ProPublica

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.

The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.

It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities. The department said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.

But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.

The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.

In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.

Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.

Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story.

Tracey Fair, the district’s director, said school officials made sure students were safe following the incident and that Drake won’t be returning to the district. She declined to comment further about the incident, but said school officials take their “obligation to keep students and staff safe very seriously.”

Doug Thompson, chief of police in Jacksonville, where the school is located, said he could not discuss the case.

A screenshot from a recording of a CCTV video shows Xander Reed being dragged down the hallway by a teacher at the Garrison School. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Xander’s mother, Amanda, said her son is fearful about going to Garrison, where she said he also has been punished by being put in a school “crisis room,” a small space where students are taken when staff feel they misbehave or need time alone. “He has not wanted to go to school,” she said. “We want him to get an education. We want him to be with other kids.”

Four Rivers serves an eight-county area, and students at Garrison range from kindergartners through high schoolers. About 70 students were enrolled at the start of the school year. Districts who feel they aren’t able to educate a student in neighborhood schools send them to Four Rivers; Xander travels 40 minutes each way to attend Garrison.

The federal scrutiny of Garrison began after ProPublica and the Tribune revealed that during a five-year period, school employees called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Police made more than 100 arrests of students as young as 9 during that period. They were handcuffed and taken to the police station for being disruptive or disobedient; if they’d physically lashed out at staff, they often were charged with felony aggravated battery.

Garrison School is part of a special education district that’s supposed to be under federal monitoring for violating the civil rights of its disabled students. (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

The news organizations also found that Garrison employees frequently removed students from their classrooms and sent them to crisis rooms when the students were upset, disobedient or aggressive.

The Office for Civil Rights’ findings echoed those of the news investigation. It determined that Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something prohibited by federal law.

The district was to report its progress in making changes to the OCR by last December, which it appears to have done, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a public records request.

But the records show the OCR has not communicated with the district since then and it’s not clear what will come of the work at Four Rivers. The OCR has terminated at least one agreement it entered into last year — a deal with a South Dakota school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Scott Reed, 6-year-old Xander Reed’s father, said he and Xander’s mother were aware of the frequent use of police as disciplinarians at Four Rivers and of OCR’s involvement. But they reluctantly enrolled him this school year because they were told there were no other options.

“You can say you’ve made all these changes, but you haven’t,” Scott Reed said. For example, he said, even after confirming that Drake had dragged the 50-pound boy down the hall, school leadership sent her home. “They did not call police until I arrived at school and demanded it” hours later, he said.

“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”

Scott and Amanda Reed, Xander’s parents, enrolled their son in Garrison School after being told they had no other options. (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

New ProPublica reporting has found that since school began in August, police have been called to the school at least 30 times in response to student behavior.

Thompson, the police chief, told ProPublica that, in one instance, officers were summoned because a student was saying “inappropriate things.” They also were called last month after a report that a student punched and bit staff members. The officers “helped to calm the student,” according to the local newspaper’s police blotter.

And police have continued to arrest Garrison students. There have been six arrests of students for property damage or aggravated battery this school year, police data shows. A 15-year-old girl was arrested for spitting in a staff member’s face, and a 10-year-old boy was arrested after being accused of hitting an employee. There were at least nine student arrests last school year, according to police data.

Thompson said four students between the ages of 10 and 16 have been arrested this school year on the more serious aggravated battery charge; one of the students was arrested three times. He said he thinks police calls to Garrison are inevitable, but that school staff are now handling more student behavioral concerns without reaching out to police.

“I feel like now the calls for service are more geared toward they have done what they can and they now need help,” Thompson said. “They have attempted to de-escalate themselves and the student is not cooperating still or it is out of their control and they need more assistance.”

Police were called to the school last week to deal with “a disturbance involving a student,” according to the police blotter in Jacksonville’s local newspaper. It didn’t end in an arrest this time; a parent arrived and “made the student obey staff members.”

by Robert Faturechi and Brandon Roberts

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Two days before President Donald Trump announced dramatic plans for “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign imports, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold stock in almost three dozen companies, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

The Feb. 11 sales occurred near the stock market’s historic peak, just before it began to slide amid concerns about Trump’s tariff plans and ultimately plummeted after the president unveiled the details of the new tariffs on April 2.

Disclosure records filed by Duffy with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show he sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock two days before Trump’s Feb. 13 announcement, and up to $50,000 more that day.

Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy has presented himself as one of the intellectual forefathers of Trump’s current trade agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last government position before Trump elevated him to his cabinet post, Duffy introduced a bill he named the “United States Reciprocal Trade Act.” The proposed legislation, which did not pass, in many ways mirrors Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work,” Duffy posted online, referring to his own bill in the House.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it’s unclear whether Duffy had any information about the timing or scale of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans before the public did.

Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs throughout the campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume Trump wouldn’t adopt the far-reaching levies that led to the market crash following his “Liberation Day” announcement.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Transportation Department spokesperson said an outside manager made the trades and Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales” — a defense that ethics experts generally consider one of the strongest against questions of trading on nonpublic information.

His stock transactions “are part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary. The account managers must follow the guidance of the ethics agreement and they have done so.”

“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson dismissed the notion that knowledge of Trump’s coming tariffs could constitute insider knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”

Duffy is the second cabinet secretary to have sold stock at an opportune time.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. A government ethics agreement required Bondi to sell the shares within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have given her until early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. After the market closed that day, Trump presented his tariffs, sending the market reeling.

Following ProPublica’s story, at least two Democratic members of Congress called for investigations. Bondi has yet to answer questions about whether she knew anything about Trump’s tariff plans before the public did. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the trades.

Disclosure forms for securities trading by government officials do not require them to state the exact amount bought or sold but instead to provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

Duffy's disclosure records show he sold 34 stocks worth between $90,000 and $650,000 on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13. Per the ethics agreement he signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Transportation Department, he was required to sell off stock in seven of those companies during his first three months in office. Cabinet members are typically required to divest themselves of financial interests that intersect with their department’s oversight role, which in Duffy’s case involve U.S. roadways, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transportation network. The ethics agreement was dated Jan. 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the senate on Jan. 28, meaning he had until late April to sell. His spokesperson said he provided his account manager with the ethics agreement on Feb. 7.

The stocks he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the ethics agreement. Those shares were valued somewhere between $27,000 and $405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are impacted by the tariffs, and John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer that has projected hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs because of Trump’s tariffs.

Other companies Duffy sold, like gambling firm DraftKings and food delivery service DoorDash, are less directly vulnerable to tariff disruptions. But even those companies will be impacted if Americans have less disposable cash to spend. Few stocks were not hit hard by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. The S&P 500, a broadbased index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy’s sales and 13% specifically after Trump unveiled the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Since Trump unexpectedly walked back much of those initial tariffs, the market has rebounded.

There’s no indication that the cash from Duffy’s sales was immediately reinvested. He appears to have held on to parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin fund, treasuries, S&P 500 funds and stock in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharma company. (Duffy also purchased some Microsoft shares, one of the stocks he’s prohibited from holding, days earlier on Feb. 7, only to sell them on Feb. 11 with the rest of his sales.)

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through their jobs could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. The 2012 law clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Current and former officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission would not aggressively investigate activities by Trump or his allies.

The president’s selection of Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation was somewhat unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” in the late 1990s, had last held public office in 2019 during Trump’s first term when he served as a Wisconsin congressman.

As a lawmaker, Duffy introduced the bill that would have made it easier for Trump, or any president, to levy new tariffs, a role that had long been largely reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if he determined that another country was applying a higher duty rate on the same goods when they were coming from America.

The bill did not pass, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs as essential to national security or in response to a national emergency. His Feb. 13 announcement called on his advisers to come up with new tariff rates on goods coming from countries around the world based on a number of restrictions he said those countries were placing on American products — not just through tariffs, but also with their exchange rates and industry subsidies.

Even the public rollout of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Duffy released a spreadsheet showing how other countries tariffed particular goods at a higher rate than the U.S. Trump also used a spreadsheet during his rollout to show that his new tariffs were the same or lower than the trade restrictions other countries had placed on American goods.

More recently, Duffy has been a booster of Trump’s trade policies.

“LIBERATION DAY!!🇺🇸🇺🇸We’re not gonna take it anymore!💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻,” he tweeted two days after Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2. “This week, @POTUS took a historic step towards stopping other countries from ripping off the American worker and restoring Fair Trade. In Congress, I helped lead the US Reciprocal Trade Act with @RealPNavarro and the @WhiteHouse to expand the President’s tariff powers in his first term. I am so proud to have been able to share the culmination of that work, Liberation Day, with my family this week. Thank you at POTUS!”

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, with additional reporting by Cassandra Garibay

“This Shits Crazy”

In their last phone call before bed, Janicke Glynn tries to reassure her husband. He is away visiting a sick relative, and a Weather Channel forecast of Hurricane Helene’s imminent collision with the North Carolina mountains is leaving him uneasy. The storm, more than 400 miles wide, is expected to strike their small community the next morning, Sept. 27.

Janicke encourages him to focus on his family up in Boston. That is more important. She is fine. It’s been raining a lot, but the house is fine. Everything is fine. He’ll fly home tomorrow. She will see him then.

“Love you.”

First image: Janicke Glynn celebrates finishing part of the renovation of her and her husband’s dream property. Second image: John Glynn with the couple’s two rescue dogs. (Courtesy of John Glynn)

Janicke, a 46-year-old French Canadian, isn’t worried. She feels a deep spiritual connection to their home in Yancey County, a remote and ruggedly sublime expanse in the shadow of trendier Asheville. Nestled on a mountainside draped in maple and birch, perfumed by mountain laurel, their property is surrounded by the Black Mountains, ancient protectors of this magical place. Mount Mitchell, the tallest among them — the tallest in the eastern U.S. — is their backyard.

When the power goes out, Janicke lights candles and opens a door. She loves to hear the creek just beyond, a normally burbling carrier of rainfall down the mountain. But after two days of rain, it is starting to roar even before Helene’s arrival. She settles onto a living room couch with a little rat terrier, Troopie, one of their two rescue dogs.

Seven years have passed since she and John first looked at this property. He was thinking about retirement spots by the time they married in 2016 after keeping up a long-distance relationship for nearly a decade. Both were sick of the harsh Northern winters, and Janicke longed to rekindle the bond she’d felt with the natural world growing up in rural Canada. When she got out of the car to look at the property, she heard the creek and felt an instant harmony with the place. It had a 1940s stone house up on a hill, two wood-paneled cottages tucked along the creek and five acres where she envisioned tending lush gardens.

When she wondered if it cost too much, John argued that wasn’t the right question.

“Do you want to live here?” he asked.

“I want to die here, Johnny.”

Janicke Glynn spent years nurturing her beautiful gardens. (Courtesy of John Glynn)

After John falls asleep in his hotel, Helene makes landfall on the Florida panhandle about 500 miles south of the Black Mountains. As its massive bands close in, Janicke stays up listening to the storm and texting a tenant who rents one of their cottages, about 40 yards away right on the creek.

He types, “This shits crazy over here.”

Janicke knows he is anxious. Hours earlier, he sent her a screenshot of a National Weather Service post on Facebook that warned Helene could become one of the region’s worst events “in the modern era.” He worried about what the forecasted 9 to 14 inches of rain, expected to fall onto the high peaks in the morning, would do to the already swollen rivers.

The post described “catastrophic, life-threatening flooding.” Her response was typically upbeat: “Thanks, Mother Nature is powerful!”

He’d been thinking he might drive to his brother’s place in Charlotte, but Janicke offered up her house if the cottage flooded. They hadn’t heard of evacuation orders or seen other signs to indicate anyone else seemed terribly concerned.

Inland vs. Coastal Responses

The response to Helene was far different on the Florida coast. Evacuation orders were swift and targeted, the routes to safety clearly conveyed. Had Helene hit North Carolina’s coast, the same likely would have happened. But as coastal areas have become far better at warning and evacuating people, inland communities too often remain ill prepared, with devastating results: In recent years, five times as many people died in freshwater drownings due to hurricanes’ extreme rainfall than from coastal storm surges in the continental U.S. — a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier.

As the hours pass and Helene closes in, Janicke’s tenant texts her, “My nerves are shot.”

He soon shows up at her door with a bag and his 15-year-old cat, Mama Kitty. The creek is pounding the foundation of his cottage and seeping inside. Its increasingly violent flow fills the air with a searing white noise as it races down the mountain past houses, horse pastures and barns. Cattail Creek Road, the main way in and out of the area, winds right alongside it.

Few people along Cattail fully realize the looming danger. Some of them sleep. One man laments that he will miss his flight in the morning. A woman downloads ebooks to have something to occupy her time if the internet goes out. Another assures a loved one that the storm will quickly pass before dawn.

Susie and Brian Hill bought their historic farmhouse the year before Helene. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Like Janicke Glynn, Brian Hill lives close to Cattail Creek. Closer, even. His century-old farmhouse sits about 15 yards from the banks. Unlike Janicke, he is starting to worry. Late the night of Sept. 26, he peers outside and is caught off guard by the creek’s fast-rising water.

Whoa, it’s really full, he thinks.

But as far as he knows, Cattail Creek has never flooded the house where he lives with his wife, Susie, and 9-year-old daughter, Lucy. Both are asleep. He tries to be quiet, but a sudden noise jolts him — boom, boom boom. It shakes his house like fireworks. He peers outside and realizes that somewhere up the mountain, the water is dislodging boulders. They are crashing down.

Around midnight, someone knocks on their door. It’s a firefighter warning that the creek has risen so high that it blocks the road in one direction. Soon, there could be no way out. “I can’t tell you what to do,” the man says. But he urges them to move to higher ground.

Brian and Susie grab their little girl and their dog, then rush out to their pickup truck. In the darkness, they drive up a hill that overlooks their property.

Up the north fork of Cattail Creek, as the water rises, no first responder knocks on Janicke Glynn’s door.

Tudy Creek, Friday Morning A Precarious Place to Be

Overnight, Helene churns across Georgia, then clips the northwest corner of South Carolina. Before sunrise, the storm collides with the Black Mountains, particularly the towering frontal wall called the Blue Ridge Escarpment. The high peaks shove the massive storm up into the cooler atmosphere.

Up in the chillier air, that water condenses. As Helene’s bands lash the Black Mountains, the storm begins to dump enormous amounts of water onto the already saturated peaks. In the morning, from 7 to 10 a.m. alone, about 8 inches of rain will fall atop Mount Mitchell. Because all that water must go somewhere, the deluge creates two critical threats: flash flooding and landslides. Both pose extraordinary danger. But landslides can destroy with far less warning.

The Cane River is about to get pummeled by both. Hemmed in by mountains, it forms the spine of one major valley in Yancey County. One of its tributaries, Cattail Creek, extends off that spine like an arm reaching east. Another, Tudy Creek, reaches west.

(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Several peaks wrap around Tudy Creek. High atop a particularly craggy one, the rainfall gets a toehold beneath soil clinging to a very steep and slightly concave slope of rock. Soil and rock will begin to slide with the water. Following the creekbed, the flow will gain velocity and weight and hurtle downhill with enough power to uproot trees and dislodge boulders.

In its path, a group of longtime neighbors live in a tranquil enclave of homes.

Among them is Ray Strickland, who retired a decade ago after 37 years as pastor of a local Baptist church. A hardworking man who still helps at the family construction company, Ray lives by the Scripture he often used during his first year at Laurel Branch Baptist, Psalm 66: “Make a joyful noise unto God.” His wife, Susan, a sweet woman with short grey hair, worked as a dental hygienist and performed as a clown named Jubilee at hospitals, nursing homes, parties — even the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Along with several of their neighbors, they raised their children here. Two newer neighbors moved here from Florida, weary of all the hurricane threats.

Ray and Susan Strickland, riding the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad a couple of years ago (Courtesy of Ginnie Strickland Beverly)

On Friday morning, the neighbors are all in their homes. Little do they know that the swath of land on which their houses sit was created, at moments back in geological time, by landslides. They had careened down steep slopes, probably following creekbeds, and dumped huge amounts of material here. That created a flatter spot to build houses in this otherwise rugged place.

In a storm like Helene, it’s also a precarious place to be. If the topography enabled a landslide here before, it could do so again.

Unfinished Warning

The neighbors might have been aware of the landslide threat if the state had finished a hazard mapping program that North Carolina legislators created 20 years ago. They acted after storms caused at least 85 landslides that killed five people. But when developers and real estate agents pushed back, lawmakers who didn’t want statewide regulations halted the program for almost a decade.

They restarted it in 2018 — after more landslide deaths. But Yancey County still hasn’t been mapped. Neither have four other counties in Helene’s path.

Given it already has been raining a lot, Ray and Susan worry most about their 43-year-old son, Aaron, who lives on the other side of the mountain with his two young children. In April, water seeped into his basement.

When Ray texts Aaron around 7 a.m., just as Helene is arriving in Yancey, he responds, “flooding.”

The curt tone isn’t like him. He and his parents normally stay in daily contact, so Ray and Susan figure they’ll try him again later.

Then their cell service cuts out. Without it, they’re among those in pockets across the county who don’t get the National Weather Service’s 8:50 a.m. emergency warning for Yancey: “The risk of life-threatening landslide activity continues to increase. … This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION.”

The storm worsens. Wind roars. So much water flows down the mountain that Tudy Creek — normally about 4 feet across — swells and merges with another creek to form a violent river that rages down the road between them. Water seems to gush through every crevice in the mountain bedrock.

Around 9 a.m., when the deluge settles between the storm’s bands, Ray heads to the back of their house where rocks are hitting the foundation. Susan ventures outside near the road, then meets Ray on their front porch. They’ve never seen anything like this. While Ray holds an umbrella, Susan records video with her phone.

Ray glances up. The tops of towering trees shake. Then a 20-foot wall of trees, boulders and mud rockets straight at them.

“Ray!” Susan screams.

“Good Luck, Everyone”

First responders were out overnight blocking off access to roads as they vanished beneath two of Yancey’s major waterways — the Cane and South Toe rivers — and the creeks that feed them. In this rural county, home to 19,000 people, the firefighters are all volunteers. So is the rescue squad.

The county commission recently received a draft of an emergency operations plan that warned, “A mass casualty event has the potential to quickly overwhelm the limited existing emergency medical resources in Yancey County.”

Now, on Friday morning, the wind and rain turn fierce. At 45, Sheriff Shane Hilliard hasn’t seen anything like it during his entire life here. Just before 8 a.m., he texts his mother to check in, but he doesn’t get a response. His parents live right on the South Toe River in the house he grew up in. His 92-year-old grandmother lives alone next door.

Rain whips downtown Burnsville, the county seat where the sheriff and other officials gather in the Emergency Operations Center. This command post is basically three desks, a conference table and four big TVs on the wall in a building near the courthouse.

In an adjacent building, calls pour into the county’s 911 center.

Landslides claw down the mountains. Hurricane-force winds splinter trees. Rivers snatch cars and rip apart homes. People climb into attics or swim through windows. A firefighter makes a distress call as the Cane River near Cattail Creek swamps his trailer. A deputy trying to rescue a family from their flooding home becomes trapped with them.

Dispatch blasts out an all-call: First responders must get off the roads. It’s too dangerous.

Cattail Creek Turns Violent

Across the street from Ray Strickland’s church, Cattail Creek decimates the community at around 10 a.m. on Sept. 27.

(Courtesy of William Pagan)

Watch video ➜

Jeff Howell, Yancey County’s emergency management director, watches the radar as storm imagery shifts to red. Helene’s rainfall now resembles blood-filled lungs hanging over the Black Mountains.

Howell, who has deep roots in the area, took the job seven years ago after three decades in the Army and Army Reserves. He had no experience with emergency management, so it’s been a lot of learn-as-you-go. For years he asked for extra hands, but as Helene approached, the department was just him and a part-time employee.

Uneven Training

Required education and training for emergency managers varies considerably by state. Florida recently enacted a law mandating minimum training, experience and education starting in 2026. Georgia requires directors to get the state’s emergency management certification within six months. But North Carolina doesn’t require specific training for its county emergency managers, who are tasked with enormous life-and-death decisions.

Now Howell faces the biggest test of his time in the office.

Over the past week, he watched each forecast turn more ominous, with western North Carolina in a bullseye of the heaviest rainfall. Yesterday around noon, a lead meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s regional office ended its final briefing before Helene’s arrival with a grim, “Good luck, everyone.”

The office also issued a public statement that warned, “Landslides, including fast-moving debris flows consisting of water, mud, falling rocks, trees, and other large debris, are most likely within small valleys that drain steep slopes.”

Around the same time, weather service staff also took to social media to post the dire message that Janicke Glynn’s tenant had seen: “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era.”

“We cannot stress the significance of this event enough,” it added. “Heed all evacuation orders from your local Emergency Managers.”

Flooding from the South Toe River in Yancey County on Sept. 27 around 9 a.m., first image, and around 11 a.m., second image (Courtesy of Zachary O’Donnell)

Unlike in South Carolina, where the governor typically makes evacuation decisions, in North Carolina, local and county governments primarily make them. Howell, the official who would recommend evacuation orders to the county commission chair, didn’t do so. In this largely conservative place — fresh off a culture war battle over a Pride display at the local library — he didn’t think the chair would go for them. Nor did he think residents would heed orders, given many locals’ disdain for government mandates and their pride in self-reliance.

Lack of Detailed Plans

Howell and other county leaders noted that while coastal areas are used to thinking about evacuations, inland communities, especially in the mountains, don’t deal with hurricanes nearly as often.

While the commission chair said he would have considered a request from Howell, he didn’t think Yancey had detailed enough plans in place to know where to advise people to evacuate given the size of the storm and the complexity of mountain terrain.

With the ongoing challenge of rebuilding, Yancey County has not formally examined its preparedness for the disaster, but the county chair expects it will do so later. In April, the state Emergency Management agency released a report it had commissioned on its response to Helene and its interactions with local officials, but the report doesn’t probe evacuations.

People who survived Helene say it’s true that not everyone would — or could — have heeded an order. But some say they would have left, or at least prepared better. Many, including those living in high-risk areas and caring for young children and frail older people, didn’t evacuate because they didn’t see clearer signs of urgency from the county.

By nightfall on Sept. 26, the day before Helene struck, three nearby counties issued mandatory evacuation orders for certain areas and at least five issued voluntary ones. Among Yancey’s rural neighbors, one of the most robust responses to Helene came from McDowell County. Officials there issued voluntary and mandatory evacuation orders for specific areas, launched two door-knocking campaigns to warn people in high-risk places, and put out flyers in English and Spanish that warned of life-threatening flash floods and urged all people in vulnerable areas to “evacuate as soon as possible.” Many did so.

Yancey also did some door knocking. Howell joined first responders urging people in the most obviously dangerous places to consider leaving. Not everyone appreciated the warning. Howell got an earful before finally convincing a man to leave a campground almost encircled by the South Toe River.

Like officials across the region, Howell took to Facebook as well. Around lunchtime on Sept. 26, he shared the weather service’s latest grim briefing and suggested people make plans to stay somewhere else if they live near flood-prone areas. But while the weather service aimed to alarm people into action with its dire post, Howell thought it best not to panic them.

So he softened the message, adding, “This information is not to frighten anyone.”

“We Need to Go Back Now!”

About 150 yards up the hill from their century-old house, Brian and Susie Hill huddled in their pickup truck with their little girl and dog overnight as rain poured and darkness enveloped Cattail Creek.

Now, a few hours after sunrise, they watch their house drown.

They would have left if the county had issued a mandatory evacuation order, especially for Lucy’s sake. Still, if they hadn’t gotten that middle-of-the-night knock on the door from the firefighter, it could have been worse.

Susie hands her cellphone to the child to distract her from the sight beyond the truck’s windows. The creek rages. It surrounds their house, pounding it with waves and ripping the porch and doors off. Windows cave in.

They bought the white farmhouse, with its mountain views, a year ago and have been busy restoring it — slowly, on two public school teacher salaries. This is a place where their daughter can run outside on 6 acres, where a neighbor’s horses graze in a field next door, where they can gather around the fire pit at night and listen to the creek. Susie raises chickens and tends a garden filled with asparagus, blueberries and strawberries.

People like Susie and Brian come to Yancey County, and stay here, and die here, for the majesty of two forces: the mountains and the rivers. The ancient mountains protect; the rivers nourish. They provide hiking, whitewater rafting, kayaking and the meditations of so many tranquil creeks.

Now it feels like both have betrayed them. Along Cattail, people watch the landscape of their happiest memories vanish beneath floodwaters.

Janicke Glynn and her tenant, who is sheltering at her house, were up all night listening to the storm. He feared what was happening to his cottage down by the creek. Janicke remained calm, lighting candles when the power went out and trying to ease his worry. He’d gone through a tough time last year, losing family and dealing with heartbreak, and they’d become close friends.

But at the first crack of daylight, his emotions fray when Janicke ventures outside to pick up branches and sticks. Rain still drenches the mountainside, and wind gusts with enough force to bend trees. Janicke wants to keep her paradise unmarred. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt. When he runs out after her, yelling at her to come back inside, she reluctantly complies.

Floodwaters Tear at the Creekside Cottage

Janicke Glynn’s tenant filmed his home at 8 a.m. Sept. 27.

(Courtesy of Janicke Glynn’s tenant)

Watch video ➜

When the rain and wind ebb just before 10 a.m., they step outside to assess the damage together. Hemlock hedges block the view of his cottage, so they head down toward it. The creek has calmed a bit as well. As they slip closer, they see the windows are busted and his belongings dragged out. Everything inside is churned up.

Janicke is fearless. But her tenant is unnerved. He thinks they are acting way too comfortable. Standing beside the battered cottage, he hollers, “I think we should go back to the house!”

Janicke steps closer to the water.

“We need to go back now!” he screams.

A gush of water rushes under her. From a dozen feet away, she turns toward him. As she does, the current rips down the cottage and then swallows them both.

Across the Ruins

Ray Strickland wonders if he is dead. The retired pastor realizes he is in a small pocket of empty space encased in debris from their home. Light reaches through a hole. Something pins his leg.

When he yells to his wife, Susan, she does not answer.

An opening. The light. If he leaves his boot, he can wriggle free. When he climbs out of the pile, destruction surrounds him. A car alarm blares. A smoke alarm screams. Water rages by.

Ray sits on a boulder, dazed. Drywall sticks out of one ear. Blood runs down his arm. What looks like road rash covers his skin. Yet he feels strangely serene. If God takes him now, that’s his will.

Some time passes. Then a man’s voice. Someone is yelling his name. It is Pete Lewicki, who lives in the next house down from him. But Pete is across a wide river blazing past the rubble. Ray hollers at him to get back.

Pete Lewicki jumped into action after the landslide. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Pete doesn’t listen. When he was in the Navy, he worked in search and rescue. Now that training kicks back in. To reach Ray, he and his 24-year-old son haul over ladders and move logs to create a makeshift bridge. Pete slips crossing the slick ladder. Floodwater tears at him as he climbs back up.

When he reaches Ray, Pete finds the man is shaking — and is eerily calm.

Once they get Ray out of the wreckage of his home and into their house, Pete’s wife wraps him in a blanket and finds dry clothes for him. Pete promises he will be back.

A landslide barreled through their enclave. Ray’s house is gone. So is the house just above Ray’s at the top of their road. So is its freestanding garage apartment, where an older man named James Andrews lived. Trees and boulders block the way. Pete makes it, then spots James. He is dead, pinned beneath a huge tree. Pete covers the body with a bedsheet in the debris.

As Pete heads back to his house, Ray comes outside. He is thinking more clearly now and is certain his wife, Susan, is in the mound of debris where he’d been trapped. They had been near each other when the landslide hit. He leads Pete and two other men from down the road to the small hole he’d crawled through in the ruins. The men inch down into it.

Pete spots Susan. She is 3 feet down from where Ray’s blood pooled in the wreckage. It’s clear she has died.

He remembers her smile, which she used to brighten people’s lives. Almost every day, she and two neighbor ladies, both recently widowed, walked up and down the road together. When they walked by shortly after Pete moved in, Susan stopped and came over to give him a big, welcoming hug. Pete, a veteran with neck tattoos who has post-traumatic stress disorder, deeply appreciated her gesture.

They all know that Susan is buried too deep to get her out themselves. Ray, her husband of almost 50 years, tells them to stop trying. It’s a miracle he is alive, and he doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt.

The Wreckage of the Stricklands’ Home

Pete Lewicki filmed a video around 11 a.m., after a landslide barreled down Tudy Creek.

(Courtesy of Pete Lewicki)

Watch video ➜

Looking across the ruins, Pete sees the landslide’s path down the steep slope above their road. The debris flow had barreled more than a mile down the mountain, leaving an expanse of mud and rocks. He had never seen this magnitude of destruction, not even during his 40 years living in Florida, where hurricanes repeatedly flooded his home. A massive mound of trees and remnants of the destroyed houses sits piled against a neighbor’s garage. A widow lives there with her parents, who are 86 and 89. Pete heads over to check on them.

When he gets there, he sees that Marie-France Herman, the woman who lives at the top of the road, is there with them. She is caked in mud with a black eye and a nasty gash on her ankle. Inside the house, they are all slogging through mud almost to their knees. But getting out means crossing the landslide’s path to reach another neighbor’s house, an A-frame that looks, somehow, unscathed.

After many precarious moments, they all make it. Ray joins them.

The neighbors share notes about what they all just survived. When the landslide hit, Marie was looking out at the worsening storm through an antique door. An 81-year-old distant relative in poor health who lives with her was sitting nearby at the kitchen table when Marie spotted trees toppling down the mountain like dominoes.

The next thing she remembers, water slammed into her. She expected to drown. Instead, she got her head above water and climbed onto some logs.

She has lost everything, even her husband’s ashes. And she doesn’t know where her relative is.

Unreachable

The rain finally lets up by late morning on Sept. 27, but the rivers and creeks rage with so much water flowing down the slopes. Hilliard, the sheriff, heads to the 911 center, which is running off a generator. The calls coming in terrify him and the other county leaders. Floodwaters fill homes. Rivers ravage roads. People watch neighbors get swept away in cars and on foot. Landslides careen down slopes.

At 10:51 a.m., the 911 center suddenly falls silent.

The sheriff and others look at one another: What just happened?

What was left of Yancey’s cell service has now failed. Landlines are already out. So is the internet.

Emergency responders are left with only their radio system. And that is quickly overwhelmed. It takes eight to 10 tries to get a call out, if they can even get one out. Many just get error tones.

Finally, somehow, the sheriff gets through to the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association director in Raleigh. “I need help!” he pleads.

But help won’t be coming, not any time soon.

Yancey County Sheriff Shane Hilliard (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

County-to-county communications across the region barely function. The state Emergency Management agency is severely understaffed, slowing its response.

As Helene’s deluge flows down the Black Mountains, it inundates rivers on all sides of the peaks, claiming dozens of lives and destroying communities in every direction. One county over from Yancey, a family of four — including two little boys — are swept to their deaths while fleeing their home. To Yancey’s south, floodwater swallows little towns en route to Asheville. A nearby landslide kills 11 people from one family and two firefighters coming to their aid. Raging water decimates downtown Chimney Rock, a tourist village, heading to Lake Lure, a resort town. The National Weather Service blasts out an alert: “DAM FAILURE IMMINENT!”

Minutes later, at 11:15 a.m., state transportation officials tweet, “All roads in western NC should be considered closed.”

Get in Touch

We will continue to tell the stories of Helene’s devastation, and we want to know: What is one thing the storm destroyed that you would have saved had you evacuated? To share, leave us a voicemail at 828-201-2738.

Hilliard knows little of this is happening. With the 911 center silent, cellphones and landlines and internet all down, officials inside the Emergency Operations Center abandon it. The command center is useless. They cannot help anyone from here.

Not long before noon, the sheriff heads out with a crew in the county’s large armored military surplus vehicle. They cannot get far. Downtown Burnsville is an island. Roads and bridges in all directions are submerged, washed away, blocked by trees or smothered in the liquefied mud of landslides. Places like Tudy Creek and Cattail Creek are unreachable.

Cattail Creek at around 10 a.m. on Sept. 27 (Courtesy of Douglas Rodgers)

Everyone in the vehicle falls silent. A look the sheriff has never seen falls over their faces: They are afraid. His radio squawks. Someone from the South Toe Fire Department hollers his name. Firefighters made it to the river where the sheriff’s parents and elderly grandmother still live.

His parents’ house is gone, washed away. And they cannot find his parents.

He yells for them to check next door at his grandmother’s house.

They tried, the voice says. But her house is gone, too.

“Where Are We?”

On Sunday morning, two days after the storm hit, Aaron Strickland still hasn’t heard from his parents. After Helene subsided, he and his girlfriend went to the local fire station where her son, a volunteer firefighter, worked overnight. He and other firefighters returning from distress calls described an apocalyptic level of destruction.

But none of them mentioned Tudy Creek, and Aaron figures that’s a good thing.

When his girlfriend finds a county building with working Wi-Fi, he’s relieved to finally make some calls. He dials his parents, but the call won’t go through. He is able to reach his sister, Ginnie Strickland Beverly, who lives a few hours away in Winston-Salem.

Ginnie is distraught. Like so many people unable to reach loved ones trapped inside Helene’s destruction zone across western North Carolina, she has been scouring news sources and Facebook, gathering scraps of details about what’s happened. She heard crews airlifted a dead person out from Cattail Creek. But she hasn’t been able to find anyone who reached Tudy Creek.

“Have you made it up to Mom and Daddy’s yet?” she asks.

Worry sets in. Aaron hangs up and hurries out. Maybe he can get there himself.

At the first bridge, police are directing traffic, so Aaron stops to see what he can find out. This is a small community, and he sees familiar faces. One is the mother of a childhood friend who lives at the base of Tudy Creek. Aaron has known her his entire life. When she sees him, she hurries over and wraps him in a hug.

“Honey, I’m so sorry,” she says. For a moment, they look at each other. Aaron isn’t sure what she means.

“Your mom is gone,” she blurts out. His father, Ray, is hurt. She doesn’t know how badly. Her son just made it down from there. A landslide. Some bodies. Aaron doesn’t hear much else.

Desperation consumes him. So does a plan.

Aaron Strickland, Ray and Susan’s son, drives along the devastated Cane River area. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Normally, it takes 20 minutes to drive around the mountain from his place to his parents’ house. But as a crow flies, it’s more like 2 or 3 miles over the mountain. Growing up, that mountain was Aaron’s playground.

He and his girlfriend’s son, the volunteer firefighter, drive to an airstrip at the top of the mountain, then hike down toward his parents’ house. As they slip on slick mud and wet leaves, fear propels them. Aaron fights back images of his father with a head wound or broken bones, or worse. He shoves away thoughts of his mother, for now.

They come upon what looks like a landslide, its mud like quicksand pocked with holes and mangled trees. To Aaron, it appears 100 yards wide. They must go around it over toppled trees and boulders.

Finally, they spot a creek. It flows down a channel scoured out that looks 30 yards across and 20 feet deep. Aaron has hiked all over these mountains, and the only creeks up here are slim little things 3 or 4 feet wide, a few inches deep.

“Where are we?” he asks.

At last, they see an old logging road. There is only one on this mountain, and it leads to the top of his parents’ road on Tudy Creek. But when they reach where it should dead end into their street, piles of mud, trees and boulders 20 feet high and 50 yards across block their path. When they scale it, Aaron looks out over the expanse of fallen trees, boulders, mud and debris.

Oh my God.

He clambers down toward the spot where his parents’ house — the home he grew up in, the tan split-level with the long front porch — should be standing. Terror replaces his desperation.

Chunks of the Stricklands’ foundation next to where their house once stood (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

The woman who told him about his mother’s death also said his father was at their neighbor Rita Thacker’s house. Aaron’s heart thunders. His stomach churns. He scrambles up the steep, muddy bank toward Rita’s. Huge fallen trees block his view. Climbing through dense branches and leaves, he looks for holes to wiggle through.

Finally he sees Rita’s beautiful A-frame. He hears voices. He hadn’t considered that other people might be there with his dad and Rita. Busting through the last branches, he pops out looking at her backyard.

Rita is standing right there with another neighbor and that woman’s elderly parents. They turn to the commotion. Aaron spots his dad.

Ray is standing with his back to him. But he is standing. He is talking. He is OK.

Aaron sprints over and wraps his arms around his father. No contact for days, terrible, awful stories coming in, running on fumes, little sleep, the shock of his mom’s death, fear for his dad’s safety, inability to communicate, all of that bursts out in the tears of this moment.

He has rarely seen his dad with a three-day scruff, so he sets his hand on his face to feel it. “It’s the best you’ve ever looked,” he says.

With no way to contact anyone, no running water or power or passable roads, the neighbors relied on each other since the landslide. One is a nurse who treated the physical wounds. Pastor Ray has fed spiritual needs — and hauled 5-gallon buckets down to gather water to flush the toilets. Rita has a gas stove, so they cook. This morning, they made waffles.

Aaron with a photo of his mother, Susan, who was one of three people killed in a landslide on Tudy Creek (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

As his adrenalin ebbs with relief, Aaron turns to the destruction.

His parents’ house looks like a giant hand crushed it. The body of Aaron’s 71-year-old mother, the woman who took him with her to clown conferences when he was a kid, is buried so deep in the mound of debris that it will take heavy equipment to get her out. He finds one of her old Bibles.

Almost a mile down the mountain, neighbors find the body of Marie’s elderly relative.

A New Fear

Janicke Glynn’s husband landed in Charlotte shortly after the storm hit, and during the two days since he has turned frantic. He hasn’t been able to reach her — or anyone else in the area. Nor can he get back to Cattail Creek. Every road he tries is blocked by flooding, landslides and police who turn him back. He is staying at a hotel 80 miles from Burnsville with no electricity.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he gets a text from their tenant. It comes from someone else’s phone, a newer one that can get a satellite connection.

“I’m so sorry Janicke is gone,” it reads.

Their tenant adds that he almost died too. When the cottage collapsed, a freight train of water and mud consumed Janicke. But when it smashed into him, it shoved him closer to the main house. He grabbed a spindly shrub and clung to it, praying that it wouldn’t snap and he might see his family again.

Eventually, screaming for help, he pulled himself out. But he could not find Janicke.

Now, he is trying to hike to the local fire station for help. He has no glasses, his skin is shredded in spots, and he’s bleeding from a deep gash in one knee. The station is a few miles away but feels unreachable with no roads and infinite destruction to cross. He promises John he will call when he can get service.

The remnants of the flash flood that destroyed the cottage where the Glynns’ tenant lived (Courtesy of John Glynn)

In Yancey County alone, 11 people died due to Helene. Per capita, that’s twice the rate of deaths as any other county in North Carolina. Yancey bore the brunt of the storm’s highest recorded wind gust and its highest recorded rainfall — both on Mount Mitchell. Thirty inches fell there over three days at the most inundated site, half of it before Helene’s arrival. Hundreds of landslides raked the county’s slopes.

Across the South, officials attribute 250 deaths to the storm. Of those, 107 died in North Carolina. Helene is the deadliest inland hurricane on record, by far.

Freshwater flooding was the top killer.

The sheriff learns his parents and his grandmother are alive after a harrowing escape through floodwaters. But across the South Toe River, a family of four who came to Yancey after fleeing the war in Ukraine were swept away.

Flooding damaged the pews, first image, and hymnals, second image, of Laurel Branch Baptist Church, where Ray Strickland served as a pastor for 37 years. (First image: Courtesy of Ginnie Strickland Beverly. Second image: Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica.)

Jeff Howell, the emergency management director, retired earlier this year and still remains haunted. During his time in the Army and Army Reserves, he was deployed three times for three wars in three decades. None got to him like Helene. He couldn’t shoot back at the storm.

In hindsight, he feels that he and others notified folks as best they could given the unprecedented nature of Helene’s assault.

It’s true that no one alive had ever seen destruction of this magnitude in the region. But the National Weather Service warnings about the storm — “catastrophic, life-threatening flooding” and “severely damaging slope failures” and among the worst “in the modern era” — proved prescient.

When Brian and Susie Hill emerged from their truck the morning of Sept. 27, they found their once-gorgeous property resembled a moonscape of mud and rocks. Inside their home, it looked like someone put the contents of their lives into a blender. But when they slogged into their daughter’s bedroom shortly after the floodwaters receded, they found her stuffed animals still on the top bunk where she left them before Helene hit. They were perched just above the water line and were the only thing she cared about salvaging.

The little girl had been so stoic. But when they left the house with her stuffed animals, she finally cried.

Lucy’s stuffed toys (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

About a week later, the Hills are living at a friend’s house. Susie is grateful that Lucy can play with the family’s three young sons and keep her mind off things. The sadness of all they have lost subsides for a moment — and is quickly replaced by a new fear.

She and Brian live on public teachers’ salaries. They have 28 years left on their mortgage. Because their house isn’t in a flood zone, they don’t have flood insurance.

She gets a pause on their mortgage. But it’s only for three months. She can think of just one place to turn to next for the magnitude of help they need. On her cellphone, through the fog of trauma, she types in “FEMA.”

The South Toe River (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) How We Reported This Story

This recounting of what happened when Helene struck Yancey County is based primarily on the stories shared with us by survivors, many of whom don’t appear by name in the story but whose experiences deeply inform it. We also relied on their videos and photographs of the storm’s onslaught, which they provided so that the rest of us could better understand the severity of the storm and what they experienced when left in its bullseye. In addition, we reviewed hundreds of videos of hurricane footage uploaded to social media. Our reporting included multiple visits to Yancey and other areas of western North Carolina devastated by the storm. In total, we reached out to more than 100 people living in our focus area along the Cane River, Tudy Creek and Cattail Creek in Yancey and interviewed dozens of survivors who live there. We also spoke with loved ones of nearly all who were killed in these communities.

Public records including emergency call logs, death records and weather data buttressed their accounts. So did interviews with many of the local officials who oversaw the response and first responders who saved lives during the storm, then rescued those who were trapped afterward.

To understand the warnings that officials and residents received, we compiled a timeline of the National Weather Service’s Helene-related alerts, reviewed its briefing packets for local officials and watched the final webinar its staff had with officials before Helene hit. We then scoured contemporaneous social media posts to understand what warnings and directives local governments across the mountain counties shared with their residents. In total, we reviewed more than 500 messages from more than three dozen jurisdictions in the lead-up to the storm.

We depended on key experts in the region to understand the science behind Helene and its destructive power. These included Trisha Palmer, warning coordination meteorologist, and Pat Moore, a lead meteorologist, at the National Weather Service’s Greenville-Spartanburg office, which serves western North Carolina. We also turned to geologist Philip Prince and Jennifer Bauer, co-owner and principal geologist of Appalachian Landslide Consultants, among other experts.

We plan to continue reporting on Helene’s aftermath to understand what lessons could better prepare these communities and others for future storms, as well as how the rebuilding effort is unfolding. If you would like to share tips with us, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

What Did Helene Take From You?

One man lost six electric guitars and four amps. One woman lost the town memorabilia kept in a landmark store that was in her family for generations. Some lost cars and homes. Many experienced the greatest loss of all, a dear friend or family member.

As we continue to tell the stories of Helene’s devastation of western North Carolina, we want to know: What is one thing the storm destroyed that you would have saved had you evacuated?

To let us know, leave a voicemail at 828-201-2738. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

Graphics and development by Lucas Waldron. Design by Anna Donlan. Visual editing by Shoshana Gordon and Donlan. Research by Mollie Simon.

by Talia Buford

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

We are pleased to announce the journalists chosen as the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.

The program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country and help better reflect the nation as a whole. Nine journalists from across the country will join four ProPublica staffers for this year’s program.

This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.

Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers.

“By providing investigative editing tools to journalists across the country, we aim to ensure that there will be more accountability reporting in more newsrooms across the country,” said Ginger Thompson, a managing editor at ProPublica. “It’s an effort we have long considered one of our highest priorities.”

Introducing the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program:

Alejandra Cancino is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom investigating the Cook County court system. Her award-winning investigations focus on the intersection of government and business, combining data with personal stories to expose systemic failures. Most recently, she co-authored a five-part narrative series that exposed how the judicial system favors landlords’ property rights over their tenants’ rights. The project was recognized with an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. In 2022, Cancino spent a year editing and training emerging journalists at City Bureau, a nonprofit organization focused on Chicago’s marginalized communities. Previously, she covered manufacturing, economic development and labor as a business reporter at the Chicago Tribune. She is a 2025 recipient of Chicago’s Studs Terkel Award, which honors a journalist’s body of work. Cancino serves on the Investigative Reporters and Editors board and is a former president and board member of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Chicago Headline Club.

Daarel Burnette II is a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Before joining the Chronicle in 2022, he served as an assistant managing editor and reporter for Education Week and the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Tennessee, a news organization based in Memphis. He has worked as an education reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Louisville Courier Journal. He also worked as a general-assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He received his undergraduate degree in print journalism from Hampton University and a master’s degree in politics and journalism from Columbia University.

Daphne Chen is the investigations editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a former investigative data reporter for the news organization. In 2022, Chen was part of a reporting team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a project that uncovered how electrical fires disproportionately endanger poor Black renters. Previously, she was a data reporter for USA Today, where she revealed that state officials repeatedly sent children to live with foster parents accused of abuse. She also spent a year as a reporting fellow in Cambodia.

Nic Garcia is The Texas Tribune’s regions editor, leading a team of reporters who live across the state and tell the story of Texas policy and politics from the ground up. In 2022, his team produced a series on Texas’ failing water infrastructure — especially in rural communities — that propelled a statewide investment in water. Garcia joined the Tribune after a year as politics editor at The Des Moines Register in Iowa. He also was a senior writer at The Dallas Morning News, where he was named journalist of the year and won a second place Headliner award for his COVID-19 coverage. A Colorado native, Garcia covered the Colorado legislature for The Denver Post. His analysis of lobbying records inspired changes to the state’s lobbying laws.

Nicole Lewis is the engagement editor for The Marshall Project, leading the organization’s strategic efforts to deepen reporting that reaches communities most affected by the criminal legal system. She previously served as a senior editor at Slate, where she led a team of writers covering the array of legal issues before the Supreme Court for the publication’s jurisprudence section. In 2020, she was the lead reporter on a first-of-its kind political survey of the incarcerated, which received an honorable mention for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Award for the project’s pioneering use of social science research methods. Prior to The Marshall Project, Nicole reported for The Washington Post’s America desk and the Fact Checker. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea Lopez-Villafaña is the managing editor at Voice of San Diego. She is also a co-host on the VOSD Podcast, the most popular local public affairs podcast in San Diego, and writes a weekly newsletter, Cup of Chisme. She previously worked as a reporter at The San Diego-Union Tribune, where she covered the city’s neighborhoods.

Jennifer Palmer is an investigative reporter at Oklahoma Watch. She has more than two decades of news reporting experience and her work has been recognized with awards in public service reporting and investigative reporting. She started her career covering police and courts at the Rio Grande Sun, a scrappy weekly in northern New Mexico, where her reporting led to the ouster of a prominent judge. Before joining Oklahoma Watch, she previously worked as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and The Oklahoman. She is a native of Norman, Oklahoma, and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma.

Chastity Pratt is the national education editor at The Washington Post. Prior to joining the Post in 2024, she was the education bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and covered education at the Detroit Free Press, Newsday and The Oregonian. Over the years, she has helped train students and journalists for Harvard College, the Education Writers Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Milton Valencia is The Boston Globe’s criminal justice editor in metro, overseeing coverage of crime, policing and public safety. He was previously deputy editor of the Globe’s inaugural Money, Power, Inequality team, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap across the region. Milton started as a reporter at the Globe in 2007. In that role, he reported from the Globe’s City Hall bureau, helping lead coverage of Boston’s historic 2021 race for mayor. In 2020, he was part of a Globe police accountability team that exposed corruption and mismanagement in the Boston Police Department. He also spent several years covering the federal justice system, including the death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He was part of the staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the bombings. Milton began his career at local newspapers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He holds a degree in philosophy and public policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and lives south of Boston with his wife and their two children.

Additionally, four ProPublica staffers will join this year’s cohort. They are:

Peter DiCampo is a visuals editor at ProPublica, where he primarily works with local partner newsrooms across the country through the Local Reporting Network. His visual editing and art direction have been awarded by the National Press Photographers Association, the Society for News Design, The Society of Publication Designers and the Online Journalism Awards. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was NPR’s international visual editor. Before turning to editing, he worked for more than a decade as a freelance photojournalist, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. He co-founded Everyday Africa, a collective of photographers using social media to broaden coverage of Africa beyond the headlines, and The Everyday Projects, a global community of photographers and a visual literacy nonprofit. He was a 2019 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and he is the recipient of grants and awards from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Code for Africa, the Magnum Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, Pictures of the Year International and the Pulitzer Center, among others.

Duaa Eldeib is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. She has examined failures that have led to a stillbirth crisis in the U.S., the ways in which insurance companies interfere with mental health treatment and the fatal consequences of delaying care during the pandemic. She was a reporter and producer on the documentary “Before a Breath.” Her reporting has sparked legislative hearings, spurred government reform and led to the exoneration of a mother who was wrongly convicted of murder, as well as the release of young men who were incarcerated as juveniles and later sent to adult prison for minor offenses. Before joining ProPublica, she worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she and two colleagues were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting twice — first in 2023 for her series on stillbirths and again in 2025 as part of the team covering access to mental health care.

Hannah Fresques is the deputy data editor at ProPublica. She has edited data-driven investigations on the aftermath of Texas’ abortion ban, high-interest tribal lending and a salmonella outbreak. She joined the organization in 2016, and her work as a reporter and editor has earned recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Journalism Awards, as well as the Online News Association and Sigma Delta Chi Journalism awards. Before working in journalism, Fresques conducted evaluations of education policy for a nonprofit research organization. She holds a master’s degree in quantitative methods for social sciences from Columbia University.

Andrea Wise is the visual strategy editor at ProPublica, where she edits photography, illustration and other forms of visual journalism. She is also the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a nonprofit organization amplifying the voices of visual creatives from underrepresented groups in the global visual media landscape. She commissioned and led a yearlong photo essay that was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of ProPublica’s reporting on the harmful consequences of state abortion bans and was also Pictures of the Year International’s Online Storytelling Project of the Year. That body of work was also recognized with a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, George Polk Award for Medical Reporting, Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, and Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism, among other honors. Her photo editing and art direction have also been recognized by Pictures of the Year, the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Publication Designers, and the Society for News Design. She holds a bachelor’s with honors in studio arts from Trinity College and a master’s in photography from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

by Mark Olalde

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Days after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency sent an email to the entire workforce with details about the agency’s plans to close diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and included a plea for help.

“Employees are requested to please notify” the EPA or the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, “of any other agency office, sub-unit, personnel position description, contract, or program focusing exclusively on DEI,” the email from then-acting Administrator James Payne said.

No employees in the agency, then more than 15,000 people strong, responded to that plea, ProPublica learned via a public records request.

Trump has made ending diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs a hallmark effort of his second term. Many federal employees, however, are declining to assist the administration with this goal. He signed an executive order on his first day back in office that labeled DEI initiatives — which broadly aim to promote greater diversity, largely within the workplace — as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and ordered them halted. His pressure campaign to end DEI efforts has also extended to companies and organizations outside the government, with billions of dollars in federal funding for universities frozen as part of the fight.

Corbin Darling retired from the EPA this year after more than three decades with the agency, including managing environmental justice programs in a number of Western states.

“I’m not surprised that nobody turned in their colleagues or other programs in response to that request,” he said, adding that his former co-workers understood that addressing pollution that disproportionately impacted communities of color was important to the agency’s work. “That’s part of the mission — it has been for decades,” Darling said.

Payne’s note to agency employees listed two email addresses — one belonging to the EPA and one to the Office of Personnel Management — where EPA employees could send details about DEI efforts. ProPublica submitted public records requests to both agencies for the contents of the inboxes from the start of the administration through April 1.

The Office of Personnel Management didn’t respond to the request, although the Freedom of Information Act requires that it do so within 20 business days. The agency also did not answer questions about whether it received any reports to its anti-DEI inbox.

The EPA, meanwhile, checked its inbox and confirmed that zero employees had filed reports. “Some emails received in that inbox did come from EPA addresses but none of them called out colleagues who were still working on DEI matters,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement in May.

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

“The optimist in me would like to believe that maybe it is because, as an agency, we are generally dedicated to our mission and understand that DEIA is intrinsic in that,” a current EPA employee who requested anonymity said. “On the flip side, they’ve done such a good job immediately dismantling DEIA in the agency that folks who are up in arms might have just been assuaged.”

Although DEI programs are often internal to a workplace, the administration also put a target on environmental justice initiatives, which acknowledge the fact that public health and environmental harm disproportionately fall on poorer areas and communities of color. Environmental justice has been part of the EPA’s mandate for years but greatly expanded under the Biden administration.

Research has shown, for example, that municipalities have planted fewer trees and maintained less green space in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of people of color, leading to more intense heat. And heavy industry has often been zoned or sited near Latino, Black and Native American communities.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who was confirmed in late January, has boasted about cutting more than $22 billion in environmental justice and DEI grants and contracts. “Many American communities are suffering with serious unresolved environmental issues, but under the ‘environmental justice’ banner, the previous administration’s EPA showered billions on ideological allies, instead of directing those resources into solving environmental problems and making meaningful change,” he wrote in an April opinion piece in the New York Post.

The EPA spokesperson said employees with more than 50% of their duties dedicated to either environmental justice work or DEI were targeted for layoffs. The agency “is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency,” the spokesperson said.

EPA environmental justice offices worked on a range of initiatives, such as meeting with historically underserved communities to help them participate in agency decision-making and dispersing grants to fund mitigation of the carcinogenic gas radon or removal of lead pipes, Darling explained.

“A sea change isn’t the right word because it’s more of a draining of the sea,” Darling said. “It has devastated the program.”

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

Texas lawmakers are pushing to impose steep penalties on local governments that don’t post campaign finance reports online, after an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found some school districts weren’t doing so.

The initial posting requirements, designed to make election spending more transparent, went into effect nearly two years ago. Most of the school district leaders said they had no idea they were out of compliance until the newsrooms contacted them. Even after many districts uploaded whatever documentation they had on file for their trustee elections, reports were still missing because candidates hadn’t turned them in or the schools lost them.

“I was surprised and disappointed,” said Republican state Rep. Carl Tepper, who authored the online posting requirement. “I did realize that we didn’t really put any teeth into the bill.”

Tepper is aiming to correct that with a new bill this legislative session. He cited the newsrooms’ findings in a written explanation of why the state needs to implement greater enforcement.

The measure would require the Texas Ethics Commission, the agency that enforces the state’s election laws, to monitor thousands of local governments’ websites across the state and to notify them if any campaign finance reports are missing. If those government agencies do not upload the records that candidates have turned in within 30 days of the state’s notice, the commission can fine them up to $2,500 every day until they comply.

The proposed measure also recommends the state allot funding for the ethics commission to hire two additional staff members, whose job would be to monitor all local government entities that hold public elections in the state’s 254 counties and roughly 1,200 cities and towns. The newsrooms previously found the agency did not have any staff dedicated to enforcing compliance in local elections and, instead, investigated missing or late reports only when it received a tip.

The bill has cleared the Texas House but still needs approval from the Senate by May 28 if it has a chance of becoming law.

The superintendent of Galveston Independent School District, which was among those that ProPublica and the Tribune found hadn’t posted any campaign finance reports online last year, said the measure would help schools like his.

“I do like the suggestion of a 30-day period to achieve compliance after an issue is reported,” Matthew Neighbors said of the new proposal in an emailed statement. “Our district, for example, had no objections to posting the necessary campaign information once our new employees were aware of the requirements.”

Kelly Rasti, the associate executive director of governmental relations for the Texas Association of School Boards, said districts do not flout the law intentionally. Rasti said the employees tasked with handling school board election documentation are not always well versed in the state’s regulations but that the association plans to provide additional resources later this year.

District employees are accustomed to handling a plethora of education-related paperwork and reporting requirements imposed by the state. But “elections are just different, and they seem to have ever-evolving laws and rules associated with them,” Rasti said.

Notably, Tepper’s bill would not directly require the ethics commission to penalize or follow up with candidates who fail to turn in their reports. He initially included a provision in his bill that would make candidates ineligible to run for office if they didn’t file those records, even if they won an election. He told the newsrooms that he cut the penalty after realizing the logistical challenges it might present.

That means the ethics commission must still decide whether to investigate and fine any of the candidates and officeholders for the state’s estimated 22,000 local elected positions should they miss a filing. By contrast, candidates who run for statewide office are automatically fined by the commission if they don’t make a deadline.

Tepper’s ultimate goal is to create a unified system in which the ethics commission compiles campaign finance records for state and local candidates in one central database, rather than leaving local filings scattered across thousands of city, county and school district government websites. The Republican lawmaker withdrew his proposal to create such a system in 2023 after the commission estimated it would cost $20 million, but he told the newsrooms that he hopes to gain enough support to make that investment next session, in 2027.

For now, he sees his proposal as a necessary advance.

“I’m a big believer in incrementalism,” said Tepper. “This is another step toward better enforcement.”

by Doug Bock Clark

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Last week, North Carolina Democrats scored a victory when Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, who’d lost a tight race for the state’s Supreme Court, finally conceded defeat after a six-month legal battle to throw out ballots that he contended were illegitimate.

But that same morning, the party suffered a setback that may be more consequential: losing control of the state board that sets voting rules and adjudicates election disputes.

The board oversees virtually every aspect of state elections, large and small, from setting rules dictating what makes ballots valid or invalid to monitoring compliance with campaign finance laws. In the Supreme Court race, it consistently worked to block Griffin’s challenges.

The conservative takeover comes after the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law stripping the power to appoint board members from North Carolina’s Democratic governor and gave it to the Republican state auditor.

Although a board spokesperson said its chair was traveling and unavailable to answer questions about how the new Republican majority would reshape North Carolina elections, experts said it will likely make it easier for challenges like Griffin’s to succeed and reduce expansive access to early voting.

It will “tilt the playing field to the advantage of the GOP,” said Gene Nichol, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies democracy in the state.

The party that controls the board holds significant power over who votes, how those votes are counted and who ultimately wins races.

Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a liberal voting advocacy organization, called the shift “very consequential” and said she was worried the new board would seek to remove voters whose registrations have missing information from the state’s rolls and tighten requirements for people seeking to register or have provisional ballots count.

Conservatives called Democrats’ concerns overblown, particularly after years of Democratic control. Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a conservative North Carolina think tank, conceded the board’s new majority might alter early voting locations or voter ID rules, over which the parties are divided. But he pointed out that many board decisions are made unanimously, not split along party lines.

“There is some sense that in the age of Trump there is some grand scheme to throw out election results and let the GOP win despite how people voted,” Kokai said. “I don’t think you’re seeing the stage being set for anything like that.”

Historically, the board’s five members have been appointed by North Carolina’s governor, with three of them coming from the governor’s party. Since 2016, the governor has been a Democrat.

When Josh Stein won a four-year term last fall, a Republican supermajority in the state legislature passed a law, then overrode his predecessor’s veto, to transfer this power to the state auditor. It was an unusual step. No other state has elections overseen by the state auditor.

Stein sued to block the law and, initially, a lower court sided with him. But in April, the state’s Court of Appeals, which has a Republican majority, issued a three-sentence decision overturning the lower court’s ruling without hearing oral arguments.

The next day, the state auditor named two new Republican members to the elections board, flipping control of it to conservatives. One is a former legislator who led efforts to redraw the state’s congressional districts in conservatives’ favor. The other was the longtime head of a conservative think tank with a history of advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud claims.

After swearing in the new members last week, the board’s first move was to fire its executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, replacing her with the general counsel to the speaker of the North Carolina House, a Republican. The board denied Bell’s request to address her staff during the meeting, but she subsequently released a statement that a spokesperson provided to ProPublica in response to a request for comment.

“We have done this work under incredibly difficult circumstances and in a toxic political environment that has targeted election professionals with harassment and threats,” she said of the board’s employees. “I hope we return to a time when those who lose elections concede defeat rather than trying to tear down the entire election system and erode voter confidence.”

Experts say the just-concluded battle over the Supreme Court seat provides a window into how changes at the elections board could affect future races, especially close ones with contested results. North Carolina is a swing state, and there have been several such cases in recent years. After the 2018 election, the board ordered a new election for a U.S. House of Representatives seat when a Republican victory was found to be tainted by an illegal absentee ballot scheme.

Before the 2024 election, right-wing activists discussed ways to overturn close election losses using a plan similar to the one Griffin put into action, according to a recording of a call obtained by ProPublica.

In the month after suffering a 734-vote loss to incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs, Griffin asked the elections board to toss out tens of thousands of ballots, mostly because information about the voters who cast them was missing from the state’s election database. The board, then majority Democrat, dismissed his challenges, concluding that voters had followed the rules in place at the time and that much of the missing information reflected administrative or clerical errors. Then Griffin sued.

Gerry Cohen, a former counsel for the legislature who is now a Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections, said it was “a real possibility” that a Republican-controlled state board “would have approved some of Griffin’s challenges” to throw out ballots. If that had happened, Riggs could have fought the board’s decision in the courts and won, but she would have then been litigating against the board rather than on the same side as it.

The law that gave the state auditor the power to appoint members of the state election board also gives him similar authority over North Carolina’s county election boards, which will mean each of them will be controlled by Republican majorities by the end of next month.

County boards approve locations and times for early voting, which is when the vast majority of North Carolinians vote. Experts predicted this could lead some boards to reduce the number of polling sites in areas that have more Democrats, like college campuses, or to close polls when Democratic voters are more likely to use them, such as Sundays when Black churches conduct “souls to the polls” voter drives.

Kokai contends that such changes aren’t necessarily meant to suppress the vote, if they even happen, and doubts they’d have much of an effect on Democratic turnout.

“If you really do care about voting, you do it,” he said. “If you go a mile off campus to do other things, you can do it to vote, too.”

Liberals, however, expect the revamped board to work hand-in-hand with the Republican-controlled legislature to transform elections in other ways.

“Things are going to look very different,” Webb said, in the 2026 midterm elections.

by Heather Vogell

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Update, May 15, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect the FAA’s announcement late Thursday that it had approved Starship 9 launch, which came after publication.

British officials told the U.S. they are concerned about the safety of SpaceX’s plans to fly its next Starship rocket over British territories in the Caribbean, where debris fell earlier this year after two of the company’s rockets exploded, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The worries from the U.K. government, detailed in a letter to a top American diplomat on Wednesday, follow the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision last week to grant SpaceX’s request for a fivefold increase in the number of Starship launches allowed this year, from five to 25. Growing the number of launches of the most powerful rocket ever built is a priority for SpaceX head Elon Musk, who is also one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers.

Of particular concern to British officials is the public’s safety in the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands — all of which could face debris risk from Starship 9.

After the explosion in January, residents of the Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the rocket on beaches and roads. A car was also damaged in the Starship 7 accident. Seven weeks later, after receiving the FAA’s blessing to proceed, SpaceX launched Starship 8 from Boca Chica, Texas, but it too exploded after liftoff. Air traffic in the region was diverted, and burning streaks from the falling rocket were visible in the sky from the Bahamas and Florida’s coast.

The British letter to a U.S. State Department official, Ambassador Lisa Kenna, asks the U.S. to consider changing the launch site or trajectory of Starship 9. If that isn’t possible, the request — from Stephen Doughty, the United Kingdom’s minister of state for Europe, North America and U.K. Overseas Territories — asks that agencies like the FAA consider altering the launch’s timing to minimize safety risks and the economic impact for the British territories.

The letter also requests that the U.S. government provide the United Kingdom more information on increased safety measures that will be put in place before Starship 9 launches, and that British territories be given enough warning to communicate with the public about those measures.

“We have been working closely with US Government partners regarding Starship Flight 9 to protect the safety of the UK Overseas Territories and to ensure appropriate measures are in place,” a  UK government spokesperson said Thursday in response to ProPublica’s questions about the letter.

The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

On Thursday afternoon, the FAA said it was “in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom and the Turks and Caicos Islands, as well as other regional partners, as we continue to evaluate SpaceX’s license modification request for its proposed Starship Flight 9 launch.”

Hours later, though, after this story originally published, the agency announced it had approved Starship 9’s launch, pending the completion of an investigation into the previous explosion.

The agency also said it was expanding the "Aircraft Hazard Area" for the mission, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean, potentially affecting 175 flights. That hazard area nearly encompasses the Turks and Caicos Islands in their entirety, according to the FAA’s environmental assessment. The agency said the changes were due to the prior Starship’s problems and because SpaceX plans to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster rocket — something it will be doing for the first time.

Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport will need to close during the duration of the launch window, the assessment said. Airspace over a portion of The Bahamas will be closed, too.

The FAA said the launch has been scheduled outside peak transit times to minimize disruptions.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. But the company has said it learns from its mistakes. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability,” the company said after the Starship 8 accident. “We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk — who sees the uptick in launches as critical to the development of technology that could help land astronauts on the moon and ultimately Mars — has been less diplomatic.

He downplayed the January explosion as “barely a bump in the road” and seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”

SpaceX has not announced the date of the Starship 9 launch, but news reports have said it could happen as soon as May 21.

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which licenses launches and reentries, is undergoing a leadership shakeup. Three top executives, including the head of the office, announced in April that they were accepting voluntary separation offers.

Musk has been leading efforts to shrink the federal government through the departures of thousands of federal workers. Critics say he has an inherent conflict of interest because his businesses are regulated by agencies such as the FAA and rely on their approvals.

Musk said in a February interview that “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Thursday that “All administration officials will comply with conflict of interest requirements.”

Last year, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines against SpaceX for violations related to two previous launches. Musk, in turn, accused the FAA of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” The administrative case remains open.

The number of rocket launches has increased dramatically in recent years, leading pilots and academics to warn about a growing danger in the air for flights that have only minutes to get out of harm’s way when a mishap — as explosions and other failures are called in industry parlance — occurs.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia found in a study published in January that the risk space objects pose to aircraft is rising. They said that the chance of an “uncontrolled reentry” from a rocket over a year is as high as 26% for some large, busy areas of airspace, such as those found in the northeastern U.S., in northern Europe or near major cities in the Asia-Pacific region.

A large union for airplane pilots told FAA officials in January that the Starship 7 breakup “raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights,” according to a letter sent the day after the rocket exploded.

“The ability of the FAA Air Traffic Control to respond in a timely fashion to an unanticipated rocket anomaly needs to be further evaluated,” said the letter from the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 79,000 pilots at 42 U.S. and Canadian airlines. It asked that flight crews receive more information about high-risk areas before a launch so they can “make an informed and timely decision about their need to potentially reject flight plans that route their aircraft underneath space vehicle trajectories.”

In a response, the FAA said it would review its processes to see whether more can be done to prepare flight crews before a launch.

Capt. Jason Ambrosi, the union’s president, said in a statement emailed to ProPublica that changes are necessary. “Any safety risk posed to commercial airline operations is unacceptable.”

by Tim Golden

Leer en español.

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In what could be a significant escalation of U.S. pressure on Mexico, the Trump administration has begun to impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on prominent Mexican politicians whom it believes are linked to drug corruption, U.S. officials said.

So far, two Mexican political figures have acknowledged being banned from traveling to the United States. But U.S. officials said they expect more Mexicans to be targeted as the administration works through a list of several dozen political figures who have been identified by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as having ties to the drug trade.

The list includes leaders of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s governing party, several state governors and political figures close to her predecessor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the U.S. officials said. They insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive policy plans.

The governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, confirmed that she and her husband, a former congressman, were told their U.S. visas were revoked because of “a situation” involving her husband. “The fact that the State Department has cancelled my visa does not mean that I have committed something bad,” she said at a news conference on Monday.

Sheinbaum said her government had asked U.S. officials to explain why Ávila was stripped of her visa but had been told that such matters are private and no further information was given.

The visa actions represent the latest political challenge for the new Mexican leader and her leftist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena. Despite the country’s historic sensitivity to any hint of U.S. meddling, Sheinbaum has thus far bolstered her support at home by asserting Mexico’s sovereignty in discussions with President Donald Trump while also moving to meet his demands for action against the biggest traffickers.

Mexican journalists reported that U.S. immigration officials also pulled the visa of another border-state governor, Américo Villarreal of Tamaulipas, an assertion that the governor’s spokesperson dismissed as “unconfirmed.” (Villarreal has been frequently accused of having ties to drug trafficking, which he has denied.) Last month, the mayor of that state’s second-largest city, Matamoros, was stopped from crossing the border into Brownsville, Texas, but he, too, insisted he had not been formally stripped of his visa.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that visa records are confidential under U.S. law.

Three U.S. officials said the visa actions will likely in some cases be accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions that block individuals from conducting business with U.S. companies and freeze financial assets they have in the United States. Ávila said that she did not have any U.S. bank accounts and faced no such sanction.

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the sanctions plan.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (Tom Brenner/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

When the administration imposed tariffs on Mexico in early March, it asserted that the country’s government had granted “safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.”

As part of what it has described as an all-out fight against fentanyl and other illegal drugs, the administration has designated some of the biggest Mexican trafficking gangs as terrorist organizations and explored the possibility of unilateral U.S. military actions against them, officials said.

The review of Mexican drug corruption was initiated by a small White House team that requested information from law enforcement agencies and the U.S. intelligence community about Mexican political, government and military figures with criminal ties.

Officials said the group has been shaping the administration’s security policy with Mexico under the leadership of a deputy White House homeland security adviser, Anthony Salisbury. It is overseen by the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment in response to questions about the group’s role in initiating the travel sanctions.

One official familiar with the team’s list said it overlaps with a file of about 35 Mexican officials that was compiled by Drug Enforcement Administration investigators in 2019, after López Obrador began shutting down Mexico’s cooperation with the United States in counterdrug programs.

That earlier effort sought to identify Mexican government figures who could be criminally prosecuted for aiding drug traffickers. It led to the 2019 indictment in the U.S. of the country’s former security chief, Genaro García Luna, and his conviction on drug charges five years later in a New York federal court.

The two former DEA officials in Mexico City who oversaw the compilation of the 2019 list, Terrance Cole and Matthew Donahue, also proposed that the State Department cancel the U.S. visas of some of the Mexican political figures named on it. Senior U.S. diplomats rejected that proposal.

Cole is now awaiting Senate confirmation as the Trump administration’s new DEA administrator.

Some current and former U.S. officials expressed concerns about the latest White House-led plan. They noted that the standard of proof required for both visa cancellations and Treasury sanctions is well below that of a criminal trial, which could encourage proponents of the measures to act on what might be less-than-solid information.

Officials said the visa actions were being taken under Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which stipulates that noncitizens can be found ineligible for entry to the United States if the government “knows or has reason to believe” that the foreigner “is or has been a knowing aider, abettor, assister, conspirator or colluder with others in the illicit trafficking” of illegal drugs. The law also allows the State Department to cancel the visas of relatives of a sanctioned official who may have benefited from their illicit gains.

One U.S. official said that while the visa withdrawals might send a powerful signal of the United States’ new willingness to challenge Mexican corruption, they could also stir new conflict between the two governments.

“We should be using all the resources of the government to go after these people,” the official said, referring to corrupt Mexican officials. “But the bigger question is: Does this work with President Sheinbaum? Are you going to lose an opportunity now with a Mexican government that has been very compliant on the drug front?”

A former Mexican ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhaan, said further visa actions against prominent figures in Sheinbaum’s party would make it hard for her to continue claiming a “good” relationship with the United States despite Trump’s often openly confrontational tone.

“But at the same time,” Sarukhaan added, “it gives her — a nationalistic president with a very chauvinistic party behind her — a perfect excuse to say that everything bad that’s happening in Mexico with the economy and everything else is because of U.S. imperialism.”

López Obrador, who came to power in 2018, had promised to fight corruption as never before. Instead, he presided over an administration that denied having any corruption problem in its own ranks even as journalists produced report after report that officials close to the president and even his own sons were engaged in profiteering and graft.

Sheinbaum has struck a different tone. In a message to a Morena party congress on May 4, she warned the faithful about the dangers of cronyism, nepotism and corruption.

“All members of Morena should conduct themselves with honesty, humility and simplicity,” she said. “There cannot be any collusion with crime — whether organized or white collar.”

Correction

May 16, 2025: This story originally misstated how much time elapsed between Genaro García Luna’s indictment and his conviction. They were five years apart, not three.

by Jesse Coburn

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Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

Staten’s complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal government’s decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued. Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate.

These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination.

“It’ll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, that’s just not happening right now. It’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”

Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: “HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. (Alyssa Schukar for ProPublica)

For many victims of housing discrimination, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments.

When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriff’s department said they had engaged in criminal activity — regardless of whether they were convicted — it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)

Such victories may be rare in the next four years.

“We are being gutted right now,” said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And it feels like it’s not even the beginning.”

The Fair Housing Office’s staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administration’s federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.

Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.

“For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.”

Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)

Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty — although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).

When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues “charges of discrimination,” akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.

It’s not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agency’s Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours — allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.

Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that “the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act.” She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.

Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trump’s “defending women” executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the country’s official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.

Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: “The number you reached is no longer in use.”

Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.

The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Office’s work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource — the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUD’s annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.

Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.

The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. “CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them,” Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstone’s CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)

The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUD’s budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.

Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUD’s retreat continues. “In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections,” said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. “It’s a terrifying situation.”

Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. “With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again,” he said when signing the legislation. “It proclaims that fair housing for all — all human beings who live in this country — is now a part of the American way of life. “

But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. “The fair housing laws were never fully implemented,” said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places.” And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket.

In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.

Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.

HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option.

Even if today’s policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. “Housing cycles are long,” one HUD official said. “This decimation will set us back for another several decades.”

April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to “uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership.” He added: “A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trump’s golden age of America.”

Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Office’s old website. The URL now redirects to HUD’s homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.

“God blessed us with this great nation,” it reads. “Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.”

by Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.

Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.

Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.

In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.

In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambia’s president with an “important request.” That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and “facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired.

Lamin Jabbi, first image, head of Gambia’s communications ministry, and Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia (Via the Facebook pages of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, and the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, Gambia)

The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.

As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.

In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlink’s license was approved despite concerns it wasn’t abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Department’s mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.

Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. “I honestly didn’t think we were capable of doing this,” one official told ProPublica. “That is bad on every level.” Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.”

The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.

ProPublica’s reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambia’s ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink — a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musk’s position — ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. “Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity,” a spokesperson wrote. “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.

During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agency’s approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trump’s return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.

Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.

At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that “we won’t let him get near” conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying “I’ll recuse myself” if conflicts arise. “My companies are suffering because I’m in the government,” Musk said.

In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. “For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.

Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”

The headquarters of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, a Cabinet agency headed by Lamin Jabbi (Brett Murphy/ProPublica)

Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide — more than the current population of the U.S.

Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musk’s fortune. His stake in Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth.

Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China aren’t far behind either.

“They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online,” said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst.

In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musk’s company a “first-mover advantage.”

Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth.

A technician mounts a Starlink satellite dish on a house in Niamey, Niger. (Boureima Hama/AFP/Getty Images)

As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africa’s 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musk’s company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa — where Starlink has so far failed to get a license — Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.

Now Musk’s campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa.

The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.

An 8-year-old democracy, Gambia’s 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.

In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the country’s tax revenue. Ads for the country’s multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works — parks, police booths, schools.

It’s unclear why Starlink’s efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense.

Banjul, the capital of Gambia, during New Year’s celebrations (Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP/Getty Images)

Cromer’s efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then “pressured” the regulator to remove “this unnecessary barrier to entry,” the ambassador wrote.

Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. “The ripple effects could be extraordinary,” Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education.

Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambia’s few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices — in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees — authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators’ ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: “They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said in 2021.

The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that don’t want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally.

Jallow, Jabbi’s top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change.

After Trump’s inauguration, Jabbi’s position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.

The stance surprised some of Cromer’s peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.

In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the company’s expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Department’s headquarters.

The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nation’s progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. “We want our license now,” Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. “Why are you delaying it?”

The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. government’s campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because “there was no more need,” Jallow said.

The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambia’s capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.

That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambia’s equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By day’s end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nation’s president.

“I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia,” the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbi’s agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbi’s predecessor.

“I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia,” Cromer concluded. “I look forward to your favorable response.”

In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. government’s efforts have continued. In late April, Gambia’s attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue.

Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt America’s image overseas. “This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator — this is a democracy, a natural ally,” said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is “a prime partner of the West” in United Nations votes. “You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.”

Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musk’s business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)

The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trump’s agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with America’s shifting foreign policy: “They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can.”

In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musk’s firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow.

In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with “Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlink’s case “early and often” with local officials, partnered with Starlink to “build an educational strategy” for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nation’s head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassy’s work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.

Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlink’s request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musk’s company had sought for years.

Do you have information about Elon Musk’s businesses or the Trump administration? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Brett Murphy can be reached at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Gary Hudson excitedly planned a fishing trip with his 4-year-old son and purchased a kids fishing pole in late 2019. He tossed it in the trunk of his Ford Taurus and parked on the street outside his Hartford, Connecticut, home.

Within hours, his car was hauled away by a tow truck. Hudson couldn’t afford to pay the more than $300 in towing and storage fees and asked if he could at least get into the car to collect his belongings — the fishing pole and the safety vest and handcuffs he needed to work nights as a security guard.

He said he offered to pay $20 but that Whitey’s, a Hartford towing company, told him he had to pay the full amount. “They would not budge, period,” Hudson said. “So I can’t get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you?” When Hudson couldn’t afford to retrieve the car, he said, Whitey’s sold it, and he lost his belongings. Whitey’s has since closed, and its owner has died.

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica have heard repeatedly from people with similar stories. Inside their vehicles, they had work equipment, child car seats or personal mementos, and towing companies refused to give them back.

Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles regulations say that vehicle owners can retrieve “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.” But that gives towing companies wide latitude in how they interpret the rule, and several people whose cars were towed said the companies used their belongings as leverage to get them to pay towing and storage fees.

Past reporting by CT Mirror and ProPublica showed how Connecticut’s laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of vehicle owners. Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country between when a car is towed and when tow companies can consider it abandoned and start the process of selling it — companies have to wait just 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500. People with low incomes have been particularly impacted by these laws, the news organizations found.

Some nearby states, like Rhode Island, have no law on the books about getting possessions from towed cars. But in those that do, the list of items owners must be allowed to retrieve is often broader than Connecticut’s. Maine allows people to retrieve clothing, car seats, medications and mail. In New York, people can retrieve anything from the vehicle. A bill in the Massachusetts legislature would let its drivers do the same.

In an interview last year, Michelle Givens, the Connecticut DMV’s assistant legal director, said she couldn’t say whether work equipment qualified as essential to health or welfare.

“It’s broad,” Givens said. “I can’t answer that and sit here and say, ‘Yes, that will qualify.’”

So I can’t get my work equipment, and you expect me to make money to pay you?

—Gary Hudson, a security guard who was not allowed to get his belongings out of his towed car

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera said he thought car owners should file a complaint with the agency if they weren’t able to get their belongings out. The complaint process can take weeks, however, which is often longer than the period before a towing company is allowed to sell a car.

Timothy Vibert, president of the industry association Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said people can generally retrieve medicine or tools, but he said that part of the law shouldn’t apply if people wait months to get them. He added that when people don’t pay the towing fees, it makes towers reluctant to return their belongings.

“If somebody owed you $800 and they called up and said they wanted to get something out of their car,” he asked, “it’s OK for them to waltz down here and take their things and then leave you with an $800 bill?”

Other towers say they are more lenient. Sal Sena, owner of Sena Brothers and Cross Country Automotive in Hartford, said if someone has keys to the vehicle or can prove it’s theirs, he lets them get stuff out of it regardless if they pay the fees.

“I don’t care if you take stuff out, but I just want to make sure you’re not putting my ass in a situation where I’m gonna get in trouble,” Sena said. “You got the key? Then take what you want out of the car because then I can justify it.”

Connecticut lawmakers are looking to change the state’s towing laws. House Bill 7162, which was voted out of committee in March, would overhaul the law and allow owners to retrieve “any personal property” from a towed motor vehicle.

The bill “makes a strong effort to identify and correct abusive practices in the towing industry that have had a serious and detrimental effect on motor vehicle owners,” legal aid attorney Rafie Podolsky said in public testimony.

Tow company employees and owners have objected to the bill, saying it would make it harder for them to tow vehicles that are parked illegally or unsafely and that towers didn’t have enough involvement in crafting the legislation.

Transportation Committee co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, said during a March meeting that the importance of the issue hit home for her because of “the number of folks” who have told her they got towed and weren’t allowed to retrieve belongings from their vehicles.

“The people should certainly be made aware of their rights with respect to towed vehicles,” she said.

Hudson, who had planned the fishing trip, had to save up to replace his holster, mace and safety equipment for the security job, which he estimated cost him about $1,000. He canceled the fishing trip and said he failed his son “by breaking a promise.”

“It really, really hurt,” Hudson said.

Hudson is one of several people who told the news organizations they lost things they needed for work — tools, chef’s knives, even the draft of a movie script.

Paul Boudreau, a carpenter and mechanic in Hamden, said he lost his entire carpentry tool set worth more than $1,500 when his Chevrolet Blazer was towed from his apartment complex in April 2021.

The vehicle wasn’t registered because it couldn’t pass an emissions test, and his mechanic was waiting on a part that was hard to get during the supply chain crisis following the COVID-19 lockdown. The apartment complex’s management gave him more time to get it registered, he said, so he was surprised when he looked out his window and saw a tow truck hooking up his vehicle.

He said MyHoopty.com, a towing company in Watertown, told him it would cost more than $300 to get it back. With his wife recovering from cancer, his carpentry work scarce because of the pandemic and “not a penny in cash,” Boudreau realized he couldn’t afford to retrieve his car.

Still, he asked multiple times to retrieve his tools and was denied, he told the DMV in a complaint, which included an itemized list of tools. But MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said in an interview, “At no point did anyone contact us or attempt to come down and retrieve any personal belongings that may have been in the vehicle.”

The Connecticut DMV found that MyHoopty committed no violations related to the tow but did not address the items Boudreau said were in the vehicle.

“Anybody we talked to was like, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” Boudreau said in an interview.

After 18 days, MyHoopty submitted a form to sell the Blazer.

The tows at his apartment complex led Boudreau to become a tenant union organizer. He said state legislators always tell him that when it comes to landlords, their “property is sacred.”

Paul Boudreau, center, speaks at a Connecticut Tenants Union rally at the state Capitol last year. His experience having his car towed led him to become a tenant organizer. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

“Why isn’t our property sacred? Why isn’t our car sacred?” Boudreau asked about tenants. “Wealthy people’s property is always sacred, but poor people’s property doesn’t mean a thing.”

Other drivers lost belongings that held sentimental value — photographs, a sewing project, a prayer card from their father’s funeral.

When Brandon Joyner’s Nissan Maxima was towed from the front of his Bridgeport home in 2017, he lost photos of his mother and aunt that had never been digitized, which he’d traveled with since he got his license as a teenager. He also had shoes, clothing and a car seat for his nieces and nephews in the vehicle, he said.

The car was towed because Joyner owed motor vehicle taxes on it. After a couple of weeks of saving, he paid the taxes. But when he asked for his car, he said he was told it had been sold.

“Everything was just gone,” he said.

It took him months to afford a new vehicle, in part because he was still paying down the old loan from the bank. When he told them he no longer had the vehicle and didn’t want to pay on it, it damaged his credit score, making it harder to get a loan for a new car, he said.

“It was hurtful, because there’s nothing you can really do,” Joyner said. “No matter how many people you talk to, you lose things, and it’s nobody’s fault, nobody cares.”

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Robert Faturechi and Brandon Roberts

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

Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.

Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, fell 13% in the following days, before rebounding.

Trump’s “Liberation Day” press conference from the White House Rose Garden unveiling the tariffs came after the market closed on April 2. Bondi’s disclosure forms showing her Trump Media sales say the transactions were made on April 2 but do not disclose whether they occurred before or after the market closed.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through work could violate the law. But cases against government officials are legally challenging, and in recent years judges have largely narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.

It’s unclear from the public record whether Bondi as attorney general would have known in advance any nonpublic details about the tariffs Trump was announcing that day. Trump, of course, publicly announced his plans to institute dramatic tariffs during the election campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, the market seemed to assume his campaign promises were bluster.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions about the trades.

The disclosure forms do not include the specific amount of stocks sold or their worth but instead provide a rough range. The documents do not say exactly what time she sold the shares or at what price. The company’s stock price closed on April 2 at $18.76 and opened the next morning, after the press conference, at $17.92 before falling more in the days ahead. In addition to selling between $1 million and $5 million worth of Trump Media shares, Bondi’s disclosure form shows she also sold between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of warrants in Trump Media, which typically give a holder the right to purchase the shares.

Bondi’s ownership of Trump Media shares has previously been disclosed. Before she became attorney general, Bondi was a consultant for Digital World Acquisition Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media to take the president’s social media company public.

As part of her ethics agreement, Bondi had pledged to sell her stake of Trump Media within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have allowed her until early May to sell the shares.

On April 1, Trump Media filed a disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission with details about holdings of various top shareholders, including Trump and Bondi. The purpose of the filing is unclear, as is whether it relates to Bondi’s sales the next day. It appeared to reregister for sale shares held by several of the company’s top shareholders.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Jake Pearson

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

One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica.

Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’

Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.

Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the consumer agency’s operations and fire most of its staff in early February.

Young’s arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB — which regulates companies that provide financial services — has jurisdiction over Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments.

The world’s richest man has in turn made no secret of his desire to do away with the bureau, posting just weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

“Musk clearly has a conflict of interest and should recuse,” said Claire Finkelstein, who directs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “And therefore an employee of his, who is answerable to him on the personal side, outside of government, and who stands to keep his job only if he supports Musk’s personal interests, should not be working for DOGE.”

Young, a 36-year-old Republican consultant, has been active in political circles for years, most recently serving as the campaign treasurer of Musk’s political action committee, helping the tech titan spend more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump.

Before joining Musk’s payroll, he worked as a vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade association representing the pharmaceutical industry’s interests, his disclosure shows. He also worked as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee and for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the New York Times reported.

Young was appointed a special governmental employee in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 30 and dispatched to work in the CFPB in early February, according to court records and his disclosure form. Someone with his position could be making as much as $190,000 a year in government salary, documents obtained by Bloomberg show. At the same time, Young collects a salary as an employee of Musk’s Texas-based Europa 100 LLC, where, according to his disclosure report, his duties are to “advise political and public policy.”

Beyond that description, it’s not clear what, exactly, Young does at Europa 100 or what the company’s activities are.

It was created in July 2020 by Jared Birchall, a former banker who runs Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, according to state records. The company has been used to pay nannies to at least some of Musk’s children, according to a 2023 tabloid report, and, along with two other Musk entities, to facilitate tens of millions of dollars in campaign transactions, campaign finance reports show.

As a special government employee, Young can maintain outside employment while serving for a limited amount of time. But such government workers are still required to abide by laws and rules governing conflicts of interest and personal and business relationships.

Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the administration to produce a range of public records documenting DOGE’s activities, said that Young’s government work appears to benefit his private sector employer.

“Which hat are you wearing while you’re serving the American people? Are you doing it for the interests of your outside job?” she asked.

In addition to his role at Europa 100, Young reported other ties to Musk’s private businesses. He affirmed in his disclosure form that he will “continue to participate” in a “defined contribution plan” sponsored by Excession, the Musk home office, and that he has served since February as a “vice president” of United States of America Inc., another Musk entity organized by Birchall, where he also advises on “political and public policy,” the records show. While he lists the latter among “sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year,” the exact figure is not disclosed.

Young did not return a call and emails seeking comment. The CFPB, DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk didn’t respond to an email seeking comment, and Birchall didn’t return a call left at a number he lists in public formation records. A lawyer who helped form United States of America Inc. hung up when reached for comment and hasn’t responded to a subsequent message. Asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, Musk said in a February interview that, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”

The revelation of Young’s apparent violation of federal standards of conduct follows a series of ProPublica stories documenting how another DOGE aide helped carry out the administration’s attempts to implement mass layoffs at the CFPB while holding as much as $715,000 in stock that bureau employees are prohibited from owning — actions one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute. The White House has defended the aide, saying he “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson also said the aide had until May 8 to divest, though it isn’t clear whether he did and the White House hasn’t answered questions about that. “These allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission,” the White House said. Following ProPublica’s reporting, the aide’s work at the CFPB ended.

On Monday, a group of 10 good government and consumer advocacy groups, citing ProPublica’s coverage, sent a letter to the acting inspector general of the CFPB, asking him to “swiftly investigate these clear conflicts of interest violations of Trump Administration officials acting in their own personal financial interest.”

ProPublica has identified nearly 90 officials assigned to DOGE, though it’s unclear how many, if any, have potential conflicts. Government agencies have been slow to release financial disclosure forms. But Finkelstein said the cases reported by ProPublica call into question the motivation behind DOGE’s efforts to undo the consumer watchdog agency.

“It matters because it means that the officials who work for the government, who are supposed to be dedicated to the interests of the American people, are not necessarily focused on the good of the country but instead may be focused on the good of themselves, self enrichment, or trying to please their boss by focusing on enriching their bosses and growing their portfolios,” she said.

Unionized CFPB workers have sued the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop his attempts to drastically scale down the bureau’s staff and its operations. Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice attempted to fire nearly all of the agency’s employees, tried canceling nearly all of its contracts and instituted stop-work mandates that have stifled virtually all agency work, including investigations into companies, ProPublica previously reported.

The parties will appear before an appeals court this Friday for oral arguments in a case that will determine just how deeply Vought can cut the agency while still ensuring that it carries out dozens of mandates Congress tasked it with when lawmakers established the bureau in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The court records produced in the litigation offer a window into the role Young played in gutting the CFPB during the administration’s first attempt to unwind the bureau beginning in early February.

He was dispatched to the CFPB’s headquarters on Feb. 6, just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, then the agency’s acting director, told the staff and contractors to stop working. The following day, Young and other DOGE aides were given access to nonclassified CFPB systems, court records show. That same day, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” with a gravestone emoji.

On Feb. 11 and 12, Young was included on emails with top agency officials. One of those messages discussed the cancellation of more than 100 contracts, an act that a contracting officer described in a sworn affidavit as including “all contracts related to enforcement, supervision, external affairs, and consumer response.” Another message involved how to transfer to the Treasury Department some of the more than $3 billion in civil penalties that the bureau has collected from companies to settle consumer protection cases, a move that could deny harmed consumers compensation. A third discussed the terms of an agreement that would allow for the mass layoff of staffers, court records show.

In his financial disclosure form, which he signed on Feb. 15, Young listed his employment by Musk’s Europa 100 as active, beginning in August 2024 through the “present.”

Then, in early March, as the legal fight over the administration’s cuts played out before a federal judge, Young sent the CFPB’s chief operating officer a message about forthcoming firings, known as a “reduction in force,” or RIF, in government parlance. In the email, he asked whether officials were “prepared to implement the RIF” if the judge lifted a temporary stay, according to a March district court opinion that has for the moment stopped most of the administration’s proposed cuts.

In addition to his employment, Young’s disclosure presents another potential conflict.

He also lists owning as much as $15,000 in Amazon stock, a company that is on the bureau’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Agency employees are forbidden from having such investments, and ethics experts have said that participating in an agency action that could boost the stock’s value — such as stripping the CFPB of its staff — constitutes a violation of the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Young hasn’t responded to questions about that either.

Al Shaw contributed reporting and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica

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.

It started with a call. A man identifying himself as a federal immigration agent contacted a Venezuelan father in San Antonio, interrogating him about his teenage son. The agent said officials planned to visit the family’s apartment to assess the boy’s living conditions.

Later that day, federal agents descended on his complex and covered the door’s peephole with black tape, the father recalled. Agents repeatedly yelled the father’s and son’s names, demanded they open the door and waited hours before leaving, according to the family. Terrified, the father, 37, texted an immigration attorney, who warned that the visit could be a pretext for deportation. The agents returned the next two days, causing the father such alarm that he skipped work at a mechanic shop. His son stayed home from school.

Department of Homeland Security agents have carried out dozens of such visits across the country in recent months as part of a systematic search for children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, and the sponsors who care for them while they pursue their immigration cases. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the children’s care and for screening their sponsors, has assisted in the checks.

The agency’s welfare mission appears to be undergoing a stark transformation as President Donald Trump seeks to ramp up deportation numbers in his second term, a dozen current and former government officials told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. They say that one of the clearest indications of that shift is the scale of the checks that immigration agents are conducting using information provided by the resettlement agency to target sponsors and children for deportation.

Trump officials maintain that the administration is ensuring children are not abused or trafficked. But current and former agency employees, immigration lawyers and child advocates say the resettlement agency is drifting from its humanitarian mandate. Just last week, the Trump administration fired the agency’s ombudsman, who had been hired by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to act as its first watchdog.

“Congress set up a system to protect migrant children, in part by giving them to an agency that isn’t part of immigration enforcement,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and later under Biden. The Trump administration, Shuchart said, is “trying to use that protective arrangement as a bludgeon to hurt the kids and the adults who are willing to step forward to take care of them.”

Republicans have called out ORR in the past, pointing to instances of children working in dangerous jobs as examples of the agency’s lax oversight. Lawyers, advocates and agency officials say cases of abuse are rare and should be rooted out. They argue that the administration’s recent changes are immigration enforcement tools that could make children and their sponsors more susceptible to harmful living and working conditions because they fear deportation.

Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint to reshape the federal government, called for moving the resettlement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, arguing that keeping the agencies separate has led to more unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally. Although Trump publicly distanced himself from the overall plan during his reelection campaign, many of his actions have aligned with its proposals.

During Trump’s first term, he required ORR to share some information about the children and their sponsors, who are usually relatives. That led to the arrests of at least 170 sponsors in the country illegally and spurred pushback from lawmakers and advocates who said the agency shouldn’t be used to aid deportation. Immediately after starting his second term in January, Trump issued an executive order calling for more information sharing between the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the resettlement agency, and Homeland Security. Now, current and former employees of the resettlement agency say that some immigration enforcement officials have been given unfettered access to its databases, which contain sensitive and detailed case information.

Data sharing for “the sole purpose of immigration enforcement imperils the privacy and security” of children and their sponsors, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, wrote in a February letter to the Trump administration. In a March response to Wyden, Andrew Gradison, an acting assistant secretary at HHS, said the resettlement agency is complying with the president’s executive order and sharing information with other federal agencies to ensure immigrant children are safe. Wyden told the news organizations that he plans to continue pressing for answers. On Tuesday, he sent another letter to the administration, stating that he is “increasingly concerned” that ORR is sharing private information “beyond the scope” of what is allowed and “exposing already vulnerable children to further risks.”

Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit last week in Washington, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully reversed key provisions of a 2024 Biden rule. Those provisions had barred ORR from using immigration status to deny sponsors the ability to care for children. They also had previously prohibited the agency from sharing sponsor information for the purpose of immigration enforcement. Undoing the provisions has led to the prolonged detention of children because sponsors are afraid or can’t claim them because they are unable to meet requirements, the lawsuit alleges. The government has not responded to the lawsuit in court.

In conjunction with those changes, Trump tapped an ICE official to lead ORR for the first time. That official was fired two months into her job because she failed to implement the administration’s changes “fast enough,” her successor for the position, Angie Salazar, an ICE veteran, said in a March 6 recording obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

“Some of these policy changes took too long. Three weeks is too long,” Salazar told staff without providing specifics. Salazar said that she would ramp up an effort to check on immigrant children and strengthen screenings of their sponsors.

She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant.

“Those are my marching orders,” Salazar told staffers. “While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.”

Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare.

Boxes packed with clothing and household goods in the Venezuelan family’s San Antonio home. The family started keeping many of their belongings boxed up and ready to ship out of fear of deportation. (Chris Lee for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.)

ORR said in a statement that it could not respond to ongoing litigation and did not answer detailed questions about Salazar’s comments or about the reasoning for some of the new requirements. Its policies are intended to ensure safe placement of unaccompanied minors, and the agency is “not a law enforcement or immigration enforcement entity,” the statement read.

Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, also declined to comment on pending lawsuits. But he criticized how the agency within his department was run under Biden, saying it failed to protect unaccompanied children after they were released to sponsors while turning “a blind eye to serious risks.” Jen Smyers, a former ORR deputy director, disputed those claims, saying the Biden administration made strides to address longstanding concerns that included creating a unit to combat sponsor fraud and improving data systems to better track kids.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, did not respond to detailed questions but said in a statement that her agency shares the goal of ensuring that unaccompanied minors are safe. She did not answer questions about the Venezuelan family in San Antonio. She also declined to provide the number of homes the agents have visited across the country or say whether they found cases of abuse or detained anyone for the purpose of deportation.

An April email obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune shows for the first time the scale of the operation in the Houston area alone, which over the past decade has resettled the largest number of unaccompanied immigrant children in the country. In the email, an ICE official informed the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that the agency planned to visit more than 3,600 addresses associated with such minors. The sheriff’s office did not assist in the checks, a spokesperson said.

An internal ICE memo obtained last month through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Immigration Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, instructed agents to find unaccompanied children and their sponsors. The document laid out a series of factors that federal agents should prioritize when seeking out children, including those who have not attended court hearings, may have gang ties or have pending deportation orders. The memo detailed crimes, such as smuggling, for which sponsors could be charged.

In the case of the San Antonio family, the father has temporary protected status, a U.S. permit for certain people facing danger at home that allows him to live and work here legally. The news organizations could not find a criminal record for him in the U.S. His son is still awaiting an immigration court hearing since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone a year ago. The father stated in his U.S. asylum application that he left Venezuela after receiving death threats for protesting against President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The father, who declined to be identified because he fears ICE enforcement, said in an interview that his son later fled for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the avenues for families, like that of the Venezuelan man and his son, to raise concerns about ORR’s conduct are shrinking. The Trump administration reduced staff at the agency’s ombudsman’s office. Mary Giovagnoli, who led the office, was terminated last week. An HHS official said the agency does not comment on personnel matters, but in a letter to Giovagnoli, the agency stated that her employment “does not advance the public interest.” Giovagnoli said the cuts curtail the office’s ability to act as a watchdog to ensure the resettlement agency is meeting its congressionally established mission.

“There’s no effective oversight,” she said. “There is this encroachment on ORR’s independence, and I think this close relationship with ICE makes everyone afraid that there’s going to come a point in time where you don’t know where one agency stops and the next begins.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

Last summer, as political debate swirled over the future of Georgia’s experiment with Medicaid work requirements, Gov. Brian Kemp held a press conference to unveil a three-minute testimonial video featuring a mechanic who works on classic cars.

Luke Seaborn, a 54-year-old from rural Jefferson, became the de facto face of Georgia Pathways to Coverage, Kemp’s insurance program for impoverished Georgians. In a soft Southern drawl, Seaborn explained how having insurance had improved his life in the year that he had been enrolled: “Pathways is a great program that offers health insurance to low-income professionals like myself.”

Kemp lauds Pathways as an innovative way to decrease the state’s high rate of uninsured adults while reining in government spending, holding the program up as an example to other Republican-led states eager to institute Medicaid work requirements.

But in the nine months since Seaborn’s video testimonial was released, his opinion of Pathways has plummeted. His benefits have been canceled — twice, he said, due to bureaucratic red tape.

“I used to think of Pathways as a blessing,” Seaborn recently told The Current and ProPublica. “Now, I’m done with it.”

Rather than an enduring symbol of success, Seaborn’s experience illustrates why the program struggles to gain traction even as the state spends millions of dollars to burnish Pathways’ brand. The Current and ProPublica previously reported that many of the approximately 250,000 low-income adults potentially eligible for the health insurance program struggle to enroll or maintain coverage.

The politics of Pathways were not on Seaborn’s mind when he received a phone call last summer from an insurance executive who handles Pathways clients. One of the first Georgians to enroll in the program in 2023, Seaborn had written a letter thanking his insurance provider for covering a procedure for his back pain. The executive from Amerigroup Community Care wanted to know: Would he take part in a promotional video for Pathways?

Seaborn, a supporter of the governor, said yes without hesitation. Soon afterward, Kemp’s press secretary, Garrison Douglas, arrived at his auto repair shop, located a few miles from the governor’s hometown, and spent hours filming in the garage filled with vintage Ford and Chevy trucks and handpainted gas station signs.

A trained chemical engineer, Seaborn had quit his corporate job to embrace his dream of repairing classic cars. But the realities of being a small business owner made that path difficult, Seaborn said, especially when it came to shouldering the cost of health insurance for himself and his son. Pathways eased the way, he said.

Seaborn said he was surprised when the governor called him out by name weeks later at the press conference during which his testimonial video was released. He wasn’t expecting to be the singular face of Pathways.

By November, though, Seaborn encountered some of the problems that other Georgians say have soured their opinion on Pathways. Seaborn said he had logged his work hours into the online system once a month as required. But his benefits were canceled after he failed to complete a new form that he said the state had added without adequate warning. Seaborn said the form asked for the same information he had been submitting every month, just in a different format. The state’s Medicaid agency did not respond to questions about Seaborn’s experience or the new form.

He said he called the same insurance executive who had asked him to take part in the testimonial. She told him she would be lunching with one of Kemp’s aides that day and promised to help, he recalled. Within 24 hours, Seaborn said, his benefits were restored, and a representative from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, which administers federal benefits programs, called to apologize.

Douglas said the governor’s office “had no involvement in Mr. Seaborn’s case.” The insurance company did not respond to requests for comment.

Pathways enrollees must submit paperwork every month proving they had completed the requirements necessary for coverage: 80 hours of work, study or volunteering. But the state says it is not verifying the information on a monthly basis — only during enrollment and upon annual renewal.

Seaborn said that after his coverage was restored, his insurance company told him he would no longer have to file his work hours monthly; the next time he would need to submit such documentation would be during his annual reenrollment. Nevertheless, Seaborn said he signed up for text and email notifications from the Pathways program so that he wouldn’t be caught off guard if requirements changed again.

Even so, technical glitches and more red tape caused him to lose his coverage once more, he said. He stopped receiving texts from the Pathways program in February. When he logged in to the digital platform in early March to make sure everything was in order, a notice informed him that his benefits would be terminated on April 1. The reason: he had missed filing an annual income statement. He said the surprise requirement had popped up on the digital platform even though his coverage was not up for renewal.

“My head exploded,” he said. “I didn’t get a text or an email. I did what I was supposed to, but that wasn’t good enough.”

Seaborn said he went ahead and filed the information, although it was late. He tried to call his insurance provider again for an explanation — and help. He reached out to the Division of Family and Children Services as well. This time, however, he said no one called him back.

In April, Seaborn paid out of pocket for his and his son’s prescription medications, an extra $40 that he said is difficult for him to afford.

Ellen Brown, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, would not say why Seaborn’s benefits were terminated.

“We are sorry to hear this happened and are looking into how we can better serve our customers and resolve communication gaps in the future,” Brown said in a written statement Friday. “Every Georgian that seeks our services is important, and we take these matters very seriously.”

Meanwhile, Seaborn received a phone call that day from the same Division of Family and Children Services representative who had apologized to him after he was kicked off Pathways last fall. He said she told him she would make sure he got his coverage back. The representative did not respond to a request for comment from The Current and ProPublica.

On Monday evening, Seaborn received a text message to alert him to a notification in the Pathways digital platform. He logged on: A notice confirmed that he had been reenrolled, a change of fortune that he credited to The Current and ProPublica’s questions to state officials about his predicament because he had already given up on contacting people for help.

“I am so frustrated with this whole journey,” Seaborn said. “I’m grateful for coverage. But what I don’t understand is them leaving me like a mushroom in the dark and feeding me nothing, no information, for more than a month.”

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

When the state of Georgia handed Deloitte Consulting a $10.7 million marketing contract last July to promote the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program, the initiative was in need of serious PR.

At the time, a year after the program’s rollout, less than 2% of those eligible for Georgia Pathways to Coverage had enrolled, well short of state targets.

To get the word out, the state turned again to the firm that it had relied on to build and manage the program. About 60% of the marketing contract went toward creating and placing ads about Pathways on television and radio, including during NFL games and morning talk shows.

Much of the remainder of the seven-month contract would go toward two efforts: $250,000 per month for Deloitte-trained teams to hand out brochures and Pathways-branded merchandise at community events and $300,000 a month for Deloitte to produce reports about its own performance.

When Deloitte’s publicity campaign ended in February, enrollment in Pathways remained less than 3% of the approximately 250,000 Georgians who are potentially eligible.

The marketing contract is part of a larger suite of services that Georgia has commissioned from Deloitte for its Medicaid experiment. Deloitte has made at least $51 million as of Dec. 31 to manage Pathways, including creating and maintaining its problematic software platform, as The Current and ProPublica previously reported. It is also earning at least $3 million more to oversee the state’s relationship with federal regulators, including its application to extend the experiment beyond its expiration this fall.

Deloitte’s outsize — and unusual — role in promoting the program it has built has allowed the firm to keep pulling in payments despite Pathways’ struggles. And there is virtually no public accounting of how well it is increasing enrollment, a key goal of the policy experiment.

An excerpt of Deloitte’s marketing contract shows its $300,000 per month expenditure on reports on its own performance, $250,000 per month for community outreach and $10.7 million total budget. (Obtained by The Current and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The marketing contract, obtained through a public records request, allows Deloitte to charge the state nearly half a million dollars for a final report on its publicity campaign, which was due to be submitted in February. When The Current and ProPublica requested the monthly and final performance reports, the state said they needed to be “reviewed” first and demanded $900 for that work. The news outlets did not pay because previous responses to public records requests for Deloitte’s Pathways contracts were heavily redacted, with the general counsel’s office at the Department of Community Health citing “confidential/trade secret.” The agency did not charge for those records.

The state recently approved another $10 million to Deloitte, Fiona Roberts, spokesperson for the Department of Community Health, Georgia’s Medicaid agency that oversees Pathways, said in response to questions about the effectiveness of Deloitte’s marketing efforts. The new marketing contract, which runs until November, includes more community meetings and a text message campaign by Salesforce Marketing Cloud rolling out in May to potentially eligible Georgians, Roberts said.

“In 20 years of researching these kinds of programs, I can’t think of another instance like this” in which a state has selected a for-profit company to both manage and market a federal benefit program, said Joan Alker, executive director for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families, where researchers have concluded that Medicaid work requirements prevent people from accessing health insurance.

Deloitte has designed and managed Medicaid and other benefit programs for many states, including Georgia, making the firm one of the nation’s experts in government health policy. But Alker said that when states want to educate and enroll residents in federal safety net programs, they typically select local nonprofits that have established relationships with low-income communities. Georgia’s arrangement with Deloitte raises questions, she said, about “whether the state is more committed to spending money on consultants or poor people.”

Deloitte, which has been in charge of the Pathways communications strategy for the past three years, declined to answer questions about its Georgia Pathways work, referring requests for information to the Department of Community Health. A contract signed in 2023 worth approximately $7 million stipulates that Deloitte would “develop first draft of response to media inquiries” on behalf of the Department of Community Health, but that responses “will be submitted by DCH and not Deloitte.” Deloitte’s duties also include drafting talking points for media interviews, including for the governor.

Roberts declined repeated requests for an interview with agency officials. When asked about Deloitte’s marketing and outreach work and whether the firm has met the state’s goals, she described the effort as a “robust, comprehensive awareness and outreach campaign throughout the state” that has generated 1.6 million visitors to the Pathways website since the campaign’s August 2024 launch.

“The state has invested heavily in marketing and outreach to reach Georgians potentially eligible for Pathways,” Roberts said in a written statement.

In 20 years of researching these kinds of programs, I can’t think of another instance like this.

—Joan Alker, executive director for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families

Gov. Brian Kemp has described Pathways as an innovative alternative to expanding Medicaid, something 40 other states have done. By contrast, Georgia’s program covers only the poorest individuals who can prove they are working, studying or volunteering at least 80 hours a month. Congressional Republicans are pointing to similar work requirements as a model in their budget negotiations.

In early 2024, less than a year after Pathways’ launch, however, Georgia legislators — including some of Kemp’s Republican allies — considered ending the experiment and instead expanding Medicaid without any work requirements. Georgia’s uninsured rate was 11.4%, or 1.2 million people, compared to the national average of 8% in 2023, the latest data available, according to KFF, a nonprofit focused on national health issues. State data showed that Pathways enrollment was well under the first-year target of 25,000 published in Georgia’s agreement with the federal government. As of April 25, approximately 7,400 Georgians were enrolled, according to the Department of Community Health.

An independent evaluation team commissioned by the state recommended ways to boost enrollment in a December 2024 report. The evaluators, Public Consulting Group, highlighted North Carolina’s strategy of allowing residents from rural communities and communities of color to help create outreach campaigns for its expanded Medicaid program in 2023. North Carolina Medicaid officials told The Current and ProPublica that they designed their outreach efforts to maximize participation in the new program, with a two-year target of enrolling 600,000 people. They achieved that goal within one year.

Georgia and Deloitte, however, took a different tack. The $10.7 million marketing contract does not lay out specific enrollment goals as a way of measuring the success of Deloitte’s efforts. The purpose of Pathways “is not and has never been to enroll as many Georgians as possible,” according to the state’s application to the federal government to continue the experiment.

The contract budgeted $247,000 to create up to four testimonial videos featuring satisfied Pathways clients; only one can be found on the state Medicaid agency’s YouTube channel, where it has received approximately 350 views since it was posted in January. The state did not respond when asked how many testimonials Deloitte produced.

Few people stopped by the Georgia Pathways booth at the Washington County Health Fair in Sandersville, Georgia, in March. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

Meanwhile, another part of Deloitte’s marketing strategy has also failed to catch wind: Deloitte had sent public relations teams to dozens of community events including farmers markets, a school Christmas pageant and a catfish festival to plug Pathways and encourage applications.

In March, one such team drove two hours from Atlanta to a health fair in Central Georgia’s rural Washington County. At the Pathways booth, the Deloitte team barely looked up from their phones for three hours. Residents largely bypassed the team to chat with locals staffing other kiosks where they could receive diapers, information on subsidized in-home nursing care and blood pressure screenings. Of those who stopped at the Pathways booth, only a handful asked about enrollment.

Other public events were tied to the state’s pursuit of federal permission to extend the Pathways program beyond September, when its original five-year mandate expires. Georgia is once again paying Deloitte to ensure that happens.

The monthslong process, managed by Deloitte, requires opportunities for public comment. A summary of these comments must be submitted with the application, which Deloitte is drafting. Health advocacy organizations say public outreach for this effort, especially to Black Georgians, has been superficial at best.

The only notice for two virtual public meetings appeared on a Department of Community Health web page that was not linked from the agency’s homepage. During both virtual events, health care advocates criticized the program’s inequitable access, but state officials did not engage with the speakers.

A third event — an in-person meeting in the rural 10,000-person town of Cordele — was added later and posted on the same website just one week before it was scheduled to occur. Only about a dozen people, some traveling for more than 80 miles, showed up to the noon meeting on St. Patrick’s Day.

Georgians traveled up to 80 miles to speak at a public meeting about Pathways held by the Georgia Department of Community Health in Cordele in March. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica) The town of Cordele has a population of around 10,000 people. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

The low attendance reflected the meeting’s out-of-the-way location and holiday timing, not a lack of public interest, said attendee Sherrell Byrd, executive director of Sowega Rising, a community advocacy group based in the majority Black town of Albany.

Inside the one-story cinder block building, three state health officials sat along a table at the front of the largely vacant room. One by one, attendees rose to the microphone to complain of technical glitches in the Pathways enrollment process, the lack of customer service and the generational health care inequalities faced by Black Georgians.

Tanisha Corporal, who lives approximately 140 miles away in Atlanta, was the only person to participate virtually. She told the Department of Community Health officials that she had submitted a Pathways application three times over the Deloitte-built digital portal only to have her file disappear. The licensed clinical social worker whose nonprofit job ended in January 2024 said state agencies offered her little enrollment support.

Grant Thomas, deputy commissioner for the Georgia Department of Community Health, sits in the back of the room during a public meeting on the Georgia Pathways program in Cordele. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

The state health officials did not respond to any of the speakers during the meeting. Grant Thomas, Kemp’s former health policy advisor and deputy director of the state Medicaid agency, sat in the back of the room and did not interact with the attendees. Thomas declined to speak on the record.

“There is a lot of disdain for real-life problems of Georgians who look like us,” Byrd said.

Robin Kemp of The Current contributed reporting.

by Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Electric companies in Oregon and Washington are hurtling toward deadlines to stop using power generated by coal, gas and other fuels that contribute to global warming. Yet the states are nowhere near achieving their goals, and the dramatic consequences are already being felt.

During a winter storm in January 2024, for example, the Northwest barely had enough power to meet demand as homeowners cranked up electric heaters and energy prices surged to more than $1,000 per megawatt-hour, or 18 times higher than the usual price. Power lines were so congested that owners of the transmission network made an extra $100 million selling access to the highest bidder.

Multiple utilities were operating in states of emergency during the storm, preparing for rotating power outages.

The storm “highlighted a tipping point and demonstrated how close the region is to a resource adequacy crisis,” the Western Power Pool, a regionwide organization of utilities, wrote in its assessment of the event.

Price spikes like this are one reason customers of major utilities in Oregon are paying 50% more on their power bills than they were in 2019. The number of utility customers disconnected last year for failure to pay soared to 70,000, the highest number on record.

Forecasters predict periods of extreme weather in the Northwest will only bring more trouble in the future: the threat of rolling blackouts within the decade if the region’s current energy trends continue.

Wind, solar and other renewables are the only forms of power that can be added to solve the problem, thanks to Oregon’s and Washington’s green energy mandates. Yet better transmission lines are needed to carry new energy sources in the windy and sunny eastern parts of the region to big cities west of the Cascade Mountain Range.

Experts say adding transmission lines in corridors that currently lack them would also enable utilities to keep power flowing when ice storms or wildfires threaten other parts of the grid.

The biggest owner of these transmission lines, the federal Bonneville Power Administration, has been slow to spend on upgrades — and slow to approve new green projects until upgrades are made.

Bonneville’s parent agency, the Energy Department, declined to make officials available for an interview, but Bonneville answered written questions.

“The potential for blackouts in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly low,” the agency said. “Grid planners and operators will continue to ensure reliability.”

Washington and Oregon lawmakers failed to address the Bonneville bottleneck when they approved clean energy mandates in 2019 and 2021, as ProPublica and OPB reported recently.

Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Portland-area Democrat who was a sponsor of the 2021 legislation, said the failure to prioritize transmission lines wasn’t the only flaw with the legislation. He said the bill failed to provide accountability, having no penalties for when a utility did not reach certain deadlines for acquiring either solar or wind energy. Helm said now, House Bill 2021 is “dead letter law.”

“Senators and representatives like me, we cannot continue to believe our own PR, that we have been successful in promoting a renewable electricity future,” said Helm, a member of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment. “We are not heading in that direction, and we’re going to have to take action to change that or nothing will happen.”

Some lawmakers tried to play catch-up this year. Legislators in each state drew up plans for state transmission authorities that could finance improvements independent of utilities and Bonneville. Those efforts failed.

“Oregon desperately needs to take some leadership here,” said Nicole Hughes, executive director of the group Renewable Northwest, which advocates for weaning the region off of fossil fuels.

The Northwest’s situation is only expected to get worse. The region’s electrical demand is forecast to double over the next 20 years, in large part because data centers, rewarded with tax breaks in both Oregon and Washington, are driving an increase in power use the region hasn’t experienced since the early 1980s.

Abandoning Oregon’s and Washington’s renewable energy laws wouldn’t help, Oregon’s Citizens’ Utility Board says, because new fossil fuel power plants would cost ratepayers more than wind or solar. Those plants would still have to contend with transmission lines that have no room for their power.

The region’s utilities, meanwhile, say they’d like to add 29,000 megawatts of generating capacity over the next 10 years — an unprecedented addition that would be roughly equivalent to all the electricity that the Northwest currently consumes at any given time. The projects on their to-do list are powered entirely by renewable energy.

Yet the utilities added only a little over half the power to their systems that they planned for last year. In fact, of the 469 projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid in the past decade, the only one to win the agency’s approval was in 2022. Growth in green energy in 2024 came from projects that began seeking a connection to Bonneville’s grid prior to 2015 or that connected to smaller transmission networks owned by private utilities.

If the utilities continue to fall as short of their goals as they did in 2024, then projections from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council suggest residents will spend the equivalent of nearly a month annually under the threat of brownouts — the inability to power all the circuits in a household — or blackouts.

“In the next few years, we may start having to make some tough choices about the availability of electricity,” Hughes said.

Hughes has spent 20 years in the renewables industry.

For now, she said, her family decided to buy a gas generator for times when their house loses power.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

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

Time and again, the U.S. Department of Education has been the last resort for parents who say the state of Idaho has failed to educate their children. The federal agency in 2023 ordered Idaho to stop blocking some students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, from special education. That same year, it flagged that the state’s own reviews of districts and charters obscured the fact that just 20% were fully complying with the federal disability law. Last year, it told the state it must end long delays in services for infants and toddlers with disabilities, which could include speech or physical therapy.

Now President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the department.

Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction Debbie Critchfield has celebrated the proposal. She insisted that the move would not change the requirement that states provide special education to students who need it. That would take an act of Congress.

But parents and advocates for students with disabilities say they are worried that no one will effectively ensure schools follow special education law.

“Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families,” said Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs, who retired last year after decades at the department.

Former federal Education Department employees who worked on special education monitoring said oversight measures would likely be hampered by the layoffs, which included attorneys who worked with the special education office to provide state monitoring reports.

Gregg Corr, a former division director with that office, said that without the group of attorneys who were focused on enforcing special education law, it will be “really difficult for staff to finalize and issue these reports to states.” He added there may also be a reluctance to take on more complicated issues without running them by attorneys.

“What might have been, you know, inconsistent with the legal requirements six months ago may be fine now — it just depends on how it’s interpreted,” Wexler said.

Before Federal Law, Millions Denied Services

For parents who have been fighting for services for years, the federal oversight has been critical.

After Ashley Brittain, an attorney and mom to children with dyslexia, moved to Idaho in 2021, she realized a key problem: Idaho’s criteria for qualifying students with specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dysgraphia was so narrow it disqualified some eligible students from receiving services, she said.

Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families.

—Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs

Together with Robin Zikmund, the founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho who has a son with dyslexia and dysgraphia, Brittain has spent years trying to get the state to acknowledge the disability and provide services to dozens of kids who needed help.

“We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students,” Zikmund previously told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “And it was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Brittain called state officials and told them they were breaking the law. State officials disagreed. No one took action, she said. In 2022, she wrote to the Office of Special Education Programs. In the letter she sent to the federal department, she said the Idaho Department of Education, under former superintendent Sherri Ybarra, was “refusing to entertain any conversations” about changing the way it determined which students were eligible for special education. Ybarra could not be reached for comment.

Before Congress passed what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and created the U.S. Department of Education as an agency under the Cabinet about five years later, Brittain would have been on her own.

At the time, nearly 1.8 million students with disabilities weren’t being served by the public schools, according to estimates. Some states had laws prohibiting students with certain disabilities from attending public schools, according to the federal government’s own history.

The law granted students with disabilities access to a “free appropriate public education” — fitting the individual needs of the student — and gave money to states to fulfill the promise. Now, the law also guarantees infants and toddlers with disabilities access to early interventions, such as physical or speech therapy.

The U.S. Department of Education has since been responsible for making sure states follow the law, providing reviews of state performance, distributing money and offering technical assistance to help states improve learning outcomes for students in special education.

The department conducts an annual review of each state, and a more intensive one that’s supposed to be completed roughly every five years. The annual reviews look at discipline numbers, graduation rates and test scores to identify problems and help states to fix them. A five-year review includes a visit to the state and a look at state policies, student data and annual reports. When states need to take corrective action, the federal special education office monitors that they are making the changes.

Idaho is one of about a dozen states currently being monitored, according to the most recent updates on the federal agency’s website.

We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students. And it was like, ‘What is going on?’

—Robin Zikmund, founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho

Parent complaints can also trigger a review, as was the case with Brittain in Idaho. After Brittain alleged that the state was wrongfully keeping kids with dyslexia and other disabilities from special education, she waited over a year before she got an answer from the Office of Special Education Programs: She was right. Idaho, it turned out, accepted a lower percentage of students with specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, into special education compared to other states — about half the national average, according to the most recent data reported to the U.S. Department of Education from the 2022-2023 school year.

By then, Idaho had a new state superintendent of public instruction, Critchfield, for whom Brittain campaigned. The Office of Special Education Programs told Critchfield in 2023 that the state needed to demonstrate its policies complied with federal law or update them.

In response, the Idaho Department of Education has updated its special education manual, which has since been approved by the Legislature. It has also directed school districts to review every student found ineligible for special education since 2023 to determine if they needed to be reevaluated.

Parents in Idaho celebrated the victory, which could make it easier for some kids to qualify in a state that has one of the lowest percentages of students who receive special education. But they acknowledged the fix wasn’t perfect and left out students who may have been found ineligible for special education before the federal office identified the problem. The state isn’t tracking the number of students who have since qualified due to the change.

Nicole Fuller, a policy manager at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said a case like this, in which some students are being missed, “truly underscores the need for federal oversight, and, of course, holding states accountable for accurately identifying disabilities.”

Federal oversight isn’t perfect. By the time Idaho addressed Brittain’s complaint, the state had been out of compliance since at least 2015. States that fall out of compliance can be at risk of losing federal funding, although that penalty does not appear to have been used in decades.

The federal government has never fulfilled its promise to fund 40% of each state’s special education costs, but Idaho relied on federal funding for about 18% — around $60 million — of its special education budget during the 2022-2023 school year, state officials said. The rest is made up by the state or by local school districts through referendums. A recent report by an independent Idaho state office estimated special education was underfunded by more than $80 million in 2023.

But U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, appointed by Trump in March, has said that closing the department wouldn’t mean “cutting off funds from those who depend on them” but would eliminate the “bureaucracy” and regulations associated with them.

Critchfield, Idaho’s superintendent, said on Idaho-based The Ranch Podcast that teachers involved in special education spend a lot of time filling out paperwork instead of “focusing on how to help that child be successful.” The changes are about “removing the bureaucracy.”

But Critchfield acknowledged that cuts at the federal level could pose challenges if states have to take on more of an oversight role.

“As much as I am a champion of states doing that, the reality is there would be implications for Idaho and our department,” she said in a statement to the Statesman and ProPublica. The state is looking at what it can do to prepare and “where gaps would exist” should more responsibilities fall to the states.

Zikmund, the advocate who praised Critchfield for being responsive to parents and having an “open-door policy,” said that parents could be better off after the changes with good leadership at the state level, but without it, they could face a “train wreck.”

One test will come in June, when the Office of Special Education Programs is expected to release reports telling states how they performed in their annual reviews. The layoffs and restructuring under Trump are making some advocates question if the federal government will truly hold states to account.

by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

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

Ronald Carver was skeptical when his investment adviser first tried to sell him on an “ugly houses” investment opportunity eight years ago. But once the Texas retiree heard the details, it seemed like a no-lose situation.

Carver would lend money to Charles Carrier, owner of Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, a high-producing franchise in the HomeVestors of America house-flipping chain known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” advertisements. The business would then use the dollars to purchase properties in which Carver would receive an ownership stake securing his investment and an annual return of 9%, paid in monthly installments.

“Worst case, I would end up with a property worth more than what the loan was,” Carver said of the pitch.

Carver started with a $115,000 loan in 2017. And sure enough, the interest payments arrived each month.

He had worked three decades at a nuclear power plant, and retired without a pension and before he could collect Social Security. He and his wife lived off the investment income.

The deal seemed so good, Carver talked his elderly father into investing, starting with $50,000. As the monthly checks arrived as promised, both men increased their investments. By 2024, Carver estimates they had about $700,000 invested with Carrier.

Then, last fall, the checks stopped. The money Carver and his father had invested was gone.

Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.

As early as 2020, Carrier had begun taking out multiple loans on individual properties — some of which he never owned. In cases reviewed by ProPublica, as many as five notes were recorded against a single property, far exceeding the property’s value. Carrier also failed to properly record many deeds that were supposed to secure the loans, accumulating more debt than he could ever repay while investors remained unaware they had no collateral for their investments.

“It’s incalculable the amount of damage this guy did,” said one investor who lost about $1 million and asked not to be named to avoid embarrassment and not to interfere with a criminal investigation into Carrier’s scheme. “He’s ruined some lives.”

Carrier, who declined an interview request, said in a brief phone conversation that he’s not trying to avoid responsibility for the harm he caused. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,’” he said. “This is a mess created by me.”

Investors also blame HomeVestors. For nearly two decades, Carrier used the company’s carefully cultivated brand as the “largest homebuyer in the United States” to gain investors’ trust. They accuse HomeVestors of failing to provide oversight that could have prevented the fraud, despite claiming to hold its franchises accountable for best business practices. In its answers to their lawsuits, HomeVestors has denied responsibility for Carrier’s actions, claiming its franchises are independently operated, despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from Carrier’s business.

HomeVestors revoked Carrier’s franchise on Oct. 24, about the time interest payments stopped arriving in investors’ accounts. The company said it had received a tip on its ethics hotline — created in 2023, after ProPublica detailed predatory buying practices by multiple franchises. When confronted by HomeVestors, Carrier admitted that “he and his business had entered into debts that they could not pay,” a HomeVestors spokesperson said. The company reported him to the FBI. In May, HomeVestors filed suit against Carrier for trademark infringement and for not indemnifying it against these lawsuits.

“We take all allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously as demonstrated by our decisive action,” the spokesperson said. “It is truly disheartening for us that anyone who lent Mr. Carrier money was misled or harmed by his alleged fraudulent activity.”

Now, Carrier is under investigation by the Department of Justice, according to a recording of an April call between the lead prosecutor and potential victims. (The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.) A judge in one of the many lawsuits against Carrier has deemed allegations of fraudulent loans to be true because Carrier never answered the complaint. And the investors are in a race with one another to recoup even a small amount of what they lost, by either waiting for the DOJ to pay restitution, suing Carrier or trying to foreclose on properties still left in his portfolio.

Just months after learning they had lost all of their investments, and before any restitution could be paid, Carver’s father died.

Five notes for a property on Glen Forest Lane in Dallas given to investors between 2019 and 2023. Two of the notes were not recorded until 2024. (Obtained, collaged and highlighted by ProPublica) A Top-Performing Franchise

In 2005, Carrier opened a HomeVestors franchise in Dallas, where HomeVestors is headquartered. In the early days, records show, he relied on a handful of institutional lenders to finance his house purchases. Soon, the Wharton School of Business MBA who had come to house-flipping following a career at Pepsi and a food service equipment company, started cultivating his wealthy friends for loans.

Carrier didn’t fit any stereotype of a glad-handing huckster with a bad loan to sell. Those who knew him describe him as a serious person, “cordial but very direct.” He always had files in front of him, constantly focusing on his business. It made him seem trustworthy, one investor said.

At HomeVestors, he was held up as a model franchise operator. C&C Residential Properties routinely made the top volume and top closer lists and was even named franchise of the year. Carrier led training sessions at company conferences and described his business as “the largest and most successful HomeVestors franchise in the United States” — a claim that remained on the website for Carrier’s business through early May.

“Chas Carrier, for maybe 15 years, was one of the golden boys at HomeVestors,” said Ben Ahern, who over two decades worked for a HomeVestors franchise and later owned one before leaving the company in 2021. “Internally, it was like, ‘Do whatever Chas Carrier’s doing.’”

It isn’t unusual for HomeVestors franchises to rely on private investors to finance their house-flipping. Banks aren’t typically interested in house-flipping loans, which are often short-term and riskier than a standard mortgage. Because of that risk, investors who lend to house-flippers earn a substantially higher return.

To further minimize their risk and ensure they had a legitimate ownership stake in the house, savvy investors would verify the transaction with an independent title company to research whether there were other liens against the property and then record the deed with the county recorder. But many of Carrier’s investors, after years of consistent payments led them to trust him, let Carrier handle recording the deeds and did not confirm that he’d done so.

As Carrier grew his business, he began relying more on individual investors. ProPublica identified through public records at least 124 people who have lent money to Carrier since 2009. Not all of them have lost money.

Carrier’s search for new investors was aided by Robert Welborn, an investment adviser in Granbury, Texas, southwest of Dallas. Welborn had built a network of clients in Granbury, a city of about 12,000 people on the Brazos River, through church, friendships and referrals. Many of his clients were older and had modest nest eggs, which Welborn said were “well diversified.” He said he built a relationship with Carrier in 2012, after researching his background for about two months. That Carrier was a successful franchisee lent him credibility, Welborn said.

“I never imagined the No. 1 franchisee with a fast-growing franchise company, HomeVestors,” would defraud investors, he said.

At the time, Welborn also solicited new investors with invitations to steak dinners where they would hear his pitch. An investment in Carrier’s business, according to Welborn’s sales material, which also featured the HomeVestors caveman mascot, Ug, was both lucrative and secure. “Your investment is protected,” the sales material assured potential clients.

For loans he sent Carrier’s way, Welborn earned a 2% commission, he said. Welborn had at least two dozen clients who invested with Carrier, most of whom had multiple loans to him, according to a public records search. He would not comment on how many of his clients invested with Carrier.

Many investors were happy for years — in some cases, more than a decade. The interest payments came in like clockwork. A lot of Welborns’ clients relied on the payments for retirement income.

“I was real tickled with it,” said Tom Walls, 85, who said he lost $50,000 of his retirement savings by investing with Carrier.

Some investors noticed small problems — a payment that arrived a few days late or an error on the paperwork to secure the loan. But Carrier always fixed the problems promptly, investors said.

“When you have this 10-year continuous, pleasant and mutually beneficial relationship, you build up a great deal of trust,” said John Moses, who estimates he lost more than $1 million to Carrier.

Looking back, the investors who spoke with ProPublica said they wished they had taken those warning signs more seriously.

(Max Erwin for ProPublica) “He Just Pencil Whipped Those Deeds”

By fall 2024, Carrier’s payments to his lenders stopped. That’s when the house of cards fell.

Carrier had spent that summer scrambling for money. Not only did Carrier have to make loan payments to scores of investors, but he also needed to keep up with the HomeVestors franchise fees and advertising payments. The company requires its franchises to make regular reports on sales and to open their books for audits, to provide financial statements when requested, and to report all assets and liabilities. Any of those reports could have called into question Carrier’s ability to stay solvent. But, according to former franchise owners and employees, HomeVestors’ audits of its franchises are mostly geared toward ensuring they’re paying all their franchise fees, which are based on sales.

Before Carrier’s tangle of fraudulent loans collapsed and was exposed in court, there were signs of trouble.

In 2016, Carrier was fined by the Texas Real Estate Commission for managing properties without a license. The HomeVestors franchise agreement requires owners to follow all laws and regulations, particularly real estate regulations. In 2020, two title insurance companies issued special alerts on Carrier’s business, advising their title officers not to enter into transactions with him without further legal and underwriting review. Carrier hasn’t paid taxes on some of his properties since early 2023, according to court and public records, another violation of his franchise agreement. Despite the apparent violations, HomeVestors didn’t terminate Carrier’s franchise agreement.

“I don’t really think they do have much in place to prevent something like this,” Ahern, the former HomeVestors franchise owner, said of the company. “HomeVestors at the time didn’t seem to have an internal system policing how franchises finance buying properties.”

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company focuses on its franchise customers’ experiences selling their homes and does not “dictate” how franchises raise capital. “The more than 950 franchises of HomeVestors are independent businesses with a wide variety of finance options available to them,” the spokesperson said.

Last spring, Carrier began borrowing against his future receipts in exchange for cash advances with exorbitant fees and annualized interest rates that he later claimed ranged as high as 600%. Between May and October, he did this at least seven times, racking up more than $1.2 million in debt beyond what he owed his investors, exhibits included with court filings show. By fall, he owed more than $75,000 in payments a week, according to the original terms. Seven companies filed suit over the cash-advance agreements, accusing him of default. Carrier has denied the allegations of default and has countersued four of the companies, claiming he was charged unreasonably high interest rates.

The lending scheme appears to have fallen in a gray area for state and federal securities regulations. It’s unclear whether the promissory notes Carrier issued to investors meet the definition of a security, two experts told ProPublica.

In October, Carrier’s investors began to confront him about the missing payments, including Jeff Daly and Steve Needham, two of Carrier’s largest investors who had been lending him money for years. Carrier came clean to Daly, admitting he had been running a lending scheme for “several” years, according to a lawsuit Daly and Needham filed. He told Needham he had taken out multiple loans on individual properties without disclosing them to the investors, according to the lawsuit. The two men claimed in their lawsuit, which resulted in default judgments against Carrier, that combined they had lost $13.5 million to Carrier.

The investor who spoke to ProPublica and asked not to be named said in an interview that Carrier broke down in tears when confronted about losing more than $1 million of the investor’s money. Carrier admitted the loans paid for his operating expenses, not for buying and refurbishing houses, the investor said.

“He just pencil whipped those deeds at the end,” the investor said, explaining that Carrier drew up documents but didn’t record them. Because the deeds were never recorded, the investor had no lien on the properties and therefore no collateral. Some deeds were for houses that Carrier didn’t own or never bought, the investor said. “It was a complete fabrication.”

Welborn’s clients, who typically invested much smaller amounts with Carrier, also learned of the house-flipper’s collapse in the fall, when their payments stopped. Carver said that Welborn called him a couple of days after the October payment was due and said, “Hey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Chas has called me and admitted to fraud.”

Carver said he got in the car and drove to Welborn’s office, where he learned the nightmarish truth that all the money Carrier had taken was gone.

“A Life-Changing Hit”

Investors are deploying a variety of strategies to get their money back — some of which pit bigger investors against smaller ones and early investors against more recent ones. Those who acted quickly are recovering some money through foreclosures and lawsuit settlements. Although Carrier is denying allegations in lawsuits brought by the cash-advance companies, he’s not fighting individual investors who are suing him. Three of their lawsuits have resulted in judgments against Carrier, and he has so far not defended himself against the others.

Welborn said he’s doing his best to help his clients recover their money by providing the necessary paperwork, connecting them with buyers for the houses used as collateral and researching lien histories on the homes. When he first learned of the scheme, Welborn tried to convince his clients to sign on with his lawyer to sue Carrier. The lawyer, Anthony Cuesta, hoped a court would seize Carrier’s assets to help recover the investors’ lost funds. But he quickly learned there were too many investors and not enough equity in the properties to fund the litigation. Now, many of Welborn’s clients are waiting for the FBI and DOJ to act, while wealthier investors are foreclosing on properties and making them ineligible to be used for restitution. Welborn said some of his clients have been paid restitution through a DOJ-appointed real estate agent’s sale of Carrier’s properties, but he declined to provide details.

Carver isn’t optimistic: “We are not going to get a dime.”

At least one investor went after Welborn individually. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, the claim was settled for $130,000. In his response to the SEC disclosure, Welborn denied breaching fiduciary duty to the client and said he “resolved the claim to avoid controversy.” Welborn told ProPublica that $120,000 of the settlement came from the sale of the house used as collateral for the family’s loan and he paid $10,000 for their attorney fees.

Welborn said he’s “devastated” by the loss of his clients’ money. “But every day I drag myself to work with God’s help and spend most of my day helping lenders with their own personal restitution battles,” he said.

Some investors said they will have to go back to work after having retired or are scrambling to find some way to replace their lost income.

Carver wishes he had paid more attention to red flags, like paperwork errors. But the monthly checks were so reliable, he didn’t listen to his gut. Or his wife.

“Every time I added money, my wife would say, ‘Don’t do it,’” Carver said. “My mother, too. She would push on my dad not to add any more. But he liked getting the monthly check.”

Carver’s dad, Larry, believed it was the best performing investment he had ever made. When the money disappeared, Carver went to work trying to recoup some of it. Maybe he could write it off on his taxes, he thought. He wanted to get at least something back for his dad. But Larry was in ill health, and in February, he died.

“My dad passed thinking he lost all of his money to this guy,” Carver said, adding he hopes Carrier “goes to jail for a very long time.”

The investor who asked not to be named said the loss was “a life-changing hit.” He had retired at 53, after sticking it out in a job he hated until his stock options vested. When he finally quit, he put the money into Carrier’s business and lived off of the monthly payments. He may have to go back to work.

“He was an arrogant son of a bitch,” the investor said. “It was gone before he told anyone there was a problem. That’s the unforgivable piece. He squandered it all away. And he had to get backed into a corner before he admitted it was all gone.”

Byard Duncan contributed reporting.