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Walthall Moore was elected on Nov. 2, 1920, as the first Black man to hold office in the Missouri Legislature.

by Anjeanette Damon and Nicole Santa Cruz

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A new centralized voter registration system in the key swing state of Nevada is getting its first real-world test in a major presidential election, after practice runs in recent months showed significant problems in transferring data accurately.

State officials said the problems, which included assigning voters to the wrong precincts and mislabeling voters as “inactive,” have been addressed and that they expect Tuesday’s vote to go smoothly.

But Cari-Ann Burgess, the former interim Washoe County registrar who has been on administrative leave since September facing charges of insubordination and poor job performance, said that she believes the shortcomings have not been fully addressed. Burgess said she plans to file a whistleblower complaint soon asking for federal oversight of Nevada’s future elections. (Washoe County, home to Reno, is the largest county to attempt the data transfer this year.)

Burgess said she has no direct knowledge of what her office has done since her last day at work on Sept. 25, but believed the issues were so daunting, they likely couldn’t be fixed by the county’s understaffed registrar’s office before early voting began on Oct. 19.

The Voter Registration and Election Management Solution, mandated by the Nevada legislature, centralizes voter registration data from 16 of the state’s 17 counties and promises to vastly improve the efficiency and security of elections. Even Burgess acknowledges how badly the state needed to modernize its voter registration system.

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, ran in 2022 on a promise to secure Nevada’s elections and rebuild voter confidence following efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to cast doubt on the 2020 election.

The new voter registration system, which is separate from the machines used to vote, better tracks who is eligible to submit a ballot. Aguilar was determined to have it in place for the 2024 general election. It went live eight weeks before early voting began.

But the launch, which involves transferring massive voter datasets from antiquated county systems to the new centralized one, has strained understaffed county clerk offices already contending with their routine general election responsibilities.

Mock elections in the spring uncovered enough issues that clerks pressured Aguilar’s office to delay the “go-live” date until after the June primary. That gave the state enough time to address 20 issues revealed by the test runs. But it also meant the system’s first use in a real election comes during a contentious presidential contest in which one side is laying the groundwork to challenge unfavorable results.

“This is a project that we cannot get wrong,” Aguilar’s deputy in charge of elections told lawmakers in early 2024. “It has to be done right the first time.”

Three election experts contacted by ProPublica said they weren’t in a position to judge whether Nevada made the right call in pushing out such a significant project in an election year. While there’s “never a good time” to change systems, one said, it appears that Nevada has put significant time and resources into the transition. Another said success is largely dependent on how well-staffed and funded local election offices are. A recent report by the Institute for Responsive Government found other states implementing such systems experienced similar problems.

Nevada has spent $30 million on the project, which was launched in early 2023. The secretary of state’s office worked closely for months with each county participating in the new system and has provided significant ongoing support during the transition.

Early and mail-in voting has been underway since Oct. 19 with only isolated reports of balloting errors. In the last presidential election, nearly 90% of Nevada voters cast their ballot before Election Day. A lack of widespread voter complaints in the weeks since early voting began confirms that the new system is working as intended, said Gabriel Di Chiara, Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state.

But that hasn’t quieted Burgess, who says incorrect voter data wound up in the new system.

Burgess alleges the state rushed implementation, potentially creating a litany of problems as ballots are cast. State and county officials both denied the allegations and provided documentation indicating deadlines for critical data transfers were met across the state. They did, however, acknowledge they continued to discover problems before voting began and were working to correct them.

Burgess said testing of the new system revealed errors affecting tens of thousands of voters in Washoe County, including voters assigned to the wrong precincts and active voters labeled as inactive or vice versa. If a voter was incorrectly marked inactive, they wouldn’t receive a mail-in ballot but could still vote in person. She also said the new system lacks safeguards meant to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls. The secretary of state’s office denied that allegation, noting the new system is no different than the old system in that regard.

“I’m incredibly worried that this is going to hurt this election,” Burgess said. “But I’m also worried that people who should not be voting are voting.”

Burgess said Washoe County didn’t have time to ensure that information for each of the county’s 384,000 voters had transferred properly to the new system. She acknowledged that her office was working tirelessly to correct the errors when she left and said she did not have firsthand knowledge of the progress made after she was placed on leave.

Clark County, home to Las Vegas, is using the same vendor as the state but will wait until next year to transfer its data to the new system.

Burgess is the only county election official to publicly raise such concerns. Other clerks have criticized the timeline of the transition but haven’t reported problems with the data transfers. After persuading Aguilar to delay the launch until after the primary, the clerks promised to “work their butts off” to get the system ready for the general election, said Douglas County Clerk-Treasurer Amy Burgans. Clerks conducted four mock elections this year to ensure that “the integrity of the system was where it needed to be,” she said.

“It’s a frustrating time to switch to a new system when we are a purple state that really makes big decisions when it comes to a presidential election,” Burgans said. “The clerks have put the time and effort into ensuring that the integrity of the election is intact.”

She said the new system is instrumental in catching voters who attempt to vote in multiple counties.

Jim Hindle, the clerk-treasurer for Storey County, which has a population of about 4,100, also said he doesn’t have reservations about the new voter registration system. “It has been working fine for the last two weeks. We’ve had nothing come up that would cause us to lack any confidence,” he said.

The rollout hasn’t been free of issues, however. In Nye County, when voters arrived for the first day of early voting, the wrong election popped up on check-in kiosks, prompting the clerk to postpone opening the polls. In Lyon County, roughly 1,100 voters were given the wrong ballot because their precinct was placed in an incorrect district for the State Assembly. Although the problem was discovered this week, it dated back to the legacy system and wasn’t caused by the new system, state officials said. The error will only affect two legislative races and will have no impact on the presidential election.

While it wasn’t ideal to transition to a new system during a presidential election year, errors identified during testing were anticipated, identified and addressed, Di Chiara said. He added that there were risks associated with continuing to use the counties’ legacy voter management systems. Washoe County’s vendor, for example, had stopped supporting software used by the voter registrar’s office and fixes over the years had been piecemeal.

During February’s presidential primary election, some voters who hadn’t cast a ballot were incorrectly labeled by the legacy system as having voted. That mistake did not affect the vote totals. And during local primary elections, some voters were mailed the wrong ballots because of errors updating their addresses following redistricting. They received correct ballots before Election Day.

“The lesser of the two risks was getting everyone on the new system and providing them support,” Di Chiara said.

Mock elections conducted before the system went live resulted in a list of 20 issues the state and its vendor had to resolve. Di Chiara refused to provide a description of the issues, citing statutes that say documents on the inner workings of election systems are confidential. But he provided ProPublica a progress report from Aug. 23, which indicated 18 of the 20 issues had been fixed by the go-live date. The remaining two were resolved before ballots were mailed to voters, he said.

Despite the fixes, messy data in Washoe County’s legacy system made its way into the new system. For example, Washoe County’s legacy system had labeled apartment buildings as commercial addresses. As a result, voters in those buildings were marked inactive in the new system. A county spokesperson said that problem was fixed before ballots were mailed. But it was just one of a multitude of data errors that forced the registrar’s staff to review individual records to ensure voters were properly categorized. “Issues identified during the rollout and extensive testing periods were addressed and resolved prior to the 2024 general election,” a Washoe County spokesperson said.

Efforts to lay the groundwork for election challenges in key states by the Trump campaign, the national Republican Party and their allies has been well documented. The implementation of Nevada’s new voter management system is already on the Republican National Committee’s radar. The party filed a public records request for documents associated with the mock elections run to test the new system. A common tactic by those trying to undermine confidence in voting is to amplify or exaggerate human errors that are routine in running elections, democracy protection experts say.

Burgess’ decision to go public follows a tumultuous 10 months as the chief elections officer for Washoe County, which she said culminated in her being forced out by county management. She also said she plans to file a lawsuit contesting what she sees as her probable termination after the election.

Under the strain of transferring to the new system, Burgess said she missed a federal deadline to clean the rolls of inactive voters. During a meeting to discuss it, she offered to step down to her former position of deputy registrar but was told to take stress-related leave. When she tried to return to work with a doctor’s note, she was given a letter from the county manager detailing a number of performance issues, including the missed deadline, insubordination for prematurely telling her staff about her leave and excessive use of overtime. She was also accused of trying to help several churches set up ballot drop-off boxes, which aren’t allowed under state law. Burgess said she was simply helping them with third-party ballot collection, which is legal in Nevada.

“You have been insubordinate, and your ability to competently carry out your duties is in question,” Brown wrote in a letter Burgess provided to ProPublica. “Washoe County will allow you to remain on paid leave until the completion of the general election, after which these issues will be reviewed and decisions about your continued employment will be determined.”

Burgess said she sought the job of registrar to help restore voter confidence in elections. Burgess is a registered nonpartisan. She said she voted for Trump this year as well as for U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat. She said she investigated every complaint, even those from some of the county’s most radicalized election deniers, and did her best to keep operations transparent.

Craig Silverman contributed reporting.

The revolving door swings when congressional staffers and elected officials move into industries they regulated while in government. The practice is a source of deference shown to corporate titans.

A Cincinnati-based graphic services company is hiring as it looks to expand its St. Louis-area office.

by ProPublica

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With just days to go before Election Day, political coverage is everywhere. At ProPublica, we avoid horse race reporting and focus on telling stories about deeper issues and trends affecting the country.

Here are some stories from the last year about issues that are important to voters.

Abortion

Candace Fails visits the grave of her 18-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Crain, who_ _died after trying to get care for pregnancy complications in three visits to Texas emergency rooms. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1970s-era ruling that guaranteed access to abortion throughout the country, states quickly enacted a patchwork of laws restricting the procedure. In all, 13 states now have a total ban on abortion.

ProPublica has thoroughly examined the impact of those laws over the last two years. Doctors have told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential for legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients who have complications.

• In Tennessee, we followed one mother, Mayron Hollis, for a year after she was denied an abortion because of the state’s newly enacted ban. She had become addicted to drugs at 12, and the state had already taken away several of her children. Doctors were concerned that this latest pregnancy, which had implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, could kill her. The story and visual narrative follows Hollis’ struggles to get care following the birth of her daughter.

• In Georgia, Amber Thurman took abortion medication to end a pregnancy but died of an infection after her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue, a rare complication that the suburban Atlanta hospital she went to was readily equipped to treat. But earlier that summer, the state had made abortion a felony, and with Thurman’s infection spreading, doctors waited nearly 20 hours before operating. When they finally did, it was too late. Thurman was the mother of a 6-year-old son. U.S. senators are examining whether the hospital broke federal law by failing to intervene sooner, and an official state committee concluded that her death was preventable. Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

• Most abortions in the U.S. take place in the early weeks of pregnancy, and roughly 63% are done using medication. We recently examined how abortion pills work and answered common questions about them.

• In Texas, Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said, “Our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

• In a second Texas case, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who was six months pregnant, visited two emergency rooms a total of three times after experiencing abdominal cramps and other troubling symptoms. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without evaluating her pregnancy. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. On Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before offering a procedure called a dilation and curettage to remove the fetus. Hours later, Crain was dead. Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.

Immigration

Delmis Jiménez stands on top of the international bridge that divides Ciudad Juárez and El Paso as her family waits for U.S. customs officers to allow them into the United States. Her husband died in a fire at an immigration detention facility while attempting to reach the U.S. eight months earlier. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

As the number of migrant encounters at the U.S. border has surged under the Biden administration, immigration has become a top issue for voters. ProPublica has recently explored how this increase differs in key ways from past surges. In recent years, more of the people crossing the border have been turning themselves in and claiming asylum rather than trying to avoid arrest.

• The U.S. faces a shortage of skilled workers, and immigrants have helped fill that gap. Even areas critical to national security, such as Navy shipbuilding, are struggling to find enough qualified workers. So undocumented workers have stepped in as contractors, but that means they get fewer protections if something goes wrong on the job.

• Cities and towns far from the southern border are facing new challenges with the arrival of significant numbers of immigrants. In the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, several hundred immigrants from Nicaragua have arrived — mostly looking for low-paying jobs in factories and farms. Police say the biggest challenge has been strained resources and immigrants driving without licenses — not a wave of crime, as falsely claimed by former President Donald Trump.

• For decades, lobbyists from the business community shaped immigration legislation and moderated the contours of the debate. But in the Trump era, businesses see far more risk in advocating for these policies, a change that’s made it even harder to get to consensus on immigration reforms, even as businesses in a variety of sectors say they need more immigrant workers.

Economy

Tire technician Juan Cantu works at Tire Town Auto Service in Picayune, Mississippi, last year. Customers there saw price hikes as the shop dealt with supply chain problems, the rising cost of raw materials and trouble finding workers. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

The condition of the U.S. economy is the top concern for voters, according to multiple polls. Across the world, inflation — the rate at which prices increase — surged beginning in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, brought on by supply chain disruptions, surges in demand for goods and services, and the war in Ukraine.

• Last year, ProPublica looked at inflation through the lens of the humble automobile tire, tracing the raw materials from a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia to a repair shop in Mississippi to try to answer the question: Why are prices so high?

• For a time in 2022, a cadre of ocean carriers were charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports, another reason the price of goods rose so quickly. That congestion has now eased considerably.

• Surveys also suggest housing costs are a primary concern to many Americans. While most economists agree that the lack of housing supply and a decade of low interest rates have fueled increases in housing prices and rents, there may be another factor at work: the use of algorithms to determine the price of your rent through the company RealPage.

• Democrats, including Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, face tough reelection fights in states that have shifted swiftly toward Trump, despite investments from the Biden administration in reviving manufacturing through the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts. National Democrats often overlook how important the place you live can be: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town struggling, you believe you are, too. Some academics have referred to this as a sense of “shared fate,” and it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest.

Health Care

Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. (Andrea Bruce for ProPublica)

Fourteen years after the Affordable Care Act passed, more Americans have health care coverage, but the system itself remains as broken and fractured as ever. ProPublica has investigated various players in the health care system, from doctors accused of wrongdoing to insurers refusing to cover lifesaving treatments. We’ve also extensively explored mental health treatment this year and how, despite rising needs, America’s health care infrastructure can’t provide meaningful support.

• When companies such as Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients. EviCore counters that it develops its guidelines for approvals with the input of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional societies, and that they are routinely updated to stay current with the latest evidence-backed practices. It said its decisions are based solely on the guidelines and are not interpreted differently for different clients.

• For Americans searching for mental health providers, many of the lists compiled by insurance companies are misleading or outdated. It’s a “ghost network” that leaves patients frustrated and unable to get timely care.

• Health insurer Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. One doctor who used to work for the company, Debby Day, said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. In written responses, Cigna has said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” In 2023, ProPublica revealed how Cigna rejects claims from patients without even reading them. In written responses about this program, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.” Cigna said its review system was created to “accelerate payment of claims for certain routine screenings,” Cigna wrote. “This allows us to automatically approve claims when they are submitted with correct diagnosis codes.”

Education

Angelica Zavala, a West Phoenix home cleaner and mother of two, considered sending her daughter to a private school using vouchers before deciding her neighborhood school was the better option. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Few issues ignite as much passion as educating America’s schoolchildren. ​​School boards and districts are facing battles over school vouchers, book bans and COVID-19 — conflict that is slowly changing how the U.S. educates kids, leaving them on different and unequal paths at school.

Many states led by conservative legislators and governors have pushed a rapid expansion of school voucher programs that promise to allow students and their parents to put state money toward the school — private or public — of their choice.

• The model for voucher programs in the country has been Arizona, which now offers vouchers to all students. But the state has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

• A ProPublica analysis shows that low-income families are using the system far less than wealthier families, in part because the location of private schools and the additional costs for transportation, tuition and meals makes using the vouchers more difficult.

• School choice advocates are intent on expanding the availability of vouchers to fund private education at the expense of public schools, but they’re facing a surprising pocket of resistance: Some conservative, rural residents are fighting the program, fearing their tax dollars will flow from the only public school in their area to benefit people in cities.

• Texas, however, remains one of the biggest holdouts against a school voucher program in which state tax dollars could be used to pay for private schools. Gov. Greg Abbott aggressively campaigned against members of his own party who did not support voucher programs. This fall, Abbott may finally get the votes needed to pass a bill, fulfilling a decadeslong wish of conservative donors in the state.

• We told the story of Courtney Gore, a Texas school board candidate who won her seat after claiming on the campaign trail that children were being indoctrinated. She later disavowed her party’s far-right platform after finding no evidence of such efforts.

• After COVID-19 school closures ended, absenteeism nearly doubled. With state and federal governments largely abdicating any role in getting kids back into classrooms, some schools have turned to private companies for a reimagined version of the truant officer.

Foreign Policy

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. Earlier this year, two U.S. government bodies concluded that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. (Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images)

The now yearlong war between Israel and Hamas has left tens of thousands dead, and Gaza is facing massive shortages of food, water and medical care. The war has sparked infighting in the Democratic Party and debates within the State Department over how best to manage the situation given the U.S.’s longtime trade and military ties to Israel. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have signaled their desire to end the war soon, though what will get both sides to agree isn’t entirely clear.

• The U.S. has long supported Israel with weapons. In January, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew urged Washington to give thousands more bombs to the Israelis because they have a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians, a request that came, at the time, amid the deaths of at least 25,000 Palestinians in the war.

• The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding.

The Democratic senator is in one of the tightest races of his career. Is his party’s brand to blame?

Thanks to dedicated state programs, young Minnesotans get to flex their voting muscles early.

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.

When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.

He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.

Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.

Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.

Get in Touch

No matter who wins the presidential election, ProPublica is planning to deepen its reporting on poverty issues, from housing to child support to Social Security benefits and Medicaid. We will be covering how the incoming administration handles federal poverty policy, as well as state and local social services agencies and private companies that profit off of the poor. Are you a current or former federal employee with insight into federal poverty programs? Are you someone with stories to pitch us on any of these topics? Reach out directly at Eli.Hager@propublica.org.

Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
• Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
• Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
• Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
• Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
• Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
• Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”

This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.

The St. Louis Jewish Book Festival is an annual celebration of authors, books, and ideas during early November, with additional author events year-round. The range of author topics is vast: […]

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Return to a time when steamboats ruled the river. The one-hour narrated riverfront cruise aboard the Riverboats at the Gateway Arch explores the history of downtown St. Louis, including the […]

The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

The firearms portion of Missouri's fall turkey season has come to an end. The Missouri Department of Conservation says the number of turkeys bagged by hunters was down this year.

Duck and coot hunting will start 30 minutes before sunrise Saturday morning. It includes northern and middle hunting zones, which include some in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

60% of voters would have to approve the ban in order for the measure to pass.

A 94-year-old Army veteran from St. Louis was honored Friday with a special home improvement project.

Two recent sex trafficking busts – one at the Renaissance Hotel in April 2023 and another at River City Casino this past February - reveal a pattern.

If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people […]