a Better Bubble™
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Just one year ago, JD Vance was a leading advocate of the Great Lakes and the efforts to restore the largest system of freshwater on the face of the planet.
As a U.S. senator from Ohio, Vance called the lakes “an invaluable asset” for his home state. He supported more funding for a program that delivers “the tools we need to fight invasive species, algal blooms, pollution, and other threats to the ecosystem” so that the Great Lakes would be protected “for generations to come.”
But times have changed.
This spring, Vance is vice president, and President Donald Trump’s administration is imposing deep cuts and new restrictions, upending the very restoration efforts that Vance once championed. With the peak summer season just around the corner, Great Lakes scientists are concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people.
Cutbacks have gutted the staff at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Severe spending limits have made it difficult to purchase ordinary equipment for processing samples, such as filters and containers. Remaining staff plans to launch large data-collecting buoys into the water this week, but it’s late for a field season that typically runs from April to October.
In addition to a delayed launch, problems with personnel, supplies, vessel support and real-time data sharing have created doubts about the team’s ability to operate the buoys, said Gregory Dick, director of the NOAA cooperative institute at the University of Michigan that partners with the lab. Both the lab and institute operate out of a building in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was custom built as NOAA’s hub in the Great Lakes region, and both provide staff to the algal blooms team.
“This has massive impacts on coastal communities,” Dick said.
Gregory Dick, director of the Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research, which works side by side with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, says that cuts to the lab will have a massive impact on coastal communities. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)Multiple people who have worked with the lab also told ProPublica that there are serious gaps in this year’s monitoring of algal blooms, which are often caused by excess nutrient runoff from farms. Data generated by the lab’s boats and buoys, and publicly shared, could be limited or interrupted, they said.
That data has helped to successfully avoid a repeat of a 2014 crisis in Toledo, Ohio, when nearly half a million people were warned to not drink the water or even touch it.
If the streams of information are cut off, “stakeholders will be very unhappy,” said Bret Collier, a branch chief at the lab who oversaw the federal scientists that run the harmful algal bloom program for the Great Lakes. He was fired in the purge of federal probationary workers in February.
The lab has lost about 35% of its 52-member workforce since February, according to the president of the lab’s union, and it was not allowed to fill several open positions. The White House released preliminary budget recommendations last week that would make significant cuts to NOAA. The budget didn’t provide details, but indicated the termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy” of ending “‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.”
An earlier document obtained by ProPublica and reported widely proposed a 74% funding cut to NOAA’s research office, home of the Great Lakes lab.
Vance’s office didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about how federal cuts have affected Great Lakes research. The White House also didn’t respond to messages.
Water samples from bodies of water in the Great Lakes region (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)Municipal water leaders in Cleveland and Toledo have written public letters of support on behalf of the lab, advocating for the continuation of its work because of how important its tools and resources are for drinking water management.
In a statement to ProPublica, staffers from Toledo’s water system credited the Great Lakes lab and NOAA for alerting it to potential blooms near its intake days ahead of time. This has saved the system significant costs, they said, and helped it avoid feeding excess chemicals into the water.
“The likelihood of another 2014 ‘don’t drink the water’ advisory has been minimized to almost nothing by additional vigilance” from both the lab and local officials, they said.
Remaining staff have had to contend with not only a lack of capacity but also tight limits on spending and travel.
Several people who have worked in or with the lab said that the staff was hampered by strict credit card limits imposed on government employees as part of the effort to reduce spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheaded by presidential adviser Elon Musk.
“The basic scientific supplies that we use to provide the local communities with information on algal bloom toxicity — our purchasing of them is being restricted based on the limitations currently being put in by the administration,” Collier said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s custom-built hub for the Great Lakes region in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)NOAA and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the agency, didn’t respond to messages from ProPublica. Neither did a DOGE official. Eight U.S. senators, including the minority leader, sent a letter in March to a top NOAA leader inquiring about many of the changes, but they never received a response.
The department described its approach to some of its cuts when it eliminated nearly $4 million in funding for the NOAA cooperative institute at Princeton University and emphasized the importance of avoiding wasteful government spending. ProPublica has reported on how the loss of research grants at Princeton and the more significant defunding of the NOAA lab it works with would be a serious setback for weather and climate preparedness.
A number of the staffing losses at the Great Lakes lab came when employees accepted offers of early retirement or voluntary separation; others were fired probationary workers targeted by DOGE across the government. That includes Collier, who had 24 years of professional experience, largely as a research professor, before he was hired last year into a position that, according to the lab’s former director, had been difficult to fill.
A scientist specializing in the toxic algal blooms was also fired. She worked on the team for 14 years through the cooperative institute before accepting a federal position last year, which made her probationary, too.
A computer scientist who got real-time data onto the lab’s website — and the only person who knew how to push out the weekly sampling data on harmful algal blooms — was also fired. She was probationary because she too was hired for a federal position after working with the institute.
And because of a planned retirement, no one holds the permanent position of lab director, though there is an acting director. The lab isn’t allowed to fill any positions due to a federal hiring freeze.
At the same time, expected funds for the lab's cooperative institute are delayed, which means, Dick said, it may soon lay off staff, including people on the algal blooms team.
In March, Cleveland’s water commissioner wrote a letter calling for continued support for the Great Lakes lab and other NOAA-funded operations in the region, saying that access to real-time forecasts for Lake Erie are “critically important in making water treatment decisions” for more than 1.3 million citizens.
In 2006, there was a major outbreak of hypoxia, an issue worsened by algal blooms where oxygen-depleted water can become corrosive, discolored and full of excess manganese, which is a neurotoxin at high levels. Cleveland Water collaborated with the lab on developing a “groundbreaking” hypoxia forecast model, said Scott Moegling, who worked for both the Cleveland utility and Ohio’s drinking water regulatory agency.
“I knew which plants were going to get hit,” Moegling said. “I knew about when, and I knew what the treatment we would need would be, and we could staff accordingly.”
The American Meteorological Society, in partnership with the National Weather Association, spotlighted this warning system in its statement in support of NOAA research, saying that it helps “keep drinking water potable in the Great Lakes region.”
Collier, the former branch chief, said that quality data may be lacking this year, not just for drinking water suppliers, but also the U.S. Coast Guard, fisheries, shipping companies, recreational businesses and shoreline communities that rely on it to navigate risk. In response to a recent survey of stakeholders, the president of a trade organization serving Great Lakes cargo vessels said that access to NOAA’s real-time data “is critically important to the commercial shipping fleet when making navigation decisions.”
Because federal law requires NOAA to monitor harmful algal blooms, the cuts may run against legal obligations, several current and former workers told ProPublica. The blooms program was “federally mandated to be active every single day, without exception,” Collier said.
First image: Harmful algal bloom on Lake Erie, observed during weekly sampling in 2022. Second image: A beaker holding a water sample taken from Lake Erie during a peak harmful algal bloom, shown at its natural concentration in 2017. (The Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan)The 2024 bloom in Lake Erie was the earliest on record. At its peak, it covered 550 square miles. Warming temperatures worsen the size and frequency of algal blooms. While the field season was historically only about 90 days, Collier said, last year the team was deployed for 211 days.
As the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is typically first to show signs of problems. But it’s also an emblem of environmental stewardship, thanks to its striking recovery from unchecked industrial pollution. The lake was once popularly declared “dead.” A highly publicized fire inflamed a river that feeds into it. Even Dr. Seuss knocked it in the 1971 version of “The Lorax.” The book described fish leaving a polluted pond “in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”
But the rise of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA, and labs like the one protecting the Great Lakes, along with legislation that protected water from pollution, led to noticeable changes. By 1986, two Ohio graduate students had succeeded in persuading Theodor Geisel, the author behind Dr. Seuss, to revise future editions of his classic book.
“I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the happy home of smiling fish,” Geisel wrote to them.
Early this year, headlines out of the Midwest suggested that “Vance could be a game-changing Great Lakes advocate” and that he might “save the Great Lakes from Trump.”
A 2023 report to Congress about the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a popular funding mechanism for projects that protect the lakes, including the research lab’s, described the lab’s work on harmful algal blooms as one of its “success stories.” Last year, with Vance as a co-sponsor, an act to extend support for the funding program passed the Senate, but stalled in the House. Another bipartisan effort to reauthorize it launched in January.
Nicole Rice was recently fired from her position at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory after 10 years with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A promotion put her on probationary status. She’s worried that federal cuts are placing the Great Lakes system at risk. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)Project 2025, the plan produced by the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term, recommended that the president consider whether NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
NOAA is “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” the plan said, and this industry’s mission “seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
“That is not to say NOAA is useless,” it added, “but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”
When asked at his confirmation hearing in January if he agreed with Project 2025’s recommendation of dismantling NOAA, Howard Lutnick, head of the commerce department, said no.
One month later, the Great Lakes lab’s probationary staff got termination notices. That includes Nicole Rice, who spent a decade with NOAA. A promotion made her communications job vulnerable to the widespread firings of federal probationary workers.
In recent testimony to a Michigan Senate committee, Rice expressed deep concern about the future of the Great Lakes.
“It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said. “But these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.”
Vernal Coleman contributed reporting.
As the Trump administration pledges to eliminate 80,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, ProPublica reporters are investigating how changes at the VA are affecting veterans themselves. Trump has promised to put veterans first, but our reporting shows veterans’ care is suffering amid wide-ranging cuts. If you’ve experienced setbacks in your care, we want to hear from you.
We would also appreciate firsthand insights about changes happening within the VA from agency employees. Please do not fill out this form if you work for the VA or another federal agency. Instead, contact our reporters via the encrypted messaging app Signal:
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If you’ve experienced setbacks in your care or benefits amid the changes at the Department of Veterans Affairs, ProPublica wants to hear from you. Share your story.
Earlier this year, doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. Sweeping cuts imposed by the Trump administration, they told higher-ups in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”
The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.
“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”
The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.
President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize veterans.
“We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”
After the Department of Veterans Affairs began shedding employees and contracts, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, pledged, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”
But dozens of internal emails obtained by ProPublica reveal a far different reality. Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care. The VA provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans.
In March, VA officials across the country warned that a critical resource — databases for tracking cancer — would no longer be kept up to date. As officials in the Pacific Northwest explained, the Department of Government Efficiency was moving to kill its contract with the outside company that maintained and ran its cancer registry, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked it for “immediate termination.”
Officials at the VA centers in the Pacific Northwest said funding for their cancer research was “updated for immediate termination” after a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. (Obtained by ProPublica)The VA in Detroit raised a similar alarm in an email, warning of the “inability to track oncology treatment and recurrences.” The emails obtained by ProPublica detail a wide variety of disruptions. In Colorado, for instance, layoffs to social workers were causing homeless veterans waiting for temporary housing to go without help.
The warnings, sent as part of a longstanding system at the VA to alert higher-ups of problems, paint a portrait of chaotic retrenchment at an agency that just three years ago was mandated by Congress through the PACT Act to expand care and benefits for veterans facing cancer and other issues after exposure to Agent Orange, burn pits or other toxins.
Doctors and other health care providers across the VA have been left scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of cuts, hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House.
VA officials in Pittsburgh sent warnings about studies being impacted by a hiring freeze. These included studies on cancer, suicide prevention and exposure to toxins. (Obtained by ProPublica)The upheaval laid bare in the emails is particularly striking because the cuts so far would be dwarfed by the dramatic downsizing in staff and shift in priorities the administration has said is coming.
The VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year. But the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months. The agency, which is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., currentlyhas nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.
Despite an expanded role mandated by Congress through the PACT Act, administration officials have said their goal is to trim the agency to the size it was before the legislation passed.
“The Biden Administration understood what it meant to pay for the cost of war; it seems the Trump Administration does not,” said Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat and chief author of the PACT Act.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to “transform” the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefits claims. One DOGE document proposed closing 17 hospitals — and perhaps a dozen more.
VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz told ProPublica that there would be no hospital closures. “Just because a VA employee wrote something down, doesn’t make it VA policy,” he said in a written statement. But he did say that use of AI will be a big part of what he called VA’s “reform” efforts.
Kasperowicz dismissed the idea that the emails obtained by ProPublica show chaos.
“The only thing these reports show is that VA has a robust and well-functioning system to flag potential issues and quickly fix them so we can provide the best possible care to Veterans,” he wrote.
DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.
Have You Been Affected by Changes at the Department of Veterans Affairs? Tell Us About It.
The White House released a budget proposal last week that calls for a 4% increase in the VA’s budget. That total includes more money for medical care, though a portion of that would be used to pay for veterans to seek care outside the VA medical system.
More answers to the VA’s larger plans may come today, when Collins is scheduled to testify before the Senate Veterans Committee, his first hearing on Capitol Hill since coming into office.
David Shulkin, who headed the VA in Trump’s first term, said the administration is too focused on cuts rather than communicating a strategy for improving care for vets.
“I think it’s very, very hard to be successful with the approach that they’re taking,” Shulkin told ProPublica.
One way local VA officials have tried to limit the damage has been by sending warnings — formally known as an issue brief — to higher-ups. And sometimes it works.
After officials in Los Angeles warned that “all chemotherapy” would stop unless Washington backed off killing a service contract, the VA reversed its decision.
And, amid growing scrutiny, the administration also made some researchers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere exempt from cuts. The laid-off social workers who helped homeless vets in Colorado were also brought back after about a month away from their jobs. Kasperowicz said that four social workers were affected but “their caseload was temporarily redistributed to other members of the homeless team.”
The warnings from officials across the country underscore how the comparatively modest cuts so far are already affecting the work of the VA’s medical system, with the study and treatment of cancer cited in multiple warnings to agency leadership.
“We have absolutely felt the impact of the chaos all around us. We’re already losing people,“ said one senior researcher, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously for fear of retaliation.
Referring to studies, he added: “We’re going to be losing things that can’t restart.”
And while Kasperowicz told ProPublica that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, locals there said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing.
In Pittsburgh, two trials to treat veterans with advanced head and neck cancer, which officials in March had warned were at risk because of hiring freezes, have still not started, according to Alanna Caffas, who heads a Pittsburgh nonprofit, the Veterans Health Foundation, that partners with the VA on research.
“It’s insane,” Caffas said. “These veterans should be able to get access to research treatments, but they can’t.”
VA employees in Pittsburgh sent a warning that they had lost research staff because of the hiring freeze. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)A third trial there, to help veterans with opioid addiction, wasn’t halted. Instead, it was hobbled by layoffs of key team members, according to Caffas and another person involved in the research.
Regarding the issues with cancer registries, Kasperowicz said there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer those registries.
Rosie Torres, founder of Burn Pits 360, the veterans advocacy group that also pushed hard for the legislation, called the emails showing impeded cancer treatment a “crisis in the making” and “gutwrenching.”
That the decisions are being made without input from the communities of vets they affect is worse, she added.
“If they are killing contracts that may affect the delivery of care, then we have a right to know,” she said.
Last week, as the second Trump administration marked its first 100 days in office, Collins celebrated what he described as its achievements.
In a recorded address, he said that under his stewardship the VA processed record numbers of benefit claims, ended “divisive” spending on diversity initiatives and redirected millions of agency dollars from “non-mission-critical” programs back toward services to benefit veterans.
“We will not stop working to put veterans first,” he wrote in an accompanying op-ed.
Others say Collins has done no such thing. Instead of focusing on veterans, said one VA oncologist, “we’re spending an enormous amount of time preparing for a staffing catastrophe.”
“Veterans’ lives are on the line,” the doctor said. “Let us go back to work and take care of them.”
Alex Mierjeski contributed research, and Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.
Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Upended, a sculpture installation by multi-disciplinary artist Judith Shaw. This is Shaw’s second solo exhibition with Bruno David Gallery. ‘Upended’ is part of […]
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