the very least, reconsider Gray’s sentence.

At one point, the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office appeared to agree and proposed a plea deal that would allow for Gray’s release. In Oregon, after the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling, the state vacated the sentences of everyone convicted by a nonunanimous jury, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences that allowed many to walk free.

But again, this is Louisiana. Unlike Oregon, the state Supreme Court decided not to vacate old split-jury convictions and left it to the Legislature to deal with the issue. In turn, lawmakers, backed by Landry, shut off all paths to freedom for people like Gray. They not only shot down legislation allowing for older split-jury verdicts to be reexamined, they passed a bill gutting the ability of prosecutors to offer plea deals. (The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment.)

The impact of this law played out in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court in late August when the district attorney’s office told Judge Robin Pittman that the new law prevented it from waiving a missed filing deadline by Gray and, as a result, it couldn’t broker a deal. Pittman set a new hearing for Oct. 30 at which she will decide if Gray’s case, in which he asked for his sentence to be reconsidered, can move forward.

“When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” Gray told me through his attorneys. “After 45 years, I’m no closer to freedom than the day I walked into this place.”

by Renee Dudley

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

The Pentagon issued a “letter of concern” to Microsoft documenting a “breach of trust” over the company’s use of China-based engineers to maintain sensitive government computer systems, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week. At the same time, the Defense Department is opening an investigation into whether any of those employees have compromised national security.

The actions came in response to a recent ProPublica investigation that exposed Microsoft’s “digital escort” system, in which U.S. personnel with security clearances supervise foreign engineers, including those in China. ProPublica found that the escorts often lack the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills.

The tech giant developed the arrangement as a work-around to a Defense Department requirement that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

“The program was designed to comply with contracting rules, but it exposed the department to unacceptable risk,” Hegseth said in a video announcement posted on X. “If you’re thinking America first and common sense, this doesn’t pass either of those tests.”

The letter serves as a warning to Microsoft, which has said in earnings reports that it receives “substantial revenue from government contracts.” It is less serious than a “cure notice,” which could lead to termination of Microsoft contracts if problems are not fixed. The department did not release the letter publicly, and it did not reply to ProPublica’s request for a copy of it.

Experts have said allowing China-based personnel to perform technical support and maintenance on U.S. government computer systems poses major security risks. Laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.

Hegseth said the newly opened Pentagon investigation into the digital escort program would focus on Microsoft’s China-based employees. The probe will “help us determine the impact of this digital escort workaround,” he said, including whether “they put anything in the code that we didn’t know about.”

Hegseth said in his video announcement that the department is also requiring a new third-party audit of Microsoft’s digital escort program. It is unclear who will conduct that audit.

Microsoft started using digital escorts about a decade ago, ProPublica found, and went on to win federal cloud computing business worth billions of dollars. Through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, the system escaped the notice of Pentagon officials. ProPublica reported last week that Microsoft failed to disclose key details of the arrangement in the security plans it submitted to the Defense Department. The company has declined to comment on those omissions.

“We expect vendors doing business with the Department of Defense to put U.S. national security ahead of profit maximization,” Hegseth said in the video.

In the wake of ProPublica’s reporting, Microsoft announced last month that it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems. In a statement provided for this story, the company said that it “will continue to collaborate with the US Government to ensure we are meeting their expectations.”

“We remain committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed,” the company said in the statement.

In addition to China, Microsoft has operations in India, the European Union and elsewhere across the globe, and engineers in those places also work on Defense Department cloud maintenance.

Last month, Hegseth said on X that “foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems.” But last week, in response to ProPublica’s questions, the Defense Department left the door open to the continued use of foreign-based engineers with digital escorts, saying that it “may be deemed an acceptable risk,” depending on factors that include “the country of origin of the foreign national” being escorted.

In his announcement, Hegseth did not mention whether the escort program would continue or say whether Microsoft’s reliance on other foreign nationals to maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems would also be reviewed. The department did not respond to questions from ProPublica seeking additional information about the new investigations.

ProPublica reported last month that Microsoft has also relied on its China-based employees to maintain federal cloud computing systems beyond the Defense Department, including those of the departments of Justice, Treasury and Commerce. In response to the reporting, Microsoft has suggested that it would also discontinue the use of China-based engineers for those departments.

In this week’s announcement, Hegseth said the Defense Department was working “with our partners in the rest of the federal government to ensure that all U.S. networks are protected.”

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Leaders in Alaska and elsewhere have repeatedly promised action in recent years to address the nation’s chronic failure to solve the murder or disappearance of Indigenous people.

Federal legislation backed by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski called for improving data collection and information sharing among law enforcement and tribes. Gov. Mike Dunleavy said again and again and as recently as May 5 that the state government would work with Alaska Natives to address the crisis.

“My administration will continue to support law enforcement, victim advocacy groups, Alaska Native Tribes and other entities working together to solve these cases and bring closure to victims’ families,” Dunleavy said in a news release last year.

Yet when an Alaska Native group asked state law enforcement officials in June for one of the most fundamental pieces of data needed to understand the issue — a list of murders investigated by state police — the state said no.

Charlene Aqpik Apok launched Data for Indigenous Justice in 2020 after trying to collect the names of missing and murdered Indigenous people to read at a rally, only to discover no government agency had been keeping track. Over time, the nonprofit built its own homegrown database with the help of villagers, friends and family across the state.

In 2023, the state started publishing a list quarterly with names of Indigenous people reported missing. But the state still does not issue a list for the other key piece of the group’s efforts: Indigenous people who have been killed.

So on June 4, the nonprofit filed two public records requests with the Alaska Department of Public Safety concerning homicide cases the agency had investigated since 2022. The group asked first for victims of all races and then for those identified as Alaska Native.

Apok said she didn’t think the request was controversial or complicated.

But the state rejected the requests a week later. The agency said fulfilling the request would take “several hours” and cited a state regulation allowing a denial if providing information to a requester would require employees to “compile or summarize” existing public records.

“We do not keep lists of victims of any type of crime, including homicide victims, and to fulfil this request DPS would have to manually review incident reports from multiple years to create a record that matched what you are looking for,” Austin McDaniel, communications director for the department, wrote to the nonprofit.

McDaniel offered no direct response when the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asked why the agency could not retrieve homicide records with a simple database query or why, even if the work required manual review and wasn’t required under state law, the agency didn’t simply create a list of homicide victims.

(Alaska’s public records law says any records that take state employees fewer than five hours to produce shall be provided for free, and the state can choose to waive research fees if providing records would serve the public interest. Even if an agency needs to create a new record, as McDaniel asserted in his denial, it’s allowed to “if the public agency can do so without impairing its functioning.”)

Data for Indigenous Justice appealed the denial to the head of the department, Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell, who decided in favor of the agency.

The nonprofit’s records request and the state’s denial revealed that Alaska, four years after creating a council on murdered and missing Indigenous people, cannot readily identify murder cases involving Indigenous victims. The state now employs four investigators who focus on such cases.

“How do they know which cases are Alaska Native or Indigenous people for their MMIP investigators if they cannot do a simple pull of the demographics that we are talking about?” Apok said.

Apok said tracking complete and accurate data on Indigenous people who have disappeared or been killed matters because otherwise, law enforcement can shrug off individual cases and deny the scale of the problem.

“That’s the power of data. That’s the power of collective information,” she said.

Grace Norton holds a photo of her niece, Ashley Johnson-Barr, who was murdered in Kotzebue, Alaska, in 2018. Kotzebue residents walked along Shore Avenue and scattered rose petals in remembrance of missing and murdered Indigenous people in 2023. (Marc Lester/ADN)

In lieu of answering detailed questions for this story, McDaniel provided a one-page response saying that the department receives thousands of records requests each year. He said the agency is a “leader in data transparency” for missing and murdered Indigenous people, adding that “to imply that we are not invested in this work due to the denial of one records request from an advocacy group is absurd.”

He cited as examples of transparency the department’s publication of information about missing Indigenous people and its provision of law enforcement data to tribal governments in support of their requests for federal grants.

Anchorage, which runs the state’s largest municipal police department, recently reversed a policy that withheld the identities of certain homicide victims. The police chief released the records after Daily News reporting revealed the policy had no basis in law and was opposed by some victims’ rights advocates.

State troopers, meanwhile, handle about 38% of all murders in Alaska, according to statistics that law enforcement reports each year. From 2019 to 2023, the most recent data available, troopers investigated an average of 22 murders each year. That means the agency would likely need to review just a few dozen reports to provide the requested names.

Watershed reports published in Canada in 2017 and by the Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute in 2018 revealed the scope of the crisis of missing and murdered people from Indigenous communities.

Those reports, Apok said, “named exactly what a lot of us were seeing and feeling, where we didn’t know our experiences were part of a larger collective.”

In 2021, Data for Indigenous Justice published the first report on the crisis in Alaska, highlighting the failure of media and local governments to gather data on cases of missing and murdered people to analyze patterns. A council appointed by Dunleavy even relied on Apok’s findings — including her conclusion that little data is available — when trying to describe the scope of the problem.

Dunleavy and Murkowski have been vocal on the issue in the years since.

A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions about the state’s failure to provide names of homicide victims to Apok’s group. Told of the decision not to release the names, Murkowski’s office said the senator was unavailable for an interview and offered no comment on the state’s actions.

Apok said her group will continue making public records requests to the state while building its own database through community connections.

“We’re going to keep doing what we do,” she said. “People will keep telling us names.”

by Tim Golden

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

More than two decades after victims of the 9/11 attacks began trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia responsible for helping the Qaida terrorists who carried out the plot, a federal judge has ruled that a civil lawsuit against the kingdom can go to trial.

The decision on Thursday, by Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, represents a crucial victory for survivors of the attacks and relatives of the 2,977 people who were killed.

“This is a historic win for the families,” said a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, did not respond to requests for comment on the judge’s ruling.

The Saudi kingdom, which has long rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, could still appeal Daniels’ decision under special protections that are afforded to foreign governments in federal law, legal experts said. However, they added that the Saudi government might be willing to consider a settlement with the plaintiffs to avoid the scrutiny of a major trial and the expansive discovery of information that it would bring.

Already, information uncovered by plaintiffs has rewritten the history of the Sept. 11 plot as it was presented in the years after the attacks by the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

Most significantly, the plaintiffs’ evidence has undermined the FBI’s conclusion that two Saudi officials in Southern California — one a part-time spy, the other a religious official with diplomatic status — acted “unwittingly” when they helped the first Qaida hijackers who arrived in the United States.

In an email, the FBI also declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

It has long been established that in the years before 9/11, some members of the Saudi royal family and some powerful Saudi officials had supported militant Islamist movements and gave money to Islamic charities that in turn helped finance al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

However, both the FBI and the CIA emphasized in the aftermath of the attacks that the Saudi royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its banished leader, Osama bin Laden, and that senior officials of the government had not assisted the group.

The litigation in New York focused on the roles of two lower-level Saudi officials living in the United States. One, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged graduate student in San Diego who had long worked for the Saudi civil aviation agency. The other, Fahad al-Thumairy, was a religious official serving in Los Angeles as an imam at a new Saudi-funded mosque and as a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate.

The FBI quickly determined that Bayoumi met the first two hijackers near the mosque soon after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000 and that he helped them rent an apartment in San Diego, open a bank account and buy a car.

Bayoumi also introduced the two jihadists — who knew no one in the United States, spoke virtually no English and had no experience of living in the West — to a group of Muslim men who provided them with crucial support over the months that they lived in the city.

Bayoumi moved his family to Birmingham, England, in the summer of 2001. Within days of the attacks, he was detained and questioned by the British police at the FBI’s request before being allowed to return to Saudi Arabia.

In a search of Bayoumi’s home, the British authorities turned up documents, notebooks, videotapes and computer files that they shared with the FBI, officials said. But only in the last two years did lawyers for the 9/11 families obtain much of that cache — and then only from the British government.

From the start, U.S. investigators were skeptical of Bayoumi’s account. In the end, though, the FBI largely accepted his claims that he met the two Qaida operatives by chance, helped them as he would any compatriots and had no idea of their terrorist plans. Both Bayoumi and the Saudi government insisted repeatedly that he had no ties to Saudi intelligence.

Despite the efforts of a small group of FBI agents to pursue the case, it was eventually closed by the bureau. The civil lawsuit nearly died in 2016, when President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to carve out an exception to the sovereign immunity of foreign governments and permit the families to sue the Saudi kingdom. Congress overrode that veto, however, allowing the suit to go forward.

President Donald Trump later blocked the families from obtaining classified government documents on the 9/11 investigations, claiming they were state secrets. President Joe Biden later reversed that stance and declassified documents that included reporting confirming that Bayoumi was a part-time agent of the Saudi intelligence service.

The evidence that plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved even more powerful.

It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaida plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video.

In his ruling, Daniels noted that the two sides had different interpretations of almost every piece of evidence. But he endorsed the plaintiffs’ views of several key exhibits, including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks. Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son with homework.

Daniels said the plaintiffs’ evidence created “a high probability as to Bayoumi and Thumairy’s roles in the hijackers’ plans, and the related role of their employer,” the Saudi government. “In many instances,” he added, “it even appeared that Bayoumi actively injected himself” into the hijackers’ illicit activities.

Eagleson, the families’ spokesperson, noted that during the long pretrial litigation, the plaintiffs had been allowed to pursue only limited discovery about Bayoumi, Thumairy and a handful of other Saudis.

“We did all of this with our hands tied behind our backs,” he said, “and even with the FBI pushing back and President Trump invoking state secrets, we created an overwhelming picture of Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting the 9/11 hijackers.”

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom, and Yilun Cheng, Houston Chronicle

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom, the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

The devastating flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed dozens of people, inundated hundreds of thousands of homes and left the community desperate for a solution.

Since then, local flood experts have extensively studied the possibility of a multibillion-dollar tunnel system across Harris County, where Houston is located. Studies have focused on the construction of pipelines, 30 to 40 feet in diameter, that could ferry massive amounts of water out to the Gulf in the event of a storm.

Now, after years of research and discussion, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project.

An investigation by The Texas Newsroom and the Houston Chronicle has found that the billionaire, in partnership with Houston-area Rep. Wesley Hunt, has spent months aggressively pushing state and local officials to hire Musk’s Boring Co. to build two narrower, 12-foot tunnels around one major watershed. That could be a potentially cheaper, but, at least one expert said, less effective solution to the region’s historic flooding woes.

Hunt’s team has said the Boring project would cost $760 million and involve the company getting 15% of the cost up front from state and local coffers.

Within two months of this push, the Harris County Commissioners Court unanimously voted to study a pilot program that included a look at smaller tunnels, with specifications similar to what Boring had pitched. The commissioners court, made up of five elected members including a county judge, oversees the county’s budget.

Both Musk and Hunt stand to benefit should Boring be selected to build any part of the project. Hunt is reportedly considering a challenge to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary. And landing a job like this would also be a significant win for Boring, which has not completed a major public project in Texas and faces criticisms for its ventures elsewhere.

The discussions about the Boring pitch have happened mostly out of the public eye. Hunt mentioned the project in passing at a town hall in Houston in February. Since then, he has refused to answer the newsrooms’ questions about when Musk sold him on the idea and why he became its pitchman.

Efforts to reach Musk and representatives with Boring were unsuccessful.

Experts and some local officials question whether Musk and his company are the right pick for the job. The Boring Co. has focused on transportation tunnels, not flood mitigation.

“If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water,” said Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues. “So what have you saved? Have you reduced the flooding upstream by an inch? And are you going to spend multimillions of dollars to do that? Well, maybe that’s not worth it.”

In response to the newsrooms’ questions, state and local officials said no public money has been allocated to Boring. County officials added that they have not chosen a tunnel contractor and any process to do so would follow normal procurement rules.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whose staff met with Hunt’s team during the legislative session to discuss the proposal, remains open to the idea. As president of the Texas Senate with close ties to President Donald Trump, he is a powerful ally.

“If Elon Musk and the Boring Company, or any other company, can build two massive tunnels under the Houston bayous in a few years to save the city from flooding, I am always going to be interested to listen,” Patrick, a Republican, told the newsrooms. “The truth is, Elon Musk is one of the only people in the world who could accomplish this.”

Then-candidate Wesley Hunt, now a Republican representative, speaks with volunteers before they campaign on his behalf in 2020. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle) The Pitch Process Begins

In 2022, the Harris County Flood Control District released findings from its yearslong tunnel study, which has so far cost nearly $3 million in local and federal funds.

The idea was to build eight tunnels, totalling around 130 miles in length, according to the report. The tunnels would be huge, wide enough for a container ship, and buried 40 to 140 feet underground, depending on the location. Austin and San Antonio have similar systems, although on a smaller scale.

The Buffalo Bayou segment of the Houston project — which Boring has proposed to build — is a centerpiece of the design and would run through the city’s core and some of its most developed neighborhoods. The county estimated it would cost $4.6 billion.

The total cost for the system was projected to be $30 billion, funded by a potential mix of federal, state and local dollars, and the timeline was 10 to 15 years to complete construction.

Given the scope and complexity of the project, the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in discussions about the tunnels since the beginning. The corps also has jurisdiction over the two federal reservoirs in the area.

Eight years after Harvey, however, the tunnel project has not broken ground.

Hunt has accused the Army Corps of “​​dragging their feet a little bit” because its study of the tunnel system has been delayed. In December, Congress ordered the Corps to finish the analysis. Hunt hailed the decision, but to date the Army Corps has not completed the study.

Just two months later, however, his staffers and Musk’s team started shopping Boring’s proposal to politicians across the state.

Emails, text messages and policy memos the newsrooms obtained through public records requests show Hunt’s chief of staff, James Kyrkanides, repeatedly attempted to obtain public money on behalf of Boring. The documents, which have not been released previously to the public, also lay out how Hunt worked to secure Musk access to lawmakers and other officials ahead of the formal bidding process.

Kyrkanides declined to comment for this story.

In February, Boring pitched its proposal to elected officials in Harris County as an “innovative and cost-effective solution.”

“We are confident in our ability to execute this project successfully to bring peace of mind to residents of Harris County and the greater Houston area during future flood events,” Jim Fitzgerald, Boring’s global head of business development, wrote in a two-page memo about the proposal addressed to Kyrkanides and shared with local officials.

That same month, Hunt spoke at a town hall meeting about his involvement.

“I talked to him” — Musk — “about Hurricane Harvey and how we need tunnels,” Hunt said, according to Community Impact. “He told me, ‘I can do that at a fraction of the cost the Army Corps of Engineers would do it.’”

A few days later, the head of a local nonprofit wrote to a county commissioner saying she’d heard Hunt and Musk were shopping the proposal around and that the idea may have been discussed on board the president’s jet.

“I hear that Congressman Hunt talked to Elon Musk about his boring company while on a trip on Airforce 1,” Colleen Gilbert, executive director of the Greens Bayou Coalition, emailed.

It’s unclear if Trump was on board or took part in the discussions. The president’s spokespeople didn’t answer questions about the apparent meeting.

In April, Kyrkanides made a detailed pitch in an email to Patrick’s staff. He passed along Boring’s proposal and suggested that $60 million be set aside in the state budget “that will be matched with another $60 million” from the Harris County Flood Control District as a “down payment for the $760 million project Elon pitched Wesley.”

“I believe the Lt. Gov. spoke with Elon and the Boring Company this week,” Kyrkanides emailed in May, a month before the regular legislative session wrapped up. “Wesley also spoke with Elon, and everything seems on track!”

Kyrkanides followed up once more mid-month: “Anything you need from us?”

Pushing for Smaller Tunnels

As they pushed the idea to state lawmakers, Hunt’s team repeatedly lobbied Harris County officials, reaching out to at least two commissioners, the county’s legislative liaison and flood control experts.

Early on, Houston officials had concerns about what Boring proposed.

The two-page letter from Boring said its tunnels would be “no shallower than 15 feet to 30 feet below ground surface,” while the county’s previous research proposed a much deeper range for the Buffalo Bayou segment.

An engineering expert in County Commissioner Tom Ramsey’s office warned that Boring’s shallower plan could interfere with bridge foundations, utility lines and existing easements.

“It discusses that the tunnel would be much shallower then anticipated,” Eric Heppen, Ramsey’s director of engineering, wrote in an email to other staffers in his office on Feb. 17. “I would quickly confirm if it can be deeper or if that becomes a load challenge for the system.”

Boring said in its pitch that the tunnel depth is “flexible,” but the company did not respond to the newsrooms’ question about whether it can build to the standards outlined in the county’s study.

Volume was another concern. A single 40-foot-wide tunnel can move about 12,000 cubic feet of water every second, county studies show. Two 12-foot-wide tunnels, laid side by side, as Boring proposed, might struggle to keep pace in a flood emergency, according to Dunbar, the veteran water resources engineer.

“One would need eleven 12-foot diameter tunnels to provide the same flow capacity as one 40-foot diameter tunnel,” he told the newsrooms. “Providing only two 12-foot diameter tunnels does not provide the flow capacity that Harris County or the Corps of Engineers are seeking.”

Boring Co.’s Proposed Tunnels Would be Narrower and Shallower Than County Plan Calls for (Sources: Harris County Flood Control District study; Boring Co. tunnel pitch. Graphic: Ken Ellis, Houston Chronicle.)

The county continued to engage with the company despite these concerns.

In March, Scott Elmer, who’s overseen the tunnel study for the past few years at the county’s flood control district, reached out to Boring executives to set up a meeting. In the following weeks, he and other flood control officials met with Boring engineers at least twice to discuss the specifics of Boring’s capabilities.

During one of the meetings, flood control officials pressed Boring representatives on whether the company could build tunnels that are at least 20 feet wide, according to an agenda shared with attendees via email.

The company was reportedly studying how to make tunnels as wide as 21 feet several years ago. But it’s unclear if Boring ever developed that capability or what it told county officials about its potential to make bigger tunnels. On its website, Boring notes it “maintains the same tunnel design for all projects to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ for every tunnel.”

An April 10 commissioners court meeting in Houston was a turning point.

That appears to be the first time county officials brought up in public the fact that Hunt had been pitching them on a smaller-scale version of the flood plan they’d studied for years. They referred to this idea as a pilot program that would focus on just a few sections of a larger, countywide tunnel system.

Ramsey, the panel’s only Republican, specifically mentioned the pilot program tunnels could be narrower in diameter, as small as 12 feet, and shallower — specifications that would fit the kind of tunnel Boring has typically built.

Commissioner Lesley Briones, a Democrat, said a pilot project may help kick-start a huge, expensive project that the county has struggled to get off the ground.

No one mentioned Boring or Musk explicitly until Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a Democrat, said he’d gotten wind that the tech billionaire might be involved.

“I’ve heard all of the stories about Elon Musk having a tunneling company,” Ellis said. “I’ve got pretty good ears. I’ve got good Republican friends, too, now.”

He questioned the pitch, saying he was worried it would take the county off track.

However, Ellis and all of the commissioners unanimously voted to produce a white paper studying the idea of a scaled-down pilot project. They also voted to ask the state for flood mitigation funds. The vote didn’t require the county to commit to a specific project.

Later that month, records show the county’s legislative liaison reached out to staff for state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, to indicate the county’s support for a $60 million budget rider for “underground flood risk reduction systems in Harris County.”

A two-page memo explaining the pilot project included with the request did not mention Musk or Boring and still referenced the larger 30- to 40-foot tunnels.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, points to a Texas- and Tesla-themed belt buckle as he answers a question about operating his business in Texas. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle) What’s in It for Musk’s Allies

Hunt has been a leading voice on the need for flood mitigation during his short time in Congress.

Last year, he partnered with Democratic U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher to order the Army Corps of Engineers to move forward with the underground tunnel study. The effort was applauded as a bipartisan victory.

But Fletcher, a Democrat, said she was not involved in Hunt’s work with Musk on the Boring proposal and has “not heard from anyone advocating for it.” She said she’s worked with Army Corps of Engineers and local communities “on a transparent, informed, community-driven effort to address water conveyance and flood control in our region.”

A West Point graduate and former Army captain, Hunt has shaped a political brand that appeals to both GOP insiders and MAGA-leaning voters. He was a regular at Trump campaign events in and outside Texas and secured a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He is the only Black Republican in the Texas congressional delegation.

But if Hunt enters the U.S. Senate race against Cornyn, he will likely need a high-profile political win to stand out, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, as incumbent senators in Texas have won nearly every primary over the past few decades.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also challenging Cornyn in the primary.

Given the volatile dynamic between Trump and Musk, aligning with the latter carries political risk but also the potential for major reward, Rottinghaus said.

“Hunt certainly is well-known enough as a member in his district, but the problem is that when you’re in Congress running for a statewide office, your base support can sometimes be very provincial,” Rottinghaus said. “To partner with Musk would provide for a kind of national profile that Hunt would need to be successful.”

Musk has tapped local politicians when pursuing similar big projects elsewhere.

In Tennessee, Republican leaders recently announced that Boring would build a transit tunnel for cars from downtown Nashville to the nearby airport. The city’s mayor and other Democratic leaders have raised questions about a lack of transparency, competitive bidding and environmental planning. At a public meeting in early August, a Boring official said the company would seek public input for the project but did not answer reporters’ questions about why they had not yet done so, according to the Nashville Banner.

In Las Vegas, where Boring built a transit tunnel system, the company was able to avoid many of the lengthy governmental reviews typical of these kinds of projects because it is privately operated and receives no federal funding, ProPublica previously reported.

In 2022, Bloomberg reported the company had pitched eight projects to Texas officials. Two were water drainage projects in Austin and Houston. Neither appears to have been built.

If Boring secures part of the Houston job, it would appear to be the company’s first public flood control project. The company lists only transportation-related projects on its website.

Texas law requires county governments to open large public projects to competitive bidding and give all potential contractors an equal shot under the same conditions.

While the law does not explicitly bar local officials from discussing projects with individual companies ahead of time, that kind of early outreach — though common in some places — hasn’t been expressly authorized by state courts or the attorney general, according to legal guidance from the Texas Municipal League, which provides legal guidance to local government officials.

Emily Woodell, the spokesperson for the Harris County Flood Control District, said the agency has not shared any sensitive information with Boring about the Houston project and only met with the company to understand its capabilities.

Ramsey, the county commissioner, told the newsrooms he believes there’s nothing wrong with officials entertaining private pitches before the formal bidding process begins.

“All companies that might have an interest in it, that might understand and offer us information, certainly we’d be open to listening,” Ramsey said.

What’s Next

The future of the project, and Musk’s involvement, are still up in the air.

The state never granted Boring the $60 million it wanted for the project. Huffman, the senator overseeing the finance committee, confirmed the rider was never placed in the state budget and told the newsrooms she had nothing to do with the proposal.

“The only involvement my office had with this proposal was when Rep. Hunt’s chief of staff reached out to my scheduler to arrange a meeting between Rep. Hunt and me, but it never took place,” she said in a statement.

County officials also told the newsrooms that they haven’t provided any public money to Musk.

However, in June, the Harris County Flood Control District produced the pilot project report that commissioners voted for in the spring, looking at a scaled-back version of the original tunnel design. This white paper proposed focusing on only a few segments of the countywide tunnel system and considered tunnels as small as 10 feet in diameter as a real option — well within Boring’s ability to construct.

The white paper also floated the idea of a public-private partnership allowing a private firm to design, build and even run the system afterward, just as Boring has done elsewhere.

It does not appear that this report has been released to the public. The flood control district provided it to the newsrooms upon request.

Carlos Gomez, acting public affairs chief for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Galveston District, told the newsrooms he had not heard about the pilot project potentially involving The Boring Co. and could not say if his agency would be interested.

After the newsrooms presented them with the findings of this investigation, Briones and Ramsey emphasized they are not committed to one particular company and that all solutions would be subject to due diligence. Ellis told the newsrooms that Musk should not be involved, calling him “someone who has shown blatant disregard for democratic institutions and environmental protections.”

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Adrian Garcia, both Democrats, declined to comment.

Woodell, with the flood control district, said there have been no further discussions with Boring in months. She said the county has looked at smaller tunnels before but acknowledged that engineering analyses found large-diameter tunnels would be the most effective option for a countywide system. Woodell added the county might still consider smaller tunnels in “specific locations.”

“There will never be a single solution to flooding in Harris County,” she said.

If Harris County moves forward with a smaller-scale project like the one Hunt wants, which doesn’t rely on federal funding, the process to design and build it could still take up to a decade.

Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center, said Musk’s slimmer tunnels might still prove useful. But he warned against handing a project of this magnitude to a private company without proper vetting.

“The scale of the problem we have really demands, I think, all of us to be open-minded about ideas,” Blackburn told the newsrooms. “Invite them in. Just don’t give them the contract tomorrow.”

Lauren McGaughy is an investigative reporter and editor with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Yilun Cheng is an investigative reporter with the Houston Chronicle. Reach her at yilun.cheng@houstonchronicle.com.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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

In the fall of 2016, as wind-stoked wildfires raced across parched forest and threatened lives around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, state and local officials went back and forth about blasting an evacuation order over the federal government’s emergency alert system. As they consulted one another, a critical 15 minutes slipped away. Cell service and electricity failed. Many people in the fire’s path could no longer receive the alert ultimately sent out. More than a dozen people died.

A few months later, across the country, torrential storms drenched the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, flooding the area around San Jose’s Coyote Creek. Local officials there didn’t send alerts over the federal system, which can, among other things, sound a blaring alarm with evacuation orders on cellphones in geotargeted areas.

“There was a general lack of institutional knowledge on how to utilize these communications technologies,” a review of the disaster later concluded.

Fast-forward seven years and myriad disasters later. Last September, when Hurricane Helene barreled north from the Gulf of Mexico, very few officials in all of Western North Carolina sent alerts over the federal system ahead of the massive storm’s arrival to warn people of risks or suggest what they do. As ProPublica reported in May, emergency managers’ actions varied considerably across the region.

Some hadn’t become authorized to use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Others weren’t confident in using it. More than 100 people in North Carolina died.

The threats have changed, as have the places. But over the past decade, the same story has played out over and over.

The problem isn’t that there is no way to alert residents. It’s that officials too often don’t use it.

ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides.

Formal reviews after disasters have repeatedly faulted local authorities for not being prepared to send targeted IPAWS alerts — which can broadcast to cellphones, weather radios, and radio and TV stations — or sending them too late or with inadequate guidance.

In 2023, a CBS News investigation similarly found that emergency alerts came too late or not at all. Yet the same problems have persisted during recent catastrophic disasters, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the flash floods in Texas among them.

Each time these failures occur, journalists and others examining what went wrong “tend to treat it as though it’s a new problem,” said Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado Denver professor who is among the country’s top researchers of public alert and warning systems. “In fact, it is the same problem we’ve seen again and again since at least 2017.”

Local emergency managers sit at the center of alerting decisions. They are supposed to prepare their communities for disasters and guide the response when they hit. But some fear sending too many alerts to a weary public. Many are busy juggling myriad other duties in small, resource-strapped offices. More than a few face political headwinds.

“There is a certain reluctance to send emergency messages out,” said Steven Kuhr, former emergency management director for New York state who now runs a crisis management consulting firm. Counterparts in the profession have lost their jobs and faced public backlash for sounding alarms, only to see the predicted disaster fizzle. “You don’t want to get it wrong.”

Perhaps no major disaster in recent years underscores what’s at stake more than the July 4 flooding in Central Texas. Officials in Kerr County failed to adequately alert residents, tourists and the hundreds of children slumbering in summer camp cabins about raging flash floodwaters barrelling down the Guadalupe River. They sent no emergency alerts over IPAWS warning people of the threat or suggesting what they do until hours into the disaster.

Instead, as people awoke to flash floods encircling their homes and to children shrieking in terror, key county leaders were asleep or out of town. Even once roused, they sent no IPAWS alerts of their own. More than 100 people — a third of them children — died.

Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s emergency management office, where he led the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy, among other disasters. To him, skipping alerts indicates a lack of training and planning.

“As a profession, we have to get our act together,” McKinney said. “We have to emerge from our complacency.”

Failure to Initiate

Terrie Burns stands in the middle of her destroyed home in Santa Rosa, California, during the Sonoma County wildfires in 2017. The state conducted an audit of the county’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Flash back eight years to 2017, when wildfires threatened Sonoma County in Northern California. Officials sent no alerts to cellphones via IPAWS telling residents what was happening or what actions to take. They feared people outside of an intended evacuation area might get the alert, causing traffic congestion. Two dozen people died.

The local sheriff conceded, “In hindsight, we should have used every tool we had.”

California conducted an audit of Sonoma County’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. It’s the type of mistake repeated across the country.

Among the 15 major disasters ProPublica identified, reviews of local officials’ actions have been completed for 11. Nine of them identified a lack of training or planning — or both — in sending alerts as a key problem.

Some, like Sonoma officials, have taken those critical lessons and made big changes. The county expanded its emergency management office from five to 20 full- and part-time employees, including one whose job is to focus on alerting the public. That isn’t possible in many lower-resourced communities. But by the end of 2020, Sonoma had so improved its approach to alerts that it was among the counties that sent the most — 59 of them — during that dangerous wildfire season. Its two major wildfires that year, while fast and destructive, weren’t as swift-moving through densely populated areas as the worst of 2017’s wildfires. With the new protocol and staff, nobody in Sonoma died in them either.

Firefighters keep a close watch on a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. Massive wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses in 2017. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Jorge Rodriguez is the county’s current alert coordinator. He described the litany of training and exercises required of employees, including creating templates of emergency messages ahead of time. “We really prepare to push the button,” he said.

That’s not true in many places.

Art Botterell, who retired in 2018 from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services as senior emergency services coordinator, calls the nation’s alert system “a moth-eaten patchwork quilt.” Officials in different places can try to get emergency messages to the public through IPAWS, their local alert programs, social media, email, phone calls, press conferences, flyers, door knocking, sirens, bullhorns and so on. Or they can do none of those things.

But if officials tap too few of them, or wait too long as danger closes in, then the tools become useless.

“The most common mode of warning system failure,” Botterell said, “is failure to initiate warnings in the first place.”

Tragedy in Texas

A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing of the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the July 4 floods that left more than 100 people dead. (Scott Stephen Ball for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Last month, along the hills of Kerr County in Central Texas, visitors settled into RVs, residents slumbered in homes and summer campers dreamed of fun in the cabins that lace the Guadalupe River. But at 1:14 a.m., a blaring alarm punctured that calm, for those who received it. A National Weather Service alert sounded over weather radios and mobile devices in the area that had service — not a guarantee in this rural stretch — with a flash flood warning.

The weather service can, and often does, send its most pressing messages over IPAWS. But those alerts can lack important information for high-risk locations, including evacuation orders. Local officials can use the system to blast alerts that go to more specific areas — a few streets, a neighborhood, a river — along with directions for what people in those places should do to protect themselves.

It was July 4. Kerr County’s top elected official was asleep at his lake house 100 miles away. The sheriff was at home dozing, too. The emergency manager was sick in bed. That’s what each later said at a Texas legislative hearing. The weather service forecasts they’d heard the day before hadn’t struck them as particularly worrisome.

Farther up the Guadalupe River, around the town of Hunt, rain was falling. It fell and fell, pummeling the area so ferociously that children at camps along the river woke in fear and teenage counselors tried to soothe them. But the rain still poured and the power failed and the river rose. By 3 a.m., the two 911 dispatchers toiling overnight were overwhelmed with the most horrifying of calls. A deputy heard children screaming in the river.

Deputies and volunteer firefighters rushed to pound on doors and rouse people as the river hauled entire homes away, occupants trapped inside. The weather service posted on X, “A very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.”

At 3:57 a.m., someone called 911 from Camp Mystic in Hunt, where hundreds of children were attending Christian summer camp in cabins along the waterways. They climbed through windows, fought floodwaters and cowered under darkness along hillsides. The flood swept many away. At least 27 campers and counselors would die.

At 4:03 a.m., the weather service intensified its messaging for south-central Kerr County to a rare flash flood emergency — its most dire flood alert — which again blasted out over IPAWS to any cellphone that could receive it: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”

The county judge, who as the top elected official heads emergency management, still slept, as did the emergency management coordinator. The sheriff didn’t wake until 4:20 a.m. Forty minutes later, Kerr County sent out an emergency message — but not over IPAWS.

Instead, officials opted for CodeRed, their local alerting system. Using software by companies like Everbridge and Smart911, systems like these are not nearly as far reaching as IPAWS. Residents have to sign up in advance to receive the local alerts, and not many typically do. In comparison, IPAWS is designed to reach any cellphone within a selected geographic area unless a person has turned off its notifications, has the phone turned off or in airplane mode, or isn’t connected to a working cell site broadcasting the alert.

The emergency management coordinator later told Texas legislators that he had helped incorporate IPAWS into Kerr County’s emergency response plans in 2020 partly to help ensure that its large seasonal population receives alerts while in town. But when he was finally woken during the floods that morning, he didn’t use it. He said the weather service had issued more than a dozen alerts already, and he thought that was enough.

By then, more than four hours had passed since the weather service blasted out its first IPAWS alert that day, during which local officials could have started sending their own messages telling people whether to evacuate or otherwise move out of harm’s way. Almost a third of those who died were camping or staying at campgrounds, the Houston Chronicle found.

As Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican, said at a legislative hearing last month: “We have to find a way to give the locals more tools and more confidence” to make critical calls about issuing alerts quickly. “It cannot be when you see the river cresting.”

Roberto Marquez, left, created and installed crosses in Guadalupe Park in Kerrville, Texas, to honor the victims of the devastating flash flood along the Guadalupe River. (Desiree Rios for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Lack of Consistency

No federal policy tells local officials how to send emergency alerts in disasters — or whether to send them at all. Nor are there requirements of what alerts should say or who should get them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, outlines best practices but deems alerting decisions “a matter of local emergency official communications plans, governance, policies and procedures,” a FEMA spokesperson said.

Nor do local authorities have to learn a lot about IPAWS alerts to become authorized to send them. They must complete an online FEMA training module that goes over the basics, then apply for public alerting permission and sign an agreement.

“You do have to demonstrate that you have the software to utilize IPAWS, but you don’t have to demonstrate that you’re good at it,” said Jeannette Sutton, a University at Albany professor and key researcher of public alert messaging. FEMA offers alert guidance and 24/7 technical help, but using them isn’t mandatory. Its IPAWS division also will review local plans for sending alerts and suggest improvements — but local officials must request this help.

The biggest hurdle to accessing IPAWS isn’t training or testing. It is money. Local governments must pay a third-party vendor for software that can interface with IPAWS — an expense of potentially tens of thousands of dollars that rural and lower-income counties struggle to afford.

A study released in July by a team at Argonne National Laboratory found that 82% of local emergency managers cited a lack of funding as their main barrier to adopting more technology. More than half cited a lack of expertise or training.

In late 2019, Congress required FEMA to create a training and recertification process that IPAWS users would have to complete each year, but that remains in the works. Although FEMA was pursuing a contract to create the program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, did not approve the funding for it, a FEMA spokesperson said.

Despite this, FEMA “continues to lean forward to launch” the program, the spokesperson said in an email.

Using IPAWS also can be daunting. Some of the software systems that local governments purchase to interface with it are confusing and require practice, Sutton said. With a disaster looming or upon them, officials face a blank white text box. They must write the alert, code it correctly and get whatever permissions their policies require.

In the back of an emergency manager’s mind is that nagging question: What if I send out this alert and the threat turns out to be a big dud? “Then they’re going to get a lot of people who are really mad,” Sutton said.

Sending alerts also doesn’t always go perfectly. In 2018, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message said, before being corrected 38 minutes later. The employee who sent it was later fired, although his attorney argued he was made a scapegoat.

Other times, software and other technical problems play a role. In January, a wildfire evacuation order sent to cellphones over IPAWS was intended for a specific area in Los Angeles County but instead blasted to all of its 10 million residents. The error stemmed from location data failing to save properly in the IPAWS system, likely due to its software vendor’s technical glitch, according to a recent congressional report.

A few months earlier, in September, an emergency manager in North Carolina hesitated to send IPAWS alerts as Hurricane Helene closed in on his county because a past experience had left him reluctant to try again.

A water line stains the side of an antique store in Yancey County four months after Hurricane Helene hit the mountainous region of Western North Carolina in September. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Jeff Howell was the emergency manager in Yancey County, a rural expanse of mountainous beauty that Helene would soon decimate. A few years earlier, when he’d sent an IPAWS alert, the message blasted to cellphones in a neighboring county and to Johnson City, Tennessee. He fielded an angry phone call from a counterpart displeased that residents in his county had received it.

Howell, who has since retired, said was told the area’s mountainous topography played a role in the message casting too far. He didn’t want that to happen with Helene approaching.

Although the weather service warned almost 24 hours before Helene’s devastating floodwaters hit that the storm would be among the region’s worst weather events “in the modern era,” Yancey County sent no IPAWS alerts giving warnings or directions to people living along its rivers and creeks, which ferry water down steep mountains. In the end, 11 people died there, more per capita than in any other county.

In hindsight, Howell said he wished he’d tried harder to send an IPAWS alert before the unprecedented flash flooding and deadly landslides tore down the mountains. But he’d often fielded complaints from residents who told him they turned off weather notifications because they got so many of them.

Few other county or city governments across the wide swath of Western North Carolina inundated by Helene’s rainfall issued any of their own alerts over IPAWS before the storm knocked out cell service and electricity. Most used only their local systems or social media accounts, although ProPublica found wide variations across the region. Some made more aggressive efforts to warn residents, including rounds of door knocking. One county distributed flyers; another issued a dire video warning. But most residents remained in their homes, largely unaware that catastrophic danger approached. The vast majority of deaths in North Carolina were flood-related.

IPAWS asked Sutton to assess the warning messages sent during Helene. She wasn’t impressed: “There was a total lack of consistency.”

Hurricane Helene destroyed areas of Swannanoa, North Carolina, first image, as well as Micaville, where a massive fuel tank remained on its side four months after the storm hit. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) “We Need to Bring Some Coherence”

During his first weeks as a new congressman in 2023, Rep. Kevin Mullin’s district in Northern California faced flooding that left one person dead. A Democrat from the San Francisco area, he began doing research. He read about incidents in other areas where alerts were confusing, delayed or not sent, leading to terrible consequences.

“This is really at the core of what government needs to get right — protecting public health and safety, protecting lives,” Mullin said. “The emergency alert is quite literally the front line of public interface.”

He also was looking for potentially bipartisan issues to work on. He hopes he’s found one.

Mullin and his staff are crafting a bill that would authorize $30 million a year for a decade to help FEMA provide technical assistance to authorities who send alerts. The money would fund things like live testing, field training and community-based exercises that can identify weaknesses in disaster plans and alert systems. These can be tough for local governments with fewer resources to afford. FEMA also would develop metrics for assessing alerts’ effectiveness.

Mullin, who expects to introduce the bill in the coming days, also supports creating basic standard operating procedures for alerts and templates for messages. “We need to bring some coherence to the way this infrastructure is set up,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin of California and his staff are crafting a bill that would require FEMA to provide more technical and financial assistance to local authorities who send emergency alerts. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

The template piece is out there. In 2021, FEMA hired Sutton’s team at the University at Albany to create the Message Design Dashboard. The new online toolkit walks message writers through a series of prompts to more quickly create an alert that includes content that social scientists have found best reduces the time people delay before taking action.

“By giving that tool to emergency managers, it’s a game changer,” Sutton said. “They’re not staring at that blank box anymore.”

Before her team’s contract ended in May, they trained 500 emergency managers to use the software, which is now free and publicly available through FEMA. But thousands more still need to be trained. And nothing requires emergency managers to learn to use it. That is up to them, and they still ultimately must decide for themselves whether to push that button.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Jeremy Kohler

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

In late July, Missouri state troopers walked into St. Louis County government headquarters and seized the cellphone of one of the most prominent Democratic officials in this solidly red state.

Two days later, a grand jury indicted Sam Page, the St. Louis County executive. Acting as a special prosecutor, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, secured two felony counts of stealing by deceit and two election-law violations.

For Bailey, bringing felony charges against the leader of the state’s biggest blue stronghold added to the resume of a MAGA warrior who had already interviewed for a key position in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Less than three weeks later, Trump tapped Bailey to help run the FBI. He’ll serve as co-deputy director with Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conservative podcast host. Bailey said he’ll resign as Missouri’s attorney general on Sept. 8 to take the post. A spokesperson said he was not taking questions from the media.

The case against Page was the latest in a string of legal strikes against Democrats by Bailey, bringing the full weight of the state on a political adversary. It wasn’t about bribery or self-dealing. Page, the top elected official in a county with about 1 million residents, wasn’t accused of stealing a dime for himself.

Instead, the charges turned on something mundane: the printing and mailing of flyers weeks before about a measure on the ballot in April — the kind of informational material local governments often send to voters and the sort of action that experts said had never led to criminal charges in Missouri.

The election asked voters to give the County Council the power to fire the county’s department heads and its top attorney. Page spent more than $25,000 of taxpayer money to print and mail flyers to voters outlining the measure. The flyer at issue did not overtly tell voters to vote no, but it listed groups that opposed it, including the police board and NAACP, and it quoted a state judge’s ruling that the ballot language was misleading and unfair. It also suggested that a yes vote would allow directors to be fired for political reasons or in emergencies and that a no vote would maintain stable leadership.

Documents filed in the case against Page also showed that he did not follow a county lawyer’s advice to make some changes to the flyer. Bailey alleged that the flyer crossed the line from providing information, which is legal, to urging a no vote, which he said was an unlawful use of tax dollars — and, in his view, grounds to seek felony charges.

If convicted on the most serious count, Page could face three to 10 years in prison and $10,000 in fines. He could also face removal from office and sanctions against his medical license; he’s an anesthesiologist, though he doesn’t currently practice full time.

“Public officials must follow the law,” Bailey wrote in a news release, “and my Office will work to ensure that they always do.”

The playbook was familiar: Trump has talked about arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Federal agents just raided the home of John Bolton, the former national security adviser in the first Trump administration and a prominent Trump critic.

Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Ed Martin, who had worked as an attorney in Missouri, to head the U.S. Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group and to investigate two prominent Democrats, New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff of California, on allegations of mortgage fraud.

“Bailey really was auditioning for that role, or something like it, and what better way to show loyalty than to do exactly what Trump wants on the federal level, but replicated on the state level,” said Paul Nolette, the director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University. “It’s a template for what type of approach Bailey is going to take on the federal level. Political opponents are going to get targeted.”

Bailey has called himself a defender of the rule of law, portraying his high-profile lawsuits and investigations in Missouri as necessary to protect the state from what he has described as illegal or unconstitutional actions by the federal government and abandonment of the rule of law by the left.

St. Louis County Executive Sam Page (Jeff Roberson/AP Images)

Page became county executive in 2019 after a federal corruption case toppled his predecessor, Steve Stenger. Page had led a bipartisan bloc on the County Council against Stenger, who was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for a pay-to-play scheme that steered county contracts to political donors. (St. Louis County wraps around — but does not include — the much smaller independent city of St. Louis.)

The cooperative spirit collapsed as Page set St. Louis County on the aggressive end of Missouri’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing early emergency orders limiting gatherings and indoor dining. That stance put him at odds with state officials who were moving to curb local power.

Despite this and other political battles, Page has twice won countywide elections — first in 2020 to finish Stenger’s term, then in 2022 to a full four-year term. He has said he will decide by the end of the year whether to run again in 2026. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday.

“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said in brief remarks to local news reporters at a ribbon-cutting for a county road project.

A Page spokesperson referred questions to his lawyer, Jeff Jensen, a former U.S. attorney in Missouri during Trump’s first term. Jensen did not respond to requests for comment.

Many have questioned the legitimacy of the case and whether Bailey’s successor, Catherine Hanaway, will see it through. Hanaway, also a former U.S. attorney, as well as a former speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, did not respond to questions.

“It certainly seems, based on my reading of it, a stretch,” said Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in legal ethics and trial practice. “It would be an uphill battle for the state to make this charge stick.”

Ken Warren, a political scientist and pollster at Saint Louis University, said the charges were “totally phony” but that “the more outrageous you are, the more you are going to attract the attention of Donald Trump.”

“Let’s say the same thing occurred but the county executive happened to be a Republican,” Warren said. “Would Bailey go after him? Of course not.”

Missouri has become a proving ground of sorts for Trump appointees. Martin — a longtime state GOP insider with a record of stoking controversies — was named the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. After it became apparent he couldn’t win Senate confirmation, he was moved to the administration’s pardon office and the Justice Department’s weaponization group.

John Sauer, a former Missouri solicitor general and anti-abortion activist who last year helped bankroll a campaign to defeat Missouri’s abortion rights ballot issue, defended Trump’s claim to presidential immunity before the Supreme Court. Now, as U.S. solicitor general, he serves as the federal government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court.

Will Scharf, who lost a primary bid last year to unseat Bailey, pivoted straight into Trump’s legal inner circle. Then there’s Billy Long. The six-term ex-congressman was confirmed in June as IRS commissioner — despite having once pushed to abolish the agency — amid scrutiny over his ties to questionable tax-credit plans. He was recently ousted and said he will become ambassador to Iceland.

That roster of loyalists is no accident. Over the past two decades, Missouri has moved from being a competitive bellwether state to a deep-red stronghold, with a political environment that rewards the kind of hard-line conservatism and culture-war ethos that Trump prizes.

John Danforth, a Republican who served as Missouri’s attorney general from 1969 to 1976 and then as a U.S. senator until 1995, said the office has shifted dramatically from its core mission. Under him, he said, the job was to represent state agencies, handle every felony appeal, respond to legal opinion requests and manage litigation with a small staff. Asked about a move last year in which Bailey investigated a St. Louis-area school district after a student was beaten during school hours — blaming its diversity policies and removal of resource officers for safety failures — Danforth said, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

As the state has shifted right, many races are effectively decided in the primary. Candidates don’t need to win over most voters, according to political experts and observers — just the small, very political group that shows up for low-turnout, winner-take-all primaries. That favors hard-line candidates.

Nowhere is that change clearer than in the attorney general’s office.

Bailey is a U.S. Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq as an armored cavalry officer. He started his career as an assistant Missouri attorney general, then worked as a prosecutor. He joined the governor’s office as deputy general counsel in 2019 and later served as general counsel to then-Gov. Mike Parson.

His politicization of the attorney general’s office follows a path blazed by two predecessors, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, who each used relatively brief tenures as the state’s attorney general to launch themselves into the U.S. Senate. In Hawley’s case, out-of-state political consultants were embedded in the office from his first weeks on the job, directing taxpayer-funded staff, shaping his policy rollouts and boosting his national profile ahead of his Senate run. Schmitt used the office to wage headline-grabbing legal fights, from suing China over COVID-19 to challenging pandemic restrictions, elevating his profile as he prepared his own Senate campaign.

Neither Hawley nor Schmitt could be reached for comment.

After Schmitt was elected to the Senate in November 2022, Parson announced that he would appoint Bailey to fill the vacancy. That set up a high-profile Republican primary last year against Scharf, a candidate with backing from the conservative establishment. Bailey won 63% of the vote and cruised to an easy general-election victory in November.

Within a week, Bailey was interviewing with Trump for the job of U.S. attorney general in the new administration.

With no Democrats holding statewide office and a GOP supermajority in the legislature, Bailey has turned his fire on Democratic officials in Missouri’s two largest cities. He pressured St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner to resign by filing a lawsuit to remove her from office that alleged willful neglect of duty and a failure to prosecute violent crimes, and he recently sought to remove St. Louis Sheriff Alfred Montgomery, accusing him of misconduct. Gardner repeatedly denied any wrongdoing before resigning; later she acknowledged misusing some public funds. Montgomery has denied wrongdoing and has refused to resign.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has also been a frequent target: Bailey threatened a Missouri Human Rights Act investigation into Lucas and his staff after a city-run social media account, responding to a speech by the Kansas City Chiefs football player Harrison Butker about women being homemakers, named the suburb where Butker lived. The city deleted the post and apologized. Bailey framed the post as discrimination against Christians.

Last year, Lucas suggested the city could benefit from asylum-seeking immigrants joining the local workforce, then clarified that he meant immigrants who were in the U.S. legally. Bailey — who had sued the Biden administration over what he called an “illegal” parole program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — accused Lucas of trying to involve Missouri businesses in a “fundamentally unlawful program.” He posted a letter on the social media platform X calling Lucas’ comments “wildly irresponsible” and said he was “putting him on notice that it is a Class D felony to knowingly transport an illegal alien in the State of Missouri.”

Lucas responded in a statement then that Bailey’s letter was “a political campaign press release with no legal effect.”

“It’s not effective lawyering,” Lucas said in a recent interview. “It’s a whole new branch of lawyering that I, as a lawyer, didn’t grow up knowing, which is: If you get a story out, who cares if you drag people through the mud?”

Bailey, on the other hand, has stepped up to defend Republican allies. His office intervened to defend three GOP state senators who were sued for false light invasion of privacy after wrongly identifying a Kansas man as the shooter at a Super Bowl parade honoring Kansas City’s NFL team — and falsely calling him an undocumented immigrant.

Two of the senators called the lawsuits frivolous, while Bailey has argued the posts were protected by legislative immunity, as the senators were acting in their official capacity.

Lawsuits against two of the officials, who are represented by the Missouri deputy solicitor general, a high-ranking lawyer in the attorney general’s office, remain pending in federal court.

by Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education

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

When Los Angeles attorney Leo Terrell, a legal commentator, lifelong Democrat and fiery fixture on Fox News, announced on the network’s “Hannity” show that he was voting for Donald Trump in 2020, the MAGA universe went wild. Oliver North hailed him on his “Real American Heroes” podcast. Fox News signed him on as a paid contributor, at a six-figure salary.

Terrell, meanwhile, rebranded himself as “Leo 2.0,” complete with red Trump-style caps he offered for sale online. Leo 1.0 had slammed Trump for cozying up to white supremacists, blamed him for a surge in violent attacks on Jews and donated to Democrats. Leo 2.0? He attacked “DEI nonsense,” compared Black Lives Matter to ISIS and declared the 2020 election was “stolen from President Trump and America!”

In January, Terrell was rewarded for his loyalty when President-elect Trump, praising him as a “highly respected civil rights attorney and political analyst” with an “incredibly successful career,” named him senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department. Terrell assumed his marquee role a month later: as head of the multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Leo Terrell celebrated his appointment as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in an Instagram post on Jan. 23. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

As a Black, Christian former Democrat with little previous engagement with Jewish causes, Terrell, now 70, seemed an improbable pick to lead the effort to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” as the task force announcement put it. But his zealous conversion and penchant for media bombast made him a perfect bullhorn for the task force’s actual mission: to strong-arm colleges into stripping away any vestige of “wokeness” in their hiring, admissions, classes and research.

In service of that goal, the government has abandoned due process in favor of media warfare, preemptive declarations of guilt and freezes on billions in critical federal funding.

Terrell has become an invaluable player in this extraordinary pressure campaign. Before most of the task force’s investigations had even launched, he publicly promised “massive lawsuits” against “Jew-hating” universities, including Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles and dozens of others.

So far, the campaign has been effective. To preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, Columbia and Brown have struck deals with the administration that cost them $220 million and $50 million, respectively, and go far beyond pledging tougher action to combat antisemitism. Columbia agreed to open academic programs and admissions decisions to outside monitoring. Brown pledged to ban transgender women from single-sex spaces and women’s sports. Harvard has sued the administration to try to unfreeze $2.6 billion in federal research funds, but it’s also trying to negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile, colleges nationwide are eliminating any remaining vestiges of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and shuttering multicultural centers lest the government come after them.

Amid the upheaval Trump’s task force has helped to sow, the history, motivations and behavior of its blustery leader have gone largely unexamined. ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed dozens of people whose paths have intersected with Terrell’s and reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and financial records related to his career and life.

The portrait that emerged is dramatically at odds with Trump’s description of a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney. Peers in civil rights law said they always considered Terrell a minor player. Documents reveal a distinctly mixed legal track record, marred by malpractice suits, client disputes and mishandling a criminal case so badly that a federal appeals court lambasted his work as “woeful.”

Until his MAGA conversion, Terrell was beset by a litany of financial troubles, including nearly $400,000 in unpaid federal taxes, a personal bankruptcy filing and a trail of court judgments and liens brought by small businesses that worked for his law firm.

Current and former lawyers at the Justice Department say Terrell is less engaged with assessing cases or negotiating settlements than he is with scaring universities into submission. They say he’s voiced open disdain for what he calls “lawyer talk,” berating career staff who try to follow proper procedures for investigating civil rights complaints.

Despite his appetite for media attention, Terrell has volunteered little about himself. Friends and neighbors recall him walking a dog and bicycling and his fondness for golf. In the “about the author” section for a self-published book, he wrote: “In his spare time, Mr. Terrell likes to work. His hobbies are work and working.”

Terrell declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to written questions. In a brief phone conversation with a reporter, he explained, “I don’t do interviews with my life.” Told some details of our reporting, he added, “I’m not going to comment on anything,” and, finally, “I’m going to hang up respectfully.”

It is unclear whether Terrell’s previous troubles turned up in administration vetting for his current job. Officials at the Justice Department and White House did not respond to questions about Terrell’s role or his background.

Jewish activists are divided on Terrell’s approach, with some lauding it for rooting out anti-Jewish sentiment that emerged on campuses during pro-Palestinian protests and others bemoaning how he’s weaponized antisemitism.

Kenneth Marcus, an Education Department official in the first Trump administration who has spent years agitating for stronger federal action against campus antisemitism, is a fan. “What the president has gotten in Terrell,” Marcus said, “is someone with unique skills in delivering public messaging.”

Although President Donald Trump has described Terrell as a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney, peers in civil rights law said they always considered him a minor player. (Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

That messaging is camouflage, according to Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national network of Jewish groups. “No one should be under any illusion that this is about keeping Jewish students or faculty safe,” she said. “Gutting cancer and Alzheimer’s research does nothing to keep them safe.”

Terrell speaks at a news conference along with Erma Bryant, left, founder of the Christian Women for Justice, in 1996 in Inglewood, California, where the group held a fundraiser for O.J. Simpson. Terrell was a frequent TV commentator on the Simpson trial. (Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo)

Terrell grew up in Carson, in south Los Angeles County, the fourth of seven siblings. Law was his second career, following a decade as a history and economics teacher in the Los Angeles public schools. He graduated from UCLA School of Law in 1990 and opened his own civil rights firm in Beverly Hills.

Almost immediately, Terrell began making a name for himself as a media personality with a decidedly progressive voice, becoming better known for his TV and radio commentary than for his courtroom achievements.

Starting in 1991, after the police beating of a Black man, Rodney King, Terrell became a regular on local and national TV and radio condemning police brutality and racial injustice. Three years later, he snagged his breakthrough commentating gig: as a friend and supporter of O.J. Simpson. Terrell’s role as a Simpson trial analyst produced a green-room friendship with Larry Elder, a conservative Black radio host in Los Angeles, who helped Terrell land his own talk show. “I thought he was smart, feisty, opinionated and entertaining,” Elder recalled. “I thought he would be good radio, despite my disagreement with virtually everything he stood for at the time.”

Terrell became a prized guest on Fox News. He spoke fast and loud, uttered every view with absolute certainty and was quick to interrupt, shout and attack, accusing one guest of tailoring his views “to make a name for himself” and another of trying to “hustle people to make money.” Pressed during one “Hannity” interview to say on air whether Simpson was guilty of murder, Terrell ripped off his ear piece and stormed out of the studio.

Prominent Los Angeles lawyers said he was never a big player in the city’s civil rights community. Carl Douglas, part of the Simpson defense team, said “Leo was always a talker,” not “a baller.” Connie Rice, former western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said Terrell “was never at the table for the big cases that made impact. He loved holding press conferences.”

Terrell represented a Black teenager who’d been expelled from a Los Angeles high school for punching a white referee during a football game after the referee allegedly had directed racial epithets at him. He took up the cause of a mentally ill, homeless Black woman who’d been fatally shot by LA police after she wielded a 12-inch screwdriver at officers wanting to question whether she’d stolen a shopping cart. (No criminal charges were brought against the officers, but Terrell won a $975,000 settlement for her family.)

Terrell, speaking at a forum held by the Congressional Black Caucus in 1999 in downtown Los Angeles, took up the cause of a mentally ill, homeless Black woman who’d been fatally shot by Los Angeles police. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)

Now scornful of “woke” practices and bias claims, Terrell once represented himself in a race-discrimination case against a parking company after a garage attendant refused to honor his free-parking validation from a shopping mall and told him he owed $10. A supervisor let Terrell leave without paying, but he still sued, saying he was singled out for being Black and demanding damages for “humiliation, mental anguish and severe emotional distress.” The suit was later settled for a confidential amount. Reached three decades later, an attorney for the parking company called Terrell’s lawsuit “absurd — the worst discrimination case I’ve ever seen.”

Terrell always had side gigs: he self-published a book on workplace rights; he offered business consultations, corporate training seminars and mediations; he had a 900 number that charged $5 for the first minute and $2 for each additional minute for legal consultations.

In 2001, he ran unsuccessfully first for Congress, then two years later for Los Angeles City Council. He routinely promoted himself as “an NAACP attorney,” though the group said he’d never been employed there.

William Bloch, a veteran Los Angeles lawyer who brought two malpractice cases against Terrell, said Terrell acted as “the carnival barker” to attract business, then failed to do the necessary legal work. In one sex-discrimination case, according to the resulting malpractice suit brought by Bloch, Terrell accepted a settlement from the city of Beverly Hills for “a pittance” despite explicit instructions from his client, a female police officer, to zealously pursue her claim. Bloch persuaded an appeals court to undo the settlement. After the officer received a $100,000 award, plus money for attorney fees and costs, she dropped the case against Terrell. In the second matter, a jail employee for the city of Beverly Hills said she paid $6,000 to retain Terrell in 2009 after he “boasted of huge verdicts and settlements,” only to have him accept a $1,000 settlement from the city without her permission. According to her claim, Terrell conducted “little or no discovery, including taking no depositions.” The case was settled for a confidential amount, with no acknowledgement by Terrell of wrongdoing.

In court filings, Terrell denied any negligence or responsibility for harm to his clients, insisting they had approved all of his actions and saying lawyers are “not a guarantor of the results of any professional services.”

“He’s a discredit to the legal profession,” Bloch said.

A low point in Terrell’s legal career began in October 2009, when he was retained by the parents of Emond Logan, a 48-year-old California truck driver alleged to have transported more than a ton of cocaine to western Michigan as part of a multistate drug conspiracy.

Terrell rarely took on criminal cases, but he’d played Little League baseball with Logan, whose family approached him after hearing his radio show. Terrell demanded a $100,000 retainer. To pay it, Logan’s father sold much of his stock from more than 30 years at Pacific Bell Telephone and borrowed money from his daughter.

Logan faced overwhelming evidence: a leader of the drug gang had testified against him, and the arresting agents had seized five cars (including a Maserati), three Rolex watches and a $125,000 diamond ring, items well beyond his truck-driving income. His court-appointed lawyer had negotiated a plea agreement capping Logan’s prison time at 10 years.

Still, Terrell urged Logan to blow up his “bullshit” deal, according to transcripts of their recorded jailhouse calls and Logan’s later testimony. Logan followed Terrell’s advice, despite prosecution warnings that such relatively generous terms would be off the table. Terrell arranged for Logan’s pretrial release on bond. Four months later, Logan was back in custody after a government informant taped him threatening to kill his federal prosecutor. Terrell then urged him to accept a new plea offer, with no cap, and Logan was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Terrell “didn’t do what he was supposed to do for the money,” Eugene Logan, Emond’s 93-year-old father, said in a telephone interview. “He told us he could get him off. If he’d taken the plea, he’d be out by now.”

Two courts denied Emond Logan’s attempts to get his sentence overturned based on Terrell’s counsel, but they excoriated Terrell’s lawyering. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney wrote in a 2017 decision that Terrell had provided “abysmal advice.” A year later, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decried Terrell’s “woeful representation” and said his overall conduct reflected “poorly on the profession.”

Terrell’s troubled legal practice left him with a worsening tangle of financial problems. Between 2004 and 2015, the IRS filed 11 liens against him for nearly $400,000 in unpaid taxes dating back to 1997. In October 2010, Terrell filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, reporting $736,938 in liabilities, $304,650 in assets and monthly income of just $4,000. Because he stopped appearing for required meetings, his bankruptcy case was dismissed and none of his obligations were legally erased. During this period, Terrell took out six new mortgage loans against his three-bedroom West LA condominium. The property was sold at foreclosure in 2013.

Lorita Seaton was one of Terrell’s many unpaid creditors. She’d loaned him $40,000 in 2008 after he said he needed it to help cover his costs for a pending discrimination suit against Costco. In exchange, Terrell had signed a promissory note committing to pay her $60,000 by year-end. By February 2009, court records show, Terrell had won $422,000 at trial for his client and an additional $510,818 in legal fees and costs. Yet Seaton said she never got a penny.

“He had the audacity to tell me ‘there’s nothing you can do about it,’” she said in an interview. “I want to go stand on the mountain and just holler about this asshole.”

Between 2006 and 2014, more than a dozen small vendors for Terrell’s law firm went to court seeking to collect more than $170,000 in unpaid bills. A&B Reporting complained that it had prepared more than 30 deposition transcripts for Terrell, billing him more than $40,000 that remained unpaid. According to the company’s 2011 lawsuit, Terrell finally sent a $5,000 check — which bounced.

In February 2014, as his private financial straits worsened, Terrell formally updated his law office address: from the Beverly Hills tower where he’d worked for more than two decades to a “suite” on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was actually a mailbox at a UPS store. He has filed just a single case in federal court since that year, according to PACER, a public database of court filings and dockets.

Terrell’s financial troubles factored into years of legal warfare among his siblings over their mother’s care and modest estate. In a court filing, Terrell’s younger brother Zachary accused him of borrowing repeatedly from their mother to save his “flailing” law practice and keep his home. Terrell acknowledged accepting a $30,000 gift from his mother after he’d done free legal work for her. The estate case finally ended in late 2021, but Terrell received little because he had already borrowed against his expected inheritance. (Deborah Terrell-Trimble was the only Terrell sibling to respond to our calls and emails for comment, but she declined to answer questions about her brother or the case, saying the family was “trying to heal.”)

Terrell eventually paid off or settled some of his debts, but there’s no record of him paying the IRS or many of his other creditors, whose legal claims typically expire after 10 years in California unless they’re renewed.

According to publicly filed liens, he still owed the IRS $92,000 at the beginning of 2024. Yet on the financial disclosure he filed for his Justice Department job, which covered that period, he listed his liabilities as “none.”

Neither Terrell nor the Department of Justice responded to requests for comment about this omission.

Terrell speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 in Orlando, Florida. (Joe Marino/UPI/Alamy Live News)

Amid the financial pressures at home and at work, Terrell underwent a startling political transformation. In 2019 Fox interviews, he had called Trump “a racial divider” and said he sent out “dog whistles” like “no president on this planet in our country’s history.” Less than a year later, he went all in for Trump. Fox News hired him as a paid contributor soon thereafter, at an annual salary of $250,000.

In interviews on Fox and other conservative outlets, Terrell offered two reasons for his ideological makeover. The first was the growing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he complained had “hijacked” the Democratic Party, citing far-left calls to “defund the police.” He also objected to Joe Biden’s comment during an interview with a Black radio host that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black,” calling it “offensive and insulting to every African American because we don’t vote as one group.”

Over the next four years, Terrell displayed the fervor of the converted. Biden was an “idiot”; Kamala Harris (whose name he repeatedly mispronounced) was only chosen as his running mate “because she’s a woman and because of her race.” Democrats were members of the “anti-Israel” and “pro-Hamas party.” Far-right agitator Laura Loomer was “a journalist,” while NBC’s Kristen Welker was “a DEI hire.” In 2023, Terrell made a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he posed poolside, making a thumbs-up gesture. Shortly before starting his Justice Department gig, Terrell made sure he was leaving no culture-war stone unturned. “I hate anti-Semitism! I hate attacks on Catholic Families! I hate attacks on parents expressing their First Amendment Rights at School Board Meetings! I hate Sanctuary Cities! I hate DEI! I hate Critical Race Theory!” he declared on X.

“I love this guy,” Trump gushed, introducing “Leo 2.0” in February at a White House commemoration of Black History Month. “He was a radical Democrat, he became a radical Republican.” Terrell returned the love, telling the audience: “We are in the presence of the greatest president of all time!”

Terrell spoke at a White House commemoration of Black History Month in February. Trump introduced him, saying, “I love this guy.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

What motivated him? Larry Elder, who was on air with Terrell as he announced his conversion and coined the nickname “Leo 2.0,” declined to speculate: “I really don’t care about why Leo did his 180. I’m just glad he finally did!”

Juan Williams, the Fox News senior political analyst, however, called the change in Terrell’s views “performative.” He said Terrell saw an opportunity to cast himself as “coming out of the liberal matrix, and ‘now I’ve seen the light.’ He understood the value in that universe.”

If it is a performance, it’s one Terrell has continued at the Justice Department, where the effect of his pugnacious style and footloose approach to the law has alarmed career staff accustomed to following strict rules regarding regulatory due process.

“That’s lawyer talk!” Terrell regularly thundered to Justice Department lawyers. “I don’t want to hear any lawyer talk!”

In the days after his Jan. 23 appointment, several said, Terrell emphatically rejected efforts by agency veterans to explain the legally required steps to bring civil rights complaints against universities.

“Leo did not want to hear our views about how to investigate, how to find a violation, how to proceed in these cases,” said a Justice Department veteran who heard Terrell’s comments. “No ‘lawyer talk’ at the Justice Department! It was just incredibly bizarre.” The attorney was one of 10 current and former lawyers with the agency’s Civil Rights Division interviewed for this story, most of whom asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

At another meeting early in his tenure, Terrell told career Justice Department attorneys he thought they were out to thwart his agenda, according to two attendees. “He immediately came in and openly told us that he did not trust any of us or believe anything we said,” one recalled.

The Justice Department antisemitism task force, which includes officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the General Services Administration, was announced on Feb. 3. It immediately announced antisemitism investigations of four medical schools regarding “offensive” pro-Palestinian “symbols and messaging” displayed by students during their 2024 commencement ceremonies. Then, over the next five weeks, the task force and Trump administration announced plans to investigate 10 universities; the “immediate” cancellation of hundreds of millions in federal funding for Columbia; an investigation of the entire University of California System; and “potential enforcement actions” against 60 colleges in 24 states.

It’s not clear whether Terrell had a hand in choosing the task force’s targets, but he took the lead in making the government’s case against them publicly.

“We are suing every one of these universities guilty of antisemitism,” Terrell told Fox News host Mark Levin on March 9. “We’re going to bankrupt these universities. We are going to take away every single federal dollar.” Antisemitism, shouted Terrell, waving his arms, “is rampant across the country!” Hate-crime charges, he vowed, would be brought against “these people who hate Jews.” Terrell blamed campus antisemitism on the MAGA movement’s usual suspects: “the Democrat Party” and “blue cities [that] have turned their back on Jewish Americans.”

“The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left,” he declared, “has been hijacked by the Marxists!”

Four days later, the task force announced plans to meet with leaders of four cities “rocked” by campus antisemitism (New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago) to determine whether federal intervention was warranted.

Career civil rights officials, many of whom had served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, were horrified. The Justice Department didn’t publicly announce who it was investigating or planned to sue. It didn’t reach findings before it had found cause in a completed investigation that typically takes months or even years. And investigating Democratic leaders in “blue cities” in the name of fighting campus antisemitism was far outside the department’s charge.

“The process is turned upside down,” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division who left in May and is now a lecturer at Columbia Law School. “We were given a conclusion and told to find supporting evidence to justify it. It’s basically civil rights enforcement as a political tool. These things don’t actually solve antisemitism. It’s about silencing political dissent they disagree with.” Former civil rights deputy chief Jen Swedish, who worked at the Justice Department for 15 years, called the actions “cover for attacking higher ed.”

Back in early February, a division-wide posting seeking attorneys to help staff the antisemitism task force had drawn just three volunteers. Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s appointee as assistant attorney general for civil rights (and one of his former personal lawyers), later told a Federalist Society conference that this revealed the career staff’s lack of concern about antisemitism.

Current and former division attorneys interviewed by ProPublica and The Chronicle said the lawyers had misgivings about the administration’s tactics and were reluctant to work with Terrell, who already had a reputation for berating staffers. One said he’d repeatedly yelled at her.

A memorable episode came in March, when Terrell loudly berated a revered 82-year-old civil rights attorney, Franz Marshall, over the failure to quickly terminate federal oversight in a Louisiana school desegregation case, a goal of Republican state officials.

Marshall, who had represented the government in hundreds of desegregation cases over five decades, tried to explain that closing the case required a motion by the school district to lift the order, which the Justice Department could support or oppose, and review by a federal judge.

“Who told you that you had to do it this way?” Terrell interrupted. “I want you to name names!”

“This is the process,” Marshall assured him. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

“Well, maybe you’ve been doing it for too long!” Terrell snapped. The tirade, which lasted nearly an hour, was audible to dozens of attorneys waiting outside the conference room for an upcoming meeting.

Marshall (who could not be reached for comment) resigned a short time later, joining a wholesale exodus from resignations, firings and reassignments that has totaled about 70% of the Civil Rights Division’s 365 attorneys since January. The Louisiana consent decree was lifted on April 29.

In late April, Terrell had convened a meeting with some of the remaining lawyers to address concerns about working with him. “That crazy guy you see on TV is not here,” he insisted, according to one attendee. “The guy before you is a civil rights attorney. There’s an urban myth that I scream and yell. I’ve never yelled in my life.”

There’s little evidence Terrell has been directly involved in negotiations with campuses under investigation; instead, those appear to have been increasingly steered by the White House. Terrell has voiced distrust of any bargaining, preferring to “lay the hammer on them with lawsuits,” as he told Justice Department lawyers in an April meeting. In mid-July, when word leaked that the Trump administration was about to announce an agreement with Columbia to restore its funding, Terrell questioned whether it was tough enough.

“I will not ‘SELLOUT’ Jewish Americans,” he posted on X. “NO DEALS!”

Six days later, the administration announced a $221 million settlement with Columbia, setting the stage for a string of similar deals with other colleges.

The extremism of Terrell’s messaging also doesn’t bother Dov Hikind, a former New York state Democratic assemblyman representing Brooklyn and the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism. “If Leo Terrell and others are speaking tough, I don’t lose any sleep over that.”

But the administration’s approach alarms other Jewish groups and erstwhile academic allies in the fight against campus antisemitism. The task force is “using legitimate fears of antisemitism in ways that are both dangerous and wrong,” said Amy Spitalnick, of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. When Terrell proclaimed on Fox News that the task force would “bankrupt” targeted universities, “they were saying the quiet part out loud,” she added.

Whether Terrell is good for Jews or bad for Jews, his conversion has certainly been good for him. Leo 2.0 now has 2.5 million followers on his personal X account, and his speaking fee runs between $50,000 and $100,000; his government salary is $167,603. Terrell has attained “a rock star persona” in the Trump administration, said Kenneth Marcus, the former Education Department official and antisemitism activist. “People are very much drawn to him in a way that’s disproportionate to his rank in the federal government.”

There’s no sign administration officials, including Terrell, will let up in their campaign against higher education. Since late July, even as negotiations with Harvard dragged on and Brown’s settlement was announced, the administration froze $108 million in funding from Duke University’s medical system, citing “systemic racial discrimination” in hiring and admissions. It also halted more than $584 million from UCLA as punishment for tolerating a “hostile environment” for Jews and demanded $1 billion to restore the flow of government money. Duke has not publicly responded to the discrimination complaints. The University of California’s president, James B. Milliken, has pledged to work with the administration, but he said a $1 billion penalty would “completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system.”

Other colleges are just trying to stay out of the administration’s dragnet — and Terrell’s sights.

“He’s scared schools stiff, so everyone is scrambling,” said Brett Sokolow, an attorney and higher education consultant whom college and university leaders have turned to for advice.

Terrell’s approach, he said, is “way over the top — and effective as hell.”

Doris Burke of ProPublica contributed research.

by Doug Bock Clark

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

Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure.

Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’s election rules to allow Republican officials to contest a potential Trump loss in that year’s presidential race. Honey also promoted election conspiracy theories, including one Trump cited in a speech to his followers before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Though states do the on-the-ground work of running elections, DHS supports them with tasks beyond their capacities, such as protecting IT infrastructure and voter databases from foreign intrusions. The agency, with bipartisan support, took on this role in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Experts on voting and state election officials warned that Honey’s appointment as DHS’ deputy assistant secretary of election integrity could erode trust between state and federal officials, prompting states not to share information with the agency.

“We are witnessing a dangerous trend: the elevation of known bad-faith actors like Heather Honey,” said Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a statement, citing Honey’s “well-documented history of spreading election lies that have been debunked in court.”

Fontes called her involvement with DHS “deeply troubling” and said “when the agency gives a platform to individuals who have actively worked to erode public trust, it becomes harder to view DHS as a reliable partner in election security.”

A DHS spokesperson did not answer questions from ProPublica on Honey’s appointment or the exact nature of her responsibilities. Honey didn’t respond to calls or emails. The White House also didn’t respond to a request for comment. Her name is listed on the organization’s leadership structure online, and her appointment was first reported by the website Democracy Docket.

In the first Trump administration, the federal government set up programs designed to shield U.S. elections from foreign interference, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of DHS. But Trump soured on this and other initiatives after the director of CISA publicly rebutted his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Since the start of the second Trump presidency, the administration has gutted those programs, cutting hundreds of employees at CISA. Its director, Chris Krebs, is now under federal investigation, DHS has said; Krebs told CNN that the investigation appeared to be an act of political retribution. The Justice Department has also rolled back a program aimed at combatting foreign influence campaigns. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memorandum that the Justice Department’s program was disbanded to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit focused on building trust in American elections, said the cuts had dismantled “nearly all” of DHS’ capacity to protect election infrastructure. He said state elections officials feared that Honey’s appointment, combined with the program cuts, signaled the Trump administration’s intent to eliminate bulwarks of fair U.S. elections.

“The hiring of an election conspiracy theorist with no election knowledge or expertise is the culmination of this reversal,” Becker said. “DHS now appears poised to become a primary amplifier of false election conspiracies pushed by our enemies.”

Two sources familiar with Honey’s hiring at DHS said she began working for the agency last week. An organizational chart dated Aug. 18 on the department’s website identifies her as a leader in the agency’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. Her position wasn’t on a version of the website archived in July, and officials in former administrations said that there’s been no such job previously.

It’s not clear yet what Honey will oversee, but former DHS officials said that deputy assistant secretaries are typically the agency’s top experts in their subject areas. They’re often involved in drafting executive orders and crafting policies. They also serve as liaisons to the White House and the National Security Council.

Since Honey started, Trump has announced “a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines via executive order, though a top aide subsequently said the administration would pursue those goals through legislative action. DHS has also threatened to cut off about $28 million in grants to help states prepare for terrorism and disasters if they don’t change voting rules to conform to the administration’s priorities, NPR has reported.

Honey’s duties likely would include helping to organize the government’s policy responses if foreign actors make intrusions into the nation’s election systems, former officials said. To do this, and to assess the security of election infrastructure, someone in her position would typically have access to classified information, including the government’s election-related intelligence.

Experts expressed concern about Honey’s portfolio, given her history of spreading misinformation.

“Heather Honey’s past misleading claims about vote counts in Pennsylvania, among other things, have helped fuel false conspiracy theories about stolen elections,” said Larry Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a nonpartisan law and policy group.

Before becoming swept up in the “Stop the Steal” movement, Honey had no experience in the federal government or as an election administrator, working as a Pennsylvania-based private investigator.

After the 2020 election, she became a contractor for a Republican-backed audit seeking proof of fraud in ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to emails between employees working on the review, which ended up reaffirming Biden’s win, Honey helped draft the final report.

Since then, Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.

Do you have information you can share about Heather Honey or elections work being done in the federal government, especially at the Department of Homeland Security? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark at doug.clark@propublica.org or on Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

Christopher Bing and William Turton contributed reporting.

by Audrey Dutton

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.

Since last year, ProPublica has been reporting on the troubled system for death investigations in Idaho, where a person’s cause of death is determined by elected coroners with no oversight or state support and, often, little training or education.

The failures documented by ProPublica left parents without answers in their baby’s sudden death and let clues vanish in the death of a woman whose family suspected foul play by her husband, a man later charged with killing his next wife.

The Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in January sent the state’s coroners a formal survey about their work, drawing responses from just over half. The office told coroners that it wouldn’t attach names to their responses when it made the survey results public, and some gave unvarnished critiques.

“The coroner system in Idaho is broken and a joke,” one wrote.

They also took the opportunity to plead for help, for changes they believe could transform Idaho into a place where death investigations consistently meet national standards.

Idaho coroners are elected to an office under county government control and funded by county budgets. Idaho politics have traditionally held the independence of local government as sacrosanct. This year’s state survey — and subsequent interviews by ProPublica — revealed a twist: Many coroners believe the state’s hands-off approach is outdated and harmful, making the quality of a person’s death investigation vary based on the county.

These local officials want the state to get involved, and they want it badly.

Jimmy Roberts of Bingham County, an agricultural area in eastern Idaho, is one such coroner. He worked with two interns in his office to draft a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system and described how states like Indiana and Arkansas addressed the same problems. In Indiana, as in Idaho, the county coroner is a constitutional elected office. But coroners in Indiana are subject to a suite of state laws that spell out what they must do.

The policies that Roberts highlighted from those states include creating a state training council for coroners, defining in law which cases must be autopsied, raising money for coroners through fees on death certificates or paying for toxicology costs through alcohol taxes, and giving coroners “first responder” status so they can access mental health care for themselves and get a supply of naloxone for reviving people who overdose.

Still, it’s unclear whether ideas like these will gain traction in Idaho after nearly 70 years of warnings and inaction on coroners.

Gov. Brad Little’s criminal justice commission has begun to take a look at the coroner system, via a subcommittee it created this year that includes coroners, the state police forensics lab director, a state legislator and others — but no county commissioners have joined yet, leaving the group without input from the people who control coroner budgets.

The subcommittee so far has drawn up a list of problems and brainstormed solutions — none of which it has endorsed — such as a state fund to help pay for autopsies, a forensic center in eastern Idaho to ramp up autopsy capacity or mandating autopsies in some child deaths.

Coroners are not united in how to make the system better and what it will take to get there.

Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, sent his 118-page report to fellow coroners and state legislators by email in October. But Roberts told ProPublica his offer to help the leaders of the Idaho State Association of County Coroners work on reform was “met with silence.”

Jimmy Roberts, Bingham County’s coroner, in his office. He drafted a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system. (Natalie Behring for ProPublica)

Torey Danner, the association’s president and a member of the governor’s subcommittee studying the issue, told ProPublica that his focus this year is on “low-hanging fruit” rather than major systemic changes. Asked about approaches that have gotten results in other states, he said he wants to review the root causes of Idaho’s problems before committing to any specific reform ideas, so that Idaho doesn’t unintentionally implement “Band-Aid” solutions in haste.

Danner said he didn’t see Roberts’ 118-page report come through his email inbox in October but plans to read it after being contacted by ProPublica. He has not deeply studied the reforms in other states.

“I haven’t taken the time because I haven’t had the time,” said Danner, one of the few coroners in Idaho to hold the job full time. “I mean, I’m still trying to do this and run my office, too.”

Here are five concrete steps other Idaho coroners have suggested.

1. More autopsies

Idaho has among the lowest autopsy rates in the U.S., with even worse rankings for autopsies in homicides and unexplained child deaths — and money is a factor. About 1 in 4 coroner’s offices answering this year’s survey said their budgets affect their ability to do autopsies.

Madison County Coroner Sam Butikofer told ProPublica that when he took office in 2019, the county’s budget for grooming snowmobile trails was larger than the coroner’s. (County budget records confirm that.)

Under Idaho’s current setup, each county sets an annual budget for its coroner’s office that estimates how many autopsies the coroner will have to order in the coming year. An autopsy in most parts of Idaho costs at least $2,300. Small counties in Idaho budget for less than a dozen a year, and a backcountry plane crash, a few unwitnessed deaths on the river, a spate of sudden infant deaths or the rare multiple homicide can quickly eat up the money that was set aside.

Lacking the kind of funding other states use to help cover the cost of autopsies, Idaho coroners must decide between forgoing autopsies or blowing the budget and having to justify it to a board of county commissioners made up of elected laypeople.

“We need to be doing more autopsies, thus we need more money to do so,” one coroner told the Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in its survey.

(Idaho counties and the state coroners association two decades ago opposed a mandate for coroners to do autopsies in sudden infant deaths, citing cost. County commissioners haven’t weighed in this year because there are no specific reforms to respond to yet, according to the Idaho Association of Counties.)

As noted in a previous report by the state office and in ProPublica’s reporting, other states — including Idaho’s neighbors Washington and Wyoming — help their local coroners pay for autopsies or the travel required to get them done.

Without a state medical examiner’s office, Idaho has no centralized setup for forensic pathologists to do autopsies. So most county coroners have contracts with the state’s largest county, Ada, where Boise is located. For the counties in Idaho’s eastern and northern reaches, the coroner has to plan for an all-day or overnight trip to the Boise area and the gas and hotel to go with it.

Autopsy tools in the Ada County coroner’s office, first image, and the morgue. The office performs most autopsies for counties in south and central Idaho. (First image: Katherine Jones/Idaho Statesman. Second image: Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman.)

Ada County is fully booked with its current workload of autopsies for dozens of Idaho counties. It has just a few forensic pathologists on staff. Its national accreditations limit how many autopsies each of those pathologists can do — a rule that’s designed to help keep the doctors from being overworked and error-prone but causes backlogs when there’s too much demand.

Coroners undertook a campaign last year to open a forensic center in eastern Idaho, as a kind of co-op with several remote, rural counties. The plan fell apart when local commissioners got spooked by the cost. Forensic pathologists, the only people who can perform the autopsies, are in high demand; it takes a salary of about $350,000 to lure one to Idaho.

“The state of Idaho needs to build an eastern Idaho forensic center and stop wasting time and money by attempting to have a county build this required facility,” one person wrote in response to the state’s coroner survey.

2. Higher pay

At least seven coroners in Idaho’s 44 counties have an annual salary below $10,000, according to an annual survey by the Idaho Association of Counties and ProPublica’s review of county budgets. Another 12 coroners’ salaries are between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.

That’s not enough to live on, so nearly all Idaho coroners either are retired from a previous career or have another job. Their ranks include medics, nurses and nurse practitioners, a physician, a library director, an attorney, 11 funeral home owners or employees, and at least three with more than two jobs.

Idaho County Coroner Cody Funke told ProPublica in July that offices like his need full-time staff. Right now, he has to respond to deaths while he’s in the middle of a workday at his main job, which is with the state prison system.

The county association’s annual survey shows that at least eight county coroners have no deputy on staff to take over when the elected coroner can’t answer a call or go to a death scene.

“Any help would be greatly appreciated but my greatest problem is low wages making it impossible to recruit deputies and any replacement for the elected officials,” one coroner told the state’s survey takers.

Another coroner who did have a deputy wrote, “My Deputy Coroner works one (1) day a month! I cannot take time off with only one day a month coverage.”

3. Office space Cody Funke, the part-time coroner for Idaho County, uses a pickup truck to do his coroner work because the county doesn’t provide a dedicated office. (Liesbeth Powers for ProPublica)

Half of the coroners who responded to this year’s survey said they didn’t do their coroner work in a county-owned office. Some did it in funeral homes or mortuaries. Some did it in other types of full-time private workplaces. Six coroners, though, said they did most of their work in their own homes.

Although the survey didn’t break down types of venues coroners used for paperwork versus examining bodies, the lack of dedicated and secure workspace poses a problem for both tasks.

Few Idaho counties have a county morgue with coolers and storage for bodies awaiting autopsy, testing or further examination. Coroners in rural areas often turn to a local funeral home or the regional hospital.

This practice can imperil a criminal prosecution, coroners told ProPublica, because the body — a crucial piece of evidence — isn’t secured through all stages of an investigation.

Without a dedicated exam room or storage for bodies, “we are not able to maintain chain of custody and funeral home staff are witness to exam details of cases that must have a high level of confidentiality,” wrote Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, in his response to the state coroner survey.

In the survey, 59% of respondents said they store dead bodies in a place that’s open to people outside the coroner’s office. Three coroners had postmortem samples, such as blood or fluids waiting for a toxicology lab test, stored in a “private residence,” and one coroner was storing unidentified or unclaimed human remains there.

Butikofer, the coroner in Madison County, had no office when he started the job. He’s asked his county commissioners for at least the past five years to give him a workspace with refrigerated and secured storage and a place to meet with families, according to public meeting minutes. The county’s master plan would fulfill that request — with construction being complete six to 10 years from now. Meanwhile, Butikofer has worked out of a truck, a card table in his family home, the local hospital’s morgue and a temporary space in the county courthouse.

“I hear rumors that the state has money,” Butikofer said in reference to Idaho’s long-running string of budget surpluses and cash reserves. “I’m just one little minnow in the pond going, ‘Hey, how ’bout some of that, you know, for the coroner system?’”

The governor early this year said he supported more resources to help coroners do their jobs. But in mid-August, with major tax cuts hitting and state revenues dropping, the governor responded by ordering spending cuts and other austerity measures — a sign that Idaho will be even tighter with money than usual in the coming year.

Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, at a budget meeting in Blackfoot, Idaho, last July. County commissioners were reluctant to increase the coroner’s budget but ultimately did so. (Natalie Behring for ProPublica) 4. Consistency statewide

One of the state survey respondents pitched an idea for holding all Idaho coroners to one standard.

“There needs to be a state run and state funded coroner system with a head coroner elected by the citizens. The top coroner would create a standardized investigation system” with protocols for coroners to follow, the anonymous respondent wrote.

Coroners interviewed by ProPublica have pointed to the system used by neighboring Montana: a hybrid coroner-and-medical examiner setup, coordinated through a coroner liaison. Montana and its counties didn’t have to bootstrap that position financially; it got funding through a federal grant from the National Institute of Justice.

Idaho’s disjointed system leaves it up to each coroner to decide how they do their job. The Legislature this year clarified which kinds of deaths coroners must investigate, but it didn’t clarify what “investigate” means. Can coroners examine the room where the person died? Get medical records to find a diagnosis that might explain the death? Order a blood test to look for fentanyl? Order an autopsy?

Other states make it clearer.

Arkansas state code expressly gives coroners subpoena power and guaranteed access to a death scene.

Laws in states including Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania direct coroners to order an autopsy in certain kinds of deaths.

Wyoming’s coroner standards board spells out what a death investigation should include: photographs, a scene investigation, an exam of the outside of the person’s body, blood or tissue samples to test for toxic substances, an inventory of any evidence or property or medications the coroner found, and, finally, a DNA sample.

5. More training

After living in an Idaho county for a year, any U.S. citizen 21 or older can become the county coroner. There’s no license or certification needed.

When coroners take office, they have one year to attend “coroner’s school,” followed by 24 hours of coroner education every two years. But there’s no enforcement mechanism for that law. At least three other Mountain West states that have coroners — Colorado, Montana and Wyoming — have penalties for not getting trained: suspended pay, forfeiture of the office or a misdemeanor charge.

ProPublica found last year that 1 in 4 Idaho coroners repeatedly fell short of training requirements. Funke, the Idaho County coroner, exceeded the requirements and sought training on his own before taking office, but he told ProPublica he still felt underprepared. Funke, in his second year on the job, signed off on cremation of a woman based on her husband’s word she died of Parkinson’s, only to learn five years later the man was indicted in the murder of his next wife in Texas.

With a decade more experience, Funke said he would do things differently now. National experts told ProPublica that Funke should have gone to the death scene and confirmed a Parkinson’s diagnosis before he ruled the Idaho County death natural. Funke said more should be done to prepare coroners for the job.

Idaho law doesn’t define what a coroner must prove they know before taking charge of death investigations in their county. At least two other states have a higher bar when it comes to deputy coroners, who often do the main work. Indiana requires deputy coroners to pass a written test and complete an externship. Arkansas requires deputy coroners to complete a training curriculum and turn in a certificate that proves they did it. Arkansas law also established a separate salary tier for coroners who complete the training.

When Idaho lawmakers made minor revisions to the state’s coroner law this year, they required training to be “approved by a nationally recognized certifying body.” But lawmakers did nothing to address the lack of consequences for coroners who skip those classes.

The Idaho performance evaluation office said two coroners it surveyed this year “urged the Idaho Legislature to step in with stronger leadership, enforceable training standards, and a sustainable funding model to ensure coroners across the state can effectively perform their duties.”

by Robert T. Garrett for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

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

On July 7, the Justice Department sent a harshly written letter threatening to sue the staunchly Republican state of Texas, notwithstanding its efforts to help elect Donald Trump and the fact that the president had singled out its leaders as key allies in his immigration crackdown.

The letter decried the congressional map previously passed by the state’s Republican-led Legislature as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” It demanded that Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton respond the same day with a plan to comply. Otherwise, the Justice Department said, it reserved “the right to seek legal action against the state.”

Despite its adversarial tone, the letter was hardly unwelcome. In fact, it was just the opposite.

It set in motion a chain of events that gave Abbott and Paxton the political cover needed to provide Trump with exactly what he wanted: a mid-decade redrawing of district lines designed to ease that path for his party to maintain control of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections.

Republican lawmakers prioritized passage of the new political map above nearly all other legislation during the state’s second special session, including disaster preparedness and relief for victims of the July 4 flooding that killed more than 130 Texans. The new congressional boundaries, crafted to net Republicans up to five more seats, drew an immediate legal challenge from a coalition of Black and Latino voters who, on Saturday morning, alleged that it discriminates against nonwhite voters. Abbott is expected to sign it into law this week.

“The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law,” Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. “I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise.”

The series of events is part of a larger trend this summer of the Trump administration using legal action or the threat of the courts to seemingly coerce Republican governors and other politically aligned defendants to do precisely what he wants them to do. The strategy has allowed his administration to sidestep state legislatures and Congress, according to legal experts and critics. In some cases, it has allowed red states to achieve a politically valuable goal they’d wanted all along.

In Texas, Trump has been met with state leaders who have been willing, if not eager, collaborators in carrying out his agenda.

Over the past three months, the Trump administration has employed a series of legal tactics in the state to achieve a desired outcome.

It filed a federal lawsuit and, in one day, killed a decades-old law allowing Texas students who were not U.S. citizens or permanent residents to receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities if they met specific criteria. The move came just two days after bills to repeal the law failed to pass the state Legislature.

The Trump administration also maneuvered within the court system, reaching an agreement to settle a lawsuit against the federal government that effectively gutted a ban on churches participating in political campaigns. Trump has long opposed the ban, which he vowed to end, but the president lacked congressional support for such a move.

On redistricting, Trump used his heft within the party to force the state Legislature to redraw the typically once-a-decade political map it had approved just four years earlier, leading to a standoff with the governors of Democratic states. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed measures that will ask voters in his state to approve five new districts that would favor Democrats in direct response to Texas’ redistricting.

Trump is not the first president to use a “sue and settle” strategy.

Republicans complained bitterly about the Obama administration encouraging liberal groups and Democratic state attorneys general to file suits against the Environmental Protection Agency, which then led to the rapid adoption of consent agreements for more stringent enforcement of environmental policies than Congress was likely to pass, said Marquette University law professor Paul Nolette.

But Trump’s strategy, Nollette said, is even more aggressive.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre and Andrew Mahaleris, an Abbott spokesperson, declined to respond to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The White House acknowledged an email seeking comment, but did not provide one.

Taken together, Trump’s legal strategies in Texas this summer show a win-at-all-costs mindset that is trampling on legal norms, said University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. He is among several legal scholars and lawyers representing civil rights and religious liberty groups who told ProPublica and the Tribune they fear the administration’s strategy to bypass the checks provided by the legislative and judicial branches of government will cause lasting harm.

“One ought to be extremely disturbed by this thoroughly authoritarian administration,” said Levinson, who has taught constitutional law for 45 years. He added that through such initiatives, Trump is “trying to enforce the ‘Führerprinzip’ of absolute loyalty to himself, rather than to abstract constitutional norms.”

“What is truly incredible is the extent to which the GOP has fallen in line,” Levinson said.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court over the Texas Dream Act, which allowed undocumented students to get in-state tuition at Texas universities. (Ken Cedeno/Reuters) “New Level”

The first clear sign that the administration was working with the state’s Republican leadership to bypass lawmakers was its successful June 4 effort to nullify the Texas Dream Act.

The 2001 law granted in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to students who lived in the state for three years and graduated from a Texas high school, even if they were not permanent residents or U.S. citizens.

Efforts to repeal or sharply curtail the benefit for immigrant children have gone nowhere in the Republican-led Legislature, including this year. It would never have passed, or remained in place for so long, without the support of Texas Republicans, said former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a lead sponsor of the 2001 law. The San Antonio Democrat recalled in an interview that the law, which former Gov. Rick Perry signed, had the support of most major groups representing Texas businesses because many believed that encouraging immigrant youth to pursue higher education expands their lifelong earnings, bolsters the workforce and benefits state coffers.

On June 4, two days after the Legislature adjourned, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court in Wichita Falls. There, only one district judge sits — Reed O’Connor, a Trump appointee. Within hours, Paxton, who is charged with defending the state’s laws, joined the federal government in filing a joint motion that asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional. O’Connor, who did not respond to a request for comment about the case, quickly agreed.

Paxton’s communications office did not respond to written questions from ProPublica and the Tribune. It’s unclear if Abbott, who succeeded Perry, supported the move by Bondi and Paxton to bypass the legislative process and kill the law.

Abbott has not said a lot about the issue since his initial run for governor in 2014, and Mahaleris, his spokesperson, did not respond to questions about it. Back then, pressed by Democratic opponent Wendy Davis, who predicted that GOP lawmakers would try to repeal in-state tuition for immigrant youth and said she’d veto any such legislation, Abbott suggested he supported making some changes and left the door open to signing a repeal bill.

“Greg Abbott believes that the objective of the program is noble. But he believes the law as structured is flawed and it must be reformed,” an Abbott spokesperson said at the time.

Had the Republican-led Legislature truly been interested in repealing the law, it would have done so, said Van de Putte, who pointed to this year’s passage of a program that allows families to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s private school education. “I mean, they got vouchers,” Van de Putte said. “This wasn’t a policy imperative.”

Van de Putte, now a lobbyist, said that when she heard of Paxton and Bondi’s maneuver, her “heart ripped.”

On June 5, a day after the Justice Department and Paxton worked together to overturn the law, Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli exulted over the collaboration, saying that because they “were able to have that line of communication and talk in advance, a statute that’s been a problem for the state for 24 years, we got rid of it in six hours.” In audio obtained by NBC News, Kambli told GOP state attorneys general at a private gathering that the president’s legal team was “learning how to be offensive-minded” and “brought in a lot of people from state-AG world” conversant in the tactics.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment about Kambli’s remarks. According to NBC, a department spokesperson did not dispute that Kambli made the statements and said it was “pretty standard” for department lawyers to notify state attorneys general of federal lawsuits ahead of time.

The same day Kambli spoke to the gathering with GOP state attorneys general, Bondi and Paxton issued a joint news release celebrating the victory. Bondi praised Paxton “for swiftly working with us to halt a program that was treating Americans like second-class citizens in their own country.” For his part, Paxton said he was “proud to stand with Attorney General Bondi and the Trump Administration to stop an unconstitutional and un-American law that gave in-state tuition to illegal aliens.” In ensuing weeks, the Justice Department sought to repeat its Texas victory by filing suits challenging immigrant-tuition benefits in Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma. Oklahoma joined Texas in agreeing to end its benefits, while Democratic statewide officials in Minnesota and Kentucky are pushing back.

The effort was “coordinated and planned collusion to circumvent the people and Texas’ legislative process,” said Kristin Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group.

Marquette’s Nolette, an expert on state attorneys general, said Paxton, a three-term Republican attorney general, and Trump’s Justice Department have moved to a “new level” of using the courts to achieve favored policy outcomes. He said the collaboration between Paxton and the Justice Department is an expansion of the “sue and settle” approach that the Obama administration employed. In many of those cases, there was at least a provision of the federal Clean Air Act allowing suits against the EPA administrator for lax policing, Nolette said.

“With Paxton, however, he is working with U.S. DOJ to challenge Texas’s own laws. There are no statutes that allow, or even anticipate, this behavior,” he said.

Trump addressed a National Religious Broadcasters convention during his 2024 presidential campaign. The association joined other conservative groups in a lawsuit to overturn the Johnson Amendment. (Seth Herald/Reuters) Court Tactics

Fresh off its success in dismantling the Texas Dream Act, the Trump administration moved swiftly to overturn a 71-year-old federal law banning nonprofits, including religious institutions, from endorsing political candidates.

The ban, known as the Johnson Amendment, did not specifically target religious groups, but, in the past three decades or so, evangelical churches that tend to align with the GOP have railed against it, saying it impermissibly muzzles their rights to free speech and exercise of religion.

In August 2024, the National Religious Broadcasters, the conservative group Intercessors for America, and two Texas churches — Sand Springs Church of Athens and First Baptist Church of Waskom, near the Louisiana line — sued in Tyler to overturn the Johnson Amendment’s strictures against secular nonprofits as well as churches.

On July 7, their case gained significant momentum when the Justice Department joined conservative lawyers for evangelical churches in filing a motion similar to the one used to end the Texas Dream Act. In both cases, the administration’s intervention set the stage for a consent judgment, an agreement reached between the plaintiffs and the defendants as part of a settlement submitted to the judge hearing the case.

In this instance, the Justice Department said the ban unconstitutionally prohibited nonprofit organizations from engaging in political speech and that religious leaders should be able to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The proposed settlement of the suit, however, only applied to houses of worship.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the consent judgment proposed to U.S. District Judge J. Campbell “Cam” Barker in Tyler amounts to “improper collusion between … the Trump administration and some religious extremists to achieve a policy objective.” Her group supports keeping the Johnson Amendment.

Barker, a Trump appointee, is allowing interested people and groups to file amicus briefs in the case. So far, he has not adopted or rejected the agreement between the administration and the evangelical groups.

Trump, who has said he learned about the Johnson Amendment when he collected evangelical ministers’ blessings as he first ran for the White House in 2015, sought to end it through an executive order. His Capitol Hill allies also tried in 2017 to repeal the tax code’s constraint on churches’ political activity but failed to attract the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which supports preservation of the Johnson Amendment, said that, if approved by Campbell, the consent order would amount to an end-run around Congress — and one defying most Americans’ wishes.

“The majority of Americans in poll after poll support the rule and don’t want nonprofits, including houses of worship, turned into just another partisan mechanism that divides communities,” Hollman said.

One of the leading Christian conservative lawyers trying to overturn the Johnson Amendment, Michael P. Farris, who represents the National Religious Broadcasters, pushed back on allegations of collusion.

“The answer to your question is pretty simple. This case was filed on August 28, 2024,” or before Trump reclaimed the presidency, he said. “We will not reply further,” said Farris, who played a key role in drafting Paxton’s bid to have the Supreme Court overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to The New York Times.

“We are answering no media questions until the judge rules,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica and the Tribune.

After the Justice Department complained about Texas’ congressional map, Gov. Greg Abbott pushed to include a redrawn map in the special legislative session. (Ronaldo Bolaños/The Texas Tribune)

Trump’s work with state officials to reach his desired outcomes is unprecedented and dangerous, said Jim Harrington, retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal group that advocates for voting rights and racial and economic justice. Filing “collusive lawsuits,” such as the ones over in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and revocation of tax-exempt status for churches that dabble in politics, and carefully selecting courts where the judges are likely to be sympathetic, lets Trump evade constraints created by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, Harrington said.

The administration’s tactics are a quick way to get around recalcitrant lawmakers but risk undermining the judiciary’s role as an independent branch of government, he said.

“Even conservative judges should raise their eyebrows about the undermining of the integrity of the judicial system that’s going on,” said Harrington, who has taught for 27 years as an adjunct law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is a really serious attack on our system.”

Race-Based Debates

Legal challenges to Texas’ new map have previously taken years to resolve, raising uncertainty over whether Saturday’s lawsuit will be decided before next year’s midterm election.

A decision will hinge, in part, on how the courts view an assertion by the Trump administration that the congressional map passed by the Legislature four years ago, and defended by GOP lawyers in court as race-neutral, suddenly must be changed because it paid too much attention to race.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that works on election- and democracy-related issues, said that the administration’s reasoning is flawed and that both the 2021 map and the new one discriminate against nonwhite voters.

The 2021 map drew intense criticism for its dispersal of nonwhite groups into districts where they’d have less influence. Dramatic gains among Texas’ Hispanic, Black and Asian American communities accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth. But lawmakers drew a map where 23 of the 38 congressional districts had white majorities, even though in the 2020 census, white and Hispanic Texans constituted roughly equal shares of the total population.

To reduce the threat to suburban GOP U.S. House members, diverse neighborhoods in Dallas and Collin counties were removed from districts that were becoming more favorable for Democrats and attached to sprawling rural districts dominated by white Republican voters.

“I’ve stated it, and I’ll state it again — we drew these maps race blind,” said the state Senate’s point person on redistricting at the time, Houston Republican Joan Huffman, who did not respond to a request for comment. “We have not looked at any racial data as we drew these maps, and to this day I have not looked at any racial data.”

During a four-week federal court trial in El Paso that ended last month, Texas officials denied practicing racial discrimination. The three judges hearing the case have delayed issuing a decision, citing the special session in Austin.

In their July 7 letter to Abbott, however, Justice Department lawyers Harmeet Dhillon and Michael Gates warned Texas to change its U.S. House map, which they said was overly biased in favor of creating districts that members of racial minorities could win.

Texas’ 2021 map for U.S. House districts has four suspect “coalition districts,” they wrote, citing three districts near Houston and one in Dallas-Fort Worth where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority. In recent years, all four have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats.

Neither Abbott spokesperson Mahaleris, nor Baldassarre, the Justice Department spokesperson, responded to questions.

The Brennan Center’s Li disputed Dhillon and Gates’ characterization of recent rulings by federal judges. Courts haven’t forbidden states from drawing minority-coalition districts but merely stated that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to proactively create them, he said.

“Given that Texas has consistently said it didn’t consider race at all in 2021, there’s certainly not a case for dismantling any of these districts.”

Misty Harris of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

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 our stories in your inbox every week.

When Lloyd Gray stood trial for rape in 1980, two jurors didn’t believe he was guilty and voted to acquit. Today, a split-jury verdict would mean a mistrial and possibly Gray’s freedom. But back then, in Louisiana, it resulted in a life sentence for the 19-year-old from Tunica, a rural community nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Gray, who has always maintained his innocence, spent the next four decades in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. During that time he lost everything, he said. From behind bars, he learned that his mother, who for a time was a guard at the prison where he was being held, had dementia and died in 2020. Prison officials refused to allow him to attend her funeral.

That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunanimous jury verdicts, legal in only Louisiana and Oregon, were unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law designed to uphold white supremacy.

Going forward, there would be no more Lloyd Grays.

But in fact, there are more than 1,000 people in Louisiana like Gray, convicted by split juries and still imprisoned, according to the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform. Although the Supreme Court says cases like theirs are unconstitutional going forward, it left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. And Louisiana alone says they should stay behind bars.

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Louisiana State Supreme Court declined to grant new trials for those prisoners, acquiescing to local prosecutors who feared that retrying hundreds of decades-old cases would tie up state courts. The conservative state Legislature, meanwhile, has repeatedly rejected bills that would have required a reexamination of their cases.

That left one very narrow path for Gray and others like him, mostly Black men, to have their cases revisited. If they could credibly argue that their convictions were secured illegally — if there was race-based discrimination in the case, for example — they could strike a plea deal with a prosecutor, securing their release. But a new state law, passed last year at the urging of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, limited local prosecutors’ ability to broker such deals, cutting off the last remaining avenue of relief for those imprisoned by nonunanimous juries.

The key problem, legal experts say, is that the Supreme Court did not make its 2020 ruling retroactive as it did in Montgomery v. Louisiana, a 2016 case in which the justices found that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles should be banned going forward as well as for those already convicted.

What’s more, in a separate decision in 2021, the court ruled that its 2020 opinion did not apply to older cases, like Gray’s, that had already gone through the regular state appeals process. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court’s majority, Oregon and Louisiana were still free to offer retroactive relief on their own.

In contrast to Louisiana, Oregon’s Supreme Court vacated every split-jury conviction in the state, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences to the majority of those prisoners convicted by nonunanimous juries. Verite News and ProPublica estimated about 760 prisoners were convicted by nonunanimous juries based on a 2018 list provided by the Oregon Department of Justice of people who had filed lawsuits claiming their convictions were unconstitutional.

“There are a lot of injustices in our legal system we can’t fix. And yet, here is this issue that is so clear and obvious that it’s on all of us to do the right thing,” said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, who fought for years to end the state’s split-jury system.

“When I look at Louisiana, it’s really heartbreaking.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Louisiana is the only state that says prisoners convicted long ago by split juries should remain behind bars. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment.

Zach Daniels, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, said the group, which backed Landry’s law, has attempted to reach a compromise with criminal justice reformers who want all past split-jury verdicts overturned. This included an alternative that would give those convicted by nonunanimous juries the opportunity to apply for parole instead of having their cases either vacated or reexamined. But some lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates rejected that option because they did not view the opportunity to be heard by a special parole committee appointed by Landry, as the plan called for, a compromise for people imprisoned unconstitutionally.

Gray’s case for freedom is particularly strong, his attorneys said, because there is good evidence that racial animus led to his conviction. They discovered last year that the two jurors who had voted to acquit were Black — a fact that doesn’t appear in the court records. And that someone had drawn a swastika on the upper right hand corner of the original district attorney’s case file.

In addition, the lone surviving family member of the victim told the district attorney’s office he is “fully supportive” of Gray’s release. He could not be reached for comment.

The New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had been in discussions with Gray’s legal team about a potential deal to secure his release before Landry’s 2023 election. But the governor’s new law constraining prosecutors from making such deals could ensure that Gray spends the remainder of his days in Angola. His current case before the court will next be considered Tuesday at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, where a judge will decide whether Landry’s law applies in Gray’s case.

“When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” said Gray, now 65, through his attorney because the prison rejected requests from Verite News and ProPublica to interview him directly. “After 45 years, I’m no closer to freedom than the day I walked into this place.”

Lloyd Gray has been incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the past 45 years. (Gerald Herbert/AP Photo) “Jim Crow Juries”

Louisiana began allowing nonunanimous verdicts — or “Jim Crow juries,” as they are sometimes called here — in response to the 14th Amendment, which ensured that Black citizens, including formerly enslaved people, had equal protection under the law. This included, among other things, the right to serve on juries. Until then, Louisiana had required a unanimous vote for criminal convictions. But state lawmakers did not want to give a single Black juror the power to undermine the will of 11 white people.

During an 1898 constitutional convention, Louisiana’s elected officials lowered the threshold for a criminal conviction from 12 votes to nine (and increased it to 10 in 1973). One committee chairman was cited in the Supreme Court ruling against the practice saying that the provision was meant to “establish the supremacy of the white race.”

In 1934, Oregon followed suit, becoming the only other state to ever approve the use of split-jury verdicts. (Oregon passed its law following public outrage that a Jewish man was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder in the high-profile death of a Protestant man.)

The jury’s decision at Gray’s trial in December 1980 unfolded as Louisiana legislators had envisioned nearly a century ago.

After initially charging Gray with aggravated rape, prosecutors offered him a deal, according to Gray and his attorneys. If he pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, he would receive a 10-year sentence. But Gray rejected the offer, never wavering in his claims of innocence. The district attorney’s office said there is no record of a proposed plea deal.

Gray and Dianna Knockum, the woman who accused him of rape, each testified on a single day, providing wildly divergent versions of what happened on a Wednesday night six months earlier. Gray, 19 at the time, and Knockum, 33, knew each other from frequenting a bar called Club Hollywood in the Hoffman Triangle neighborhood of New Orleans. Gray claimed they got into a fight outside the bar over $15 Knockum owed him. When she refused to pay, Gray said he hit her twice in the face, at which point a mutual friend separated them and brought him back into the club.

Knockum claimed Gray was angry after she rejected his advances. She said he followed her as she left the bar then hit her with a hard object on the back of the head. Knockum said she regained consciousness in an abandoned building where Gray raped her.

At trial, prosecutors noted that Knockum identified Gray as her attacker, and that doctors found bruises on her head. Gray’s defense team focused on the lack of physical evidence or witnesses tying him to the crime, and that Knockum’s injuries didn’t indicate she was raped. DNA testing didn’t exist at the time, and the evidence was not saved for later examination.

After 54 minutes of deliberations, the jury returned with its verdict: The 10 white jurors voted guilty, and the two black jurors, Elizabeth Sensley and Audrey Kaywood, not guilty. Gray was sentenced to life without parole.

Knockum died more than 20 years ago, according to a 2024 court filing by New Orleans prosecutors.

Sensley and Kaywood provided statements to Gray’s attorneys last year in which they said the racial makeup of the jury likely contributed to his conviction. Sensley said there were plenty of Black people in the jury pool, yet only two were selected. The prosecution used its only jury selection strike to prevent a third Black person from serving. At the time, Black people made up 67% of the city’s population.

“I knew that my voice would not matter,” Sensley told an investigator with Gray’s legal team, recounting how she felt about being Black on the nearly all-white jury. “I cannot believe that Lloyd Gray is still in prison.”

Elizabeth Sensley, a juror in Gray’s case, gave a statement to an investigator with Gray’s legal team recounting how she felt about being Black on the nearly all-white jury. (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News)

Kaywood told the investigator she had a “strong feeling” Gray might be innocent. “I wondered aloud to my husband, what if he didn’t do it. The case impacted me deeply,” she said. “I never wanted to serve on a jury again.”

Neither woman could be reached for comment.

Keeping Black people off juries was vital to prosecutors, as they were seen to be more “skeptical of the state,” according to a 2018 investigation by The New Orleans Advocate. In convictions with split-jury verdicts, Black jurors were 2.5 times more likely to dissent compared with white jurors, the report found. That’s why prosecutors used their strikes to remove prospective Black jurors at more than twice the rate as they did white jurors.

Gray’s legal team has noted that his conviction happened at a time of intense racial strife in New Orleans. Just a few years earlier, the Ku Klux Klan, led by David Duke, marched through the French Quarter to protest the city’s first Black mayor. The district attorney’s office was headed by Harry Connick Sr., whose 30-year tenure was stained by accusations of racial bias. During Connick’s time as district attorney, there were 32 cases of wrongful convictions, 27 of which involved prosecutorial misconduct, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Of those wrongfully convicted, 97% were Black.

Harry Connick Sr. in 1990. His 30-year tenure was stained by accusations of racial bias. (Bill Haber/AP Photo)

And yet Connick refused to crack down on his staff, drawing the ire of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As part of a wrongful-conviction case in which prosecutors hid blood evidence, Ginsburg said in a 2011 dissent that Connick had created a “tinderbox in Orleans Parish” where it was expected that prosecutors hide evidence from the defense. And when those violations occurred, she wrote, “Connick insisted there was no need to change anything, and opposed efforts to hold prosecutors accountable on the ground that doing so would make his job more difficult.” Five of the other eight justices disagreed with her.

After his conviction, Gray was sent to Angola, one of the most violent penitentiaries in the country at the time. The 19-year-old was frightened, but he wasn’t alone. A few years prior to his incarceration, his mother, Ora Gray, had taken a job as a guard at Angola. She worked the night shift in a watchtower that overlooked the same cell block that would briefly house her son.

Gray said he would wake up early every morning, sit by a window and look up into his mother’s tower, about 40 yards away. And every morning she would look down at him.

“I was sitting there to let her know that I was safe,” Gray said.

After about six weeks, Gray said he was transferred to another part of the prison. Gray assumed prison officials wanted to separate them, afraid his mother would hesitate to shoot if he tried to escape.

Ora Gray worked at Angola for more than three decades until she retired in 2012. She died eight years later. Lloyd Gray, wracked by guilt, said he should have cared for her in her final years and held her hand as she slipped away. Instead, he couldn’t even attend her funeral.

The system “was designed to put people of color in the situation I’m in,” he said.

Scenes from Angola in 2004. The prison is a former 19th-century antebellum plantation that was once owned by a slave trader. (Chandra McCormick via AP) A Deal Retracted

After nearly four decades in Angola, Gray had settled in as best he could. He held a mixture of jobs — tutor, office clerk, field hand, kitchen orderly — and tried to stay safe and out of trouble. But he told his lawyers he struggled to come to terms with where life had taken him.

Gray’s sister sent him a family picture, and he didn’t know who half the people were, especially the younger children. That was the hardest part, he said, contemplating everything that had been taken from him.

Gray’s prospects began to improve, however, in tandem with a growing sentiment that the criminal justice systems across the country were heavily weighted against poor and minority communities and needed to be reformed. A series of victories for this movement, on both the state and national levels, gave Gray hope, starting in 2018. That’s when 64% of Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment outlawing nonunanimous juries for any crime committed after Jan. 1, 2019.

Those who fought for the amendment focused their campaign on the damage such juries had done to the state’s minority communities: Black people make up 67% of the prison population but 80% of those convicted by split juries, according to a report from the Promise of Justice Initiative.

Split-jury verdicts also resulted in lengthier sentences. In Louisiana, 62% of all prisoners convicted by split juries are serving life sentences, like Gray, while only about 16% of the overall prison population is doing so, the report said.

That’s because the split-jury law created an incentive for prosecutors to hand down the most serious charges they could. Lesser crimes that carried shorter sentences were tried before a six-person jury that had to rule unanimously. Former prosecutor and state Sen. Dan Claitor said during a 2018 legislative hearing on nonunanimous juries that the numbers frequently led him to “up-charge” defendants “because it was easier for me to convict them with 10 out of 12 than it is six out of six.”

Louisiana’s voter referendum prohibiting nonunanimous juries was a significant victory, but it did little to address the plight of people like Gray who had already been convicted. And then, two years later, in Ramos v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 vote that split-jury verdicts violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a fair trial.

In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed to the court by President Donald Trump, wrote that the origin of split-jury verdicts could be “traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities.” In Louisiana, he wrote, the point was “to ensure that African-American juror service would be meaningless.”

In the months that followed, the Promise of Justice Initiative filed appeals for 1,049 Louisiana prisoners convicted by split juries. Hundreds of those, including Gray’s, were filed in New Orleans, where a new district attorney, Jason Williams, had just been elected.

New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams has taken on split-jury verdicts. (Jack Brook/AP Photo)

Williams took office in January 2021, one of a wave of progressive prosecutors across the country. He pledged to root out and reconsider potentially problematic cases involving wrongful convictions, excessive sentences or racial bias. He also took on split-jury verdicts.

Within days of being sworn in, Williams had established a civil rights division and hired Emily Maw, the former head of the Innocence Project New Orleans, to lead it. As of July 2024, the division had vacated or reduced the sentences of more than 350 men and women, 150 of whom were convicted by nonunanimous juries, according to the district attorney’s office.

In 2022, prosecutors with the unit proposed a potential deal to Gray’s attorneys: If he pleaded guilty to forcible rape, he would walk, according to Gray and his attorneys. The lesser charge carried a maximum sentence of 40 years; Gray had already served 41.

Such plea deals would soon prove to be the only shot people like Gray had at freedom. The same year Gray was offered a plea deal, the state’s highest court ruled in a 5-2 vote that the federal ban on nonunanimous juries was not retroactive, preventing more than 1,000 people convicted by split juries from having their day in court, according to estimates by the Promise of Justice Initiative.

The only Black member of the Louisiana Supreme Court, Justice Piper Griffin dissented, writing: “Such convictions were racially discriminatory in 1898. They were racially discriminatory in 1975. They remain racially discriminatory today.”

While he agreed with the majority that the state shouldn’t overturn all past split-jury verdicts, Justice James Genovese wrote in a partial dissent that prisoners who could demonstrate that their verdicts were “tainted by racial animus” should be “entitled to relief, regardless of the date of their conviction.” In particular, he said, new trials should be granted when it can be proven that a Black juror had voted to acquit the accused.

Louisiana’s rejection of retroactivity put a premium on the type of deals offered to Gray. But before his could be finalized and approved by the courts, it was upended in November 2023 by a massive political shift in Louisiana as Landry was elected governor.

Campaigning on a tough-on-crime platform, the former police officer and state attorney general vowed to accelerate executions, impose stiffer sentences and end the reign of “woke district attorneys” whom he accused of “playing a dangerous game of catch and release” with criminals.

Within his first few months in office, in March 2024, Landry signed Act 10, which prohibits district attorneys from waiving the two-year deadline for prisoners to challenge their convictions through post-conviction relief. Such a waiver is typically needed to revive decades-old cases like Gray’s.

It was set to go into effect Aug. 1, 2024.

Swastika on the Case File

The clock was now ticking for Gray and his attorneys. Given the drastic change in the political climate, they believed they needed to uncover additional evidence that Gray’s prosecution was unjust to increase his chances of being released. And they needed to do so before Williams lost the ability to have missed deadlines waived.

They caught their first break the same month Landry signed Act 10 into law. That’s when they requested and received Gray’s original 1980 case file from the district attorney’s office, something they had never seen before.

Colin Reingold, Gray’s attorney from 2021 to 2024, said he skimmed the file, blowing past the cover page, looking for any facts that could help secure Gray’s release. He then recalled receiving a Slack message from an investigator on his team who was also scouring through the new documents: Wow, this swastika on the front cover is sure crazy, isn’t it?

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t see it at all,” Reingold said. “And then I immediately went to the DA file and pulled it up. And, I mean, it’s unmistakable.”

That someone with the district attorney’s office would doodle the Nazi symbol on the case file of a Black man accused of rape in the early 1980s raises significant concerns about the motivations of the prosecution, Reingold said.

“You always suspect that there are, in some cases, bad actors with beliefs that could taint the whole process,” Reingold said. “But you never think that you’re going to find it in black and white like that.”

A doodle of a swastika on the upper right corner of the cover of Gray’s file (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News. Highlight added by ProPublica.)

The district attorney’s office does not dispute the swastika’s existence or that a staff member might have drawn it more than 40 years ago, according to a September filing by prosecutors. Assistant District Attorneys Jim Letten and William O’Hara prosecuted Gray’s case. O’Hara died in 2007. Letten, who would later serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Our office acknowledges that a derogatory symbol appears on a microfilmed copy of Mr. Gray’s case file,” Keith D. Lampkin, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, told Verite News and ProPublica. “There is no record indicating who drew the symbol or when it was drawn.”

The swastika was important to Gray’s claims of racial bias, but even more vital was the discovery two months later, in June 2024, that the two people who voted to acquit Gray were Black.

Erica Navalance, an attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative who currently represents Gray, said these new pieces of evidence spoke directly to the two factors Genovese said in his partial dissent should trigger a new trial: racial bias and proof that a Black juror voted to acquit.

Armed with this information, Gray’s attorneys filed a new appeal the day before Act 10 went into effect. They knew that Williams was under increasing pressure from Landry to abandon his efforts to reinvestigate old cases but hoped this new evidence would convince his office to keep their word and free Gray.

Publicly, Williams refused to back down, telling his conservative opponents during a legislative hearing last September that he could not ignore the city’s long history of wrongfully convicting Black people.

“In the city of New Orleans, we’ve been so good at mass-producing defective convictions that I think it is incumbent that we make sure that we let these cases be heard,” Williams said.

Eleven days later, Williams’ office took an unexpected position in its response to Gray’s appeal. Its hands were tied by Act 10, it said, and it could no longer waive missed deadlines. As a result, Gray would have to serve out the remainder of his life sentence, prosecutors claimed.

The district attorney’s office has maintained this position despite Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Robin Pittman stating in November as part of Gray’s case that its interpretation of Act 10 was wrong. As long as the appeal was filed before Aug. 1, Pittman said, it retained the ability to waive deadlines. Four months later, the state Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Taylor came to the same conclusion.

Navalance said she’d never before witnessed the state district attorney’s association rallying behind a law that would strip them of their own power.

“​​I thought our goal was to see justice done,” Navalance said. “I thought we all agreed that meant Lloyd Gray should come home 45 years after being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.”

Gray on a recent video call with his lawyers. He fears he will never leave Angola. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

The district attorney’s office told Verite News and ProPublica that its response to Gray’s case simply reflects statutory changes. “It is now for the court to determine whether Mr. Gray’s application overcomes those procedural requirements,” Lampkin said.

Gray said the whiplash of events over the past several years — from believing he once had a shot at freedom to fearing the door might be permanently closed — have felt like a “mirage.”

“You see it,” he said, “but when you reach for it, it’s not really there.”

Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research.

Clarification, Aug. 28, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify that Montgomery v. Louisiana retroactively barred the imposition of juvenile life without parole as a mandatory minimum sentence. The Supreme Court did not prohibit life without parole sentences for juveniles altogether.

by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.

Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.

But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”

Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.

It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.

In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.

And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.

This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.

The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.

ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.

Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Halimi was forced to flee Afghanistan in 2021. “I had no choice,” he said. (For ProPublica)

Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.

Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.

About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4x4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.

The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”

While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.

“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.

He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.

A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.

Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.

In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.

At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.

For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”

With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.

Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.

“The Taliban Gets DOGED” The segment in which Nate Cavanaugh, Elon Musk and others mislead viewers about the content in Halimi’s contract (Fox News)

Watch video ➜

At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”

Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.

Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”

“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”

“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.

He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”

In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”

In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.

While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.

Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.

Timeline of Events

March 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.

March 31, 3:58 p.m. EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.

March 31, 7:17 p.m. EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.

March 31, 7:29 p.m. EST, to April 1, 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.

April 1, 7:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.

Around April 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.

May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.

USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.

He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.

As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.

Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.

“He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known.”

After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.

Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)

The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.

“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”

It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.

When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”

Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.

Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.

Halimi, front, second from the left, with Afghan students in Egypt (Courtesy of Mohammad Halimi)

But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.

Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.

Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.

While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.

In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.

When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.

Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.

When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.

Nate Cavanaugh, the DOGE team member integral to the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.

But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.

It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.

But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.

When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.

Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.

The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.

Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.

They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.

An aircraft charter agreement shows that USIP chartered a plane during the period of the 2021 Kabul airlift in Afghanistan. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.

“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”

Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.

During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.

A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work (Obtained by ProPublica)

Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.

Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.

Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

“DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.

Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”

USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.

Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”

At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.

In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”

George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”

The USIP headquarters, with its insignia torn from the wall. The missing letters — U, S, I and P — form the group’s acronym. (Christopher Bing/ProPublica)

Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.

In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?

“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”

Design and development by Allen Tan.