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Five months after Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved a boost in the minimum wage and a paid leave plan, Republican lawmakers moved Tuesday to repeal the law.

The 1904 World’s Fair was a fascinating yet complex event that continues to evoke a range of emotions. It was grand and shameful. It was full of fun and full […]

The post The 1904 World’s Fair Exhibit appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

LGBTQIA+ people have been part of St. Louis from the beginning. But until recently, their lives, struggles, and contributions have often been overlooked. In Gateway to Pride, the Missouri History Museum […]

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Presented by the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, The Artist Who Captured Eichmann is a captivating temporary exhibition that tells the exciting exploits of Peter Malkin, a Mossad agent […]

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Northbound Interstate 55 in south St. Louis will be closed overnight March 14 and 21.

ALTON – As election season heats up in the Riverbend, Our Daily Show on Riverbender.com is bringing the region’s most in-depth political conversations to voters with State of the Race 2025 . Host CJ Nasello is sitting down with candidates in Alton and Godfrey for hour-long interviews, giving them a platform to share their vision, policies, and priorities ahead of the April election. Confirmed guests for the special series include: Alton Mayoral Race Mayor David Goins – March 12 at 10:00 AM Former Mayor Brant Walker – March 21 at 10:00 AM Alton Aldermanic Candidates (Current Schedule) Kierstan Gray (6th Ward Candidate) – March 12 at 9:20 AM Carolyn MacAfee (2nd Ward Alderwoman, Seeking Re-Election) – March 13 at 9:20 AM Martha Pfister (2nd Ward Candidate) – March 19 at 9:20 AM Tiana Gipson (2nd Ward Candidate/Alton School Board Candidate) Rosie Brown (4th Ward Alderwoman) John Meeha

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In his new book, biologist Thor Hanson reveals the power of paying attention to the natural world "close to home."

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead and they've got a huge treat in store for fans.The legendary band is set to release a 60-CD collection, Enjoying the…

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Officials say it's part of revitalization plan for Kinloch, one they hope can help spur new development in the city for the first time in years.

Internal Spotify communications viewed by 404 Media show Spotify’s own employees complaining about Andrew Tate’s course being available on the platform.

The St. Louis Board of Education approved a plan starting next fall where students can attend a maximum of one year in three schools with 940 students.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

With a mass email sharing what it called “difficult news,” the U.S. Department of Education has eroded one of its own key duties, abolishing more than half of the offices that investigate civil rights complaints from students and their families.

Civil rights complaints in schools and colleges largely have been investigated through a dozen regional outposts across the country. Now there will be five.

The Office for Civil Rights’ locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco are being shuttered, ProPublica has learned. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The OCR is one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, investigating thousands of allegations of discrimination each year. That includes discrimination based on disability, race and gender.

“This is devastating for American education and our students. This will strip students of equitable education, place our most vulnerable at great risk and set back educational success that for many will last their lifetimes,” said Katie Dullum, an OCR deputy director who resigned last Friday. “The impact will be felt well beyond this transitional period.”

The Education Department has not responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

In all, about 1,300 of the Education Department’s approximately 4,000 employees were told Tuesday through the mass emails that they would be laid off and placed on administrative leave starting March 21, with their final day of employment on June 9.

The civil rights division had about 550 employees and was among the most heavily affected by Tuesday’s layoffs, which with other departures will leave the Education Department at roughly half its size.

At least 243 union-represented employees of the OCR were laid off. The Federal Student Aid division, which administers grants and loans to college students, had 326 union-represented employees laid off, the most of any division.

On average, each OCR attorney who investigates complaints is assigned about 60 cases at a time. Complaints, which have been backlogged for years, piled up even more after President Donald Trump took office in January and implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work.

Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw the OCR under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden said: “What you’ve got left is a shell that can’t function.”

Civil rights investigators who remain said it now will be “virtually impossible” to resolve discrimination complaints.

“Part of OCR’s work is to physically go to places. As part of the investigation, we go to schools, we look at the playground, we see if it’s accessible,” said a senior attorney for OCR, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not laid off and fears retaliation. “We show up and look at softball and baseball fields. We measure the bathroom to make sure it’s accessible. We interview student groups. It requires in-person work. That is part of the basis of having regional offices. Now, California has no regional office.”

The OCR was investigating about 12,000 complaints when Trump took office. The largest share of pending complaints — about 6,000 — were related to students with disabilities who feel they’ve been mistreated or unfairly denied help at school, according to a ProPublica analysis of department data.

Since Trump took office, the focus has shifted. The office has opened an unusually high number of “directed investigations,” based on Trump’s priorities, that it began without receiving complaints. These relate to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students.

Traditionally, students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their school districts. The process is free, which means families that can’t afford a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit may still be able to seek help.

When the OCR finds evidence of discrimination, it can force a school district or college to change its policies or require that they provide services to a student, such as access to disabilities services or increased safety at school. Sometimes, the office monitors institutions to make sure they comply.

“OCR simply will not be investigating violations any more. It is not going to happen. They will not have the staff for it,” said another attorney for the Department of Education, who also asked not to be named because he is still working there. “It was extremely time and labor intensive.”

The department said in a press release that all divisions at the department were affected. The National Center for Education Statistics, which collects data about the health of the nation’s schools, was all but wiped away.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the layoffs “a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.” In addition to the 1,300 let go on Tuesday, 600 employees already had accepted voluntary resignations or had retired in the past seven weeks, according to the department.

Trump and his conservative allies have long wanted to shut the department, with Trump calling it a “big con job.” But the president hasn’t previously tried to do so, and officially closing the department would require congressional approval.

Instead, Trump is significantly weakening the agency. The same day Congress confirmed McMahon as education secretary, she sent department staff an email describing a “final mission” — to participate in “our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service” by eliminating what she called “bloat” at the department “quickly and responsibly.”

Education Department employees received an email on Tuesday afternoon saying all agency offices across the country would close at 6 p.m. for “security reasons” and would remain closed Wednesday. That led many workers to speculate that layoffs were coming.

Then, after the workday had ended, employees who were being laid off began receiving emails that acknowledged “the difficult workforce restructuring.”

Emails also went to entire divisions: “This email serves as notice that your organizational unit is being abolished along with all positions within the unit — including yours.”

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.

Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Leland Dudek (via Social Security Administration)

Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.

Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”

Did you know that 40% of energy used in the average American home is spent on heating and cooling? This staggering statistic highlights a critical aspect of home management that often goes overlooked: preparation for the changing seasons. Beyond just switching out your wardrobe or adjusting your thermostat, effective seasonal preparation can lead to comfort, energy efficiency, and long-term savings. So, how can you ensure your home is ready to embrace the shifts that come with each season? Let’s explore practical steps you can take to prepare your living space for whatever nature has in store. Assessing Your Home’s Exterior An often-neglected area in seasonal preparation is the exterior of your home. The first line of defense against the elements, your home’s exterior should be well-maintained to effectively protect the interior. Roof and Gutters: Start by inspecting your roof for missing or damaged shingles. A small leak can lead to significant water damage an

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March 12 is a date rich with significant events that have shaped the course of history across various fields, from politics and science to culture and civil rights. **The Launch of the First Successful Space Shuttle Mission (1981)** March 12, 1981, was a historic date for space exploration as NASA launched the first successful space shuttle mission, STS-1, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. This marked a new era in space travel, allowing for reusable spacecraft to transport astronauts and cargo to and from space. The mission was crewed by astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen, who successfully completed two orbits around the Earth before landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The success of STS-1 set the stage for future space shuttle missions, leading to significant advancements in satellite deployment, scientific research, and international cooperation in space exploration. **The Launch of the First Mobile Phone (1973)** On March 12, 1973, Martin Cooper,

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Metallica has announced an "immersive concert experience" film created for the Apple Vision Pro headset.The film features footage from Metallica's 2024 performance in Mexico City, and showcases songs including "One,"…

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